When Nelson Rockefeller arrived, he claimed he had almost twice as many firm delegates as Reagan. The standing ovation John Wayne had just received put that notion rather in doubt.
__
Over and over again, delegate Ronald Reagan had visited on his recent Southern tour told him they might switch their votes to him if he were a declared candidate. At 4 pm Reagan returned to Miami Beach and stepped up to the press conference microphones and announced that this was what he now was.
__
Harry Dent, Strom Thurmond’s man, said he’d never seen anything like what happened next. Reagan enthusiasts appeared out of nowhere. Reagan was queried for his reaction: “Gosh, I was suprised. It all came out of the blue.”…
… If one were willing to consider ‘four years of non-stop underground campaigning’ as “out of the blue”. I’ll admit I never knew how far back St. Ronnie had started to run for his eventual ascension; if we’re gonna talk about what-ifs: What if Nixon’s paranoia hadn’t been stoked by his “friends'” continual assaults on his right flank? (All we ever seem to hear about is the Original DFHs trying to garrote him with their love beads from the other side of the aisle, which is, after all, the purpose of a two-party system.)
What’s your take?
Linda Featheringill
Just because you’re paranoiac doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
Look at how paranoiac Stalin was and how many of those people actually were out to get him [answer: a lot of them].
Linda Featheringill
It looks like the arrival of spring has interfered with our scheduled gabfest but I have a question anyway:
Are large portions of the US populace really afraid of
condescending and self-serving liberals “who make their money out of plans, ideas, communication, social upheaval, happenings, [and] excitement” ?
licensed to kill time
Speaking of John Wayne, I liked this quote from Nixon’s Kevin Phillips :
The easy appeal to the angry resentful crowd.
Proto-Teapeeps.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty)
Plus ca change: “Thurmond would tell old war stories … and promise, ‘Nixon will not ram anything down our throats.'”
What is it with these guys and ramming things down throats? 43 years and they haven’t come up with a different phrase?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I haven’t gone back over this chapter yet, but what struck me was St Ronnie’s religiosity. I guess it was only because he’s been off my radar for so long, but I was struck by his “It’s up to the Good Lord” attitude.
Also too, his slightly nasty one-liners aimed at that resentful lowest common denominator. “Hippies look like Tarzan, dress like Jane and smell like Bonzo!” Does that all sound like someone we know, also, too?
ETA: “he didn’t even know that much of the budget was set by statute…. “Can anyone tell me what’s in my legislative program?” he once plaintively asked aides in the middle of a press conference”.
Plus ca change indeed.
Linda Featheringill
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty):
How do you think that Deep Throat got that way? :-)
stuckinred
I was a month from shipping out and all I wanted to do was rock and roll! Fuck all of em!
Damned at Random
I’m stating to wonder how many of my “memories” of this era are actually second hand from documentaries and retrospectives. I think I watched the conventions that year – if only because they pre-empted other TV – but I have no memory of the violence INSIDE the Dem Convention. I remember “the whole world is watching” and the police riot outside – but not delegates and reporters being roughed up or Ribicoff dissing Daley to his face. I was 14 years old in summer of ’68, so I should have had some understanding of the importance of these events – right? So why is so much of this book surprising to me?
Omnes Omnibus
The impression I get of Nixon is that he was never anyone’s first choice. Ever. There was always someone to right of him, or the left, or more charming, etc., so that he had to outmaneuver, outwit, or outlast them. He was Richard Hatch from the first Survivor season.
stuckinred
@Damned at Random: I dunno, I’m only 4 years older. We sat in the barracks at Ft Lewis waiting to ship out for Vietnam and watched “our people” get the shit beat out of them in Chicago. Maybe the fact that I am from there added to the interest but we sure knew what was going on inside and out.
Damned at Random
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Me too. Then I decided he was actually saying he didn’t want to have to work for it.
Davis X. Machina
People keep insisting that Reagan was, when he ran against Carter in ’76, an empty shell, a sock puppet for the MIC, a figure of universal derision, ‘just an actor’, proof that we as a country will elect anyone, if he’s packaged correctly, and a salutary warning about the (rapidly receding) Palin threat.
He was a politician, down to his fingertips, if an unconventional one.
Reagan was running, hard, for the White House from the day he was sworn in in Sacramento. No one who takes politics seriously, took Reagan lightly.
licensed to kill time
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Oh yes. Sarah! genuflects at the altar of Reagan but she hasn’t got his ability to sound genial as she shoots her barbs.
Alex S.
I guess one could say that Reagan was the Chris Christie of 1968. And Nixon was the Reagan of 1950. And it shows that, no matter how bright they shine, it’s very unlikely that these rising stars actually capture the nomination. They still lack the kind of institutional support that needs time to grow. In 1968, Thurmond represented this kind of support. In 1976, it was Jesse Helms.
NeverRepentAmarillo
Nixon played the game better than anyone, but he didn’t make the rules. He was brilliant at understanding what it took to achieve his goals; he wasn’t Bush II, who waltzed into the presidency. Nixon worked hard and could never ignore the reality that he did indeed have enemies – on all sides.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty)
@Damned at Random: I was 17, and I’m sure I watched the conventions, but my guess is that most of my memories are from reading Norman Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” that came out in the next year or so.
Linda Featheringill
@stuckinred:
You were a child when you landed in Vietnam, weren’t you? Sigh.
arguingwithsignposts
I have to confess that I haven’t been following along with Nixonland. I think the book is very well written, but incredibly depressing, and it makes me want to punch people in the neck. There’s enough of that with what’s going on RIGHT NOW so that I haven’t looked at it since the “Summer” chapter. I’ve been reading Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” as an antidote, but it doesn’t always help.
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: I am reliably informed that I was in Grant Park as all of this happened. Of course, I had turned four earlier that month so I don’t recall much of it. My parents were there and couldn’t afford a babysitter which meant the I went along. My mother has a deep and longstanding aversion to the Chicago PD from that time.
Damned at Random
@NeverRepentAmarillo:
Seems like Nixon was playing a lot of Calvinball – whenever he had a lock, the rules changed to someoneelse’s advantage.
stuckinred
@Linda Featheringill: I was 18 and had already done a 13 month tour in Korea.
Anne Laurie
@Damned at Random:
Part of it, I’m sure, is that any “live” TV feeds came during the end-of-summer last-long-evenings when people (especially those of us hormonal teenagers looking forward — not — to going back to school) were otherwise occupied. My parents were quite ‘political’, in the sense that they bought their first tv to watch the Kennedy/Nixon election night in 1960, but I remember them being much more concerned with the newspaper reports the days after the conventions, not the tv coverage of the convention itself.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: I bet, I’ve mentioned before that there were warnings all over Seattle that it was a set-up and people were going to get hurt. Between hard core disillusioned peacneniks and agents provocateur they were right.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
The image of a pudgy, hairy Nixon strutting around a tropical beach nekkid is one I could’ve lived without, thenkyewvurrymuch.
Of course, being RMN, even if he took his pants off, he’d still be wearing his wingtips, and black over-the-calf socks, with garters. I’m seeing the Herblock cartoon now…
PurpleGirl
@Davis X. Machina: I’d say that Reagan was running for something from the first day he went on the rubber chicken circuit giving speeches at meetings for GE and other corporate entities. He just hadn’t been focused on what role yet, but he was preparing for something.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@arguingwithsignposts:
Yup. The whole plus ca change aspect does make your head spin, right down to Stevenson insisting that Democrats take the high road, old-guard conservative Dems trying to tell all the shrills to calm down (right down to Hal “Cokie’s Pappy” Boggs, fercrissake). Acid in the water supply was the creeping sharia law of forty years ago.
Depressing for other reasons, too; a lot of people I had thought of as good guys don’t look so good under the spotlight of the Civil Rights movement. I remember seeing Sam Ervin in some commercial back in the seventies–“just an old country lawyer”– and my mom telling me he was one of the good guys from Watergate. Sad to see that he was such a rancid segregationist.
Omnes Omnibus
@Davis X. Machina: I think Reagan probably knew that, in ’68 only four years removed from Goldwater, a true candidate of the Right would not be able to get the nomination. He played at being surprised by the attention and knew that he was setting himself up for the future, specifically 1976.
stuckinred
@PurpleGirl:
If the bloodbath must come, then let’s get on with it!
Gov. Ronald W. Reagan to the U.C. Board of Regents
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty)
I’m struck by the difference in approach between the Yippies and the Mobe. I always had a soft spot for Abbie Hoffman, because of the theatricality he brought to protesting.
But that move of his in the police office, to smash the display of trophies when he knew they couldn’t touch him? What an asshole. No two ways about it.
Linda Featheringill
@Anne Laurie:
Pants-less Nixon:
It is difficult to imagine how Richard and Pat managed to produce children. I just can’t picture it.
stuckinred
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
HalHale“Cokie’s Pappy” Boggs,Davis X. Machina
@PurpleGirl: Reagan’s hero-worshiping of FDR, the showman-statesman, is all of a piece with that. He just was making his bones in the reverse order, on the way to becoming the anti-FDR.
His abortive ’68 ‘campaign’ was like FDR’s VP run in 1920.
If George Lucas could actually do character, and dialog, and stuff, it’s a helluva plot-line for a movie.
stuckinred
@Linda Featheringill: Two-bagger.
Omnes Omnibus
@Linda Featheringill:
@Anne Laurie:
I apologize. I meant it metaphorically only.
arguingwithsignposts
@Linda Featheringill:
Rule 34 and things that are imagined cannot be unimagined.
Chris
@licensed to kill time:
Seems to me the difference is that Reagan talked to the silent majority by basically saying “those rich faggy elitists on the coasts think they’re so much smarter than you. They think you’re stupid. ButI don’t think you’re stupid: I respect you guys, so vote for me.”
Whereas Sarah Palin shows every sign of thinking the silent majority is that stupid, so fucking stupid and sheeplike that she doesn’t bother to do more than half-ass a few lazy dogwhistles to bring them running.
(And as far as the right wing base goes, Palin may well be right, but I can’t help but think her “lookit me, I’m dumb like you!” act is helping to keep her poll numbers down in the general population).
Anne Laurie
@Linda Featheringill: The sad thing is, from every report, Pat genuinely loved Richard, and he loved her as much as he was capable of loving anybody.
I’m just glad Nixon didn’t have sons, because a smarter version of the Bush Boys, I don’t think America could’ve survived.
PurpleGirl
@stuckinred: I know he said that, but I don’t understand what your comment to me means exactly. My point was that he started his political career by giving speeches to GE executives and others; he had time to learn what the message was that they (GE) wanted to hear.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty)
More plus ca change (I’m catching up on reading while we’re doing this): Regarding seating the Georgia delegation, when it was decided half the delegation would be regulars and half would be insurgents, Julian Bond “expressed appreciation at the half loaf.”
Response? “‘So now we can’t trust Julian Bond any more.’ … a crux of the New Politics: compromises were always suspect.”
Current version? Obama is worse than Bush, he sold us out.
Good lord, I wish we had gotten beyond all of this in the last 40 years.
licensed to kill time
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty):
What I remember from the time was the lightheartedness and the Theater of the Absurd aspect of the Yippies. This:
Which made the brutal police crackdown all the more shocking. I agree the trophy smashing was petty and dickish.
The Creeping Meatball, ha.
stuckinred
@PurpleGirl: That’s another message they wanted to hear.
NeverRepentAmarillo
@Damned at Random: Exactly – reading the book has increased my understand of Nixon and just what he was dealing with. Even the paranoia was pervasive. The culture oozed it and the disorder and chaos fed it. I was young when the Dem convention blew up, but my Irish Catholic union connected relatives,very political, kept me informed at the kitchen table and with the arguments directed at the TV news; it was one of the cracks in many years solid support of the Democratic party. (My grandfather stored whiskey in the garage during prohibition to help persuade the Irish to vote and maybe vote properly.) The disorder and fear made simple law and order arguments awfully appealing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chris: Really? I see Palin as utterly sincere, and really one of those resentful many she speaks for and to.
What strikes me about Reagan vs Nixon is that Nixon was always ready and willing to humiliate himself, to grovel before the far right, in a way that Reagan never had to. I didn’t review these chapters carefully, but doesn’t Perlstein make the point that Reagan’s governorship, like his presidency, was far less extreme than his rhetoric, and he just got away with it ’cause of that Teflon? Whereas Nixon had to crawl on his belly because of the lack of it.
stuckinred
@licensed to kill time: My DuPage county republican family KNEW that the demonstrators provoked it and deserved every lick they got.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Nixon v. Kennedy as well. Ever the Orthogonian.
licensed to kill time
@Chris: What’s that term for so stupid you don’t know you’re stupid? That’s Palin for ya.
NeverRepentAmarillo
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yes. On all points.
Linda Featheringill
When I look back on these times, I’m surprised that we made any progress at all. But we did.
We still have civil rights and the end to systemic discrimination if not complete equality. We still have Roe v. Wade. We have young women making decisions about things my mother had no choice about. And some other things that don’t come to mind right now.
And we had to kick and scream and fight every step of the way.
arguingwithsignposts
Over the last week, I got to walk through some of the more historical parts of Philadelphia with The Somebody. We went to Ben Franklin’s print shop, saw the liberty bell, walked through cemeteries and up and down cobbled streets. The thing that struck me the most was this plaque at the new exhibit at Independence Hall commemorating the President’s House. We wandered around the exhibit and The Somebody pointed me toward this memorial. The words of our President at the top of this plaque hit me hard. I didn’t cry, but it was hard not to.
So fuck Richard Nixon and all his goddamned progeny. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.
Damned at Random
Depressing
Davis X. Machina
@Damned at Random: Strom knew his man — and it wasn’t Nixon. He lived long enough to get him, too.
Damned at Random
@Linda Featheringill: Which is exactly why so many people still think the 50’s were awesome. All those people knew their place back then
Chris
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Maybe it’s the narcissistic vibe she gives off. I just don’t get the impression that she has feels a great deal of respect or affinity for the people she “speaks for.” She’s running a con on them as much as any old Republican candidate, she’s just markedly lazier about it.
licensed to kill time
This is an interesting documentary called Chicago 10 that uses archival footage, animation and actors which deals with the DNC convention and the trial after.
Some good music and footage. I just saw it on the TV a few weeks ago.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:I think Nixon had to crawl to the right because they, rightly, saw that he was not one of them in the way that Reagan was. Nixon would tack right if he needed to, but he would also tack left. He was not trusted because he was not a true believer.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Davis X. Machina: The rehabilitation of Strom Thurmond should stand as an indictment of our political media in and of itself. A vicious old racist who staggered into old age long enough to be remembered as the delightful old rascal who pinched Sally Quinn’s bottom at a garden party (I am not making that up).
Anne Laurie
@Linda Featheringill: And there are Gay People now! In the early 1970s, when I was in college, it was possible for some of my nice suburban midwestern fellow students to insist that they’d never met a “queer” — which, they argued, proved there probably weren’t any, except for some teeny-tiny minority of extreme freaks isolated in coastal enclaves like Greenwich Village & San Francisco.(Freshman year, my dorm was providing volunteer labor & sleeping space for the first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which was more-or-less against the campus rules, so there was Much Discussion.) Today, even the most devoutly fundamentalist homeschooler knows that gays are everywhere, whether or not God Hates Them. They may argue that homosexuality is a sin, or a fad, or overrated, but they can’t simply pretend it doesn’t exist.
And you can say the same thing about working women. Or middle-class African-Americans / Hispanics. Or…
MikeJ
@licensed to kill time: Look Out Haskell, It’s Real! Is one of my favorite documentaries. The making of Medium Cool.
Napoleon
@licensed to kill time:
The best part about that Kevin Phillips quote is look at one of the themes in his more recent books where he laments the fact the yahoos control the Rep party. Talk about buyer’s remorse.
NeverRepentAmarillo
@Damned at Random: True. And while my opinion of Reagan has mellowed just a tiny bit over the years, the continued uncritical worship of him on the right, still befuddles.
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
We did know our place in the 50s. Under somebody’s boot.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chris:
I agree she’s a total narcissist, but her resentments are all the more real for that. Socially and culturally, she’s a latter-day Orthogonian, but unlike Nixon, she could never come up with that name.
She’s again not unlike Reagan in that, though his disconnect was probably stronger. He was far more comfortable, I believe, with the kind of social elites that Palin (rightly) thinks look down on her
Villago Delenda Est
Palin might be sincere.
At fleecing her marks.
I see her as a vile, dishonest con artist, without even the charm of Professor Harold Hill.
licensed to kill time
@MikeJ: I’ve never seen that, I’ll check it out.
Anne Laurie
@Chris:
Truth be told, I suspect Palin’s laziness is part of her appeal to the slackers and/or the mooted ‘South Park Republicans’. Wanting to win, working to win in a system that’s so thoroughly, visibly corrupted is for luzers. When Palin demands rock-star perks and top dollar in advance, shows up late, rattles off a litany of sneering buzzwords from her trailerpark teleprompter, and bugs out without a backward glance towards her adoring syncophants, she’s Sticking It to The Man, dude! Livin’ the Seth Rogen dream!
Napoleon
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty):
I think Abbie did enormous damage to the left that the left still needs to live down. My biggest hope is that Caribou Barbie and Bachman do the same to the right.
In any event I met Abbie and Jerry Rubin at a private reception when they went on a speaking tour in the early 80s. They clearly hated each other but Abbie knew exactly how to jerk Rubin’s chain. It was an interesting dynamic.
Chris
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Oh, I’m sure her resentment of the elites is real. I’m just talking about the way she perceives voters – as dumb sheeple waiting to be scammed.
stuckinred
@Napoleon: Nothing Abbie, or any of the rest of us did, came close to the fucking crime that the war in Vietnam was.
Damned at Random
Another item that surprised me was Strom Thurmond’s list of “acceptable” VP candidates – George HW Bush and Howard Baker??
Baker I understand – he was never as moderate as the Watergate hearings made him appear and he was from a Southern border state – but George Bush?? He was just a one term Congressman, right- and though he made his money in Texas, he had a very Eastern establishment pedigree. What did Thurmond see in him?
Death Panel Truck
Not Bonzo. Cheetah.
Or more correctly, Cheeta.
Anne Laurie
@Villago Delenda Est:
David Mamet’s characters, Gordon Gekko, they had “charm”. Palin’s appealing to the Neil Bute demographic — outspoken, unvarnished ugliness is the New Chic. Having a big vocabulary, using words with precision, pretending that there’s a message beyond “I Got Mine, Fvck You” is for bloodless elitists now.
NeverRepentAmarillo
@Villago Delenda Est: I haven’t seen any indication that Palin is self aware enough to be considered a con artist. Or bright enough.
ppcli
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty):
I think it’s a universal for a certain kind of conservative, world-wide. I remember my Canadian grandfather (quite liberal, in fact, for a police officer, except on language issues) ranting about Trudeau “shoving French down our throats”.
stuckinred
@ppcli: Like this bullshit, “they passed it in the middle of the night”!
Chris
@Napoleon:
Interesting thing to say. When the Tea Party Movement popped up a couple years ago, I remember hoping that they’d be for the other side what the 1960s radicals were for ours – the movement that finally took things too far for the average American and jump-started a backlash that moved the country back towards the other side of the aisle.
Of course, the New Left would’ve killed for the kind of institutional and financial support the teabaggers have, and we don’t have anyone poised to take advantage of the situation like Nixon did. Still and all… nice thought.
Damned at Random
@ppcli: The other blast from the past I thought was more current was Nixon’s promise to appoint “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court. I thought that whole meme originated in the Clinton years as code for “no liberals or moderates.” Exactly when did that formulation originate?
Anne Laurie
@Damned at Random:
Craven biddability — always Poppy’s biggest selling point. Same thing Willard Romney’s trying to flog right now. Unfortunately, Gresham’s Law has really swamped the modern market for craven; when every candidate is willing to be carnally assaulted by a gang of banksters live on this week’s top reality show in return for a .001 projected Nielsen bump, it’s hard to stand out.
stuckinred
Lot’s of hand-wringing about “60’s” radicals. WTF? Maybe if we had just stuck to the button down collars and being nice the fucking war would have withered away.
Kool Earl
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty):
re the Abbie Hoffman police station incident: In Hoffmans autobio, he said that he had a good relationship with the precinct commander and that he smashed the trophy case in a calculated response to an incident where an African American in the neighborhood was unfairly arrested and brought to the station house and that he wanted to have blacks see hippies standing up for them.
MikeJ
@stuckinred: You don’t think attempting to levitate the pentagon got it over with any quicker do you? I’ve never seen any sign that the anti-war protests did anything.
Unlike the civil rights movement, which was lead by a suit wearing guy, until they shot him.
stuckinred
@MikeJ: Yea, I remember you telling me how wildly ineffective the VVAW was too.
Damned at Random
We appear to be out of steam. I do have one more nteresting quote:
WTF?
Napoleon
@stuckinred:
I agree, but he was a clown that tarred people who where not who happened to have the same opinion and made it easy to dismiss “the left” as comprising of clowns while people like Nixon were viewed as serious.
Omnes Omnibus
@Damned at Random: He was trying to head off the arrival of a deaf, dumb, and blind kid.
Napoleon
@Chris:
Chris, the final chapter on them has not been written yet. Just look at the hard right Governor’s poll numbers in WI, MI, OH and PA. I think we are still several years out (4-6) from seeing what kind of damage they may cause the right.
licensed to kill time
@Damned at Random:
That makes me think about the “Fortas films” and the coin-operated peep shows (O-7!)they brought into the Senate Supreme Court nomination hearings that were so nasty the Senators couldn’t even get aroused! pg 288, laughing too hard to look up exact quote.
Anne Laurie
Thanks everybody for participating. Same time, same place next week, next two chapters?
I’ll admit that sometimes the only thing that’s kept me going for one more page on this project is the thought that we’re finally approaching the peak of Nixon’s “triumph”. It’ll still be plenty ugly, but from this point forward, at least there will be some suffering for the CREEPsters and other villians in the tragedy known as “The Fall of Richard the Turd”…
Chris
@Napoleon:
I definitely hope you’re right.
licensed to kill time
@Anne Laurie: Thank you for hosting, Anne Laurie. Looks like everyone’s distracted by current events today, but I always enjoy these discussions.
Will tune in next week, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!
stuckinred
@Napoleon: If you were the slightest bit different you were a “clown” or a freak. Fuck em.
Kool Earl
@stuckinred:
I was a grade schooler during the height of the Vietnam war, but I think stuckinred is correct. Note that per the incidents circa 1965 against the original antiwar dissenters described in NIXONLAND, the people who opposed the anti-war people were intolerant and/or violent long before the anti-war movement started lashing out in understandably desperate frustration.
Rick Perlstein
‘Nothing great discussion. Wish I could have joined you. Maybe next time. RP
Rick Perlstein
I mean “nother” as in “another” great discussion!
cfeddy
I just was amazed that the public thought the police were in the right. I guess it took a while before people could absorb that fact that the authorities were not always the good guys.
Chris
@cfeddy:
(I realize this is coming in totally late, but)
The “federal government is your friend” attitude seems to’ve been very prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, from everything I’ve read. The New Deal and its success in creating a modern, middle-class society probably had a lot to do with that.
Chet
@Anne Laurie: I’m reminded of that old John Derbyshire piece in NR where a woman at a dinner party dismissed him as a “milk and water conservative” because he wouldn’t support antisodomy laws.
Once you’ve gotten used to that all-red-meat diet, I guess it’s hard to have a taste for anything else.