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

by Rick Perlstein

The White House’s Office of Telecommunications Policy was crafting a public-broadcasting funding bill. OTP general counsel Antonin Scalia had drafted a series of memos on how the Corporation for Public Broadcasting might be made a more pliant vassal of the White House. “The best possibility for White House influence is through the Presidential appointees to the Board of Directors,” he wrote; the best way to shed the influence of “the liberal Establishment of the Northeast” would be to strengthen local stations at the expense of the national organization. Such subtleties were all well and good until Richard Nixon read in his news summary that Sander Vanocur, late of NBC, who’d been a Nixon bête noire since the 1960 presidential debates, was slated to coanchor a new PBS newsmagazine. Nixon issued a blunt dictate: “all funds for Public Broadcasting be cut immediately.”