Richard
Milhous Nixon did not follow any of the charted channels
of American politics in his extraordinary passage to
the presidency. Whereas other American presidents could
point to their "humble origins" with some
sort of romantic pride (or even describe their family
summer home as a "log cabin"), Nixon really
suffered during his childhood from poverty. His father,
Frank Nixon, moved to California at the turn of the
century after having been frostbitten working in an
open streetcar in Columbus, Ohio. After working as a
farmhand and oil roustabout, he attempted to cultivate
lemons outside Los Angeles. After Richard was born,
on January 9, 1913, Nixon abandoned the "lemon
-ranch," and the family moved to the Quaker community
of Whittier, California. They were so impoverished that
Nixon's mother was forced to work as a scrubwoman in
a sanatorium in Arizona in order to pay for the treatment
of Richard's brother Harold, who suffered from tuberculosis.
At the age of ten Richard Nixon was sent to work as
a farm laborer to help out his family. He fully understood
the degrading nature of poverty; at the age of fourteen
he was forced to work as a barker for a fortune wheel
for the Slippery Gulch Rodeo, a cover for illegal gambling
rooms in back of the rodeo."
Young Nixon also exercised
his oratory skills on the Whittier High School debating
team and won prizes for the best oration on the Constitution.
He graduated from high school in the. depths of the
Depression, and worked his way through a small Quaker
college in Whittier while living at home and supporting
his family. Then, winning a scholarship, he attended
law school at Duke University. Although he distinguished
himself and graduated third in his class, all the prestigious
New York law firms where he applied for a job turned
down his application, apparently because he did not
have the right contacts or connections. He continued
to eke out a living as a clerk in a local law office
in Whittier for the first few years after law school;
then, when World War II broke out, he joined the Navy
as a junior officer. He was eventually sent to Middle
River, Maryland, to assist the Navy in liquidating contracts
for a flying-boat project (in which Howard Hughes also
took an active interest).
Late in 1945, a few months
after he completed the settlement for the Navy on the
boat project, Nixon was invited by a group of local
businessmen, in his hometown of Whittier, to seek the
Republican nomination for the congressional seat then
held by Jerry Voorhis, a liberal Democrat. But until
that time, Nixon had had no grounding in local California
politics-indeed, he attended his first political rally
in 1945-and therefore, in lieu of local issues, he played
upon a more generalized fear: the fear of communism.
In likening communism to an invisible virus that infects
the body politic, he was able to arouse fears among
the public that even avowed non-Communists might serve
as carriers of this dread disease. Thus, even though
his opponent Voorhis was outspoken in his criticism
Of Communism, Nixon labeled him in the public's mind
as a tool of communism. The politics of fear worked
for Nixon, and he was elected to Congress in 1946 and
reelected in 1948. In 1950 he defeated Helen Gahagan
Douglas for her seat in the United States Senate, having
defamed his opponent as the "pink lady" and
a "dupe" of communism. In the Senate, he so
adroitly managed the putative menace of international
communism that General Dwight D. Eisenhower chose him
as his vice-presidential candidate. In 1952, seven years
after he entered politics as a Navy veteran, the former
barker from Slippery Gulch was elected vice-president
of the United States.
During the next eight years,
as vice-president, Nixon traveled widely to the various
power centers of the world, including the Soviet Union,
and served as one of President Eisenhower's main liaisons
with the National Security Council. In a sense then,
even as vice-president, Nixon had relatively little
experience with domestic issues in America.
In 1960, however, Nixon found
that times had changed in American politics: the fears
of communism which he had so successfully exploited
in the late forties and early fifties had subsided,
and Americans were becoming increasingly concerned with
domestic problems rather than international ones. In
a close election in 1960 he was defeated for the presidency
by John F. Kennedy; and two years later he was defeated
by Pat Brown for the governorship of California. Rather
than a national hero of the Republican party, he was
now a defeated man without a future in politics. In
1963 former vice-president Nixon moved to New York City
and joined, as a senior partner, the law firm of Mudge,
Stern, Baldwin and Todd.
Though he had not entirely
abandoned his dreams and schemes of being president,
Nixon realized that the menace of communism on which
he built his early reputation no longer was an effective
focus for organizing the fears of the American public.
Since the Cold War had waned as a national concern,
domestic issues received increasingly more attention
in the national press. The former vice-president had
no claim to any special knowledge or competence in these
domestic fields; he was rarely called upon for public
comment. Indeed, after his 1962 defeat in the California
gubernatorial election, ABC News presented Nixon's "political
obituary." If he was again to become a center of
political attention, Nixon foresaw that he would have
to identify himself with the control of a new menace.
Thus he turned to the growing unease that was being
reported out of the major cities in America-riots had
erupted in Los Angeles, New York, and other major cities
in the mid-1960s (and though not a new phenomenon in
themselves, they were for the first time nationally
televised); crime rates, as reported by the FBI, had
practically doubled between 1960 and 1967; and polls
were indicating that personal safety from crimes was
rapidly becoming the dominant concern of the electorate.
Until then, the law-and-order battle cry had been used
mainly by local politicians for local problems and as
a shibboleth for the race problem and crime control;
Nixon found he could now use it to organize fears on
a wider scale. In 1967 Nixon, using much the same rhetoric
as that employed against the threat of international
communism, attempted in an article in Readers Digest-entitled
"What Has Happened to America?"-to elevate
local crime to the status of a national menace jeopardizing
the very survival of the nation. Successfully capturing
law and order as a political issue, he argued that "in
a few short years ... America has become among the most
lawless and violent [nations] in the history of free
people" because liberal decisions in the courts
were "weakening the peace forces against the criminal
forces." As in his earlier war, against the Communist
menace, Nixon suggested that government officials and
judges were soft on crime and were subverting the efforts
of police to prevent criminals from preying on an innocent
society.
After he received the
Republican nomination for president in 1968, he immediately
ordered his chief speech writers to develop law and
order into a major theme of his campaign. Nixon, of
course, did not invent the issue of law and order. Until
1968, however, the law and order issue in American politics
was confined mainly to the state and local levels, as
noted in the case of Nelson Rockefeller, and scant,
if any, mention of this motif can be found in prior
presidential campaigns. To be sure, politicians had
earlier urged "wars" or "crusades"
against alleged criminal conspiracies-notably, the Mafia
as a means of achieving a national reputation. (Estes
Kefauver and Robert F. Kennedy had both waged highly
publicized wars against conspiracies of organized crime
and had gained national prominence for their efforts,
though there were few indictments.*) For the most part,
however, these earlier efforts were intended only to
produce the sort of publicity which would allay the
fears of the public by exposing a few symbolic "chiefs"
of the underworld (who usually turned out to be bookies).
Nixon played on the law-and-order theme in a very different
way: the target be directed his audience's attention
to was unorganized crime that directly threatened the
life and safety of all - muggings, murder, robbery,
rape, and burglary. The threat to the public safety
that he depicted was not a handful of Mafia chiefs but
the subversion of the legal system by those who were
more sympathetic to the rights of criminals than to
the protection of the innocent. Nixon shrewdly perceived
that law and order could be effectively transposed into
an issue of the Democrats' undermining of public authority.
* Victor S. Navasky has given
an excellent account in Kennedy Justice of how Attorney
General Kennedy presented Joseph Valachi, who claimed
to be a member of the criminal conspiracy while in prison,
to the national media in order to mobilize support for
legislation expanding wiretap and other authorities
being proposed by the Kennedy administration-clearly
an adumbration of the future.
Even at this early stage, Nixon
realized that unless he could preempt the crime issue
for himself by generalizing it, Governor George Wallace,
who was making an independent bid for the presidency
in 1968, could be expected to exploit it to attract
votes among Nixon's natural constituency.
Though Nixon successfully developed
law and order into a principal issue of the 1968 campaign,
he intentionally avoided defining the problem in anything
more than a vague way. Patrick J. Buchanan, a thirty-one-year-old
journalist from St. Louis who was then working as Nixon's
chief speech writer on the law-and-order issue, recalls
the polls' suggesting that the public believed that
lawlessness could be dealt with by a more determined
effort of the federal government. However, at that stage,
Nixon's speech writers had little specific knowledge
about the characteristics or causes of crime and disorder.
Although Governor Nelson Rockefeller had brilliantly
pioneered the heroin menace in New York State, and Nixon
himself realized the political potential of a drug-abuse
menace, the candidate's strategists were not yet fully
conversant with the vocabulary of dread that was used
by Rockefeller to exploit the drug issue. As late as
September 12, 1968, Buchanan teletyped Martin Pollner,
a member of Nixon's law firm and campaign staff who
had been a former prosecutor in New York City, that
it was "vital that we get some background on the
narcotics problem in this country." Pollner immediately
consulted with John W. Dean, 111, another lawyer-working
in the Nixon campaign, and then wrote a four-page memorandum
to Buchanan-"Potential Materials and Recommendations
for R.N.'s Position on Narcotics and Drug Abuse."
Then, with the help of Peter Velde, another lawyer on
the campaign staff, Pollner sent another memorandum
on the "narcotics problem in southern California."
These analyses detailing the problems of law enforcement
and rehabilitation, however, were far too specific for
Nixon. The speech he gave on the subject of narcotics
in September, 1968, in Anaheim, California, for which
Buchanan requested this research, began with Nixon's
describing a letter that he had supposedly received
from a nineteen-year-old drug addict. Then, using the
Hobsonian imagery of heroin's corrupting innocents,
he asserted, "Narcotics are a modern curse of American
youth.... I will take the executive steps necessary
to make our borders more secure against the pestilence
of narcotics." But narcotics remained only a subsidiary
issue in the 1968 campaign. The strategists instead
played upon the more general fear of personal violence,
saturating television across the nation with commercials
that showed an obviously nervous middle aged woman walking
down the street on a dark, wet night while an announcer
stated, "Crimes of violence in the United States
have almost doubled in recent years ... today a violent
crime is committed every sixty seconds ... a robbery
every two and a half minutes... a mugging every six
minutes ... a murder every forty-three minutes... and
it will get worse unless we take the offensive. . .
." The commercials ended with the message, "This
time vote like your whole world depended on it."
After winning the election by a narrow margin, Nixon
was expected to deal effectively with the menace to
law and order that he himself had helped to popularize.
But for him it was an opportunity, not a problem.
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