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

by Rick Perlstein

Bremer was an unemployed busboy whose only extended conversation with another friendly human in months was with a girl in a massage parlor whom he was disappointed to learn wasn’t a prostitute. He had a plan, however, to get noticed: he would shoot the president of the United States and go out in a blaze of glory. He wrote it all down in a diary, comparing himself to Melville’s Ishmael and Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich: This will be one of the most closely read pages since the scrolls in those caves. But everything was going awry. He started his hunt in New York. You had to be twenty-five to rent a car there, so he wouldn’t be able to tail the president. On his way back to Milwaukee he left the suitcase with his guns on the plane (he was impressed with himself to hear his name called over the airport loudspeaker). His ’67 Rambler Rebel was decrepit, which at least provided him a rusted cavity beneath the floor mat in which to hide a .38. But then he pushed it too deeply into the floorboards and lost access to the gun. Bremer headed toward Canada to meet Nixon on his pre–Earth Day trip to Ottawa. Then he worried he wouldn’t be able to cross the border without his car registration—so he called U.S. customs and asked. Then, at his motel on the way, he accidentally discharged his Browning 9mm. He got rid of his excess ammunition (except for one bullet he later found in his pocket) and threw his gun cases into a pond (and thereupon discovered they floated). He’d cut his hair t...

The president, sucking down cocktails, started woolgathering: “left-wing propaganda” was what he hoped they’d find. “Too bad we couldn’t get somebody down there to plant it.” At which Colson realized that there was no reason they couldn’t.

When he came back, the president asked him, “Is he a left-winger, right-winger?” “Well, he’s going to be a left-winger by the time we get through, I think.”

Nixon could formulate no coherent strategic plan for the general election until he knew which Democratic Party he might be running against. Hopefully, he would soon have the intelligence he needed. The same team that had broken into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s shrink had established a beachhead at the Howard Johnson’s across from DNC chair O’Brien’s office at the Watergate complex, ready to effectuate the revised CRYSTAL phase of Gordon Liddy’s Operation GEMSTONE.

They were smoother criminals than Arthur Bremer, but not by much.

Apparently they decided neither inebriation nor torpor would hinder their mission: the epicurean Hunt catered an extravagant meal and libations (nursing a bleeding ulcer, he took his whiskey mixed with milk).

McGovern wanted to campaign on issues. But he was bored by their details. Richard Nixon was bored by them, too. But Richard Nixon was willing to bullshit.

His spokesmen lied Wednesday morning that McGovern’s victory had been “very convincing,” “absolutely decisive,” making the candidate of reform sound just like another Washington snake-oil salesman.

The old salts of the press saw what was happening: the regulars would be working behind the scenes to pool Muskie, Humphrey, and George Wallace delegates in a “stop McGovern” bloc being organized by Southern governors such as Jimmy Carter of Georgia.

The White House was doing things criminal bosses who don’t want to get convicted do: fouling the chain of evidence, putting detectives off the scent, lying, inventing alibis—obstructing justice.

Another problem, as formidable in its way as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was John Mitchell’s wife.

A drunk, a harridan, a shrew, a troublesome woman, this Martha Mitchell. Mardian was making sure she didn’t see a newspaper that morning. Then they locked her in the proverbial attic.

Billy Graham called the president and offered to help counsel John and Martha Mitchell through their difficult patch. Another successful public relations score.

In Which Playboy Bunnies, and Barbarella, and Tanya Inspire Theoretical Considerations upon the Nature of Democracy

It had been set ablaze by commando feminists.

But to the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, there was no personage so monstrous as a reformer.

A former officer of the Chicago League of Women Voters testified about her own encounter with one of these door-knockers: she said the sample ballot violated the democratic reform guidelines; the mook responded he’d never heard of these “guidelines” of which she spoke; she replied that they demanded slates balanced by sex; he responded, “Women don’t belong in politics.”

Her friends got the six hundred signatures required to get her on the ballot, outhustled the machine with volunteers, and won—only to find her victory legally overturned. Daley controlled the judges, too.

(“Every mother wants her boy to be president, and every boy wants to be president,” he blathered, oblivious that Rose Kennedy, having seen two sons murdered for that ambition, might be the exception.)

There were to be no compromises. This was the New Politics.

Somewhere, Richard Nixon was smiling.

Here was another development to warm the cockles of Richard Nixon’s heart: wedge issues within the New Politics coalition itself.

Where were the sweaty, fat, bald men in suits and ties of yesteryear? The congressmen’s wives in evening gowns? The plump matrons in floral dresses dancing with banners and balloons? The broads in cheerleader outfits, Humphreyettes, Johnsonettes, Kennedyettes, Stevensonettes, Trumanettes—where were they? The only men dressed in Native American dress were…Native Americans. These people were…the wrong kind of exuberant. They were dressed…the wrong kind of crazy. The colors were…the wrong kind of riotous. The women were…the wrong kind of sexy.

Richard Nixon knew Americans didn’t want to know their politicians had psychological problems like anyone else. That was why, back in the 1950s, after Walter Winchell raised suspicions about the number of visits Nixon was making to a certain Dr. Hutschnecker on Park Avenue, Nixon started seeing a military doctor in Washington instead.

“Munich: Where the Good Times Are”).

Richard Nixon received a blow the next morning from the Washington Post: “Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds,” ran a small article by Carl Bernstein and his colleague Bob Woodward. Though the story was hardly noticeable among the thirteen pieces, heralded by a banner across all eight columns, on the Eagleton resignation.

Vietnam was becoming a forgotten war. Jane Fonda was one of the few who insisted people remember. She had once been an apple-cheeked sex symbol, a girl next door, so conventional that in 1959 she accepted the ceremonial title of “Miss Army Recruiter.” She had been trying to visit North Vietnam for over a year. Finally granted a visa, she arrived during the Democratic National Convention. Upon her return, she announced she was quitting acting to work full-time for Richard Nixon’s defeat. She wanted to help prisoners of war. It would later become easy to forget: helping prisoners of war was a strong issue for the left. (It was one of the reasons Nixon was so eager to co-opt it for himself.)

While Fonda was in Vietnam, the New York Times reported that the rules of engagement for “fixed wing air operations” since May of 1971—no incendiary ammunitions were to be used in inhabited areas—included a B-52–sized loophole: unless “necessary for the accomplishment of the commander’s mission.”

Anthony Lewis had recently reported in the Times after visiting hospitals that had been bombed despite red crosses painted on their roofs.

Fonda arrived in Paris and called a press conference. She brought film of the bombed dikes. “I believe in my heart, profoundly, that the dikes are being bombed on purpose,” she said, “hydraulic systems, sluice gates, pumping stations, and dams as well.” She pointed out that a Nazi commander had once been executed by the Allies for bombing dikes in the Netherlands.

The same day, the State Department promised they would disprove Fonda’s assertions with photographic evidence. Assistants carted easels into the pressroom at Foggy Bottom. Then, suddenly, the briefing was canceled. “The administration realized,” the New York Times reported sardonically, “that Hanoi also could produce photographs.” Ron Ziegler spoke from the White House pressroom: “North Vietnam is having some success with their campaign to get the world to believe that American planes were bombing dikes.” State’s spokesman contradicted that the next day: yes, American planes were bombing dikes, but as “a result of legitimate attacks on military installations such as antiaircraft sites.” Then the State Department released an intelligence report on the dike system: it admitted damage to twelve locations, all accidental. Which unfortunately cut across the State Department’s other habitual assurance: that America’s laser-guided bombing systems were the most accurate in the history of warfare. The sci-fi sex kitten from Barbarella had the White House sweating bullets. Then the sex kitten was joined by the secretary-general of the United Nations: “I cannot tell you whether the bombing is accidental or not,” Kurt Waldheim said. The results were the same; the problem was the war. “The United Nations can no longer remain a mute spectator of the horror of the war and of the peril which it increasingly poses to international peace.”

Then Nixon sent his UN ambassador, the failed Senate candidate George Herbert Walker Bush, to advise Kurt Waldheim to stop repeating propagandistic falsehoods. The meeting, however, was brief. Bush, a fighter pilot in World War II, emerged looking shell-shocked, suddenly unwilling to press his assigned case that the dikes had been spared. He told reporters, “I think that the best thing I can do on the subject is shut up.”

The actress’s trip marked the emergence of a new narrative about Vietnam: that people like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon weren’t responsible for the disaster, but people like Fonda, stabbing America’s soldiers and South Vietnamese allies in the back, were. It was the most convenient possible development for Richard Nixon—who was, exactly then, planning to stab America’s soldiers and South Vietnamese allies in the back.

But they couldn’t settle it before October. They needed the war to keep going through the election. That way they could blame the continuation of war on the Democrats: their line could be, Haldeman wrote in a memo, that the sustained fighting proved the Communists were “absolutely at the end of their rope,” their only chance of victory “to stagger through to November hoping that President Nixon will lose and they can get a good deal from the next administration.”

Nobody wanted to be tagged for the rest of his career as a loser. The candidate of last resort turned out to be Sargent Shriver, the former Peace Corps director, husband of JFK’s sister Eunice—a counterfeit Kennedy.

“Is there anything braver or more noble about burning up children who live north of the seventeenth parallel or who live in Cambodia or Laos? They all feel pain. They’re all children of the same God. Those it seems to me are the

On the other hand, Richard Nixon’s take on the question—that his own person, clothed in the the garment of the presidency, embodied the will of the people—was, at least, less messy. It surely made for a smoother TV show.

The spectacle on the screens told the story. Richard Nixon had brought us together. But not, you know, too together. He had given Americans something to be exuberant about. But not, you know, the wrong kind of exuberant.

CIA agents got to work proving Lennon’s strings were being pulled by Moscow paymasters.

By summer Lennon was too busy trying to stay in the country to either tour against Nixon or make it to the Republican convention. The threat to national security had been neutralized.

Even Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were embarrassed. They fancied their Yippie spectacles as creative—such as the “puke-in” they attempted on the sidewalk outside the reception. (“The problem being,” they lamented, “that a group of individuals cannot puke in unison, whatever medicine they might take.”)

Richard Nixon was good at speaking to people who felt looked down upon.

It turned out, mysteriously, that they had all received personal invitations to the event in the mail.

McGovern just wasn’t playing fair.

October 10, a scoop from Bernstein and Woodward:

But if the White House was implicated, why were so many of these stories at the bottom of the page?

An astonishing watershed in American political history had passed: a major journalistic institution was willfully and cynically discredited by a president as if it were a rival political candidate—the Washington Post as Jerry Voorhis, or Helen Gahagan Douglas. And the president had no trouble getting away with it.

Republicans announced a ludicrous crowd estimate of 425,000 (they had claimed 700,000 at his only other real campaign motorcade, in Atlanta, within a space that could physically contain only 75,000).

It gave Chuck Colson an idea: a White House agent provocateur could infiltrate the welfare rights picketers in front of one of the Committee to Re-Elect the President storefront offices and throw a brick through a window that had a poster version of the weather-vane ad within frame for the TV cameras.

“They don’t realize how rough I can play. I’ve been such a nice guy around a lot of times…. But when I start, I will kill them. There’s no question about it.”