{"id":134200,"date":"2020-09-01T12:15:08","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T20:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=134200"},"modified":"2020-09-06T15:04:34","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T23:04:34","slug":"nixonland-the-rise-of-a-president-and-the-fracturing-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=134200","title":{"rendered":"Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review<\/a>: “…when Nixon turned down his admission to Harvard (because his father would not pay the train fare, which happened to my uncle too) he matriculated at Whittier College. There he attempted to join an elite student society, The Franklins. He was turned down by them and rather than sulk in private, rather than become a campus shooter, or lonely alcoholic bum, he got even. He formed his own club, The Orthogonians (orthogon meaning right angle, Straight and Square), made up of the students rejected by the Franklins. This pattern, of both sharing and exploiting the feelings of rejection and hostility towards the elites of ordinary people, would be Nixon\u2019s meat and potatoes for the rest of his career.”<\/p>\n

Here are some highlights from this 2009 book by Rick Perlstein<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* YOU MIGHT SAY THE STORY STARTS WITH A TELEVISION BROADCAST. It issued from the Los Angeles television station KTLA, for four straight August days in 1965, culminating Sunday night, August 15, with a one-hour wrap-up. Like any well-produced TV program, the wrap-up featured its own theme music\u2014pounding, dissonant, like the scores composer Bernard Herrmann produced for Alfred Hitchcock\u2014and a logo, likewise jagged and blaring. It opened with a dramatic device: a voice-over redolent of the old L.A. police procedural Dragnet\u2014elements familiar enough, almost, to make it feel like just another cops-and-robbers show.
\n\u201cIt was a hot and humid day in the city of Los Angeles, Wednesday, August eleventh, 1965, \u201d the gravelly narration began …
\n\u201cThe City of Angels is the nation’s third-largest metropolis.
\n\u201cTwo and a half million people live here, in virtually an ideal climate, surrounded by natural beauty, and the benefits of economic prosperity.
\n\u201cWithin the vast metropolitan spread live 523,000 Negroes. A sixth of them reside in southeastern Los Angeles in an area that is not an abject slum in the New York or Detroit context, but nonetheless four times as congested as an average area in the rest of the city.
\n\u201cThe community had prided itself on its relatively harmonious racial relations, few demonstrations, no massive civil disobedience, little trouble from militant factions. \u201d
\nThe camera tracks an ordinary-looking residential block, tree-lined and neat, a row of modest ranch houses fronted by postage-stamp lawns, suburban, almost. The angle came from a helicopter\u2014KTL A-TV\u2019s \u201ctelecopter\u201d was the first of its kind. The utility of the Korean War-vintage Bell 47G-5 with the camera affixed to its belly had so far been mostly prurient: shots of the swimming pool where Marlon Brando\u2019s maid had drowned; of the well that swallowed a darling little girl; of movie stars\u2019 mansions being devoured by brush fires in the Hollywood hills. Now the chopper was returned to its wartime roots. Los Angeles\u2019 black citizens were burning down their neighborhood.
\nWhen the Watts riots began, television stations sent in their mobile cars to cover it. They were stoned like a scene from Leviticus. The next day militants cautioned, or threatened, the TV crews not to come: they were all-white\u2014 the enemy. There was even fear that KTLA\u2019s shiny red helicopter might be shot down, by the same snipers peppering the firefighters who were trying to douse the burning blocks.
\nThe risk was taken. Which was why the worst urban violence in American history ended up being shown live on TV for four straight days, virtually nonstop. %
\nThen, that Sunday-night wrap-up: The narrator paused, the telecopter slowed to a hover at the end of the tree-lined block, lingering on a single bungalow on the corner. Its roof was gone, the insides blackened like the remains of a weekend barbecue.
\nThe voice-over intensified:
\n\u201cThen with the suddenness of a lightning holt and all the fury of an infernal holocaust, there was HELL in the City of Angels\/\u201d
\nCue the music: shrieking trumpets, pealing from television speakers in Southern California recreation rooms and dens, apartments and bars, wherever people gathered, pealing as heralds, because American politics, for those white, middle-class folks who formed the bedrock of the American political conversation, could never be the same again.
\nUntil that week the thought that American politics was on the verge of a transformation would have been judged an absurdity by almost every expert. Indeed, its course had never seemed more certain.
\nLyndon Johnson had spent 1964, the first year of his accidental presidency, redeeming the martyr: passing, with breathtaking aplomb, a liberal legislative agenda that had only known existence as wish during John F. Kennedy\u2019s lifetime. His Economic Opportunity Act of 1964\u2014the \u201cwar on poverty\u201d\u2014 passed nearly two to one. The beloved old general Dwight D. Eisenhower came out of retirement to campaign against the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut. But Lyndon Johnson passed that, too. And then there was the issue of civil rights.<\/p>\n

* Unadulterated political passion was judged a dangerous thing by the dominant ideologists of American consensus. One of the deans among them, University of California president Clark Kerr, used to give his students a piece of advice that might as well have served as these experts\u2019 motto: a man should seek \u201cto lend his energies to many organizations and give himself completely to none.\u201d Lest all the competing passions crosscutting a modern, complex society such as America\u2019s become irreconcilable, beyond compromise\u2014a state of affairs Kerr could only imagine degenerating into \u201call-out war.\u201d<\/p>\n

* He signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6 under the Capitol dome. He intoned about the slaves, who \u201ccame in darkness and they came in chains. … Today, we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds.\u201d
\nPeople cried. The Negro\u2019s cause was America\u2019s cause. Who could argue with that? Johnson, the Times’ agenda-setting pundit James \u201cScotty\u201d Reston avowed, was \u201cgetting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn\u2019t tried that yet.\u201d
\nThe rioting in Los Angeles began five nights later. The spark came at the corner of 116th and Avalon. Two black men, brothers, were stopped by a California highway patrolman at 7:19 p.m., the driver under suspicion of drunkenness. The three scuffled; a crowd gathered. Their mother came out from her house to quarrel with the cops, then another woman joined the fight. The crowd thought the second woman was pregnant (she was wearing a barber\u2019s smock). When the cops struck the second woman\u2014kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach?\u2014the mob surged as one. By ten fifteen several hundred Watts residents were on the street, throwing things at white car passengers, staving in store windows, looting. Police tried to seal off the immediate area. But things had already spiraled out of control.
\nThe images came soon afterward, raw and ubiquitous\u2014and, because of a quirk of technology (the telecopter did not record its images on film, as most news cameras did, but via^ microwave signal), live. KTLA fed it raw into people\u2019s homes for the next four days. As a public service, they shared the feeds with the other L.A. channels and the networks.
\nYou would see the telecopter hovering over a hapless lone individual turning a garden hose on a fire at an army surplus store, whose exploding ammunition had already kindled adjacent drug and liquor stores, as upward of a thousand lingered to watch them burn and to harass the Good Samaritan as fire trucks approached and were turned away by a hail of bricks.
\nYou saw fire trucks escorted by sixteen police cruisers to secure their passage, flames high enough to down power lines, the transformer in front of a furniture store about to blow, black smoke spreading second by second over a massive expanse of roof, then over the lion\u2019s share of the block, the helicopter tacking through banks of black smoke, looking for ribbons of light through which to capture the scurrying firemen below.
\nThe reporter narrates the action in surges and lulls, like a demonic sports play-by-play:
\n\u201cThere is little that they can do. These buildings will he a total loss before they can get the first drop of water on the building\u2014AND ANOTHER FIRE JUST ERUPTED ABOUT A BLOCK AWAY!…
\n\u201cAnd the spectators do not seem to be concerned by what’s going on….
\n\u201cHere are two kids running away from the fire right now!… If the command center can see our picture, I would check the parking lot next to the National Dollar Store for three individuals. . . . AND NOW THERE’S ANOTHER BUILDING ON FIRE ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE STREET!…
\n\u201cAnd there’s another group of spectators! All they’re doing is standing around and looking. They couldn’t be less concerned. . . .
\n\u201cAnd now we have orders to climb higher into the air as potshots are being taken from the ground. Rifle fire and small-arms fire. So we’re pulling up and out. \u201d
\nThen you saw the helicopter swof-swof across two more miles of blazing streets, to Fifty-first and Avalon, for shots of a burning car turned on its back like a helpless scarab, the crowd guarding their treasure with a street barricade of picnic tables, park benches, and trash cans, the flames ascending heavenward.
\nWar, breaking out in the streets of the United States of America, as if out of nowhere.<\/p>\n

* There had been race riots in the summer of 1964 in New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Rochester. And then, when Goldwater lost overwhelmingly, pundits systematically breathed a sigh of relief. \u201cWhite Backlash Doesn\u2019t Develop,\u201d the New York Times headlined. But backlash was developing, whatever the Times’s triumphant conclusion. In a statewide referendum in California, with Proposition 14, voters struck down the state\u2019s \u201copen housing\u201d law, which prevented property owners from discriminating against purchasers or renters on the basis of race, by a proportion of two to one\u2014 an anti-civil-rights vote of almost the same size as the day\u2019s vote for President Johnson.<\/p>\n

* Watts was absorbed, six days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, as a visitation from another planet. \u201cHow is it possible after all we\u2019ve accomplished?\u201d Lyndon Johnson cried in anguish. \u201cHow could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?\u201d Los Angeles radio station KNX fired its most popular call-in host. He insisted on talking about Watts. His bosses wanted him talking about anything but. In this way consensus was institutionalized.<\/p>\n

* The most frightening Watts footage did not require a telecopter. The morning after the first day, a series of calm intervals led officials to the false hope that the worst of the riot was over. The Los Angeles Human Relations Commission called a community meeting at Athens Park, eleven blocks from ground zero. A respected black minister with a polite little mustache made an appeal to stay off the streets: \u201cI think that the civil rights drive in America has demonstrated that violence will never be the just end to the grievances we have.\u201d He soon lost control of the meeting. A parade of locals stepped to the microphone with angrier and angrier grievances: at the police (who were known to buck themselves up before ghetto tours of duty by crying \u201cLSMFT\u201d\u2014\u201cLet\u2019s shoot a motherfucker tonight\u201d); at their rotting homes (nine in ten Watts houses were built before 1939); at the 30 percent black unemployment rate.
\nThen a kid stepped up to the microphone. He was sixteen, but he looked younger.
\n\u201cI\u2019m going to tell it the way it is,\u201d he began. \u201cI\u2019m gonna tell you somethin\u2019. Tonight there\u2019s gonna be another one, whether you like it or not.\u201d
\nMurmurs.
\nHe raised his hand for attention, his face intensifying. \u201cWait! Wait! Listen. We, the Negro people down here, have got completely fed up. And you know what they gonna do tonight. They not gonna fight down here no more. You know where they go in\u2019. They after the white people. They gonna congregate, they gonna caravan out to Inglewood, to Marina Del Rey\u201d\u2014 someone tried to push him away from the microphone\u2014\u201cand everywhere else the white man\u2019s gonna stay. They gonna do the white man in tonight! \u201d
\nThere was applause.
\nThe human relations commissioner begged local stations not to air the clip that night. They showed it anyway. Angry whites had begun mobbing sporting-goods stores. More TV images, these ones to scare Negroes: Caucasians siting down the barrels of rifles, stockpiling bows and arrows, slingshots, any weapon they could lay their hands on. Race war seemed imminent. In the integrating community of Pasadena, a little girl lay awake at night wondering whether the new family moving in down the block was going to burn down her house while she slept, she remembered forty years later.<\/p>\n

Within two hours the violence in Watts started up worse than before, now in broad daylight. L.A.\u2019s police chief, William Parker, called Pat Brown\u2019s executive secretary to ask for the National Guard\u2014a pro forma request, he thought. A maelstrom of misunderstanding and recrimination unfolded instead. Anderson, who mistrusted Parker as a blustering racist, held off. By the time Anderson made it back to Los Angeles, Parker refused to meet with him.
\nAt four fifteen Parker called a press conference to fulminate against a municipal stab in the back. Watts by then was six thousand rampaging bodies, the most violent civil disturbance since the New York City draft riots of 1863. The first National Guard units hit the streets at 7 p.m.\u2014around the time the first rioter was shot by police. Pat Brown learned his city was out of control from the Athens Daily Post. He embarked on the twenty-four-hour journey home, arriving back in time for a report from a French airline pilot upon his final approach to Los Angeles International that the view looked in no way different from the war zones he had overflown during World War II.<\/p>\n

* Watts was subdued once and for all Sunday morning by 12,242 National Guardsmen, twenty-year-olds patrolling American streets in troop carriers with .30-caliber machine guns, looking like scared doughboys from General Pershing\u2019s expeditionary force, guarding the Harbor Freeway, a main Southern California artery that passed directly above the rioting, the imagined vector for some imminent black incursion on Greater Los Angeles. When KTLA aired its roundup documentary \u201cHell in the City of Angels\u201d Sunday evening, they had to label the violent scenes \u201cvideotape\u201d lest viewers think the uprising was still ongoing\u2014though that reassurance was subverted when they had to cut in with live footage of new rioting in nearby Long Beach.<\/p>\n

* Some whites noticed a pattern: in 1964, rioting had broken out a few weeks after the signing of the last civil-rights-law-to-end-all-civil-rights- laws. Watts wasn\u2019t even the only riot that week; in Chicago, a black neighborhood went up after an errant fire truck killed a woman. Some whites noticed some liberal politicians seemed to be excusing it all. Time quoted Senator Robert F. Kennedy: \u201cThere is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law. To many Negroes the law is the enemy.\u201d
\nBut what were we left with without respect for the law? Time answered that question by quoting a \u201chusky youth\u201d: \u201cIf we don\u2019t get things changed here, we\u2019re gonna do it again. We know the cops are scared, and now all of us have guns. Last time we weren\u2019t out to kill whites. Next time is going to \u2022 be different.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments. He raged for what he could not have or control.<\/p>\n

* As a schoolboy he hadn\u2019t a single close friend, preferring to cloister himself up in the former church\u2019s bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad.<\/p>\n

* Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular\u2014silent\u2014majority.<\/p>\n

* Ever-expanding circles of Orthogonians, encompassing all those who ever felt their pride wounded by the Franklins of the world, were already his constituency. Richard Nixon at their center, yet apart, as their leader. The circle could be made to expand, Richard Nixon might have realized even then. Though via a paradox: the greater their power, the more they felt oppressed. When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less; even if the Franklins weren\u2019t always really so powerful at all, Franklin \u201cpower\u201d often being merely a self-perpetuating effect of an Orthogonian sense of victimization. Martyrs who were not really martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white middle class. The keynote of the new, Nixonian politics…<\/p>\n

* Some people say the best way to win at poker is to possess an iron butt: never bet a hand until you are sure you can win, even if that means folding for hours on end. You play the person, not the cards. You always give something to the mark: give him the confidence to believe he has one up on you. That is when you spring the trap.<\/p>\n

* It is another psychobiographical theme in the lives of successful men: the deaths of siblings.<\/p>\n

* Richard Milhous Nixon was born to beat Horace Jeremiah Voorhis, his first opponent for Congress. The California Twelfth District\u2019s popular five-term congressman was rich, well-bred, a Yale Phi Beta Kappa, and a Yale Law graduate. He had been voted the most hardworking congressman by his peers and the most honest congressman by the press corps\u2014even, in 1945, the year before Nixon faced him, the best congressman west of the Mississippi. It was said that he was the model for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. If nobility was Jerry Voorhis\u2019s liability, nobody had thought to exploit it before.<\/p>\n

* The pitch Nixon had spent years setting up, McCarthy hit out of the park.<\/p>\n

* George Smathers beat Florida senator Claude Pepper by accusing him of being a \u201csexagenarian,\u201d committing \u201cnepotism\u201d with his sister-in-law, openly proud of a sister who Smathers said was a \u201cthespian.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Nixon marked it well: in the fever swamps of the Red Scare, fears of sexual and political irregularity were deeply intertwined. Hints of sexualized threat suffused his Senate campaign.<\/p>\n

* Adlai Stevenson wrote his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the (courtly) Harvard economist, \u201cI want you to write the speeches against Nixon. You have no tendency to be fair.\u201d Galbraith acknowledged that as a \u201cnoble compliment.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Went one of the Stevenson\/Galbraith jeremiads: \u201cAs a citizen more than a candidate, I recoil at the prospect of Mr. Nixon as a custodian of this nation\u2019s future, as guardian of the hydrogen bomb.\u201d Ran another: \u201cOur nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.\u201d
\nOf course, saying a President Nixon would unleash the bomb was also slander and scare, and spared not the innuendo. Adlai Stevenson and his learned speechwriter had coined a useful word, Nixonland. They just did not grasp its full resonance. They described themselves outside its boundaries. Actually, they were citizens in good standing.<\/p>\n

* Thus a more inclusive definition of Nixonland: it is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans. The first group, enemies of Richard Nixon, are the spiritual heirs of Stevenson and Galbraith. They take it as an axiom that if Richard Nixon and the values associated with him triumph, America itself might end. The second group are the people who wrote those telegrams begging Dwight D. Eisenhower to keep their hero on the 1952 Republican ticket.<\/p>\n

* The DNC was right: an amazingly large segment of the population disliked and mistrusted Richard Nixon instinctively. What they did not acknowledge was that an amazingly large segment of the population also trusted him as their savior. \u201cNixonland\u201d is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States. It would define it, in fact, for the next fifty years.<\/p>\n

* Luckily when Stevenson began to gain. General Eisenhower gave Nixon license once more to breathe fire. (Nixon later recalled he felt \u201cas if a great weight had been lifted from me.\u201d) Eisenhower was reelected in a landslide. Stevenson\u2014who\u2019d taken to uttering at the mealtime mention of Nixon\u2019s name, \u201cPlease! Not while I\u2019m eating! \u201d\u2014wrote an anguished letter to a friend: \u201cThe world is so much more dangerous and wicked even than it was barely four years ago when we talked, that I marvel and tremble at the rapidity of this deterioration.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Richard Nixon had tried to win his future wife Pat\u2019s favor by driving her on her dates with other men; Kennedy blithely stole a wife seventeen years younger than Pat from her fianc\u00e9 when he needed a family to display for his political career.<\/p>\n

* Even after the Checkers Speech, coverage of Nixon was quite balanced. Balance was the fourth estate\u2019s religion. They were even, sometimes, unbalanced in his favor. In 1960, for example, the two most powerful magazines in the country, Henry Luce\u2019s Time and Life, were practically Nixon megaphones.<\/p>\n

* Write a book, Jack Kennedy once advised him, the intellectuals will love you. Nixon had written much more of Six Crises than Jack Kennedy ever had of Profiles in Courage, which Joe Kennedy had fixed to win a Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n

* Nineteen sixty-six, and Watts was the nation\u2019s preoccupation.
\n\u201cNow and then the police cars mount the sidewalk and drive through the ruins, threading through alleyways and behind stores, their searchings darting here and there for hiding youths,\u201d the Washington Post reported, quoting one of those youths: \u201cThey are looking at the same old places. What they don\u2019t know is that when it comes it ain\u2019t gonna be like last time.\u201d The Times also quoted an L.A. cop: \u201cThere are a lot more guns out there. They looted every pawnshop and sports shop in the area last summer.\u201d The cop repeated himself: \u201cThere are a lot more guns out there.\u201d
\nThe meaning of Watts was fiercely debated. Militant blacks spoke of an \u201cinsurgency\u201d: \u201cI threw the firebomb right in that front window,\u201d a youngster fondly reminisced to a CBS correspondent. \u201cI call it getting even.\u201d A group of Berkeley radicals, the Vietnam Day Committee, appropriated Watts for their manifesto: \u201cThe Los Angeles riots in the summer of 1965 are analogous to the peasant struggle in Vietnam.\u201d Liberal technocrats reasoned, \u201cIf the Los Angeles rioting reveals the underlying weaknesses of the current federal approach to segregation, poverty, and housing, and if it stimulates some fresh thinking\u201d\u2014this was a Columbia professor\u2014\u201cit may compensate at least in part for the terrible havoc it wreaked.\u201d Fortune magazine, speaking for enlightened business opinion, counseled understanding, quoting Langston Hughes:
\nNegroes,
\nSweet and docile,
\nMeek, humble, and kind:
\nBeware the day They change their mind!
\nBut the debate was dominated by the conservatives. Their spokesman was Chief William Parker, who in press conferences, like a candidate running for office, laid out the party line: it was the civil rights movement\u2019s fault.
\nThey were the ones who preached, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to obey the law if you think it\u2019s unjust.\u201d They were the ones who forced guilt-ridden passage of civil rights laws that \u201csanctified their acts.\u201d Chief Parker had provided this account of the riot\u2019s origins to Governor Brown\u2019s blue-ribbon panel studying Watts: \u201cSomeone threw a rock, and like monkeys in a zoo, they all started throwing rocks.\u201d He maintained that unless dece’nt folks did something drastic, the monkeys would be visited even unto their own doorsteps\u2014and for saying it was drowned in forty thousand congratulatory messages a month.<\/p>\n

* That Reagan represented Goldwater\u2019s ideas without Goldwater\u2019s liabilities was precisely why his boosters backed him for governor in the first place.<\/p>\n

* These bizarre outbreaks of black people burning down their own neighborhoods, what did they mean ? Was it some kind of political blackmail, a gun pressed to the head of a Congress debating a civil rights billP^he opportunism of greedy criminals? The mania of a people losing its collective mind? The natural expression of people who were savages to begin with? A Communist plot? How was it related to bearded picketers against the Vietnam War, the orgies so vile, or singer John Lennon, who had blasphemously called his rock band \u201cbigger than Jesus\u201d and had to apologize that August to the pope? Was this the whirlwind a civilization reaped once the seeds of moral relativism were sown?<\/p>\n

* The Wall Street Journal articulated an argument echoing through Congress: \u201cIt is strange, although to an extent understandable, that the more civil rights legislation is piled onto the statute books, the more Federal money poured into attempts at Negro betterment, the more help freely prof erred by businesses and individuals\u2014the more the anger rises. . . . Every legislative enactment seemed to incite more mob activity, more riots, demonstrations, and bloodshed.\u201d<\/p>\n

* In Chicago, movement Turks like Jesse Jackson were insisting it was time to move on Cicero\u2014the nation\u2019s largest municipality without a single black resident. The last time a black man tried to live there, in 1951, the ensuing white riot was so big it made news around the world. This very summer a teenager who crossed over the border looking for work was beaten to death. \u201cWe expect violence,\u201d Jackson said, \u201cbut it wouldn\u2019t be any more violent than the demonstrations last week.\u201d Another King deputy, James Bevel, said, \u201cWe will demonstrate in the communities until every white person out there joins the Republican Party.\u201d
\nAt that, Daley gave in: he would negotiate with King.<\/p>\n

* Joseph Alsop, perhaps the most influential columnist in the United States, wrote a series of columns making the same argument demographically: in 1961, twenty-six thousand white children attended Washington, D.C., elementary schools. Now so many whites had fled to the suburbs that the number was thirteen thousand. He predicted there would be, \u201cone day, a President Verwoerd in the White House.\u201d
\nHendrik Verwoerd was the prime minister of South Africa, the architect of apartheid.<\/p>\n

* Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the \u201cparty of Lincoln\u201d was identified by the public as the party more favorable to the aspirations of Negroes.<\/p>\n

* Decades later, two political scientists crunched the opinion poll numbers and identified 1958 as the key date at which both parties were judged equally Negro-friendly. After that, the two parties diverged.<\/p>\n

* Nixon knew the issue was the royal road to Republican victory in November\u2014in California, he told his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Robert Finch, running on Reagan\u2019s ticket for lieutenant governor against the incumbent lieutenant governor, Glenn Anderson, \u201cI want everyone in California to believe that Glenn Anderson was responsible for Watts.\u201d Nixon just left it to others to push it.
\nRace had always been the best-oiled hinge in the strange contraption that was Nixon\u2019s ideology, swinging from one position to the next year to year, month to month\u2014even, at the 1960 convention, from hour to hour. In 1963 he supported JFK\u2019s civil rights bill. Then, when the bill was debated in the House, he savaged efforts \u201cto enforce integration in an artificial and unworkable manner.\u201d He had no problem catering to fear of Negroes if political expediency demanded it. (It was indeed what he felt in his heart. Went through his whole thesis re: blacks and their genetic inferiority, Bob Halde- man wrote in his diary one day of a May 1969 meeting with the boss.) Why he didn\u2019t wish to be associated with the hottest Republican issue, as he jockeyed for the Republican grass roots, was a bit of a mystery. The front-runner for the nomination, George Romney, was appealing publicly for Title IV to be kept in the civil rights bill, riots be damned. Behind closed doors, Richard Nixon was telling other Republicans to hit the riot issue as hard as they could. And he was an ex officio member of the House Policy Committee, which had come out against the open-housing title of the civil rights bill as a menace to law and order.<\/p>\n

* For twelve years, Southern schools had hardly done a thing to honor Brown v. Board of Education. The federal government had hardly done anything to punish them. County after county maintained \u201cdual\u201d school districts: superior schools for whites, inferior ones for blacks.<\/p>\n

* Nixon had given himself license to lie about Vietnam. The trick was devising the most politically useful lies for any given interval. Hindsight makes the pattern obvious. Nixon had taken just about every possible position on Vietnam short of withdrawal\u2014we should escalate, we should negotiate, we should bomb more, we should pause the bombing, we should pour in troops, pouring in troops would be a scandal.<\/p>\n

* Johnson was haunted by a sense of illegitimacy. Even at the height of his popularity in 1964, he had considered dropping out of the presidential race. Now, as he approached his 1,036th day in office\u2014the last day JFK served\u2014 his popularity was dropping week by week. It didn\u2019t take much for a man like Nixon to probe LBJ\u2019s deepest anxieties. Many of those anxieties he shared.<\/p>\n

* A new movie, Planet of the Apes, imagined what life would be like if whites suddenly found themselves a subject population.<\/p>\n

* Godfrey Hodgson wrote of the media about-face: \u201cThey had been united, as rarely before, by their anger at Mayor Daley. Now they learned that the great majority of Americans sided with Daley, and against them. It was not only the humiliation of discovering that they had been wrong; there was also alarm at the discovery of their new unpopularity. Bosses and cops, everyone knew, were hated; it seemed that newspapers and television were hated even more.\u201d
\nNixon paid attention. The public was on his side in his war against the media Franklins, in a way deeper than Nixon had ever dared dream. Again, he had it both ways: for actually the media was, if anything, accommodating him.<\/p>\n

* A Nixon campaign commercial called \u201cConvention\u201d:
\nA brass band, like the brass band that played over the McCarthy delegates standing on their chairs singing peace songs, blares \u201cA Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.\u201d The familiar, old-fashioned convention scenes: standards, balloons, placards, Hubert at the podium, exuberant delegates.
\nThe music distorts electronically into a hideous pulse. With each new picture, someone\u2019s mouth is open wider. Hubert\u2019s is the punctuation mark. It looks as if he is screaming.
\nA new set of photographs, cutting quicker: firemen and flames; bleeding protesters running from the police; a bearded, screaming peacenik; more flames; another bearded screamer.
\n(No black people were seen rioting in commercials like these; that would have been labeled \u201cracism.\u201d Instead, only the aftereffects of black rioting were shown: rubble and flames. Rioting white hippies in Chicago were thus a visual godsend.) <\/p>\n

* \u201cNow let\u2019s get serious a minute,\u201d the president of a Polish-American club told Wallace\u2019s right-hand man, Tom Turnipseed, arranging a rally outside Webster, Massachusetts. \u201cWhen George Wallace is elected president, he\u2019s going to round up all the niggers and shoot them, isn\u2019t he?\u201d When the aide replied, laughing, \u201cWe\u2019re just worried about some agitators. We\u2019re not going’to shoot anybody,\u201d his host responded, with dead seriousness, \u201cWell, I don\u2019t know whether I\u2019m for him or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

* At his next press conference the New Republic’s correspondent thought he heard a sneer in Nixon\u2019s voice when answering a question about Clark Clifford\u2019s suggestion in Foreign Affairs that the drawdown should be greater. During Clifford\u2019s year in the defense secretary\u2019s chair, Nixon responded, \u201cour casualties were the highest of the whole five-year period, and as far as negotiations were concerned, all that had been accomplished, as I indicated earlier, that we had agreed on, was the shape of the table.\u201d A sneer was a sign Nixon was feeling himself again. Afterward he spent hours on the phone asking associate? how he had done\u2014something he did only when he was confident he would hear praise. The president was in the arena, and all was well with the world.<\/p>\n

* Richard Nixon judged the inflation risk acceptable. Economics was one more aspect of domestic policy that he tended to ignore. But he did harbor one core economic conviction. In the traditional trade-off between recession and inflation, he would always choose inflation. As Haldeman wrote in his diary, \u201cP made point that he never heard of losing an election because of inflation.\u201d But a recession, he was sure, had lost him his first try at the presidency: Eisenhower had taken his dour former treasury secretary George Humphrey\u2019s fiscally conservative advice instead of his labor secretary Jim Mitchell\u2019s fiscally liberal advice, allowing a slowdown in 1960. Nixon\u2019s was the first Republican presidency in eight years, he pointed out to his economic policy committee in April of 1969\u2014and those eight years had seen no further such slowdowns. \u201cWe can\u2019t allow\u2014wham!\u2014a recession. We will never get in again.\u201d <\/p>\n

* \u201cI 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

* Nixon came across an episode of CBS\u2019s All in the Family in which an old buddy of Archie\u2019s came out of the closet. \u201cThe show was a total glorification of homosex\u2026. Is this common on TV?\u2014destruction of civilization to build homos. Made the homos the most attractive type.\u201d He added a fillip on classical civilization: \u201cYou know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them.\u201d <\/p>\n

* Meanwhile the city had realized it needed more low-income \u201cscatter site\u201d public housing to conform to HUD guidelines. Lindsay chose to put some of it in Forest Hills, in Queens, where Brooklyn and Lower East Side Jews had moved from crowded tenements after World War II in their first step on the upward-mobility ladder. Jews, Lindsay thought, wouldn\u2019t protest the arrival of poor blacks; they were liberal. But Jews who had mortgaged everything they had to leave crime-ridden poor neighborhoods, it arrived, did not prove so obliging. Lindsay had ignored the existing racial tensions in Forest Hills schools. The meetings to explain how most of the new public housing residents would be senior citizens, how families would be carefully screened, that the development would bring a slew of new social service amenities, were scheduled on Friday nights, when elderly refugees from Hitler\u2019s Germany\u2014the most scared and vulnerable members of the community\u2014attended synagogue. Jack Newfield tagged along at a damage-control session at the Forest Hills Jewish Community Center and heard them \u201ccall Lindsay redneck names under the shadow of the Torah.\u201d <\/p>\n

* One especially nasty operator was loaned by the College Republicans to the campaign to defeat the Democratic candidate for state treasurer in Illinois in 1970, Al Dixon. Dixon was having a formal reception to open his Chicago headquarters. This kid assumed an alias, volunteered for the campaign, stole the candidate\u2019s stationery, and distributed a thousand fake invitations\u2014they promised \u201cfree beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing\u201d\u2014at communes, rock concerts, and street corners where Chicago\u2019s drunken hoboes congregated. The kid\u2019s name was Karl Rove. The RNC soon hired him at $9,200 a year to give seminars on his techniques. <\/p>\n

* It was partially a Camelot thing, this notion that having liberal Hollywood celebrities ever at his elbow helped a candidate. The 1960 Democratic convention, the first held in Los Angeles, was a riot of celebrities, from Marlon Brando to Harry Belafonte to Frank Sinatra. Beatty and his sister, Shirley MacLaine, had been at the outskirts of that circle then. Now they were at its center\u2014and the circle kept expanding. Celebrities hungered for meaning in their lives. \u201cWhy does McCarthy need you?\u201d someone heckled Paul Newman in New Hampshire in 1968. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t need me,\u201d Cool Hand Luke replied. \u201cI need him.\u201d Celebrities filled politicians\u2019 hunger, too. Even modest McGovern was bitten by the bug; it showed in how he tied his tie. It also seemed to solve a political problem. Everyone had a story about the first time they entered a room George McGovern occupied without realizing they were in the presence of a senator (Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s version of the story took place in a lavatory). For a politician who blended into the woodwork, a little glamour seemed only a plus. The proximity to stars, after all, had never hurt Jack Kennedy.<\/p>\n

* Shirley MacLaine\u2019s alienation from her audiences was never plainer than when she addressed a black women\u2019s luncheon and fashion show in Pittsburgh during the Pennsylvania primary. She spoke extemporaneously, as she always did, and said underprivileged women like them understood, as she and McGovern understood, that material things didn\u2019t matter, that too many Americans cared about the wrong things. The response was stony silence. The wealthy movie star was baffled. A young black man had to explain it to her: \u201cYou can\u2019t tell those women that stuff. You can\u2019t tell them they don\u2019t have much. They\u2019re proud people.\u201d They \u201cwant the things\u2014those very things\u2014you think are useless.\u201d Her brother Warren was politically undisciplined enough to tell a reporter that he favored the legalization of pot. Perhaps that\u2019s how people got the idea that was his candidate\u2019s position. <\/p>\n

* RNC chair Bob Dole had recently been divorced from his wife of twenty-four years; on the prowl, he had started sporting chocolate brown bell-bottom suits and, a Chicago reporter observed, \u201cone of those all-year tans that celebrities manage.\u201d <\/p>\n

* Prostitutes were lonely, too. The New Politics, this movement of acid and abortion for all, had a Calvinist work ethic. Many McGovern delegates had won their spots by outlasting the flabby old regulars in caucuses, just as they\u2019d outlasted rival left factionistas at endless antiwar meetings. They were not in Miami to party. Germaine Greer, the women\u2019s liberationist, complained she \u201ccouldn\u2019t find anyone to ball.\u201d <\/p>\n

* Richard Nixon knew Americans didn\u2019t want to know their politicians had psychological problems like anyone else. That was why, back in the 1950s, after Walter Winchell raised suspicions about the number of visits Nixon was making to a certain Dr. Hutschnecker on Park Avenue, Nixon started seeing a military doctor in Washington instead. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review: “…when Nixon turned down his admission to Harvard (because his father would not pay the train fare, which happened to my uncle too) he matriculated at Whittier College. There he attempted to join an elite student society, The Franklins. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=134200"}],"version-history":[{"count":59,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134289,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134200\/revisions\/134289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=134200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=134200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=134200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}