In this segment I want to talk about Richard Nixon.
Nixon I have here as the
the third of the presidential candidates, major candidates, running
in the 1968 election. Nixon's not third because he's the least important
by any means, and I wouldn't want to give you that impression but Nixon's third in
no small part because he,
his shadow, let's put it that way.
His shadow cast across the 20th century
is extraordinarily long. From
World War II all the way through the end of his presidency and really beyond
there's the presence of Richard Nixon
in and behind American politics.
And I think that's something really worth considering as we talk about Richard
Nixon.
So Nixon runs as the Republican
candidate in 1968 against the Democrat Hubert Humphrey and
the Independent George Wallace.
As far as background goes Nixon comes from California,
coming from the west coast. And
he grew up with a very devoted mother
who apparently thought extraordinarily highly of her son,
and a Quaker mother, in other words his mother was
also a Quaker. And I'm not sure entirely
what effect that had on Nixon, I've read differing accounts,
but I dare say it it helped both the fact he had a sort of doting mother and
that he comes from this Quaker background it probably helped in
fundamental ways to define
his character, his personality, who he was
when you kind of moved aside the political facade.
He served in the Second World War
out in the Pacific, if I remember correctly.
And I remember a story
about Nixon's service and that was that he was a poker player,
but he didn't play for fun.
He played to win. If he didn't have the hand that he thought would win the game
Richard Nixon would fold and wait until he found
a really good hand knowing that he would win. It wasn't the bluffing.
It wasn't the the skill of judging personality it was nothing like that.
It was a sort of intense desire
for success, not winning for its own sake,
but success in terms of accumulating capital.
Now what I'm focused on with that statement
is I think we already are learning something about Richard Nixon.
And I don't know any better way to put it than he's
not a fun guy. When you get beyond the politics
into the the man there, he's just not a fun guy.
He's intense. He can be extraordinarily disciplined,
rigid even, I think at times.
He's always focused. Always focused
and he's a fighter. We're going to find that out. It turns out that
Nixon apparently used some of his poker winnings from the Second World War to
help fund
his first political race and he's already
into politics by 1946.
He goes on of course to Congress in the
1940s and 1950s. He develops
a reputation as a very strong, I was almost going to say virulent, but very strong
anti-Communist.
1953
he becomes Vice President under Dwight Eisenhower and then of course in 1960
when he runs for the presidency himself,
Richard Nixon is defeated by John F Kennedy by an extraordinarily slim margin.
It's quite possible for Richard Nixon to
have contested the 1960 election
and I think it's notable that he chose not to.
Instead, he goes back to California
and seeks to become the governor of California in 1962.
And the campaign is a failure.
And here again we have a chance I think to see something about the Nixon
personality.
He was always at odds with Dwight Eisenhower. They didn't get on well.
I don't think Eisenhower trusted Richard Nixon.
He saw him as perhaps too ambitious but also I think
Nixon's own personality, a bit of paranoia,
a sense of insecurity, a lack of confidence if you will,
probably put Eisenhower off a good bit.
After the 1962 gubernatorial campaign,
Nixon strikes out at the media. He
makes that kind of woeful statement that,
I'll paraphrase some of it, but basically he hopes that the
media is happy now that Nixon's been beaten, that they were on the
opposition side and
he says that you know you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore.
Most political observers
pretty much forgot about Nixon in a sense
as a potential candidate for high office, high national office.
He didn't go away. He did sort of disappear from the national radar a bit
He practiced law. And
he actually started by about 1966 he started really fostering relationships.
He would go out and sort of partly on his own dime, certainly with his own time,
he would go out and campaign
for other Republican candidates. Building
numerous, numerous obligations
throughout the Republican party so that these folks who won their elections and
they won, in part, because Nixon had helped them campaign,
they owed him.
And you get a sense that Nixon the ambitious politician,
post 1962, hadn't simply drifted away but in fact
was already planning. Had already planned,
perhaps is a better way to put it, for his reemergence
on the national scene.
It's in 1968
at a sort of opportune moment, that Richard Nixon
reemerges as a presidential candidate for the Republican Party.
Essentially Nixon
will run on many of the same
issues that George Wallace will utilize.
Nixon had come to see, come to believe
that most Americans certainly middle-class Americans
had had enough of hearing
about the problems of the other
America. That they had
or at least had a sense that they had already sacrificed
in some ways for
racial justice. That they were tired of this campaigning for reform
that seemed to benefit
an undeserving class.
Nixon also
saw
and drew upon
the backlash to federal government
that many Americans had come to believe lay behind
many of the problems that the United States now faced.
That, that big government
i.e., Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs,
etc. simply had fostered
not an improvement in the United States but in fact
a loss. In particular, a loss
of certain values that the middle class held as
truly representative of the United States.
So Richard Nixon is
appealing to what he considers to be,
and the term that's often used is, the silent majority.
In other words, he's trying to appeal to the American,
kind of middle-class American, that's going to work every day,
trying to pay off the house, trying to pay off a car, they're not out in the
streets protesting, they're not out the streets rioting, they're not demanding
their rights. At least that's kinda of how Nixon would put it.
They are respectable.
Nixon is also going to play to
questions about Vietnam.
Although he's not terribly specific during the campaign, Nixon promises to
end the war in Vietnam with honor.
In other words, we're gonna get the US outta this quagmire, we're gonna get the US
outta this drain, but we're going to do it in a way
that will not tarnish the reputation
of the United States worldwide.
So if you really wanted to boil it down,
for now think about the silent majority
as the focus of the appeal,
think about a promise of law and order
i.e., basic government, good government,
and then end the war in Vietnam with honor.
And those become the the kind of essential pieces perhaps
of the Nixon
campaign.
Where all this comes down
at the very end of it, the 1968 campaign
just to give you some idea... the Democrats are split.
They were already split before the campaign
and they never managed to truly unify
during the campaign. George Wallace
really doesn't hurt the Democrats in some ways
because the Conservatives are already fleeing the Democratic Party,
so much as he pulls potential votes from Richard Nixon,
especially among blue-collar workers.
Nixon wins and here are the statistics:
His victory in 1968
is by a margin that's almost as small as the margin
of defeat he suffered in 1960;
Nixon whens 43.4 percent of the popular vote;
Hubert Humphrey manages a comeback and ends up winning 42.7 percent of the
popular vote;
and George Wallace the Independent candidate takes home 13.5
percent
of the popular vote.
In Electoral College terms, Hubert Humphrey
takes Washington, Minnesota,
Texas-in all 14 states;
Nixon will take the West
and the Midwest,
but here's the interesting thing, and something we'll talk about the next
segment,
Nixon also takes Tennessee, Kentucky,
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
and Florida. And what you have there
is not merely through the west like California, where Nixon's from,
not really the Midwest, kind of middle America,
but you also have Nixon taking states in the upper South
and a few deep South or lower South states.
George Wallace in the Electoral College, and
remember that's done by state so we actually have in this country fifty
different state elections for president,
George Wallace takes Louisiana, Arkansas,
Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
Most of those are deep South states.
So the South, the old Democratic conservative South, has gone for Wallace
and portions of the upper South and lower South then have gone for Nixon, the
Republican.
Wallace is an Independent. That gives you
a sense of a couple things. One, what's happened to the Democratic party?
And what's happened to the Democratic party is it's fractured and it split.
Southern conservatives traditionally Democrats are no longer loyal
necessarily to the Democratic party.
Many Southern senators and representatives have
begun switching over to the Republican party by 1968.
What we're seeing in the 1968 election
is a realignment,
a realignment of American politics. And again, it doesn't just happen in '68.
It starts before and
it comes after but it reflects the emergence,
the emergence of a new conservative theme
in American politics and in American society
that manifests itself regionally.
In different regional political alignments.
If you look at the record today,
the American South tends to vote Republican.
Tends to vote Republican. Not all parts of the South,
not all states all the time,
but it's extraordinarily different politically than the early 20th century
when the solid Democratic South
could be depended upon to provide a minority control for
Southerners in the Democratic party.
We'll pick up in the next segment
talking about some of the reasons for this realignment.
And then we'll move on to examine the Nixon presidency
and ultimately we'll make it to Watergate.