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

by Rick Perlstein

(A joke going around the New Left: a policeman tells a protester to come back after she has removed the obscenity from her FUCK THE WAR placard and she returns with one reading FUCK THE.)

But that was a different age, when such nuances were possible. Now everyone had to choose a side.

Abbie Hoffman always “shouted”; Judge Hoffman always “said” (even if it was really the other way around). To much of the public, the presumption was that the defecation was nonstop.

They had socialized apart, eaten apart—and, when together, spent most of their time in the jury room debating child-rearing philosophy. One of the convict-on-all-accounts jurors talked about the time she took her willful daughter to see a shrink who said she just needed “love and patience”—and how she stalked out saying of her daughter that she needed to have something “shoved down her throat.” They voiced their fears that their children would end up hippies, said things like “They are evil” and “This is like Nazi Germany—hippies want to take over the country” and “They had no right to come into your living room.” The liberal jurors argued that slovenliness wasn’t a crime, the prosecution was corrupt, and that for the first time they were afraid the government might be spying on them. They wondered whether the antiriot statute was constitutional. At that, the conservative side wondered, if the law didn’t protect decent people from this, then what did it protect them from?

Three days later Judge Hoffman received an enthusiastic clap on the shoulder from Richard Nixon. He was a special guest at the president’s weekly Christian service in the East Room, where the Reverend Billy Graham preached that America’s “differences could melt in the heat of a religious revival.”

As the danker corners of his mind got busy with things the public needn’t know.

Slowly, sedulously, maneuvering around civil service protections, the Nixon administration got to work.

As Haldeman wrote in his diary, “P made point that he never heard of losing an election because of inflation.”

“I think you will find that chain stores who generally control these prices nationwide are primarily dominated by Jewish interests. These boys, of

course, have every right to make all the money they want, but they have a notorious reputation in the trade for conspiracy.”

“What is centrally at issue in this nomination is the Constitutional responsibility of the President to appoint members of the Court—and whether this responsibility can be frustrated by those who wish to substitute their own philosophy or their own subjective judgment for that of the one person entrusted by the Constitution with the power of appointment…. The question arises whether I, as President of the United States, shall be accorded the same right of choice in naming Supreme Court justices which has been freely accorded my predecessors of both parties.”

(Nixon was in love with pomp and finery, too: for a time, he dressed the White House police in uniforms that resembled monarchical livery, until the press started making fun of him.)

William O. Douglas, the most liberal Warren Court justice left, had a weakness for taking outside fees, and Nixon convinced Jerry Ford to form a House committee to look into his impeachment.

“I think it is important for the President to show a little more concern for Mrs. Nixon as he moves through the crowd. At one point he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up. From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her. Women voters are particularly sensitive to how a man treats his wife in public.”

Two hundred State Department employees immediately signed a petition of protest. Nixon responded by calling an undersecretary in the middle of the night: “Fire them all!”

Friday, the next morning, was not quite a typical spring day on the campus of the second-biggest public university in Ohio. It was Derby Day. Every May 1, Kent State frat brothers wore silly hats, and sorority sisters chased them down to plant kisses. This year the squealing “coeds” gave chase near the field where black students were staging a rally—angry young Mau Maus in dashikis with a bullhorn threatening to shut down the school they called Kenya unless five thousand black students were added to the student body “with no complaint that black high school students aren’t prepared for college work.” Kent was a nervous campus, on pins and needles over a yearlong movement to get rid of ROTC. All over town, walls and sidewalks were covered with graffiti: FREE BOBBY. FREE HUEY. U.S. OUT OF CAMBODIA. However, the townies in the Ohio college towns of Columbus, Athens, and Oxford were jealous of Kent. Their schools were even less peaceful. At Ohio State, the National Guard was patrolling the campus. At noon the Victory Bell on the commons was tolled by a group of history graduate students for a ritual interment of the Constitution: “It is now our task to see that it is resurrected in its original form.” One attendee was a Bronze Star–winning infantryman. He announced, “I’m so disgusted with the behavior of my country in invading Cambodia that I’m going to burn my discharge papers.” About three hundred students witnessed the ceremony.

Led by imbeciles, too—such as Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., twenty-four, who’d flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College but was given command of a platoon anyway, even though he couldn’t properly read a map.

That night, on the strip of taverns on Water Street in Kent, Ohio, a bar owner nabbed a spray-painting vandal. She called him a “capitalist pig” and squirmed loose. Someone started a bonfire in the middle of the street; someone threw a bottle. A mob rocked an old man’s car; he sped off under a hail of beer bottles. A group of girls chanted, “Pigs off the street! We won’t go to Cambodia!” Motorcycle gangs arrived. The cops read the riot act and released tear gas. Some students retreated to campus. A voice from a bullhorn drifted across rolling hills: “The revolution has begun! Join us! We’re going to burn the ROTC!” One kid picked up a brick and made to throw it through the window of the rickety old wooden ROTC structure. A policeman arrested him before he could; Kent State had been pacified.

At that very moment, radicals were circling the Kent State ROTC building, passing out handbills to the gathering crowd as if programs for a show about to begin. “There’s no need to condone violence,” a faculty marshal told one of the onlookers. “The point of discussion is passed,” the student returned. “The time for action is here…. I don’t want to hear anything a fucking pig like you has to say.” Then he spat on the professor. A chant went up: “Down with ROTC! Down with ROTC!” Two thousand more students straggled toward the site from the high-rise dorms to the east, acting together in ways they’d never act alone, throwing rocks at the rickety wooden building. A teaching fellow, seeing one of her brightest students rushing across the common with an empty oil drum, said, “Stop that!” “We’ve just got to do this. The building has got to go…. Six years of peaceful protest got us nowhere. They’ll listen only when they see flames, and tonight they’re going to see flames.” The oil drum became a battering ram. Its wielders missed a door, bounced off a wall, and tumbled backward in a heap. Lit railroad flares rebounded off the building and spluttered out, except for one, which set off a pair of curtains. The mob cheered, then groaned as the flame smothered. Another group took torches to a wall, but only singed the paint. Ohio boys and girls were proving themselves poor arsonists. An American flag burned much more effectively, illuminating the evening sky. A football player pulled o...

Perhaps 80 percent were “draft-motivated”—they joined to avoid Vietnam. Most resented kids who had the means and wherewithal to get out of the draft via the far more pleasant route of the student deferment. Others had done tours in Vietnam—and saw these marauding students as rearguard allies of the same enemy that had scattered their buddies’ body parts. Commanders tried to keep these guys off the Kent front lines. They didn’t want berserk Vietnam vets with live weapons anywhere near protesters. The units were a little like the troops of Charlie Company in Quang Ngai province: battle weary after being hunted by a shadowy enemy. Truckers were on a wildcat strike in eastern Ohio. Scabs were getting their tires shot out on the Ohio Turnpike. Ohio governor James Rhodes called out jeeps full of soldiers to keep the freight moving. Strikers called out harassment raids on scab trucks over CB radios; guardsmen came under sniper fire.

Guardsmen sent home for a respite after the trucking strike were called back for Kent State. Kent citizens were thrilled to see the tanks and jeeps rumble through town. Rumors poured into City Hall: “I saw an Illinois car loaded with six Weathermen armed with shotguns!” The units established a perimeter around the ROTC building. Students greeted them with obscenities and rocks. The guardsmen sent out their first volley of tear gas, which blew back due to a miscalculation of the wind. Daring students got in the troops’ faces and screamed. A sergeant moved in on a jeep to try to arrest ringleaders. “A very pretty girl stuck her hand right under my nose, gave me the finger, and uttered four words I’ve never used myself,” he recalled. “I’m not sure I want my daughter to go to college if that’s how they teach her to talk.” Such psychic considerations were not trivial, not to men who sang songs to guard against the humiliation of being called tin soldiers. “You have enough girls throwing wisecracks at young soldiers,” an observer reflected, “it does something to them.” The students were subdued with minimal force. The shabby old ROTC building, which was built to be carted to the South Pacific as a temporary World War II field hospital, burned itself out by 10:30 p.m. Commanders corrected their wind bearings and cleared out the mob with tear gas. The boldest protesters kept on harassing them, which didn’t take that much courage: after the disasters of the sixties urban riots, it ...

Sunday morning the rolling campus hills had the feel of a carnival. Children climbed around the tanks and helicopters; coeds struck up innocent flirtations with guardsmen; a private joked with a freshman, “Hang around, buddy. There’s a rumor that the state is going to cut our pay from $25 a day to $12.80. If they try that, Governor Rhodes will be calling you characters out to subdue us.” The two kids struck up such a friendship that the student went off and bought him some oranges. The soldier said he couldn’t accept them. “Didn’t you hear what the girls did to us at Berkeley? Injected the damned fruit with acid, and you had guys all over the place going off on trips.” Governor Rhodes flew into town at 9 a.m. on a helicopter—there to look tough because the Republican primary was on Tuesday. He was running for Senate. His opponent, Robert Taft III, was running as a New Politics liberal calling for “irreversible” withdrawal from Vietnam. And Taft was ahead in the polls. The governor met in Fire House No. 1 with the mayor, the National Guard commander, the federal district attorney, the district prosecutor, and the commander of the State Highway Patrol. Rhodes banned university officials from the meeting. He didn’t want any liberal administrators whimpering please. Gruff, dough-faced Rhodes laid out the goal: keep the university open without any further demonstrations so as not to hand a victory to the “dissident element.”

“We’re not going to treat the symptoms. And these people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. “They’re worse than the brownshirts and the Communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America. And I want to say this: they’re not going to take over a campus.”

Some guardsmen started removing their name patches because kids were looking up their numbers in the Akron phone book and harassing their wives: “Hey, you beautiful chick, who are you fucking now that your pig husband is here on the Kent campus?” Night fell. Students gathered at the Victory Bell, though rallies were supposed to have been banned: “One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucking war!” “Fuck you! Ag-new!” A jeep, a bullhorn: “You are breaking the law. You must disperse. If you continue to demonstrate, you will be arrested.” “Fuck you, pig!” Shortly before 8 p.m. a guardsman found two bottles of gasoline and a wick in the bushes by university police headquarters. Fifteen minutes after that, five gallons of gasoline were found on the roof of the administration building. After nine, radicals marched to the president’s house, surging past the dormitories: “Join us! Join us!” They were turned back by tear gas, and two hundred detached themselves to take Main Street. They were met by an armored personnel carrier. When it rumbled onto a side street, they cheered a tactical victory. They sat in the middle of a busy intersection. Helicopters flashed antiriot lights over rooftops, searching out snipers. At the street corner the cops handed over a car’s PA system to a student who seemed responsible. He turned out not to be so responsible. He claimed the police had told him they wouldn’t be arrested and that the National Guard was leaving campus. At eleven, the hour of...

On the Kent State campus there were bomb threats at fifteen-to-thirty-minute intervals. Eleven a.m. classes were cut short; the commotion outside was too great. The university radio station and intercoms announced, “All outdoor demonstrations and gatherings are banned by order of the governor. The National Guard has the power of arrest.” But when a class session let out on a major university campus, it looked all the world like a “gathering.” Only a fraction of students had heard the radio and intercom announcements anyway. University administrators could have told law enforcement that. But the governor had banned university administrators—quislings—from the operation’s planning. Fifteen minutes to noon. Students made their way toward whatever it was they did on an ordinary Monday. A general saw what looked to him like a mob. Three minutes later, someone rang the Victory Bell and started rousing rabble for a noon rally. A minute after that, a campus police officer shouted the riot act into a bullhorn. He was standing by the ROTC rubble; now the military’s staging area, its ashes a constant reminder of what these students were capable of. Hardly anyone could hear the announcement. A jeep made its way across the common: another hail of rocks. At 11:55 guardsmen were ordered to load and lock their weapons and prepare to disperse gas. Two columns of troops moved out in a V, one directly east, another northeasterly. The eastbound company had to summit a steep hill south of Tayl...

Two Students, Two Guardsmen Dead, the local paper reported. Those two students had it coming, much of Kent decided. A respected lawyer told an Akron paper, “Frankly, if I’d been faced with the same situation and had a submachine gun…there probably would have been 140 of them dead.” People expressed disappointment that the rabblerousing professors—the gurus—had escaped: “The only mistake they made was not to shoot all the students and then start in on the faculty.” When it was established that none of the four victims were guardsmen, citizens greeted each other by flashing four fingers in the air (“The score is four / And next time more”). The Kent paper printed pages of letters for weeks, a community purgation: “Hurray! I shout for God and Country, recourse to justice under law, fifes, drums, marshal music, parades, ice cream cones—America—support it or leave it.” “Why do they allow these so-called educated punks, who apparently know only how to spell four-lettered words, to run loose on our campuses tearing down and destroying that which good men spent years building up?…Signed by one who was taught that ‘to educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.’” “I extend appreciation and whole-hearted support of the Guard of every state for their fine efforts in protecting citizens like me and our property.” “When is the long-suffering silent majority going to rise up?” It was the advance guard of a national mood. A Gallup poll found 58 percent blam...

Townspeople picketed memorial services. “The Kent State Four!” they chanted. “Should have studied more!” “Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves to be shot,” a Kent resident told a researcher. “Have I your permission to quote that?” “You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.” “But you had three sons there.” “If they didn’t do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.” A letter to Life later that summer read, “It was a valuable object lesson to homegrown advocates of anarchy and revolution, regardless of age.” Time had called the Silent Majority “not so much shrill as perplexed,” possessed of “a civics-book sense of decency.” Pity poor Time, whose America was but a memory.

Within the week, in front of the burbling fountain on Revelle Plaza at UC–San Diego, George Winnie Jr., twenty-three, held up a cardboard sign reading IN GOD’S NAME, END THIS WAR, struck a match, and went up in a burst of flame. That didn’t make the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or Chicago Tribune; a nationwide student tsunami had broken, too much drama to keep track of it all.

“They figure they might just as well die here for something they believe in as to die in Vietnam.”

In farm-belt Carbondale, home of Southern Illinois, a center of military research, martial law was declared.

Five thousand students at Northwestern did them one better by voting unanimously to secede from the United States.

Al Capp added a new line to his speeches: “The real Kent State martyrs were the kids in uniforms…. The president showed angelic restraint when he called the students ‘bums.’”

The rock musician Neil Young saw the pietà-like picture of a young girl leaning in anguish over the body of Jeff Miller. He hastily composed a song: Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming. We’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio. The song was banned from Ohio playlists at the urging of Governor Rhodes. That helped send it shooting up the hit parade: one more scene in the new American civil war.

In their identical brown overalls, carrying American flags of the sort that topped off construction sites, they looked like some sort of storm trooper battalion.

The riot began. Workers singled out for beating boys with the longest hair. The weapons of choice were their orange and yellow hard hats. A construction worker recalled, “The whole group started singing ‘God Bless America’ and it damn near put a lump in your throat…. I could never say I was sorry I was there. You just had a very proud feeling. If I live to be one hundred, I don’t think I’ll ever live to see anything quite like that again.” A student recalled, “When I was on the ground, I rolled myself into a ball just as four or five pairs of construction boots started kicking me.”

Workers launched another chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; good patriots, the cops removed their hats and stood at attention instead of attending to the gleeful ongoing beatings.

“The police collaborated with the construction workers in the same way that Southern sheriffs used to collaborate with the rednecks when the rednecks were beating up freedom riders.”

Either as fears or boasts, the predictions of disorder proved unfounded. “All we are saying is give peace a chance”: the press could hear the refrain wafting from outside the White House gates as the president, visibly weary and nervous, stepped to the podium for a televised press conference the evening before the rally. Flyers were everywhere: “NIXON WOULD LIKE YOU TO USE VIOLENCE IN THIS DEMONSTRATION TO DISCREDIT THE STUDENT PEACE MOVEMENT. DO THE HARD THING…AVOID VIOLENCE.” Jane Fonda, in a T-shirt and braless, welcomed the crowd: “Greetings, fellow bums!” She gestured to the men in uniform patrolling the perimeter: “Those men may well have seen combat in Vietnam. They know better than any of us what this war is like. Don’t assume they are against us for opposing war.” A booming cheer went up. A GI flashed a conspicuous peace sign. A massed contingent marched into sight behind a banner reading FEDERAL BUMS AGAINST THE WAR. The crowd went wild. Thousands bathed in the Reflecting Pool. A black man strapped himself to a giant crucifix. Shirley MacLaine, Coretta Scott King, Dr. Spock, David Dellinger delivered soaring perorations. Time reported with pleasure how some government officials, even John Mitchell, circulated through the crowd, inviting students back to their offices for raps. The father of one of the slain Kent State students, a Pittsburgh steelworker, announced, “My child was not a bum.”

“Thank God for the hard hats!” Nixon cried. He had been so delighted by the liberal Pete Hamill’s exposé of the political alienation of the white working class in New York magazine in 1969 that he ordered a Labor Department study on the question. Assistant Secretary Jerome S. Rosow had just delivered his report “The Problem of the Blue Collar Worker.” It described a population “on a treadmill, chasing the illusion of higher living standards,” fighting via the only apparent weapon at their disposal: “continued pressure for high wages.”

The Republican business class, small-town America, backyard-pool suburbanites, Dixiecrats, calloused union members: now it was as if the White House had discovered the magic incantation to join them as one. Nixonites imagined no limit to the power of this New Majority: “Patriotic themes to counter economic depression will get response from unemployed,” Haldeman wrote in a note to himself. Then no one would be a Democrat anymore.

Billy Graham was holding one of his ten-day crusades and had “invited” the president to speak on Youth Day. It all was an exceedingly ingenious political contrivance. There was a student uprising, so Nixon would listen to students—on a playing field he controlled, where if they booed him, they’d be booing America’s Pastor.

That was a win-win situation from a political perspective: let the liberals bicker against patriotism and piety at a moment of moral crisis. That set the table for the rally perfectly—for putting such conflicts on display was more than half the point of this exercise.

A piano tinkling behind her, she referred to the president as if he were Christ: “He belongs to everyone who wants to receive and accept him.”

That made the student editors either exquisitely naive or gifted Republican publicists: the protesters couldn’t make their feelings known to the president without also alienating the participants in the crusade. That was the whole point.

“Certainly a President of the United States should be allowed to attend a ball game, entertainment, or a religious service without it being interpreted as political.”

“Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, at his unmuzzled worst, is a danger to the country, not because of his own rhetorical excesses or crudity of thought, but because of the response which his aggressiveness produces.”

“politics is the art of polarization.”

New Politics theorists saw it as an increasingly postparty age, one in which people made up their minds via media that delivered experience directly into their homes. And that, in a society where the average age was falling every year and more and more young people were going to college, conservatism could only but yield diminishing returns.

General Eisenhower had come out for it in 1966, reasoning that if you were old enough to die for your country, you were old enough to choose the leaders who sent you to do it.

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble—whether instituting open housing, civilian complaint review boards, or sex education programs—when they presume that a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. It is then that they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureacratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.