The presentation of Nixon as the Great Conciliator wasn’t exactly a confidence game, because Richard Nixon on some level believed it. It showed in the personal exhortations he wrote to himself on yellow legal pads in the hideaway office he established in the Old Executive Office Building: Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone…. Need to be good to do good…. The nation must be better in spirit at the end of term. Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspiration. But neither was any of it precisely true. It would be a mistake, for example, to say Nixon cherished domestic
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