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

by Rick Perlstein

“State systems for selecting delegates to the National Convention display considerably less fidelity to basic democratic principles than a nation which claims to govern itself can safely tolerate.”

But some would say that purity and power don’t mix.

Another longtime dream of reformers was to do away with the antiquated and antidemocratic electoral college. The House had passed a bill for direct popular election of presidents in September of 1969 by vote of 338 to 70. But as Senator Strom Thurmond knew better than anyone else, the South’s major political trump card was the threat of a renegade third-party presidential candidate using his electoral votes to keep either of the major parties from an electoral college majority. Thurmond had Senate Judiciary chair James Eastland of Mississippi bottle the bill up in committee.

Bipartisan governing boards with fixed statutory terms would be replaced by chairmen serving at the pleasure of the president. A new Office of Management and Budget, a Domestic Policy Council, their duties deliberately unspecified, were proposed, to which Nixon planned to appoint his smartest loyalists—seizing power from ornery cabinet departments, forging a weapon to exact political retribution against recalcitrant legislators via the federal power of the purse. Their personnel would be vetted not by senatorial advice and consent, but by his favorite “internal security” bulldog, the right-wing exuberant Tom Charles Huston.

Fonda proved a disappointment. She never incited, and abusive language wasn’t her style. The president, however, was obsessed with her case (“What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment,” one aide later recalled), and in fall the powers that be arranged for her to be stopped at customs at the Cleveland airport. When she pushed aside agents who refused her access to the bathroom (she was having her period), she was arrested for assaulting an officer. In her possession were pills marked, mysteriously, B, L, and D; for possessing vitamins to be taken with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, she was also charged with narcotics smuggling. Her daughter was followed to kindergarten. (America needed to know, FBI files later revealed: did her school teach “an anti–law enforcement attitude”?)

The next day Nixon savaged Chet Huntley’s “almost totally negative approach to everything the administration does.” It was, he said to his chief of staff, “important to destroy him for [the] effect on all other commentators.”

Nixon acted not despite the Silent Majority he described as so pure and decent, but in a sense on their behalf, and even at their request. His paranoia and dread were their own. Across the state of mind known as Middle America, a subterranean viciousness was bubbling ever closer to the surface.

New rages dissolved old rules of decorum.

“I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist,” writer Sally Kempton wrote in the July Esquire.

Shortly afterward, the presidential commission studying Kent State, chaired by former Pennsylvania governor William Warren Scranton, pronounced the killings “unnecessary and unwarranted.” But the grand jury in Ohio had already handed down twenty-five indictments, most against students, none against guardsmen. They spoke for the Silent Majority, which had itself spoken in angry letters to the Scranton Commission: “What these young radicals need is a good beating. And I will be the first to break the back of one of these little bitches or bastards.”

“There was a time when the liberalism of the old elite was a venturesome and fighting philosophy—the vanguard political dogma of a Franklin Roosevelt, a Harry Truman, a John Kennedy. But the old firehorses are long gone. Today’s breed of radical-liberal posturing about the Senate is about as closely related to a Harry Truman as a Chihuahua is to a timber wolf.”

Haldeman shuffled the Supreme Council of the Sons of Italy into the Oval Office for a photo opportunity. Their “supreme venerable” told the press Nixon was “our terrestrial god.”

Agnew knew the scribes would write about it, if only to mock him. That was good: let the elites mock patriotism!

“If the vice president were slightly roughed up by those thugs, nothing better could happen for our cause. If anybody so much as brushes against Mrs. Agnew, tell her to fall down.”

“It’s based on the concept that people will have enough prejudice, provincialism, intolerance, and ignorance that if the national leadership will make an appeal to it, it will win.” Politics, he said, “should uplift the people, not downgrade them.”

Nixon slipped a story to the Chicago Sun-Times about CIA photographs that suggested the Soviets were building a submarine base in Cuba (it turned out to be a soccer field).

In Rochester, Agnew trotted out that classic Nixonian rhetorical trope, the unsourced, invented rhetorical question: “Earlier today, I was asked if I would support a member of the radical-liberal clique who is running in New York as a Republican. I made clear that I will not support a radical liberal no matter what party he belongs to.” Goodell hit back by accusing Agnew of “sophisticated McCarthyism.” Agnew proved him a piker six days later by invoking the name of the former soldier who’d become a celebrity in the 1950s by turning himself surgically into a woman. Goodell was the “Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party”—a man who had surrendered his manhood. (“Miss Jorgensen Asks Agnew for Apology,” the New York Times headlined demurely.)

Nixon leapt up on the hood of his bulletproof limousine, made the two-handed V-salute, and jutted out his chin. He told his handlers, “That’s what they hate to see!” He was answered with a hail of rocks, flags, and candles from the candlelight vigil: Caracas in California. Press secretary Ron Ziegler was later asked why the leader of the free world had placed his person in such danger. He responded that Nixon had spotted a “friendly face” in the crowd. Haldeman put it differently in his diary: “Made a huge incident and we worked hard to crank it up, should make a really major story and might be effective.” Ziegler released a statement: “The stoning at San Jose is an example of the viciousness of the lawless elements in our society.”

“Let me try to bring some clarity to this deliberate confusion,” he said. Democrats wanted security against lawlessness, too, but Democrats also thought you deserved economic security. The Republicans? “They oppose your interests” and “really believe that if they can make you afraid enough or angry enough, you can be tricked into voting against yourself. It is all part of the same contempt, and tomorrow you can show them the mistake they have made.” The debate wasn’t between left or right, but between “the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says: you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says: the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men…. In voting for the Democratic Party tomorrow, you cast your vote for trust, not just in leaders or policies, but trusting

He began seeing 1972 in apocalyptic terms: if he lost the presidency, America might end.

“Prophets of doom are as common as girls in bikinis (there are even a few prophets of doom in bikinis). Some predict the whole state will break off and sink into the Pacific—probably this month.”

The public appetite for counsels of doom was bottomless.

Protecting yourself, keeping a scary outside world at bay: by 1971, for many Americans, left and right, that was what politics was for.

“We must claim victory regardless of the outcome.”

The renewed public relations push was driven by paranoia—a consuming rage for control. The White House was starting to smell from it, and some were noticing the stench.

So was marijuana, which traded for tobacco cigarettes at an exact one-to-one rate.

He referred to something called “fragging”: soldier-murder of hated officers (the word was short for “fragmentation bomb”—they scattered pellets so indiscriminately it looked like an accident). In 1970, there were at least 109 cases. One officer walked around with a $10,000 bounty on his head.

Their public face was a handsome, charismatic twenty-seven-year-old Yalie who had volunteered to command a “swift boat,” the most dangerous naval duty in Vietnam. John Kerry led off the press conference on March 16 with his Purple Hearts and Silver Star flashing in the TV lights.

White House tapes registered hours upon hours of strategizing to neutralize the political threat of the “alleged veterans”—the phrase White House spokesmen always used. Antiwarriors who had been warriors cut off the Silent Majority argument at the knees. These were not spoiled brats: they were the people who weren’t able to get college deferments, who couldn’t work the system to get documentation to excuse them from service (in Los Angeles, at least ten dentists would fit kids for service-disqualifying orthodontics for $1,000 to $2,000), who re-upped because their families needed the reenlistment bonus. They were unglamorous, empirical witnesses. They were also former officers, trained to fight, who had seen a lot worse in their previous job than anything any pale bureaucrat could throw at them. They had to be destroyed.

When Calley had first been called to Washington in June of 1969, he thought it was to receive a medal.

That was one of the things the president liked to do in these conversations: probe novel ways to salve his guilty conscience.

This was useful political intelligence. It meant the falsehood Nixon had been selling since 1966 was taking root: that we could “win.”

The president who rated himself a deeply committed pacifist had something else he wanted to discuss first. “I don’t have any use for weak men, Bob, I have no use for ’em. I don’t want to have ’em around. I’d rather have a bunch of right-wing fascists around me than weak men. I really mean that. I feel very strongly about it.”

The law-and-order president commanded, “John, ignore it as much as you can.” (To Haldeman later in the day: “Mitchell was arguing strenuously about the law this morning. I said, ‘Goddamn it, forget the law!’”)

He explained where the name had come from—the “words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the sunshine patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough. We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now.” Point by point, he debunked the war’s “thousands of rationalizations.”

“This administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifice we made for this country. In their blindness and fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in ’Nam.”

The president of the United States seemed to have faith in him. Or perhaps Nixon just feared embarrassment if his ties to a sex criminal were exposed.

“I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to a point of responsibility,” John Wayne said. And: “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

“What we assumed, and it seems sort of dumb in retrospect,” David Broder later reflected, “was that just because the press conference had grown up from Wilson on and seven or eight presidents had adhered to it, it had somehow become institutionalized. It’s not institutionalized at all. In fact, you could effectively say that Richard Nixon has abolished the presidential press conference as an institution.”

The general had won a bloody concession in return for his favor to Richard Nixon. In December 1970, “East Pakistan,” the Muslim province controlled by Pakistan and later known as Bangladesh, had its first free election in a decade. The wrong man won, General Khan kept the new government from convening, and at the end of March, he sent troops through India to put down what he called an insurrection. Ten thousand civilians were slaughtered the first three days. America said nothing.

The stakes for keeping secrets had never been higher. And yet it happened as the White House suffered one of the most dramatic leaks in the history of the republic—one that saw Richard Nixon revert to his most irrational self. Thus, in the summer of ’71, the doors were opened to Watergate.

What became known as the Pentagon Papers—three thousand pages of historical narrative and four thousand pages of government documents—was shocking to all but the most hardened antiwar cynics. The expansion into genuine warfare began, the Times summarized, “despite the judgment of the government’s intelligence community that the measures would not cause Hanoi to cease its support of the Viet Cong insurgency in the South…. The bombing was deemed militarily ineffective within a few months.” To catalog the number of times Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon looked the American people squarely in the eye and said the exact opposite would require another book.

“I have not yet thought through all the subtle ways in which we can keep the Democratic Party in a constant state of civil warfare,” Colson summed, “but I am convinced that with some imagination and creative thought it can be done.”

The president, who salved his basest guilts by presuming everyone else as venal as himself, caught his drift right off: Democrats all over town were by then “probably burning stuff and hiding stuff as fast as they can.”

Meanwhile the White House operationalized its longtime goal of expanding its internal secret-policing capacity. They called it ODESSA, or the Special Investigations Unit, or the Room 16 Project, for its suite number in the White House basement. It contained the kind of “sterile” telephones used by the CIA (a Secret Service agent used an IBM card to enter the access code every morning) and a safe that required three combinations to open. A doddering elderly relative of the coleader of the operation was proud to learn her boy was working on “leaks”: “Your grandfather,” she said, “was a plumber.” In jest, he put up a sign on his office door: MR. YOUNG—PLUMBER. The Plumbers was the name by which the group became known.

On July 19 they hired on another staffer, a former FBI agent, assistant district attorney, and failed congressional candidate from Dutchess County, New York. As an FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy had been pushed out because he was, in the words of a superior, “a wild man” and a “superklutz.” As assistant DA he had fired a pistol at the ceiling while summing up a case before a jury. When he lost a Republican congressional primary in 1968 (slogan: “Gordon Liddy doesn’t bail them out—he puts them in”) but won the Conservative Party’s line, he was rewarded for throwing the race with a job at the Treasury Department—which he lost, in 1971, for speaking against the administration’s gun-control bill at an NRA convention. He liked to show off his toughness by putting his hand in a candle flame. He also liked to demonstrate the best way to assassinate a man with office supplies: a puncture to the neck with a freshly sharpened pencil, directly above the Adam’s apple. He confessed an admiration for Adolf Hitler and wrote in his memoirs about the Pledge of Allegiance, “I enjoyed the mass salute and performed it well, unexcelled in speed of thrust and an iron-shaft steadiness throughout the remainder of the pledge. That habit became so deeply ingrained that even today, at assemblies where the pledge is made or the national anthem played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm.” Such was the caliber of the men now called to work in the Executive Mansion.

A PULP THRILLER OF RELEVANCE TO THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION came out in 1971. It was called The Coven. The author was David St. John, and his hero was a Washington, D.C., private investigator named Jonathan P. Gault (kind of like the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), who lived in a Georgetown that had become a warren of head shops and strung-out fourteen-year-old junkies: “The Aquarians had taken over.” So had venal union bosses ripping off honest workingmen, and the kind of young defense lawyer who charges “police brutality” at the drop of a handkerchief and “affects a storefront desk in the ghetto and lunches at the Metropolitan Club where he feels more comfortable.”

“David St. John” was E. Howard Hunt, writing, like a good spook, under a pseudonym. He had started writing novels out of boredom from being put on ice at the CIA. He was quite successful at it, too. The Coven provided a window into the mind of a Plumber. Everette Howard Hunt believed, as many in the White House believed, that behind the earnest humanitarian face of liberalism lay irredeemable evil. George Gordon Battle Liddy suspected Daniel Ellsberg was a KGB agent, or that the Times had acquired the Pentagon Papers through a black-bag job. In their minds, every evil was linked. Liddy gave over twelve pages in his memoirs to an account of his involvement in a raid on the home of Timothy Leary—“one more problem of the sick ’60s.” When he moved to Washington in 1970, Liddy noted his neighbors as “career Democrat-liberal bureaucrats who hated Richard Nixon and had a laissez-faire attitude toward the raising of their children”—so he threatened one of these children with “a restraining hold I had learned before in the FBI.” For, “To permit the thought, spirit, life-style, and ideas of the ’60s movement to achieve power and become the official way of life of the United States was a thought as offensive to me as was the thought of surrender to a career Japanese soldier in 1945.”

In Washington, D.C., feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, speaking at Catholic University, speculated over whether the Blessed Virgin Mary had been “knocked up.” Enraged, William F. Buckley’s sister Patricia raced onto the stage and started assaulting her.

The berserk was breaking out on every side. Sometimes it was hard to tell the sides. The Plumbers and their patron harbored no such doubts. The left were the aggressors. Everyone else was just playing defense. The aggressors worked, for instance, by defiling religion. The president endured a receiving line at a White House dinner honoring voluntarism; “Typical of the group,” he complained to Haldeman, “was a fellow who came through the line from California who said he was a Quaker. He was an obvious, roaring fag.” The aggressors poisoned the airwaves. When the president flipped through the channels after a ball game he wanted to watch was rained out, he came across an episode of CBS’s All in the Family in which an old buddy of Archie’s came out of the closet. “The show was a total glorification of homosex…. Is this common on TV?—destruction of civilization to build homos. Made the homos the most attractive type.” He added a fillip on classical civilization: “You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them.”