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

by Rick Perlstein

Kissinger called J. Edgar Hoover and told him it was time to move forward on a project they had discussed: wiretaps of Laird, Laird’s senior military assistant, and three NSC staffers, including Morton Halperin.

A reporter was next. This time, however, it wasn’t Kissinger working through the FBI. The president wanted to monitor Henry Kissinger.

So they scrounged up some phone company credentials and shimmied up a pole to affix a bug to the reporter’s phone wire.

Nixon needed to know what his foreign-policy right-hand man was up to. Which was only fair. Kissinger was already working toward opening an entirely separate channel to glean what secrets Nixon might be keeping from him.

What one side saw as liberation the other saw as apocalypse: and what the other saw as apocalypse, the first saw as liberation: Nixonland.

At out-of-the-way Kent State University in Ohio, SDS leaders rampaged through classes chanting, “Work! Study! Get ahead! Kill!” then brawled their way past cops into the administration building.

At Kent State, athletes and fraternity brothers faced down SDS in a street fight on the university Commons.

Richard Kleindienst imagined a time when “concentration camps” might be necessary for America’s “ideological criminals.”

For the first time, a white American neighborhood was under military occupation.

It pointed up a dynamic of Nixonland: war and the efforts to end war looked alike on TV. They all just looked like more war.

Legislators—petty, grandstanding, insolent. The worst were the ones who read the Constitution, especially Article I, Section 8, granting them powers “to declare War…to raise and support Armies…to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.” Interference with what Nixon saw as his sovereign foreign-policy-making prerogatives drove him nearly around the bend.

“I’ve always thought the country could run itself domestically without a president,” Nixon once told Theodore White.

Everyone knew what “pretty, witty” secretaries were

privileged little rich boys for whom the rules never seemed to apply.

An aristocracy can convey grace and nobility; it can convey dissolution and decadence. Overnight, the Kennedys learned for the first time what it was like when the former became the latter. Richard Nixon could not be more overjoyed.

In the annals of tabloid sex scandals, after all, this one was the moon shot.

The question was, even giving him the most gracious benefit of the doubt, whether a man who under some combination of impairment and pressure wasn’t able to act decisively was the kind of man you wanted to have his finger on the nuclear button.

Time, on the other hand, claimed to see what the kids saw. And this was a watershed. It meant that Middle America was supposed to be embracing Woodstock, too. The cover of the August 29 issue featured Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. Page 33 featured a full-color photograph from Woodstock captioned, “Boys and girls related in a nearby river”; none of the relating boys and girls wore clothes. The accompanying essay, “The Message of History’s Biggest Happening,” noted that though Time usually recognized “battles won, treaties signed, rulers elected or deposed,” Woodstock should be counted among them “as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age.” It was “the moment when the special culture of U.S. youth of the ’60s openly displayed its strength, appeal, and power.” The magazine called the attendees “pilgrims” and cited the scholar Theodore Roszak, author of the celebratory new book The Making of a Counter Culture—“these rock revolutionaries bear a certain resemblance to the early Christians”—and snubbed “the oversimplification that all narcotics are dangerous and thus should be outlawed” as something as “absurd and hypocritical as Prohibition.” Time also complimented the New York Times for finally coming around—in a second editorial that redubbed Woodstock “essentially a phenomenon of innocence.”

“the agape-like sharing of food and shelter by total strangers; the lack of overt hostilities despite conditions that were ripe for fear and panic…. In spite of the grownup suspicions and fears about the event, Bethel produced a feeling of friendship, camaraderie, and—an overused phrase—a sense of love among those present.”

The hosannas were remarkable.

Time meant to be making peace. Some spied in their olive branch a declaration of cultural war.

A similar attitude obtained on abortion. In 1962, the host of a popular children’s show in Arizona, Sherri Finkbine, pregnant with her fifth child, accidentally took a tranquilizer containing thalidomide, which caused babies to be born without limbs. Her doctor recommended an abortion—forbidden in Arizona as everywhere else in the United States. Finkbine took her case to court. The judge turned her down. She traveled to Stockholm for the procedure. The story was covered widely; Finkbine’s plight helped catalyze a nationwide movement to liberalize abortion laws.

“The very idea that abortion should present a dilemma infuriates me. The morality of satisfied, waistcoated male legislators complacently discussing the academics of ending a prenatal life while terrified women are desperately inserting pointed objects into their wombs is, to my mind, infinitely more questionable than the subject of abortion itself.”

Since 1966 army intelligence had been keeping an eye on protesters who might specifically represent a threat to the army. The Nixon administration tapped an attorney in the Justice Department, William Rehnquist, to write a memo justifying expanding the program to spy on any antiwar activity. Soon, one thousand undercover agents in three hundred offices nationwide were compiling dossiers on such groups as the NAACP, ACLU, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam.

The Nixon administration set up an apparatus to haunt dissidents via their tax returns. When Nixon learned that the IRS had audited John Wayne and Billy Graham—as Nixon himself had been audited in 1961 and ’62—he growled, “Get the word out, down to the IRS, that I want them to conduct field audits of those who are our opponents if they’re going to do our friends.”

Then, in July, three months after the indictment and two months before the trial was set to begin, Attorney General Mitchell made an extraordinary announcement: since the executive branch had the power “to gather intelligence information concerning those organizations which are committed to the use of illegal methods to bring about changes in our form of government and which may be seeking to foment violent disorders,” it would violate the national interest for the defense to review the logs.

In March the ministers, priests, and rabbis of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV) sent out sixty thousand posters listing the number of Americans and Vietnamese killed in the war. Pastors led Eastertide marches: thirty thousand people in the rain in Chicago, forty thousand in San Francisco, one hundred thousand in New York. Quakers read out the names of the thirty thousand American war dead in front of draft boards, then on the Capitol steps—then, after they were threatened with arrest, arm in arm with congressmen. When CALCAV held its convention in Michigan, the president of Dow Chemical, Gil Doan, a devoted Episcopalian, invited them to his home. In 1967, in response to student riots over napalm, which was manufactured by Dow, Doan had responded, “As long as the U.S. is involved in Vietnam, we believe in fulfilling our responsibility to this national commitment of a democratic society.” Now he told the divines that if they could demonstrate that napalm was primarily affecting civilians, he would try to get the company out of the contract. Soon after, Dow reportedly intentionally overbid for the Department of Defense napalm procurement contract and stopped producing the weapon because it was hurting their recruitment efforts among students.

To Nixon and Kissinger, it was the most cataclysmic development imaginable. The only things worse than loud antiwar demonstrations were quiet antiwar demonstrations. A mass movement of ordinary citizens resisting the war screwed up what they had in mind to win it: a haymaker, the knockout blow.

The president dictated eight memos outlining a public relations pushback. It was part of the foreign policy game. De-escalation was contingent on the enemy believing Nixon would escalate; which was contingent upon keeping presidential approval ratings high; which was contingent on the appearance of de-escalation.

Through the looking glass with Richard Nixon: this stuff was better than LSD.

And then there was Washington, D.C. On the evening of the fourteenth, twenty-three congressmen began an intended all-night session on Vietnam on the House floor. Gerald Ford managed to shut them down after four hours.

White House that was already ruthless was becoming more so by the day. The hatred of the press became more obsessive.

At an air base off the Atlantic City airport, MPs wondered why they were on twenty-four-hour alert. A team of soldiers stood guard around two B-52s. Their pilots sat in the ready room carrying guns. An MP madly scanned the newspaper in vain for some international crisis. He knew what it meant when B-52 copilots started carrying sidearms. It was for one copilot to shoot the other if he was too chicken to follow orders and drop the big one.

He then turned the phrase for which the speech became known. “So tonight, to you, the great—silent—majority of my fellow Americans”—he sounded pleased with himself—“I ask for your support.”

“Every American has a right to disagree with the president of the United States, and to express publicly that disagreement. But the president of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of the country have the right to make up their own minds and form their own opinions about a presidential address without having the president’s words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested” by “this little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address, but more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues of our nation.” They became, “in effect, the presiding judge in a national trial by jury.”

In actual fact that was how the founders, brave men, intended it. Indeed, they reveled in it. A querulous American press—far more opinionated, nasty, and partisan than anything Nixon would have to suffer—predated American government. Thomas Jefferson used to lay out the most scabrous articles about him in the White House antechamber where emissaries of foreign potentates waited to be received by him. They would stride forth, waving the pages: Mr. President, are you aware of the things they’re writing about you? Jefferson found nothing so delightful. Yes, he would reply, and they’re welcome to say it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. This is what America means. But Agnew argued these gentlemen of the media were a usurping cabal.

Americans took in an increasingly unpleasant world through their TV screens. Agnew told them the fault was not in the world, but in our networks.

then stoned the Justice Department and bashed in the windows with red flags.

“During World War II, Calley would have been a hero,” a father in northern California growled. “Yeah, if you were a Nazi,” snapped his teenage son.

The Silent Majority had Richard Nixon to protect them. He would bring the My Lai renegades to justice—if indeed that massacre had even happened. He would keep our daughters from killing us. CBS News ran a poll after his December 8 press conference: Nixon’s approval rating was 81 percent—up thirty points in two months. In the South, it was 86. Fifty-eight percent now said they wished America had never gotten involved in Vietnam. But then, Richard Nixon said he wished that, too. Sixty-nine percent, in a third poll, agreed that antiwar protesters were “harmful to public life.” Nixon was the peacenik they could trust.

The NBC cameras trained upon a blond nurse in hippie sunglasses asking him in all earnestness “when you’re going to take the first woman to the moon.” Armstrong answered with leering innuendo. Bob chimed in with a joke about diet-conscious ladies: “I’m sure they’ll all go when they find they can go up there and be weightless.” Meanwhile, the camera found a banner out in the crowd: a peace symbol and the circle-and-cross emblem of women’s liberation.

Smart businessmen figured out ways to sell to both sides. The Christmas season’s most brilliant entrepreneur was surely the guy who invented the Spiro Agnew wristwatch. Hipsters bought it as a kitschy screw-you to his admirers. The Silent Majority bought it as a screw-you to his detractors.

Soon TV producer Norman Lear would have a new hit show, All in the Family. The sympathetic character was supposedly the long-haired, liberal son-in-law. The racist, know-nothing father was the butt of the jokes. Lear never dreamed what would happen next: Archie Bunker was embraced as a hero by the very people the show was meant to lampoon.

He was “allowing some Southern school districts more time to formulate their desegregation plans,” but chose as his chief justice Warren Burger, whose Supreme Court “unanimously rejected the delays”: perfect equipoise.

“Only three of Morenci’s nine Marines made it back alive…. Yet none of the three is really angry about the war.”

During jury selection, the questions the defense wanted the pool to be asked included “Do you know who Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix are?” and “If your children are female, do they wear brassieres all the time?”

When Bobby Seale’s family managed to get seats, Judge Julius Hoffman summoned a marshal and had these strange people with bushy Afros removed. The jury wouldn’t be able to watch his child’s and wife’s reactions when Seale was bound and gagged like a slave.

The next day a defense lawyer argued the four-year sentence was illegal and asked the judge to explain himself. Judge Hoffman replied, “I have known literally thousands of what we used to call Negro people and who are now referred to as black people, and I have never heard that kind of language emanate from the lips of any of them.”

Federal judge selection was supposed to be random. But in Chicago, the fix was always in. In big mob cases, the state always angled to argue before Judge Hoffman: he always decided against the defendant and made the prosecuting attorneys look like heroes. He “is the bane of do-gooders who would give every bum a second chance, and a third and a fourth and a fifth,” Chicago’s American said. He was also a self-hating Jew who took willful pleasure in mispronouncing his fellow Jews’ names (Weinglass: “Fineglass,” “Weintraub,” “Weinruss,” “Weinrob”) and wouldn’t let one witness wear a yarmulke in court (“Take off your hat, sir”). He popped a vein when Abbie Hoffman called himself his “illegitimate son,” but hated David Dellinger (“Derringer,” “Dillinger”) most of all: he was a WASP who’d surrendered privileges the judge so dearly wished to possess.

The seventy-four-year-old they called Mr. Magoo was a hanging judge, hired to grease the rails for a conviction that would only be overturned on appeal. It was a show trial. So why not put on a show?