Being Nixon: A Man Divided (31 page)

Nixon’s interest in the environment would wax and wane; in a diary entry in August, Haldeman observed that Nixon skipped a helicopter tour of the smog problem of Los Angeles to play golf instead.
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But he was sensitive to the times and public sentiment, as well as to nature’s beauty. Nixon “saw the polls,” recalled Whitaker. “His eyes would glaze over when we got into detail. But if you mentioned ‘parks,’ he would lighten up again. He said he had gone to Yosemite as a kid.”
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Delivering his first
State of the Union speech on January 22, 1970, Nixon sounded like a champion of government as friend of the poor and healer of the weak. As Nixon biographer Richard Reeves pointed out, he borrowed the rhythms of Martin Luther King Jr. Standing at the Speaker’s podium as he addressed the House and the Senate, the Joint Chiefs, the cabinet, and the Supreme Court, he began:

I see an America in which we have abolished hunger, provided the means for every family in the nation to obtain a minimum income, made enormous progress in providing better housing, faster transportation, improved health and superior education….

He went on to promise to spend $10 billion on “clean water” and concluded with a sweeping declaration that he had remembered from a quote from Thomas Jefferson. We act, Nixon said, “not for ourselves alone, but for the whole human race.”

The establishment press was delighted by the liberal tilt of Nixon’s State of the Union speech. “Nixon, Stressing Quality of Life, Asks in State of Union Message for Battle to Save the Environment,” bannered
The New York Times
. Dan Rather of CBS saw the political sleight of hand and folksily invoked Tom Sawyer: “What it boils down to is that the President has caught the Democrats bathing and he’s walked away with their clothes.”
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O
n October 26, 1969, in the case of
Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education
, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools could no longer desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” the standard set by the court in its famous school desegregation cases in the mid-1950s. Many school boards, especially in the South, had stalled or outright defied the courts. The High Court ruled that desegregation must be “immediate.”

In many places, again especially in the South, the reaction was angry. Congressman Otto Passman of Louisiana came to the Oval Office to show President Nixon a photograph of “his little golden-haired granddaughter” who was “bein’ bused right past her neighborhood school” clear across town to the formerly all-black high school. Ehrlichman recalled that Nixon talked “for days” about Passman’s visit.
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Nixon was not above pandering to Southern voters. To attract their votes in 1968, he had promised to choose “strict constructionists” for the Supreme Court. When his nominee Clement Haynsworth, a reputable Southern conservative judge, was voted down by Senate liberals in the fall of 1969, Nixon was furious. He said to Harry Dent, his White House emissary to the South, “Harry, I want you to go out this time and find a good federal judge
further south and further to the right
.”
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Dent, as aides sometimes did, took Nixon too literally. It soon came out that his next nominee, G. Harrold Carswell,
had once declared, “I believe that segregation of the races is proper” and that he had endorsed “the principles of white supremacy.” When Nixon read of Carswell’s comments in his daily news briefing, he wrote in the margin, “My God!”
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Commander-in-chief.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

When Nixon was trying to sound tough, in the manner of one of the boys in a circa-1950 country club locker room, he would sometimes make racist remarks. “Is there something in it for the jigs?” he asked Henry Kissinger about an upcoming presidential address to Congress that February. With Ehrlichman, he opined that blacks were “just down out of the trees.”
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In March, when Congress considered creating a Martin Luther King holiday, Nixon wrote Haldeman in larger-than-usual handwriting, “No! Never! That would be like making Nero Christ!”
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But this was largely vile bluster, Nixon’s exhaust pipe opened too wide. On the subject of Nixon and race, the words of Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, are also instructive. On July 1, 1969, during a meeting with a group of thirty African Americans who had come to protest administration policies on civil rights, Mitchell puffed on his pipe and said, “You would be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say.”
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What Nixon did on school desegregation during the course of 1970 is an example of Nixon’s political judgment, a quality defined by British philosopher and statesman Isaiah Berlin as “a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicolored, evanescent, perpetually overlapping data.”
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It is an example of Nixon’s pragmatic politics—also, his occasionally well-concealed desire to do the right thing.

In Alabama, George Wallace began talking of running for president in 1972 on a ticket of massive resistance to the North. A civil war raged in Nixon’s own administration. At the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, liberal Republican appointees and holdover Democratic bureaucrats were publicly threatening to cut off federal funds for Southern school systems that failed to desegregate. The secretary of HEW, Nixon’s old friend Bob Finch, seemed to have lost control. Attorney General Mitchell began, à la LBJ, to refer to
Finch as “Fink,” and Nixon lamented to his aides about “Poor Bob.”
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The director of the civil rights office of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a liberal Republican from California named Leon Panetta, was ignoring signals from the White House to pipe down. In the harsh way of Washington, Panetta found out that he had “resigned” when Nixon’s spokesman Ron Ziegler announced it at a press conference.
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Fresh off his creation of the vice president as scourge of the liberal media, speechwriter Pat Buchanan wanted to unleash Agnew to deliver a scathing denunciation of forced integration. Leonard Garment, the in-house liberal, protested strongly. Nixon ordered the two men to try to write a speech together, but they ended up spending most of the night yelling at each other. Borrowing Nixon’s unfortunate metaphor, Buchanan wanted a speech that would “tear the scab off the issue of race in this country.”
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Nixon would often pit his aides against each other, the better to produce incisive debate, but in this case he could see that he had to step in and settle the argument. Nixon’s views on America’s racial problems were carefully considered and usually empathetic, notwithstanding his intemperate or provocative utterances. He believed that the best cure to racism was economic. He wanted to help blacks get jobs. To that end, he had quietly pushed to fund small black businesses and to set up a program (“the Philadelphia Plan”) that would require some federal contractors to set aside jobs for minorities (thereby infuriating Democratic-dominated, mostly white trade unions).
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Nixon understood that blacks needed better educations to get better jobs. On February 20, he summoned his feuding speechwriting staff, plus Haldeman, and spoke thoughtfully about race. “The nation is at an historic moment,” he said. Swiveling his chair around to
look out the Oval Office window, he said, “You’re not going to solve this race problem for a hundred years. Intermarriage and all that, assimilation, it will happen, but not in our time. Desegregation, though, that has to happen now.”

He let the words sink in and went on. “That’s why we have to hit this minority enterprise thing so hard—sure, they laugh at it—but better jobs, better housing, that’s the only way Negroes are going to be able to move to Scarsdale.” He pointed to Haldeman, his fellow Californian. “Bob, that’s the only way they’re going to get into Palisades High and Whittier High.”
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Nixon said that he, not Agnew, would announce the administration’s position on school desegregation, but not in a speech. Rather, he would issue a public statement. He wanted “no emotional response,” he said.
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On March 24, the White House released an eight-thousand-word statement that was balanced (desegregation yes, forced busing no), exhaustive, and tedious. “A golden opportunity missed,” grumbled Buchanan, who had wanted a TV address to bash liberal judges and northern hypocrisy.
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But Nixon’s approach to actually solving the problem was a model of smart politics and good governance.

Nixon appointed a cabinet committee, nominally headed by Vice President Agnew—a sop to the South—but in fact run by Labor Secretary George Shultz. A carefully considered Princeton grad but also a tough former Marine, Shultz was among the best of the many Ivy Leaguers Nixon claimed not to want but routinely appointed. “A bull dog,” Nixon called him, approvingly, after the stern but patient Shultz had maneuvered the building unions to hire more minority employees.
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Shultz, in turn, set up the blandly named State Advisory Committees for the seven Southern states still holding out against the Supreme
Court decision in the
Holmes
case. The committees were composed of local leaders, black and white, from Klansmen to activists in the NAACP. They would be invited to the White House and engaged in an orchestrated dance. “It was all a set piece,” Shultz recalled. The group, starry-eyed, would be led to the Roosevelt Room, just across from the Oval Office. “I let them argue and get it out of their systems,” said Shultz. At about the two-hour mark, Shultz would call in Attorney General John Mitchell, who was known as a no-nonsense law-and-order type and “by whites as ‘their man,’ ” as Shultz described him. In a rehearsed minuet, repeated every time for each of the state committees, Shultz would ask the attorney general what he planned to do about the schools in the South. “I am attorney general and I will enforce the law,” Mitchell would say, gruffly, puffing on his pipe, and then leave the room.

At lunch, the group would be trooped over to the diplomatic reception rooms at the State Department and shown the desk on which Thomas Jefferson had written parts of the Declaration of Independence, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” After lunch, back in the Roosevelt Room, Shultz would let the committee members talk and argue some more, and “when the time was right,” walk them across the hall to meet President Nixon. The president would calmly say they were all standing in a room where great decisions had been made. The president had made his decision to enforce the law. Now it was time for the state committees to make their decision.

Shultz had been unimpressed when he met with Nixon in a Los Angeles hotel room during the 1968 campaign. “He was defensive around me.” But as president, speaking to the awed Southern community leaders, “he was magnificent. A performer,” Shultz recalled to the author.
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The newly desegregated schools of the South opened peacefully that fall. There was no rioting, no “massive resistance.” In 1968, 68 percent of black children in the South attended all-black schools. By 1972, only 8 percent did. There were fierce battles ahead over court-ordered
busing, but Nixon had achieved a milestone in race relations. In August 1970, reflecting on what they had accomplished with the committees and what still lay ahead, Nixon was philosophical. “There are no votes in the desegregation of Southern schools,” he said, “and the NAACP would say my rhetoric was poor if I gave the Sermon on the Mount. But I’m a firm believer that the law should and must be carried out.” Nixon was determined not to rub it in, however. “I don’t believe in kicking the South around; we’ll do the job swiftly and fairly.” He warned Elliot Richardson, the new secretary of HEW, not to let his young attorneys grandstand. In Ehrlichman’s meeting notes, the “old,” vituperative Nixon popped up, just for a moment: “Tell all the little pipsqueaks. Eager beavers would like to screw us—don’t let them do it.”
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At the time,
the press largely missed the real story of how Nixon desegregated the schools. Instead, they focused on Agnew as salesman of Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy to win white votes in the South. Nixon indulged them. Every winter in Washington since 1885, the press had held its white-tie Gridiron Dinner, a boozy evening of songs and skits. Nixon had been going, grudgingly, since 1950. On March 14, 1970, Nixon and Agnew took the stage. The president asked, “Mr. Agnew, I would like to have your candid response to a few questions. First, what about this ‘Southern Strategy’ we hear of so often?” Agnew, speaking in a broad Southern drawl, clicked his heels, saluted, and answered, “Yes suh, Mister President, Ah agree with you completely on yoah Southern Strategy.” Nixon sat down at the piano and told the audience he wanted to play a few of the favorite songs of past presidents. He began with FDR’s “Home on the Range.” After a couple of notes, Agnew sat down and began banging out the familiar notes to “Dixie.” Nixon responded with Truman’s “Missouri Waltz,” and Agnew started up “Dixie” again. Nixon tried LBJ’s “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” and Agnew came right back with “Dixie.” By now, wrote presidential chronicler Richard Reeves, “the crowd was roaring with laughter and cheers.”
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“Hold it! Hold it!” Nixon called out. “Now we’ll play my favorite.” He swung into “God Bless America,” and everyone joined in. In his diary, Haldeman wrote, “P called me after we got home, was really pleased with how it had come off, as he should have been. Feels he’ll never be able to top it, and won’t even go next year.”
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Nixon’s hero worship
was fed by the movies. John Wayne was a favorite leading man, though any powerful, masculine star could win his plaudits. Generally speaking, Nixon’s taste in movies was wide-ranging, from light comedies to serious drama, and generally followed no pattern. He would happily sit through almost anything, as long as it wasn’t too prurient.
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But in the beginning of April, he watched a series of movies that had, as their overarching theme, the nature of leadership. On April 3, he watched
Hamlet
, Shakespeare’s masterpiece on the perils of paralyzing self-awareness. On April 4, he watched
Patton
, with George C. Scott as the ultimate macho leader, defiant of authority, lover of risk and the smell of war. On April 6, he watched
The Caine Mutiny
, the tragedy of the paranoid Captain Queeg, who almost gets his men killed by taking them into a raging typhoon.
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Of the three, Nixon liked
Patton
the best. He seemed to make no mention of the other two movies while repeatedly referring to Scott’s portrayal of “Old Blood and Guts.” “It comes up in every conversation,” Secretary of State Rogers told Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, which released the movie.
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Haldeman wrote in his diary on April 7 that Nixon had told him to see the movie. General Patton, said Nixon, “inspired people, charged them up.” Nixon was struck by the image of General Patton standing in front of a giant American flag, talking about how Americans hated losing a war. A few days later, in a conversation with Haldeman, Nixon complained that he was not getting enough credit for his bold leadership style. He
said that de Gaulle, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson “all got enormous coverage of the mystique” while he, Nixon, got none.
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