The 1968 race pitted the inevitable winner, Humphrey, against the suddenly revived Richard Nixon, who had made one of the most amazing political comebacks of all time to capture the Republican nomination. Just six years earlier, when he lost the governor’s race in California, Nixon had told reporters, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” Nixon resurrected himself largely because of the rampant lawlessness in the country and his insight that Americans longed for “law and order.” He also understood that, if elected, he had to get the United States out of the war, one way or another, and he therefore claimed to have a “secret plan” to get America out of Vietnam. His anticommunist record suggested that whatever it was, it would not be concession to Hanoi. Claiming there was a “Silent Majority” of Americans who did not protest and did not demonstrate, but worked at their jobs, paid their taxes, and raised their families, Nixon appealed to the many who held the country together, kept the roads and Social Security funded, and raised kids who never broke any laws, yet who constantly found themselves portrayed by the media as boring, unimaginative, unhip, uncool, and generally not with it. In selecting Spiro T. Agnew, the governor of Maryland, as his running mate, Nixon further alienated the media and the elites, handing them a human lighting rod to absorb their attacks. During the first incarnation of the Republican “southern strategy,” Nixon told southern convention delegates that he would not “ram anything down your throats” and that he disliked federal intervention. Many took Nixon’s comments as code words for a lackadaisical approach to desegregation—which they may well have been—but he had also acknowledged that states did have legitimate constitutional protections against federal interference. At any rate, the southern strategy effectively nullified a strong third-party candidacy by former Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist and strong hawk.151
Although the margin of victory was somewhat distorted by Wallace, Richard Nixon won convincingly in the electoral college, 302 to 191. Wallace received nearly 10 million popular votes, along with 46 electoral votes in five southern states that almost certainly would have gone to Nixon in a two-way race. This meant that Nixon received only 43 percent of the popular vote, or about the same as in other three-way races, for example, Wilson in 1912 or Bill Clinton in 1992. He failed to carry a single large city, yet racked up California, Illinois, Ohio, and virtually all of the West except Texas.152 Viewing the Nixon and Wallace states together spotlighted a strong rejection of LBJ and his policies. Of course, the press was unhappy with this result. Reporter David Broder warned that the “men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon…[and it is] easier to accomplish the second time round.”153 Nixon saw the press as the enemy, telling his staff “nobody in the press is a friend.”154
In fact, he was right. Virtually unnoticed, the media in America had undergone a fundamental and radical shift in the sixties. This began with journalists’ utter failure to cover the Kennedy administration fairly and, subsequently, to cover the assassination either objectively or thoroughly. Seeking to recover lost ground and their journalistic virginity, members of the press had accelerated their attack on LBJ throughout the Vietnam War; then, when “their” candidate—Eugene McCarthy—scarcely made a dent in the Democratic nominating process, they opened up all their guns on Nixon. Most members of the press did not like Nixon, either personally or ideologically, and his “illegitimate” election allowed them to attack mercilessly.
“We Are All Keynesians Now”
Nixon came into office hoping to restore the pomp and circumstance of the White House, outfitting the marine guards with European-style ostentatious uniforms. Patriotic, convinced of the rightness of his position, Nixon unfortunately lacked the charisma that Kennedy, Jackson, or the Roosevelts had exhibited. His taste never seemed quite right: the new uniforms he had ordered for the White House guards only led to complaints that he was trying to create an “imperial” presidency. Having struggled through a poor childhood, Nixon never adapted to the modest wealth and trappings associated with the presidency. He never looked comfortable in anything less than a coat and tie. Yet he was a remarkable man.
Raised as a Quaker, he had played piano in church and was a high school debater. He entered the navy in World War II after putting himself through Whittier College and Duke University Law School. Elected to Congress from California in 1946, he was largely associated with anticommunism, especially the investigation of Alger Hiss. Criticized for failing to support desegregation issues, Nixon took states’ rights seriously. The notion that he was a racist in any way is preposterous: since 1950, when it was definitely not fashionable, he had been a member of the NAACP, and he had received the praise of Eleanor Roosevelt for his nondiscrimination policies as chairman of the Committee on Government Contracts.
Politically, Nixon’s election promises of respecting Main Street and upholding “law and order” had touched a desire among Americans to control the decade that had spun out of control.155 Billed as the “the most reactionary and unscrupulous politician to reach the White House in the postwar era,” Nixon was neither.156 Both Kennedy and Johnson had exceeded Nixon in their ability to deceive and lie, and if one considers Nixon’s economics, he was arguably was less conservative than Truman.
Far from retreating from liberalism, Nixon fully embraced the basics of New Deal economics and, at least in practice, continued to treat social programs as though they were indeed effective and justifiable public policies. “We are all Keynesians now,” he stated, indicating a faith in Keynesian economics, or the proposition that the government, through fiscal and monetary policy, could heat up or cool off the business climate. With the remnants of Great Society congressional delegations entrenched, and with the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, the giant welfare state of the Great Society promised to grow, and grow rapidly, without a chief executive holding it in check. Meanwhile, the bill for LBJ’s programs started to come due under Nixon, and social spending rose dramatically during his administration, especially the budget for AFDC. Per-person costs to “lift” someone out of poverty went from $2,000 in 1965 to $167,000 by 1977.157
Even without the prodding of the Democrats, Nixon expanded government’s scope and activities. Under his watch, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came into being, with its tendency to acquire vast and unchecked powers over private property in the name of the environment. The agency had a $2.5 billion budget and had employed seven thousand people in less than two years.158 Its Endangered Species Act of 1973 stopped construction of a $116 million dam in Tennessee because it might affect a fish called a snail darter, but that was only a taste of the runaway power the environmental agencies would later wield. By 1998, some 1,100 different endangered species were protected by the government to the extent that merely shining a light on a kangaroo rat at night—even if by accident—constituted a federal violation!
Farmers watched in horror as EPA agents, often dressed in black with firearms, sealed off their land or seized their equipment for threatening “wildlife preserves,” otherwise known as rancid ponds. Restrictions on killing predators in the West grew so oppressive that ranchers engaged in the shoot-and-shovel approach, where they simply killed coyotes or wolves and buried the bodies. By the 1990s, a Florida man was sent to prison for two years after placing clean sand on his own lot; a Michigan man was jailed for dumping dirt on his property (because his wife had asthma); and an Oregon school district was taken to court for dumping sand on a baseball field. Land that was dry 350 of 365 days a year could be designated by the EPA as a “wetland”! The government claimed private land as small as 20 feet by 20 feet as a sanctuary for passing birds—or, as one wag called them, glancing geese. These and numerous other excessive and outrageous practices by the EPA and related land and environmental agencies went far beyond Teddy Roosevelt’s goal of conserving wildlife and nature and bordered on elevating animals to human status.159
Such an approach was not surprising
. A linchpin of the modern environmental movement, made popular in a 1968 book by biologist Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, was the notion that people were reproducing far too rapidly and would soon create such environmental and population problems that the seas would dry up and “millions” would starve when the agricultural sector could not keep up.160 “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he intoned: “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”161 Malthus eventually repented of such preposterous views after he had written them. Almost two hundred years later, events proved Ehrlich’s theories as wrong as flat-earth theories.162 The United States—and the world, for that matter—continued to increase food production per capita, both on average and on every continent. Indeed, with very few exceptions, almost every twentieth-century famine was politically induced.163 At the time Ehrlich predicted the deaths of “hundreds of millions,” an Iowan named Norman Borlaug, who had grown up in the Depression-era Dust Bowl, concluded from observing dry midwestern fields that the problem was the lack of technology, not the application of it.164 Borlaug engineered new strains of wheat, which expanded food production in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the slowest food-growing regions of the world. Not only did Borlaug’s efforts produce more food overall, but his techniques increased production per acre.
Of more immediate impact on the Nixon-era economy was the environmental movement’s attack on the automobile. Seeking to drastically cut back auto emissions, the EPA planned widespread new controls to “rein in” Detroit. Exhaust gases in the atmosphere, by then called smog, which included less visible but possibly more dangerous elements, had become an obvious problem in many cities, especially Los Angeles. The problem arose from the “tragedy of the commons,” wherein it was in the individual interest of people to pollute, but in no one’s individual interest to spend money for expensive pollution equipment on a car. Rather than provide tax incentives or other indirect methods to encourage people to move, on their own, to less polluting vehicles, the government used brute force. Even for those convinced that the government needed to act, the emphasis should have been on having the government set a standard—as it does with the department of weights and measures—and allowing Detroit to meet it by whichever means it found most effective or profitable. Instead, the EPA quickly drifted into determining which technologies cars “should” use. Without doubt, the air was cleaned up within twenty years, but other aspects of American life suffered dramatically as Americans saw taxes for the growing bureaucracy increase while their choices shrank, and there is no evidence that the same results could not have been achieved through market-oriented methods.
Similar measures passed by the 1968–74 congresses included the Occupational Health and Safety Act (administered by OSHA, the Occupational and Safety Health Administration), the Toxic Substances Control Act, and a series of clean air and pure food and drug acts. By 1976, businesses estimated that it cost $63 billion per year to comply with this legislation—money that ultimately did not come from the “evil corporations,” but from (often low-income) consumers who paid higher and higher prices. At the same time, productivity fell. The Coal Mine Health and Safety Act reduced coal production by 32 percent. “Good,” shouted the environmentalists, but it made America more dependent on foreign fuels. Worse, unemployment soared in states where federal pollution mandates forced vast new expenditures on scrubbers and other pollution-control devices.
Not only did Nixon fail to resist any of these measures, he embraced them, accelerating the growth of government on his own, even when legislation was not foisted on him. The White House staff, which before Kennedy consisted of 23, rose to 1,664 by the time of his assassination, then leaped to 5,395 by 1971.165 Expanding government across a wide range of activities by maintaining the Great Society social programs and the space race, and adding the requirements of Vietnam and the cold war on top of all the new costs of the EPA and other legislation, had made Washington’s debts such a drag on the economy that it had to slow down, if not collapse. The first sign that something was seriously wrong was inflation and its related effect, the declining value of the dollar abroad. Europeans, especially, did not want to hold dollars that had steadily lost their value. If the U.S. government could not control its appetites, then the international banking system—headed by American banks—could and did.
The postwar financial structure, created under the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, called for foreign currencies to be pegged to the dollar—the international medium of exchange—and for the dollar to be held relatively constant to gold (at about $35 per ounce). A stable dollar was achieved through balanced budgets and fiscal restraint in the United States. Once the Great Society programs had kicked in, however, balancing the budget—especially under Nixon’s Keynesian structure—was nearly impossible. Every new deficit seemed to call for new taxes, which, in turn, forced productivity and employment downward, generating more deficits. Eventually, Nixon severed the link to gold, and although many conservative economists howled, he had actually unwittingly foisted the dollar into an arena of international competition that imposed discipline on the U.S. Congress that it could never achieve itself. Within a decade, as electronic money transfers became common, the free-floating currency markets reacted swiftly and viciously against any government that spent money too freely. Nixon’s paradoxical legacy was that he helped kill Keynesian economics in the United States for good.
The End of Vietnamization
“Peace with honor” had characterized Nixon’s approach to getting the United States out of Vietnam. Along with his national security adviser, Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, Nixon had sought to combine a carrot-and-stick approach to dealing with Hanoi. The “carrot” negotiations involved continuing talks in Paris to get the North Vietnamese out of the South. After Tet, with the elimination of most of the VC armies, this would have amounted to a victory for the South. But Hanoi did not want any genuine negotiations and had stalled, hoping to run out the clock on the patience of the American public. Kissinger’s “stick” included an accelerated bombing of the North combined with an immense resupply of the Vietnamese army, known as Vietnamization.
In reality, Vietnamization returned to the original Kennedy policy of supporting Vietnamese troops in the field, and by 1969 the Saigon government seemed much more enthusiastic about demanding that its own generals actually fight. As it turned out, as long as they had American air support and supply, the Vietnamese troops proved capable, holding their own against the communists. Nixon, whose name is strongly associated with the Vietnam War because of the protests, withdrew Americans at a faster rate than John Kennedy had put them in.
In May 1969, Nixon announced a new eight-point plan for withdrawing all foreign troops from Vietnam and holding internationally supervised elections. Under the new plan, the United States agreed to talk directly to the National Liberation Front (NLF), but behind the scenes it sent Kissinger to work the Soviet Union to pressure the North. That June, Nixon also withdrew the first large number of troops from Vietnam, some 25,000. Another 85,000 men would be brought home before the end of the year. This, obviously, was the corollary of Vietnamization—the withdrawal of American forces, which, after hitting a peak of 540,000 troops when Nixon came into office, steadily declined to only about 50,000 at the time of his resignation.
Another element of the stick strategy, though, was a renewed commitment to bombing North Vietnam. Here the United States missed yet another opportunity to take control of the conflict. Unlike Johnson, who had made the strategic bombing of the North ineffectual by selecting targets and instituting pauses and peace offensives, Nixon appreciated the necessity for pressure applied consistently and focused particularly on Hanoi. Still, North Vietnamese casualties were light, with only 1,500 civilians killed during the entire war compared to nearly 100,000 dead in the bombing of Tokyo in World War II. Such facts did not dissuade antiwar Senator George McGovern from telling NBC that t
he United States had conducted “the most murderous aerial bombardment in the history of the world,” had engaged in “the most immoral action that this nation has ever committed,” and had carried out a “policy of mass murder.”166 In fact, a real “mass murder” had occurred, although it had taken place nearly a year before, while Johnson was still in office.
In the fall of 1969 the Pentagon revealed that during the Tet offensive, American soldiers had entered a village at My Lai and massacred the inhabitants, including women and children. First Lieutenant William Calley, who had led the assault, was court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of twenty-two unarmed civilians. A psychiatric team who examined the men concluded they were sane, and had known what they were doing at the time. Naturally, this incident fanned the flames of the antiwar movement, which derided soldiers as “baby killers.” Calley’s statement justifying his conduct indicated that he had not differentiated at all between Vietnamese civilians and Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldiers. “It was no big deal,” Calley said. “That was my enemy out there.”167
It was not My Lai, but another action, this time by Nixon, that set off the protesters like never before. Nixon did not intend to let the communists attack allied bases from Cambodia with impunity, and beginning in March 1969, the president sent American aircraft on secret bombing missions over Cambodia, exposing North Vietnamese troops there to fire. A year later, on April 30, 1970, U.S. troops entered Cambodia to clear out the North Vietnamese sanctuaries. It was a move that should have occurred in 1965, and would have occurred in any declared war almost instantly. But this merely temporarily protected Americans already in the South. It did little to affect the attitudes of the North.
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