Nixon campaign.25
These incidents reinforced Nixon’s critique of a country that was badly off the rails and in need of a return to law and order. By raising social, cultural, and even, very subtly, racial issues, Nixon tapped into a deep groundswell of conservative attitudes in an American electorate exhausted by 1960s political unrest, radicalism, and rising crime.
The Nixon tactics and style have been emulated ever since—perhaps most famously in the 1988 Willie Horton ad by the George Bush campaign, which used the story of a convicted murderer let out on furlough, only to then commit armed robbery and rape, to eviscerate Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis and portray him as a soft-on-crime liberal. In 2004, George W. Bush used the image of his presidential rival, John Kerry, windsurfing to depict him as privileged and—subtly—unmanly, a risky steward of the nation’s security.
Similarly, Nixon’s influence can be seen in every candidate who seeks to remake him or herself. Whether it be Mitt Romney trying to prove that he’s a regular guy or Al Gore trying to show that he has a sense of humor, they each channel the New Nixon in the hopes of convincing the American electorate that its prevailing image of them as a candidate is wrong. Yet no one has ever been more successful than Richard Nixon himself in pulling off that feat.
A Record, an Influence, a Legacy
The picture that emerges from all of this is of a man derided and disliked—often hated—yet as accomplished as any American politician of the twentieth century, as measured not only by his political impact and influence but also by his substantive achievements in office. Though I freely acknowledge that mine is a minority view, I see Nixon on par with Franklin Roosevelt: he helped to bring an end to the Vietnam War on terms the United States could still have prevailed under; he developed a foreign policy framework that, along with the leadership of Ronald Reagan a decade later, helped to spell the end of the Cold War; and domestically, he institutionalized New Deal policies more extensively than Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon’s record on civil rights and desegregation is stellar, and he was the first president to take a leadership role on the environment.
The majority of the chapters in this book focus on how Nixon’s presidency influenced and shaped American politics. But before we try to understand why his influence has been so far-reaching, we must first reckon with his substantive record. Thus, in the first section, “The Nixon Record,” chapter 1 begins with a survey of Nixon’s domestic policy record—in which I argue that he was not only a pragmatic centrist but also perhaps America’s last liberal president. In chapter 2, I look at the politician’s foreign policy achievements, which have cast a long shadow—mostly positive—over American statesmen to the present day.
Section 2, “The Nixon Influence,” dives into the American political history of the last forty-five years, looking at it through the lens of the Nixon record and its effect on both major parties. In two chapters devoted to each party, I argue that it is Nixon who is the presiding influence on the shape both parties have taken since the late 1960s—often in ways little noted or poorly understood. The section’s final two chapters bring matters up to the present day, examining first how Bill Clinton, through his wielding of triangulation and middle-class appeals, became Richard Nixon’s truest political heir, and then how George W. Bush and Barack Obama, from different ideological directions, forgot Nixon’s lessons—especially in foreign policy—and pursued base-oriented presidencies, both of which would be marked by historic levels of ideological polarization and voter disgust.
In section 3, “The Nixon Legacy,” the book’s final section, I examine Nixon’s place in history from two perspectives: The first involves an in-depth analysis of the Watergate scandal and its analogues in subsequent decades—especially the Iran-Contra scandal, the Iraq War, and the Obama administration’s IRS scandal. Taking on Nixon’s influence from another perspective, I then look at how Nixon’s postpresidency deserves to better remembered as a template for influential statesmanship in retirement—not to mention, on its own terms, as a personal story of grit and resilience.
This book is being published as Americans gear up for what promises to be, in 2016, another crucial and highly contested presidential election. While commentary and analysis will not be in short supply, Americans would do well to step back and consider the deep roots of our current political divisions—and that examination relies heavily on understanding Richard Nixon’s impact, the forces he set in motion (for good and ill), and the strategies he used. This book aims to make clear how we must understand our thirty-seventh president to understand American politics today.
The Domestic Policy Pragmatist
Nixon remains the only modern president whose personality, rhetoric, and image can be used with impunity to dismiss or ignore his concrete achievements, especially in the area of expanding civil rights enforcement in particular, and domestic reform in general.
—JOAN HOFF1
Since [Nixon assumed office] . . . the great symbol of racial subjugation, the dual school system of the South, virtually intact two years ago, has quietly and finally been dismantled. All in all, a record of good fortune and much genuine achievement. And yet how little the administration seems to be credited with what it has achieved.
—DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN2
The 2,027 days Nixon spent in office have been remembered most for Watergate, next for foreign policy, and least for domestic reform. I think this order should be reversed.
—JOAN HOFF3
Richard Nixon is many things to many people, but a little more than forty years after his crushing 1972 reelection victory, he is also something few would have imagined: America’s last liberal. That may sound like a stretch, a misunderstanding of Nixon’s presidency and his policies. But if we look back over the last forty-five-odd years, Nixon’s credentials have put him starkly at odds with today’s Republican Party. Though Nixon, and other Republicans in the 1970s, would never have expressed it in this way, our thirty-seventh president was a pro–big government, pro–public spending, and pro–safety net president.
To some extent his domestic liberalism resulted less from deep-seated convictions than from political pragmatism. Because the truth about Nixon is that he was never terribly interested in domestic policy. He once said: “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President. . . . You need a President for foreign policy.”4 To be sure, this perspective sometimes got Nixon into trouble domestically: as I go on to briefly outline, Nixon’s economic policies were scattershot, inconsistent, and not terribly successful by any measure. He lacked a firm foundation in economics, and it showed in his policies. Yet, in other crucial domestic areas—especially civil rights and the environment—he achieved remarkable successes unmatched by any of his successors (and some of his immediate predecessors). In further areas—especially health care and social welfare—he proposed bold, innovative reforms that, while not becoming law, helped to shape the reforms adopted decades later.
What’s striking about all of these areas is how much Nixon’s record plays against the conventional image of him. Nixon’s image today, on racial and civil issues, for instance, is almost wholly negative. It’s an image that he himself did much to create, especially on the White House tapes, in which he is heard saying things about blacks that had they been heard publicly,