The Wars of Watergate (12 page)

For the next year, Nixon ran the old-fashioned way, beating the political bushes, touching base with party officials and contributors who would influence primaries and delegate selections. The apparent purpose was to aid and build the party; Richard Nixon himself, of course, was the primary beneficiary. The march was now the race.

Johnson’s withdrawal in the spring of 1968 resolved Nixon’s future. But the future of the war itself and the nation’s political leadership remained unsettled and in doubt. The
Washington Post
, a Johnson supporter, praised the President’s “personal sacrifice in the name of national unity,” and thought
him entitled “to a very special place in the annals of American history and to a very special kind of gratitude and appreciation.” Gratitude for what? For the promise of a presidential campaign “of less divisiveness and less bitterness than the one the country had expected.” The metaphors swirled in editorial ecstasy: “The President” had “lanced the boil of faction and opened the abscess of partisanship on the body politic,” the
Post
concluded; his “moving declaration” had restored “unity.”
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But LBJ’s lame-duck actions only magnified frustrations with the war. When he announced his withdrawal as a candidate in March 1968 and promised his best efforts to the peace process, approximately 486,600 Americans were in South Vietnam. By August, the President had authorized a troop level of 545,500. Johnson talked of massive peace efforts, and his new Defense Secretary, Clark Clifford, advocated what later came to be called “Vietnamization”—that is, enlarging the Army of South Vietnam, equipping it, and giving it sole responsibility for the defense of the country. And yet the reality of the war hardly changed a ripple, accentuating the President’s image as a manipulator and deceiver. Most of all, the unity that the
Washington Post
had predicted would be the consequence of Johnson’s withdrawal remained elusive and illusory.

Unity was not the only casualty. Johnson’s command of power steadily diminished. Johnson understood power: “I know where to look for it, and how to use it,” he said. But by the spring of 1968, there was little for him to use. The President’s own faults and shortcomings only partially explained his declining position. The Vietnam war, it must be remembered, was not the only cause for alienation and disaffection in American life. The rebellions in the northern black ghettos and in the white South, and among educated, middle-class young whites, as well as various other causes ranging from ecology to gay liberation, had little connection with Johnson’s lack of “style” or his conduct of the war. Altogether, the prevailing unrest was, as law professor Alexander Bickel noted, “an extraordinarily sustained experience of civil disobedience and conscientious objection.”
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Probably no regime could have survived, let alone turned back, such powerful tides.

America seemed to be coming apart, and its President appeared so powerless, so unable to master events. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. sparked a new wave of urban riots in New York, Chicago, Newark, Baltimore, and saddest of all, in Washington, D.C. Looting was widespread, and police responded quickly and with decisive force, as if sensing a new mood that demanded such a reaction. The sight of flames in the nation’s capital, only blocks from the White House and Congress, offered another blow to the Administration’s pride and reinforced its appearance of isolation. What was worse, the flames seared the consciousness of significant portions of the nation, spelling new trouble for powerholders. Protests had been heard in the land for nearly three years; but now, new
voices of counterprotest emanated from what, unscientifically but not without reason, would be dubbed the “Silent Majority.”

The important, sustained revolution came from within the ranks of what had been the dominant political coalition. The “risen” middle class, the blue- and white-collar workers, and ethnics who had nourished the growth of the Democratic majority, now found themselves unhappy with the young protesters who were the new cohabitants of its political home. The protesters’ challenges to cherished views of the American way of life, the criticisms of what was wrong with America, left the “old-fashioned Democrats” confused, shaken, and above all frightened, especially as events took a violent turn. Whatever their own disenchantment with the Vietnam war, they hardly identified themselves with the public expressions of outrage by disaffected groups. A political alliance between protesters and conventional Democrats simply was improbable. The latter had little sympathy for the blacks and dispossessed who, in their minds, had not worked to achieve the American Dream. Their disdain, even contempt, for the alienated young campus radicals was as powerful. After all, these were the spoiled, pampered, comfortable children of those above—or even their own ungrateful offspring.
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America had changed. The long-familiar assets that historically had characterized American society—vast space, mobility, available and abundant capital for technological development, sophisticated communications techniques, “grassroots democracy”—now emerged as liabilities. Their negative effects multiplied and rippled into waves of irritation and mutual distrust that threatened the harmony and delicate balance of American life. Perhaps the pluralist wars that raged just beneath the surface of life no longer could be contained.

The counterrevolutionists questioned long-prevailing liberal dogma that crime, poverty, and other social disorders reflected cultural and social wrongs. The standard liberal response to social ills was money, programs, and empathy—“bleeding hearts” and “doing good,” in the terms of unfriendly commentators. The same simplistic, one-sided approach is precisely what the Silent Majority also questioned, as they saw cities in flames, order and authority flouted, and the cherished realities and symbols of flag and institutions treated with contempt. Enough. Poverty and unemployment could be deplored, yet the prevailing liberal sympathy for the aggrieved seemed somehow disproportionate to other realities. Wasn’t there a place for condemning anarchy and lawlessness as well? Richard Nixon thought so.

As the 1968 primary season wound down, and as he had imposed his own moratorium on discussions of the war, Nixon turned to the “law-and-order” theme. He scoffed at Johnson’s Great Society programs. Money, he insisted,
had not solved the problem of crime. We needed more police and more money for them, less “soft” Supreme Court decisions, an Attorney General who would enforce the law, more wiretapping—in short, more support for the “peace forces” and less sympathy for the “criminal forces.” Nixon never strayed far from that theme.
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Meanwhile, black militant H. Rap Brown called violence “as American as cherry pie,” only compounding the liberal dilemma and further legitimating Nixon’s law-and-order demands.

Alabama Governor George Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1968 was a twofold blessing for Nixon. First, during the primaries, Wallace divided the Democrats. His third-party candidacy guaranteed some erosion of Democratic strength. Better yet, Wallace’s stridency on the war (particularly after he selected as his running mate Air Force General Curtis LeMay) and on domestic issues gave Nixon a golden opportunity to preempt the middle. But one had to divine the calculus of the middle. After King’s assassination, Nixon advisers hotly debated whether he should attend the funeral services. His law partner Leonard Garment reportedly remarked: “Things have come to some pass when a Republican candidate for President has to take counsel with his advisers about whether he should attend the funeral of a Nobel Prize winner.” Nixon eventually went, but he did not march behind the mule-drawn wagon bearing King’s body—
that
presumably was no place for a centrist candidate. Still, Nixon would periodically thereafter rebuke those who had suggested he attend the funeral, complaining that it had been “a serious mistake” and almost cost him the South.
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The political earthquakes that divided the Democrats left the Republican Party mostly untouched. The party’s internal fratricide of four years earlier now seemed to be history, largely because the conservative faction dominated. But the conservatives lacked a candidate of their own, and Nixon soon had the field to himself. It seemed so easy, perhaps even boringly so.

George Romney served as Nelson Rockefeller’s surrogate in 1968. Rockefeller himself no longer seemed viable as a candidate, since the entrenched Goldwaterites remained implacable toward him. As president of American Motors, Romney had made a name for himself as a gadfly to the Detroit automobile establishment, successfully challenging their pet marketing and design notions. He parlayed his entrepreneurial success into a political one, twice winning election as governor in the Democrats’ Michigan stronghold. He was “Mr. Clean,” a man whose integrity and moral rectitude went unchallenged. Romney seemed a perfect alternative to the tarnished images of “old pols” such as Johnson and Nixon. But any candidate of the time had to come to terms with the Vietnam war, and that proved Romney’s undoing.

In a casual interview with a local Detroit radio station, Romney remarked that he had been “brainwashed” by his military hosts when he had visited South Vietnam. No doubt, Romney had been misled, perhaps even deliberately
deceived, as others had been before and would be after him. The remark seemed true to the man: candid and blunt, yet betraying a long-suspected naïveté. If Romney could be brainwashed by our own military, how could he withstand other, more pernicious, attempts to influence him? “Brainwashing” was a poor choice of words, conjuring up images of Korean prisoners of war who had displayed a fatal weakness when confronted with a trying situation. Somehow, the media managed to convey the image of Romney as an inept, incompetent, perhaps even clownish figure. He was through. His explanations fell flat, and he announced his withdrawal even before the New Hampshire primary balloting. Richard Nixon had a clear field.

Party leaders steadily gravitated toward Nixon. Republican Senate leader Dirksen regarded Nixon as a party loyalist—“kosher” was his improbable description. Even Eisenhower proved malleable to Nixon’s will after all the years. The former President had offered to endorse Nixon but proposed waiting for the opening day of the Republican Convention. Nixon pressed Ike for an earlier statement and got it on July 17. Eisenhower praised Nixon in the predictable fashion, but he added a personal note on a copy of his prepared text that he sent his Vice President: “Dear Dick—This was something I truly enjoyed doing—DE.”
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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.
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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.
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