This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Note: Wicker 1967

677

Tom Wicker, “in The Nation: Which Law and Whose Order?” New York Times, 3 October 1967, p. 46.

This page is referenced by:

Richard 37th, Act II: Resurrection, Race and Reaction, 1963-1967 Intermezzo:

People react to fear, not love.
They don’t teach that in Sunday School,
but it’s true.
--Richard M. Nixon *

During Act I of Richard 37th, Richard M. Nixon transcended his Southern California regional base and became a national and international leader. but ultimately, in 1960, failed in his competition for the White House with his arch-rival, John F. Kennedy. Tracking Nixon is also tracking the arrival of Southern California's political culture at the U.S.-national and global scales.
The story told in this act of the Nixon tragicomic melodrama is that of Nixon's rise from the tomb of his own defeat to become the self-appointed Republican party unifier.[Note]

Mapping Nixon's leading role in post-WWII American political life is to make visible the concrete pathways through which Los Angeles regional political culture grew to define the national political culture as a whole. Nixon did fumble his leadership of the New Right when he lost the presidency in 1960 and then the California governorship in 1962, but once he learned how to lead from the front, he led the New Right to victory as the hegemonic ruling-regime ideology of the United States, which has lasted into the 21st century. For one man--a homely, ill-tempered Angeleno--this was a colossal feat of political leadership and electoral realignment.

This great-leader story bore the greatest consequences: 1) For the masses of angry white American suburbanites and Sun-belters that he led; and 2) for everyone else in the polyglot world of racial diversity, exploited peoples, and cities occupied by militarized police departments.

Richard Nixon dragged America to a very dark place: one that embraced Southern California's homegrown Pulp Fascism.

Act II of Richard 37th tells a story of resurrection, in which Nixon leveraged racial fear and and the fear of mass violence to forge the most reactionary administration since Andrew Johnson. In 1960 and 1962, Nixon had underestimated the volcano of populist, resentful, Christian evangelical, media-savvy and above all uncompromising right wing Republicanism.

The next act in our story of Richard III begins in the fateful year of 1963, in which Nixon emerges from his political tomb, fighting furiously to master the scrambled politics of the Republican party, and of the United States.

The story in this essay begins with deepest irony, because the populist wildfire that burned Nixon's backside was blowback from his earlier work as anti-communist scare-monger.

While serving his 1950s tutelage under Eisenhower's august brow, Nixon had played the Sorcerers Apprentice, conjuring an army of suburban broomsticks to keep the nation free of Communists and New Dealers, courting all the while the Liberal-Moderate Eastern wing of the Republican party.

This plain-folk broomstick army had seemed easy enough to mobilize, as Act I of Richard 37th recounts. But the broomstick army was programmed single-mindedly, to destroy anything but the small-government world of Calvin Coolidge.

While Nixon's back was turned, facing eastward toward New York, the nascent New Right blindly attacked him precisely because he had made peace with Republican leaders who had made peace with the newly expanded New Deal welfare and regulatory state.

Eisenhower and the big-city moderates like Thomas Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge and Nelson Rockefeller were the moderates fated to extinction, but Nixon did not yet know that while running for president in 1960 and California governor in 1962.

As Southern California's "extremist" mobilization swept from the Southwest and the Confederate South under Barry Goldwater's insurgency of 1963-4, Nixon learned to lead from the Right once again, while keeping the rest of the Republican party in line.

If the Fifties can be characterized as Nixon learning to dance to a national tune of New York-centered Moderate Republicanism, the 1960s can be characterized as Nixon teaching the United States to march to Southern California's tune of New Right "extremism."

By 1965-6 Nixon was the Republican party's sole unifier, and by 1967-68 had re-made the party in his own image.

That image increasingly bore the ugly stamp of repressive reaction and the rise of a tyranny. Nixon achieved his realignment by manipulating fear to mobilize the white middle-class voting masses to back his drive for a more aggressive war in Vietnam, a more aggressive Cold War throughout the world, and his drive to militarily suppress the urban and campus uprisings at home.
Springtime for Nixon and Reagan, 1964
President Johnson's major achievement in the Winter of 1963-4 was to leverage Jack Kennedy's assassination to push through "the god-damned..." Civil Rights bill, the CRA of 1964. It sailed through the House (290–130) on 10 February 1964, but the surprise spoiler in this heroic story was Senator Barry Goldwater's very public opposition to the act, voting against it in the Senate on 19 June, just weeks after sewing-up the delegate count in the 2 June California Primary. The Civil Rights Act did not become law until 2 July, after the House voted on a Senate amendment and President Johnson signed it into law. So the furore over Goldwater's opposition typified the debates among the stunned Republican leadership going into the 13-16 July Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

The earthquake that up-ended the Republican party in the 1964 election cycle was the successful grass-roots capture of the part apparatus by the "Draft Goldwater" movement that had been in place since 1961. "In a manner reminiscent of Communist tactics in the labor unions in the 1930s," wrote Robert J. Donavan, Washington Bureau Chief for LA Times, "they infiltrated Republican organizations and won control by out-fighting and out-lasting their opponents."Note Thanks to years of groundwork, Southern California led a simultaneous launch of the New Right Republican Party, the "Extremists." The crucial engine of this movement was was Darren Dochuk calls "Goldwater's Evangelical Front" in Southern California.Note

Nixon feigned grace and made it clear from the outset that he would not pursue the nomination, unless he were drafted to break a deadlock. In other words, he had the audacity to keep his hat firmly in the ring. Then he waited, and took part steadily in the wider debates, but did not take sides until Goldwater, his seeming ally, gained momentum. This threatened Nixon's home ground. Having stood by Goldwater in California during the Primary, Nixon suddenly leapt onto "the burning deck of Republican liberalism" to endorse George Romney, less than a week after Goldwater's stunning upset. Now Nixon, improbably, leaped to the liberal side of the Party, to join their attack, a totally disingenuous, cynical move. He declared it a "tragedy" if Goldwater's views (little different than his own) "were not repudiated by the Republican platform and the nominee himself." Goldwater was correctly indignant and bemused: "I guess he doesn't know my views very well...I got most of them from him."Note Throughout the chaotic primary season that culminated in the the 2 June California Goldwater victory, "Nixon was the most helpful," Robert Donovan of the LA Time wryly observed: "He tried to help everyone lose."Note

Despite this initial stab-in-the-back, Nixon kept enough distance from the fray until the final moment of Goldwater's upset nomination, and then stepped onto the stage in just the right light. He wrangled for himself the role of the speaker who introduced Goldwater for his Nomination Acceptance Speech. Nixon's speech would precede the nominee's and serve as a tantamount official statement of the Republican Party. It was an extraordinary comeback from his deep hole of just the previous year. In it, further, Nixon appealed to "Unity." Goldwater's acceptance speech then endorsed "extremism," in a shocking statement that led to angry disavowals from the Liberal republican candidates. "Extremism in the cause of Liberty is no vice; moderation in the cause of justice is no virtue." It would be hard to exaggerate the shock waves Goldwater made with this declaration.Note

Too late now to "Stop Goldwater," the Liberals and Progressives tried instead to control the national Party platform. Goldwater's arch-rivals Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney carried Senator Kuchel's torch to back a failed "anti-extremism" plank. The defeat of that plank made Rockefeller, Romney, Scranton, and Lodge all the more bitter when Goldwater in his acceptance speech, uttered the most provocative words of the 1964 election cycle: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is not a vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue." Nixon saw all this coming, and had engineered for himself the role of introducing Goldwater as the party's nominee. His own speech was a call for unity, so he had it both ways: friendly to the "extreme" right-wing candidate, but calling, not for extremism, but for ecumenical party loyalty. Even after Goldwater's peace-shattering bombshell, Nixon stood tall with Ike and Goldwater himself, calling for party unity.

Rockefeller, after years of being outmaneuvered by Nixon and now Goldwater, was utterly furious. He not only refused the extended hand of unity, but "ripped" Goldwater with a stern denunciation: "to extol extremism -- whether in defense of liberty or in pursuit of justice -- is dangerous, irresponsible, and frightening. Any sanction of lawlessness, of the vigilantes and of the unruly mob can only be deplored. The extremism of the Communists, of the Ku Klux Klan and of the John Birch Society -- like that of most terrorists -- always has been claimed by such groups to be in defense of liberty."Note

Confusion reigned about the meaning of Goldwater's statement, but everyone agreed that the party was splitting apart very seriously, calling to mind the Whig party's collapse of the 1850s.Note Goldwater's initial embellishments were not reassuring. In response to Rockefeller, at a news conference at the SF airport, Goldwater reportedly said "Extremism in politics is either fascism on one side or communism on the other." Was Goldwater's right-wing extremism fascism then? Illinois moderate Republican Charles H. Percy joined a chorus when he demanded that Goldwater issue a clarification. Again, Nixon captured this fractious moment. Rather than standing on the side, he managed to control its outcome. Most probably following a prior arrangement and negotiation with Goldwater, Nixon issued on 10 August an open letter asking for clarification. In it, Nixon offered Goldwater terms of acceptable and unacceptable "extremism": "The charge has been made that in using these phrases you were, in effect, approving political recklessness and unlawful activity in achieving the goals of freedom and justice." Remember, Nixon had already advocated extremism within the political process. The "unlawful" boundary was not very hard for Goldwater to accept. "I have assured," Nixon leadingly wrote, "all of those who have raised this question with me that you would be the firs to reject the use of any illegal or improper methods to achieve the great goals of liberty and justice we all seek." This particular statement bears a chilling irony, considering Nixon's alliance with the Lansky-Luciano mafia and his extensive use of illegal methods during his own presidency. Goldwater's reply shifted attention to the passion with which one pursues liberty within peaceful democratic procedures. After a long-winded apologetic elaboration blaming the "misunderstanding" on "context,", he concludes "If I were to paraphrase the two sentences in question in the context in which I uttered them I would do it by saying that wholehearted devotion to liberty is unassailable and that halfhearted devotion to justice is indefensible."Note

Goldwater had now advanced an unremarkable platitude, but the impact of his statement reverberated throughout the 1964 electoral cycle. And his faction had dominated the Platform Committee, so it practically disavows Civil Rights, except to say that the Civil Rights laws ought to be enforced. more forcefully, it condemned "inverse discrimination" in schools and jobs, meaning a loss of places in schools "and by job pro-ration." The platform makes clear," judged Joseph Alsop of the Boston Globe "...the real guts of the campaign, however, will be an appeal to the so-called white backlash."Note

Nixon, having supported, then opposed, then returned to support Goldwater again, declared at a press conference on the day of his "Unity" Nomination Speech, that "I will do everything I can all over this country to support and elect the Republican ticket form top to bottom just as Barry Goldwater worked for our ticket in 1960."Note Even after Goldwater's Extremism declaration, Nixon's role was to champion Goldwater's (temporary) standard-bearing role, helping him out of that tight spot, in fact. It would be hard to exaggerate the depth of the divisions now in the Republican party. Goldwater had demanded what Walter Lippmann called "unconditional surrender" at the Convention of the Liberal wing. The alacrity with which Nixon flew to Goldwater in this departure from the Party of Lincoln, is seen most clearly in his abandonment of Civil Rights. Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act, in the Freedom Summer of 1964, was tantamount to endorsing the Massive Resistance of George Wallace, the white Citizens Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan. Senator Kuchel broke with Senator Knowland because he refused to endorse or support Goldwater, the party's own nominee. Nixon's support for Goldwater at this juncture reinforced the false impression that the Republican Party was opposed to Civil rights. As Geoffrey Kabaservice laments, the Republicans had actually drafted the triumphant Civil Rights law of 1964. The "rule and ruin" strategy of Goldwater--with Nixon stabbing his moderate colleagues in the back--for those who wish to think of Nixon as a Moderate--had a most devastating effect on the lost liberalism and moderation of the Republican party, well into the 21st century.Note Nixon's loyalty to Goldwater only last as long as it served him, however. After the catastrophic losses in November 1964, Nixon consoled losing Congressional candidates by blaming "the drag at the top of the ticket."Note

African-American Republican, James L. Flournoy, then serving in the California Assembly, publicly withdrew his support for Goldwater after the Convention, saying "I can't support Sen. Goldwater because I don't know what his position on civil rights is. Nowhere in his acceptance speech did he mention civil rights." Sadly, Flournoy belonged to the super-majority of the Republican Party's officeholders who supported the Civil Rights Act: "I can't forget that 82% of the Republicans in the Senate and 80% in the House voted for the civil rights bill."Note

As if there weren't enough "extreme" voices, Phyllis Schlafly published a paranoid tract in April of 1964, for the primary season, titled A Choice Not an Echo. In it, she claimed that America was controlled by an international cabal of investment bankers who she called "the king makers." The Kings they made were their puppets at the head of the Republican Party's liberal-moderate wing; Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, Nelson Rockefeller, even Robert S. McNamara. "Consciously or not," Geoffrey Kabaservice writes, "Schlafly evoked a centuries-long tradition of rage against treasonous elites in secret control of the world..." Not surprisingly, the John Birch society's autocratic leader, Robert Welch proudly claimed Schlafly "one of our most loyal members."Note

In Ronald Reagan's landmark performance, the movie actor-cum-political activist wrote and delivered a pro-Goldwater speech, pre-recorded for television before an audience on 27 October titled "A Time For Choosing." Known since then mainly as "The Speech" quickly attained legendary status in a pantheon alongside William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold or Abe Lincoln's House Divided.

In it, Reagan drew on his own positive portrayal of the same anti-New Deal conservatism that Goldwater espoused, but unlike Goldwater's "extreme" rhetoric, Reagan's was appealing and reasonable. Two much-quoted lines stand out as central messages, really cornerstones of the Reagan Revolution that would ultimately take place in the 1980s. The first is that the U.S. Government is deserving of the same fear and contempt that the British Crown was held during the Revolution. This is a direct repudiation of the New Deal and Great Society liberalism, even Republican Liberalism: the US Government is our government and gets big only to help Americans, as a positive force. The Goldwater movement completely rejected this premise, and under Reagan successfully expanded a political culture in which the Government is always doubted and often feared as destructive to American lives.
"The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing."

The second move, departing entirely from the "extremism" framework with an approach wholly different than Nixon's, was to reject the whole "left" and "right" axis of polarity altogether in favor of a bad-vs-good axis. In this, all "totalitarian" politics are "down" in the "swamp" of evolution, and all "free individual" politics are "up" in the evolutionary heavens.
"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream – the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order – or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."

The Speech drew the attention of Goldwater's highly-mobilized but also dismayed backers, who knew that the 1964 campaign was doomed with the wrong spokesman. party chieftains, especially those who backed Goldwater--to Reagan himself as a potential presidential candidate. The idea was a brilliant one: put a reasonable-sounding actor in the role of articulating the insurgent vision of the "extremists." But Reagan had never held political office, so the first task was to get him elected to the Governorship of California. The Speech set those plans in motion, with Southern California businessmen Henry Salvatori and Caspar Weinberger stepping up to led the effort. It also gave careerist Republicans like Weinberger a vehicle to stay in the ring, his ankles already bleeding from the attacks on him as old guard by the insurgents.Note
Shakespearean Nixon and Cervantean Reagan
Reagan's sudden emergence as a major figure in 1964-66 cannot be considered separately from the rise of Nixon recounted here. The two represented rivals and also allies, both drawing from the same Southern California "base" of institutions, organization, demography, and ideology. Yet their core way of being as politicians was dramatically dissimilar. Nixon was a true-grit self-made political leader. The soil of his growth was that of the "plain folk" of suburban Southern California, which meant also the "grower-exurban" interface. Rural California was the most reactionary territory in the West, where anti-union and anti-government discourse was common. His leadership was the result of his own daily labors on the phone and in airplanes,tirelessly building the Republican party with his own hands.

Nixon entered politics, as Act I shows, through the front door of the Los Angeles Times: Regular Republican party chieftains approved of him and let him run for U.S. Congress. Reagan entered politics from Hollywood, which was always already political, having re-shaped the American political public sphere since the 19teens. As historian Steve Ross shows, Reagan, when he shifted from the pro-FDR studio of Warner Brothers to the Republican network headed by Louis B. Mayer at M-G-M, followed a well-established beachhead of the republican Party in right-wing Hollywood. Reagan's political potential was boosted enormously by his mentor's triumph in the Senate Race of 1964 over liberal Kennedy insider Pierre Salinger.

The difference between the two world-historic figures that emerged from Southern California can be summarized as a contrast between a homely political nerd who made himself indispensable and autonomous as a political leader through hard work of fact-gathering and policy positions selected according to electoral political strategies, and a handsome veteran actor who sincerely believed in the newly clear ideological vision of the National Review, who reached the people first through movie and television screens before he spoke to live audiences as a politician. His candidacy was managed and produced by a corporate-style committee using Reagan as a pitch-man who could be relied on not to screw up. Nixon was nobody's production and had to rely on himself at every step. As Skowronek writes, Nixon's "preemptive" politics resulted in a sudden political crash--he tried too radically to re-organize and disrupt the stable political equilibrium. Reagan, who was essentially drafted to be the standard-bearer of an already-rolling movement, and whose profession it was to enact ideals, successfully presided over a genuine American political re-alignment.

In the shortest of political shorthand, Nixon was Shakespearian and Reagan was Cervantean.
California's Reversal of Civil Rights: The Referendum Repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Law in 1964
After Goldwater advocated using nuclear weapons and Johnson expertly campaigned on the Kennedy-Johnson achievements, LBJ enjoyed one of the biggest landslides in all of American history. Johnson's vote frequently ran above 75% throughout counties in Northern California, but his lead was just over 60% in Los Angeles County, and Goldwater's only urban California wins were Orange and San Diego Counties. Californians' also put Republican George Murphy into the US Senate and rejected Pierre Salinger, closely identified with the Kennedy clan. Most ominously, Californians simultaneously handed Johnson a landslide and repealed the state's newly-enacted Rumford Fair Housing Law, in the landslide success of Proposition 14.Note

Heat Map: Proposition 14, The Plebiscitary Repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Law Nov 1964. Compare with Racial Majorities, 1960 and 1970.

Slightly ahead of the national drive for Civil Rights laws, the California legislature in 1963 enacted the Rumford Act, named for one of the leading African American Assembly members, W. Byron Rumford (D- Berkeley). The Rumford Act “declared racial discrimination in housing to be against public policy and forbade owners of residential property including more than four units, or owners of any publicly assisted residential property, to engage in racial discrimination in its rental or sale.” Such a law ran counter to decades of real estate practices and the common sense of White property owners, who had been led to believe that the racial integration of neighborhoods guaranteed an immediate drop in property values. The California Real Estate Association, which in the 1930s had helped the Roosevelt Administration construct the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation’s “security maps” that redlined racially-mixed neighborhoods, led the attack on the Rumford law. Denouncing the new policy as “forced housing,” opponents raised the necessary signatures for a referendum repeal of the law. The measure passed overwhelmingly in November of 1964, most tellingly in the same year the U.S. Congress passed its sweeping Civil Rights law. The disrespect of this remarkable, electoral repeal of a Civil Rights law was both indicative of how far white Californians had to go before recognizing the basic tenets of equality. It also amounted to a major blow to the morale of the mainstream Civil Rights movement.
State Escalation and Urban Rebellion, 1965
The worst of times for a defeated, riven and contentious Republican party, the winter and spring of 1964-5 was the best of times for Richard Nixon. Nixon thrived most brightly among the misfortunes of others. His party suffered the biggest landslide and reverse in decades. Democrats took 36 seats from the Republicans in Congress, giving the Democrats and 2/3rds majority, the biggest since 1936. Indeed, it looked like a full-tide return of the New Deal, now called The Great Society. Bewildered Republicans had to watch a supermajority of Democrats enact the wide-ranging Great Society social programs: the Social Security Amendments of 1965: Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC; Primary and Secondary Education Act; and the sweeping and very potent Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Only Nixon, it seems, understood the opportunity to make hay while the skies poured rain. These new Federal bureaucracies, programs, rules, interventions in State law and local social-racial arrangements, all with bloated budgets were fat targets for the exact policy platform that Goldwater, and now Reagan, had articulated so clearly: Americans should fear their government. This was NOT the Liberal-Moderate Republican wing's outlook. They favored Civil Rights and most New Deal social programs. Nixon saw that the weapons had already been forged, and the grassroots armies had already been raised, so his speeches throughout 1965 pandered primarily to that wing, while he maintained a public commitment to "unity" for the whole party, speaking also about moderate positions and keeping his ties intact with the Liberals and Moderates.

Nixon played this role brilliantly, and because he was the only major Republican leader not holding office, he was able to be more ideological and more strident about foreign and domestic policy than Governors Rockefeller, Romney, and Scranton. Nixon, already an elder statesman at 55, had taken firm control of the entire party. As Loftus wrote as early as 14 February 1965, Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon "has firmly grasped the leadership role which, being unofficial, can become anything he wants to make it. He intends apparently to make much of it.....Nixon has been defeated but not humiliated. He has remained regular. He has made the entire Republican party his power base."Note

As a partner in the century-old law Manhattan firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Mitchell, Nixon had as many international corporate clients as he wanted, with unlimited travel expense accounts, and all the liberty he needed to play world statesman. "He was very much a world figure," writes biographer Steven Ambrose: "a man who could fill a room to overflowing at any capital on either side of the Iron Curtain just by announcing a press conference. He carried himself as if he were leader of the opposition, and he was so treated by the press at home and abroad."Note

From Goldwater to Reagan to Watts, 1965
Nixon's dual strategy in 1965 was to weaken the Democratic party's formidable hold on Washington, and to build himself up in the eyes of the press, his own party, and the world, as the leading voice of opposition. Nixon's strategy fed on violence, domestic and foreign--which he sought to link. In the weeks following the Watts Rebellion, Nixon paused in Los Angeles long enough to make public statements before continuing on his "business trip" to  Japan, Formosa, Thailand and Australia. After calling the Watts "riot" a "turning point" for America, called for "stepped-up" bombing of North Vietnam, especially the capital of Hanoi.Note As the self-appointed avatar of his party, Nixon wanted the press to gossip as much as possible about his possible next moves, so he "did not rule out the possibility of going to Viet Nam" during his upcoming Asian tour, "and said such a stop would be decided upon in the course of his travels.”

The other game-changing event in 1965 was the rise of Ronald Reagan as the banner-bearer for the New Right. Reagan's "Speech" for Goldwater was a smash hit. Reagan had already given it many times before the recorded TV broadcast, and he would continue many times more. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak’s syndicated column, Inside Report was not mere reportage, but rather influential opinion-making punditry. When they headlined the 17 April 1965 column “Reagan Supplanting Goldwater as Conservatives' National Symbol,” they were also enacting that outcome.Note Within a week, Gladwin Hill would report for the New York Times, "Reagan Weighing a New Role In Gubernatorial Race on Coast”Note Evans and Novak took an early dislike for Nixon, however,which was mutual. (Evans ultimately made it to President Nixon's "Enemies List.")

Nixon seized upon the violence of Watts in August 1965 as evidence of the breakdown of order under Democratic rule. "Even before the riots," Bill Boyarsky wrote, "Democratic strategists expressed fear of voter rebellion in Los Angeles County's nominally Democratic white suburbs." Mayor Sam Yorty, a Nixon loyalist from 1960 through the end of his increasingly reactionary tenure in 1972, was, as Boyarsky observed, "eyeing" those suburban voters. And as Mervyn Dymally, the Trinidad-American who represented South LA pointed out, "I think Yorty has picked up strength in the [98% white San Fernando] Valley. And there are more votes in the Valley than in my area."Note

Through the tumultuous events of 1965, continued the hand-wringing observance of “extremism.” Well-meaning advocates of dialogue ironically created more platforms for the intolerant. In November of 1965 a student organization at Valley College (later renamed California State University, Northridge) sponsored a series of lectures on extremism. Their first guest was Barry Goldwater, Jr, whose political career had been launched the previous year during his father’s unsuccessful run for the presidency. Young Barry had relocated permanently to Los Angeles, promoting the wildfire of young conservatism that the 1964 campaign had inspired. “Does The Radical Right Hurt Conservatism?” the students asked. Goldwater rejected the question, probably because it seemed to impugn his own position. “Topics such as yours,” he said, “seem to say that anything that is not in some vague, undefined middle-of-the-road is extremism.” Unafraid to show his colors, he denied that the John Birch Society was extremist because it did not, he claimed, advocate violence. He drew the line at the border of the Ku Klux Klan, however.

The next speaker in the 1965 Valley College series was the suspended Los Angeles Police Department officer Michael Hannon, who had gained notoriety in August 1964 by participating in a “lie-in” to protest the meeting of the White Citizens Council at the Los Angeles Breakfast Club, 3201 Los Feliz Blvd. The action was organized by the Congress On Racial Equality (CORE).Note Responding to his assigned topic, “Does The Radical Left Hurt Liberals?” Hannon, a member of the Socialist Party, made a spirited defense of radicalism: “The radical left exists to articulate the needs and goals of the working classes, undiluted by the quest for money which the liberal needs to get elected.”Note Hannon’s public civil disobedience had earned the ire of the avowed anti-radical Chief William H. Parker, who suspended him for “conduct unbecoming an officer.”Note [9] Indeed, Chief Parker had been operating the venerable “Red Squad” of political police detectives, founded during the first Red Scare of 1919.

As public forums like these continued to debate "extremism" New Right activists were steadfastly practicing it within the Republican party, commandeering the Young Republicans by the end of 1965, convert it, as Evans and Novak observed, into a vehicle for "training conservatives for intro-party warfare."Note. The organization behind this hijack took the ominous name of The Syndicate, run by William Rusher, publisher of William F. Buckley's National Review, and Clif White, who had begun the Draft Goldwater movement as early as 1961. The New Jersey branch of the YRs, known as the Rat Finks, gained unwanted press attention in January of 1966 for anti-semitic and racist songs, and the California Young Republicans elected officers not only from the John Birch Society, but even, in the Long Beach chapter, from the American Nazi Party.Note
Burning Decks, Sinking Ships, and Heavy Bombers: Race and Reaction, 1966-67
To take control of the Republican party in 1966-7, Nixon repeated a strategy from his days in the early Eisenhower administration: letting the party's far-right wing (McCarthy at that time) run amok stirring-up fear and hatred, while seeming to rise above such extremes until that scourge had run its course, and Nixon could co-opt it into electoral strength. He rightly understood that he did not need to avow extreme positions himself to get the vote of those mobilized by them He just needed to appear open to their views and hostile to their enemies, while keeping the Midwestern and Eastern Liberals and Moderates on friendly enough terms to accept his incessant call for party unity. Now that the tide of terror had been turned in the urban rebellions and repressions; in Southern KKK killings; and in Johnson's escalating Vietnam War, Nixon drove the party forward to reap backlash votes on the campaign of "fear and reassurance," to borrow an apt term form film studies.[Note Ross] As Johnson and McNamara escalated the ground and air war in Vietnam, Nixon kept to the right, hammering a steady drumbeat for greater escalation, heavier bombing, invoking the clarity of World War II's simplicity: The Republican party "should not join the appeasement group," he declared in April of 1966. In May he called for bombing escalation against Hanoi and other targets in North Vietnam.

Nixon carried on his party-mending activities as an intrinsic part of his peripatetic speaking tours. "Nixon looks upon himself as the man with the glue who can stick his party together," wrote Arthur Edson of The Sun in March of 1966: "He’s on speaking terms with those Republicans who in 1964 were aggressively for and those who were violently against Senator Barry Goldwater."Note Throughout the key election year of 1966, Nixon, because he was not on any ballot "was able to appear all over the country, the only Republican campaigning on a national basis."Note

During the Goldwater insurgency and after Goldwater's electoral humiliation, Nixon had twice leapt onto the "Burning Deck of Republican Liberalism." He kept a steady position there, wrenching the helm from time to time toward the right, as teh party's unofficial but practically real ideological-strategic leader. He really was the only National Republican who could work comfortably with Southern racists, New Right evangelicals, and Northern liberals. While campaigning for Charles H. Percy in Illinois, Nixon picked up the "Black Capitalism" program, a Liberal Republican idea to expand government programs and expenditures, --- to promote business enterprise in African American communities. Nixon's current reputation as a "Liberal" owes directly to these chameleonic borrowings. It is also clear from his numerous policy reversals on these issues while president that he was not ideologically favoring them, but electorally. He knew that he could adopt these positions in 1966-7 if he also courted the racist and states-rights, and the New Right's anti-government crusade.

As he had campaigned for Goldwater in 1964 despite Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act, Nixon was the only national Republican with credibility in the Confederate states. In the South, Nixon "drew long applause when he said that both parties in the South should stop campaigning on racial issues." He then, however, also wrote in his nationally syndicated column, that Southern Republicans "must not climb aboard the sinking ship of racial injustice." That was for the ears of Charles Percy and the Northern Liberals. The next phrase maintains his credibility among those who were racially motivated: "Any Republican victory that would come courting racists, black or white, would be a defeat for our future in the South and our party in the nation." Nixon's sly jab: "racists, black or white," evens the score for those whites feeling very threatened in their segregated working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. As Nixon had already refused to interfere with white supremacy clauses in southern state party platforms, he also got away with his principled pronouncements against racism. Why? Because he was also for state's rights.Note

As Nixon courted the segregationists too closely, however, and Illinois Sen. Percy was unafraid to call him out on it. In a speech to the Mississippi Council on Human Relations in Jackson, Percy said he only wanted to see voters switching from Democrat to Republican in the South "not for the reasons that were there on election day 1964," referring to the racist, anti-Civil Rights vote for Goldwater in the deep south. "Dick Nixon would make his fellow Republicans feel better about his southern exposure if he talked like that, Percy added."Note.

Nixon's years in New York (not to mention the National Security Council), armed him with a Van Buren-like cleverness in maintaining party unity across regional lines. Nixon had it both ways by the end of his tour of the 11 Confederate states, culminating in Jackson, where the Mississippi State Republican party still had a plank in its platform declaring that the "segregation of the races" was "absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations.” When challenged on this by reporters during Nixon's visit to support segregationist candidates, he replied: "I will go to any state in this country to campaign for a strong two-party system, whether or not I agree with the local Republicans on every issue.” Nixon thought it "unrealistic and unwise" for his national party to require state parties to replace these planks. The reverence for party unity over principle was no more than a strategic choice by the acknowledged leader of his party. Nixon's principled pro-civil rights, federalist - state's rights agnosticism is brilliantly on display in his formulation:
“The national Republican party, he said, should state its own support for civil rights forthrightly and try to convince state parties to agree.
   ‘It cannot dictate to them,’ he insisted.”Note
The November 1966 elections resulted in just the reversal Nixon and the Republicans worked to achieve: 40 seats switched back to the Republicans for the Congress that would be seated in January 1967. Nixon seized on this result as a national mandate for his policy positions stated as those of the Republican Party during his 1965-6 Tour of Unity. For Vietnam, "The people voted against the conduct of the war," Nixon concluded: "not against our effort to stop communist aggression in south-east asia." For that, he repeated: "An overwhelming majority of the people want a stronger policy aimed at ending the war." Nixon had refined his foreign policy difference with the Democrats: the war must be prosecuted more aggressively to end it successfully. But the goal was not to end the war; it was to win it in order to stop communist aggression. Ending it was, always in his formulations, dependent upon winning it. For this Nixon "Urges LBJ" as the Chicago Tribune's article by William Kling was headlined: "Adopt War Economy."Note

The November 1966 election results completely vindicated Nixon's long, hard 1966 campaign trail. He had responded to 300 invitation to speak every week, recognized from March through November as the "GOP's Top Man," and the only Republican leader able to "bridge schisms" in the "divided GOP."Note.

From the winter of 1967, then Nixon distinguished himself as a bellicose hawk. In the Spring of 197m Nixon undertook a 34-nation speaking tour., which attracted extended media attention. In Europe he berated NATO allies for not supporting or opposing the U.S intervention in Vietnam. The race for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination had already begun, and Governor Romney, the leading Liberal Republican candidate, was then in London attempting to develop his own international credentials. In an insightful comparison by in The Guardian, Alistair Cooke observed that "Where Governor Romney is solemn, patriotic, and pedestrian, Mr. Nixon is tough, and chauvinistic, and on the warpath."Note

Nixon remained on the chauvinistic warpath while Governor Romney fell off it in his bungled attempt to develop a Republican opposition to it. Asked in August 1967 to explain how he switched from pro- to anti-war, Romney knocked himself out of the race with his infamous explanation to the press, that the Generals in Vietnam had originally "Brainwashed" him. Ironically, Nixon was the leading civilian doing the "brainwashing" of the American people,by promising that the war cold and should be ended victoriously through additional firepower.Note

Nixon's domestic policy focus on urban issues continued to emphasize violence and repression, and the military-style public actions of the Oakland, California-based Black Panthers gave Nixon the perfect evidence to develop a "warpath" for the nation's cities as well. On 2 May 1967, the Panthers mounted one of the most audacious protests in all of U.S. history. They had gained their initial notoriety by patrolling the streets of Oakland with shotguns, in a show of "defending" their neighborhoods from police violence. The open brandishing of shotguns was only possible because of a loophole in the California gun law, that prohibited carrying concealed weapons without a license, but failed to state that unconcealed weapons also required a license. To close this loophole the California legislature was set to take up a bill when on that day, the Panthers occupied the State Capitol building carrying their shotguns. Hoover's FBI was already planning to take this groug down, and within months all of its leaders were either killed, as in the case of Fred Hampton in Chicago; behind bars, os with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton; or in exile, as with Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' Minister of Information, who took up residence in Algiers.

By October of 1967 Nixon had developed his central policy slogan for the 1968 campaign: "Law and Order," citing decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America.” But as Tom Wicker, writing in the New York Times, asked, "Whch Law and Whose Order?"Note

Nixon had an answer when he announced an urban warfare strategy on 15 December of 1967, speaking to the National Association of Manufacturers--one of the most fiercely free-enterprise and anti-labor organizations in the United States since the late 19th century. Nixon's principal topic was the "war in our cities." He chose his words carefully and even defined them: "A riot is a spontaneous outburst. A war is subject to advance planning. Behind this "war" were "guerrillas": "Year by year, the violence in our cities takes on more of the aspects of guerrilla war – and the rhetoric of its prophets escalates accordingly." Nixon revealed his intelligence, just as he had in 1948 against Alger Hiss, against the Rosenbergs in 1953, against Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and against he Viet Cong in his current attacks:

"Now the revolutionaries are boasting that their war plans for next summer’s riots include strikes at public utilities, at urban expressways, and at other nerve centers … these men, educated and articulate, are guerrilla leaders in the classic pattern." Nixon knew how to sew up a knot. This revolutionary activity, of course, was encouraged by the Democrats' Great Society welfare and rights legislation: what he called "extravagant promises": "Much of the bitterness of the slum dweller is the result of these false promises," profiting from the failure of those promises to date.Note

By the end of 1967, Nixon had positioned himself as the most strident voice on the Right who had a chance to win a national election. But Wallace's strong appeal in Southern California in December was an outstanding indicator of the reactionary mood that Nixon sought to channel into his own presidential bid.

“If we could let the police run this country for two years, the streets would be safe.”
  --George Wallace, Orange County Fairgrounds, December 1967.

The radical right was no mere bogey-man inflated by Centrist accusers in the “extremism” discourse. This would become abundantly clear in December 1967, when George Wallace mounted his white supremacist campaign for president on the American Independent Party label. At a large gathering of Wallace supporters, held at the Products Pavilion of the Orange County Fairgrounds, he welcomed the very zealots that Senator Kuchel had tried to nullify in his 1963 speech. “We believe in the separation of the races for Christian reasons,” one attendee explained to a reporter. Another praised Orange County because “The atmosphere is very discouraging to Negroes.” Then Wallace, surrounded by sixteen Alabama State Troopers, mounted the bulletproof podium and electrified the crowd with authoritarian visions: “If we could let the police run this country for two years,” Wallace boomed, “the streets would be safe.” Later, in the relaxed atmosphere aboard his DC-6, Wallace told disparaging stories about protesting “niggers,” prompting an aid to shake his head. As reporter Mary Reinholz recounted Wallace's next phrase: “’Ah don’ know,’ he said half-seriously, ‘This country needs a dictatorship, ah hope we can be it.”Note
Wallace didn't get his chance. He was no match for Nixon.  Nixon knew all about dictatorships: it was his foreign policy achievement as Vice President to help set up dictatorships in Latin America, Iran, and the Philippines. When he assumed the presidency in 1969, he and Kissinger installed more dictators by fomenting coups against democratic governments, and heavily supported ones that had been installed by the Eisenhower administration, especially The Shah of Iran and President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Nixon himself would establish a gang-connected underground political police operation. He did not have the kinds of powers that Wallace probably dreamed of in that moment in Orange County, but the Nixon administration did massively support the militarization of urban police departments, so in effect he did magnify the "police state" environment that came to characterize nearly all major US cities by the 1980s and 1990s.
Recovered Act II People react to fear, not love.
They don’t teach that in Sunday School,
but it’s true.
--Richard M. Nixon *

During Act I of Richard 37th, Richard M. Nixon transcended his Southern California regional base and became a national and international leader. but ultimately, in 1960, failed in his competition for the White House with his arch-rival, John F. Kennedy. Tracking Nixon is also tracking the arrival of Southern California's political culture at the U.S.-national and global scales.
The story told in this act of the Nixon tragicomic melodrama is that of Nixon's rise from the tomb of his own defeat to become the self-appointed Republican party unifier.[Note]

Mapping Nixon's leading role in post-WWII American political life is to make visible the concrete pathways through which Los Angeles regional political culture grew to define the national political culture as a whole. Nixon did fumble his leadership of the New Right when he lost the presidency in 1960 and then the California governorship in 1962, but once he learned how to lead from the front, he led the New Right to victory as the hegemonic ruling-regime ideology of the United States, which has lasted into the 21st century. For one man--a homely, ill-tempered Angeleno--this was a colossal feat of political leadership and electoral realignment.

This great-leader story bore the greatest consequences: 1) For the masses of angry white American suburbanites and Sun-belters that he led; and 2) for everyone else in the polyglot world of racial diversity, exploited peoples, and cities occupied by militarized police departments.

Richard Nixon dragged America to a very dark place: one that embraced Southern California's homegrown Pulp Fascism.

Act II of Richard 37th tells a story of resurrection, in which Nixon leveraged racial fear and and the fear of mass violence to forge the most reactionary administration since Andrew Johnson. In 1960 and 1962, Nixon had underestimated the volcano of populist, resentful, Christian evangelical, media-savvy and above all uncompromising right wing Republicanism. Our story begins in the fateful year of 1963, in which Nixon emerged from his political tomb, fighting furiously to master the scrambled politics of the Republican party, and of the United States.

The story in this essay begins with deepest irony, because the populist wildfire that burned Nixon's backside was blowback from his earlier work as anti-communist scare-monger. While serving his 1950s tutelage under Eisenhower's august brow, Nixon had played the Sorcerers Apprentice, conjuring an army of suburban broomsticks to keep the nation free of Communists and New Dealers, courting all the while the Liberal-Moderate Eastern wing of the Republican party. This plain-folk broomstick army had seemed easy enough to mobilize, as Act I of Richard 37th recounts. But the broomstick army was programmed single-mindedly, to destroy anything but the small-government world of Calvin Coolidge.

While Nixon's back was turned, facing eastward toward New York, the nascent New Right blindly attacked him precisely because he had made peace with Republican leaders who had made peace with the newly expanded New Deal welfare and regulatory state.  Eisenhower and the big-city moderates like Thomas Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge and Nelson Rockefeller were the moderates fated to extinction, but Nixon did not yet know that while running for president in 1960 and California governor in 1962. As Southern California's extremist mobilization swept from the Southwest through the South under Barry Goldwater's insurgency of 1963-4, Nixon learned to lead from the Right once again, while keeping the rest of the Republican party in line. If the Fifties can be characterized as Nixon learning to dance to a national tune, the 1960s can be characterized as Nixon teaching the United States to march to Southern California's tune. By 1965-6 he was the Republican party's sole unifier, and by 1967-68 had re-made the party in his own image. That image increasingly bore the ugly stamp of repressive reaction and the rise of a tyranny. Nixon achieved his realignment by manipulating fear to mobilize the white middle-class voting masses to back his drive for a more aggressive war in Vietnam, a more aggressive Cold War throughout the world, and his drive to militarily suppress the urban and campus uprisings at home.
Prologue: Nixon's Caribbean Crossroads, November 1962
"Plots I have laid, inductions dangerous..." --Shakespeare, Richard III Act 1. Sc. 1

Metaphorically, following Orpheus, Nixon emerged from political Hades in 1963. Quite literally, he also emerged from the Underworld of the Cuban-Italian-Jewish mafia. Nixon's gangland plunge took place at the precise juncture when his political capital was at its lowest. We can only assume that this walk over to the dark side resulted from his twin defeat in some way. Perhaps, more specifically, it was motivated by his experiences in those years. Nixon himself left plenty of clues, in his bitterness about the Kennedys deployment of the Federal espionage apparatus to spy on him. Nixon's turn to the Lansky-Luciano "Syndicate," also illustrates the character of the man at this crucial juncture of his very ambitious life.

Nixon was at the proverbial Crossroads, where the Devil appears, to offer a prize, for a price. He had been a heartbeat away from the Presidency for eight years, had his White House victory stolen from him in 1960, and was humiliated in the 1962 California Governor election. When the going got tough, Nixon took his soul to the Crossroads. Before the end of November, Nixon's best friend, Cuban-American Bebe Rebozo, escorted him to the Meyer Lansky - Lucky Luciano operation on "Paradise Island," a hotel-casino-resort on small island in the Bahamas. Like angry hornets knocked loose from their hive, many mobsters wanted to recover, or at least replace the Havana casinos lost in the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Nixon most likely had sufficient knowledge of the Cuban mobsters because of his participation in NSC-CIA planning to assassinate Castro, through the end of the Eisenhower administration in January of 1961. Kennedy's Bay of Pigs and Castro-assassination plans had all been drawn up and in process when Kennedy took his Oath of Office.

The covert nature of this excursion is indicated by the participation of phone company executive John Davies, who had uncovered Robert Kennedy's wiretapping of Nixon during the 1962 campaign. Thanks to the investigative journalism of Anthony Summers, it seems clear that Nixon's purpose on this visit was to invest wisely with an organization that could a) guarantee very large returns on an invisible source of political funding; and b) give Nixon a steady set of partners for committing illegal activity including burglary, wiretapping, money laundering, intimidation and murder (Summers, 239-245). This visit also began Nixon's long and close association with Lansky's casino manager at Paradise Island, Sy Alter. Alter used Rebozo's Key Biscayne bank for numerous transactions and tapped mobsters for Nixon's 1968 campaign fund. As Summers reports: "Alter's relationship with Rebozo became so close that Alter would be admitted to the Florida White House--the Nixon-Rebozo Compound--at the height of Watergate." (243).
Revolt of the Generals? (Rumors of a Presidential Coup d'Etat), 1963
Two major motion pictures in production during 1963 explored the possibility of a military coup d'etat, each led by an extreme anti-Communist general who thinks the President cannot be trusted to save the nation from the Soviets. On a planet studded by military dictators who seized power in the service of America's Cold War, the production of a major Hollywood production making plausible such an outcome in the United States was portentous.

In Seven Days in May, Kennedy confidant John Frankenheimer directed an adaptation of the 1962 novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, portraying a coup led by a fictional Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster). Knebel and Bailey based their mutinous general on the all-too-real model of Major General Edwin Anderson Walker, who was forced to resign by the Joint Chiefs and President Kennedy in 1961 for his excessive political activity (calling Eleanor Roosevelt and President Truman "Pink," coercing the votes of his troops, etc). Jack Kennedy liked the novel Seven Days in May and and supported Frankenheimer, giving him White House access after the Pentagon refused to participate in the film. Seven Days was produced by Kirk Douglas, who took the role of the patriotic Colonel Jiggs Casey, who foils the plot by Joint Chiefs Chairman Scott (Lancaster), by informing the President (Fredric March). The screenplay, written by Rod Serling, then in his third season of Twilight Zone (1959-1964), uses nothing more than precedent and existing realities to explore a plausible alternative future, much as he did in his dead-pan television scripts.

A military coup led by a rabid anti-Communist general seemed inevitably to promise a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, and the public discussion of nuclear warfare reached a terrifying climax in October 1of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many began to make plans for a possibly real Apocalypse (how else to threaten Mutually Assured Destruction than to make real threats?) In this atmostphere, Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick studied the appalling planning for nuclear war then promoted by respectable U.S authorities, such as Professor Henry Kissinger, whose 1957 Nuclear Strategy coldly plans for future nuclear wars. In Kubrick's great masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (released by Columbia Pictures at the end of January 1964), the obsessively anti-Communist Air Force General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), commander of a nuclear-armed B-52 wing of the Strategic Air Command, invokes a poorly-known provision of the nuclear attack protocol to initiate, on his own discretion, a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The obvious model for Ripper was Curtis LeMay, the outspokenly ferocious advocate of first-strike nuclear war, who had assumed command of the .... LeMay, who commanded the mega-death slaughter of 700,000 to 1.2 million Japanese civilians in the incendiary and nuclear attacks of March-August 1945, would become George Wallace's running mate on the segregationist American Independent party ticket in 1968. A mild-mannered, president, feminized by Kubrick's satiric script with the name Merkin Muffley, is no match for the determined General Jack D. [The] Ripper, nor for the "Doomsday Machine," an automatic trigger for all-out nuclear exchange recently installed as a (unsuccessful) "deterrent" by the Soviets.
The Hinge of Fate, 1963-4
Globally, 1963 was a convulsive year, led by two major animosities: Cold War military imperialism in Vietnam, and race convulsion in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. On 2 January in the Battle of Ap Bac, National Liberation Front (NLF) Communist guerrillas scored a major military victory against the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) backed by U.S. forces. With only 350 NLF guerrillas against a US-backed mechanized force of 1,500, covered by helicopter gunships, the NLF lost only 18 soldiers. They killed, by contrast, 83 ARVN plus 3 US soldiers and shot down 5 U.S. helicopters.

Days later, in Montgomery on 14 January, George Wallace took the oath of office as Governor of Alabama, standing on the same spot where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as President of the Confederacy. Facing the same steps a half-block away, stands Reverend King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, from which he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott seven years earlier. Wallace's speech achieved a new militancy that would join with Goldwater's movement by 1964: "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever"

By April, Martin Luther King, Jr, Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Bevel launched the Birmingham Campaign, the spectacle of Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor's brutality in the violent repression of nonviolent protesters that shocked the conscience of the white American majority. Back in South Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam entered the "Buddhist Crisis," a period of repressive violence by the intolerant and corrupt leadership of Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother, the Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục. After banning the Buddhist flag, Diệm's troops shot and killed 9 unarmed protesters.

"Extremism" became an increasingly potent banner in the mass mobilization of discontent that surged to the right every year from 1962 to 1968, in Nixon's long-march campaign of fear. The first step for Nixon was to pull away from a strong Civil Rights stance while running for president in 1960, suddenly labeling a legislative approach "extreme." The next step in his construction of the term "extremism," was his break with the John Birch Society beginning during his failed campaign for governor against Pat Brown in 1962. The John Birch Society, had been growing impressively in membership since its founding in 1958 by Robert Welch, Fred Koch, and other business leaders who, despite the decline of McCarthyism, still feared that Communists had infiltrated all levesl of American government. In an open letter to the group published on 16 March 1962, Nixon tellingly embraces and defends "extremism" in American political discourse, but defines his rejection of the Birch society as based on two faults with the organization: 1) It is run dictatorially by Robert Welch, who prohibited dissent with then the Society; and 2) Welsh had denounced both President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles as Communists. "In his book, 'The Politicians,' Welch describes General Eisenhower as 'a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,' and says, 'There is only one word to describe his purposes and actions. That word is treason." Nixon rejected the Birchers while retaining ownership of "Extremism." Nixon then slammed Attorney General Robert Kennedy for ignoring the need to root out and suppress Communists. Nixon's illusionary denunciation of the John Birchers concludes with an invitation for all Birchers to follow Nixon instead of Welsh: "It is not enough to tell people that they should get out of the John Birch Society. What they need is a positive alternative. It is the responsibility of political leaders of both parties to provide this alternative."Note

This was a brilliant move, to reject and to retain the far right at the same time, but Governor Brown, then fighting to stay in office, called Nixon on the sleight of hand, charging him with "aping the John Birch tactics he pretends to disavow by moving closer to the extreme right even as he tries to portray himself as a moderate."Note

Nixon's advocacy of extremism left him a wide path through American norms for future polarization: "It is not extremism per se of either the right or left which presents a problem in our society today....Every American is entitled to have 'extreme' feelings about his country, his political beliefs and the world-wide threat of communism." Nixon's statement hardly even rejects the Birch society as a legitimate force. He places it within the bounds of democratic discourse: "Our two-party system is broad enough to encompass the whole range of extreme ideas from those sponsored by members of the John Birch Society on the right to those of the Americans for Democratic Action on the left."Note

The term burst into more widespread use in the convulsive year of 1963. What has emerged anew in American political discourse in 1963 is the self-consciousness of "Extremism" as a political position. Of course it is not in itself a political position, but if on the right it would be fascism and if on the left it would be communism. We see its users strenuously trying to refine and control its meaning. Wallace's "segregation forever" speech in January 1963 set one standard: the capacity to be uncompromising, to hold onto principles knowing that one's cause or party may face inevitable defeat in the short term. The term also seemed to indicate recourse to violence. The assassinations of Diem and then Kennedy in November 1963 proved the existence of extreme, undemocratic paths of action. At that very moment, two motion pictures were nearing release that imagined military coups d'etat.

On 21 April 1963, the first day of Spring, Richard Nixon delivered a dense but artfully written speech on U.S. foreign policy to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. This venue, which Nixon chose carefully, was essentially pouring a message into the central arteries of the nation's public sphere. Newspapers were "prestige media" in the 1960s, with the major network "news hour" shows hosted by Walter Cronkite (CBS) and others following close behind. Because the TV networks took most of their stories directly from the print press, it is safe to say that the nation's newspaper editors held the most influential positions in the United States's structure of its political public sphere.

Just a few months from his humiliation in California, Nixon created venues for himself and claimed leadership of the Republican party-out-of-power. Not holding office was ideal for this role. Had he been elected Governor of California, he would necessarily represent the State of California every time he spoke He would also have been accountable for his policy positions as an officeholder. But Nixon could propose or advocate anything, unlike his two primary targets, President Kennedy and President Johnson. And he did, as a consistent war hawk in foreign policy, and a newly skeptical of Civil Rights legislation.

Nixon's speech was a militarist diatribe, with a strong focus on Cuba, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April of 1961, and the Missile Crisis less than six months earlier, in October of 1962. "The United States cannot tolerate the continued existence of a Soviet military and subversive base 90 miles from our shore," and ridiculed each of Kennedy's actions regarding Cuba: "In Cuba we have goofed an invasion, paid tribute to Castro for the prisoners, then given the Soviet squatters' rights in our backyard." Note

Ironic in rhetorical construction, Nixon's speech is bold and provocative. He ridicules Kennedy for feint-hearted, indecisive failed invasion of Cuba and a indecisive nuclear strategy, essentially capitulating to the Soviet Union. After the speech Nixon engaged in a Q & A. The first question was already nearly inevitable, and would remain so until 1967, when it was no loner a question: "Do you envision yourself as a candidate for any future political office, and I will assume that you think that the Kennedy Administration can be beaten next year?"Note

In a highly-publicized “conference on Extremism” held 28 April--just one week after Nixon's foreign policy speech--at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel (where Robert F Kennedy would be assassinated in 1968).Note Titled “Enemies of Democracy—Labor in the Forefront of the Fight for Freedom,” the conference was organized by the AFL-CIO’s Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which had been purged of its left wing in 1949.Note Headliners included Governor Pat Brown and the anti-Communist leader himself, AFL-CIO President George Meany. The bulk of the speakers were regional peacemakers such as the Reverend John H. Burt, president of the Southern California Council of Churches and a leading activist in the Human Relations movement. In short, the conference was attempting to re-enforce the anti-communist Liberal Center. While speakers criticized both Communists and the “ultra-right,” the emphasis was first on the “Intruders on the Left,” to use the title of an AFL-CIO pamphlet.Note

Just one week later, on 2 May 1963, California's Senator Thomas Kuchel delivered “the most sweeping attack ever heard on the Senate floor against America’s right wing," Senator Thomas Kuchel was among the last warriors of the party of the Lincoln-Roosevelt League.   For a full hour, California’s Thomas Kuchel, the assistant Senate Republican leader, savaged and ridiculed the claims to patriotism by the vocal John Birch Society and other groups. Colorado’s Gordon Allott praised Kuchel’s courage. “These extreme right wingers…have been more damaging to the morale of the United States than anything else,” Allott chimed along. Kuchel detailed that he received an average of 6,000 letters a month from California constituents who had fallen “hysterically and emotionally, without reservations, for the unadulterated venom spewed by out-and-out crackpots.” One crackpot that he named specifically was former San Gabriel Valley Congressman John H. Rousselot, now the western state’s director of the John Birch society, the leading “fright peddler.” Rousselot responded immediately, repeating his claim that “Red Chinese troops are known to be in Mexico,” and reasserting the demand to expel the United Nations from U.S. soil.Note

Kuchel's breed of Progressive Republican was dying. He was the brave representative of the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, the Progressive insurgents who seized control of the California Republican party in 1909-1912 and re-wrote the California Constitution, arming the state with its plebiscitary direct-democracy measures of initiative, referendum, and recall. Governor and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was the greatest of them all. In their embrace of the New Deal and strong Civil Rights leadership, they were indistinguishable from the Liberal-Progressive Democrats, led by Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, who defeated Nixon in 1962.

The 11th of June 1963 could be said to climax the force and violence used by repressive regimes against peaceful protesters: a Buddhist uprising in Vietnam and nonviolent Christian Civil Rights uprising in the former Confederate states. On that day in Saigon, the monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death to protest the anti-Buddhist actions of the Ngô Đình Diệm. On the same day in Alabama,  Governor George Wallace staged one of the most dramatic State v. Federal confrontations since the Civil War. For defying a Federal court order to allow the registration of Vivian Malone and James Hood at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, President Kennedy "federalized" the Alabama National Guard, turned it on the Governor, under the command of General Henry Vance Graham. Wallace was there to score propaganda sensation.

Later this same evening of 11 June, President Kennedy made a hastily-scheduled nationally televised address, in which he also proposed the strongest Civil Rights law proposed since Reconstruction in the 1860s. It was, ironically, primarily the work of the Republican party, originally drafted by Progressive and Liberal Republicans who had wished to see the party of Lincoln take the lead in desegregation and equal rights. In answer to the Kennedy Administration, White Citizens Councilman Byron De La Beckwith, ambushed the decorated U.S. Army veteran of the Battle of Normandy, Medgar Evers, leader of the Mississippi NAACP, killing him with a hunting rifle on the steps of his home in Jackson Mississippi. He was only 24 years old, with a young wife and child just inside the doorstep on which he collapsed.

After the climactic 28 August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, things got very extreme indeed: teh KKK terrorist bombing of the Sixteenth Ave Baptist Church, the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm in a coup d'etat by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. On November 15–20, George Wallace announced his intention to oppose President Kennedy in the 1964 Democratic Primaries. Something was afoot in Dallas, it seems. Nixon also flew in, accompanied by Joan Crawford, both of them members of the Board of Director of Peps, reputedly for a Board meeting. On the 21st, Nixon ridiculed Kennedy for needing a bulletproof bubble on his vehicle. It is through that Kennedy may have ordered the top down on the 22nd in response to this taunt. Of course the third to arrive within just three short days was U.S. President John F. Kennedy , where he met his fate at  Dealy Plaza in Dallas on 22 November. Nixon flew out of Dallas the afternoon of the assassination, then lied to the press about being there on 22nd, saying he had flown out on the 21st.
Springtime for Nixon and Reagan, 1964
President Johnson's major achievement in the Winter of 1963-4 was to leverage Jack Kennedy's assassination to push through "the god-damned..." Civil Rights bill, the CRA of 1964. It sailed through the House (290–130) on 10 February 1964, but the surprise spoiler in this heroic story was Senator Barry Goldwater's very public opposition to the act, voting against it in the Senate on 19 June, just weeks after sewing-up the delegate count in the 2 June California Primary. The Civil Rights Act did not become law until 2 July, after the House voted on a Senate amendment and President Johnson signed it into law. So the furore over Goldwater's opposition typified the debates among the stunned Republican leadership going into the 13-16 July Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

The earthquake that up-ended the Republican party in the 1964 election cycle was the successful grass-roots capture of the part apparatus by the "Draft Goldwater" movement that had been in place since 1961. "In a manner reminiscent of Communist tactics in the labor unions in the 1930s," wrote Robert J. Donavan, Washington Bureau Chief for LA Times, "they infiltrated Republican organizations and won control by out-fighting and out-lasting their opponents."Note Thanks to years of groundwork, Southern California led a simultaneous launch of the New Right Republican Party, the "Extremists." The crucial engine of this movement was was Darren Dochuk calls "Goldwater's Evangelical Front" in Southern California.Note

Nixon feigned grace and made it clear from the outset that he would not pursue the nomination, unless he were drafted to break a deadlock. In other words, he had the audacity to keep his hat firmly in the ring. Then he waited, and took part steadily in the wider debates, but did not take sides until Goldwater, his seeming ally, gained momentum. This threatened Nixon's home ground. Having stood by Goldwater in California during the Primary, Nixon suddenly leapt onto "the burning deck of Republican liberalism" to endorse George Romney, less than a week after Goldwater's stunning upset. Now Nixon, improbably, leaped to the liberal side of the Party, to join their attack, a totally disingenuous, cynical move. He declared it a "tragedy" if Goldwater's views (little different than his own) "were not repudiated by the Republican platform and the nominee himself." Goldwater was correctly indignant and bemused: "I guess he doesn't know my views very well...I got most of them from him."Note Throughout the chaotic primary season that culminated in the the 2 June California Goldwater victory, "Nixon was the most helpful," Robert Donovan of the LA Time wryly observed: "He tried to help everyone lose."Note

Despite this initial stab-in-the-back, Nixon kept enough distance from the fray until the final moment of Goldwater's upset nomination, and then stepped onto the stage in just the right light. He wrangled for himself the role of the speaker who introduced Goldwater for his Nomination Acceptance Speech. Nixon's speech would precede the nominee's and serve as a tantamount official statement of the Republican Party. It was an extraordinary comeback from his deep hole of just the previous year. In it, further, Nixon appealed to "Unity." Goldwater's acceptance speech then endorsed "extremism," in a shocking statement that led to angry disavowals from the Liberal republican candidates. "Extremism in the cause of Liberty is no vice; moderation in the cause of justice is no virtue." It would be hard to exaggerate the shock waves Goldwater made with this declaration.Note

Too late now to "Stop Goldwater," the Liberals and Progressives tried instead to control the national Party platform. Goldwater's arch-rivals Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney carried Senator Kuchel's torch to back a failed "anti-extremism" plank. The defeat of that plank made Rockefeller, Romney, Scranton, and Lodge all the more bitter when Goldwater in his acceptance speech, uttered the most provocative words of the 1964 election cycle: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is not a vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue." Nixon saw all this coming, and had engineered for himself the role of introducing Goldwater as the party's nominee. His own speech was a call for unity, so he had it both ways: friendly to the "extreme" right-wing candidate, but calling, not for extremism, but for ecumenical party loyalty. Even after Goldwater's peace-shattering bombshell, Nixon stood tall with Ike and Goldwater himself, calling for party unity.

Rockefeller, after years of being outmaneuvered by Nixon and now Goldwater, was utterly furious. He not only refused the extended hand of unity, but "ripped" Goldwater with a stern denunciation: "to extol extremism -- whether in defense of liberty or in pursuit of justice -- is dangerous, irresponsible, and frightening. Any sanction of lawlessness, of the vigilantes and of the unruly mob can only be deplored. The extremism of the Communists, of the Ku Klux Klan and of the John Birch Society -- like that of most terrorists -- always has been claimed by such groups to be in defense of liberty."Note

Confusion reigned about the meaning of Goldwater's statement, but everyone agreed that the party was splitting apart very seriously, calling to mind the Whig party's collapse of the 1850s.Note Goldwater's initial embellishments were not reassuring. In response to Rockefeller, at a news conference at the SF airport, Goldwater reportedly said "Extremism in politics is either fascism on one side or communism on the other." Was Goldwater's right-wing extremism fascism then? Illinois moderate Republican Charles H. Percy joined a chorus when he demanded that Goldwater issue a clarification. Again, Nixon captured this fractious moment. Rather than standing on the side, he managed to control its outcome. Most probably following a prior arrangement and negotiation with Goldwater, Nixon issued on 10 August an open letter asking for clarification. In it, Nixon offered Goldwater terms of acceptable and unacceptable "extremism": "The charge has been made that in using these phrases you were, in effect, approving political recklessness and unlawful activity in achieving the goals of freedom and justice." Remember, Nixon had already advocated extremism within the political process. The "unlawful" boundary was not very hard for Goldwater to accept. "I have assured," Nixon leadingly wrote, "all of those who have raised this question with me that you would be the firs to reject the use of any illegal or improper methods to achieve the great goals of liberty and justice we all seek." This particular statement bears a chilling irony, considering Nixon's alliance with the Lansky-Luciano mafia and his extensive use of illegal methods during his own presidency. Goldwater's reply shifted attention to the passion with which one pursues liberty within peaceful democratic procedures. After a long-winded apologetic elaboration blaming the "misunderstanding" on "context,", he concludes "If I were to paraphrase the two sentences in question in the context in which I uttered them I would do it by saying that wholehearted devotion to liberty is unassailable and that halfhearted devotion to justice is indefensible."Note

Goldwater had now advanced an unremarkable platitude, but the impact of his statement reverberated throughout the 1964 electoral cycle. And his faction had dominated the Platform Committee, so it practically disavows Civil Rights, except to say that the Civil Rights laws ought to be enforced. more forcefully, it condemned "inverse discrimination" in schools and jobs, meaning a loss of places in schools "and by job pro-ration." The platform makes clear," judged Joseph Alsop of the Boston Globe "...the real guts of the campaign, however, will be an appeal to the so-called white backlash."Note

Nixon, having supported, then opposed, then returned to support Goldwater again, declared at a press conference on the day of his "Unity" Nomination Speech, that "I will do everything I can all over this country to support and elect the Republican ticket form top to bottom just as Barry Goldwater worked for our ticket in 1960."Note Even after Goldwater's Extremism declaration, Nixon's role was to champion Goldwater's (temporary) standard-bearing role, helping him out of that tight spot, in fact. It would be hard to exaggerate the depth of the divisions now in the Republican party. Goldwater had demanded what Walter Lippmann called "unconditional surrender" at the Convention of the Liberal wing. The alacrity with which Nixon flew to Goldwater in this departure from the Party of Lincoln, is seen most clearly in his abandonment of Civil Rights. Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act, in the Freedom Summer of 1964, was tantamount to endorsing the Massive Resistance of George Wallace, the white Citizens Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan. Senator Kuchel broke with Senator Knowland because he refused to endorse or support Goldwater, the party's own nominee. Nixon's support for Goldwater at this juncture reinforced the false impression that the Republican Party was opposed to Civil rights. As Geoffrey Kabaservice laments, the Republicans had actually drafted the triumphant Civil Rights law of 1964. The "rule and ruin" strategy of Goldwater--with Nixon stabbing his moderate colleagues in the back--for those who wish to think of Nixon as a Moderate--had a most devastating effect on the lost liberalism and moderation of the Republican party, well into the 21st century.Note Nixon's loyalty to Goldwater only last as long as it served him, however. After the catastrophic losses in November 1964, Nixon consoled losing Congressional candidates by blaming "the drag at the top of the ticket."Note

African-American Republican, James L. Flournoy, then serving in the California Assembly, publicly withdrew his support for Goldwater after the Convention, saying "I can't support Sen. Goldwater because I don't know what his position on civil rights is. Nowhere in his acceptance speech did he mention civil rights." Sadly, Flournoy belonged to the super-majority of the Republican Party's officeholders who supported the Civil Rights Act: "I can't forget that 82% of the Republicans in the Senate and 80% in the House voted for the civil rights bill."Note

As if there weren't enough "extreme" voices, Phyllis Schlafly published a paranoid tract in April of 1964, for the primary season, titled A Choice Not an Echo. In it, she claimed that America was controlled by an international cabal of investment bankers who she called "the king makers." The Kings they made were their puppets at the head of the Republican Party's liberal-moderate wing; Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, Nelson Rockefeller, even Robert S. McNamara. "Consciously or not," Geoffrey Kabaservice writes, "Schlafly evoked a centuries-long tradition of rage against treasonous elites in secret control of the world..." Not surprisingly, the John Birch society's autocratic leader, Robert Welch proudly claimed Schlafly "one of our most loyal members."Note

In Ronald Reagan's landmark performance, the movie actor-cum-political activist wrote and delivered a pro-Goldwater speech, pre-recorded for television before an audience on 27 October titled "A Time For Choosing." Known since then mainly as "The Speech" quickly attained legendary status in a pantheon alongside William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold or Abe Lincoln's House Divided.

In it, Reagan drew on his own positive portrayal of the same anti-New Deal conservatism that Goldwater espoused, but unlike Goldwater's "extreme" rhetoric, Reagan's was appealing and reasonable. Two much-quoted lines stand out as central messages, really cornerstones of the Reagan Revolution that would ultimately take place in the 1980s. The first is that the U.S. Government is deserving of the same fear and contempt that the British Crown was held during the Revolution. This is a direct repudiation of the New Deal and Great Society liberalism, even Republican Liberalism: the US Government is our government and gets big only to help Americans, as a positive force. The Goldwater movement completely rejected this premise, and under Reagan successfully expanded a political culture in which the Government is always doubted and often feared as destructive to American lives.
"The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing."

The second move, departing entirely from the "extremism" framework with an approach wholly different than Nixon's, was to reject the whole "left" and "right" axis of polarity altogether in favor of a bad-vs-good axis. In this, all "totalitarian" politics are "down" in the "swamp" of evolution, and all "free individual" politics are "up" in the evolutionary heavens.
"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream – the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order – or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."

The Speech drew the attention of Goldwater's highly-mobilized but also dismayed backers, who knew that the 1964 campaign was doomed with the wrong spokesman. party chieftains, especially those who backed Goldwater--to Reagan himself as a potential presidential candidate. The idea was a brilliant one: put a reasonable-sounding actor in the role of articulating the insurgent vision of the "extremists." But Reagan had never held political office, so the first task was to get him elected to the Governorship of California. The Speech set those plans in motion, with Southern California businessmen Henry Salvatori and Caspar Weinberger stepping up to led the effort. It also gave careerist Republicans like Weinberger a vehicle to stay in the ring, his ankles already bleeding from the attacks on him as old guard by the insurgents.Note
Shakespearean Nixon and Cervantean Reagan
Reagan's sudden emergence as a major figure in 1964-66 cannot be considered separately from the rise of Nixon recounted here. The two represented rivals and also allies, both drawing from the same Southern California "base" of institutions, organization, demography, and ideology. Yet their core way of being as politicians was dramatically dissimilar. Nixon was a true-grit self-made political leader. The soil of his growth was that of the "plain folk" of suburban Southern California, which meant also the "grower-exurban" interface. Rural California was the most reactionary territory in the West, where anti-union and anti-government discourse was common. His leadership was the result of his own daily labors on the phone and in airplanes,tirelessly building the Republican party with his own hands.

Nixon entered politics, as Act I shows, through the front door of the Los Angeles Times: Regular Republican party chieftains approved of him and let him run for U.S. Congress. Reagan entered politics from Hollywood, which was always already political, having re-shaped the American political public sphere since the 19teens. As historian Steve Ross shows, Reagan, when he shifted from the pro-FDR studio of Warner Brothers to the Republican network headed by Louis B. Mayer at M-G-M, followed a well-established beachhead of the republican Party in right-wing Hollywood. Reagan's political potential was boosted enormously by his mentor's triumph in the Senate Race of 1964 over liberal Kennedy insider Pierre Salinger.

The difference between the two world-historic figures that emerged from Southern California can be summarized as a contrast between a homely political nerd who made himself indispensable and autonomous as a political leader through hard work of fact-gathering and policy positions selected according to electoral political strategies, and a handsome veteran actor who sincerely believed in the newly clear ideological vision of the National Review, who reached the people first through movie and television screens before he spoke to live audiences as a politician. His candidacy was managed and produced by a corporate-style committee using Reagan as a pitch-man who could be relied on not to screw up. Nixon was nobody's production and had to rely on himself at every step. As Skowronek writes, Nixon's "preemptive" politics resulted in a sudden political crash--he tried too radically to re-organize and disrupt the stable political equilibrium. Reagan, who was essentially drafted to be the standard-bearer of an already-rolling movement, and whose profession it was to enact ideals, successfully presided over a genuine American political re-alignment.

In the shortest of political shorthand, Nixon was Shakespearian and Reagan was Cervantean.
California's Reversal of Civil Rights: The Referendum Repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Law in 1964
After Goldwater advocated using nuclear weapons and Johnson expertly campaigned on the Kennedy-Johnson achievements, LBJ enjoyed one of the biggest landslides in all of American history. Johnson's vote frequently ran above 75% throughout counties in Northern California, but his lead was just over 60% in Los Angeles County, and Goldwater's only urban California wins were Orange and San Diego Counties. Californians' also put Republican George Murphy into the US Senate and rejected Pierre Salinger, closely identified with the Kennedy clan. Most ominously, Californians simultaneously handed Johnson a landslide and repealed the state's newly-enacted Rumford Fair Housing Law, in the landslide success of Proposition 14.Note

Heat Map: Proposition 14, The Plebiscitary Repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Law Nov 1964. Compare with Racial Majorities, 1960 and 1970.

Slightly ahead of the national drive for Civil Rights laws, the California legislature in 1963 enacted the Rumford Act, named for one of the leading African American Assembly members, W. Byron Rumford (D- Berkeley). The Rumford Act “declared racial discrimination in housing to be against public policy and forbade owners of residential property including more than four units, or owners of any publicly assisted residential property, to engage in racial discrimination in its rental or sale.” Such a law ran counter to decades of real estate practices and the common sense of White property owners, who had been led to believe that the racial integration of neighborhoods guaranteed an immediate drop in property values. The California Real Estate Association, which in the 1930s had helped the Roosevelt Administration construct the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation’s “security maps” that redlined racially-mixed neighborhoods, led the attack on the Rumford law. Denouncing the new policy as “forced housing,” opponents raised the necessary signatures for a referendum repeal of the law. The measure passed overwhelmingly in November of 1964, most tellingly in the same year the U.S. Congress passed its sweeping Civil Rights law. The disrespect of this remarkable, electoral repeal of a Civil Rights law was both indicative of how far white Californians had to go before recognizing the basic tenets of equality. It also amounted to a major blow to the morale of the mainstream Civil Rights movement.
State Escalation and Urban Rebellion, 1965
The worst of times for a defeated, riven and contentious Republican party, the winter and spring of 1964-5 was the best of times for Richard Nixon. Nixon thrived most brightly among the misfortunes of others. His party suffered the biggest landslide and reverse in decades. Democrats took 36 seats from the Republicans in Congress, giving the Democrats and 2/3rds majority, the biggest since 1936. Indeed, it looked like a full-tide return of the New Deal, now called The Great Society. Bewildered Republicans had to watch a supermajority of Democrats enact the wide-ranging Great Society social programs: the Social Security Amendments of 1965: Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC; Primary and Secondary Education Act; and the sweeping and very potent Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Only Nixon, it seems, understood the opportunity to make hay while the skies poured rain. These new Federal bureaucracies, programs, rules, interventions in State law and local social-racial arrangements, all with bloated budgets were fat targets for the exact policy platform that Goldwater, and now Reagan, had articulated so clearly: Americans should fear their government. This was NOT the Liberal-Moderate Republican wing's outlook. They favored Civil Rights and most New Deal social programs. Nixon saw that the weapons had already been forged, and the grassroots armies had already been raised, so his speeches throughout 1965 pandered primarily to that wing, while he maintained a public commitment to "unity" for the whole party, speaking also about moderate positions and keeping his ties intact with the Liberals and Moderates.

Nixon played this role brilliantly, and because he was the only major Republican leader not holding office, he was able to be more ideological and more strident about foreign and domestic policy than Governors Rockefeller, Romney, and Scranton. Nixon, already an elder statesman at 55, had taken firm control of the entire party. As Loftus wrote as early as 14 February 1965, Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon "has firmly grasped the leadership role which, being unofficial, can become anything he wants to make it. He intends apparently to make much of it.....Nixon has been defeated but not humiliated. He has remained regular. He has made the entire Republican party his power base."Note

As a partner in the century-old law Manhattan firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Mitchell, Nixon had as many international corporate clients as he wanted, with unlimited travel expense accounts, and all the liberty he needed to play world statesman. "He was very much a world figure," writes biographer Steven Ambrose: "a man who could fill a room to overflowing at any capital on either side of the Iron Curtain just by announcing a press conference. He carried himself as if he were leader of the opposition, and he was so treated by the press at home and abroad."Note

From Goldwater to Reagan to Watts, 1965
Nixon's dual strategy in 1965 was to weaken the Democratic party's formidable hold on Washington, and to build himself up in the eyes of the press, his own party, and the world, as the leading voice of opposition. Nixon's strategy fed on violence, domestic and foreign--which he sought to link. In the weeks following the Watts Rebellion, Nixon paused in Los Angeles long enough to make public statements before continuing on his "business trip" to  Japan, Formosa, Thailand and Australia. After calling the Watts "riot" a "turning point" for America, called for "stepped-up" bombing of North Vietnam, especially the capital of Hanoi.Note As the self-appointed avatar of his party, Nixon wanted the press to gossip as much as possible about his possible next moves, so he "did not rule out the possibility of going to Viet Nam" during his upcoming Asian tour, "and said such a stop would be decided upon in the course of his travels.”

The other game-changing event in 1965 was the rise of Ronald Reagan as the banner-bearer for the New Right. Reagan's "Speech" for Goldwater was a smash hit. Reagan had already given it many times before the recorded TV broadcast, and he would continue many times more. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak’s syndicated column, Inside Report was not mere reportage, but rather influential opinion-making punditry. When they headlined the 17 April 1965 column “Reagan Supplanting Goldwater as Conservatives' National Symbol,” they were also enacting that outcome.Note Within a week, Gladwin Hill would report for the New York Times, "Reagan Weighing a New Role In Gubernatorial Race on Coast”Note Evans and Novak took an early dislike for Nixon, however,which was mutual. (Evans ultimately made it to President Nixon's "Enemies List.")

Nixon seized upon the violence of Watts in August 1965 as evidence of the breakdown of order under Democratic rule. "Even before the riots," Bill Boyarsky wrote, "Democratic strategists expressed fear of voter rebellion in Los Angeles County's nominally Democratic white suburbs." Mayor Sam Yorty, a Nixon loyalist from 1960 through the end of his increasingly reactionary tenure in 1972, was, as Boyarsky observed, "eyeing" those suburban voters. And as Mervyn Dymally, the Trinidad-American who represented South LA pointed out, "I think Yorty has picked up strength in the [98% white San Fernando] Valley. And there are more votes in the Valley than in my area."Note

Through the tumultuous events of 1965, continued the hand-wringing observance of “extremism.” Well-meaning advocates of dialogue ironically created more platforms for the intolerant. In November of 1965 a student organization at Valley College (later renamed California State University, Northridge) sponsored a series of lectures on extremism. Their first guest was Barry Goldwater, Jr, whose political career had been launched the previous year during his father’s unsuccessful run for the presidency. Young Barry had relocated permanently to Los Angeles, promoting the wildfire of young conservatism that the 1964 campaign had inspired. “Does The Radical Right Hurt Conservatism?” the students asked. Goldwater rejected the question, probably because it seemed to impugn his own position. “Topics such as yours,” he said, “seem to say that anything that is not in some vague, undefined middle-of-the-road is extremism.” Unafraid to show his colors, he denied that the John Birch Society was extremist because it did not, he claimed, advocate violence. He drew the line at the border of the Ku Klux Klan, however.

The next speaker in the 1965 Valley College series was the suspended Los Angeles Police Department officer Michael Hannon, who had gained notoriety in August 1964 by participating in a “lie-in” to protest the meeting of the White Citizens Council at the Los Angeles Breakfast Club, 3201 Los Feliz Blvd. The action was organized by the Congress On Racial Equality (CORE).Note Responding to his assigned topic, “Does The Radical Left Hurt Liberals?” Hannon, a member of the Socialist Party, made a spirited defense of radicalism: “The radical left exists to articulate the needs and goals of the working classes, undiluted by the quest for money which the liberal needs to get elected.”Note Hannon’s public civil disobedience had earned the ire of the avowed anti-radical Chief William H. Parker, who suspended him for “conduct unbecoming an officer.”Note [9] Indeed, Chief Parker had been operating the venerable “Red Squad” of political police detectives, founded during the first Red Scare of 1919.

As public forums like these continued to debate "extremism" New Right activists were steadfastly practicing it within the Republican party, commandeering the Young Republicans by the end of 1965, convert it, as Evans and Novak observed, into a vehicle for "training conservatives for intro-party warfare."Note. The organization behind this hijack took the ominous name of The Syndicate, run by William Rusher, publisher of William F. Buckley's National Review, and Clif White, who had begun the Draft Goldwater movement as early as 1961. The New Jersey branch of the YRs, known as the Rat Finks, gained unwanted press attention in January of 1966 for anti-semitic and racist songs, and the California Young Republicans elected officers not only from the John Birch Society, but even, in the Long Beach chapter, from the American Nazi Party.Note
Burning Decks, Sinking Ships, and Heavy Bombers: Race and Reaction, 1966-67
To take control of the Republican party in 1966-7, Nixon repeated a strategy from his days in the early Eisenhower administration: letting the party's far-right wing (McCarthy at that time) run amok stirring-up fear and hatred, while seeming to rise above such extremes until that scourge had run its course, and Nixon could co-opt it into electoral strength. He rightly understood that he did not need to avow extreme positions himself to get the vote of those mobilized by them He just needed to appear open to their views and hostile to their enemies, while keeping the Midwestern and Eastern Liberals and Moderates on friendly enough terms to accept his incessant call for party unity. Now that the tide of terror had been turned in the urban rebellions and repressions; in Southern KKK killings; and in Johnson's escalating Vietnam War, Nixon drove the party forward to reap backlash votes on the campaign of "fear and reassurance," to borrow an apt term form film studies.[Note Ross] As Johnson and McNamara escalated the ground and air war in Vietnam, Nixon kept to the right, hammering a steady drumbeat for greater escalation, heavier bombing, invoking the clarity of World War II's simplicity: The Republican party "should not join the appeasement group," he declared in April of 1966. In May he called for bombing escalation against Hanoi and other targets in North Vietnam.

Nixon carried on his party-mending activities as an intrinsic part of his peripatetic speaking tours. "Nixon looks upon himself as the man with the glue who can stick his party together," wrote Arthur Edson of The Sun in March of 1966: "He’s on speaking terms with those Republicans who in 1964 were aggressively for and those who were violently against Senator Barry Goldwater."Note Throughout the key election year of 1966, Nixon, because he was not on any ballot "was able to appear all over the country, the only Republican campaigning on a national basis."Note

During the Goldwater insurgency and after Goldwater's electoral humiliation, Nixon had twice leapt onto the "Burning Deck of Republican Liberalism." He kept a steady position there, wrenching the helm from time to time toward the right, as teh party's unofficial but practically real ideological-strategic leader. He really was the only National Republican who could work comfortably with Southern racists, New Right evangelicals, and Northern liberals. While campaigning for Charles H. Percy in Illinois, Nixon picked up the "Black Capitalism" program, a Liberal Republican idea to expand government programs and expenditures, --- to promote business enterprise in African American communities. Nixon's current reputation as a "Liberal" owes directly to these chameleonic borrowings. It is also clear from his numerous policy reversals on these issues while president that he was not ideologically favoring them, but electorally. He knew that he could adopt these positions in 1966-7 if he also courted the racist and states-rights, and the New Right's anti-government crusade.

As he had campaigned for Goldwater in 1964 despite Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act, Nixon was the only national Republican with credibility in the Confederate states. In the South, Nixon "drew long applause when he said that both parties in the South should stop campaigning on racial issues." He then, however, also wrote in his nationally syndicated column, that Southern Republicans "must not climb aboard the sinking ship of racial injustice." That was for the ears of Charles Percy and the Northern Liberals. The next phrase maintains his credibility among those who were racially motivated: "Any Republican victory that would come courting racists, black or white, would be a defeat for our future in the South and our party in the nation." Nixon's sly jab: "racists, black or white," evens the score for those whites feeling very threatened in their segregated working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. As Nixon had already refused to interfere with white supremacy clauses in southern state party platforms, he also got away with his principled pronouncements against racism. Why? Because he was also for state's rights.Note

As Nixon courted the segregationists too closely, however, and Illinois Sen. Percy was unafraid to call him out on it. In a speech to the Mississippi Council on Human Relations in Jackson, Percy said he only wanted to see voters switching from Democrat to Republican in the South "not for the reasons that were there on election day 1964," referring to the racist, anti-Civil Rights vote for Goldwater in the deep south. "Dick Nixon would make his fellow Republicans feel better about his southern exposure if he talked like that, Percy added."Note.

Nixon's years in New York (not to mention the National Security Council), armed him with a Van Buren-like cleverness in maintaining party unity across regional lines. Nixon had it both ways by the end of his tour of the 11 Confederate states, culminating in Jackson, where the Mississippi State Republican party still had a plank in its platform declaring that the "segregation of the races" was "absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations.” When challenged on this by reporters during Nixon's visit to support segregationist candidates, he replied: "I will go to any state in this country to campaign for a strong two-party system, whether or not I agree with the local Republicans on every issue.” Nixon thought it "unrealistic and unwise" for his national party to require state parties to replace these planks. The reverence for party unity over principle was no more than a strategic choice by the acknowledged leader of his party. Nixon's principled pro-civil rights, federalist - state's rights agnosticism is brilliantly on display in his formulation:
“The national Republican party, he said, should state its own support for civil rights forthrightly and try to convince state parties to agree.
   ‘It cannot dictate to them,’ he insisted.”Note
The November 1966 elections resulted in just the reversal Nixon and the Republicans worked to achieve: 40 seats switched back to the Republicans for the Congress that would be seated in January 1967. Nixon seized on this result as a national mandate for his policy positions stated as those of the Republican Party during his 1965-6 Tour of Unity. For Vietnam, "The people voted against the conduct of the war," Nixon concluded: "not against our effort to stop communist aggression in south-east asia." For that, he repeated: "An overwhelming majority of the people want a stronger policy aimed at ending the war." Nixon had refined his foreign policy difference with the Democrats: the war must be prosecuted more aggressively to end it successfully. But the goal was not to end the war; it was to win it in order to stop communist aggression. Ending it was, always in his formulations, dependent upon winning it. For this Nixon "Urges LBJ" as the Chicago Tribune's article by William Kling was headlined: "Adopt War Economy."Note

The November 1966 election results completely vindicated Nixon's long, hard 1966 campaign trail. He had responded to 300 invitation to speak every week, recognized from March through November as the "GOP's Top Man," and the only Republican leader able to "bridge schisms" in the "divided GOP."Note.

From the winter of 1967, then Nixon distinguished himself as a bellicose hawk. In the Spring of 197m Nixon undertook a 34-nation speaking tour., which attracted extended media attention. In Europe he berated NATO allies for not supporting or opposing the U.S intervention in Vietnam. The race for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination had already begun, and Governor Romney, the leading Liberal Republican candidate, was then in London attempting to develop his own international credentials. In an insightful comparison by in The Guardian, Alistair Cooke observed that "Where Governor Romney is solemn, patriotic, and pedestrian, Mr. Nixon is tough, and chauvinistic, and on the warpath."Note

Nixon remained on the chauvinistic warpath while Governor Romney fell off it in his bungled attempt to develop a Republican opposition to it. Asked in August 1967 to explain how he switched from pro- to anti-war, Romney knocked himself out of the race with his infamous explanation to the press, that the Generals in Vietnam had originally "Brainwashed" him. Ironically, Nixon was the leading civilian doing the "brainwashing" of the American people,by promising that the war cold and should be ended victoriously through additional firepower.Note

Nixon's domestic policy focus on urban issues continued to emphasize violence and repression, and the military-style public actions of the Oakland, California-based Black Panthers gave Nixon the perfect evidence to develop a "warpath" for the nation's cities as well. On 2 May 1967, the Panthers mounted one of the most audacious protests in all of U.S. history. They had gained their initial notoriety by patrolling the streets of Oakland with shotguns, in a show of "defending" their neighborhoods from police violence. The open brandishing of shotguns was only possible because of a loophole in the California gun law, that prohibited carrying concealed weapons without a license, but failed to state that unconcealed weapons also required a license. To close this loophole the California legislature was set to take up a bill when on that day, the Panthers occupied the State Capitol building carrying their shotguns. Hoover's FBI was already planning to take this groug down, and within months all of its leaders were either killed, as in the case of Fred Hampton in Chicago; behind bars, os with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton; or in exile, as with Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' Minister of Information, who took up residence in Algiers.

By October of 1967 Nixon had developed his central policy slogan for the 1968 campaign: "Law and Order," citing decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America.” But as Tom Wicker, writing in the New York Times, asked, "Whch Law and Whose Order?"Note

Nixon had an answer when he announced an urban warfare strategy on 15 December of 1967, speaking to the National Association of Manufacturers--one of the most fiercely free-enterprise and anti-labor organizations in the United States since the late 19th century. Nixon's principal topic was the "war in our cities." He chose his words carefully and even defined them: "A riot is a spontaneous outburst. A war is subject to advance planning. Behind this "war" were "guerrillas": "Year by year, the violence in our cities takes on more of the aspects of guerrilla war – and the rhetoric of its prophets escalates accordingly." Nixon revealed his intelligence, just as he had in 1948 against Alger Hiss, against the Rosenbergs in 1953, against Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and against he Viet Cong in his current attacks:

"Now the revolutionaries are boasting that their war plans for next summer’s riots include strikes at public utilities, at urban expressways, and at other nerve centers … these men, educated and articulate, are guerrilla leaders in the classic pattern." Nixon knew how to sew up a knot. This revolutionary activity, of course, was encouraged by the Democrats' Great Society welfare and rights legislation: what he called "extravagant promises": "Much of the bitterness of the slum dweller is the result of these false promises," profiting from the failure of those promises to date.Note

By the end of 1967, Nixon had positioned himself as the most strident voice on the Right who had a chance to win a national election. But Wallace's strong appeal in Southern California in December was an outstanding indicator of the reactionary mood that Nixon sought to channel into his own presidential bid.

“If we could let the police run this country for two years, the streets would be safe.”
  --George Wallace, Orange County Fairgrounds, December 1967.

The radical right was no mere bogey-man inflated by Centrist accusers in the “extremism” discourse. This would become abundantly clear in December 1967, when George Wallace mounted his white supremacist campaign for president on the American Independent Party label. At a large gathering of Wallace supporters, held at the Products Pavilion of the Orange County Fairgrounds, he welcomed the very zealots that Senator Kuchel had tried to nullify in his 1963 speech. “We believe in the separation of the races for Christian reasons,” one attendee explained to a reporter. Another praised Orange County because “The atmosphere is very discouraging to Negroes.” Then Wallace, surrounded by sixteen Alabama State Troopers, mounted the bulletproof podium and electrified the crowd with authoritarian visions: “If we could let the police run this country for two years,” Wallace boomed, “the streets would be safe.” Later, in the relaxed atmosphere aboard his DC-6, Wallace told disparaging stories about protesting “niggers,” prompting an aid to shake his head. As reporter Mary Reinholz recounted Wallace's next phrase: “’Ah don’ know,’ he said half-seriously, ‘This country needs a dictatorship, ah hope we can be it.”Note
Wallace didn't get his chance. He was no match for Nixon.  Nixon knew all about dictatorships: it was his foreign policy achievement as Vice President to help set up dictatorships in Latin America, Iran, and the Philippines. When he assumed the presidency in 1969, he and Kissinger installed more dictators by fomenting coups against democratic governments, and heavily supported ones that had been installed by the Eisenhower administration, especially The Shah of Iran and President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Nixon himself would establish a gang-connected underground political police operation. He did not have the kinds of powers that Wallace probably dreamed of in that moment in Orange County, but the Nixon administration did massively support the militarization of urban police departments, so in effect he did magnify the "police state" environment that came to characterize nearly all major US cities by the 1980s and 1990s.
Burning Decks, Sinking Ships, and Heavy Bombers: Race and Reaction, 1966-67 To take control of the Republican party in 1966-7, Nixon repeated a strategy from his days in the early Eisenhower administration: letting the party's far-right wing (McCarthy at that time) run amok stirring-up fear and hatred, while seeming to rise above such extremes until that scourge had run its course, and Nixon could co-opt it into electoral strength. He rightly understood that he did not need to avow extreme positions himself to get the vote of those mobilized by them He just needed to appear open to their views and hostile to their enemies, while keeping the Midwestern and Eastern Liberals and Moderates on friendly enough terms to accept his incessant call for party unity. Now that the tide of terror had been turned in the urban rebellions and repressions; in Southern KKK killings; and in Johnson's escalating Vietnam War, Nixon drove the party forward to reap backlash votes on the campaign of "fear and reassurance," to borrow an apt term form film studies.[Note Ross] As Johnson and McNamara escalated the ground and air war in Vietnam, Nixon kept to the right, hammering a steady drumbeat for greater escalation, heavier bombing, invoking the clarity of World War II's simplicity: The Republican party "should not join the appeasement group," he declared in April of 1966. In May he called for bombing escalation against Hanoi and other targets in North Vietnam.

Nixon carried on his party-mending activities as an intrinsic part of his peripatetic speaking tours. "Nixon looks upon himself as the man with the glue who can stick his party together," wrote Arthur Edson of The Sun in March of 1966: "He’s on speaking terms with those Republicans who in 1964 were aggressively for and those who were violently against Senator Barry Goldwater."Note Throughout the key election year of 1966, Nixon, because he was not on any ballot "was able to appear all over the country, the only Republican campaigning on a national basis."Note

During the Goldwater insurgency and after Goldwater's electoral humiliation, Nixon had twice leapt onto the "Burning Deck of Republican Liberalism." He kept a steady position there, wrenching the helm from time to time toward the right, as teh party's unofficial but practically real ideological-strategic leader. He really was the only National Republican who could work comfortably with Southern racists, New Right evangelicals, and Northern liberals. While campaigning for Charles H. Percy in Illinois, Nixon picked up the "Black Capitalism" program, a Liberal Republican idea to expand government programs and expenditures, --- to promote business enterprise in African American communities. Nixon's current reputation as a "Liberal" owes directly to these chameleonic borrowings. It is also clear from his numerous policy reversals on these issues while president that he was not ideologically favoring them, but electorally. He knew that he could adopt these positions in 1966-7 if he also courted the racist and states-rights, and the New Right's anti-government crusade.

As he had campaigned for Goldwater in 1964 despite Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act, Nixon was the only national Republican with credibility in the Confederate states. In the South, Nixon "drew long applause when he said that both parties in the South should stop campaigning on racial issues." He then, however, also wrote in his nationally syndicated column, that Southern Republicans "must not climb aboard the sinking ship of racial injustice." That was for the ears of Charles Percy and the Northern Liberals. The next phrase maintains his credibility among those who were racially motivated: "Any Republican victory that would come courting racists, black or white, would be a defeat for our future in the South and our party in the nation." Nixon's sly jab: "racists, black or white," evens the score for those whites feeling very threatened in their segregated working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. As Nixon had already refused to interfere with white supremacy clauses in southern state party platforms, he also got away with his principled pronouncements against racism. Why? Because he was also for state's rights.Note

As Nixon courted the segregationists too closely, however, and Illinois Sen. Percy was unafraid to call him out on it. In a speech to the Mississippi Council on Human Relations in Jackson, Percy said he only wanted to see voters switching from Democrat to Republican in the South "not for the reasons that were there on election day 1964," referring to the racist, anti-Civil Rights vote for Goldwater in the deep south. "Dick Nixon would make his fellow Republicans feel better about his southern exposure if he talked like that, Percy added."Note.

Nixon's years in New York (not to mention the National Security Council), armed him with a Van Buren-like cleverness in maintaining party unity across regional lines. Nixon had it both ways by the end of his tour of the 11 Confederate states, culminating in Jackson, where the Mississippi State Republican party still had a plank in its platform declaring that the "segregation of the races" was "absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations.” When challenged on this by reporters during Nixon's visit to support segregationist candidates, he replied: "I will go to any state in this country to campaign for a strong two-party system, whether or not I agree with the local Republicans on every issue.” Nixon thought it "unrealistic and unwise" for his national party to require state parties to replace these planks. The reverence for party unity over principle was no more than a strategic choice by the acknowledged leader of his party. Nixon's principled pro-civil rights, federalist - state's rights agnosticism is brilliantly on display in his formulation:
“The national Republican party, he said, should state its own support for civil rights forthrightly and try to convince state parties to agree.
   ‘It cannot dictate to them,’ he insisted.”Note
The November 1966 elections resulted in just the reversal Nixon and the Republicans worked to achieve: 40 seats switched back to the Republicans for the Congress that would be seated in January 1967. Nixon seized on this result as a national mandate for his policy positions stated as those of the Republican Party during his 1965-6 Tour of Unity. For Vietnam, "The people voted against the conduct of the war," Nixon concluded: "not against our effort to stop communist aggression in south-east asia." For that, he repeated: "An overwhelming majority of the people want a stronger policy aimed at ending the war." Nixon had refined his foreign policy difference with the Democrats: the war must be prosecuted more aggressively to end it successfully. But the goal was not to end the war; it was to win it in order to stop communist aggression. Ending it was, always in his formulations, dependent upon winning it. For this Nixon "Urges LBJ" as the Chicago Tribune's article by William Kling was headlined: "Adopt War Economy."Note

The November 1966 election results completely vindicated Nixon's long, hard 1966 campaign trail. He had responded to 300 invitation to speak every week, recognized from March through November as the "GOP's Top Man," and the only Republican leader able to "bridge schisms" in the "divided GOP."Note.

From the winter of 1967, then Nixon distinguished himself as a bellicose hawk. In the Spring of 197m Nixon undertook a 34-nation speaking tour., which attracted extended media attention. In Europe he berated NATO allies for not supporting or opposing the U.S intervention in Vietnam. The race for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination had already begun, and Governor Romney, the leading Liberal Republican candidate, was then in London attempting to develop his own international credentials. In an insightful comparison by in The Guardian, Alistair Cooke observed that "Where Governor Romney is solemn, patriotic, and pedestrian, Mr. Nixon is tough, and chauvinistic, and on the warpath."Note

Nixon remained on the chauvinistic warpath while Governor Romney fell off it in his bungled attempt to develop a Republican opposition to it. Asked in August 1967 to explain how he switched from pro- to anti-war, Romney knocked himself out of the race with his infamous explanation to the press, that the Generals in Vietnam had originally "Brainwashed" him. Ironically, Nixon was the leading civilian doing the "brainwashing" of the American people,by promising that the war cold and should be ended victoriously through additional firepower.Note

Nixon's domestic policy focus on urban issues continued to emphasize violence and repression, and the military-style public actions of the Oakland, California-based Black Panthers gave Nixon the perfect evidence to develop a "warpath" for the nation's cities as well. On 2 May 1967, the Panthers mounted one of the most audacious protests in all of U.S. history. They had gained their initial notoriety by patrolling the streets of Oakland with shotguns, in a show of "defending" their neighborhoods from police violence. The open brandishing of shotguns was only possible because of a loophole in the California gun law, that prohibited carrying concealed weapons without a license, but failed to state that unconcealed weapons also required a license. To close this loophole the California legislature was set to take up a bill when on that day, the Panthers occupied the State Capitol building carrying their shotguns. Hoover's FBI was already planning to take this groug down, and within months all of its leaders were either killed, as in the case of Fred Hampton in Chicago; behind bars, os with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton; or in exile, as with Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' Minister of Information, who took up residence in Algiers.

By October of 1967 Nixon had developed his central policy slogan for the 1968 campaign: "Law and Order," citing decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America.” But as Tom Wicker, writing in the New York Times, asked, "Whch Law and Whose Order?"Note

Nixon had an answer when he announced an urban warfare strategy on 15 December of 1967, speaking to the National Association of Manufacturers--one of the most fiercely free-enterprise and anti-labor organizations in the United States since the late 19th century. Nixon's principal topic was the "war in our cities." He chose his words carefully and even defined them: "A riot is a spontaneous outburst. A war is subject to advance planning. Behind this "war" were "guerrillas": "Year by year, the violence in our cities takes on more of the aspects of guerrilla war – and the rhetoric of its prophets escalates accordingly." Nixon revealed his intelligence, just as he had in 1948 against Alger Hiss, against the Rosenbergs in 1953, against Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and against he Viet Cong in his current attacks:

"Now the revolutionaries are boasting that their war plans for next summer’s riots include strikes at public utilities, at urban expressways, and at other nerve centers … these men, educated and articulate, are guerrilla leaders in the classic pattern." Nixon knew how to sew up a knot. This revolutionary activity, of course, was encouraged by the Democrats' Great Society welfare and rights legislation: what he called "extravagant promises": "Much of the bitterness of the slum dweller is the result of these false promises," profiting from the failure of those promises to date.Note

By the end of 1967, Nixon had positioned himself as the most strident voice on the Right who had a chance to win a national election. But Wallace's strong appeal in Southern California in December was an outstanding indicator of the reactionary mood that Nixon sought to channel into his own presidential bid.

“If we could let the police run this country for two years, the streets would be safe.”
  --George Wallace, Orange County Fairgrounds, December 1967.

The radical right was no mere bogey-man inflated by Centrist accusers in the “extremism” discourse. This would become abundantly clear in December 1967, when George Wallace mounted his white supremacist campaign for president on the American Independent Party label. At a large gathering of Wallace supporters, held at the Products Pavilion of the Orange County Fairgrounds, he welcomed the very zealots that Senator Kuchel had tried to nullify in his 1963 speech. “We believe in the separation of the races for Christian reasons,” one attendee explained to a reporter. Another praised Orange County because “The atmosphere is very discouraging to Negroes.” Then Wallace, surrounded by sixteen Alabama State Troopers, mounted the bulletproof podium and electrified the crowd with authoritarian visions: “If we could let the police run this country for two years,” Wallace boomed, “the streets would be safe.” Later, in the relaxed atmosphere aboard his DC-6, Wallace told disparaging stories about protesting “niggers,” prompting an aid to shake his head. As reporter Mary Reinholz recounted Wallace's next phrase: “’Ah don’ know,’ he said half-seriously, ‘This country needs a dictatorship, ah hope we can be it.”Note
Wallace didn't get his chance. He was no match for Nixon.  Nixon knew all about dictatorships: it was his foreign policy achievement as Vice President to help set up dictatorships in Latin America, Iran, and the Philippines. When he assumed the presidency in 1969, he and Kissinger installed more dictators by fomenting coups against democratic governments, and heavily supported ones that had been installed by the Eisenhower administration, especially The Shah of Iran and President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Nixon himself would establish a gang-connected underground political police operation. He did not have the kinds of powers that Wallace probably dreamed of in that moment in Orange County, but the Nixon administration did massively support the militarization of urban police departments, so in effect he did magnify the "police state" environment that came to characterize nearly all major US cities by the 1980s and 1990s.

This page is referenced by:

Springtime for Nixon and Reagan, 1964

Shakespearean Nixon and Cervantean Reagan

California's Reversal of Civil Rights: The Referendum Repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Law in 1964

State Escalation and Urban Rebellion, 1965

From Goldwater to Reagan to Watts, 1965

Burning Decks, Sinking Ships, and Heavy Bombers: Race and Reaction, 1966-67

Prologue: Nixon's Caribbean Crossroads, November 1962