1968 (63 page)

But the Democrats had an almost two-to-one majority and
supported the appointments, and a great deal of the Republican
leadership, including the minority leader, Everett Dirksen, did
as well.

At his hearings Fortas was submitted to a grilling
unprecedented in the history of chief justice appointees. He
was attacked by a coalition of right-wing Republicans and
southern Democrats. Among his chief inquisitors were Strom
Thurmond of South Carolina and John Stennis of Mississippi, who
denounced him for being a liberal in “decisions by which
the Court has asserted its assumed role of rewriting the
Constitution.” It was a new kind of coalition, and in
carefully coded language they were attacking Fortas and the
Warren Court in general for desegregation and other
pro–civil rights decisions as well as for protection for
defendants and rulings tolerating pornography. Fifty-two cases
were brought up in which it was claimed that in forty-nine of
them Fortas’s vote had prevented material from being
ruled pornography; this was followed by a private, closed-door
session in which the senators reviewed slides of the allegedly
offensive material. Strom Thurmond even attacked Fortas for a
decision made by the Warren Court before Fortas was on the
bench. In October they managed to defeat the nomination with a
filibuster, which requires a two-thirds majority to break. The
pro-Fortas senators lacked fourteen votes, so the appointment
was successfully tied up until the end of the congressional
session—the first time in American history that a
filibuster was used to try to block a Supreme Court
appointment. Since Fortas would not be vacating his associate
justice seat, Thornberry’s nomination was dead also.

When Nixon came to power, he began to attack the Supreme
Court, attempting to destroy liberal judges and replace them
with judges, preferably from the South, who had an
anti–civil rights record. The first target was Fortas,
who was driven from the bench by a White House–created
scandal for accepting fees in a manner that was common practice
for Supreme Court justices. Fortas resigned. The next target
was William O. Douglas, the seventy-year-old
Roosevelt-appointed liberal. Gerald Ford spearheaded the
impeachment drive for the White House but it failed. The
attempt to place southerners with anti–civil rights
records in the court failed. The first, Clement Haynsworth, was
rejected by the Democratic majority still angry over the attack
on Fortas. The second, G. Harrold Carswell, was found
embarrassingly incompetent. But the Fortas attack plus bad
health of elderly judges did give Nixon the unusual opportunity
of appointing four Supreme Court judges in his first term,
including the Justice Department’s legal expert behind
the Supreme Court attacks, William Rehnquist.

To the astute observer, Nixon’s strategy, the new
Republican strategy, was first presented at the Republican
convention in Miami when he chose Maryland governor Spiro T.
Agnew. Many thought the choice was a mistake. Given
Rockefeller’s popularity, Nixon-Rockefeller would have
been a dream ticket. Even if Rockefeller wouldn’t accept
the number two spot, New York mayor John Lindsay, a handsome,
well-liked liberal who had helped write the Kerner Commission
report on racial violence, had made it clear that he was eager
to run as Nixon’s vice president. Conservative Nixon with
liberal Lindsay would have brought to the Republican Party the
full spectrum of American politics. Instead Nixon turned to the
Right, picking a little-known and not much loved
archconservative, with views, especially on race and law and
order, that were so reactionary that to many he seemed an
outright bigot.

Agnew, sensitive to the unusually hostile response to his
nomination, complained, “It’s being made to appear
that I’m a little to the right of King Lear.” The
press took the obvious follow-up question, Why was King Lear a
rightist? Agnew replied with a smile, “Well, he reserved
to himself the right to behead people, and that’s a
rightist position.” Quickly the smile vanished as he
talked about the reception he was getting in the party and
press. “If John Lindsay had been the candidate, there
would have been the same outburst from the South and accolades
from the Northeast.” This was exactly the point. Agnew
was part of a geographic strategy, what was known in politics
as a “southern strategy.”

For one hundred years, southern politics had remained
frozen in time. The Democratic Party had been the party of John
Caldwell Calhoun, the Yale-educated South Carolinian who fought
in the decades leading up to the Civil War for the southern
plantation/slave-owning way of life under the banner of
states’ rights. To white southerners, the Republican
Party was the hated Yankee party of Abraham Lincoln that had
forced them to release their Negro property. After
Reconstruction, neither party had much to offer the Negro, so
for another century white southerners stayed true to their
party and the Democrats could count on a solid block of
Democratic states in the South. The point George Wallace was
making in his independent runs for president was that southern
Democrats wanted something different from what the Democratic
Party was offering, even though they were not going to become
Republicans. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was expressing
the same idea as early as 1948 when he ran against Truman as
the candidate for president for a party significantly named the
States’ Rights Party.

In 1968 Thurmond, Abe Fortas’s harshest interrogator,
committed the once unspeakable act of becoming a Republican. He
was an early supporter of Nixon’s and worked hard for him
at the Miami convention after getting Nixon’s promise
that he would not pick a running mate who was distasteful to
the South. So Lindsay had never really been in the running,
though he didn’t know this.

In 1964, after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, close
associates said he was depressed and talked of his having just
signed over the entire South to the Republican Party. This was
why he and Humphrey had adamantly opposed seating the
Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic convention.
The inconsistent support from the president, attorney general,
and other government agencies that the civil rights movement
experienced was the result of an impossible juggling act the
Democrats wanted to perform—promoting civil rights and
keeping the southern vote.

Many white liberals and blacks, including Martin Luther
King, had always been distrustful of the Kennedys and Johnson
because they knew these were Democrats who wanted to keep the
white southern vote. John Kennedy, in his narrow victory over
Nixon, got white southern support. Johnson, as a Texan with a
drawling accent, was particularly suspect, but John
Kennedy’s southern strategy was choosing him for running
mate. Comedian Lenny Bruce, in his not always subtle satire,
had a routine:

Lyndon Johnson—they didn’t even let him talk
for the first six months. It took him six months to learn how
to say Nee-Grow.

“Nig-ger-a-o . . .”

“O.K., ah, let’s hear it one more time,
Lyndon now.”

“Nig-ger-a-o . . .”

After the Civil Rights Act, white bigots, if not blacks and
white liberals, had no doubt about where Johnson stood. In the
1964 election Johnson defeated Goldwater by a landslide.
Republicans bitterly blamed northern liberal Republicans,
especially Nelson Rockefeller, for not getting behind the
ticket. But in the South, for the first time, the Republican
candidate got the majority of white votes. In a few states,
enough black voters, including newly registered voters, turned
out, combined with traditional die-hard southern democrats and
liberals who hoped to change the South, to deny Goldwater a
regionwide victory. But the only states that Goldwater carried,
aside from his home state of Arizona, were Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

Now Nixon was realigning the party. “States’
rights” and “law and order,” two thinly
veiled appeals to racism, were mainstays of his campaign.
States’ rights, from the time of Calhoun, meant not
letting the federal government interfere with the denial of
black rights in southern states. “Law and order”
had become a big issue because it meant using Daley-type police
tactics against not only antiwar demonstrators, but black
rioters as well. With each black riot, more white “law
and order” voters came along, people who, like Norman
Mailer, were “getting tired of Negroes and their
rights.” The popular term for it was “white
backlash,” and Nixon was after the backlash vote. Even
that most moderate of black groups, the NAACP, recognized this.
Philip Savage, NAACP director for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and
Delaware, called Agnew and Nixon “primarily backlash
candidates.” He said that having Agnew on the ticket
“insures the Republican Party that it will not get a
significant black vote in November.”

In 1968 there were still black Republicans. Edward Brooke
of Massachusetts, the only black senator and the first since
Reconstruction—a moderate social progressive who served
with Lindsay on the Kerner Commission—was a Republican.
The Democratic Party had not yet become the black party. It was
the nomination of Agnew that changed that. Most of the 78 black
delegates to the Miami convention, out of a total of 2,666,
went home either unwilling or unable to back the ticket. One
black delegate told
The New York Times,
“There is no way in hell I can justify Nixon and Agnew to
Negroes.” A black Chicago delegate said, “They are
telling us they want the white backlash and that they
don’t give a damn about us.” The Republican Party
lost its most famous black supporter when Jackie Robinson, the
first black to break the color line in Major League baseball
and one of the country’s most highly respected sports
heroes, announced that he was quitting Rockefeller’s
Republican staff and going to work for the Democrats to help
defeat Nixon, calling the Nixon-Agnew ticket
“racist.”

Accurately defining the political party division of the
future, Robinson said, “I think what the Republican Party
has forgotten is that decent white people are going to take a
real look at this election, and they’re going to join
with black America, with Jewish America, with Puerto Ricans,
and say that we can’t go backward, we can’t
tolerate a ticket that is racist in nature and that is inclined
to let the South have veto powers over what is
happening.”

One of the advantages of Agnew as a running mate was that
he could run a little wildly to the right, while Nixon,
statesmanlike, could strike a restrained pose. Agnew insisted
that the antiwar movement was led by foreign communist
conspirators, but when challenged on who these conspirators
might be, he simply said that some SDS leaders had described
themselves as Marxists and he would have more information on
this later. “Civil disobedience,” he said in
Cleveland, “cannot be condoned when it interferes with
civil rights of others and most of the time it does.”
Translation: The civil rights movement has impinged on the
civil rights of white people. He called Hubert Humphrey
“soft on communism” but retracted the statement
with apologies after the Republican congressional leaders,
Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford, complained. Agnew said,
“It is not evil conditions that cause riots but evil
men.” Another famous Agnew declaration was, “When
you have seen one slum you’ve seen them all.” And
when criticized for using the words
Jap
and
Polack,
the vice presidential candidate countered that Americans were
“losing their sense of humor.”

Liberal Republicans struggled not to show their revulsion
at the ticket. Lindsay, whose city had seen its share of
rioting and demonstrating from blacks, students, and antiwar
protesters, wrote:

We have heard loud cries this year that we should insure
our safety by placing bayoneted soldiers every five feet, and
by running over nonviolent demonstrators who sit down in the
streets.

You can now see the kind of society that would be. Look
to the streets of Prague, and you will find your bayoneted
soldier every five feet. You will see the blood of young
men—with long hair and strange clothes—who were
killed by tanks which crushed their nonviolent protest against
communist tyranny. If we abandon our tradition of justice and
civil order, they will be
our
tanks and
our
children.

As for the Humphrey campaign that came limping out of
Chicago, it was clear to Humphrey that he had to challenge
Nixon on the right. His running mate, Senator Edmund Muskie
from Maine, was an eastern liberal who helped solidify their
natural base. The Left might be unhappy with Humphrey, but they
were not going to turn to Nixon. His position on the war was
that it was not an issue because North Vietnam “has had
it militarily” and a peace would be negotiated before he
came to office in January. But in the last weeks before the
election, Humphrey started to speak out against the campaign of
fear and racism and began to gain ground against Nixon.
“If the voices of bigotry and fear prevail, we can lose
everything we labored so hard to build. I can offer you no easy
solutions. There is none. I can offer you no hiding place.
There is none.”

Humphrey added a new chapter to the fast-developing
television age by campaigning on local TV. Traditionally, a
politician would come to a town, arrange a rally, as large as
possible, at the airport, and arrange an event at which he made
a speech. Humphrey often did this, too, but in many towns he
skipped it. The one thing he did everywhere he went was appear
on the local television show. As for Nixon, he was probably not
the last nontelegenic presidential candidate, but he was the
last one to accept that about himself. It was widely believed
that his five o’clock shadow on television during the
debates had cost him the 1960 election. Significantly, the
majority of people who only listened to the debates on radio
thought Nixon had won. In 1968 a makeup team had worked out a
regimen of pancake foundation and lighteners so that when the
lights went on he did not look like the villain in a silent
movie. His television coordinator, Roger Ailes, who believed
his young age of twenty-eight to be his advantage, said,
“Nixon is not a child of TV, and he may be the last
candidate who couldn’t make it on the Carson show who
could make it in an election.” In 1968 appearing on
television talk shows had become the newest form of
campaigning. Ailes said of Nixon, “He’s a
communicator and a personality on TV, but not at his best when
they say on the show, ‘Now here he is . . .
Dick!’”