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

by Rick Perlstein

Joseph Alsop, perhaps the most influential columnist in the United States, wrote a series of columns making the same argument demographically: in 1961, twenty-six thousand white children attended Washington, D.C., elementary schools. Now so many whites had fled to the suburbs that the number was thirteen thousand. He predicted there would be, “one day, a President Verwoerd in the White House.” Hendrik Verwoerd was the prime minister of South Africa, the architect of apartheid. A few days later, that particular premonition of apocalypse was capped off when Verwoerd was assassinated on the floor of parliament.

That August was a watershed in American history. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the “party of Lincoln” was identified by the public as the party more favorable to the aspirations of Negroes. The Democrats’ situation was complicated: they simultaneously began winning the allegiance of black voters by dint of the New Deal and relied on Southern segregationists for their majorities. But by the early 1960s, with Goldwater conservatives in the ascendancy among Republicans, and Northern liberals in the ascendancy within the Democratic coalition, a crossover point had been passed.

The long, hot summer of 1966 was when the national Republican Party changed its mind.

And so on the first anniversary of the riots in Watts, twenty-one months after the 1964 Johnson landslide, Goldwaterism became official House Republican policy on civil rights.

He had no problem catering to fear of Negroes if political expediency demanded it. (It was indeed what he felt in his heart. Went through his whole thesis re: blacks and their genetic inferiority, Bob Haldeman wrote in his diary one day of a May 1969 meeting with the boss.)

Different moments carried with them different political requirements; this week’s was oleaginous demonstrations of Republican unity.

As for George Mahoney, he was so racist the state’s prominent Democrats endorsed the Republican, Spiro Agnew, the undistinguished chief executive of Baltimore County.

And that led to the first shot on Fort Sumter.

“The polls still place the war in Vietnam and the rising cost of living as the major political issues of 1966.” He was lying. As far as domestic issues went, Gallup showed race far outstripped inflation as a concern.

Until that time, the public would just have to be told what the public had to be told.

Nixon was hitting Johnson with the same chair every time he mentioned inflation. Inflation was something a president could little control in the best of circumstances.

The insinuating speech, hands balled over his stomach, his jaw working upward and downward—thought Garry Wills, Esquire magazine’s mordantly brilliant political correspondent, “like Charlie McCarthy’s.”

One day, Representative Schmidhauser appeared at a farm bureau meeting, prepared for a grilling on the Democrats’ agricultural policies. The questions, though, were all on rumors that Chicago’s Negro rioters were about to engulf Iowa in waves, traveling, for some reason, “on motorcycles.” The liberal political-science professor was as vulnerable as a sapling. Hence Nixon’s visit to Davenport. Nixon visited Iowa as often as he could. Despite the old joke about Iowa going Democratic when hell goes Methodist, five of its seven congressional seats belonged to freshman Democrats. Now that farmers were afraid that Martin Luther King would send Negro biker gangs to rape their children, the Republican restoration was inevitable.

am shocked that the NAACP has formed a Hitler-like group that would apparently take the law into their own hands.” He didn’t ask for an injunction against the armed Klansman posted outside the Waukesha home of their grand dragon.

“A great man once said, ‘In the Democratic Party, even the old seem young.’” And the people before him roared, because they were Democrats. “But in the Republican Party even the young seem old!”

It was classic Nixon: courting sympathy for getting attacked in a fight you yourself had started.

Experienced observers had long ago learned to read the president’s entrails like Greek oracles, seeking in his changing medical humors clues to his political fears.

let them pounce on your “mistake,” then garner pity as you wriggle free by making the enemy look unduly aggressive. Then you inspire a strange sort of protective love among voters whose wounds of resentment grow alongside your performance of being wounded.

Union members voted for politicians who weakened their unions because the Democrats supported civil rights.

“national political leaders do not like to waste their time campaigning for heavy favorites; if they did, their average could be much higher.” Nixon had bamboozled the Times. Wasting his time on candidates he thought most likely to win was exactly what he had been doing.

He reported eighty-nine civilian deaths in one town, forty in a second, twenty-four in a third—and that, in this “brushfire war,” more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam since 1966 than the entire tonnage dropped on Japan during World War II.

The Pentagon claimed what civilian casualties there were came from the Communists’ deliberate emplacement of surface-to-air missiles in populated areas.

Lying about Vietnam: it had become a Washington way of life.

A kid from Michigan State: “Mr. Secretary, what happens if we continue the policy you’ve outlined…this continued gradual escalation until the other side capitulates…up to and including nuclear war, and the other side doesn’t capitulate?” Rusk leaned back, hissed forth a stream of tobacco smoke, and solemnly replied, “Well, somebody’s going to get hurt.” Here, before their eyes, was the maniacal air force general Buck Turgid-son from Dr. Strangelove. The room drew silent, their thoughts as one: My God, the secretary of state is crazy.

In a way, the most honest messages about Vietnam available in the mainstream came from the massively popular annual NBC broadcasts of Bob Hope’s Christmas shows for the troops. Time was the place to go each week if you wanted to read about how the American GIs “main concern in off-duty hours is aiding Vietnamese civilians.” None of that bullshit from Bob; he told winking jokes about prostitutes. To connect with his audience, Hope had to earn their trust. He did it by telling home truths. At Qi Nam, he acknowledged the war’s hopelessness with a joke about LBJ’s proposed tax hike: “When a Texan says we need money, you know we’re really in trouble.” To a crowd at Da Nang, fifteen thousand marines bigger than the year before, he acknowledged the conflict’s uncontrollable growth: “I probably look like Mickey Rooney from back there!”

He was too damned forthright, too earnest—especially about Vietnam. He grappled with it honestly. Which would make what he said sound absurd, since everyone else was in denial or lying.

They buttonholed Republicans and reporters, arguing that the best way to avoid the party-killing rancor their efforts had lamentably produced in 1964 was not for no one to declare his candidacy but for everyone to declare his candidacy.

In New York, Richard Nixon smiled. LaRue and O’Donnell were his secret agents. Sowing a dozen or more presidential “contenders” starved the five or six who actually were contenders of attention, leaving Nixon to plot behind the scenes in peace.

It was as if someone had called to this boom of babies sired by the domesticity-starved veterans of World War II, “Ye shall be as gods.” And they believed it. Because they were told it all the time.

“To warn the ‘civilized world’ of its impending collapse,” through “communications among aware communities outside the establishment.”

Something was happening here. What it was wasn’t exactly clear.

A rumor was spreading across America’s ghettos: the government was preparing concentration camps for blacks. The Panthers took it for settled fact. Which was why the Executive Mandate continued, “At the same time that the American government is waging a racist war of genocide in Vietnam, the concentration camps in which the Japanese Americans were interned during World War II are being renovated and expanded. Since America has historically reserved the most barbaric treatment for nonwhite people we are forced to conclude that the concentration camps are being prepared for black people who are determined to gain their freedom by any means necessary….

But police who perceived they’d been “handcuffed” tended to act in a less, not more, restrained manner.

Police were ordered to avoid arrests for looting, for arrests would be an acknowledgment there was a “riot.” Insurance companies didn’t cover riots.

This, too, was another riot pattern: a lack of investigative energy where police offenses were concerned.

Some cops had used personal weapons, making ballistic reports uncheckable.

In actual fact the photo had been staged by a blustering black nationalist, and what the copy claimed was an upper-floor vantage onto the streets was actually a first-floor room overlooking a trash-strewn backyard. “The whole time we were in Newark we never saw what you would call a violent black man,” Life photographer Bud Lee later recalled. “The only people I saw who were violent were the police.”

“I’m gonna shoot at anything that moves and that is black,” an arriving National Guardsman declared.

Politicians fiddled. Detroit burned.

It was the sound of a presidency breaking.

Then Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan stood up to speak—trembled, in fact, with rage. Rats, she said, had killed more people “than all the generals in history.” They “carry the most deadly of diseases. Do you think that’s funny?”

The NRA, once a hobby club for sportsmen, was becoming a new kind of organization altogether. Its magazine, American Rifleman, had a new column, “The Armed Citizen,” which ran glowing accounts of vigilantes.

“I do not believe that either side has the capacity…of winning a quick victory.” Unfortunately for his reputation as a foreign policy sage, it turned out to be a six-day war. Nixon dispatched Pat Buchanan to convince the press he’d been right anyway.

The riots were “the most virulent symptoms to date of another, and in some ways graver, national disorder—the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America….

“Our opinion-makers have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal, is to blame.

“Our teachers, preachers, and politicians have gone too far in advocating the idea that each individual should determine what laws are good and what laws are bad, and that he then should obey the law he likes and disobey the law he dislikes.

the “primary civil right” was “to be protected from domestic violence.”

To what clubs did Mr. X belong? To whom did he owe money? What letters to the editor had he written? And who in town might sell him out? This information was how delegate-hunters locked in adherents, then ensured their loyalty.

“Where does it all end?” He worried the Joint Chiefs of Staff still wouldn’t be satisfied. They’d beg to bomb the locks, the dikes, mine the harbors, starve the peasants. They’d call for invasions of Laos and Cambodia. They’d ask for biological warfare, for nuclear weapons. He knew how the generals thought.

The fact that only 1.5 percent of reservists ever made it to Vietnam was part of what helped sell it as not really a war at all.