Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

The surprise issue was a strategic godsend. Fortas’s opponents, among them Judiciary chairman Sam Ervin, had been casting about for excuses to stretch the hearings out until after the August recess to give them time to find more damning information, hoping for enough votes to win a filibuster. Thurmond’s politics were razor-sharp. Blocking a president’s Supreme Court nominee was an unpopular decision and was hard to defend. Explaining the technical issues behind the “lame-duck” charge to constituents was daunting. But protecting kids from porn—that was easy. It gave Southern Democrats cover for defying their president. It gave Republicans cover to not appear partisan. Thurmond arranged a movie screening for his colleagues, who in private forgot their horror, laughing, shouting crudities at the images projected on the wall—until they screened a print, seized during a 1967 raid on the University of Michigan campus, of the underground polysexual art film Flaming Creatures, which received less glowing reviews: “I was so sick, I couldn’t even get aroused,” one senator said—acknowledging publicly for the first time that shocked, shocked senators sometimes got aroused, too.