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

by Rick Perlstein

“We are told that the Chicago police are under orders that if they come into the hall to arrest delegates or otherwise do their duties, they are not to wear helmets. Presumably because it doesn’t look very good.” Huntley, holding a headphone to his ear: “David, I think we can establish this without fear of contradiction: this is surely the first time policemen have ever entered the floor of a convention.” Brinkley, with a weary, slow shake of the head: “In—the—United—States.”

NBC News reporter Don Oliver reports that Mike Wallace of CBS was being detained by the Chicago police in a command post trailer on the second floor of the amphitheater after a disturbance on the floor of the convention. There is a report that Wallace has been struck by a security guard.”

“He looked at Mayor Daley!” Huntley says. “Would like to know what the mayor is saying,” Brinkley responds. (Later an expert lip-reader suggested an answer: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home.”)

We felt if we could elect Nixon, we’d get to the revolution that much sooner,” one recalled),

He still had Hubert’s pecker in his pocket.

“Nothing would bring the real peaceniks back to our side unless Hubert urinated on a portrait of Lyndon Johnson in Times Square before television—and then they’d say to him, ‘Why didn’t you do it before?’”

Never before had a candidate devoted so much to saying so little to so many.

Even the elephant at the rallies was carefully prepped—with an enema, to foreclose any embarrassing accidents.

This way, viewers could enjoy the frisson of seeing a celebrity in familiar surroundings. It was especially effective in Chicago—the same streets slicked with blood at the Democratic convention, redeemed by adoring, well-starched Republican crowds.

Television was America’s most hidebound medium, the three commercial networks cowed into lowest-common-denominator uniformity by corporations obsessed with controlling the image of their national brands. There really were only two exceptions, both midseason replacements—which meant that they were accidents. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS was intended as a generic variety show, until the younger Smothers brother, Tommy, began injecting New Leftish touches into the skits, to the great consternation of network executives. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (think sit-in, teach-in, be-in) was a deliberate attempt to harness insurgent new cultural energies for the mainstream. It featured a giant, hairy, falsetto-voiced folksinger named Tiny Tim, a deadpan comic Nazi, a nubile go-go dancer with psychedelic slogans painted on her torso, and more sexual innuendo than you could shake a stick at. And on Monday, September 16, 1968, it featured Richard Milhous Nixon.

Not going on Laugh-In himself was one of the things Humphrey lamented cost him the election.

The biggest, most noticeable word was treason, that old Nixon trick: he wasn’t calling anything “treason,” just reporting what others were saying;

“In Chicago,” Stewart Alsop wrote, “for the first time in my life it began to seem to me possible that some form of American fascism may really happen here.”

“When I was with the Marines, I thought I was fighting for democracy, but now I come home to find a police state as bad as the Communists’”; and “We need to establish immediately a ‘humane society’ for the prevention of cruelty to our finest people, who are still human enough to protest the wholesale killing of a wonderful people in the name of patriotism by a nation of moral imbeciles.”

Frank Shakespeare fantasized aloud to a reporter about calling in NBC’s chairman of the board and telling him, “We are going to monitor every minute of your broadcast news, and if this kind of bias continues, and if we are elected, then you just might find yourself in Washington next year answering a few questions. And you just might find yourself having a little trouble getting some of your licenses renewed.”

Rioting white hippies in Chicago were thus a visual godsend.)

Shortly before Election Day, Graham broke his announced policy of not involving himself in partisan politics by conceding he had voted for Nixon absentee.

But the visuals were more clever than the politics. Many viewers weren’t sure what they were supposed to be laughing at; just that Democrats were telling them to laugh at someone—just the thing a sanctimonious liberal would do. And if it so happened that you liked Spiro Agnew, that voice on the TV was laughing at you.

But Nixon couldn’t be elected to produce peace if peace had already been produced.

And in Paris, the chances of peace seemed to be receding every day. Every time the North Vietnamese appeared ready to agree to a condition, the South Vietnamese raised the bar. The reason was that Nixon had sabotaged the negotiations. His agent was Anna Chennault, known to one and all as the Dragon Lady. She told the South Vietnamese not to agree to anything, because waiting to end the war would deliver her friend Richard Nixon the election, and he would give them a better deal.

For now, the bottom line was this: there was no chance of getting the war ended before the election. Because Richard Nixon had made it impossible.

Something, anything, to redeem the dread: if he lost, he was telling his family, it would be because America had proven herself unworthy of his idealism.

Rain was not salubrious for his appearance: it made his dark hair dye run, and risked showing the gray in his short sideburns. Public speaking—a president’s first task—was also not salubrious for his appearance. “The disjointedness,” as Garry Wills described it, “seemed expressed in his face as he scowled (his only expression of thoughtfulness) or grinned (his only expression of pleasure). The features do not quite work together. The famous nose looks detachable…. The parts all seem to be worked by wires, a doomed attempt to contrive ‘illusions of grandeur.’”

The audience, too, was not salubrious. He was sworn in by Justice Black with the defeated vice president by his side, before a crowd of but 250,000—and the Post just had to inform the world that this was “far smaller and at times less enthusiastic than the 1.2 million” that came out for Lyndon B. Johnson on January 20, 1965.

“To lower our voices would be a simple thing. “In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words: from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. “We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another—until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices. “For its part, government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways—to the voices of quiet anguish, the voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart—to

to the injured voices, the anxious voices, the voices that have despaired of being heard.”

The thirty-seventh president of the United States concluded, “To the crisis of the spirit we need an answer of the spirit. And to find that answer, we need only look within ourselves…. We have endured a long night of the American spirit. But as our eyes catch the dimness of the first rays of dawn, let us not curse the remaining dark. Let us gather the light.”

Afterward, the Justice Department’s Warren Christopher met with new White House counsel John Ehrlichman. Christopher handed over a packet of documents and instructed the president to keep them on hand at all times: proclamations to declare martial law, with blanks to fill in the date and the name of the city.

Journalists took Nixon at his word: this was a new day in Washington. They fell over themselves to take him at his word.

“Incessantly, during the last year we heard from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike that ‘America faces its greatest crisis of a hundred years.’” Thank God that was over. “The ground has been prepared for an era of better feeling,” wrote Joseph Kraft.

“Truth will become the hallmark of the Nixon administration…. We will be able to eliminate any possibility of a credibility gap in this administration.”

The presentation of Nixon as the Great Conciliator wasn’t exactly a confidence game, because Richard Nixon on some level believed it. It showed in the personal exhortations he wrote to himself on yellow legal pads in the hideaway office he established in the Old Executive Office Building: Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone…. Need to be good to do good…. The nation must be better in spirit at the end of term. Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspiration. But neither was any of it precisely true. It would be a mistake, for example, to say Nixon cherished domestic tranquillity. He welcomed conflict that served him politically.

A briefing paper came to the president’s desk in the middle of March instructing him to expect increased violence on college campuses that spring. “Good!” he wrote across the face.

“I want everyone fired, I mean it this time” went a typical Nixon command, this one on the sixteenth day of his presidency.

His agriculture secretary, Clifford Hardin, started in on the problem of hunger. “Millions of Americans,” he began, then the president interrupted him: “It is not constructive to say that people here are starving.”

Every morning, staffers would study Herb Klein’s face to know how to handle the boss that day. Another was insecure. Hours were taken up after important meetings grilling Haldeman or his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, about whether he did well or bragging about how well he did.

At his first economics gathering, he suggested cutting federal aid to education (so much for the Times’s “dramatic escalation”) and housing construction loans. Spiro Agnew, who had made his bones as a politician placating suburban voters, shot down the second immediately: “You are thrusting against the young, white, middle-class factor.” The idea was never heard from again.

Nixon would lie about anything: spreading word that he took no naps though he took them almost daily, marked as “staff time” on his public schedule; claiming to the Council on Urban Affairs that his management philosophy was to stick to the big picture—“John Quincy Adams and Grover Cleveland read every bill and almost killed themselves”—even though precious hours of the Leader of the Free World’s time were spent worrying over details such as the spray of the presidential shower, or the precise lighting angles in his TV appearances.

In the middle of March, Nixon ordered the bombing of the sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that meandered through Cambodia, the beginning of a long-term plan called Operation Menu (its component parts were “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Snack,” “Dinner,” “Dessert,” and “Supper”). This scaled new peaks of deception: the bombings were recorded on a secret ledger, which was later destroyed. A half million tons of ordnance were eventually dropped on this neutral country, 3,875 sorties without congressional knowledge. “State is to be notified only after the point of no return,” he instructed on March 15. Then he called in his secretary of state, who opposed the bombing, and secretary of defense, who favored the bombing but opposed doing it secretly, and asked them to advise him on whether to bomb. Sixty B-52s were already on their way.

Such as, on Day 17: “I still have not had any progress report on what procedure has been set up to continue on some kind of basis the letters to the editor project and the calls to TV stations.” This project was a Nixon obsession. The RNC and state and local Republican parties put together lists of loyalists—the “Nixon Network”—willing to write on their own or lend their names to ghostwritten missives on items of presidential concern. Day 52, it was the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour: “They have a sequence in which one said to the other that he found it difficult to find anything to laugh about—Vietnam, the cities, etc., but ‘Richard Nixon’s solving those problems’ and ‘that’s really funny.’” Nixon told aides he wanted letters to the producers, stipulating their argument: the gag was inaccurate “in view of the great public approval of RN’s handling of foreign policy, etc., etc.” The show was canceled one month later. A press aide, Jim Keogh, a former Time editor, pointed out on Day 29, “Media treatment of the President is almost uniformly excellent.” The president answered, “You don’t understand, they are waiting to destroy us.”

Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a constitutional obsessive, said it would “better be titled ‘A Bill to Repeal Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution.’” D.C.’s police chief said he didn’t want or need it. That wasn’t important to the White House, for whom it was a no-lose proposition: they didn’t expect it to pass, but got points for proposing “bold” action all the same.

They weren’t kicking Dick Nixon around anymore. They started bending over backward to be accepted by him and his supporters instead.

He “feels trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored…. The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

William Rogers, was a member of that Establishment, a former colleague of Tom Dewey’s, a legal adviser to the Washington Post. He had also been a confidant of Nixon’s since the 1940s—the man Nixon had gone to for advice on how to handle the Establishment during his slow, soiling humiliations. Perhaps that was why Nixon singled out his secretary of state for systematic humiliation again and again. Kissinger was glad to oblige—once spreading the rumor that Rogers was a “fag” who kept a hot, young stud in a Georgetown town house.

Balancing nations’ interests against each other, vouchsafing stability even at the price of apparent moral inconsistency, now seemed the highest good.

Kissinger was even on the record as once opining that Richard Nixon “was not fit to be president.” But then, Kissinger was as ruthless a bastard as any Nixon had seen. Each appreciated how the other played the game. That was another place where their minds met.

The Johnson team trusted him implicitly. They shouldn’t have. Kissinger was the double agent feeding the intelligence to Nixon that let him scotch the peace deal before the election.

Together Nixon and Kissinger revolutionized American foreign affairs across a Shakespearean tangle of mutual manipulation, affection, and resentment.

Nixon issued National Security Decision Memo 2 during the inauguration parade. The document disbanded the group within the State Department that checked the NSC. That made Kissinger the most powerful foreign policy officer in history. It also produced a paradox. Nixon and Kissinger had given themselves more single-handed control over foreign affairs than any other two men in American history. They fetishized the secrecy of their deliberations more than any other two officers in American history as well. It promised them control—and made those things they could not control all the more enraging: the secrets that slipped their containment chambers, the negotiating miscues, the battlefield blunders, the public relations setbacks. It made them all the more susceptible to losing emotional control.

And already, a refusal by a paranoid president to believe that the media’s acceptance of him as a responsible leader had happened at all. Already, a palimpsest of lies.