Richard Nixon Press Conference 3/24/1972
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Richard 37th, Act III: Thermidor, 1968-1974 [TEST - Related Material]
When we look at America we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home. ...
What America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people!--Richard M. Nixon, Republican Party Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, Miami Beach, 8 August 1968
During the winter of 1967-8 the North Vietnamese under the command of General Võ Nguyên Giáp laid preparations for the mighty Tet Offensive, which would prove the turning point in the long war by setting U.S. public opinion firmly against the war, and forcing President Johnson to withdraw from re-election. Americans having lost most of the South Vietnam countryside to the Viet Cong, still claimed that to least to control the cities and towns. By attacking more than 100 cities and towns beginning the night of the Tet Lunar New Year, forces that rose in waves to more than 80,000 soldiers, temporarily forced the greatest military power on Earth onto a bloody defensive. It required weeks of ferocious fighting to re-take the ancient city of Hue in furious door-to-door urban combat, including the aerial destruction of its fortress, the Citadel, dating from the 15th century. America lost Vietnam in these pivotal urban battlegrounds, and by April more than 100 American cities in flames to match, like ill-fated sister cities. The year 1968 was the bloodiest, most destructive, and divisive year for the United States internally since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Not since the Great Upheaval of the 1870s-80s had the nation experienced such widespread urban unrest and mass confrontation with authorities. In Vietnam, America was losing a war for the first time in almost two centuries since Independence.
It was Nixon's finest hour. Leading the angry masses under the reactionary banner of "Law and Order," Nixon earned heavy returns on his investment in a fear and reassurance. He now brought together his own unique Shakespearean will to power with the Southern California blend of authoritarian, military-industrial political culture that created him as a public man. Continuing the second track of his grand strategy for achieving the White House, he made a great show of Liberal-Moderate Republican policies and key advisers. But soon after his inauguration, he threw most of these policies under the bus, sidelining the liberals in his Cabinet as his "dark side" gained dominance by the end of 1969.
Thermidor had arrived, institutionalizing the extremism that Nixon had promoted and manipulated throughout his Interregnum-- between his eight-year tenure as Vice President, 1953-1961, and his achievement of the Oval Office in January 1969, and six years as President until resignation in August 1974. Nixon did not labor alone to reap the rewards of all this fear. The dynamics of escalating state and collective violence from 1963 through the early 1970s always supplied him with an endless parade of horrors to attack, all apparently emerging from the great, mixed-race metropolitan centers. While pointing his finger at enemies, foreign and domestic, from the Communist Bloc to the guerillas in Vietnam to the threat of non-white central city, Nixon built a regime that was tyrannical by the strict standards of the term: an anti-constitutional one that operated covert political police conducting domestic espionage and political assassinations. By 1970, Nixon isolated himself in an inner world of court intrigue: wiretapping his own officials, mobilizing his mob soldiers, and spreading a network of political espionage that would be institutionalized in 1971 after the leak of the Pentagon Papers. In his feverish nightmares, he cursed the leading institutions of American liberty, beginning with the free press, which never stopped hounding him: "Never forget," he told Kissinger, "The press is the enemy, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times."Note. Having instituted numerous authoritarian dictatorships in Latin America, from the 1950s to the 1970s, having ordered numerous assassinations, Nixon internalized the belief that authoritarian ruling power is just and necessary in order to keep the dominant institutions in power.
Nixon's audacious lawlessness was eventually exposed by an aggressive free press, alongside a commercial public sphere that had just broken the bounds of censorship for the first time in Western history, to shame--if only temporarily--the "silent majority" he had mobilized, and drive his defenders into hiding on Capitol Hill, leaving him no choice but to resign. This was a signal victory for the Constitution's division and balance of powers, proving the scientific theory of the Founders, that tyranny can be prevented in predictable ways. Both Congressional and Judicial branches had refused Nixon's corruption and forced him from power.
Forcing Nixon from power was also, and equally a signal triumph for America's newly functioning critical public sphere, a mass culture that had been liberated by the Civil Rights movement, the Beats, the New Journalism, the New Left, and the New Hollywood. With new freedoms and powers of expression andTerrible Forces: Fear and Reassurance in 1968
"We've just seen some very terrible forces unleashed. Something bad is going to come of this."
On 16 March, just weeks after the Tet Offensive, Robert Kennedy, emboldened by Eugene McCarty's anti-war challenge to displace President Johnson in the Democratic primaries, announced his own Candidacy, and "terrible forces" were indeed unleashed. by the 31st of March, Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that he would not seek nor accept, his party's nomination for re-election to the presidency, an action tantamount to resigning the presidency. Just five days after that, on 4 April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lloraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, followed by a massive wave of urban uprisings that struck 110 U.S. cities. Despite pleas to honor the nonviolent mission of King, anger turned violent first and worst of all in the nation's capital. Stokley Carmichael openly advocated violence and led crowds throughout Washington. With angry crowds numbering more than 20,000, Johnson ordered a military defense of the city. Twelve people died, about 1,200 structures burned, totaling about 27 million in property damage. Marines mounted machine guns on the Capital steps and the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry guarded the White House, in the largest military occupation of a U.S. city since the Civil War. Next to Washington, D.C, the most heavily hit by uprisings were Chicago, Baltimore, and Kansas City. The Baltimore violence led directly to Nixon selecting his running mate in the November elections. Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew made a stink by scolding Baltimore's African-American leaders for not trying harder to suppress the violence. Nixon preferred a pit-bull Vice President to the right of him, just as Nixon was to Ike in the 1950s, allowing his presidential role to be more positive and conciliatory.
--Candidate Richard Nixon, upon learning that
Robert Kennedy had entered the campaign for
the presidency, 16 March 1968.
The California primaries enveloped the tragedies of the 1968 violence-stricken electoral cycle. During the primary, Bobby Kennedy finally completed his journey from anti-communist reactionary in the 1950s to the labor-based Left, marched with United Farmworkers leader Cesar Chavez and Watts-based Ted Watkins in Southern California. In that revival of the Popular Front, Bobby had the terrible duty of informing a crowd that Dr. King had been murdered. By the date of his victory in the California Primary on 6 June, in the kitchen hallway of the ambassador Hotel, Wilshire Blvd, Bobby would suffer the same fate. Without assuming any role whatsoever in these assassinations, still Nixon profited from both. The explosion of urban violence in reaction to King's assassination from 4 to 8 also fed the flames of Nixon's law and Order promise, framed, as ever he had in the last two years, as a problem to be dealt with by military force, as an internal "war."
Nixon probably profited the most from the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Macbeth suffered the same dread as Nixon at this juncture. Bobby raised the spectre of a blocked path to the presidency. Nothing had stung Nixon worse in his entire psycho-political development than having the 1960 election stolen from him by Jack Kennedy and Mayor Richard J. Daley. Jack Kennedy in this analogy was Banquo. After his assassination, Banquo's son, who escaped in Macbeth, remains a threat to his own kingship, according to the prophecy of the three Weird Sisters. Bobby, the shining, attractive baby brother, was the son of Banquo's Ghost: another obstacle before the throne. After 3 September Nixon no longer had a serious contender among the Democratic Party leadership.Sirens and Armies of the Night
Richard Nixon faced only minimal challenges, from Ronald Reagan, at the Republican National Convention 5-8 August in Miami Beach Convention Center. His Acceptance Speech was a call to arms, and a declaration that strong leadership would put down the nation's disorder and heal its divisions. This speech is remarkable for these two elements: the massive protests by urban citizen and colleges students were illegitimate, because the "first civil right is the right to order" Security then was the primary goal. But also unity. Here he proposed an end to "polarizing" speech, something he cynically ignored once in office, as we shall see.
Anthony Hopkins's portrayal of Nixon's Acceptance Speech, in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1998). Here I have to differentiate Stone's/Hopkins's "tragic" thesis, from Bahr/Ethington's Melodramatic thesis. HOwever, Stone's research is similar to mine. He paid very serious attention to the evidence of Nixon's involvement in murderous activities, including the aggressive hypothesis that Nixon participated in the planning of John Kennedy's assassination.
The Democratic Party collapsed into factional division in its cataclysmic Chicago Convention, August 26-9. Sheltered from violent street clashes by a cordon of barbed wire, the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie, weak opponents of Nixon bearing responsibility for the nation's failed leadership over the previous tumultuous years. With Richard Daley's Chicago Police battering protestors with billy clubs and tear gas throughout the nationally televised circus, the Democratic party appeared hapless hostage of urban disorder.
Nixon, having performed his Law and Order vs. Sirens in the Night message for three weeks already between the Miami Republican Convention and the Democratic Convention, promised security to a republic of white suburbanites who wanted their sons and daughters back from campus upheavals, from the battlefields of Vietnam, from the the Summer of Love and protection from the Blacks and Latinos in the urban core. They wanted to gat back to the american Dream in the 1950s, when Vice President Nixon kept the Communists at bay and internal dissent was suppressed through censorship.
Nixon's Long March to the White House was in its final stages, he was certainly not planning to leave this election to chance. [Plug story of his election handlers in secret force]**
Nixon’s competition with Wallace for the 1968 vote of the disaffected whites in the South, the so-called Southern Strategy, has been modified by Matthew Lassiter to read “Suburban Strategy,” cunningly calculated to drive to power in 1968 on the energy of fear, Nixon’s central tenet. Nixon’s campaigning in 1968 was remarkable in the annals of U.S. political history, as the last hurrah of whistle-stop campaigning, in the old-style party organizations, before the reforms of the 1970s made parties more democratic and less deliberately led and rigged. Nixon had also make his own mastery of the media, calculating just the right messages to keep his opponent Hubert Humphrey on the defensive, which was not hard after1969: Inauguration of a Crackdown
Richard Nixon's 20 January 1969 Inaugural speech is a marvel of noble principles suspended in excessive platitudes. Nixon deplored that "in these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading." This public rhetorical strategy describes exactly what Nixon himself pursued in his path to power through the battlefield of extremism.
Nixon also made a major principled statement for equality before the law. It is a remarkable statement for seeming to declare the Civil rights movement over. "The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to insure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man." While a pro-civil rights position is clear and consistent with Nixon's positions since the 1950s, this statement also clearly implies that no new laws are needed.
While Nixon was skillful in declaring for liberal ideals like the equality of all before man, what rapidly proved completely hypocritical are the Inaugural's appeals to unity, to "speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices." It took Nixon no longer than May to chart a hard-line course against campus protests. Students protested on campuses across the United States, not only against the Vietnam War, but also against the University-Industrial-Military complex that had become entrenched in most major University research campuses by the 1960s. Racial injustice was a major source of mass campus mobilizations.
A fresh wave of campus protests broke out during the Spring Commencement season of 1969. Nixon rejected the advice of a informal Congressional task force recommending concessions to student demands, such as lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. Instead, Nixon unleashed Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, Nixon's lieutenant of crack-downs, to give a blistering, confrontational Commencement at Ohio State University n 7 June 1969:
"A society which comes to fear its children is effete. A snivelling, hand-wringing power structure deserves the violent rebellion it encourages. If my generation doesn't stop cringing, yours will inherit a lawless society where emotion and muscle displace reason." Integral to this diagnosis of the crisis is that the weakness of liberal authorities had created the violent disintegration of "reason." From Nixon's standpoint," Kabaservice writes, " a moderate and understanding approach toward the students who hated him would win him no votes, but stoking the silent majority's anger against radical students and the permissive elites who allegedly encouraged them offered rich political rewards."Note. Kabaservice, who has charted in convincing detail the crucial role lpayed by Nixon in the polarization fo the Republican party, identifies this early moment in his presidency as the turning point, when his "dark side" began to predominate: "Nixon's belief in the need for toughness, even ruthlessness, in the conduct of government eventually won out, leading him to despise most moderate Republicans as pious weaklings."Note.The Moon, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Manson Murders
Nixon made the most of the successes in the Apollo Moon Program launched by Kennedy back in the perilous times of 1961. The "Space Program," was just a small part of the overall military purpose of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), of course. The point of the "Space Race" between the USSR and the USA was to demonstrate ever-more effective superiority in the delivery of nuclear weapons. Sputnik had humiliated the United States in 1957 by demonstrating the Soviet's ability to encircle the globe with armed and espionage satellites. "Escape velocity" had been achieved for the first time, to break free of the Earth's gravitational field.
Now the United States had finally scored a decisive victory over the Soviets. During his Inaugural, Nixon included a long section on the wonder and symbolism of the "Earth From Space" image that was delivered from Apollo **. On 16 July at Cape Canaveral Florida, Apollo 11 was carried into orbit by the mighty Saturn V rocket, a missile designed and built in Southern California, the capstone of Wehrner Von Braun's career as America's sanitized SS-Nazi missile man.
After detaching from the Command Module on 20 July, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin piloted Landing Module Eagle to radio back that "The Eagle Has Landed." Nixon's subsequent videophone televised conversation with Armstrong and Aldrin has wide-ranging spatial significance, on the spatial configuration of power. Geospatially, Nixon's conversation with Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon broadcast, live, the greatest territorial achievement of any nation on Earth: to reach out and actually occupy the Moon itself. Their conversation is couched in good will for all humankind, but it was nothing less than a humiliating defeat for the USSR, and a joyous triumph for a vast military regime.
Without exaggerating, we can say that the United States' possession of "Tranquility Base" on the surface of the Moon, however small, can be traced backward through space to a massive footprint in Southern California. This footprint is easily visualized in the vast network of aerospace Prime Contractors and subcontractors throughout Southern California, including Raytheon, the developer of the Saturn V rocket engine, the most powerful engine ever produced by humankind.
Nixon's televised conversation with the Astronauts epitomized his long-standing roots in suburban Southern California. Just as his family served the growing suburbs, he became a suburban political candidate, representing the ambitious but fearful little burghers of the 'Burbs. Shopping Centers were a favorite venue for Nixon in all of his campaigns, like the West Covina Mall. Those sububs were increasingly saturated with more than one hundred thousand aerospace workers, all of whom thrived personally during military buildups, fuelled by military confrontations and bellicose politicians like Nixon.
Throughout Nixon's rise from Congress to Senate to the Vice Presidency, and then to the Presidency, Southern California remained one of the world's greatest concentrations of the “aerospace industry,” where prime- and sub-contractors designed and produced military missiles, satellites, aircraft, munitions, and electronics systems. The "Big Five" military contractors were Convair, Douglas, Lockheed, North American, and Northrup. Convair Astronautics was the largest of Convair’s divisions, employing nearly 25,000 workers at its San Diego plant alone, where workers produced the Atlas ICBM, which became operational at Vandenberg Air Force Base in September 1959, and the Atlas-Centaur spacecraft, originally designed for the first landings on the Moon. At Douglas, missile and space programs by 1960 accounted for 72% of the company’s outstanding orders.[6] The Saturn V subcontractors shared a footprint with the suburban ring of the Los Angeles Metropolis.
Manson Murders of August 1969: Racist Terrorism as Horror Movie
Americans only had a fortnight to celebrate their nation's finest hour on the Moon when the news broke of the horrific Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles, on 8 and 9 August. The highly manipulated followers of messianic lunatic Charles Manson, calling themselves "the Manson Family," committed horrific slasher killings of the pregnant move actress Sharon Tate, wife of Polish-born film director Roman Polansky. Manson planned the murders so as to appear that Blacks were the culprits (by planting a Black neighborhood with stolen items from the crime scene), hoping to start a race war. Manson Family plan to emerge from caves and take control for the white race.
Manson's "Family" was a violent mockery of the American family, and a chilling affront to the culture of security circulated in the suburban-targeted mass media.
While the American media, typified by Life Magazine, framed Manson's cult killings as "the dark edge of hippie life," Mason's terror killings were a phantasagoric extension of the rise of carnography in the mass media. Roman Polansky's Rosemary's Baby, a film that made a great sensation in 1968, also, uncoincidentally, invereted the family with the very Devil fathering a child in a Stanaic colony disgused as respectable New Yorkers. Polanski's bloody scene in which Mia Farrow's character is raped by Satan, marketed the slashed female body for mass consumption--as art? A year later, Charles Manson, targeting both Polanski and his wife Tate, perpetrated cruel murder of the Polanski-Tate and the LaBianca households for mass media consumption--for political terror.
The sudden collapse of censorship in the 1960s opened the space for filmmakers to explore all taboo subjects of the body, from erotic fantasies to sadistic violence. The New Hollywood was a powerful force pushing down the long-standing limits on cinematic expression. But ironically, in the carnival of sex and violence burst from any boundaries, good or evil, as it became possible for graphic and morally shocking images to "go viral."
Sharon Tate was the "It Girl" of 1969, her celebrity and beauty made her the target Manson sought, someone whose gruesome death would shock the Whites of Los Angeles into a murderous rampage against people of color. All of this is about bodies and horror. Race war fantasies, as Mike Davis showed in his brilliant and unique essay, The LIterary Destruction of Los Angeles, have been surprisingly common motif. In Manson, the fantasies escaped the bound of slasher-genocide pulp novels and science fiction movies, to invade the public sphere in a mounting Age of Terror.
The conflicts of these years were all territorial in important ways. Racial and economic segregation is the map of inequality, and all political and ideological movements enjoy geographic centers of support and power. From the Southeast suburbs of Los Angelenos county, then Orange County south to San Diego , was a vast regional reservoir of support for the New right. Reagan county it came to be called, and the ground had been prepared for decades by many a John the Baptist. Billy Graham was one of the most influential, and his Southern California Crusade at the Anaheim "A"s Stadium in September 1969 was both a successor to previous Graham mass revivals, but an answer to the decadent immorality broadcast from the Liberal Democratic coalition of West LA, Hollywood, and Central LA.
Nixon's Descent into Darkness, 1970-1974 (When Birnham Wood Comes to Dunsinane)
Act V Sc. III Dunsinane. A room in the castle.
Enter Macbeth, Doctor, and Attendants
Bring me no more reports; let them fly all:
Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane
Richard Nixon was a life-long consumer of information, producer of information, disinformation,, keeper or secrets. He sought to shape the world, the whole human globe, and did so in uncountable ways. But he was always frustrated that he could not control the public sphere. His anger at the press was very deep-seated, made notorious in his "Last Press Conference " of 1962. By his Presidency, his hostility to the press and his dissonance with the media in general led to a pathological hatreds and paranoias, thoroughly documented by his inner circle, beginning with H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, his Chief of Staff. As he said to former Harvard Professor Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, his National Security Adviser: "Never forget. The press is the enemy, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times."Note. Nixon's relation to the American public was so isolated and delusional that Garry Wills titled a chapter of his Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970), "They The People."
Nixon's war with public information began almost immediately after his hypocritical Inaugural Address. Furious that the New York Times had published news of small but secret invasion of Cambodia in April 1969 (a prelude to the much larger one he announced a year later), he and Kissinger both initiated a FBI investigation of both high-ranking Nixon administration official and journalists. Those reports kept flowing throughout 1970, feeding Nixon's increasingly voracious appetite for espionage-derived information. Wiretapping his own subordinates without their knowledge allowed him to know what everyone said behind his back. He eventually ordered the installation of the most thorough, voice-activated bugging and taping system in the White House, ever devised. A string of presidents did also make clandestine recordings of conversations: Kennedy and Johnson especially. But those systems needed to be switched-on manually. Nixon's system was totalitarian. It taped everything that was said in numerous key meeting rooms. Alexander Butterfield, aide to Bob Haldeman, introduced President Nixon to his elaborate system in February of 1971.Note.
The gruesome horrors, including real crimes against humanity, that the press revealed to the world public over the dreadful winter of 1969-70 provoked widespread protests and anger, more exposures of secret Nixon administration information, and an escalating hard-line by Nixon on suppressing internal dissent and targeting its participants. In November the atrocity of the My Lai Massacre was made public for the first time, the mass murders have been perpetrated nearly two years earlier, on 16 March 1968. Then on 30 April 1970 Nixon announced the "Cambodian Incursion," a major US expansion of the Vietnam War. On 1 May, without even waiting for the public to react, Nixon lobbed another stink-bomb when he taunted the nation's student protesters, "You know, you see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys on the college campuses today are the luckiest people on earth...and here they are burning burning up the books. I mean storming around on this issue. I mean you name it, get rid of the war, there will be another one." The outburst was a rant, as the closing phrases indicate. Nixon went on to compare thsoe "bums" unfavorably with the soldiers fighting in Vietnam: "kids just doing their duty." His view of the world was remarkably impoverished with only the claim that "boys" on campuses should just study and "kids" in war should just do their duty. Nixon had no idea what the American public who opposed the war actually felt about it, nor did that matter to him.Note
Nixon's twin statements set-off waves of anti-war protest across U.S. campuses. Quite possibly taking their cue from the President, soldiers and police now found themselves ready to suppress students with deadly force. At Kent State, Ohio, National Guardsmen in infantry formation fired a fullisade of 67 rifle shots directly into an unarmed crowd of students, killing four: Jeffrey Glenn Miller; age 20; Allison B. Krause; age 19; William Knox Schroeder; age 19; Sandra Lee Scheuer; age 20, and wounding nine others. Ten days later, students on the mostly-African American Jackson State University, protesting the Kent State killings and other grievances, were fired upon by officers of the Jackson Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, killing two students with shotguns: Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior, and James Earl Green, 17, both unarmed and at the steps of University buildings.
While it is a serious charge against Nixon to write that his reckless provocation led to the Kent State and Jackson State killings, it is significant that Nixon's first reaction to Haldeman's news was one of guilt. "Is this because of me, of Cambodia?...How can we turn this stuff off?" His second instantaneous reaction was his next recorded sentence: "I hope they provoked it." Haldeman's diaries corroborate the White House Tapes.Note. In both, he tells Nixon that it is unlikely the students provoked the shootings: "no real evidence that they did, except throwing rocks at the National Guard." [Haldeman 159] Despite what Haldeman told him, Nixon proceeded officially to blame the students for the killings. Nixon's public statement, crafted with Haldeman that day, offered no condolences for the families of the slain youths. Instead, the stern Law and Order president scolded the unarmed protestors for the violence: "This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy." Calling the killings a "tragic and unfortunate incident," he concluded with a warning campus "administrators, faculty, and students alike" to maintain order.Note.
Nixon switched on and off violence at will, worldwide. Now, for once at least, he felt the consequences of his actions. Haldeman recored in his diary that Nixon "Obviously realizes, but won't openly admit, his 'bums' remark very harmful." Most revealing for his conscious strategy of provocation, having set Agnew loose at Ohio State. Haldeman records that Now, after Kent State, Nixon "Wants VP [Agnew] to stop saying anything about students."Note.
While anxious to avoid further bloodshed on U.S. campuses, Nixon was nevertheless entirely without empathy for the sources of the widespread protest against the Vietnam War. He saw the protests merely as a matter of disrespect for authority. Shown photographs of the dead bodies of Gibbs and Green, a college and High School student, respectively, killed at Jackson State, Nixon said "What are we going to to do to get more respect for the police from our young people?"Note.
Nixon was un-ironically square, with a fixed and narrow cultural consciousness. By chance one night, while watching television, he stumbled upon All in The Family, the very popular sitcom conceived by Norman Lear. Nixon had never heard of it, and was shocked by what he saw. In it, Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) plays a bigoted, intolerant father of the Wold War II generation, with a married left-wing daughter living at home with her husband, played by Rob Reiner. The TV script is clearly written to favor the humanity and liberal perspectives of the son and daughter, but both sides are treated with sympathy. Nixon could not sort this out at all, however. He simply took it literally, and sided with Archie Bunker: The next day he ranted about the show to Haldeman, who recorded the diatribe:
"Star of show--square type--named Arch. Hippy son-in-law...the show was a total glorification of homosex. Made Arch look bad--homo look good. Is this common on TV?--destruction of civilization to build homos."Note.
Nixon leapt to the defense of Archie Bunker, whom he called "Arch." Like a 19th-century American ready to leap on the stage of a play defend the honor of the (fictional) Hero. Nixon saw the show as dangerous speech because it made homosexuality normal and honorable against the intolerant views of a blue collar guy.
"Jews are all over the government," Nixon recorded himself saying to Haldeman in the Oval Office: "Most Jews are disloyal...generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards." He said that the IRS was "full of Jews," and demanded that Haldeman get him the "names of the Jews, you know the big Jewish contributors [to the Democratic Party]...could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?"Note
Nixon's domestic policies have consistently earned him high marks as a "Liberal" or "Moderate" Republican who, like Eisenwhoer, had not abandoned the New Deal. Especially impressive was his aggressive approach to Civil Rights. By all accounts Nixon was a sincere believer in equal opportunity. we have seen how, even while courting Southern segregationist votes, he declared consistently that he was opposed to segregation and that his party should not be racist. Perhaps his biggest success as President was the so-called "Philadelphia Plan," which required contractors who received federal funds to hire fixed quotas of minorities. The policy was the work of Treasury Secretary George Schultz (later President Reagan's Chief of Staff), and his African-American Assistant Scretary, Arthur Fletcher. Tom Wicker praised this program as "perhaps teh first real success of any president on affirmative action." It was, however, an act of cynical political gain. Nixon and Schultz knew that the Democratic Party was dependent on its union support, and most Democratic unions hated this policy because it meant job loss for their all-white segregated unions.Note
Nixon could ride the high horse of Integration, hope to cultivate a few African-American Republicans, and undermine the Democratic party all at the same time. "Make sure there is something in it for the jigs," Nixon told Kissinger, using a racial epithet, but reminded him that "We do not make votes playing to Negroes." To Haldeman regarding Civil rights enforcement, "nothing more done int eh South beyond what the law requires," because of "No political gain for us."Note. When Nixon saw a Savannah News headline that read, "SEGREGATION DEADLINES WON'T BE ENFORCED," Nixon responded "Excellent job." Regarding the Congressional movement for a national holiday to honor Dr. King's birthday, he noted "No! Never!...That would be like making Nero Christ."Note
Nixon does not deserve real credit for his Civil Rights commitments because he negated those gains both by the cynical approach he took, and by his parallel track of signaling the opposite, per his white-racist targeted "Southern strategy." His Attorney General John Mitchell was most vocal in cutting back enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, withholding action against segregated schools, and Nixon himself took a major stand against "forced busing," declaring a national Busing Moratorium. Calling Busing "a remedy not a right": Nixon responded to charges that he was restoring the "Separate But Equal" by his busing moratorium and increasing funding for inner city mostly-black schools Listening to Nixon's press conference of *** date, we hear both the master policy wonk, and the master of political dissimulation. Nixon on Busing, 1972
In his management of publicity, Nixon actually preferred to be perceived as hostile to Civil Rights. All of this fit with his own personal racism in any case. "There were things he said to me that he never would have said on the record," Ehrlichman recalled, "for example, that blacks are ethnically inferior." "Former aids have said that he referred to blacks as 'niggers,' 'jigs,' 'jigaboos,' and 'jungle bunnies,.' This last epithet, John Ehrlichman said, was picked up from Bebe Rebozo."Note.
Cancer on the Presidency
From this point onward, Nixon became increasingly, criminally, brutal. Nixon already began the operations later to be discovered during the "Watergate" crisis, upon assuming office in 1969. Nixon mined all sources of clandestine intelligence, from the FBI to the CIA, to his own Plumbers, and he kept about him a veritable Praetorian Guard. He used the Secret Service as his secret police, a practice that alarmed even John Ehrlichman. (Summers 247). Nixon worked very, very hard, reading and writing constantly. He kept his cabinet divided and monopolized necessary, key information to himself, or between him and his very inner circle: H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, Chief of Staff, and John Ehrlichman, domestic affairs adviser, and Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser,. played very tough court intrigue against Secretary of State Rogers. Haldeman, a crew-cut Eagle Scout and Naval Reserve veteran, called himself "the President's Son of a Bitch."
Nixon and Haldeman planned an as-yet unknown number of crimes, from felonies to misdemeanors, on a daily basis. A chilling example was their discussion on 5 May 1971 about intimidating the leaders of the Anti-War movement, Abbie Hoffman in particular:
HALDEMAN: Do it with the Teamsters. Just ask them to dig up those, their eight thugs.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Yeah....They've got guys who will come in and knock their heads off.
HALDEMAN: Sure. Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that's what they really do. Like the Steelworkers have and--except we can't deal with the Steelworkers at the moment.
PRESIDENT NIXON: No.
HALDEMAN: We can deal with the Teamsters...
PRESIDENT NIXON: Yeah.Note.
It was the massive leak of the Pentagon Papers that had driven him to such a fury. When the 7,000-page internal study of the Vietnam War, documenting years of lying by the Pentagon to the public, began to surface, Nixon blamed some group of "fucking Jews" on Kissinger's staff.Note. It was, in fact, U.S. Marine veteran Daniel Ellsberg, one of Kissinger's brilliant students. Capable of loosing "murderers" against the Anti-War movement in May, Nixon by June of 1971 ordered the theft-by-firebombing of files on Vietnam held by the Brookings Institution, the liberal think-tank in Washington DC supporting opposition to the War. Nixon himself acknowledged his 30 June 1971 break-in order, in his 1975 memoirs, and multiple sources, including Dean, Ehrlichman, and Colson, concur that he also ordered the "firebombing" of Brookings, in order to allow FBI agents to follow the firefighters and pilfer the targeted documents.Note.
On tape, Nixon can be heard telling Haldeman: God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get them.Note.
"You are going to be my Lord High Executioner from now on,"" Nixon growled to Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman With this medieval command, Nixon authorized Haldeman to assemble a clandestine force of operatives--the "Plumbers"--a secret force that would stop up the leaks. To Chuck Colson, his Communications Director and reputedly the personification of Nixon's "Dark Side," Nixon fumed and gave a blank check for any unlawful act: "I don't give a damn how it is done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks,,,,I don't want to be told why it can't be done....I don't want excuses, I want results. I want it done, whatever the cost."Note.
Nixon's descent into darkness reached its lowest point, ironically, during and after his historic landslide re-election in November 1972. By all acconts, he retreated to Camp David like Saul in his tent, borooding and nursing a terrible vengeance. There he concocted his plan to humiliate his entire Cabinet by asking all for there resignations. There he set his will to teh "Chirstmas Bombing" [use the qutoes about not wanting do start it on Sunday]. and there he began to deal with teh fateful fallout of teh Watergate investigations.
Of course, Nixon did far more with his merry band of Cuban, American, Ex-CIA, Ex-FBI, Ex-Mercenary burglars and buggers. Perhaps John Dean's conversation with Nixon in the "Cancer on the Presidency" tape of *** June 1973 provides a fitting summary of the Tyranny that Nixon had imposed on his much-divided nation.
[analysis of the Cancer tape. Include both audio file and transcript.
Use this Tape Transcript Use this
1973: Cancer on the PresidencyBuggings, Muggings, Black Bag operations. All itn eh office of he Attorny General's office. Nixon wasn't surprised or shocked. His questioning is directed at determining how mny peopl eknow how much, whterh they can be kept silent. It's a leacy cancer ont eh presidency.
Conclusion
A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. --Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776)
Richard Milhaus Nixon would not allow his power to be corrupted by others. Instead, he corrupted himself with power. He sought and won a kind of power that far surpasses the seduction of money: the unlimited political power of the state. A U.S. president wielding nation-state power can trump the greatest fortunes and all the advantages of inherited privilege. Indeed, there was no higher power on Earth during the height of the Cold War when Nixon held the office. Since the World Wars, the presidential office is sufficient to control the world's economy, geography; sufficient to decide the lives and deaths of millions of people worldwide. Teddy Roosevelt proved that: he re-cast the U.S. presidency as the muscular, militaristic "bully pulpit" that struck aggressively, taking anything, from the Philippines to Cuba and the Panama Canal, that would advance American national interests. A big game hunter, TR forced mighty corporations and militant labor unions to negotiate because he cared more about nation-state power than money. No U.S. president wielded TR's "Big Stick" with greater strength and fury than Richard Nixon. In this sense, Nixon was a "great" president during the height of his global power. As President, at the apogee of U.S. global military-economic power, Richard Nixon was quite literally the most powerful man who ever lived. And as Tom Paine accurately predicted, the greater the power, the greater the potential of corruption.
ENDNOTES
[18] “Transcript of a meeting between the President and H.R. Haldeman in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972 from 10:04 to 11:39 AM.” National Archives, White House Tapes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roham Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Anderson, Terry H. The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. Oxford University Press, 2004
D.J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014.
Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. - Richard 37th, Act III: Thermidor, 1968-1974 [TEST - Related Material- 2]
- Richard 37th, Act III: Thermidor, 1968-1974 [TEST - Related Material- 3]
