Senator and Mrs. Richard M. Nixon with daughters Tricia and Julie, July 28, 1952. Source: Library of Congress

Nixon Beyond Watergate

A History of the Presidency Before the Scandal

01.25.19

Today the presidency of Richard Nixon is mostly remembered for how it ended – with the Watergate scandal, impeachment and resignation. But what about early Nixon, the man sworn into office in January 1969? As Nathan, Ed and Brian discover, Nixon ran a more imaginative and ideologically flexible administration than its ignominious ending might suggest.

Nixon administration; Richard Nixon; presidency

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Earth Day

April 22nd, 1970 marked the celebration of America’s first Earth Day. Twenty million people all over the country raised awareness and protested against the rapid degradation of the environment. Sounds like Nixon’s worst nightmare, right? Not according to Historian J. Brooks Flippen, who explains that Nixon supported Earth Day… sort of.

Earth Day; Richard Milhous Nixon; environmental degradation; environmentalism

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Speaker 1: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story. Welcome to Back Story, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and along with Joanne Freeman, we explore a different aspect of American history each show.

Nathan Connolly: We’re going to start this week by going back in time to April 22nd 1970.

Narrator: Earth Day, a question of survival. Fairmount Park in Philadelphia today. As much like a rock music festival as a teach-in on the environment. A few older people, a few blacks, and some of the poor, but mainly white middle-class young people. As much aroused by the music as by the damage done to the environment by pollution. This is Philadelphia …

Ed Ayers: Oh, it was huge. There are estimates of 20 million participants. They were 10 thousand schools, and 2000 universities and colleges.

Nathan Connolly: The first Earth Day isn’t exactly how we remember the presidency of Richard Milhous Nixon, but historian J. Brooks Flippen says the president, ever the pragmatist, was an unlikely environmentalist. He saw the environment as a way to court young votes, and divert attention from the Vietnam war.

Ed Ayers: It was all across the land. Communities large and small, and you’d have businessmen and housewives, college students, children, workers, anti-establishment radicals. It really represented every strata of American society. It grew generically. There was a movement in San Francisco with an activist named John McConnell, and he had been pushing for Earth Day on March 21st every year. Which was the annual time when the sun crossed the equator, and to him it symbolized the harmony and balance in nature.

Nathan Connolly: Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, built on McConnell’s idea, and turned Earth Day into a national event intended to bring awareness to pollution and the rapid destruction of the environment. Earth Day was part protest, part celebration.

Ed Ayers: A lot of the official agenda of these meetings were speeches or petitions and displays, there was some music, but it’s funny to look at some of what individual people were doing. For example, at the University of Minnesota members of the Students for Environmental Defense had a mock funereal service for the internal combustion engine, complete with putting an engine in a coffin and lowering it into the ground. People would wear gas masks to protest pollution. A New Jersey housewife hung a banner with a black skull and crossbones on dredging equipment, and people were throwing out birth control pills. It’s pretty amazing given the breadth of this that there weren’t really wasn’t that much trouble.
13 people were arrested for blocking access to Logan Airport, and several self-styled Yippies at Indiana University plugged municipal sewage pipes with concrete. There was a Florida man who was arrested for violating sanitary codes presenting a local utility company with a bunch of decaying fish. Little things like that, but they were all geared to getting the attention, and they did.

Brian Balogh: Earth Day U.S.A., happy time for many. Conservatives were for it. left liberals were for it. Democrats, Republicans, and independents were for it. So were the ins, the outs, the executive, and the legislative branches of government. It was Earth Day, and like Mother’s day, no one in public office could be against it. President Nixon, through a White House spokesman, said he had earlier expressed his concern about pollution, and hoped yesterday’s events would be the start of a continuing campaign against it. Arizona Republic, Thursday April 23rd 1970.

Ed Ayers: There were a number of people in the Nixon White House which worried that if Nixon came out strongly for Earth Day, it might degenerate into one gigantic criticism of the administration, or it might be a venue of radicals of one sort or another. It could even result in violence.

Nathan Connolly: But Nixon had appointed some staunch environmental advocates in his administration. Chief among them were John Whitaker, Deputy Assistant for domestic affairs, and Christopher DeMuth, Staff Assistant. Together, they were the loudest voices pushing Nixon to get involved with Earth Day. A great debate ensued within the White House between Nixon’s environmental and economic advisors. Ultimately Nixon settled on a middle-of-the-road approach.

Ed Ayers: Nixon, what he decided to do on Earth Day was to have his administration appear very pro-environment, pro-Earth Day, in many respects. He ended up dispatching a lot of officials about, and Whitaker and DeMuth worked up a plan for inside the White House for each department to develop a way to show that they were involved, but Nixon himself refused to issue an Executive Order directing federal workers to participate. They didn’t declare a national holiday, although Whitaker and DeMuth really wanted him to. They figured that if the day appeared to be going well, he could issue a press release later in the day, he could sort of tag on if it was going well, and if it didn’t go well then he wasn’t too involved.
Nixon had coordinated White House cleanup of the Potomac River the week of Earth Day, and Nixon was hoping something like that would mute some of the criticism that he himself, Nixon as president, did not personally get involved. So Nixon wants to win this constituency, but it’s a political consideration for him. He’s not really concerned about the core issues, but he doesn’t want to appear that he’s anti-environment, he’s sort of treading water, he’s going go where the political winds seem to take him.

Nathan Connolly: By any measure, Earth Day was huge success. It was the largest mass demonstration in American history to date, with minimal instances of violence, but Nixon drew criticism for his tepid support of Earth Day. He was frustrated that the media didn’t give him the credit he thought he deserved, and so as the years went by, the Nixon administration drew back from subsequent Earth Days.

Ed Ayers: Dan Rather called the administration’s response to Earth Day “Benign neglect.” Earth Day remained very strong in the early 70s. 1971 Gaylord Nelson returned to have the first anniversary of Earth Day, and actually proclaimed an Earth Week. The administration was still trying to tread water here, they were still involved but not wanting to become too involved. In 1972 there was on June 5th a World Environmental Day at Stockholm in the U.N. conference on the environment. 74, there was a notable Earth Day, but with the exceptions of the anniversary years, like 1990, or 1995, Earth Day has begun to fade as a national celebration, and today, for many people, it goes unnoticed. Even when it is noticed, it’s kind of ironic, because Earth Day has been many, many companies have turned Earth Day into a marketing phenomenon. It’s been ironic when you consider how it began.

Brian Balogh: So today on the show, Richard Nixon without Watergate. We’ll explore the legacy of a man whose presidency tends to be reduced to impeachment.

Ed Ayers: You’ll hear about Nixon’s embrace of an economic idea popular in Silicon Valley today.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll learn how a man who hated the great outdoors signed more environmental legislation than any other U.S. president.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll discuss how Nixon’s constant obsession with his image in the media forever changed how we relate to politicians today.

Who Is The ‘Silent Majority’?

Less than a year after he took office, President Nixon gave a speech where he asked the “Silent Majority” for its support of U.S policies in the Vietnam War. On the surface, the rhetoric was meant to recognize and praise the people who were not protesting the war. But historian Matt Lassiter says the populist label bolstered polarization among the electorate and shifted the way politicians reach out to the American people.

Music:

Isn’t Another Post War Movie by Jahzzar

Richard Milhous Nixon; Vietnam War; political rhetoric; populism; protest; silent majority

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Fall, 1969. As Nixon approached the end of his first year in office, the promise of the 60s had curdled into political unrest and violence.

Matt Lassiter: You had urban uprisings. Detroit and Newark in 1967. King’s assassination in 68. Civil Rights movement. Pressure and backlash against that, and the Vietnam War kept escalating.

Brian Balogh: That’s historian Matt Lassiter. He’s written extensively on 20th century politics and culture. On November 3rd, Nixon decided to address the nation from the Oval Office in a televised speech.

Nixon: Good evening, my fellow Americans. Tonight I want to talk to you on a subject of deep concern to all Americans, and to many people in all parts of the world, the war in Vietnam.

Matt Lassiter: The anti-war movement was having massive demonstrations around the country. So the November 1969 speech was really designed to address the nation at a time of real crisis, both domestic and foreign policy.

Brian Balogh: The speech took about 30 minutes, and Nixon spent most of that time outlining the American government’s plans for Vietnam.

Nixon: I would like to answer some of the question that I know are on the minds of many of you listening to me. How and why did America get involved with Vietnam in the first place? How has this administration changed the …

Brian Balogh: But towards the end of the speech, Nixon used a phrase that jumped out from the rest of his words. He made a plea for support from the American people, or at least some of them.

Nixon: So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support. I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed.

Matt Lassiter: The power of the silent majority term is that it’s a populist label that tries to define the great center of the country against the alleged extremes. He called them people who work hard and play by the rules, who don’t protest, who don’t riot, who don’t commit crimes, and he was really reaching out in this sense in a domestic, as well as foreign policy sense. Defining middle America as the people who were not violent activists, anti-war activists, Civil Rights protesters, urban rioters. In other words, most Americans, he said, were not what people imagine Civil Rights protesters and anti-war demonstrators to be. It’s not a new term when he says the great and silent majority in November 1969. It’s an updated version of the group that he called the forgotten Americans in the 68 election.

Brian Balogh: Who out there listening to this speech, or perhaps reading about it, who did this really resonate with?

Matt Lassiter: This is essentially an appeal to white voters, but it’s a color blind language. Nixon didn’t explicitly say these are white voters. In fact, he often said black voters are part of the silent majority also, but it wasn’t really a language designed to win their votes, it was to try to create a coalition politically that crossed the class boundary between the working class and the upper-middle class white voters.

Brian Balogh: The Silent Majority speech was a big win for Nixon. His approval ratings shot up, and thousands of letters and telegrams poured into the White House supporting the president. In the wake of the speech’s success the Nixon administration devised an idea to mobilize the silent Majority.

Matt Lassiter: I was doing research in the Nixon Presidential Library and came across a bunch of folders where they tried to create organizations called the Silent Majority Incorporated in all 50 states. They tried to AstroTurf a grassroots movement with the silent majority group. Chuck Colson, a White House operative, created a group called Americans for Winning the Peace, and the held a few rallys. They even worked with a really elusive African-American to create something called the National Black Silent Majority. Which put out a few pamphlets.

Brian Balogh: But Lassiter says their plan to AstroTurf, or create a fake grassroots movement sort of backfired, or at least misfired.

Matt Lassiter: The most interesting thing about the silent majority concept is Nixon applied it in the context of the Vietnam War, but it gained its most political traction as white Americans began to mobilize against court order busing, and against other policies of Affirmative Action, housing integration, crime issues. So grassroots organizations around the country started calling themselves variations on the silent majority theme. Started identifying as members of the silent majority that have been pushed around by judges, and the Civil Rights activists. It really took off more in domestic politics than it did in foreign policy, and they tried to AstroTurf it as a foreign policy wave of support for Nixon’s Vietnam program, but it really resonated more in terms of urban and suburban politics on the domestic front.

Brian Balogh: As you know better than anybody, Matt, we live in a political age of polarization. Was this appeal to a silent majority part of that, or was Nixon simply trying to tap into a trend that was already going on, and that he just wanted to capitalize on?

Matt Lassiter: It was both, but Nixon and his advisors deserve a lot of credit or blame for their explicit efforts to polarize the electorate. Kevin Philips, who said that the Republicans were gonna have a dominate majority because of the Sunbelt.

Brian Balogh: The emerging Republican majority.

Matt Lassiter: Exactly. He said the secret of politics is figuring out who hates whom, and appealing to their hatreds.

Brian Balogh: This sounds very current as well, Matt.

Matt Lassiter: That has been a blueprint for Donald Trump obviously, but Nixon also said this is who we’re against, and the power of the silent majority is it’s a moral language that portrays ordinary Americans as victims and as heroes at the same time. They’re heroes because they just go about their day, and they don’t protest. He always said tax-paying, hard working Americans. So they’re the heroes of the country, but also they’re the victims. Victims of these forces outside their control. When Conservatives have successfully utilized this language, they portray middle Americans, meaning white Americans, although they don’t say that explicitly, as victims of left-wing activism, but Democrats have been able to use the language too.
I feel like Bill Clinton practically plagiarized Nixon when he said, “It’s the forgotten and quiet people who just work hard and play by the rules.” Obama used this language, and when Democrats have used it successfully, it’s almost like an anti-polarization strategy for Democrats. They’re trying to redirect peoples’ anger at unfair economic systems at difficult times. It’s been a strategy that works for both political parties, but in terms of polarization it’s definitely a part of the Republican playbook.

Brian Balogh: Let’s step back for a moment, Matt, and talk a bit about the legacy of Nixon’s silent majority speech and the silent majority strategy that grew out of it. What is the lasting impact?

Matt Lassiter: On the one hand, the legacy of the silent majority is a populace language in American politics where everybody from Reagan to Clinton to Obama to Trump can say that they’re speaking for the real Americans. It’s a very portable concept. It’s a populist idea that most people are on one side, and their enemies are on the extremes. On another hand, it was a very backward looking idea for Nixon that the real America was the kind of nostalgic mythical 1950s. Men working, women at home, children obedient, people not protesting, and so it’s an effort to appeal to a kind of nostalgic past, a make America great again kind of past to neutralize anti-war activists, to neutralize Civil Rights activists.
It’s resonated in that sense throughout the years as a way for politicians to try to say that most Americans oppose these kind of vocal activists on the fringe. It’s less successful as an electoral strategy, I think, than as a way to position legitimate civil dissent as outside of the boundaries of the American political tradition.

Brian Balogh: Matt Lassiter is a History professor at the University of Michigan. He’s also the author of the ‘Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South’.

Environmentalist or Pragmatist?

The long shadow cast by Watergate has obscured the fact that Nixon did more to secure environmental protection than perhaps any other president. Yet despite his unprecedented support of green legislation, Nixon himself never personally cared about the environment. We continue our discussion with historian J. Brooks Flippen about how Nixon saw the environmental issue as a way to win votes and deflect criticism.

Music:

Laid Back Fuzz by Podington Bear

Richard Milhous Nixon; Watergate Scandal; environmental legislation

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Nathan Connolly: Earlier in the episode we learned about how the first Earth Day sheds light on Nixon’s pragmatic approach to the environmental issue, but Nixon’s environmental policy record includes more than just Earth Day. In fact, Nixon signed more environmental bills than any president before. Most notable of which created the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Clean Air and Water Acts, and the Endangered Species Act.

Nixon: Each of us all across this great land has a stake in maintaining and improving environmental quality. Clean air and clean water, the wise use of our land. The protection of wildlife and natural beauty. Parks for all to enjoy. These are part of the birthright of every American. To guarantee that birthright, we must act, and act decisively.

Nathan Connolly: This legislation supported the burgeoning environmental movement which began cresting in the 1960s. After the end of World War Two, the country went through a period of exponential growth. There was more disposable income, and population increases. More cars, and urban sprawl, but behind the sheen of economic prosperity lay heaps of trash and pollution that contaminated the air, water, and land. So, by the time Nixon became president in 1969, the environment was a major concern that cut across party lines, and as with Earth Day, the historian J. Brooks Flippen explains that Nixon’s support of environmental legislation was based on ulterior motives.

J. Brooks F.: He didn’t have much environmental background and not much personal interest, but he was certainly an astute politician and realized that there was constituency to be had. He was also recognized that it was many young people, and the young people were the ones that were more likely to be against his Vietnam War, and he saw a way to broaden his appeal. A lot of things were going on, a lot of evidence of environmental decay right when he came into office. There’s a great public outcry and Nixon took advantage of it. He ended having one of the most outstanding environmental records of any president to this day.

Nathan Connolly: So give us some sense of the kinds of legislation that Nixon helps to establish and sign into law as the environmentalist-in-chief, so to speak.

J. Brooks F.: Well, early in his administration, Nixon had a major address on the environment. It was 37 point agenda, and it covered pretty much all aspects of the environmental protection. So that included strengthen the air pollution laws, tightening emission standards, and spending more money for waste treatment facilities. A lot of this became legislation months, if not years later, after a lot of rigmarole, but when Nixon came into office, Democrats were pushing for some centralized organization within the administration to coordinate environmental protection. This was not Nixon’s idea, but he realized that it had tremendous support in congress, and what he decided to do was he decided to sort of get on board and take it over.
The result of that was of course the Environmental Protection Agency, which Nixon created. Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, and Nixon wanted to take advantage of it, signed it on January 1st 1970, sure to get as much public attention as possible. That declared protection of environmental policy, the nation’s policy. E.P.A. and Nepa were tremendously important in the years to come.

Nathan Connolly: Nixon was very good at trying to target particular voting blocks. He tried to go after African-Americans by supporting things like black capitalism, he tried to go after workers by making sure that he talked about law and order, and the building of strong communities. He certainly was trying to target young people through his environmental policy. Especially at a time when many young people were taking a very explicit anti-American, or at least anti-Vietnam War stance, which was clear cornerstone of his administration. How effective was he at targeting young people with this environmentalist approach?

J. Brooks F.: I don’t think he was as affected as he certainly would’ve liked. Every time that Nixon proposed an environmental outreach, a lot of times Muskie and the Democrats would out-propose him. If Nixon proposed 10 billion dollars for waste treatment facility, Muskie came back with 15 or 20. Nixon really felt that he wasn’t getting the credit that he deserved. So Nixon does an awful lot for the environment, a lot of really important bills in the 1969 to 1971 period, but because he felt that he wasn’t getting the credit, you’re gonna see Nixon begin to back away from the issue.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

J. Brooks F.: Nixon is going to always maintain rhetorical support for it, and indeed, even late in his administration he accomplishes much, but you see him shifting his policies, and in the long run you can trace many of any environmental reactionaries back to this period in Nixon. Nixon sort of shifted his stance, and I think a lot of that was because he wasn’t getting credit.

Nathan Connolly: If you had to think about Nixon’s legacy, relative to environmentalism, given all the legislation that you just put out there, his stance on Earth Day, certainly thinking about trying to animate young voters around this issue, how would you characterize the consequences of his legislation after he resigned, but also the broader impact of his particular stance well after his resignation?

J. Brooks F.: He signed into the law the cornerstones in the environmental protection today, and most of what the environmental debate is today is interpreting laws that were passed during the Nixon era, or shortly thereafter, but when Nixon began to retreat a bit, I think Nixon set the stage for what followed, and it was tough. Nixon is a tremendous politician, and he realized that the public opinion was shifting when you get to the mid-70s. What you have is the energy crisis, and business was certainly organized and they had their own lobby now against environmental protection. They were complaining to the Republicans in Congress, Nixon was facing Watergate, he wanted to shore up his conservative base, but Nixon began to back away and it’s tough to maintain public support for environmental protection because so much of the environmental debate had gone from street activism and things like Earth Day, and now it’s lawyers with briefcases.
They’re debating over percentage of particles in the air or the water, and it’s just really tough to keep that public support up when it’s such minutiae. It’s important, but it’s not gonna be something that you can get a broad movement. Nixon began to calculate that people would always say that they care about the environment, but they would vote on other issues. I think that assumption has followed so many presidents afterwards. Very few presidents in the days since Nixon have come out and said, “Well, the environment is not important, and the environmental protection, it’s not something we should worry about.” What they’ve maintained is support for it, and then worked in ways to weaken the economic impact. That’s when you get the partisanship, and it kind of all goes back to Nixon.

Nathan Connolly: Give me a sense, Brooks, as to how Nixon thought about his environmental contributions later in life.

J. Brooks F.: I think Nixon late in life, Nixon was looking for an alternative to the narrative of the Vietnam War and Watergate. I’ll give you an example. In 1991, Nixon gave a speech at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Afterward he ran into William Riley who actually had been a Nixon veteran, but then was George Bush’s E.P.A. administrator. Nixon commented to Riley, “I know you. You’re an E.P.A., and I founded E.P.A. I’m an environmentalist too!” That was reported, and Nixon I think took pride in that. If you’re a cynic you can say, “Well, Nixon was just trying to, again, divert from Watergate and Vietnam”, but I like to think that maybe late in life he realized that it was perhaps a substantive issue worthy of addressing, and he maybe recognized that his legacy was important and quite positive in this respect.

Nathan Connolly: J. Brooks Flippen is a professor of History at South Eastern Oklahoma State University, and the author of ‘Nixon and the Environment’.

Nixon’s Shadow

Political historian David Greenberg describes the lengths Nixon went to in crafting his public image. And how, despite his best efforts, Nixon often couldn’t manage to control how he was ultimately perceived but did succeed at forever changing how Americans view politics.

Music:

Horizon Event by Podington Bear

Richard Milhous Nixon; perception; political ideology

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Brian Balogh: In the age of television, Nixon understood just how much image mattered. He knew that Americans evaluate a candidate’s personality before their policy. Political historian David Greenberg say that while Nixon worked tirelessly to craft his image, he was often received in vastly different ways.

David Greenberg: Nixon was really one of the first conservative politicians on a national scale to try to move the Republican party away from its image as the part of bankers and businessmen, and give it more of a cast of the party of the working man, of the everyday Joe. In his first campaign he had the slogan, ‘Richard Nixon is one of us’. Nixon made an issue of abortion, made an issue of pornography, made an issue of drug use, particularly Vietnam War protesters was a biggie. All of these issues he was trying to pit the average American who he wanted in the Republican column against the liberal elite, the university professors like you and me, the media, and all of those people who were defined as alien and somehow vaguely, or not so vaguely un-American.

Brian Balogh: Is it fair to say that Nixon’s own personal story gave him more street cred with that silent majority than let’s say a Donald Trump?

David Greenberg: Well, absolutely! In our age biography has been an important element in shaping the political image of all kinds of candidates. Now people work to get around that, modify it, or change it, but Nixon came from a fairly hard-scrabble existence. He felt he had to work his way up, and fight for everything. He contrasted himself with John F. Kennedy, who he saw as a child of privilege to whom everything came easily, and to whom everything was handed. That sense of Nixon as someone who drove, who worked hard, who pushed, who fought hard, sometimes dirty, was one that he proudly embraced. In the 60s and the early 70s he was proud to be a square, as opposed to a Hippy. He was happy to embrace that image.

Brian Balogh: So, when did Nixon the victim emerge? ‘Cause his early political career is remarkably successfully skyrockets from being a congress person, to a U.S. senator, Vice President, all when he’s relatively young.

David Greenberg: Nixon really wallows in the victim image when the Watergate scandal breaks, and he’s under siege, but you can see elements of the self-pitying quality, the sense that he has been victimized by powerful forces, the establishment, the liberals, and so on. Early in his career, as early as 1952, when he’s been chosen as Eisenhower’s running mate, it emerges that he’s kept a slush fund to pay for certain expenses, and he goes on television to give what’s now called the Checkers speech. This famous speech at the time to the largest audience that had ever seen any speech, because it was televised. In this very sort of mock-ish self-pitying tone, he talks about, and again, here you see maybe the populist merging with the victim. He talks about how he struggled, how his wife Pat didn’t have fur coat.

Nixon: I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a Mink coat, but she does have a respectable Republican Cloth coat, and I always tell her that she’d look good in anything. One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something, a gift after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog, and believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from the Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little Cocker Spaniel dog in a crate that he sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. Our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. You know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep him.

Brian Balogh: That so-called ‘Checkers Speech’, who did that work with, and who did it not work with?

David Greenberg: What’s remarkable about the Checkers speech, Brain, is we remember this as almost a comic moment in political history as this great failure. We look back on it and it’s made fun of. In the 1970s left-wing film maker Emile de Antonio does a movie about Nixon and shows the Checker speech without commentary for laughs that he can count on from his Harvard Square audience.

Brian Balogh: Those were hip squares in Harvard Square.

David Greenberg: Right, exactly. The hip square of Harvard Square. Yeah. In 52, it was big hit with most of the country. This saved his place as Eisenhower’s Vice Presidential running mate. I looked through the archives of the letters that came in to Nixon, and came into the Republican National Committee. What’s most remarkable is the words that people used were words like ‘Authentic’, ‘Sincere’, and ‘Genuine’. The exact opposite of the words that were being used the next day by liberal columnists like Max Lerner and Walter Lippmann, and others.

Brian Balogh: So when it came to image making, how much time did Nixon self-consciously devote to it, and how good was he at it?

David Greenberg: Nixon obviously was obsessed with his image. We see this in all reports from his aids, it’s in all the memoirs, and we hear it on the tapes. We have accounts of Nixon saying he needs to hire a TV advisor to tell him whether to hold the telephone with his left hand, or the right hand. The level of detail, and of course at the same time he’s always protesting that he never gives it any thought. A classic case of protesting too much. A lot of his aids come from the worlds of advertising, public relations, people like William Safire who became a speech writer, or H.R. Haldeman, his Chief of Staff. These people had been in politics before. Other presidents and politicians had used advertising men before, but they hadn’t quite populated their staffs with them to the extent that Nixon had.
So it really was an obsession. Now as to whether he was good or bad, it’s tricky. Trick Dick. Things are tricky. Like the Checker speech, sometimes this kind of image making, and the concern with television proves very effective. Other times, say the 1960 debates with Kennedy, by this point, eight years after Checkers, audiences have gotten somewhat wiser to television, and they’re no longer just impressed with a plain straight-forward presentation. Kennedy’s more relaxed cool style in Marshall McLuhan’s terms is actually the more effective. The favorite story I have about Nixon’s attempts at image making, and how they often backfired, comes from his presidency when he was always obsessed with Kennedy, and always trying to look Kennedy-esque. He envied the way that Kennedy was photographed casually walking along the beach.

Brian Balogh: Coat slung over his shoulder, if he had a coat at all.

David Greenberg: Exactly. So Nixon, who ease a vacation at San Clemente in Southern California, decides he’s going to do a Sea Shot as it’s called, and he’s summons the White House reporters and cameramen to a bluff in San Clemente. They’re waiting there for the photo op, and out comes Nixon walking along the beach, but in trousers and wingtips. It’s classic Nixon, ’cause instead of looking Kennedy-esque he looks like someone trying to seem Kennedy-esque.

Brian Balogh: Right. My favorite misfire, and this might have been a nasty photographer, much more than Nixon, is this iconic photograph of Nixon shaking hands with the crowd. He’s walking in some kind of parade, maybe an inaugural one, and he’s shaking hands, he’s wading into the people, but he’s looking at his watch while he’s shaking hands. It really doesn’t give the sense of a warm and fuzzy kind of guy.

David Greenberg: Yeah, he was always too self-conscious about the impression he was casting, and it got in the way of his relaxing and being himself. All of his aids described how he was just terrible at smalltalk. How he would, every time he met them at a White House reception, make the same joke, or the same remark about their tie. He was really, for someone who goes into politics, which is the extrovert’s business, he was an introvert who succeeded through internal struggle, dogged hard work, but not through a natural bon-ami, or backslapping, or any of that.

Brian Balogh: What would you say Nixon’s legacy is for politicians today, especially in the area of image shaping?

David Greenberg: It was in a way through Nixon and his really half century in public life that we became aware of the extent to which politics is this contest of created images that are being put before us. A battle of image making, a battel of spin. Media coverage fundamentally changes say between 68 when Nixon comes in, and 88 when Reagan goes. Never again is it possible to write a sort of straight-forward news lead about a candidate or president’s rally. Its always done with comments on strategy, cynical quips by the reporter in an effort to court favor with this group, “So-and-so today positioned himself”. That kind of language becomes pervasive in our political coverage in a way that simply wasn’t the case pre-Nixon.
Today, it’s almost hard to find the reporting amid the commentary, and everybody’s a strategist and an analyst. I think that is, if not directly attributable to Nixon as a person, attributable to the American experience with him. He’s coming of age at the same time as political consultants as the rise of television, and collectively this experience I think does change how we see politics and how we talk about politics.

Brian Balogh: David Greenberg is a professor of History and Journalism, and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of ‘Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image’.

Nixon and Universal Basic Income.

Today the idea of Universal Basic Income still has a whiff of Utopianism about it. But long before Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg took up the cause, Universal Basic Income, in the form the Family Assistance Program, was a key plank of Richard Nixon’s economic policy. Ed finds out more from Professor Molly Michelmore of Washington and Lee University.

Richard Milhous Nixon; family assistance program; universal basic income; utopianism

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Ed Ayers: In 1516 the English philosopher Sir Thomas More published his treatise ‘Utopia’. In that treatise he envisaged a future in which the state paid its citizens a regular income. Today the idea of Universal Basic Income is gaining popularity with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Robert Reich, along with a clutch of noble laureates in economics. You probably wouldn’t associate that idea with the Republican administration, but you should think again.

Molly M.: So this is actually called the ‘Family Assistance Plan’, and it takes shape in 1969. It’s one of the first things that Richard Nixon proposes when he takes office in 1969, and it essentially established a basic floor of 1600 dollars. So not a lot, right, per year? Then there was essentially a work incentive built in. So you could get a little bit more through the tax code if you worked. It was kind of a basic income plus what we now think of as the Earned Income Tax Credits, or Refundable Tax Credit for folks that had income, but income that fell below a certain level.

Ed Ayers: That’s Molly Michelmore, Associate Professor of History at Washington and Lee University. She says that Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan came very close to becoming law, and it amounted to a Universal Income plan.

Molly M.: One of the things that sank this plan was that people who were actually on welfare at the time didn’t like it, because many people who were receiving aid to families with dependent children, which is the program we usually refer to as welfare, would actually lose money under this new proposal.

Ed Ayers: Was that the intention?

Molly M.: Well, there is some argument that it was, and that this Universal Basic Income, this Family Assistance Plan, would redirect federal money to people that Nixon liked. That is to say white working-class voters in the South, rather than to the primarily African-American voters in the North. So one of the arguments behind the Family Assistance Plan, and this is an argument articulated most strongly by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, right? Who people may know from authoring the famous Moynihan Report in 1964-

Ed Ayers: For his bow tie.

Molly M.: … for his bow tie, this was his idea. That this would be a way to essentially give assistance to two parent families, rather than simply to women raising children alone, because it would be available to everybody.

Ed Ayers: Is that kind of racially coded there?

Molly M.: I think so, right? And this is one of those things that historians have tried to get their head around. To try to figure out what it was that was in Nixon’s mind when he decided to go, really I think, all in on this in 1969 and 1970.

Ed Ayers: It sounds kind of like the domestic version of Nixon to China, meaning it seems so contrary to what we think of conservative thought being. I understand about the racial and regional, and the partisan rationale, but what was … I’m sure they had a larger explanation for why they thought this was a good thing to do.

Molly M.: Yeah. I think it comes out of … There is this sense in the late 1960s that welfare wasn’t working. So it didn’t please conservatives who thought that it was incentivizing all kinds of bad behaviors. Whether that’s non-work, non-marriage, illegitimate child bearing. It didn’t please liberals who thought that it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do in terms of rehabilitating the poor, reintegrating them into the mainstream of American society and American economy. Welfare recipients themselves hated it, because it required them to essentially lay bare their lives to social workers, to case workers. To lay bare their-

Ed Ayers: “Get off my case.”

Molly M.: Yeah.

Ed Ayers: Right? It’s kind of from that …

Molly M.: Exactly! Right? Their finances, their personal relationships, they had to open their homes, right, to case workers who wanted to make sure that they were raising their children right, that they were spending their grants correctly. So there was this sense that there was a crisis in welfare, and liberals had begun to toy around with the idea of income maintenance in 1967 or so. L.B.J. establishes an income maintenance task force which is sort of looking at alternatives to the existing welfare system. So there was this sense that the existing thing was broken.

Ed Ayers: That had kind of accrued over time, right? And gained lots of appendages and things so it’s time to maybe just start all over again.

Molly M.: Yeah. People had tried to fix this basic program by tinkering around the edges, or making it bigger, or making it smaller, or trying to put some work incentives in there, or trying to put some disincentives for non-marital child bearing, and none of it had seemed to work. None of it had made the program any better. None of it had made any of the stakeholders any happier with it. So there was a moment where there could have been a sort of reset, right? You could do a kind of unplug the thing, count to 30, plug it back in and see what you could do.

Ed Ayers: How close did this come to actually happening?

Molly M.: It came pretty close. It passed the House, but then it dies in the Senate Finance Committee.

Ed Ayers: Why is that?

Molly M.: Well, the Senate Finance Committee was Chaired by a guy named Russell Long of the Louisiana Longs. So he was related to Earl, and to Huey Long. Less flamboyant than them, but he took his job as Chairman of the Finance Committee quite seriously, and he hated welfare. He was not particularly fond of welfare recipients. There’s a moment in 19-

Ed Ayers: I’m guessing that that’s a real understatement.

Molly M.: It is a real understatement. There’s a moment in 1967 when the Finance Committee is considering amendments to the Social Security Act that would have penalized illegitimacy by cutting off support for women on AFDC if they had one more child out of wedlock after they’d been on AFDC. So a bunch of mothers from the National Welfare Rights Organization appear in the Senate Finance Committee in these committee hearings to testify, and he kicks them out. He says, “If you have time to protest, you have time to work”, right? He refers to them as “Broodmares”.

Ed Ayers: Oh, god.

Molly M.: So he was a racist, I think, and his antipathy towards these women and their mother work was fueled by his animosity towards Civil Rights, and towards African-Americans in general. So it gets through the House, it gets locked up in the Senate Finance Committee, both because Russell Long has a problem with it. The sort of idea of giving free money, right? To folks that don’t work, and because there were some more liberal folks on that Senate Finance Committee that thought that the 1600 dollars floor was simply too low.

Ed Ayers: Was this a missed opportunity? Would things have been better has we had Family Assistance?

Molly M.: I think so. The Family Assistance Plan was small, right? It wouldn’t have provided much assistance to a lot of those women with children who were dependent on AFDC in 1968 and 1969, but it would have created, I think, a sort of entering wedge for a more robust, a more stable system of income support in the United States.

Ed Ayers: How do we make sense of this in the context of the Nixon administration? I find that kids today just can’t imagine that Nixon was anything other than the Watergate guy, and that he didn’t seem to color inside the lines in the way that we would think people do on a partisan basis today. How do we make sense of this in the larger trajectory of Republican ideology and of Nixon himself?

Molly M.: Well, Nixon really thought as himself, and hoped that he would be a change maker in American politics. He wanted to be the Republican F.D.R. essentially, right? Historians talk a lot about the New Deal Order, the talk a lot about the Roosevelt Coalition, and Nixon really wanted to piece together a new Republican coalition, but he was often … He saw himself as the father of that new coalition. He referred to it as the ‘New American Majority’, right? It wouldn’t necessarily be liberal or conservative, or even Democratic or Republican, but it would be this new coalition of the silent majority voters that changed the direction of American politics.

Ed Ayers: So, after the failure of the Family Assistance Plan, and all of this recalculation, what do the Republicans do instead of that?

Molly M.: Taxes. They cut taxes, right? One of the questions is how are we going to give this group of voters who’s felt left behind, alienated by politics? How are we gonna give them something to get them into our coalition? So one of the things that happens is the Republican party abandons fiscal responsibility, and embraces the politics of tax cuts. This is what Jude Wanniski described in the mid-1970s, and Jude Wanniski is one of the publicists for Supply-side economics. He writes for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He calls this the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’. So liberals, Democrats, right, are the Santa Claus of spending, and then Republicans should remake themselves as the Santa Claus of tax cuts. Give them to everybody and to anybody, and that will a way of shoring up the kind of economic interests of those folks that you wanna bring into your coalition.

Ed Ayers: Today, does the idea of Universal Basic Income then belong to either party?

Molly M.: I don’t know that anybody has embraced it, right? Although there certainly is a lot of talk around this notion of providing a basic income to everybody.

Ed Ayers: So does this still have a Republican support?

Molly M.: I don’t think so. I haven’t heard anybody talk about it.

Ed Ayers: So now it sounds like Socialism most of the most on [crosstalk 00:51:51]

Molly M.: Yeah, now it sounds like Socialism, but we do need to remember, right, that this was Milton Friedman’s idea, and that it got furthest when it was pushed by a Republican administration. When it passed through the House of Representatives through a Ways and Means Committee dominated by a Southern conservative Democrat, and that this history of this legacy is far more complicated, I think, than the politics or at least the way we talk about U.B.I. now suggests.

End Riff

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Ed Ayers: Molly Michelmore is the author of ‘Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism’.
As you guys know, I don’t really focus very much on the 20th Century, but I do remember Richard Nixon, and I’ve certainly seen him represented in popular culture very much. I’d have to say I was little surprised at some of the things we were talking about in this show. So have we misunderstood Richard Nixon?

Brian Balogh: Well certainly scholars think we have, and Nixon-

Ed Ayers: Some scholars apparently, since this one missed the memo.

Brian Balogh: No, no, no, no, no. 20th Century scholars have. Nixon, like most presidential administrations, has gone through all kinds of revisionist cycles. Certainly he was remembered as Tricky Dick. He was remembered for his impeachment, and of course he was remembered for extending the Vietnam War when he coyly suggested that he was gonna end it when he ran for president. But Nixon revisionism in many ways started by reconsidering the importance of his opening to the People’s Republic of China. It’s important to remember that really just a few years before Nixon was elected the first time in 1968, China was viewed as 10 times more irrational and threatening than even our strongest enemy the Soviet Union.
There were all kinds of ethnic and racial stereotypes about those crazy Chinese, and I think what has happened is as China’s role in the world and influences increased we’ve recognized the importance of Nixon’s opening to China, and there is literally a phrase “It took Nixon to go to China”. Meaning it took an old cold warrior like Richard Nixon to make an opening to this Communist nation.

Nathan Connolly: I have a slightly different vantage point for explaining Nixon and his revision in some ways is that we are reevaluating the 70s as a period in ways that we just didn’t in the 80s and in earlier moments. It’s really wonderful to see how the 70s have become a point in time that historians are taking very seriously. They’re using Nixon as a kind of starter for understanding all kinds of political realignments, thinking about, again, the environmental movement, thinking about law and order politics, a whole host of questions that can be traced to the early 1970s and certainly our tributaries flowing from interventions that Nixon made. Even the idea that Republicans are supposed to be reaching out to minority voters in ways that are defined in the modern era by appeals to peoples’ property rights, or appeals to their sensibility of being generally aggrieved.
All of that really does begin with the kinds of interventions that Nixon made. Again, largely for pragmatic reasons. So I think it’s important to recognize certainly that Watergate is still that starting point, that base, that root, for describing any other political scandal, but there’s a lot that can be said about other kinds of movements that began under Nixon that had a very long shelf life well after.

Ed Ayers: Why hasn’t that widespread scholarly revision penetrated to the popular realm more? We still Tricky Dick and Watergate.

Brian Balogh: David Greeenberg nailed it, the image of presidents is incredibly important, and I think it will be hard no matter what Nixon accomplished on the policy front to erase first the image of Tricky Dick, and most enduringly the only president who has resigned from the presidency. I just wanted to add to what Nathan was saying about reaching out, because it’s so important to remember this, Nixon was president before the era of hard polarization along partisan lines. When Nixon was President, he had a deal with a Democratic majority in both houses, but it’s very important to remember that the Democratic party still contained a very powerful conservative Southern wing, and there was something that has become a totally endangered species, that’s the moderate Republican.
So the Republicans had lots of liberals, and in fact in the area of Civil Rights there were some very progressive Republicans and there were some very, very reactionary Democrats. Some of the reasons that we remember Nixon as passing legislation, like all that environmental legislation, was that he was able to work with the middle from both parties in ways that is very difficult to do today regardless of who the president is. Whether it’s Donald Trump, or Barack Obama.

Ed Ayers: So, Brian and Nathan, as the voice of the silent majority here trying to understand this Nixon guy, always associated him with a Southern strategy in which he pivots to trying to appeal to those former Southern Democrats to the Republican party. No?

Nathan Connolly: Well, the country isn’t really in a position to adopt an explicit appeal to race, or even to good ole boy Southern politics. In 1970 the country is a different place, even in the five or six years that have passed since major legislation of the 1960s. So there are ways in which Nixon’s administration makes one go at trying to appeal in the midterm elections of 1970 on basically running candidates who are making overt racial references, and then moves to something far more subtle once they get trounced in those midterms in 1970. So there’s a way that Spiro Agnew and other members of the Nixon team are learning how to talk about a quote/unquote Welfare Ethic for instance, as a way of dog whistling certain kinds of racial politics. Certainly law and order becomes one of these.
Even black capitalism becomes a really effective way of reaching voters on both sides of the color line, because the idea is that you’re gonna use the free market to give African-Americans a chance of economic equality and not use government programs. Certainly many African-Americans are like, “Absolutely, we want to be good businessmen and Capitalists.” So Nixon is extraordinarily nimble in his ability to use language and wield it on the campaign trail and with his surrogates in ways that allows him to undermine what would be considered a state-funded federally orchestrated Civil Rights approach, and instead, find ways of building new inroads into ethnic white voters and in some cases conservative African-American voters on a vocabulary that is not as threatening as some who experienced 1960s might consider.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, and Nathan, remember Nixon had to use those dog whistles because there was someone in the South who was using a bullhorn, and his name was George Wallace.

Nathan Connolly: That’s right. That’s right.

Brian Balogh: And there was nothing subtle about his visceral appeal to race.

Matt Lassiter: This is very interesting to me living in another century, but what I want to know is what consequence does it have for today that we’re re-imagining Nixon as a more, you say, nuanced, or more nimble man? What difference does it make that he’s not the person that the popular perception has him to be?

Nathan Connolly: I think the first thing is to one, look at the politics of the late 60s and early 70s with new eyes, and not to just let the scandal of Watergate do what I think it wound up doing which was to simply discredit any forms of government action in general, right? I think there’s a way that the real gravity of the Watergate scandal needs to be de-centered a little bit, and say, “Yeah, you know what? The 1970s were a really phenomenal moment of really important long-term legislation.” So anything that de-centers the scandal, or state failure, and looks at some of the gains in a broad variety of realms, I think is very important way to start that conversation.

Brian Balogh: I’d second that, Nathan, and talk about taking that longer view, even when we’re in the midst of an administration. So to apply Nathan’s lesson to our current president, regardless of the kind of controversies that are swirling, and the constitutional crisis, and I mean plural, that we are facing today, the fact of the matter is Donald Trump’s appointment of two Supreme Court Justices may well change the politics and the policy of the United States for decades to come. Perhaps we should be paying a little bit more attention to that right now.

Brian Balogh: So do you want a real personal anecdote?

Nathan Connolly: Oh, he’s got something!

Brian Balogh: Heck yeah! Of course! I think you guys know that I grew up in South Florida, and my father had customers for his Jewelry store in high places, and one of those customers was good friend of Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo.

Ed Ayers: Oh, one of the great names of American history.

Brian Balogh: Exactly. This customer owned a steakhouse, wait for it, called the Hasta Manana. This was before the day, Nathan, when people had flashlights in their cellphones. In fact, they didn’t even have cellphones, but when you walked into the Hasta Manana, you could have used a flashlight in your cellphone. It was all dark, and my father said when we were eating there one night, “You wanna see Richard Nixon?” So he took me and we went back to literally a room that looked like a cave, and truth in advertising I never saw Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo because it was so dark I couldn’t see anybody, but my father insists that Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo were enjoying a steak there at the Hasta Manana.

Ed Ayers: What year was this?

Brian Balogh: Oh, this must have been in the late 60s or early 70s.

Ed Ayers: Wow, so he was President?

Brian Balogh: Oh yeah!

Ed Ayers: I’m not trying to poke holes in your stories, and I want to believe it, but were there not Secret Service agents around or something?

Brian Balogh: They were so good I didn’t see them that night.

Nathan Connolly: So, Brian, that’s the most Nixon story I’ve ever heard, right? It’s the president you can see, but not see.
That’s gonna do it for us today. Do get in touch. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter at Back Story Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Ed Ayers: Back Story is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 11: Brian Balogh is professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of History and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Back Story was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.