American Experiment (368 page)

For many women it was difficult to move from “personal” politics into the public arena. Women who were most experienced in movement politics and organization often had the most difficulty in the transition, because party and electoral politics had their own organizational imperatives, sacred turfs, lines of influence, points of access, rules, and taboos. Women’s organizations had not been built as electoral machines; they were not easily convertible. Some women, on the other hand, feared that feminists would be
too
successful in invading big political institutions—they feared the kind of co-optation that would blunt their organizations’ image and thrust, compromise their specific goals, and yet not have any lasting reform impact on the broader political system.

Election year 1972. For many leaders in the older branch of women activists and in the black and peace movements who had staked their political futures on working within the two-party system, 1972 beckoned as a test of this strategy. For many in the younger branch, and for many of their “aging the system” counterparts in the other movements, 1972 loomed as one more series of concessions and “sellouts” by left-liberal forces to a major party and its candidate, who would abandon the left if they won and blame the left if they lost. For historians then and later, 1972 was the culmination of one of the most turbulent decades in American history, from the nationwide mobilization of black protesters early in the 1960s to the fiery protests of student, anti-Vietnam, and women’s forces later in the decade; from the first involvement of “advisers” in Indochina to the massive intervention of the late 1960s; from the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 to the killing of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy five years later to the near-murder and political disabling of George Wallace in May 1972 after his impressive showings in several northern Democratic primaries.

If the 1972 presidential election outcome was a fair test of the strategy of older-branch leaders committed to the Democratic party, they failed. Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, after a generally negative campaign interspersed with calls for “Peace with Honor,” swept the nation, aside from Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The Republicans won the largest popular vote margin in history, 47.2 to 29.2 million. And at last, with Wallace out of the game, Nixon carried the whole of the Solid South, which even Ike had failed to do. Older-branch leaders took solace in the high participation rate of women—especially blue-collar
women, liberal and young women—in the campaign and their increased voting turnout, and in the continuing Democratic majorities in Congress despite the Nixon sweep. But it was small comfort after such high hopes.

If 1972 was a litmus test for women’s political leadership and activism, it was even more so for the two other great movements of the 1960s. Blacks had developed such strength politically in numbers and organization by 1972 as to protect most of their gains; they could chalk 1972 defeats off as temporary setbacks. The anti-Vietnam activists suffered the worst defeat. The campaign was fought out largely on terms that they had set— Vietnam, arms reduction, the draft—and Nixon would have appeared to have won a mandate against them had he not pirouetted around both or all sides of the peace issue during the campaign.

So 1972 was a setback, but there would be other elections. To some women in both branches a more important long-run question was the quality of the established leadership and of the next generation of leaders, male or female. The 1960s—the fateful decade—had produced a burst of political talent: John Kennedy, who by 1963 was positioning himself to provide strong détente and civil rights leadership; Lyndon Johnson, who brought thirty years of New Deal, Fair Deal, and New Frontier promises to culmination; Martin Luther King, who taught blacks and whites how to be both militant and nonviolent; Robert Kennedy, probably the only leader of his generation who had the potential to have firmly united the black, peace, and women’s movements with the Democratic party. Three of these leaders were killed; the other was politically disabled. Who would—who could—take their place?

With McGovern and Shriver decisively defeated and Humphrey and Muskie vanquished four years earlier, no potential successor was visible among the Democratic party leaders of either gender. Both the party and its allied movements, however, were rich in second-cadre leaders in Washington, the state capitals, and the myriad movement headquarters. Many of these men and women were talented speakers, negotiators, legislators, administrators, spokespersons for their causes. Was there a Martin Luther King among them? The more one studied King’s life, the more one was impressed not simply by his obvious political skills but even more by his intellectual qualities. His life was a reminder that transforming leadership is a product of formal learning molded and burnished by combat and controversy. In theological school King had steeped himself in the writings of Gandhi and social theorist and activist Walter Rauschenbusch, of Niebuhr and R. H. Tawney, of Marx and Hegel. Hence he was able then and later to define and sort out his values, shape ways and means to achieve those values, and devise day-to-day political strategies and street tactics
necessary to achieve the changes he sought. And he was a focus of conflict—in the black movement and organizations, with other black leaders such as Malcolm X, with white critics ranging from J. Edgar Hoover to benign but hostile editors and fellow ministers.

Much of the force of the 1960s movements lay in their intellectual strengths—in the kind of prolonged debate and analysis that went into the Port Huron Statement, the remarkable teaching of women by women that backed up their philosophy and strategy, the street seminars and walking debates of King and his co-leaders. For many, movement life had been a special form of higher education. But street skills and intellectual leadership were not enough. Also indispensable for effectiveness in American politics was individual and organizational persistence, sheer staying power—both as an expression of confidence and determination and as a warning to political friend and foe that you will be around for a long time and must be reckoned with. A century earlier the business leaders of the North, by moving into the top councils of the Republican party, and by staying with the GOP through thick and thin, had dominated the federal government for decades. In the 1930s the liberal-labor-left forces of the nation, by moving into the top councils of the Democratic party, and by staying with the Democracy through depression and war and cold war, through election triumphs and defeats, had put their stamp on federal and state policy-making. The insurrectionists of the 1960s left an array of groups and organizations devotedly carrying on their causes. But they neither maintained their influence in the Democratic party nor created a party of their own—they had not achieved staying power.

Paradoxically, even as the strength of the left was waning after its relative high point early in 1972, conservative movements were rising that within a decade would accomplish essentially what the left had not—would find their unifying and transforming leader, who in turn would seize control of a major political party after initial setbacks, would lead that party to victory, and then would firmly seize the reins of office and power.

All this lay in the future. At the moment—election night, November 7, 1972—Richard Nixon, strangely morose and withdrawn after his big win, contemplated four more years in the White House.

F
OUR YEARS AFTER HE
became President, a quarter century after he entered politics, Richard Nixon the private man remained a figure of mystery in the public mind. Some of the most gifted interpreters of American politics and politicians could not seem to get a handle on him. Of all the Presidents since 1789, Kenneth S. Davis wrote in the
Encyclopedia of American Biography
following the first term, Nixon was “probably the most baffling to contemporaries who sought truly to know and understand him as mind, character, personality, and to relate this knowledge to major acts of his public career.” Most American Presidents have had complex personas; save for a few war heroes, less complicated men are unable to “embrace multitudes” and win their embrace. But Nixon was not merely complex, he was opaque; not merely ambivalent as a policy maker but pulverized as a personality.

He was a preacher of harmony who viewed his critics with a cold implacable hatred, a mildly pacifist Quaker who had favored dropping atomic bombs—only three small ones, to be sure—to rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu, a mediator between moderate and conservative factions of the Republican party who seemed equally at home in either wing, a fierce nationalist and practitioner of
Realpolitik
who held the idealistic, internationalist Wilson in veneration, a man of seething resentments and black Irish hatreds who liked to appear with Billy Graham in politico-spiritual assemblies dripping with cheerfulness and piety, an advocate of “guts” and determination who swore that he was not a quitter but who finally quit, a man who evaded personal confrontations but relished crises. Many political leaders are torn between conventional and “rational” alternatives, between left and right alternatives, or between principled and practical strategies of leadership. Nixon was so eviscerated by multiple lines of tension and cleavage as to leave him a shredded man.

“Let’s see—What’ll I wear today?,” Herblock, the Washington
Post’s
political cartoonist, had Vice President Nixon saying upon rising and facing a choice of apparel labeled “Dead-End Gang,” “All-American Boy,” “Look, Folks, I’m a Statesman,” and “Political Pitchman.”

Challenged by this complexity, students of personality sought to uncover the sources of Nixon’s political character. James David Barber, analyzing types of presidential character, labeled Nixon “active-negative” —ambitious, power-seeking, devious, aggressive, hyperactive—as against “active-positive” (FDR, Truman, JFK), “passive-positive” (Taft, Harding), or “passive-negative” (Coolidge, possibly Ike). There was much interest in Nixon’s early years: life with an often angry, financially insecure father, the death of two brothers, a beloved mother’s prolonged absences. Psycho-historian Bruce Mazlish noted his fears of being unloved, of being considered weak or timid. At the deepest level, Mazlish wrote, Nixon was a political actor whose role-taking substituted for “an insecurely held self.” Psychiatrists diagnosed him—from afar—as orally and/or anally fixated, as a “compulsive obsessive,” as driven by the need for power. An astute biographer, Garry Wills, emphasized more the impression Nixon gave of being adrift, of lacking a sense of place, of coming across as “the least ‘authentic’ man alive.”

The President’s domestic policy-making during his first term was no help to the search for the “real Nixon.” Right-wing Republicans and conservative southern Democrats had for decades listened to Nixon sound the tocsin against federal regulation and spending, and were hoping that his Administration would roll back four decades of liberal Democratic and moderate Republican reform; they were quickly disillusioned. Myriad programs were extended—environmental protection, occupational safety and health, urban mass transit, farm price supports—and even expanded. The Clean Air Act of 1970, establishing comprehensive air pollution programs that sharply curbed carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions in 1975 cars, appeared to be precisely the kind of legislation Nixon had long denounced for stifling free enterprise. On other matters, such as some of his judicial nominations, a series of crime and drug control acts, and his (unsustained) veto of a major water pollution control bill, he gave some satisfaction to the right. On still other issues such as civil rights—and especially women’s rights—the Administration’s record was mixed.

Eventually the President’s domestic program dissolved into a jumble of disparate policies. Halfway through his term, in his January 1971 State of the Union address, he suddenly asked Congress for a “New American Revolution,” which, after the hyperbole was extracted, still looked somewhat radical: welfare reform, health insurance reform, major governmental reorganization, revenue sharing, “full prosperity in peacetime.” Such proposals cloaked for a time the reality that Nixon was essentially bored by domestic policy-making—especially environmental—compared with foreign policy.

Without a firm hand from above, disputes broke out between liberal and conservative advisers—notably between Assistant for Urban Affairs Daniel Patrick Moynihan and economic specialist Arthur F. Burns. Burns, the former chief of Eisenhower’s economic advisers, was perturbed by Nixon’s quick policy decisions—it had taken only two minutes, he said, to persuade the President to go ahead with revenue sharing. During a long series of intra-Administration battles over welfare reform, Burns complained to friends that when he told presidential aide John Ehrlichman that Moynihan’s guaranteed income plan was not in accord with the President’s philosophy, Ehrlichman had asked, laughingly, “Don’t you realize that the president doesn’t have a philosophy?”

In foreign policy it was going to be different. After the disarray of LBJ’s final years in office, the new Administration would propound a strategy of foreign and military policy-making—a strategy of Administration teamwork, careful setting of priorities, linkage among foreign policy initiatives—aimed at continuity, coordination, consistency. “If our policy is to embody a coherent vision of the world and a rational conception of America’s interests,” according to this plan, “our specific actions must be the products of rational and deliberate choice,” as compared with the “series of piecemeal tactical decisions forced by the pressures of events” of the past.

The team that Nixon assembled for this “new strategy for peace” hardly appeared equal to this awesome task. His Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, was a respected lawyer who had had only a marginal relationship to foreign policy-making. A loyal friend of Nixon’s from the early years, he had served as Attorney General under Eisenhower. Rogers and Nixon had drifted apart during their years in New York in the 1960s—in part, Rogers’s friends believed, because of the former Attorney General’s success as a big-league lawyer and on the Manhattan social circuit. The new President chose him as a skillful negotiator, not as a strategist or shaper of foreign policy; Nixon hoped to be his own Secretary of State. For Secretary of Defense he turned to Melvin Laird, a longtime congressman out of the Wisconsin heartland, an expert on military appropriations, and a shrewd middleman among Washington’s power brokers. Neither secretary was well prepared to master his huge bureaucracy packed with talented specialists protecting their turfs and slowed by endless processes of clearance, consultation, and collective judgment.