Labor poured unprecedented resources into the Democratic campaign going into the home stretch, registering 4.6 million voters, sending out 115 million pamphlets, establishing 638 phone banks, fielding 72,000 house-to-house canvassers and 94,000 Election Day volunteers. Humphrey nabbed 15 last-minute points from Wallace among unionists. He also ran a lachrymose print ad: “Don’t let him buy the White House” over a picture of a smiling Richard Nixon. “No man has ever paid more trying to be President… “
Well, there’s a fitting epitaph for our own Ragged Dick Nixon.
And in these chapters the rest of the CREEPSTER band of brigands falls into place: Haldeman, Erlichman, Kissinger. Do I actually remember a period crack about “two German Shepherds and a German Jew”, or is that post-Watergate?
Some things never change on the (D) side of the aisle, either:
Reasoned [Humphrey’s] chief political deputy, “Nothing would bring the real peaceniks back to our side unless Hubert urinated on a portrait of Lyndon Johnson in Times Square before television — and then they’d say to him, “Why didn’t you do it before?”
What’s your impression of the Triumph of the Richard?
Linda Featheringill
Political races often have unpredictable endings.
However, Nixon did a much better job at campaigning. His group controlled the media, controlled the message, controlled his image, and even controlled the Vietnam peace negotiations.
He had a hunger for control. Some of the things we hate Nixon for were just the results of his efforts to gain control of this or that problem [Watergate for instance].
But controlling the campaign paid off for him.
licensed to kill time
In addition to the pee on the portrait quote I also noted:
…which is similar to comments made by some that not voting for Obama/undermining his efforts will somehow get us to a more progressive place.
Reading this book is like deja vu all over again.
(edited for clarity)
Linda Featheringill
@licensed to kill time:
Apparently people come up with that idea frequently. Sort of like the slingshot effect of going around the sun in order to pick up the speed to make it to the outer edges of our solar system.
But I don’t think it works too well in politics.
Batocchio
This was my most common reaction reading Nixonland (and re-reading it). All roads lead to Nixonland.
Damned at Random
Wow- I tried to comment and got eaten.
Again – the 68 campaign was the 60 campaign with the roles switched. Humphrey was doing a retail, baby-kissing, hand-shaking campaign like Nixon ran in 60 while Nixon was the pre-packaged professionally presented product of a media savvy campaign. The guy was a lifelong learner.
What surprised me was the freedom Kissinger had to upstage Nixon from early on and still keep his job. Why did Nixon, whose paranoia required complete loyalty from other staff, let Kissinger act out with impunity?
stuckinred
@licensed to kill time: That’s because many of us at the time saw liberals as part of the problem not part of the solution.
Villago Delenda Est
@Batocchio:
Yup, gotta agree with this.
I don’t think enough can be said about the problem of the FDR coalition getting what it wanted…and then falling apart because they were so determined not to allow others to share in that success. Particularly the black.
licensed to kill time
@Linda Featheringill: Yes, I think people often feel an emotional urge to blow it all up and start over…but that can lead to unanticipated outcomes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Batocchio: That is one of the things that makes this book a painful slog to read.
Villago Delenda Est
@Damned at Random:
Kissinger had more freedom because Kissinger had skills Nixon needed to accomplish his international objectives…in particular, the great triumph of his administration, the opening up of China.
stuckinred
@licensed to kill time: four dead in Ohio
Villago Delenda Est
@licensed to kill time:
That’s always the problem with the “revolution” option. The American Revolution was the exception, not the rule, to positive outcomes. The French and Russians learned that the hard way…in many ways, all they managed to do was usher in worse tyrannies than they had to begin with.
gnomedad
@Linda Featheringill:
/ Trekkie
Actually, since the sun is by definition at rest with respect to the solar system, it can’t be used for that trick, but NASA uses planetary fly-bys to gain or lose momentum all the time.
/ Nerd
stuckinred
@Villago Delenda Est: China was no walk in the park.
Anne Laurie
Housekeeping question here: Now that the days are getting longer, would it be easier for people if we pushed the start time back on these discussions, maybe to 6 or 7 pm EDT?
Villago Delenda Est
@stuckinred:
“The Establishment”. Definitely considered to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: The American Revolution, much like Britain’s Glorious Revolution, was extraordinarily limited in scope.
stuckinred
@Villago Delenda Est: Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Linda Featheringill
@gnomedad:
Ah, planets and not the sun. Because planets are in relative motion, I assume. [Physics will be the death of me yet.]
cfeddy
No one could believe Humphrey, that he was really ready to end the war. I think a lot of people believed Nixon was the peace candidate. I personally sat this one out, since they both were sleazy politicians. Humphrey was tainted by his proximity to Johnson, and Nixon, because he was just sleazy.
Damned at Random
Reminds me of an Iranian friend of mine who was gung-ho to go back to Iran after the Shah was toppled. He reluctantly stayed in the US to finish his degree at his Dad’s insistence, but his cousin went back. A year later, his cousin told him to do anything he could to remain in the US. My dispirited friend told me “It doesn’t matter who is in power, the people suffer”
Damned at Random
@Anne Laurie: I suspect some people are dropping out because to material is too depressing to go on.
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
“. . . .the new boss, the same as the old boss.”
licensed to kill time
@stuckinred: @Villago Delenda Est:
I was one of those who didn’t trust the Establishment or any politicians. If you’d asked me at the time I probably would have gone with Bring on the Revolution, man! But I was pretty young and had no idea what that meant, really. I imagine most folks who say those kind of things don’t either.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s because both were not aiming to totally upset the applecart, and were led by members of the elite. They were both fighting against monarchs seeking to undo changes and revert back to an earlier political paradigm, definitely not the case in France or Russia.
Lord North actually undid a lot of the more oppressive taxes in the colonies, but kept the tea tax specifically to assert Parliament’s power to tax. He missed the boat…if he had gone a step further and given the colonies seats in Parliament, Elizabeth II might be our head of state right now.
Anne Laurie
@stuckinred:
Part of it, I think — and I’m old(er) now, but I can remember thinking like this when I was 18 — is that when you’re a Young Revolutionary, you figure once everything’s broken, you’ve got plenty of time to ride through the apocalypse and still have a long prosperous life. People who’ve already spent years making their lives, establishing careers, starting families, they’re a lot less willing to “scrap everything and start over”.
gnomedad
@Linda Featheringill:
Exactly. The spacecraft gains/loses speed while the planet is imperceptibly slowed/sped up.
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
You may have a point. Several people who are too young to have lived through this time have complained about how depressing it all is/was/whatever.
And it is depressing because it looks like we are caught in a loop of repeating the same mistakes over and over again in electing our officials.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Oh, I agree. Revolution can be a Pandora’s Box. We got lucky in the 18th century.
Linnaeus
@Damned at Random:
It’s also a huge, huge book. I’ve fallen behind in the discussion simple because I’ve got too many other books to read right now.
Anne Laurie
@Damned at Random:
When Reagan was shot, I was a library clerk for a woman who’d lost her husband in the Ibo (Nigerian) War, a man who’d left Hungary just before the Soviet tanks rolled in, and a woman whose parents barely got the family out of Estonia during WWII. Their perspective on the wisdom of assassination as a political weapon was… quite different than that of most of the other good Midwestern university liberals.
licensed to kill time
@Linda Featheringill: I think people who lived through it find it even more depressing! for the reasons you mention. Not to take anything away from Rick’s book, it is very well written and researched and entertaining in a ‘look at the car wreck’ kind of way.
But dang, we just keep doing the same stupid things in this country.
Villago Delenda Est
It’s my hope that over time, as happened in France, it will happen in Russia, and in Iran, and in China…”Liberté, égalité, fraternité” will eventually be realized, but it takes decades, if not centuries, to get there.
gnomedad
@Anne Laurie:
I’m neutral, but I’d guess it would be a net gain — Sunday afternoon outings and all that. Forgot my reading assignment for this week but am eager to continue.
Woodrowfan
whenever I hear someone say something like “let it get worse, then it will get better!” I know they’re not thinking about those who truly will suffer: the poor who lose their jobs, or their homes, their retirement, etc. Sorry, but your desire for a purer candidate, to not settle for half a loaf (or less), doesn’t trump the need of those who will really have to suffer so your oh-so-progressive fee-fees don’t get bruised.
Shorter: It’s never the eggs who think “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” is a good idea…
Even Shorter: F**** Nadar
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, I keep coming back to the title. In a lot of ways, we left the USA and entered Nixonland, a land of hyperpartisan resentments, and politicians who know how to ride those to victory.
If I have to lay the blame anywhere, it’s Vietnam, which ushered in the compulsive lying from the top driven by the fear of losing the war and taking the blame. Nixon found the cracks, put his wedge in them, tapped his hammer, and sent us all to Nixonland. For what appears to be the rest of my life.
The damage will be incalculable, for in Nixonland there’s no one with any expertise worth listening to, no such thing as climate change, no peak oil, nothing but Business As Usual so the rich get richer until it all collapses out from under us.
WereBear
@Omnes Omnibus: One problem with Revolution’s Appeal is that people are not used to thinking on the scales required. Revamp your closet by throwing everything out and starting over; okay, you might show up with a missing element, but the excitement will override the problems.
Civilization is much more complicated.
I know, when discussing the long centuries our system of jurisprudence evolved over, people get all het up about “starting over” and I have to remind them that we got the present system by starting from scratch and wrestling out a multitude of problems. We can’t just start over.
Face it, a working civilization is a hard slog in bad weather. It’s tough to get people on board with “Let’s all just be patient and not get discouraged…”
stuckinred
@Anne Laurie: I was so fucking angry when I came home I wanted to bring the war home. Seems silly now but it didn’t then.
gnomedad
@licensed to kill time:
My reaction tends to be “OMG, I’d forgotten just how bad it was. Maybe we can survive this.”
stuckinred
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: And it started with J F Fucking K.
Blanche
Yep, it’s a depressing book, but there are so many fascinating tidbits … George Romney faced a blip of “he’s not an American” slander (he was born during his parents’ vacation in Mexico) … and the right’s trashing of opponents thru ‘sexual innuendo’ … just a couple of bits that come to mind.
MikeJ
And some people don’t really keep up with the conversation on the book that they continue to read because the comment threads have proven the pee quote to be absolutely true.
It’s not the depressingness of the content, it’s that reactions to it are as depressingly the same as they are for anything else.
Damned at Random
The most striking thing about the book to me is Nixon’s intelligence. I remember him scrambling to cover-up Watergate but knew little about his background and route to power. He read widely and absorbed so much (unlike so many successful pols). And he was capable of suppressing his ego when it served his higher purpose – accepting the media advisors to win the election. He could think outside the box- opening up relations with China and playing them off of the Russians- and recognizing that he needed that asshole Kissinger to do it (again suppressing his own ego).
All those character traits were so interwoven that in the end they couldn’t be untangled. The resentments that drove him to excel couldn’t be repressed once he achieved ultimate power. And they kept him from being beloved by his constituents like Reagan was, who he resented as a Franklin. If he could hear the Reagan worship in the modern Republican Party, he would be spinning in his grave.
Villago Delenda Est
@Woodrowfan:
Hear, hear.
Nader’s attitude reminds me of the German Communists in the 30’s: “Nach Hitler, Uns”. Yes, ruling over a country utterly devastated by the “liberation” of the Red Army.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@licensed to kill time: I think it was in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail that the phrase “after the revolution” came up. I think it was in the context of the newspaper reporters saying “After the revolution we’ll all be able to write like Hunter.”
For a brief moment there, it looked like it was possible. And then it just became a catchphrase — hoping for some change you knew could never happen.
WereBear
I’ve been trying, and failing, to come up with any circumstances where that works. Marriages? Operating systems? Digestive systems?
cfeddy
This period is depressing. I really don’t know how the country survived.I really didn’t remember the half of what was going on. I don’t remember a lot of the shooting being done by police.
Villago Delenda Est
@stuckinred:
No, Truman started it, by backing the French (due to the considerations of the Cold War) over Ho Chi Mihn, who revered George Washington and wanted to be a firm ally of the United States, a country he greatly admired.
Not that JFK didn’t double down on the stupid, mind you…
Anne Laurie
@Damned at Random:
Ain’t it just. But while you guys are here, I’m here!
However, to the degree that it’s people are outside longer on Sunday afternoons, gardening or doing sports or whatever, no reason we can’t accommodate the schedule.
Linda Featheringill
@gnomedad:
Yes, we might live through it this time.
Although some of us may have to fight all of our lives so that the next group can actually make some progress.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@stuckinred: Yep, no denying that fact. My opinion all these years later is that Kennedy needed to do the Macho Swagger thing same as W, 40 years earlier.
Johnson ended up stuck with the war that JFK dropped on him and didn’t have the fortitude to say Fuck It and leave. I’m not sure any president does or ever did, now that I think on it. Any counterexamples?
Damned at Random
@Anne Laurie: I’m retired so I can (and will) be here anytime.
Majority rules.
It’s rained here 22 out of the last 25 days, so I never considered anyone wanting to be outside on a Sunday afternoon.
Linda Featheringill
@Anne Laurie:
Later would be all right with me. I actually have a day off on Sundays and so am the very picture of inactivity! :-)
Woodrowfan
oh well, at least some of the music was good…
In 1968 I went to grade school in Moraine, Ohio, which had a heavily white union GM laborer population. I was the only Humphrey supporter in my class and the Nixon and Wallace kids kept ripping down my signs. I remember my neighbor having a HUGE George Wallace sign in his garage. Wallace won the school election. Hubert was a distant third.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Anne Laurie: 7 PM sounds good to me. If it ever warms up I’m going to want to be outside gardening.
26 degrees yesterday morning!
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
Bless your heart! Where are you?
stuckinred
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Halberstam has some great JFK quotes about the Nam in “The Coldest Winter”. Something to the effect that the next dumb bastard will have to deal with this shit.
Damned at Random
and so on
Omnes Omnibus
@Damned at Random: Seattle?
NeverRepentAmarillo
@WereBear: Too true. I really want to blame television the commercials implying you just acquire this or that product and you become rich, thin, good looking with the significant other of your dreams. Analysis, incremental improvement, even striving for your desires is no longer admired. It seems people prefer instant gratification and simple answers; they distrust those who work hard (like Nixon, maybe he poisoned the idea of ambition and study and smarts), they admire those who are lucky or anointed as being somehow purer, chosen by the ‘guy in the sky’.
Damned at Random
@Linda Featheringill: Oregon. Small town south of Eugene. There is a reason our football teams here are the Ducks and the Beavers
Nicole
@Anne Laurie:
But I remember also being so much more impatient when I was younger and I think there’s also a belief at that age that if you tear something apart you can have your ideal in place that much sooner. It takes time to accept the first part of MLK’s quote about the arc of history and not just the second part.
Oh, and 6 or 7 on Sundays is great with me. It’ll distract me from mourning the loss of “Big Love.”
stuckinred
@Nicole: Mildred Pierce tonight!
licensed to kill time
I noted a Roger Ailes tactic on pg 331, where he comes up with the idea to plant a ‘Wallaceite cabdriver’ in the audience of a Nixon TV panel discussion to throw out a “Awright Mac, what about these niggers?” question so Nixon could act shocked and moderate in contrast. Ratfucker from way back.
Also, Nixon’s pathetic little notes to himself where he tries on personas and seems to believe that thinking he’s a good guy makes it so. It’s all about the image, not the reality.
God, it makes me so disgusted with him all over again. Let’s dig him up and kick him around some more!
Jim Pharo
Let me throw something out that I think Rick touches on, but isn’t his focus.
LBJ really ushered in the era in which Progressives felt that their inherent moral rightness should have been adequate to win elections. I think we are still struggling with this in a big way.
I think LBJJ was the turning point for the Dems. By bringing on board those opposed to racial inequality and chucking the racists overboard, I suspect be believed he was entitled to the nation’s gratitude and admiration — which he got in 64.
I think from HHH to McGovern, to Carter to Dukakis to Mondale to Gore to Kerry, (with Clinton a possible exception) our leaders have simply believed they were morally superior and deserved to win. This has led to a failure to fight, since they believed their superiority was evident if only people would look and stop being so obstinate.
I think BHO sees this, too, and fights the smugness that has all too often characterized our side of the aisle. (Hillary, not so much.)
While the rise of the Right is obviously Rick’s focus, it’s really the flip side that most interests me — the decline of the Left. I think this is what Chris Hedges is driving at when he attributes our current dire straits not to the Right’s propensity to do harm, but rather to the Left’s failure to adequately resist.
What do you all think?
Damned at Random
Mildred Pierce starts tonight. Look forward to that.
Anne Laurie
@Damned at Random:
Thing is, talking about his background, Reagan was just as much of an Orthogonian as Nixon. His dad was the town drunk, in a small(minded) Midwestern village when that actually meant something, and his mother was a borderline hysteric whose antics must’ve been just as embarrassing. But “Dutch” chose to cope the way some children of alcoholics do, by creating a narrative, aka “lying”, about his happy youth as the adored offspring of a beloved scamp and a free-spirited performer. He developed from a childhood of lying to himself, to his radio career lying about baseball games (making up ‘color commentary’ from tweet-like telegraphed stats of games he wasn’t actually watching), to his B-movie Hollywood career pretending to be different characters, to his “GE spokesman” days pretending to be an actor while learning (being groomed) to be a politician. Once you read anything about his background, the fact that his presidential career was going to be all lies, fantasies, and brutal suppression of any unpleasant reality really wasn’t a big surprise.
Maybe the difference between Nixon and Reagan is that Nixon acted like a guy desperate to re-shape the world in service to his personal resentments. But Reagan chose to accept that the world was a horrorshow run by a cabal of rich monsters — his job was to put a sunny face on a pretty cover story to keep the proles (us) from realizing what was really going on. And he did so WELL by it!
Shorter: Nixon, the failure of substance. Reagan, the triumph of… truthiness?
Citizen Alan
I’m not reading the book, but I’ll make the following unsolicited observation: the only reason Nixon left was because there were still enough honorable and patriotic Republicans who would have supported impeachment if he had not resigned. If he’d had today’s Republicans and Fox News on his side, Nixon could have publicly admitted to ordering the break-in, made some vague “national security” excuse for it, defied the court order to turn over his tapes and, for an encore, cooked and eaten a human baby, and he’d still have made it through the rest of his term without being forced it.
The worst thing about the Bush era was that it exposed the dirty little secret of our “democracy”: that if the President has 34 Senators who vow to support him unconditionally in all things, he can rule as a dictator.
Nicole
@stuckinred: I forgot! Thanks for the reminder about Mildred Pierce!
NeverRepentAmarillo
@Jim Pharo: Agreed. That is a recurring theme, the left continuing to make intellectual appeals they feel are self evident, while failing to engage both the fearful and hopeful subconscious of the majority. The left notices the dog whistles of the opposition, but cannot seem to find an effective emotional argument of its own. It does at times come off as very smug. If the position is worth fighting for, why not use all the tools at your disposal? It doesn’t necessarily call for dishonesty, but it does require a “Nixon assessment” of what is needed to effectively promote your position. Being smug will not cut it.
Anne Laurie
@licensed to kill time:
In the “Given a time machine, who is the one key figure of the last half-century you’d assassinate to change the world for the better?” sweeps, I think Roger Ailes would be an excellent choice. Talk about damaged human beings taking their resentments out on the rest of us…
NeverRepentAmarillo
@Citizen Alan: Even at the time, there were those that thought if Nixon had just come clean as soon as things started to erupt, he would have survived.
Nicole
@Citizen Alan:
And that I blame on Ford’s pardon of him. The Right resented the Left for his resignation and the Left saw Nixon escape justice. The 2000 Supreme Court decision, to me, is the natural descendant of the pardon (as was Iran Contra, which was the defining political event of my youth).
licensed to kill time
@Anne Laurie: Yeah, I’d vote Roger off the planet.
Reagan, the triumph of truthiness was most excellent, AL.
R-Jud
@Anne Laurie: Him or Murdoch; it’s a toss-up.
PurpleGirl
Not directly related but a memory that shows the changing feelings about the Democratic leadership. Hubert Humphrey was the keynote speaker at the awards ceremony for the IBEW Local 3 scholarship program in spring 1969. To this then high school senior he was boring and had quite an old feeling. His was very establishment and connected to LBJ. Another speaker that morning was Herman Badillo, of Puerto Rican ancestry who was Bronx Borough President and would become the Puerto Rican in the House. Eventually he became a Republican as he felt left behind and ignored by the City’s Democratic leadership. I don’t think the Republicans treated much better.
Damned at Random
@Anne Laurie:
Brilliant summation. But I think Reagan exudes Franklin-esque truthiness so convincingly that he became the prototype Franklin in Nixon’s mind. The background story made him an inspirational American success story in the Horatio Alger tradition – but without the need to do anything too demeaning to be acceptable to upper crust sensibilities. Nixon was just an unromantic middle class striver. Boring
Jim Pharo
@PurpleGirl: And then of course it was off to jail for Herman, no?
R-Jud
@Nicole:
And didn’t Dick Cheney say to a reporter that the attempt to impeach Clinton was basically revenge for Nixon having to resign(albeit not in so many words)? Or did I dream that?
cfeddy
To change the subject, I was also surprised that Humphrey ran out of money. You would think the Democrats would have backed their own chosen candidate.
Damned at Random
My best friend is the daughter of an alcoholic and, boy, can she keep a secret.
Anne Laurie
@Nicole:
Seconded. I really, really wish the Obama Administration had set up some kind of “Truth & Reconciliation Committee” to examine its predecessors’
war crimesquestionable choices… many of them committed by people (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) who got their start in politics under Richard Nixon.Sigh. If wishes were horses, I’d have the most successful livery stable since Mr. Hobson!
Damned at Random
I think Humphrey was doubly fucked. He warned Johnson about the quagmire Vietnam could become, but the loyalty that won him the nomination kept him from running as a credible peace candidate.
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson – none of them did their VPs any favors
Anne Laurie
@Damned at Random:
John Adams snorts. Bitterly.
cfeddy
Triply fucked, because wasn’t Johnson actually working against him, behinds the scenes?
WereBear
@Jim Pharo: That’s a great take on the situation; I mean, I fall prey to the “Bleedin’ Obvious” syndrome, but obviously it’s not that way for everyone.
licensed to kill time
Nixon sabotaging the Peace talks in Paris is pretty breathtaking too. Especially since he warned about that very possibility some months before. I guess he was warning the country about himself in some weird twist of projection-fueled paranoia.
It reminded me of Reagan doing the same thing with the Iranian hostage negotiations. Secret backroom deals just so they could win, screw the country.
Damned at Random
The major difference being the hostages got out alive. Many US servicemen and Vietnamese weren’t so lucky. So Reagan wins that round
Anne Laurie
@R-Jud:
If you did, we had similar dreams. I remember it as Rove ‘explaining’ it, but he’d probably have been quoting Darth Cheney.
cfeddy
As despicable Nixon was from the outside, this book really shows how much worst he was secretly. We really didn’t know the half of it at the time. The idea that he would interfere with peace talks really made my head explode.
Damned at Random
@Damned at Random: and Cambodians. I forgot the dead Cambodians
Nicole
@Anne Laurie: You and R-Jud are right, but it was Henry Hyde:
And sadly, what happened was… Nothing.
Linky to article
Nicole
Sorry for block quote fail. Forgot the HTML trick…
PurpleGirl
@Jim Pharo: He was a deputy major for Ed Koch for two years. He resigned that post after he disagreed with Koch about redevelopment of the South Bronx. He floated around Democratic politics during the 1980s and 1990s but by the end of the 1990s he was supporting Republicans. He ran for Comptroller with Rudi Guiliani but lost that election. He changed party affiliation, but as I said, the Republicans didn’t treat him much better than he felt the Democrats did. He’s currently practicing law and works with the conservative Manhattan Institute.
Nicole
@Damned at Random: Word. My stepmom is a survivor of the Pol Pot regime. One time the family played a “If you could meet a famous person, living or dead, whom would you choose?” game and my stepmom said Nixon to ask him why he did what he did to her country.
licensed to kill time
Another thing that makes my head ‘splody is the craven about-face the mainstream press did once they saw which way the wind was blowing. Walter Cronkite kowtowing to Daley. No more sympathetic ‘look what they are doing to the kids’ coverage.
(I just noticed that you can re-size the comment text box by dragging the corner! when did that happen?)
Chris
@Anne Laurie:
He came to the right era.
By the end of the 1970s, the ugliness in American society had been ripped open for all to see: the segregation and the racism that underpinned it (not just in the South but all over the country), the ugliness of the war and what it was doing to both the troops on the ground and the people whose “freedom” we were supposed to be fighting for, and other things. The 1950s image of a benevolent, freedom loving country full of happy people making themselves and the world all better, was gone. By 1980, I imagine people were just starving to put a “happy, sunny face” on the whole mess, which is exactly what Reagan did.
Ever heard the quote “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night: well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.” That quote is Reagan in a nutshell. It’s the purest form of bullshit, but it’s the kind of “well, our problems aren’t so bad after all” logic that was probably seductive for a lot of people coming out of the depressing 1970s. (As long as you weren’t one of the 17 million, you could afford to believe it).
nancydarling
@Linda Featheringill: @Anne Laurie: I’m late to this discussion and have only skimmed the thread (been out chasing the neighbor’s cows off my place and back onto their own). I sense that you two are near my age—pushing hard at 68 for me. I married in ’64, had a child in ’66 and was going to college part or full time in all the years when the “revolution” was happening. Beyond a couple of anti-war rallies, all of this revolutionary thinking passed me by. I’m much more of a radical now in my thinking than I ever was in my 20’s. My sense of my college class mates and a lot of acquaintances my age is that they have become their parents except more liberal on a few social issues. Do you think we ever had the critical mass needed in those days to really make changes? So many of my college friends were motivated partially by the draft hanging over their heads. Without the draft, they probably would have been in it just for the sex and drugs. Playwright Lanford Wilson passed away a few days ago and I was watching a 10 year old interview in which he lamented the loss of the innocence and idealism of the 60s and 70s. I’m not so sure that innocence and idealism was ever more than skin deep for most of us. Your thoughts?
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
I sort of agree, but I don’t think it’s because Republicans were honorable or patriotic – I think it’s just because Nixon wasn’t their man.
Come to think of it, he wasn’t really anybody’s man. The Democrats didn’t like him because he successfully destroyed their four-decade-old coalition. The Dixiecrats didn’t like him because… well, you know the Dixiecrats. The moderate Republican establishment (Eisenhower/Rockefeller wing) didn’t like him because the same antiliberal rhetoric he used on Democrats applied to them. The ascendant hard right (Goldwater/Reagan wing) didn’t like him because he was a big government Keynesian up there with FDR.
So when push came to shove, there was no one to speak for him. If he’d had the kind of political base that Reagan did during Iran-contra, it would have been a different story.
Anne Laurie
@Nicole: Thanks!
The blockquoting trick is “Two underscores (underlines) between paragraphs. No more, no less, if you want them to be invisible.”
(Took the liberty of fixing for you.)
Nicole
@Anne Laurie: Thank you for fixing the block quote. I’m on my iPad and it doesn’t offer me the edit function like the laptop does.
Bob Loblaw
@WereBear:
The state of Wisconsin?
cfeddy
Well, I’m around nancydarling’s age(sorry don’t know how to do the @name thingy), and my friends were definitely liberal and remained so. It became a sort of “shouting into the wind” thing after a while. We thought we could change things, but it became apparent that was impossible. I’m ashamed to say I dropped out and gave up.
Damned at Random
@Bob Loblaw: Maybe. Fingers crossed
nancydarling
@Woodrowfan: Woodrow, I’m not willing to sit back and let things get worse, so that they can start to get better. Molly Ivins had a great column about this, or maybe it was in one of her books. My fear is that things will get worse no matter what we do.
@Jim Pharo: AS for the Left’s failure to resist, maybe there were never enough of us truly committed to the long haul. Civil rights for blacks took a hundred years. God bless Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner; their names are etched in my heart, but are there enough of us like that now?
licensed to kill time
@cfeddy: To put the @namethingy in you just hover your mouse over the comment you want to reply to. You’ll see “reply” pop up in the lower right corner, click on it and it puts code in the comment box for you. Then hammer out your pithy reply and submit :)
stuckinred
@nancydarling: I was “active” after I came home. I was committed because I saw the war first hand and wanted it over. Sex, drugs and rock and roll? Hell yes but “I believed, I believed I believed “.
Anne Laurie
@nancydarling:
Well, I’m actually 55, but I was politically precocious. As a back-end boomer, the theme of my entire godsdammned life has been “You should’ve been here just a couple years ago, before everything was used up & worn out — it was all soooo great, then!” I think you’re right about the general currents, though — “your generation”, the early-boomers, had an optimism about the possibility of changing things by sheer force of personality / weight of numbers that mine didn’t. You guys had reason to believe that if enough Americans wanted political change, it would happen. My generation (and a lot of our successors) were much more cynical about whether any such changes would be for the better.
On a related note, Gloria Steinam had a great essay on why men tend to be political radicals in their youths but grow more conservative with age, while women tend to much more accepting of the status quo when they’re young & get radicalized as we get older. I need to look through my library & see if I can put up a proper link to the excerpt.
Linda Featheringill
@nancydarling:
Hi. In case you check back to see if I answered you.
I think we had the fire and energy back then but we didn’t have the depth of support in the population that showed up in 2008 [and not just in the black community].
Right now, it looks like we might have the support of a large part of the people in 2012 because of the war on unions and because of the inequality of wealth. I’d really like to be right this time [but there is no guarantee].
Yes, I’m in your age bracket [pushing on 67] but I can still piss people off so life is good.
:-)
Damned at Random
I read Gail Sheehy’s book Passages many years ago and she said that in middle age women’s horizons open up because they are free of the toil associated with child-raising whereas men look at all the goals they have not accomplished and start working harder on a narrower set of goals.
Anne Laurie
Thanks everybody for participating. Next week, how about we try 7mp EDT for a change, see how that works?
Also, should we go for three chapters instead of two? Three would take us up to Charles Manson…
cfeddy
@licensed to kill time: Thanks,(if this works)
nancydarling
@cfeddy: If you move your cursor to the lower right of the comment you want to respond to an arrow followed by “reply” comes up—click on that. I still don’t know how to do block quotes. I’m so lo-tech that I cause my children endless despair. I only learned to use the text function on my phone a year ago and I’ve had it 4 years.
stuckinred
@Damned at Random: I did grad work in adult ed and the academics pooh-poohed Sheehy’s work as too pop. I liked it and the sequel.
licensed to kill time
@cfeddy: It worked! You’re welcome!
@nancydarling: The easiest way to blockquote is to copy/paste (or type) the text into the comment box, then highlight the text (making sure to put two underscores in any empty lines btwn paragraphs) THEN hit the b-quote button.
That will insert the all the code in the proper places in one go.
cfeddy
@nancydarling: I got scared when I saw all the code come up…ha,ha.
WereBear
That was one of the head-a-splody things about this book. And it’s not like I went into it with any high opinion of Nixon.
nancydarling
@licensed to kill time: I’m not sure what this means or how to do it:
licensed to kill time
@nancydarling:
See Anne Laurie’s comment for the same instructions, perhaps more pithily expressed…@Anne Laurie:
nancydarling
@licensed to kill time: Thanks, I saw Anne Laurie’s post after I had already submitted.
Anne Laurie
@nancydarling: If you have more than one paragraph that you want to block-quote, add two underscores (underlines) to the ’empty’ line between each paragraph. If you use just one underline, or three or four, the paragraphs will still “stick together” properly but you’ll see the line. They tell me it’s a coding issue, the WP daemon wants 2-no-more underscores to be invisible.
licensed to kill time
Thanks again to Anne Laurie for hosting this discussion.
So, 7pm EDT, number of chapters three, next week here I be.
Damned at Random
I’m good with the later time and with 3 chapters if no one else objects
Jim Pharo
@nancydarling: The problem is that we aren’t creating enough new people for our side. We persuade very few Republicans. The tea party is chasing people out of the GOP, but they ain’t comin’ to us.
We don’t do the hard work of explaining our views and making our case in a compelling way. The other side is all about evangelizing; we’re all about sitting back and waiting for the justice of our cause (or worse, the injustice of the other side) to be sufficient. This hasn’t worked so far, and isn’t going to magically just start to be effective either….
Anne Laurie
@Jim Pharo:
Excellent point. Maybe we should stop telling each other that Adalai Stevenson joke, the one about how “Even if ‘all thinking people’ vote for me, I still need a majority.” As any Republican strategist would point out, it’s not as if Stevenson won.
nancydarling
@Jim Pharo: Jim, what do we do? When I went to my Democratic Women’s Club this month (I am probably the oldest one there)and they were all fired up about what was going on in Wisconsin and impressed that I had driven to Little Rock in February for a Support Wisconsin rally where I made a little speech.
A couple of weeks later, when I was driving to Springfield, MO for another rally(1 hour away) and put the invitation out if anyone wanted to go with me, I got no takers. There are a lot of smart, liberal progressives in Arkansas along with the troglodytes. I know this from reading some in-state blogs. We’ve got to do more than laugh and point, although the derision is well deserved.
Kool Earl
I wonder how much the bear market of 1973-1974 and the oil crisis of 1973 contributed to Nixon being forced out of office and if Americans would have overlooked Watergate if the economy had been healthy at that time.
5x5
@Chris:
I think that’s what made the difference. There’s also the “make me” attitude (like Clinton in NH, he just said “no” to leaving the field.)
I’m a couple of chapters behind (I bought the book late.) The book isn’t depressing me (I think we’ve made important gains.)
Nixon depresses me. I hate what he did and feel sorry for him. (I’m such a f’ing lib.)
Villago Delenda Est
@Kool Earl:
I don’t think it would have helped. The Senate select Watergate committee unearthed a lot of GOP slime. The Special Prosecutor’s grand jury had to be persuaded by Leon Jaworski NOT to indict Nixon, which, based on the evidence presented, they wanted very much to do…so they settled for “unindicted co-conspirator” instead.
It’s difficult to imagine now how much people were pissed about what Nixon did. Once the “smoking gun” came out it was politically untenable even for hard core elected right wing Republicans to support him. All his defenders on the House Judiciary Committee said they’d vote to impeach after that tape came out. Nixon’s lawyers were pissed at him…he lied to them, too.
The only thing that saved Nixon from the ignominy of being Impeached and removed from office was that he resigned before the full House could vote to Impeach.
Don K
Impression? I just remember being 14 and in 9th grade at the time. We were having some kind of assembly the morning after the election, and in the middle of the assembly the principal came over the PA to announce that Ohio (or some damned state) had been declared for Nixon, and he was the winner. In our middle-upper middle class NJ town (Moorestown, if you must know) there was a chorus of boos in the auditorium, and damned few cheers. We knew.
I had been all for McCarthy in the spring and summer, but had reconciled myself to Humphrey in the fall (“a toaster man, anything but Nixon”). It was my first real “Oh, fuck” moment in politics.
And I’ll note the UAW did yeoman’s work dragging enough members away from Wallace to get Michigan into the Humphrey column.
Spaceman Spiff
Thank you guys & gals…
Been reading this thread for hours now — & all thanks to you I just went to amazon & bought Nixonland.
rickstersherpa
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, part of it was the white, ethinic, urban classes and blue collar Southerners resenting that they were being asked to share with “Black.” And this led to the mutual disenthrallment between the Left and the White Working Class, along with the fact that it was this class, along with the Black and hispanics working class, who were sent to Vietnam and then when the survivors came home were greeted as something cursed. And of course the rich and powerful took advantage of this divide and still do.
Something I noted in reading the biographies of Gail Norton and David Stockman is how they were both active in the anti-war movement coming from a baiscally libertarian/Ayn Rand perspective.
Chris
IGMFY destroyed the New Deal coalition, IOW.
In economic terms, the New Deal empowered the “average voter” (middle class nation). In ethnic terms, it gave a stake in the system to white Southerners and urban immigrants, who were the base of the Democratic Party and had both been hated outsiders by the “Real America” of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Once those groups had what they wanted, well, screw the people who were still left behind (e.g. the remaining poor people, and the blacks and Hispanics).
Two things, though:
1) I’d be curious to see how much of the white working class actually votes Republican. I’m sure it’s more than it was sixty years ago, but my impression of the Republican base is that it’s middle class, not working class. For the latter, union activism isn’t exactly dead.
2) It’d hard for me to see what we could have done different. The root problem isn’t anything we did – it’s that traditional Democratic constituencies just didn’t want the “colored” folk empowered. Complaints about liberals being smug or elitist are just avoiding that central point (there’ve been politicians and intellectuals like that in every age and every party).
So what were we supposed to do – tell black people “we’re sorry, but you’re just going to have to go on waiting for your rights until Southerners and white union folk can stomach the sight of you?” That wasn’t happening. The civil rights stuff broke the Democratic coalition, but from where I’m standing, looks like the only way that could possibly have gone down.
Anne Laurie
@Chris:
You’re completely correct that tha LBJ made the best choice when he chose “to lose the South for the next 40 years”. And that the Repubs have given us an opening to reclaim our lost voters, if we’re willing to do the work. They’re determined to reduce what’s left of the ‘middle class’ — small business owners, white-collar workers — back to the near-serf level of the working class during the First Gilded Age. We Democrats need to point out that only organizing against the Robber Barons got our grandparents out of the tenements & the dark satanic mills, to a point of income security where our parents felt ‘entitled’ enough to start voting Republican!
Chris
@Anne Laurie:
I agree – I’m just skeptical because of the degree of hold identity politics still has on the American voter base. It’s a lot harder to rally near-unanimous voter opposition against the robber barons when those kinds of divides are readily available. Even the New Deal was only passed by accomodating the racist establishment in the South (no welfare for blacks).
On the other hand, it’s also true that the Depression finally, finally convinced the Real America of its time to hold its nose and join the Southerners and immigrants in voting for a Democrat. That’s cause for hope: identity politics doesn’t always have to have the last word. Still, it’s staggering that it took something as huge as the Great Depression to finally break that down, and it leaves me wondering just how bad things have to get for something like that to happen today.