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

by Rick Perlstein

The aggressors poisoned the minds of the innocent young.

Inmates who believed negotiations still ongoing made a bluff to strengthen their hand: they displayed eight of the hostages on an open walkway, bound and blindfolded, with blades pressed to their throats. Revenge-minded officers fired indiscriminately. Troopers in their vision-obstructing gas masks shot hostages. When the choking, blinding fog of CS gas cleared, scores of bodies littered the ground, writhing or motionless. Nine hostages and twenty-six inmates died immediately, four more of wounds in the days to come.

“We have the power but are we using it? To investigate contributors to Hubert Humphrey, contributors to Muskie, the Jews, you know, that are stealing everybody…” He trailed off. “You know, they really tried to crucify Ho Lewis”—Hobart Lewis, Reader’s Digest’s president and executive editor, who had been audited. “Are we looking into Muskie’s return?…Hubert? Hubert’s been in lots of funny deals…. Teddy? Who knows about the Kennedys? Shouldn’t they be investigated?” (Like old hens, they started gossiping about Teddy’s marriage.) The next week the president took it up with Haldeman: “Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats…. Could we please investigate some of these cocksuckers?”

The president’s response was bizarre. Indeed, none of his briefers knew what the hell he was talking about.

The non sequitur served a purpose. They called it, in Washington, “getting it out there”—the sleazy business of slipping in narratives to embarrass the opposition among a barrage of otherwise irrelevant information.

Meanwhile there were the broadcast networks to flay—four of them, now that PBS, which unlike the others was relatively free of the need to placate corporate sponsors, had matured into a fearless news powerhouse.

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.”

“Look, Nixon’s no dope. If the people really wanted moral leadership, he’d give them moral leadership.”

Liberals had always had a hard time grasping how anyone could identify with Nixon.

But that conflicted with another of his schemes to build a New Majority: seducing union members into the Republican Party.

In 1960, 6 million voters claimed no allegiance to either of the two major political parties. Now the number was over four times that. Flux was the keynote of politics now.

so many Democrats intended to take on a weakened Richard Nixon that Topps came out with a set of collectible trading cards.

America’s problems stem “not so much from the fact that people mistrust their government as from the fact that the government so obviously mistrusts the people.”

The New Politics Democrats’ logic came down to a chain of antinomies. Americans were turning against Nixon in the polls, angry at his embrace of secrecy; so the candidate who could beat Nixon in November would be the one to most credibly embrace openness. Nixon dripped cynicism from every pore; so the candidate to beat Nixon would have to exude idealism. Nixon was all insincerity; the anti-Nixon had to be genuine, an antipolitician. Nixon attracted the alienated old. The anti-Nixon would have to be a magnet for the authenticity-seeking young. Nixon was a creature of the system. His vanquisher would have to come from the grass roots. Nixon was unprincipled and unpopular; the Democratic nominee would have to be principled to be popular. Nixon asked citizens to be spectators; a politics to oppose him would have to be based on participatory democracy.

Even the Wallace surge fit into the theory: his followers were a subspecies of the alienated American, angry because they were shut out from the Establishment. Dutton insisted that “some of the younger voters who were for Wallace in ’68 were concerned less with his racial connotations than his stance as a fighter and his role as the most anti-establishment candidate available that year.”

McGovern was an idealist, confident in the power of goodwill to change the world. In graduate school at Northwestern, during a late-night bull session, another student asked him, “George, what makes you tick?” The South Dakotan thought of his father, a rural fundamentalist minister, and uttered a favorite quotation from the Gospel of St. Matthew: “Whoever shall save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it.” He kept that verse on his Senate office wall. Others, too, though they were too small for visitors to notice: “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk kindly with thy God.” “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.” “And as you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”

But he was a war hero who’d come away with a sense of war’s madness seared deeply onto his conscience,

The war could be ended without further bloodshed, on terms the United States had always claimed it wanted: self-determination for South Vietnam.

The Saigon police chief who had left the party to their fate, claiming they were meeting with Communists, was the fiancé of President Thieu’s daughter. These were the thugs American boys were fighting and dying for.

“Following the President’s lead,” Jonathan Schell of the New Yorker observed, “people began to speak as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.”

All this was only possible, he implied, because certain Americans did not behave like Americans at all. They had the temerity to believe the president would lie.

You go to church on Sunday and pray to Jesus Christ.

In the war at home, the Party of the New Politics was ceding momentum to the Party of Reader’s Digest.

Nixon chimed in his theory about how it took a right-winger to make the kind of peace moves that left-wingers—easier for political opponents to tar as treasonous—could only talk about. Chou graciously cleared up an international mystery: the whereabouts of unreliable left-wingers within their own regime, led by Lin Biao, who had opposed Nixon’s visit, and whom the world had not seen or heard from in months. The Chinese leaders clearly now believed themselves among friends. Mao explained that they had died in a plane crash. Chou hinted that it had not been an accident. Nixon winked his solidarity.

At the Peking Zoo she admired the pandas. At one of the sumptuous banquets she reached for a cylindrical container of cigarettes, admiring the two cuddly bears on the label. “Aren’t they cute? I love them,” she burbled. “I’ll give you some,” Chou En-lai replied. “Cigarettes?” “No. Pandas.” And just like that, the National Zoo ended up with two precious and extraordinarily rare Chinese pandas.

Then William Loeb of the Manchester Union Leader, always eager to destroy a liberal, reproduced on his February 24 front page a handwritten, semiliterate letter from someone named Paul Morrison, who said he had met Muskie in Florida and asked how he could understand the problems of black people given the few minorities in Maine. A Muskie aide, the letter related, responded that they did have minorities in Maine: “Not blacks, but we have Canucks”—at which Muskie was reported to have laughed appreciatively. Canucks, also prevalent in New Hampshire, were French Canadians. Muskie thought of them, evidently, as New England’s niggers.

A White House staffer, not “Paul Morrison,” had written the “Canuck” letter. A man on the White House payroll had hired and supervised the black picketers who greeted Muskie at his Florida hotel. His name was Donald Segretti, and he had also secured a spy to get hired as a Muskie campaign driver—which was how Evans and Novak got the secret memo on Muskie’s California property-tax hearings. The director of the Youth for Nixon unit of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, Kenneth Rietz, received stolen Muskie documents on Washington street corners from a contact known as “Fat Jack.” Jeb Magruder, the deputy director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, ran another, entirely separate dirty tricks team. Thus all the fake leaflets, stink bombs, stickers, and press releases claiming unlawful use of government typewriters that were driving the Democratic campaigns insane.

They had seen how their candidate’s general election campaign was sunk by the infighting of the rival Republican factions from the primary season. That same eyeball-scratching disarray was what they had to engineer in the Democrats. The survival of civilization depended on it.

It’s hard to reconstruct exactly the steps that led George Wallace to his January announcement in Tallahassee that he was running for the Democratic nomination. He had been on a flight with several other Southern governors and the president from Key Biscayne to Alabama in the summer of 1971; Wallace and Richard Nixon looked suspiciously buddy-buddy after the plane touched down. A few days later Wallace drawled casually to his chief field operator Tom Turnipseed, to Turnipseed’s surprise, “I’m tired of those kooks in the third-party business. I’m thinking of going back into the Democratic Party.” Three months later, Evans and Novak noticed, the grand jury investigating tax-fraud charges against Wallace’s brother Gerald was mysteriously dissolved. Then in November 1971 the Justice Department’s civil rights division announced, suddenly and improbably, that Alabama’s civil rights enforcement plan “is a much better plan than many states’.”

Florida was also a shrieking nest of mutual recrimination.

All was confusion, all was hate—just as Nixon wanted it.

The strong showing for the Alabaman who campaigned against the “pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington” was taken as a sign of an embittered, cynical, and resentful electorate ready to back any candidate who could credibly pledge to tear down the ossified old Establishment.

Ratfucking took money—and drained money away from throwing a proper national party convention.

The multinational conglomerate International Telephone & Telegraph had acquired three companies in 1969 in a deal bureaucrats in the Justice Department worried fell afoul of antitrust laws. Thus it was that in the middle of 1971 an ITT lobbyist named Dita Beard convened a lollapalooza negotiating session whose principals included John Mitchell, Maurice Stans, John Ehrlichman, Chuck Colson, Bud Krogh, and Vice President Agnew. The upshot: ITT promised $400,000 in donations to help stage the San Diego convention. Mitchell would protect the merger. The deal created more problems than it solved. As the Florida campaigning entered the home stretch, columnist Jack Anderson published a 1971 memo in which Dita Beard exclaimed to her boss that their “noble commitment has gone a long way.” The memo also included the observation, “Certainly the President has told Mitchell to see that things are worked out fairly.” Its famous last words: “Please destroy this, huh?” Beard’s boss didn’t. The reference to the president and attorney general of the United States—now Richard Nixon’s campaign manager—as direct parties to a bribe was more than a little embarrassing. So Howard Hunt was sent to cajole Beard into claiming she’d never written such a memo. “Who exactly do you represent?” Dita Beard’s daughter asked of the redheaded stranger who appeared on her doorstep. “High Washington levels who are interested in your mother’s welfare,” he replied. Beard’s public recantation clamped the lid on w...

And what the general counsel suggested, at a meeting with Hunt and a physician who once specialized in nondetectable “accidents” for the CIA, was that Jack Anderson be assassinated—a car crash, perhaps, or a drugging; or, Liddy suggested, Anderson could “just become a fatal victim of the notorious Washington street-crime rate.”

Saving civilization from the Democrats would be expensive.

And you couldn’t exactly, in the wake of ITT, do it by approaching respectable Republican businessmen and asking them to cough up checks to finance ratfucks and prostitutes.

Shakedowns had previously been Herbert Kalmbach’s job. In October of 1971, for example, the president’s personal lawyer approached the chairman of American Airlines at a dinner and asked him to kick in $100,000. The chairman said he might be able to come up with $75,000. Kalmbach told him he couldn’t be sure of the consequences with the Federal Aviation Administration should the full $100,000 not be forthcoming. And so it was. Such corporate contributions were illegal. Companies maintained slush funds to wash the money.

“I realized that, for many Americans, democracy is a religion.” He began to feel a bit of that old-time religion himself. “Sometimes it is possible to unify Americans,” he realized, “in situations that call for generosity or fairness instead of dividing them into battles over physical or psychological turf.”

“I still think we ought to take the dikes out now,” Nixon offered. “I think—will that drown people?” “Zhat will drown about two hundred thousand people.” “Oh, well, no, no. I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?” “Zhat, I think, would be too much. Too much.” “The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ’s sakes!”

Badger State labor leaders told their memberships not to vote for McGovern because he hadn’t voted to end a right-wing filibuster against an antilabor right-to-work law in 1966. This was nasty politics: actually McGovern’s labor voting record was just about flawless, better than John F. Kennedy’s in 1960—so good, in fact, that he feared for his reelection in 1968 in a conservative state like South Dakota. Upon which George Meany, like some labor pope, had granted McGovern an absolution to vote against right-to-work in 1966. In 1971, Meany had explicitly signed off on McGovern as an acceptable Democratic nominee. Now, in 1972, the pope ordered his Wisconsin bishops to use that vote to call McGovern a traitor to labor, and turn out their machine for Humphrey.

A Democratic civil war.

The neatness of the Democrats’ divisions was almost…suspicious. “The only logical explanation of the Democratic Presidential campaign so far,” Scotty Reston wrote in his New York Times column at the end of April, “is that it must have been planned by the Republicans.” Little did he know his joke was literally true. The White House was delighted at George McGovern’s ascendancy; he was the one serious contender they never rat-fucked. They loved the combustion between the kind of people who loved Humphrey and the kind of people who liked McGovern; they themselves had helped set the fuse.

The formulation was about one-half libel.

But the invention that McGovern was pushing abortion and drug legalization took hold. The story contained a certain poetic truth: not about the policy issues specifically, but about the nation’s polarization.

Back home, an annoyance cleared up for Richard Nixon. J. Edgar Hoover, the man who wished to claim all power of intimidation in Washington for his very own, who began compiling his files on five hundred thousand “subversives” during the 1919 Red Scare, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since its founding, who kept columnist Joseph Alsop on a string by retaining photographs of him in flagrante delicto with male KGB agents in Moscow, was dead. “Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!” was the president’s private response. Publicly, Nixon arranged for Hoover’s half-ton, lead-lined coffin to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda as if he’d been a president and said at his funeral, “The good J. Edgar Hoover has done will not die. The profound principles associated with his name will not fade away. Rather, I would predict that in the time ahead those principles of respect for law, order, and justice will come to govern our nation more completely than ever before. Because the trend of permissiveness in this country, a trend which Edgar Hoover fought against all his life, a trend which was dangerously eroding our national heritage as a law-abiding people, is now being reversed.”

And, as if on cue, the president’s men amped up their lawlessness.

There is a saying in politics: if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

On May 8, amid this latest flurry of Democratic disarray, the president went on TV to sell another escalation in the air campaign. Connally urged him, “Don’t worry about killing civilians. Go ahead and kill ’em. People think you are now. So go ahead and give ’em some.” “That’s right,” concurred the president. “There’s pictures on the news of dead bodies every night,” chimed in Haldeman. “A dead body is a dead body. Nobody knows whose bodies they are or who killed them.”

“Mighty McGovern Art Players,” as the South Dakotan’s staff began calling the ever-expanding entourage: Leonard Nimoy, Marlo Thomas, John Kenneth Galbraith, a half dozen athletes—and first and second among equals, Shirley MacLaine and her luminous brother, Warren Beatty. The star of Bonnie and Clyde was organizing five celebrity rock-concert fund-raisers for McGovern. He was so close to the campaign’s inner circle that Gary Hart started wearing his hair and clothes like him.