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• 1 2015-04-04T12:04:37-07:00 Richard 37th, Act III: Thermidor, 1968-1974 292 image_header 2018-04-10T05:34:52-07:00

  When we look at America we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home. ...
  
  What America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people! 

  --Richard M. Nixon, Republican Party Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, Miami Beach, 8 August 1968

  During the winter of 1967-8 the North Vietnamese under the command of General Võ Nguyên Giáp laid preparations for the mighty Tet Offensive of 30 January to 28 March, which would prove to be the turning point in the long Vietnam War by shifting U.S. public opinion against the war, forcing the Pentagon to admit that the war was un-winnable, and forcing President Johnson to withdraw from re-election.  Every year from this date onward Americans were losing this war, until Nixon and Kissinger essentially surrendered in the Paris Peace Treaty negotiations of 1973-74.
  
  Richard Nixon pushed the United States every year from the early 1950s, from his Vice Presidency through his Presidency, and all the years in between (1961-1969), to maximize air, sea, and ground power against North Vietnam.  He was the most aggressive Hawk of his generation, but in the end, he sold the Republic of Vietnam down the Mekong River.  His vindictive, even reckless military wrath was unexcelled, and his deceit and cynicism was unmatched, by any previous wartime president.Note.
  
  The year 1968 was the bloodiest, most destructive, and divisive year for the United States internally since the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Not since the Great Upheaval of the 1870s-80s had the nation experienced such widespread urban unrest and mass confrontation with authorities.  America was losing a war for the first time in almost two centuries since Independence.
  
  It was Nixon's finest hour.  Leading the angry masses under the reactionary banner of "Law and Order," Nixon earned heavy returns on his investment in a strategy of spreading fear and providing the reassurance of an iron fist.  He now brought together his own unique Shakespearean will to power with the Southern California blend of authoritarian, military-industrial, and repressive political culture that created him as a public man.  Continuing the second track of his grand strategy for achieving the White House, he made a great show of liberal and moderate Republican policies and advisers.  But soon after his inauguration, he threw most of these policies under the bus, sidelining the liberals in his Cabinet as his "dark side" gained dominance by the end of 1969.  
  
  Thermidor had arrived.  Nixon marshaled the forces of reaction, having promoted and manipulated hateful and violent speech throughout his Interregnum (1961-1969)Note.  Nixon did not labor alone to produce all this fear.  The entire New Right from the John Birch Society to Barry Goldwater had also promoted a politics of fear, and Nixon rode the resulting tsunami.  Like the military generals and dictators that he put and maintained in power, from Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran to Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte in Chile, to Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos, Sr. in the Philippines to General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in South Vietnam, Nixon became a tyrant. The dynamics of escalating state and collective violence from 1963 through the early 1970s supplied him with an endless parade of enemies.  While pointing his finger at enemies, foreign and domestic, from the Communist Bloc to the guerillas in Vietnam to the non-white central cities of the United States, Nixon built a regime that was tyrannical by classical standards.
  
  By 1970, Nixon, while waging a brutal air and ground war against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, isolated himself in an inner world of court intrigue: wiretapping his own officials, mobilizing his mob soldiers, and spreading a network of political espionage that would intensify in 1971 after the leak of the Pentagon Papers.  In his feverish nightmares, he cursed the leading institutions of American liberty, beginning with the free press, which never stopped hounding him: "Never forget," he told (Professor) Kissinger, "The press is the enemy, the press is the enemy.  The establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times."Note.  Having instituted numerous authoritarian dictatorships in Latin America, from the 1950s to the 1970s, having ordered assassinations, Nixon showed every indication that he believed in the justice of authoritarian ruling power.
  
  Nixon's audacious lawlessness was eventually exposed by an aggressive free press, alongside a commercial public sphere that had just broken the bounds of censorship, if not for the first time, more widely than ever before in Western history.  In the Watergate Crisis (1972-4), a victorious press and mass media shamed--if only temporarily--the "silent majority" he had mobilized, and drove his defenders into hiding on Capitol Hill, leaving him no choice but to resign.  This was a signal victory for the Constitution's division and balance of powers, proving the scientific theory of the Founders, that tyranny can be prevented in predictable ways. Both Congressional and Judicial branches had refused Nixon's corruption and forced him from power.
  
  Forcing Nixon from power was also, and equally, a signal triumph for America's newly functioning critical public sphere, a mass culture that had been liberated by the Civil Rights movement, the Beats, the New Journalism, the New Left, and the New Hollywood. With new freedoms and powers of expression, the American public sphere transformed itself fundamentally in an American Glaznost.  This new unlimited public sphere--powered by mass media that flowed heavily from Los Angeles, proved capable of bringing Nixon down, but its carnivalesque powers of sensationalism and terror also followed its own commercial logic of profit. Terror, fear, exploitation, and inequality are the dark side of mass media, easily promoted, commoditized, and made real through the immersive nature of American mass media. 
  
  The final battle of Shakespeare's Macbeth occurs as a nightmare, when Macbeth is amazed to see the trees of Birnham wood approaching his castle, Dunsinane.  The Witches had told him "Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him."  Macbeth mistakenly considered this prospect to be so impossible, that he held the prophecy as a guarantee of his long-lived rule.  By the time of this scene in the last Act, Macbeth's crimes had so outraged the great nobles of Scotland that he faced the entire kingdom's strength in opposition.  MacDuff, son of the king that Macbeth slew in Act I, now commands his soldiers to cut boughs from the trees of Birnham Wood to camouflage their advance on the castle, hence the illusion of the forest itself advancing on Macbeth.  The image Shakespeare creates is that of the landscape, metaphorically the nation as a whole--its fabric--closing in on the ruler.  Nixon felt this acutely, facing the wrath of an outraged public.  He refused to see that he had made his own people the enemy, and blamed instead the messengers--"the press."  "The press is the enemy,"  as he fumed to Kissinger one day in 1971.  Nixon's entrenchment during his final three years in office, from 1971-1974, involved a retreat into clandestine government.  He enshrouded his rule behind the vast powers of the National Security State that he had come to represent more fully than any other postwar president.  Nixon's bitter downfall came on the battlefield of Washington D.C., in the form of a closed tyranny versus an open democracy.  Nixon's battles against democracy relied on the tools of autocracy: secrecy, militarization, felonies, mercenaries, deniability, unaccountability, criminality, misinformation.
  
  The final battles in the overthrow of the Nixon tyranny were battles for information.  The victory belongs to the functioning American Constitutional division of powers, and also to the mass public sphere.  The Hollywood engine at the heart of that mass-mediated public sphere, however, brought new vehicles of political power into the equation, which Ronald Reagan had already mastered.  Los Angeles had contributed Nixon's "preemptive" presidency--it also contributed the restructuring of the political public sphere under commercial media principles, having made a long journey from the deliberative critical public sphere of a century before.  Nixon was primarily a product of the print-based culture of the 19th-century.  He earned his way into public life as a debater, lawyer, and speaker.  He brought his hard-earned knowledge to bear in countless press conferences.   But Ronald Reagan earned his way into public leadership through acting, which requires not knowledge itself, but the study of "lines" that will thrill and amaze an audience.  In starkest terms, Nixon's public discourse descended from knowledge and debate, while Reagan's descended from illusion and deceit.  The greatest irony may be that Nixon was deceitful while Reagan was honest.
   

  Terrible Forces: Fear and Reassurance in 1968

  "We've just seen some very terrible forces unleashed.  Something bad is going to come of this."
            --Candidate Richard Nixon, upon learning that
                Robert Kennedy had entered the campaign for
                the presidency, 16 March 1968.

  
  Having lost most of the South Vietnam countryside to the Viet Cong, The United States and its dependent proxy, the incompetent military dictatorship of General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, still claimed at least to control the cities and towns of South Vietnam.   That claim was decisively disproven by the end of January 1968.  The coordinated NVA-VC attacks on South's urban strongholds overwhelmed the US-ARVN forces, the first of several bold and decisive moves by the North's commander of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), Võ Nguyên Giáp.
  
  Attacking more than 100 cities and towns beginning the night of the Tet Lunar New Year, 31 January 1968, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces rose in waves to number more than 80,000 soldiers--roughly the equivalent of eight divisions.  The Tet Offensive proved excessively costly to the United States. Forcing the greatest military power on Earth onto a bloody defensive, Tet required weeks of ferocious fighting to re-take the territory lost.  Far to the North, near the 38th Parallel, the U.S. poured firepower and hundreds of lives into the ancient city of Hue. The Battle of Hue (30 Jan to 3 March) was one of the longest battles of the entire war: one month of furious door-to-door urban combat, resulting in the aerial destruction of its fortified Imperial City, the Citadel, dating from 1806.
  
  America lost Vietnam in these pivotal urban battlegrounds of the January-March 1968 Tet Offensive; by April more than 100 American cities were in flames to match, like ill-fated sister cities.
  
  On 16 March, just at the end of the Tet Offensive, Robert Kennedy, emboldened by Eugene McCarty's anti-war challenge to displace President Johnson in the Democratic primaries, announced his own candidacy, and "terrible forces" were indeed unleashed.  By the 31st of March, Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that he would not seek nor accept, his party's nomination for re-election to the presidency. It was an action tantamount to resigning the presidency.  Just five days after that, on 4 April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lloraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, followed by a massive wave of urban uprisings that struck 110 U.S. cities.
  
  Despite pleas to honor the nonviolent mission of King, anger turned violent first and worst of all in the nation's capital, Washington D.C.  Stokley Carmichael openly advocated violence, leading crowds across the city.  With angry crowds numbering more than 20,000,  Johnson ordered a military defense of the city.  Twelve people died, about 1,200 structures burned, totaling about 27 million in property damage. Marines mounted machine guns on the Capital steps and the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry guarded the White House, in the largest military occupation of a U.S. city since the Civil War.  
  
  Next to Washington, D.C, the most heavily hit by uprisings were Chicago, Baltimore, and Kansas City.  The Baltimore violence led directly to Nixon selecting his running mate for the November elections.  Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew made a stink by scolding Baltimore's African-American leaders for not trying harder to suppress the violence.  Nixon preferred a pit-bull Vice President to the right of him, just as Nixon himself was to Ike in the 1950s.  It allowed him to project a positive and conciliatory persona.  Nixon was anything but.  
  
  The California primaries enveloped the tragedies of the 1968 violence-stricken electoral cycle.  During the primary race, Bobby Kennedy finally completed his journey from anti-communist reactionary in the 1950s to the labor-based Left, marching with United Farmworkers leader Cesar Chavez and Watts-based UAW official Ted Watkins in Southern California.  In that revival of the Popular Front, Bobby had the terrible duty of informing a crowd in Indianapolis, Indiana, that Dr. King had been murdered in the Lloraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.  By the date of his victory in the California Primary on 6 June, Bobby would suffer the same fate, in the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, California.  Without assuming that he had any role whatsoever in these assassinations, Nixon profited from both.  The explosion of urban violence in reaction to King's assassination from 4 to 8 April also fueled the flames of Nixon's Law and Order reaction.  as ever he had in the last two years, Nixon framed urban crime, violence, and as uprisings problems to be dealt with by military force, as an internal "war."  
  
  Nixon profited most of all from the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, who alone among Democrats had the potential block Nixon's path to the presidency.  Macbeth suffered the same dread as Nixon at this juncture.    Nothing had stung Nixon worse in his entire psycho-political development than having the 1960 election stolen from him by Jack Kennedy and Mayor Richard J. Daley.  Jack Kennedy in this analogy was Banquo.  After his assassination, Banquo's son, who escaped in Macbeth, remains a threat to his own kingship, according to the prophecy of the three Weird Sisters.  Bobby, the shining, attractive baby brother, was the son of Banquo's Ghost.  After 3 September Nixon no longer had a serious contender for President among the Democratic Party leadership.

  Sirens and Armies of the Night

  At the Republican National Convention, 5-8 August 1968, in the Miami Beach Convention Center, Richard Nixon faced only minimal challenges from his old rivals from the Liberal wing--Rockefeller and Romney--and much more so, on the Goldwater Right, from Ronald Reagan.  His Acceptance Speech was a call to arms, and a declaration that strong leadership would put down the nation's disorder and heal its divisions.  This speech is remarkable for these two elements: the massive protests by urban citizen and colleges students were illegitimate, because the "first civil right is the right to order"  Security then was the primary goal.  But also unity.   Here he proposed an end to "polarizing" speech, something he cynically ignored once in office, as we shall see.
  
  Because Nixon is Shakespearean, artists and writers tend to assume that he should also be tragic.  But he was melodramatic, and that is why Director/writer Oliver Stone and actor Anthony Hopkins missed the mark so widely in their portrayal in Nixon (1998).   The idea of Nixon as a tragic figure is akin to the idea that he was a liberal or moderate Republican.  Tragic heroes aim for high ideals but fail, due to a tragic flaw.  Nixon's highest ideal was his own greatness, and he would sell his soul to achieve it.
  
  Stone and Hopkins massively re-wrote Nixon's Acceptance Speech, to match a tragic model.  Ignoring huge portions of the actual speech, adding words ("angry people," "good people," does not occur in the original).  Stone's cinematic version is a montage of historic video--of Carmichael, of Wallace, of King--overlaid on Nixon's rising grandeur.  The actual speech has no such grandeur. Plodding along on a poverty of ideals, the speech is a drumbeat for social order and especially, renewed respect for the office of the presidency, a theme to which he returns three times.
  
  Nixon also did a re-write, but his was of the Founders.  In his account, the Revolution was for "progress," a word unknown to the Founders. Their revolution, our Constitution, was for liberty, equality, and the rule of law.  Nixon's revolution is about increasing wealth and imposing order through respect for authority.  Nixon could easily have played Hamilton during the Washington administration.
  
  The Democratic Party collapsed into factional division in its cataclysmic Chicago Convention, August 26-9.  Sheltered from violent street clashes by a cordon of barbed wire, the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie, weak opponents of Nixon, bearing responsibility for the nation's failed leadership over the previous tumultuous years.  With Richard Daley's Chicago Police battering protestors with billy clubs and tear gas throughout the nationally televised circus, the Democratic party appeared hapless hostage of urban disorder.  
  
  Nixon, having performed his Law and Order vs. Sirens in the Night message for three weeks already between the Miami Republican Convention and the Democratic Convention in Chicago, promised security to a republic of white suburbanites who wanted their sons and daughters back from campus upheavals, from the battlefields of Vietnam, from the the Summer of Love and protection from the Blacks and Latinos in the urban core.  They wanted to gat back to the american Dream in the 1950s, when Vice President Nixon kept the Communists at bay and internal dissent was suppressed through censorship.
  
  Nixon’s competition with Wallace for the 1968 vote of the disaffected whites in the South, the so-called Southern Strategy, has been modified by Matthew Lassiter to read “Suburban Strategy,” cunningly calculated to drive to power in 1968 on the energy of fear, Nixon’s central tenet. Nixon’s campaigning in 1968 was remarkable in the annals of U.S. political history, as the last hurrah of whistle-stop campaigning, in the old-style party organizations, before the reforms of the 1970s made parties more democratic and less deliberately led and rigged. Nixon had also make his own mastery of the media, calculating just the right messages to keep his opponent Hubert Humphrey on the defensive, which was not hard after.
  
  Left to the side of discussion from Lassiter and Kruse's metropolitan-geographic revision of the "Southern Strategy" thesis about Nixon, is the full international geographic scale of his regime.  To review his life: he was born and raised in a suburban/metropolitan milieu; the central type were the lower-middle-class shopkeepers that where his parents.  He absorbed the key reactionary principles of his historically authoritarian Republican regime leaders, the Otis-Chandler family, and then he transcended that regional extremism when he sought the Vice Presidency, becoming not only a nationalist but a true internationalist.  Nixon was by far the most traveled and experienced foreign policy authority of any leading American politician of his age.  
  
  Nixon finally reached the presidency by mobilizing the frightened, domestic(ated) suburban middle classes.  He was, in effect, projecting a suburban American territoriality on the globe: containment of Communism and Central Cities at the same time, in the name of a National Security State fighting a global war.  Far more interested in greatness as a world leader than he was in accomplishing a domestic policy reform agenda.  His vaunted liberal domestic a policies were placeholders only for him, to keep his coalition in line.    We have seen over and again that he treated policy positions instrumentally: not for the ends they would achieve, but for their electoral effect.  Before the Democratic centrists Carter, Clinton, and Obama, Nixon was the last of the Republicans to try to occupy the legislative center, and he did so with even more experimentalist nonchalance than F.D.R.
  
  In foreign policy, Nixon was more aggressive than Eisenhower in his will to defeat the Communists militarily, and more aggressive than either Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson, who were far to the right of Eisenhower. The framework of the 1968 election contest was a public sphere activated just as much by Vietnam War issues as by domestic policy issues. To their right, Nixon and Agnew faced the ominous pairing of George Wallace with running mate General Curtis LeMay on the Confederate-state based American Independent Party. LeMay, the bloodthirsty commander of the 20th Air Force;s devastating firebombing attacks on Japan, and later Commander of the US Strategic Air Command, responsible for the airborne nuclear arsenal. After concluding that Nixon would be too conciliatory to the Soviets, LeMay, who had rejected the offer previously, finally decided to run as Vice Presidential candidate with Segregationist George Wallace. At their first press conference together, LeMay advocated the use of nuclear weapons, in general, and explained to an astonished press corps that nuclear warfare is essentially safe for humans and other living things.  He began a truly remarkable string of comments by apparently rejecting the use of nuclear weapons: "We can win this war without nuclear weapons."  Note he, like Nixon planned to "win" a war that had been lost since the Tet Offensive.  Next, LeMay put his pro-nuclear case on the table: "It think there are times when it would be more efficient to use nuclear weapons,' dismissing public "horror" at nuclear weapons as a result of "being fed propaganda." He then talked about seeing Bikini Atoll after "20" nuclear bombings and reported that "the fish are back in the lagoons, the cocoanut trees are growing cocoanuts, and the birds are back.  While the crustaceans are "a little hot," the "rats are bigger, fatter, and healthier than they ever were before."  [From eating the radioactive remains of so many dead animals, one might assume].Note
  
  While Johnson ran against an advocate of nuclear weapons in Vietnam in 1964, Nixon did as well, in 1968, which enabled him to appear sober and unwilling to intentionally risk World War III and a nuclear winter.    The truth is, Nixon did in fact attempt to play that card as a threat once in office, with his so-called "Madman Theory," which he rehearsed with Haldeman in a much-quoted conversation: "I call it the Madman Theory," Haldeman recalled the president telling him. "I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button,’ and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace." 
   

  1969: Inauguration of a Crackdown

  Richard Nixon's 20 January 1969 Inaugural speech is a marvel of noble principles suspended in excessive platitudes.  Nixon deplored that "in these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading."  This public rhetorical strategy describes exactly what Nixon himself pursued in his path to power through the battlefield of extremism.  
  
  Nixon also made a major principled statement for equality before the law.  It is a remarkable statement for seeming to declare the Civil rights movement over.  "The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to insure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man."   While a pro-civil rights position is clear and consistent with Nixon's positions since the 1950s, this statement also clearly implies that no new laws are needed. 
  
  While Nixon was skillful in declaring for liberal ideals like the equality of all before man, what rapidly proved completely hypocritical are the Inaugural's appeals to unity, to "speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."  It took Nixon no longer than May to chart a hard-line course against campus protests.  Students protested on campuses across the United States, not only against the Vietnam War, but also against the University-Industrial-Military complex that had become entrenched in most major University research campuses by the 1960s.  Racial injustice was a major source of mass campus mobilizations.  
  
  A fresh wave of campus protests broke out during the Spring Commencement season of 1969.  Nixon rejected the advice of a informal Congressional task force recommending concessions to student demands, such as lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. Instead, Nixon unleashed Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, Nixon's lieutenant of crack-downs, to give a blistering, confrontational Commencement at Ohio State University n 7 June 1969:

  "A society which comes to fear its children is effete.  A sniveling, hand-wringing power structure deserves the violent rebellion it encourages.  If my generation doesn't stop cringing, yours will inherit a lawless society where emotion and muscle displace reason."  

  
  Integral to this diagnosis of the crisis is that the weakness of liberal authorities had created the violent disintegration of "reason."   From Nixon's standpoint, "a moderate and understanding approach toward the students who hated him would win him no votes, but stoking the silent majority's anger against radical students and the permissive elites who allegedly encouraged them offered rich political rewards."Note. Geoffrey Kabaservice, to whom my analysis is indebted, has charted the crucial role played by Nixon in the polarization of the Republican party.  He identifies this early moment in his presidency as the turning point, when his "dark side" began to predominate: "Nixon's belief in the need for toughness, even ruthlessness, in the conduct of government eventually won out, leading him to despise most moderate Republicans as pious weaklings."Note.

  The Moon, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Manson Murders

  Nixon made the most of the successes in the Apollo Moon Program launched by Kennedy back in the perilous times of 1961.  The "Space Program," was just a small part of the overall military purpose of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), of course.  The point of the "Space Race" between the USSR and the USA was to demonstrate ever-more effective superiority in the delivery of nuclear weapons.  Sputnik had humiliated the United States in 1957 by demonstrating the Soviet's ability to encircle the globe with armed and espionage satellites.  "Escape velocity" had been achieved for the first time, to break free of the Earth's gravitational field.  
  
  Now the United States had finally scored a decisive victory over the Soviets.  During his Inaugural, Nixon included a long section on the wonder and symbolism of the "Earth From Space" image that was delivered from Apollo **.  On 16 July at Cape Canaveral Florida, Apollo 11 was carried into orbit by the mighty Saturn V rocket,  a missile designed and built in Southern California, the capstone of Wehrner Von Braun's career as America's sanitized SS-Nazi missile man.
  
  After detaching from the Command Module on 20 July,  Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin piloted Landing Module Eagle to radio back that "The Eagle Has Landed."   Nixon's subsequent videophone televised conversation with Armstrong and Aldrin has wide-ranging spatial significance, on the spatial configuration of power.  Geospatially, Nixon's conversation with Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon broadcast, live, the greatest territorial achievement of any nation on Earth: to reach out and actually occupy the Moon itself.  Their conversation is couched in good will for all humankind, but it was nothing less than a humiliating defeat for the USSR, and a joyous triumph for a vast military regime.  
  
  Without exaggerating, we can say that the United States' possession of "Tranquility Base" on the surface of the Moon, however small, can be traced backward through space to a massive footprint in Southern California.  This footprint is easily visualized in the vast network of aerospace Prime Contractors and subcontractors throughout Southern California, including Raytheon, the developer of the Saturn V rocket engine, the most powerful engine ever produced by humankind.
  
  Nixon's televised conversation with the Astronauts epitomized his long-standing roots in suburban Southern California.  Just as his family served the growing suburbs, he became a suburban political candidate, representing the ambitious but fearful little burghers of the 'Burbs.  Shopping Centers were a favorite venue for Nixon in all of his campaigns, like the West Covina Mall.  Those suburbs were increasingly saturated with more than one hundred thousand aerospace workers, all of whom thrived personally during military buildups, fueled by military confrontations and bellicose politicians like Nixon.
  
  Throughout Nixon's rise from Congress to Senate to the Vice Presidency, and then to the Presidency, Southern California remained one of the world's greatest concentrations of  the “aerospace industry,” where prime- and sub-contractors designed and produced  military missiles, satellites, aircraft, munitions, and electronics systems.  The "Big Five" military contractors were Convair, Douglas, Lockheed, North American, and Northrup. Convair Astronautics was the largest of Convair’s divisions, employing nearly 25,000 workers at its San Diego plant alone, where workers produced the Atlas ICBM, which became operational at Vandenberg Air Force Base in September 1959, and the Atlas-Centaur spacecraft, originally designed for the first landings on the Moon.  At Douglas, missile and space programs by 1960 accounted for 72% of the company’s outstanding orders.[6]  The Saturn V subcontractors shared a footprint with the suburban ring of the Los Angeles Metropolis.
  
  Manson Murders of August 1969: Racist Terrorism as Horror Movie
  
  Americans only had a fortnight to celebrate their nation's finest hour on the Moon when the news broke of the horrific Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles, on 8 and 9 August.  The highly manipulated followers of messianic lunatic Charles Manson, calling themselves "the Manson Family," committed horrific slasher killings of the pregnant move actress Sharon Tate, wife of Polish-born film director Roman Polanski.  Manson planned the murders so as to appear that Blacks were the culprits (by planting a Black neighborhood with stolen items from the crime scene), hoping to start a race war.  Manson Family plan to emerge from caves and take control for the white race.
  
  Manson's "Family" was a violent mockery of the American family, and a chilling affront to the culture of security circulated in the suburban-targeted mass media.  Surely the majority of American media became more critical and more liberated in its range of discourse in every year from 1961-1969, so a wide-ranging exploration of alternative American families flooded the  airwaves, from All In the Family to The Adams Family.  In film, the New Hollywood began with an outlaw marriage in Bonny and Clyde (1967) and dysfunctinoal suburban families in Valley of the Dolls (1967)
  
  While the American media, typified by Life magazine, framed Manson's cult killings as "the dark edge of hippie life," Mason's terror killings were a phantasmagoric extension of the rise of carnography in the mass media.  Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, a film that made a great sensation in 1968, also, un-coincidentally, inverted the family with the very Devil fathering a child in a Satanic colony disguised as respectable New Yorkers.  Polanski's bloody scene in which Mia Farrow's character is raped by Satan, marketed the slashed female body for mass consumption--as art?  A year later, Charles Manson, targeting both Polanski and his wife Tate, perpetrated cruel murder of the Polanski-Tate and the La Bianca households for mass media consumption--for political terror.
  
  The sudden collapse of censorship in the 1960s opened the space for filmmakers to explore all taboo subjects of the body, from erotic fantasies to sadistic violence.  The New Hollywood was a powerful force pushing down the long-standing limits on cinematic expression.  But ironically, in the carnival of sex and violence burst from any boundaries, good or evil, as it became possible for graphic and morally shocking images to "go viral."
  
  Sharon Tate was the "It Girl" of 1969, her celebrity and beauty made her the target Manson sought, someone whose gruesome death would shock the Whites of Los Angeles into a murderous rampage against people of color.  All of this is about bodies and horror.  Race war fantasies, as Mike Davis showed in his brilliant and unique essay, The LIterary Destruction of Los Angeles, have been surprisingly common motif.  In Manson, the fantasies escaped the bound of slasher-genocide pulp novels and science fiction movies, to invade the public sphere in a mounting Age of Terror.  
  
  The conflicts of these years were all territorial in important ways.  Racial and economic segregation is the map of inequality, and all political and ideological movements enjoy geographic centers of support and power.  From the Southeast suburbs of Los Angeles County, then Orange County south to San Diego, was a vast regional reservoir of support for the New Right.  Reagan County as it came to be called; the ground had been prepared for decades by many a John the Baptist.  Billy Graham was one of the most influential, and his Southern California Crusade at the Anaheim "A"s Stadium in September 1969 was both a successor to Graham's mass revivals dating from the lag 1940s, and also an answer to the decadent immorality broadcast from the Liberal Democratic coalition of West LA, Hollywood, and Central LA.
  
  
  Nixon's Descent into Darkness, 1970-1974 (When Birnham Wood Comes to Dunsinane)
  
  Dunsinane. A room in the castle.  Enter Macbeth, Doctor, and Attendants
  
  Bring me no more reports; let them fly all:
  Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane
        -Shakespeare, Macbeth Act V Scene III)
  
  Richard Nixon was a life-long consumer of information, producer of information, disinformation, and keeper or secrets.  He sought to shape the world, the whole human globe, and did so in deliberately unaccountable ways.  But he was always frustrated that he could not control the public sphere.  His anger at the press was very deep-seated, made notorious in his "Last Press Conference " of 1962. By his Presidency, his hostility to the press and his dissonance with the media in general led to a pathological hatreds and paranoias, thoroughly documented by his inner circle, beginning with H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, his Chief of Staff.  As he said to former Harvard Professor Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, his National Security Adviser: "Never forget. The press is the enemy, the press is the enemy.  The establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times."Note.  Nixon's relation to the American public was so isolated and delusional that Garry Wills titled a chapter of his Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970), "They The People."
  
  Nixon's war with public information began almost immediately after his hypocritical Inaugural Address.  Furious that the New York Times had published news of small but secret invasion of Cambodia in April 1969 (a prelude to the much larger one he announced a year later), he and Kissinger both initiated a FBI investigation of both high-ranking Nixon administration official and journalists.  Those reports kept flowing throughout 1970, feeding Nixon's increasingly voracious appetite for espionage-derived information.  Wiretapping his own subordinates without their knowledge allowed him to know what everyone said behind his back.   He eventually ordered the installation of the most thorough, voice-activated bugging and taping system in the White House, ever devised.  A string of presidents did also make clandestine recordings of conversations: Kennedy and Johnson especially.  But those systems needed to be switched-on manually.  Nixon's system was totalitarian.  It taped everything that was said in numerous key meeting rooms.  Alexander Butterfield, aide to Bob Haldeman, introduced President Nixon to his elaborate system in February of 1971.Note.
   
  The gruesome horrors, including real crimes against humanity, that the press revealed to the world public over the dreadful winter of 1969-70 provoked widespread protests and anger, more exposures of secret Nixon administration information, and an escalating hard-line by Nixon on suppressing internal dissent and targeting its participants.  In November the atrocity of the My Lai Massacre was made public for the first time, the mass murders have been perpetrated nearly two years earlier, on 16 March 1968. Then on 30 April 1970 Nixon announced the "Cambodian Incursion," a major US expansion of the Vietnam War.  On 1 May, without even waiting for the public to react, Nixon lobbed another stink-bomb when he taunted the nation's student protesters, "You know, you see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.  Listen, the boys on the college campuses today are the luckiest people on earth...and here they are burning burning up the books. I mean storming around on this issue.  I mean you name it, get rid of the war, there will be another one."  The outburst was a rant, as the closing phrases indicate.  Nixon went on to compare those "bums" unfavorably with the soldiers fighting in Vietnam: "kids just doing their duty."  
  
  Nixon's twin statements set-off waves of anti-war protest across U.S. campuses.  Quite possibly taking their cue from the President, soldiers and police now found themselves ready to suppress students with deadly force.  At Kent State, Ohio, National Guardsmen in infantry formation fired a fusillade of 67 rifle shots directly into an unarmed crowd of students, killing four: Jeffrey Glenn Miller; age 20; Allison B. Krause; age 19; William Knox Schroeder; age 19; Sandra Lee Scheuer; age 20, and wounding nine others.  Ten days later, students on the mostly-African American Jackson State University, protesting the Kent State killings and other grievances, were fired upon by officers of the Jackson Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, killing two students with shotguns: Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior, and James Earl Green, 17, both unarmed and at the steps of University buildings.
  
  Nixon was aware that his reckless provocation led to the Kent State and Jackson State killings. "Is this because of me, of Cambodia?...How can we turn this stuff off?"  His second instantaneous reaction was his next recorded sentence: "I hope they provoked it."  The White House Tapes verify Haldeman's diaries.Note.  In both, he tells Nixon that it is unlikely the students provoked the shootings: "no real evidence that they did, except throwing rocks at the National Guard." [Haldeman 159]  Despite what Haldeman told him, Nixon proceeded officially to blame the students for the killings. Nixon's public statement, crafted with Haldeman that day, offered no condolences for the families of the slain youths.  Instead, the stern Law and Order president scolded the unarmed protestors for the violence:  "This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy."  Calling the killings a "tragic and unfortunate incident," he concluded with a warning to campus "administrators, faculty, and students alike" to maintain order.Note.
  
  Nixon switched on and off violence at will, worldwide.  Now, for once at least, he felt the consequences of his actions.  Haldeman recorded in his diary that Nixon "Obviously realizes, but won't openly admit, his 'bums' remark very harmful."  Most revealing for his conscious strategy of provocation, having set Agnew loose at Ohio State. Haldeman records that Now, after Kent State, Nixon "Wants VP [Agnew] to stop saying anything about students."Note.
  
  While anxious to avoid further bloodshed on U.S. campuses, Nixon was nevertheless entirely without empathy for the sources of the widespread protest against the Vietnam War.  He saw the protests merely as a matter of disrespect for authority.  Shown photographs of the dead bodies of Gibbs and Green, a college and High School student, respectively, killed at Jackson State, Nixon said "What are we going to to do to get more respect for the police from our young people?"Note.  
  
  Nixon was un-ironically square, with a fixed and narrow cultural consciousness.  By chance one night, while watching television, he stumbled upon All in The Family, the very popular sitcom conceived by Norman Lear.  Nixon had never heard of it, and was shocked by what he saw.  In it, Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) plays a bigoted, intolerant father of the Wold War II generation, with a married left-wing daughter living at home with her husband, played by Rob Reiner.  The TV script is clearly written  to favor the humanity and liberal perspectives of the son and daughter, but both sides are treated with sympathy.  Nixon could not sort this out at all, however.  He simply took it literally, and sided with Archie Bunker: The next day he ranted about the show to Haldeman, who recorded the diatribe:

  "Star of show--square type--named Arch.  Hippy son-in-law...the show was a total glorification of homosex.  Made Arch look bad--homo look good.  Is this common on TV?--destruction of civilization to build homos."Note.

  
  Nixon leapt to the defense of Archie Bunker, whom he called "Arch."  Like a 19th-century American ready to leap on the stage of a play defend the honor of the (fictional) Hero.  Nixon saw the show as dangerous speech because it made homosexuality normal and honorable against the intolerant views of a blue collar guy.  
  
  "Jews are all over the government," Nixon recorded himself saying to Haldeman in the Oval Office: "Most Jews are disloyal...generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards."  He said that the IRS was "full of Jews," and demanded that Haldeman get him the "names of the Jews, you know the big Jewish contributors [to the Democratic Party]...could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?"Note
  
  Nixon's domestic policies have consistently earned him high marks as a "Liberal" or "Moderate" Republican who, like Eisenhower, had not abandoned the New Deal.  Especially impressive was his aggressive approach to Civil Rights.  By all accounts Nixon was a sincere believer in equal opportunity.  we have seen how, even while courting Southern segregationist votes, he declared consistently that he was opposed to segregation and that his party should not be racist.  Perhaps his biggest success as President was the so-called "Philadelphia Plan," which required contractors who received federal funds to hire fixed quotas of minorities. The policy was the work of Treasury Secretary George Schultz (later President Reagan's Chief of Staff), and his African-American Assistant Secretary, Arthur Fletcher.  Tom Wicker praised this program as "perhaps teh first real success of any president on affirmative action."  It was, however, an act of cynical political gain.  Nixon and Schultz knew that the Democratic Party was dependent on its union support, and most Democratic unions hated this policy because it meant job loss for their all-white segregated unions.Note  
  
  Nixon could ride the high horse of Integration, hope to cultivate a few African-American Republicans, and undermine the Democratic party all at the same time.  "Make sure there is something in it for the jigs," Nixon told Kissinger, using a racial epithet, but reminded him that "We do not make votes playing to Negroes."  To Haldeman regarding Civil rights enforcement, "nothing more done int eh South beyond what the law requires," because of "No political gain for us."Note.  When Nixon saw a Savannah News headline that read, "SEGREGATION DEADLINES WON'T BE ENFORCED," Nixon responded "Excellent job."  Regarding the Congressional movement for a national holiday to honor Dr. King's birthday, he noted "No! Never!...That would be like making Nero Christ."Note
  
  Nixon does not deserve real credit for his Civil Rights commitments because he negated those gains both by the cynical approach he took, and by his parallel track of signaling the opposite, per his white-racist targeted "Southern strategy."  His Attorney General John Mitchell was most vocal in cutting back enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, withholding action against segregated schools, and Nixon himself took a major stand against "forced busing," declaring a national Busing Moratorium.  Calling Busing "a remedy not a right": Nixon responded to charges that he was restoring the "Separate But Equal" by his busing moratorium and increasing funding for inner city mostly-black schools.  Listening to a cued-up segment of Nixon's press conference of 24 March 1972, we can hear both the master policy wonk, and the master of political dissimulation.  
  
  In his management of publicity, Nixon actually preferred to be perceived as hostile to Civil Rights.  All of this fit with his own personal racism in any case.  "There were things he said to me that he never would have said on the record," Ehrlichman recalled, "for example, that blacks are ethnically inferior."  "Former aids have said that he referred to blacks as 'niggers,' 'jigs,' 'jigaboos,' and 'jungle bunnies.' This last epithet, John Ehrlichman said, was picked up from Bebe Rebozo."Note. 
   

  Cancer on the Presidency

  From this point onward, Nixon became increasingly, criminally, brutal.  Nixon already began the operations later to be discovered during the "Watergate" crisis, upon assuming office in 1969.  Nixon mined all sources of clandestine intelligence, from the FBI to the CIA, to his own Plumbers, and he kept about him a veritable Praetorian Guard.  He used the Secret Service as his secret police, a practice that alarmed even John Ehrlichman. (Summers 247). Nixon worked very, very hard, reading and writing constantly.  He kept his cabinet divided and monopolized necessary, key information to himself, or between him and his very inner circle: H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, Chief of Staff, and John Ehrlichman, domestic affairs adviser, and Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser,.  played very tough court intrigue against Secretary of State Rogers.  Haldeman, a crew-cut Eagle Scout and Naval Reserve veteran, called himself "the President's Son of a Bitch."  
  
  Nixon and Haldeman planned an as-yet unknown number of crimes, from felonies to misdemeanors, on a daily basis.  A chilling example was their discussion on 5 May 1971 about intimidating the leaders of the Anti-War movement, Abbie Hoffman in particular:
  
  HALDEMAN:  Do it with the Teamsters.  Just ask them to dig up those, their eight thugs.
  PRESIDENT NIXON: Yeah....They've got guys who will come in and knock their heads off.
  HALDEMAN: Sure.  Murderers.  Guys that really, you know, that's what they really do.  Like the Steelworkers have and--except we can't deal with the Steelworkers at the moment.
  PRESIDENT NIXON: No.
  HALDEMAN: We can deal with the Teamsters...
  PRESIDENT NIXON: Yeah.Note.
  
  It was the massive leak of the Pentagon Papers that had driven him to such a fury.  When the 7,000-page internal study of the Vietnam War, documenting years of lying by the Pentagon to the public, began to surface, Nixon blamed some group of "fucking Jews" on Kissinger's staff.Note.  It was, in fact, U.S. Marine veteran Daniel Ellsberg, one of Kissinger's brilliant students.  Capable of loosing "murderers" against the Anti-War movement in May, Nixon by June of 1971 ordered the theft-by-firebombing of files on Vietnam held by the Brookings Institution, the liberal think-tank in Washington DC supporting opposition to the War.  Nixon himself acknowledged his 30 June 1971 break-in order, in his 1975 memoirs, and multiple sources, including Dean, Ehrlichman, and Colson, concur that he also ordered the "firebombing" of Brookings, in order to allow FBI agents to follow the firefighters and pilfer the targeted documents.Note.  
  
  On tape, Nixon can be heard telling Haldeman:  "God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get them."Note.
  
  "You are going to be my Lord High Executioner from now on,"" Nixon growled to Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman  With this medieval command, Nixon authorized Haldeman to assemble a clandestine force of operatives--the "Plumbers"--a secret force that would stop up the leaks.   To Chuck Colson, his Communications Director and reputedly the personification of Nixon's "Dark Side," Nixon fumed and gave a blank check for any unlawful act: "I don't give a damn how it is done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks....I don't want to be told why it can't be done....I don't want excuses, I want results.  I want it done, whatever the cost."Note.
  
  A Quaker's Heart of Darkness: The Easter Offensive the Christmas Bombing, 1972 
  
  Like all American presidents since the Second World War, Nixon hoped that air power could keep the balance of forces in the U.S. favor as he drove toward a seemingly victorious negotiated withdrawal.  Nixon drove not for what he had demanded during all of his years out of power, however.  His demands were smaller, it turns out, than those of Johnson.  Johnson had insisted on a full withdrawal of NVA from the South.  Nixon left Kissinger free to negotiate an end to the war that left the North Vietnamese forces in control of South Vietnamese territory, asking only for a "decent interval" between the withdrawal of US troops and the "Fall" of the South. Nixon was prepared for the South ultimately to lose, if only the US could be cut free of it without the appearance of losing at the time of withdrawal.Note
  
  Nixon's air power strategy must be seen and judged in the context of US Air Force air power strategy since the 1920s.  In the essay Target Tokyo, Ghost Metropolis covers that long history, which has divided American air strategists between those advocating a civilian population-focused "terror bombing" approach, known as "Douhet" strategy after the 1920s Italian Fascist who first fully theorized it.  The Douhet strategy is meant to demoralize the enemy's civilians as a method of undermining support for the regime.  The Americans developed an alternative strategy is known as "precision bombing," which rejects the war crimes necessary in the Douhet strategy, in favor of bombing only logistical and military production targets, in order to cripple the enemy's supply lines, while minimizing civilian casualties. In the early 1960s the economist and military strategist Thomas Schelling developed a risk-based model of aerial strategy that was partially Douhet and partially precision in approach.  Schelling proposed the use of either civilian demoralization or infrastructural damage to as "costs" that the enemy leadership would suffer during increasingly severe waves of attack.  The ratchet-like increase would convince the enemy to avoid future risks by negotiating a surrender or settlement.Note  
  
  Note, however, that there are always "civilian casualties" in even the most conscientious implementation of "precision bombing." Transportation nodes, marshaling yards, transportation choke points like bridges and railway stations, are always located in rather densely populated blue-collar or even Central Business District zones of cities and towns.  "Collateral damage" is the euphemism for the killing of noncombatants: Supposedly unintentional (although predictable) civilian deaths in areas surrounding precision targets remain a grey area in International Humanitarian Law today.
  
  Nixon, like Johnson, was under intense pressure from the US and international opposition to the War, to minimize civilian casualties. Civilian casualties were the most prominent source of principled opposition to the War, so an overt Douhetian strategy would have been impossible to sell to the American people.  The question is not, then, simply whether a president ordered a Douhetian, anti-civilian attack, or a fully clean attack on precision "military" targets.  The question is rather, how many civilian casualties is that president willing to sustain as acceptable or necessary to achieve a victory?
  
  With his "Freedom Train" of early 1972, Nixon had begun with the same ratcheting Schelling strategy that Johnson had tried in the failed Rolling Thunder operation. It failed as well, leaving Le Duc Tho, Kissinger's negotiating adversary, in a bold position by May of 1972, when, when Ho and Giap launched the massive Easter Offensive, the largest land invasion since the Chinese crossed the Yalu River in the Korean war.  Within weeks, 200,000 North Vietnamese infantry in armored divisions poured into South Vietnam and took territory with the intent of keeping it.  US-backed ARVN forces fell back rapidly, losing entire control in the northernmost regions, including the provincial capital of Quang Tri.
  
  This was a dramatic shift in military strategy for Communist North Vietnam.  Operations since the very beginning of US ground intervention in the Kennedy Administration had been guerilla-based.  Johnson's air power strategy in Rolling Thunder was ineffective because air power is nearly useless against a dispersed guerilla army.  This bold regular military offensive by contrast opened the opportunity for US "precision" Air War doctrine to be immediately applied.  Operation Linebacker I was the result.   Nixon's gave his hard-line vengeance full reign here at this point: "Those bastards are going to be bombed like there've never been bombed before," Nixon said, and told Kissinger: "I intend to stop at nothing to bring the enemy to its knees."Note.
  
  As Robert Pape has shown with a convincing comparative method, Linebacker I, by focusing on the supply lines and concentrations of assets that major conventional land armies present, was a success, grinding the Easter Offensive to a halt by the end of June. The trouble began again, however, when South Vietnam dictator, General Thieu rejected the terms of a the peace treaty Kissinger and Le Duc tho had hammered-out, which would have left the North in control of large proportions  of South Vietnamese territory. The North walked away from negotiations at this point.  Nixon's goal was still unrealized, then, during the November elections, to which he had had to turn his attention in late summer and throughout the fall.

  The Christmas Bombing

  Nixon's descent into darkness reached its lowest point, ironically, during and after his greatest electoral victory, his historic landslide re-election on * November 1972.  By all accounts, he retreated to Camp David like Saul in his tent, brooding and nursing a terrible vengeance.  His withdrawal that seems also to have been calculated to project an image of Nixon as a lonely genius planning to solve the world's problems.  Indeed, he made numerous notes about being  a lonely hero, peppering Haldeman with images to broadcast. "Courageous," "burdened" "lonely." 
  
  We have seen that throughout the 1960s he consistently called for greater escalation, and always indicated that "peace" meant "victory," the end of Communist aggression.  Nixon concealed his aggressive plans during the crucial months of the 1968 campaign, stressing instead his formula of "Peace with Honor."   In order to force the North back to the negotiating table with Kissinger, Nixon ordered "Linebacker II" (18-29 December 1972), a major air attack on the most valuable assets of North Vietnam, in Hanoi and the Haiphong Harbor.  Assembling 200 B-52 Stratofortress heavy bombers--more than half of the Air Force's supply--The Joint Chiefs flew almost 3,000 sorties over twelve days, destroying major targets.
  
  Nixon knew what scale of killing he was about to unleash, and that civilians would die, so he postponed the initial attack so that it would not begin while he was in church on Sunday.  Haldeman's Diary reads: "The P said I would rather bomb on Monday, unless you think we really need to do it on Sunday.  He didn't like the idea of having  Sunday church service while we were bombing."Note.  Nixon also gave the North Vietnamese people a break on Christmas, 25 December, so that Americans could celebrate the Prince of Peace without a massive contradiction to contemplate that day.
  
  The assault was furious, and the North Vietnamese inflicted serious losses during their anti-Air defenses: 15 B-52s and 12 tactical aircraft were shot down.  Conservative estimates but the number of civilian deaths at over 1,300, with military deaths unknown, as this was not a land battle but a battle against urban targets and anti-aircraft batteries.  The North Vietnamese  loss of aircraft, was, in any case far smaller than that of the U.S.

  Watergate and Ruin

  By 1973, while Nixon was furiously inflicting the heaviest U.S. bombing attack since World War II, the American press and media, along with a growing number of U.S. Senators and Representatives, were hounding the President about the troubling revelations and leads resulting from the Watergate break-in of June 1972.  Despite a powerful report by Walter Cronkite, Daniel Schorr, and Dan Rather, aired on the eve of the November elections, the voting public took little notice, having handed Nixon a landslide victory.  But multiple investigations the winter and spring forced White House Counsel John Wesley Dean III, just 34 years old at the time, to try, frantically, to cover the whole thing up, coaching White House officials as they were called to testify before grand juries and give depositions.  By June of 1973 Dean, exasperated by the growing containment problem, decided to meet with Nixon to warn him that the cover-up was getting increasingly difficult to maintain.  Too many witnesses who had "the knowledge," as he put it, were capable or blowing the whistle, and the number kept growing, like a "cancer on the presidency," that was "growing, compounding daily."
  
  Because Nixon, in his lonely paranoia, was bugging (audio taping) his entire top-level White House cabinet, staff, and even himself, we have audio tapes of nearly every conversation Nixon had during his final years in office.  The "Cancer on the Presidency" tape and transcript, recording Dean's meeting with Nixon on 21 March, from 10:12 to 11:55 AM, in the Oval Office, is deeply revealing of Nixon's engrained criminality.  (Provided here is the complete, official audio recording and transcript, from the Nixon Presidential Library, a branch now of the National Archives).
  
  Dean began the Cancer meeting with Nixon with small talk disparaging the current FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, who had succeeded J. Edgar Hoover, who had died in office on 2 May 1972, after running the Federal Bureau of Investigation since 1924.  Gray was exerting independence, an unpleasant novelty for Nixon, who had enjoyed Hoover's support for his entire political career, since his days on the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s.  "He's just quite stubborn and -- he's quite
  stubborn; also he isn't very smart," Nixon opined.  Gray's Deputy Director, W. Mark Felt, it turns out, was at that moment dispensing damning information to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.  Felt was identified for decades only as "Deep Throat," Woodward and Bernstein's code name for this "deep background" source during the Watergate crisis.
  
  After this small talk, punctuated by the lid of a jar clattering on the desk of the most powerful man on Earth, Dean got down to business and explained the purpose of this meeting.  This opening is very important because it is a dance of mutual misinformation.  Dean pretends that Nixon does not know all the details of the Watergate crimes, and Nixon goes along with that.
  
  DEAN: Uh, the reason I thought we ought to talk
  this morning is because in, in our
  conversations, uh, uh, I have, I have the
  impression that you don't know everything I know
  PRESIDENT: That's right.
  DEAN: ...and it makes it very difficult for you to
  make judgments that, uh, that only you can
  make...
  PRESIDENT: That's right.
  DEAN: ... on some of these things and I thought
  that--
  PRESIDENT: You've got, in other words, I've got to know
  why you feel that, uh, that something...
  DEAN: Well, let me...
  PRESIDENT: ...that, that we shouldn't unravel
  something.
  
  Next Dean starts his prepared introduction, qualifying the "cancer on the presidency" metaphor, seemingly to avoid a direct accusation that Nixon himself is the the malignancy (within...near...):
  
  DEAN: ...let me give you my overall first.
  PRESIDENT: In other words, you, your judgment as to where it stands, and where we go now---
  
  DEAN: I think, I think that, uh, there's no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we're, we've got. We have a cancer--within, close to the Presidency, that's growing. It's growing daily. It's compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself. Uh, that'll be clear as I explain you know, some of the details, uh, of why it is, and it basically is because (1) we're being blackmailed; (2) uh, people are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people and the like. And that is just--and there is no assurance--
  
  PRESIDENT: That it won't bust.
  
  DEAN: That, that won't bust.
  
  PRESIDENT: True.
  
  Dean then begins a long narration:  "First of all, on, on the Watergate: How did it all start, where did it start?"  Readers and listeners need to remember that Nixon knows all of this already.  The conduct of this conversation is disingenuous, from these opening lines, which read now like a fable: "It started with an instruction to me from Bob Haldeman to see if we couldn't set up a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation over at the [Nixon's] Re-election Committee."  Such a "legitimate" operation for spying on the Democratic Party would only involve legal operations, he claims: "a normal infiltration, I mean, you know, buying information from secretaries and all that sort of thing."
  
  As Dean continues, the plot thickens and the plans become very illegal once the principal planners settled on G. Gordon Liddy, veteran FBI operative "who had done some extremely sensitive things for us at the White House."   The phrase "extremely sensitive" in this context means very illegal and likely to be very harmful politically if revealed.Note.  Dean then describes two meetings, both in the office of John Mitchell, Attorney General of the United States and at the time described, Chairman of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President.  Notice in the transcripts that as Dean describes the planning of felonies, Nixon does not respond with surprise or disapproval, indicating that these plans were already well known to him Instead, he repeatedly asks who was in the room, to determine how far knowledge of these plans had spread.
  
  In the first of these two initial espionage planning meetings, Dean describes "black bag operations, kidnapping, providing prostitutes, uh, to weaken the opposition, bugging, uh, mugging  teams."
  
  At which point Nixon interjects:

  PRESIDENT: But, uh...
  DEAN: And--
  PRESIDENT: ...that was, that was not, uh...
  DEAN: No.
  PRESIDENT: ...discussed with...
  DEAN: No.
  PRESIDENT: ...other persons.
  DEAN: No, not at all. And--
  PRESIDENT: (Unintelligible)
  
  Describing the second meeting, Dean relates that he arrived late at the meeting, but soon enough to hear plans for "bugging, kidnapping and the like."  Dean now claims to have confronted these planners--including the highest law enforcement officer in the United States--with the patent illegality of their actions (specifically, conspiracy to commit felonies punishable by the death penalty), claiming to have scolded the whole group:
  
  DEAN: ...And at this point I said, right in front of everybody, very clearly, I said, "These are not the sort of things (1) that are ever to be discussed in the office of the Attorney General of the United States"--where he still was--"and I am personally incensed." I was trying to get Mitchell off the hook, uh, 'cause--
  PRESIDENT: I know.
  DEAN: He's a, he's a nice person, doesn't like to say no under--when people he's going to have
  to work with.
  PRESIDENT: That's right.

  Again, Nixon expresses no alarm whatsoever about the planning of felonies.  Instead, he primarily wants to know who else can bear witness to such a nefarious planning session:
  
  PRESIDENT: Who else was present? Be-, besides you--
  DEAN: It was Magruder, Magruder--
  PRESIDENT: Magruder.
  DEAN: Uh, Mitchell, Liddy and myself. I came back right after the meeting and told Bob, I said, "Bob, we've got a growing disaster on our hands if they're thinking this way.' and I said, "The [White] House has got to stay out of this and I, frankly, am not going to be involved in it." He said, "I agree John." And, I thought, at that point the thing was turned off. That's the last I heard of it, when I thought it was turned off, because it was an absurd proposal.
  PRESIDENT: Yeah.
  
  The conversation then wanders though a maze of possible sources of revelation, principals involved who have already "had to perjure themselves," and introduces "the most troublesome post-thing"  (meaning post-Watergate arrests).
  
  This phase of the conversation culminates in the real climax of the taped meeting: Nixon's willing offer to help raise money for the blackmailers to keep them silent and thus commit "obstruction of justice."  While all this criminality is rightly alarming, the truly appalling aspect of these next few minutes is the clear admission by Nixon that he is an underworld "professional" who knows how to do things that "this is the sort of thing Mafia people can do."  Dean, in later years, has explained this part of the conversation as a moment of amazement to himself.  He had gone into the meeting, he recalls, assuming that at this point, Nixon would see that hte task of keeping so many witnesses silent through hush-money would become impracticable, and that some other course were needed at this point.
  
  DEAN:  "It'll cost money. It's dangerous. Nobody, nothing--people around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, and things like that, uh--we're--we just don't know about those (noise) things, because we're-not used to, you know--we are not criminals and not used to dealing in that business."
  It's, uh, it's, uh--
  PRESIDENT: That's right.
  DEAN: It's tough thing to know how to do.
  PRESIDENT: Maybe we can't even do that.
  
  Dean had some hope at this point that he was getting through to Nixon, but those hopes were dashed a few lines later, when Nixon suddenly asks: "How much money do you need?"  Dean responds, and Nixon then fills-in the the blanks:
  
  DEAN: I would say these people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, - two years. (Pause)
  PRESIDENT: We could get that.
  DEAN: Uh, huh.
  PRESIDENT: You, on the money, if you need the money, I mean, uh' you could get the money. Let's say--
  DEAN: Well, I think that we're going--
  PRESIDENT: What I mean is, you could, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten.
  DEAN: Uh, huh.
  PRESIDENT: I mean it's not easy, but it could be [done]. But, uh, the question is who the hell would handle it?
  DEAN: That's right, uh--
  PRESIDENT: Any ideas on that?
  DEAN: Well, I would think that would be something that Mitchell ought to be charged with.
  PRESIDENT: I would think so, too.
  DEAN: And get some, get some pros to help him.
  PRESIDENT: Let me say, there shouldn't be a lot of people running around getting money. We should set up a little--"
  
  Given the passes just previous to this, in which Dean and Nixon agree that this is the sort of thing that "Mafia people," and "criminals" do, Nixon's confession that "you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten," is a tacit admission to already being fully connected to the mafia.
  
  Tape Transcript 
   

  Conclusion: A Fascist Tyranny.

  
  A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.  --Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776)
  ​
  Richard Milhaus Nixon would not allow his power to be corrupted by others.  Instead, he corrupted himself and infected the entire system, leaving a cadre of apprentices, from Richard "Dick" Cheney and his protege, Donald Rumsfeld, to Pat Buchanan, and the Bush dynasty.  He sought and won a kind of power that far surpasses the seduction of money: the unlimited political power of the state.   A U.S. president wielding nation-state power can trump the greatest fortunes and all the advantages of inherited privilege.  Indeed, there was no higher power on Earth during the height of the Cold War when Nixon held the office.  Since the World Wars, the presidential office is sufficient to control the world's economy, geography; sufficient to decide the lives and deaths of millions of people worldwide.  Teddy Roosevelt proved that: he re-cast the U.S. presidency as the muscular, militaristic "bully pulpit" that struck aggressively, taking anything, from the Philippines to Cuba and the Panama Canal, that would advance American national interests.   A big game hunter, TR forced mighty corporations and militant labor unions to negotiate because he cared more about nation-state power than money.  No U.S. president wielded TR's "Big Stick" with greater strength and fury than Richard Nixon.  In this sense, Nixon was a "great" president during the height of his global power.  As President, at the apogee of U.S. global military-economic power, Richard Nixon was quite literally the most powerful man who ever lived.  
  
  Without Los Angeles, none of that would have been possible.  Nixon is impossible to understand outside of his regional milieu, which fostered an American variant of fascism.  Fascism is a complex of enmities, arguably a complete repudiation of Western humanism.  There are many studies of fascism, to which I am indebted.  My own summary of fascism's core features is as follows, in alphabetical order (because all components are interactive and inter-dependent): Authoritarian; Anti-Semitic and Racist; Assassination (both physical and character) as signature political tactic; Collusive and Coextensive with Organized Crime; Criminal espionage; Either-Or ideological extremism; Militaristic, Populist base; Procapitalist; Propagandistic use of the media; Negative mobilization of masses (mobilizing against minority population); Suppressive of the political and cultural Left; State violence and secret violence wielded in a political of Fear and Reassurance.
  
  For the sake of the world, would that it were not so, but the Los Angeles-based career of Richard M. Nixon follows a fascist script to the letter.  Nixon carried an American fascism all the way to the White House and launched the New Right movement that continues to thrive in the early 21st century.  Nixon did not achieve a dictatorship, to be sure.  In that his fascism is not comparable to that of his allies General Franco in Spain and his puppet Agusto Pinochet in Chile.  But he did achieve a tyranny, a fascist tyranny: the gravest threat ever to American liberty.
  
  
  ENDNOTES
  
  [18] “Transcript of a meeting between the President and H.R. Haldeman in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972 from 10:04 to 11:39 AM.” National Archives, White House Tapes.