The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  Nixon’s greatest tactical success came not from any actions of his own but from the Democrats’ fratricidal warfare. Johnson’s withdrawal left the putative dragon slayer, Eugene McCarthy, still in the field. But McCarthy would not accept his role as a Kennedy spear-carrier and get out of the way of the engine of history. Robert Kennedy, LBJ’s readily imagined foe, now became Nixon’s very real one when he entered the race. And then there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, eagerly trying somehow to repudiate his President and yet succeed him. His formula was the “politics of joy,” a slogan that rang hollow amid the growing casualties in Vietnam, the state of siege and open rebellion in major American cities and universities, and the gloominess and defeatism pervading an Administration he was obligated to defend. Joy somehow seemed perverse.

  Much of the Democrats’ primary brawling at first was left to McCarthy and Kennedy, since the Vice President had entered the race too late to qualify for the elections in most states. In May, McCarthy surprised Kennedy with a decisive victory in Oregon, thus piercing the Kennedy aura of invincibility. The Democrats’ nomination really was settled in the California primary a few weeks later, and in a surprising, tragic manner. Kennedy edged McCarthy in the balloting. But the evening’s results were dramatically reversed in the early morning hours when Sirhan Sirhan, a frustrated Palestinian nationalist, assassinated the New York Senator in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Assassination for a second Kennedy, and for the second prominent American figure in two months, paralyzed the nation, with grief for Kennedy’s partisans and with shock for others, appalled again by the convulsive violence that wracked the society. The mourning and sadness scarcely disguised the fact that Humphrey had been the primary political beneficiary.

  When the Republicans gathered in Miami for their convention in August, Nixon’s well-oiled machine projected an impression that the convention was merely a coronation ritual. After all, Nixon was the “people’s choice,” as the primaries had shown; since Romney’s withdrawal, no candidate had seriously challenged him. But the Miami convention closely resembled the pro-Goldwater gathering in San Francisco four years earlier, and the thunder on the right was ominous. For many delegates, Nixon was a choice, yet not one that enraptured either their hearts or their minds. Conservatives desired a rollback of the liberal welfare state and realized all too well that Nixon had often opportunistically supported it. The 1968 platform reflected their will as it reaffirmed the preceding one in a call for a conservative counterrevolution. Nixon simply was not “the one” for those fully committed to such views.

  By 1968, Barry Goldwater lacked credibility as a national electoral candidate, but the Republican Right now had Ronald Reagan, then in his first term as California governor and a rising star on the political scene. After years on the lecture circuit, attacking big government and promoting free enterprise, Reagan had gained national prominence with a last-minute television speech on behalf of Goldwater in 1964. Two years later, he parlayed his newfound fame into a rout of Governor Pat Brown. Reagan had promised a reduction in spending, lower taxes, and an end to campus disruptions. He delivered on none of his promises, but his popularity and appeal remained undiminished.10 And Reagan bore no loser image; after all, he had defeated Brown. Nixon had a real problem.

  From practically the moment of his election as governor in 1966, Reagan had been publicly coy about seeking the presidency. His lieutenant governor, Robert Finch, who had been Nixon’s personal assistant during the 1960 campaign, remembered that during the state election, Reagan’s staff was not yet prepared for the presidential game. But “twenty minutes after” he was elected, Reagan’s supporters turned their attentions to the big prize. They thought Finch would support him, but he remained loyal to Nixon.11

  The Reagan people had an informal alliance with the Rockefeller forces, one characterized by cynicism and convenience. The New York governor believed that to stop Nixon and gain the support of a deadlocked convention for himself necessitated giving Reagan running room. Such thinking was futile, naïve, and downright dangerous—unless the allegedly “liberal” Rockefeller actually preferred Reagan to Nixon. Many Nixon delegates reportedly were prepared to bolt to Reagan after an obligatory first-ballot declaration for the former Vice President. The Texas delegation had voted 41–15 for Nixon, but supposedly the figures would have been reversed in Reagan’s favor on a second ballot. The real danger to Nixon came from Southern delegations, ones deeply committed to the conservative agenda. Reagan clearly had gained some momentum in Miami, particularly after the Nixon camp had let it be known they would seriously consider various liberal Republicans for the vice presidency.

  For some time, the Nixon camp had worked out the outlines of what came to be known as the “Southern Strategy,” whereby, first, Southern convention delegates would be corraled, and ultimately, Southern electoral votes sealed for the candidate in November. Such a strategy entailed close alliances with prominent Southern political leaders. South Carolina Senator J. Strom Thurmond, a former Democrat who led the “Dixiecrat” revolt against Harry Truman in 1948, was the key figure. Nixon assured Thurmond of his opposition to school busing to achieve racial balance and promised to restore “local control” over education—a code phrase for reversing or at least limiting the process of desegregation that had been underway since the Supreme Court had declared “separate but equal” facilities unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

  Thurmond was Nixon’s most important operative at the Miami convention. He moved among the Southern delegations, affirming his satisfaction with Nixon’s stand on the busing and school issues. Equally important, he repeated what Nixon had told him in Atlanta on June 1: Nixon pledged “to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will respect the Constitution rather than rewrite it.” Nothing had reassured Thurmond more about Nixon, according to Thurmond aide Harry Dent. Thurmond also conveyed word to the delegates that Nixon had promised to consult him on the selection of a vice-presidential candidate, one who would be “acceptable to all sections of the party.” Fellow conservatives William Rusher and Phyllis Schlafly warned Thurmond and his aides to get their “pound of flesh” from Nixon, including written commitments on certain issues involving the South and national security.12 Thurmond, however, maintained his trust in Nixon and his commitment to him. John C. Calhoun, the great antebellum Southern political theorist and Thurmond’s ancestral political godfather, would have rejoiced when the South in effect realized Calhoun’s cherished notion of a concurrent veto.

  The Nixon lines held at the Republican Convention, and he gained his first-ballot victory, with 692 votes. But the combined total of his opposition was 641. It was not his last close call of the electoral season.

  After his nomination, Nixon selected his running mate in a largely conventional manner. He chose Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, a onetime Rockefeller supporter who had faced down black militants in the Baltimore riots following King’s assassination in April. Agnew’s presence on the ticket apparently satisfied Nixon’s Southern allies, but it would eventually cause him no end of problems—in the campaign and beyond.

  For Hubert Humphrey and the Democrats, the convention in Chicago was a disaster. The McCarthy forces remained adamantly opposed to the Vice President. The Kennedy delegates, with Senator George McGovern as their front man, were determined to assert their priorities and distance the party from the Johnson Administration. Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson stayed in the White House, seemingly irrelevant to the convention. In fact, he still exerted enough power to ensure a platform that in no way repudiated his presidency or his current policies, especially regarding the war. The result was an impossible situation for Humphrey. As he entered the race, he predicted that “Johnson’s not going to make it easy.”13 Given his position within the Administration, and given Johnson’s residue of power, Humphrey simply could not build bridges to the party’s detached wings.

  The Democratic Convention proceedings eventually became a sideshow to the turmoil in Chic
ago’s streets. Day and night, national television audiences watched confrontations between demonstrators and the Chicago police that seemed reminiscent of newsreel accounts of political rioting in Europe in the 1930s and elicited feelings that could be shared by Right and Left alike. If this were the “democratic process” at work, it did the Democrats little good. Indeed, the Chicago street battles only reinforced the fears and forebodings of that “Silent Majority.” The very success of certain elements in the old Democratic coalition only alienated them from the outraged protests in Chicago.

  At the convention itself, a last-minute attempt to reincarnate Camelot with Senator Edward Kennedy fell victim to Kennedy’s inertia and deteriorated into a comedy of errors as the “new pols” clumsily imitated “old pols” in wheeling and dealing. Humphrey easily captured the nomination on the first ballot, with more than four hundred votes to spare for a majority. But the convention would not record the usual unanimous vote for the candidate. The McCarthy forces left the convention with candles and departed for a funeral march through downtown Chicago. The next day, McCarthy addressed his loyal followers as “the government in exile.” The anger and activism in the streets had turned to contempt. One demonstrator held aloft a sign reading: “There Are Two Sides to Every Question—Humphrey Endorses Both of Them.”

  A few weeks later, George Wallace formally launched his American Independent Party. Talk persisted of a fourth-party candidacy for McCarthy. Humphrey was surrounded. The polls showed him trailing Nixon by more than fifteen points and ahead of Wallace by only five. Among the press and public there was enough contempt to allocate equally among the candidates. Comedian Dick Gregory thought that Humphrey looked like the man who would buy a used car from Nixon, and Wallace looked like one who would steal it.14 Still, reports of the Democrats’ demise were premature, if only because Richard Nixon remained a dubious commodity.

  The Nixon and Humphrey campaigns carried on, isolated from each other and from reality. Whatever the substantive shortcomings of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, they offered some appearance of engagement, of confrontation, allowing each candidate to offer a public test of himself while pitted against his adversary. None of that occurred in 1968. One candidate talked of a politics of joy, the other of unity. One was unreal, while the other offered unity on terms precisely opposite to the expressed needs and demands of those who had broken the national consensus. The Republican candidate broke new ground with a “made-for-media” campaign, largely avoiding longwinded orations, relying instead on clever thirty- or sixty-second commercials and using carefully screened public audiences for “grassroots” question-and-answer sessions. The Democratic candidate meanwhile ran perhaps the last traditional campaign in American presidential elections, featuring large rallies of the party faithful whom he addressed with hortatory stemwinders, desperately hoping to create a bandwagon psychology. Nixon shielded himself from intimacy with working journalists; Humphrey desperately sought it, but not necessarily to any advantage. (Some reporters confided to one another that they preferred Nixon: his victory would mean Key Biscayne presidential vacations rather than Minnesota ones.15) The campaigns to some extent reflected the different personalities of the candidates. But in fact, money—its abundance and its scarcity—dictated the differing strategies.

  Nixon’s campaign had been pointed at the alienated American “middle” since the primary season. The arrangement with Thurmond and other southerners sealed the course. The candidate’s surface talk of unity thinly disguised a blatant appeal to darker forces. Tape-recorded conversations with convention delegates revealed Nixon’s instinct for the expedient positions on the war, the role of the courts, open housing, gun control, and desegregation. In brief, Nixon chose to exploit the divisions in American society, carefully calculating what he thought was the winning position. The danger was apparent; eventually, as a leading editorial voice warned, he would have “to consider what kind of country he would then have to govern and whether he, or any man, could govern it effectively.”16

  Just after his nomination, Nixon told reporters that he would “barricade” himself “into a television studio and make this an antiseptic campaign.” He was as good as his word. The campaign was a seamless web of public-relations tactics. Nixon carefully avoided discussions of hard issues, darting especially around the vexatious Vietnam war. One aide later observed that the staff had tired of balloons and rallies and yearned for “issue-oriented drop-bys,” but he admitted that they produced few “because we were short on ideas.” Nixon and his handlers sought only to enhance his image as the man who would reassert traditional American values, while seeking to paint his opponent as one who had tarnished those values.

  The “selling” of Nixon in 1968 is central to understanding the campaign. Nixon’s advisers knew they had to use television to his advantage to avoid past mistakes. Marshall McLuhan had written in 1964 that Nixon’s 1960 television appearances had been disastrous. The Vice President’s “sharp, intense image” had contrasted unfavorably with Senator Kennedy’s “blurry, shaggy texture.” The Richard Nixon of 1960 was all wrong for the medium, McLuhan argued. Nixon was too anxious to sell himself, perhaps too pushy. His staring, dark eyes, McLuhan thought, gave him the image of a “railway lawyer who signs leases that are not in the interests of the folks in the little town.” Television typecast Nixon, making him all too obvious and leaving nothing to the viewer’s imagination.17 Nixon’s entourage thoroughly absorbed the McLuhan lessons. “[T]elevision would have to be controlled,” wrote one Nixon media adviser. He would need men around him “who knew television as a weapon” and could exploit it to portray “Richard Nixon, the leader, returning from exile.” Image was all. Even Nixon’s chief speechwriter understood. He urged experimentation with film and television techniques in order to pinpoint “those controlled uses of the television medium that can best convey the image we want to get across.” Words and ideas fruitlessly engaged the voters’ intellect, writer Ray Price argued; better to work on their emotions, which “are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”18

  What had to be sold was a “New Nixon,” something new for the media to project, something new for people to consider. Nixon’s advisers pushed hard on the idea. Leonard Garment described himself as a lifelong Democrat who had found Nixon abhorrent. “But he’s changed,” Garment insisted to reporters. “The years in exile have made him a better man, a more thoughtful and compassionate man.” Journalists, thus briefed, received an interview (more like an audience) with the candidate, who then would dutifully portray the New Nixon, impressing those who came with his new, serious views, betraying none of the stereotypical negative images so familiar to media people who had been close to him. The New York Times assigned a reporter full time to Nixon in late 1967. He diligently cultivated the Nixon staff, convincing them that he saw Nixon with “a fresh eye.” In one of his first stories, he announced that the familiar “Red-baiting Nixon” was gone, and the New Nixon represented “a walking monument to reason, civility, frankness.”

  The new package was also offered in a newly humanized flavor. Nixon appeared on the popular television program Laugh-In, revealing that he could make fun of himself. His participation was calculated and marked the absorption of another McLuhan lesson. In 1963, Nixon had chatted and played the piano on a popular talk show. Instead of the “slick, glib, legal Nixon,” McLuhan observed, “we saw the doggedly creative and modest performer.” That kind of touch, McLuhan believed, might well have altered the 1960 results.

  More hostile critics, such as writer Norman Mailer, admittedly found Nixon “less phony,” agreeing that he had moved away from his earlier drives of “total ambition and total alienation from his own person” to a point of partial conciliation with himself. Mailer thought Nixon a blur, going in and out of focus between something true and something false, but now carefully correcting the “phony step.” Mailer missed the point; becoming a blur was the ultimate McLuhan “message.”

 
In a carefully contrived television question-and-answer session with a popular football coach as host, Nixon showed his own special way of dealing with the old/new dichotomy. To great applause from his studio audience, he urged Americans to ask “which Humphrey” they now faced. The Republican candidate acknowledged himself as a “new Nixon,” older, wiser, and aware of a new, changing world. But there was, too, an “old Nixon,” firmly wedded to his belief in “the American system.” Thus he offered “new ideas for the new world,” but as for his belief “in the American view and the American dream, I think I am just what I was eight years ago.”19

  Perhaps there was no New Nixon—just new perceptions. Howard Phillips, a militant conservative who had idolized Nixon since his teen years, believed that the man never really changed. Speaking in the last days of the Nixon Administration in 1974, as he issued a “conservative manifesto” calling for the President’s resignation, and at a time when talk of a New Nixon had faded and the Old Nixon appeared very much restored, Phillips said: “Throughout his public career, Mr. Nixon has always tried to please his audience, seeking their confidence and admiration by becoming the man he thinks they want him to be. The changing perceptions of Nixon—the New Nixon, the Old Nixon, the statesman, the strategist—do not reflect a change in the man but in the audience to which he is at any moment appealing.” When the imagery was contrived, Ray Price understood what was necessary: “It’s not the man we have to change, but rather the received impression.”20 In short, the changes in Nixon really amounted to smoke and mirrors. What was new was an outwardly restrained Nixon—a “cool” man to match the media needs his handlers so respected and understood, and which, together, they would master in this campaign.