Nixon’s Shadow

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’.