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

by Rick Perlstein

Force Leviathan to show its “true,” fascist, face.

The cops got the confrontation they wanted. The revolutionaries got the confrontation they wanted. Lo, a new crop of revolutionaries; lo, a new crop of vigilantes: Nixonland.

“Where are you going to get all the money for these federally subsidized programs you’re talking about?” one inquired in a put-upon tone. “From you,” the candidate shot back, and pointed out how few black faces he saw. “You are the privileged ones…. You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam.”

“I want real loyalty,” Johnson liked to say. “I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window and say it smells like roses.”

“He is for America first.”

In Michigan, Alabama’s first gentleman said his wife’s cancer was “improving.” She was actually shrunken down to eighty pounds and finally succumbed a couple days later. Twenty-five thousand mourners waited up to five hours to pay respects at a silver casket—open, at George Wallace’s insistence, despite Lurleen’s dying wish that it be closed—engraved with a line from her inaugural speech: “I am proud to be an Alabaman.”

Moderates can be seized by ideological fever dreams as much as extremists; it has always been thus.

“HAS VIOLENCE BECOME AN AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE?”NEWSWEEK’S cover story asked. Time’s cover pointed a stark black handgun at the reader. “The country does not work anymore,” a young columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote. “All that money and power have produced has been a bunch of people so filled with fear and hate that when a man tries to tell them they must do more for other men, instead of listening they shoot him in the head.”

The grassroots right-wing army that had lost with Goldwater in 1964 had survived to fight a thousand battles more. For instance, since 1966, they’d been battling the toxic eighth-grade history textbook Land of the Free by John Hope Franklin, circulating a filmstrip that alternated passages from the book with readings from the Communist Manifesto, and putting out pamphlets by FACTS in Education—the acronym stood for Fundamental issues, Americanism, Constitutional government, Truth, and Spiritual values—tut-tutting the book’s favorable mention of Martin Luther King despite his “record of 60 Communist front organizations.” One parent said he’d sooner go to jail than let his daughter be in the same room with the book.

Kuchel himself knew enough to be worried. After the Goldwater crusade, his enemies now controlled the California Republican Party. In 1966 he called in Richard Nixon to broker a series of peace meetings with conservatives. It wasn’t enough. Someone more formidable than John Wayne arose to challenge him: the man who led the campaign against Land of the Free. For saving their children from what he called the “sick sixties,” California conservatives loved Max Rafferty more than Watts Negroes loved RFK. The Louisiana native and son of an autoworker had been an obscure school administrator in 1961 when he was invited to address a school board meeting in his new district outside Pasadena. He chose not to dilate upon the topic of his dissertation, “Personnel-Pupil Ratios in Certain California Elementary School Districts”; instead he excoriated activists who “seem to spend every waking moment agitating against ROTC, booing authorized congressional committees, and parading in support of Fidel Castro…. This sizable minority of spineless, luxury-loving, spiritless characters came right out of our classrooms. They played in our kindergartens, went on field trips to the bakery and studied things called ‘social living’ and ‘language arts’ in our junior high schools. They were ‘adjusted to their peer groups.’ They were taught that competition was bad. They were told little about modern democratic capitalism. They were persuaded that the world was very shortly to become one big, happy fam...

An intellectually ambitious memo by a new kid, Kevin Phillips, a former aide to the right-wing Bronx congressman Paul Fino, “Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority,” was circulating among the Nixon strategists. The language was new, but the theory was as old as the crusade against Alger Hiss: elections were won by focusing people’s resentments.

The New Deal coalition rose by directing people’s resentment of economic elites, Phillips argued. But the new hated elite, as the likes of Rafferty and Reagan grasped, was cultural—the “toryhood of change,” condescending and self-serving liberals “who make their money out of plans, ideas, communication, social upheaval, happenings, excitement,” at the psychic expense of “the great, ordinary, Lawrence Welkish mass of Americans from Maine to Hawaii.” Nixon groped toward giving that Lawrence Welkish mass a name and a nobility of purpose in a May 16 national radio address. William Safire took special delight in poaching the keynote from a liberal. Paul Douglas once gave a speech labeling all those millions of Americans condescended to by their economic overlords the “silent center.” Nixon described the “silent center” as “the millions of people in the middle of the American political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly.” They were loud. You were quiet. They proclaimed their virtue. You, simply, lived virtuously. Thus Nixon made political capital of a certain experience of humiliation: the humiliation of having to defend values that seemed to you self-evident, then finding you had no words to defend them, precisely because they seemed so self-evident. Nixon gave you the words. “A great many quiet Americans have become committed to answers to social problems that preserve personal freedom,” he said. “As this silent center has become a part of the...

The two sides were not symmetrical. Only one had the power to put the other in jail.

For years Dr. Benjamin Spock had watched mysterious men in slouch hats take notes wherever he spoke; “one Dr. Spock is more dangerous to the war effort than 1,000 draft-card burners,” the Nation pointed out. In January 1968, Spock was indicted for criminal conspiracy to interfere with the draft laws, along with four others who had signed a petition counseling draft resistance before the Pentagon protest.

The jury was told the government needn’t prove these “conspirators” were ever in the same room, or even in on the same phone conversations—only that “a meeting of the minds” had taken place. Hundreds had signed the same document. Why had the government chosen these five? Mitchell Goodman was the forty-four-year-old novelist who had shouted, “We are burning children in Vietnam!” during Hubert Humphrey’s appearance at the National Book Awards. Marcus Raskin was a thirty-three-year-old former Kennedy administration defense official. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin was the forty-four-year-old chaplain of Yale University, a former CIA officer. Only one, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate student of no particular public reputation named Michael Ferber, resembled a typical antiwar activist. The state was on the lookout for gurus: “teachers, preachers, and politicians,” as Nixon had put it in Reader’s Digest, who led children astray. Our children were the symbol and substance of American innocence. The thought that they’d come to insurrectionist conclusions on their own was too painful for some to bear. Their Svengalis had to be punished. Svengalis were in patriots’ sights everywhere.

The Establishment hated the gurus. Which was why they went after a far more prominent guru with even greater fury—the guru who was first among equals. “Is Dr. Spock to Blame?” asked the cover of Newsweek, next to an infant wearing buttons reading UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHER and DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 3. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was the taproot of the new generation’s insolence, said a friend of Richard Nixon’s, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale: “Feed ’em whatever they want, don’t let them cry, instant gratification of needs.” And now Dr. Spock was fighting off jail. It was all a little fantastic: Dr. Spock’s actual prescriptions were only permissive in the context of a previous generation of baby books (“Infants should be kissed, if at all, upon the cheek or forehead, but the less of this the better” went the typical counsel). People needed scapegoats. “Liberal parenting” fit the bill.

He proposed a budget that cut every department by 10 percent, which made as much sense as trying to lose 10 percent of one’s body weight by extracting tissue from every organ; he didn’t even know that much of the budget was set by statute. He never came within a mile of the goal. Then he passed the largest tax increase in the history of a U.S. state.

Reagan was in way over his head. “Can anyone tell me what’s in my legislative program?” he once plaintively asked aides in the middle of a press conference. It hardly mattered to those who wanted to see him president.

According to legend, Rockefeller—despised by them anyway as a civil rights liberal—disqualified himself by committing the mortal sin of pouring sugar on his grits.

Delicately, Nixon carved out his own position. Brown v. Board of Education was a done deal, settled law, he said. But a “strict construction” of the Constitution unfortunately limited the federal government’s ability to enforce it; and of course, he would only appoint “strict constructionists” to the bench.

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.

Given their learned South Carolina colleague’s legendary sexual appetites, it must have been hard not to laugh.

Amerika was becoming a prison.

A riot represents people making history.”

The City of Chicago had its own definition of the word open. It had to do with her definition of other words.

A citizen was someone who was orderly, obedient, who followed the rules. Anyone else, in this argot, was an outsider—whether

“Any trouble, it would come from outsiders.” Outsiders were what threatened the convention’s openness.

Those not with the city’s program were by definition openness’s despoilers.

On April 11, the city council passed a disorderly conduct ordinance making illegal “any unreasonable or offensive act, utterance, gesture, or display which…creates a clear and present danger of a breach of peace.”

Two weeks later, cops flexed their muscles at City Center Plaza. Those with press passes were systematically manhandled. They were seen by most cops as the root of the problem. The press, Quinn Tamm of the International Association of Chiefs of Police wrote in the June Police Chief magazine, “overpublic[ized] militants, assiduously stoking the fires of unrest.” Mayor Daley agreed. He didn’t anticipate any trouble convention week—“unless certain commentators and columnists cause trouble.”

A terror over law and order engulfed the nation’s cities.

“Outside of the visible return of Jesus Christ,” a Chattanooga minister proclaimed, “the only salvation of the country is the election of George Wallace.”

The National Governors’ Conference forwent tropical cocktails to meet in Cincinnati, adopting a resolution declaring “crime in the streets of America as a problem which demands the utmost concern and attention of all Americans” (they refused to endorse a gun control bill requested by the nation’s police chiefs).

The national press remained sufficiently distracted by the funny hats and windy speeches to hardly notice.

That showed how well he grasped the delicate psychological sensitivities of the region that still smarted from the humiliation of losing what he had learned, during his law school days at Duke, to call when occasion demanded the “War Between the States.” The idea that cultural bigotry lay behind the North’s calling to account of the South on civil rights was central to Southern identity.

The famous political question of 1968 was born: “Sparrow who?” Nixon had a habit of impetuously falling in love. He had not known Spiro Theodore Agnew long, but he felt a kinship with him. They came of common roots: both the sons of grocers who were strict disciplinarians, both had worked their way through college, both junior officers in World War II—strivers, grinders, resentful outsiders.

They hit it off. They shared the same resentments. They shared the same enemy.

crux of the New Politics: compromises were always suspect.

“They beat cameramen to keep them from filming policemen beating other people, and newsmen not in spite of the fact they were newsmen but because of it.

Dramatic stuff, if you followed this sort of thing. A boring blizzard of disconnected names if you didn’t.

“We’re not going to give up, not any of us…. When you’ve been in a party as long as I have, and you love it, and you see the end of something—I’m just saying good-bye, is what I’m doing.”

They cut to the New York delegation waving curiously flimsy STOP THE WAR signs, standing on their chairs and singing “We Shall Overcome,” and John Chancellor: “This floor is a cacophony of sound! When the New York delegation, or most of it, began standing on their chairs and singing this song, the podium tried to ‘get order’ as it called it, and then the band, under orders from the podium, began to play—” (“We Shall Overcome” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” simultaneously.) David Brinkley: “A rather furious contest between the delegation and the convention orchestra—” The string section, sawing away furiously in their tuxedos. “The conductor keeps on asking for ‘one more chorus.’”

A war has broken out on the floor of an American major-party convention. You can’t imagine anything more engrossing than this.

“I’m with two adornments of the Florida delegation,” says Edwin Newman, putting his microphone before two smartly dressed suburban women. “Mrs. Heatter, you’re not particularly happy with the way the convention has gone, I think.” “No, I’m a McCarthy delegate, and this is my first time at a convention, and I had the dreams from high school democracy class, that everybody voted their conscience, and everyone voted for their constituents, because they were elected delegates. And that’s not how it goes. I hear people say, ‘What am I supposed to vote here?’ not, ‘What is the issue?’” “Who are ‘they,’ Mrs. Heatter?” “I don’t know, but they look like they’ve had a lot of experience with conventions…. I think we should have a new system…the people at home want things so badly, and the delegates-at-large and people like that don’t give it to them…there’s going to be people who say, ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’”

The camera is now on Daley, his jowls, his scowl, men attending to him as if he were a Bourbon potentate. Brinkley jokes, “Well, he left the hall in a fleet of black limousines, spent a while, and came back in a fleet of black limousines. And so we take it for granted that he did better than hot dogs.

“The freedom of speech, the freedom of choice in what you wear, how you look, is one of the most important things we have.”

A Gulf commercial: A couple pulls into a filling station, where they’re giving out a free donkey or elephant pin with every fill-up. The husband wants the donkey. The wife wants the elephant: “I think it’s very important to be strict.”

“I hope and pray that we Democrats, win or lose, can campaign not as a crusade to exterminate the opposing party, as our opponents seem to prefer, but as a great opportunity to educate and elevate.” This is from Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 acceptance speech, read in tribute to Stevenson’s insistence that Democrats remain nicer than Richard Nixon.

Peace marchers who started out walking south met a wall of police and turned northward into the plaza containing Buckingham Fountain, then looped around to head south again, avoiding the cops. So the hemmed-in cops threw tear-gas canisters across the street at the apex of the marchers’ U-turn—which was the sidewalk in front of the building that billed itself as “the world’s largest and friendliest hotel.” GRANT PARK, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, the chyron now reads, and a woman’s voice says, “The kids are still marching, it looks like a whole gathering of people with terrible colds”; and then Brinkley back in the convention hall: “Mrs. Saarinen has been gassed in the course of that report, has received medical attention, and is all right.” The next image, appropriately enough, is a commercial about the joy brought to a small Louisiana town when Gulf built a chemical plant.

“The Chicago police are now in the aisle with billy clubs, clearing people out!…They’re dragging people right out of the aisle. One, two, three, four, five, six—some of them wearing the blue helmets.” Photographers hoist their cameras above their heads and into the scrum: click, click, click. “This is the first time in my memory of going to political conventions that the police have come in, on the floor, armed as they were, and taking out people who were disputing the checking of credentials.” “First time in the United States, John.”