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You are here: Home / Books / NIXONLAND, Week 11: “The Polarization”, “Tourniquet”, “Mayday”

NIXONLAND, Week 11: “The Polarization”, “Tourniquet”, “Mayday”

by Anne Laurie|  April 10, 20116:56 pm| 78 Comments

This post is in: Books, Nixonland

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In 1969, the average factory worker earned 82 cents less a week in real terms than he did in 1965. … In NY, some letter carriers were eligible for welfare. Across the economy, long-term labor contracts that had failed to keep pace with prices were expiring… Where union leaders weren’t able to settle to their restive memberships’ satisfaction, a price was being exacted: the ‘wildcat’ strike…
__
Richard Nixon judged the inflation risk acceptable. Economics was one more aspect of domestic policy that he tended to ignore. But he did harbor one core economic conviction. In the traditional trade-off between recession and inflation, he would always chose inflation…
__
But creeping price hikes were shaking that confidence. Dour old financiers were once more warning a president to cool the economy… The Federal Reserve Chairman waxed gloomily in a June 1969 speech to an audience of bankers: with federal expenditures growing 60% in three years and revenues & productivity not keeping pace, the U.S. economy was “a house of cards.” The time had come to cool it down: “We’re going to have a good deal of pain and suffering before we can solve these things.”

***********

1970: The Summer of Hunkering Down. I was a teenager in NYC then, and my dad worked in the area (for the Port Authority), but I don’t remember the ‘Wall Street Hard Hat Riots’ at all. What I do remember was the increasing polarization, a sort of angry despair, which in retrospect seems to have been very much the goal of the Nixon administration and the Permanent Ruling Party in general. The big local story that I recall — of course, my family had skin in that game — was the state of near-war over the construction of the WTC. Memories have been re-written in the hate-us-for-our-freedom afterglow of 9/11, but when it was actively destroying a vibrant small-business neighborhood the whole project was regarded by a lot of the natives (Daily News and Post readers) as a way for upstate’s Rockefellers (NYT / WSJ readers), working together with Big NJ Crime, to tear a chunk out of Manhattan’s vitals and destroy the city’s status as a working port. I remember it as the time when unions turned against each other, ‘hard hats’ (construction workers) versus ‘city workers’ (Port Authority workers like my dad, but also firemen, cops & other civil-service workers who saw their jobs being threatened when funds & attention were reallocated to the Shiny New Sinkhole). I do remember plenty of media talk about escalation in Vietnam, ‘student riots’, and general state-sponsored murder out there, elsewhere in the big world, but locally it was all about extended family gatherings breaking down into screaming matches and fistfights over much more parochial concerns. We would’ve agreed the whole world was going to hell, though.

***********

This was the Nixon who once shared in a moment of introspection to an aide, “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it because it is part of you and you need it as much as an arm or leg… You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.”

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Reader Interactions

78Comments

  1. 1.

    Rick Perlstein

    April 10, 2011 at 6:58 pm

    I’m here at an airport for the next hour and a half with nothing to do but play with you all! :-)

  2. 2.

    srv

    April 10, 2011 at 7:03 pm

    We would’ve agreed the whole world was going to hell, though.

    Good times.

  3. 3.

    Little Boots

    April 10, 2011 at 7:07 pm

    @Rick Perlstein:

    so this Nixon guy, do you think he can bring us together?

  4. 4.

    licensed to kill time

    April 10, 2011 at 7:08 pm

    Anne Laurie, I find it absolutely uncanny how you pick quotes that I’ve bookmarked EVERY TIME. Nixon couldn’t quit his old ways, he played the game until he stumbled over the edge of the precipice and fell right in.

    (edited to make some sense, dang it.)

  5. 5.

    Omnes Omnibus

    April 10, 2011 at 7:08 pm

    The more I read in this book the happier i am that I was only turning 6 in the summer of 1970. My concerns were somewhat smaller.

  6. 6.

    Linda Featheringill

    April 10, 2011 at 7:09 pm

    1970 was an interesting year. My right wing family [slightly to the left of Goehring, I always say] did NOT approve of strikes, let alone wildcat strikes. They did not approve of protests of any kind. They did not approve of criticizing the government [how dare you criticize the commander-in-chief?], etc.

    Of course, they didn’t approve of divorce, either, but I went ahead and got one. I enrolled in a university that year to work towards a degree. Family didn’t approve of that, either.

    Good times, indeed.

  7. 7.

    Bob Loblaw

    April 10, 2011 at 7:10 pm

    “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it because it is part of you and you need it as much as an arm or leg… You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.”

    Barack Obama, please come to the courtesy desk…

  8. 8.

    Little Boots

    April 10, 2011 at 7:12 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    of course, I think we all get to live through it again … and again … and again. yay, us.

  9. 9.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 7:13 pm

    The trial of the Chicago 7 had me yelling, “What?!” as I read it in the laundromat (in my neighborhood that is not considered unusual behavior, so it was okay). And fascinating and depressing to read that the jury members, it seemed, were pretty much divided from the time they were selected.

  10. 10.

    JPL

    April 10, 2011 at 7:13 pm

    The Nixon era was not one to be proud of. Sorry, Rick but I could not read the book. I had several friend recommend it but the thought of reliving that time tied my stomach in knots. I don’t have the same problem with Reagan, although he has done more damage to our country and I’m looking forward to reading your book about his Presidency.

  11. 11.

    Rick Perlstein

    April 10, 2011 at 7:16 pm

    JPL, my next book will be about Reagan’s rise in the 1970s, not his presidency.

  12. 12.

    Little Boots

    April 10, 2011 at 7:20 pm

    Rick, I’m not sure how much you’re following events in Wisconsin, but if so, would you say Scott Walker is another Nixon, or is something else going on there?

  13. 13.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 7:20 pm

    @Rick Perlstein: I’m really interested in reading that, Rick. As I wasn’t around for the 1960’s, this book has been fascinating for me in seeing the names I recognize from the 1980’s and onward (Iran Contra being about when I started being politically aware).

    What’s also interesting is your depiction of Nixon as a man with not much interest in the domestic agenda. He’s given credit for things that I see were less an example of a progressive mindset and more just a man not paying attention (or trying to condense power- the bit on the formation of the EPA was an eye-opener).

  14. 14.

    Rick Perlstein

    April 10, 2011 at 7:25 pm

    Little Boots, following them quite closely. I’m originally from Wisconsin, and have participated in the protests. I would say Nixon was a man of his time (or ahead of his time–a true leader that way) and Walker a man of his. I don’t see any particular match there. And Nixon’s about 10 times smarter and more strategically and tactically shrewd. Don’t you think?

  15. 15.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 7:27 pm

    I imagine I’ll find out myself when I get to the end, Rick, but do you pick up the Jeffrey MacDonald thread again? You bring him up in “The Polarization”? I assumed, because his alibi was so preposterous, that the guy had killed his own family, but I think that’s been the only mention of him so far.

  16. 16.

    Rick Perlstein

    April 10, 2011 at 7:29 pm

    No, Nicole, it’s just a little tease. A little inside joke to those who know what really happened. One of those ways in which I try to limi information wherever possible to what people experiencing the time would have known then.

  17. 17.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 7:29 pm

    @Nicole: He still comes off as progressive in comparison to the Republicans since. Paranoid and constantly looking to consolidate power, but Nixon reads pragmatic compared to some of the Republican political stars of the present.

  18. 18.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    April 10, 2011 at 7:33 pm

    @Rick Perlstein: I would add that, at least to me, Walker and other Randian types (Galtians, I guess we’ve been calling them) don’t see themselves as Orthogonians, if not quite as Franklins, rather as unappreciated visionaries who have the guts and the strengths to make tough decisions and execute them. See also, too, Paul Ryan. Too arrogant to see themselves as Orthogonians, too entranced with the illusion of their own toughness to see themselves as effete Franklins.

  19. 19.

    gnomedad

    April 10, 2011 at 7:34 pm

    @NeverRepentAmarillo:

    He still comes off as progressive in comparison to the Republicans since.

    Founded the EPA. Promoted a version of the “negative income tax”. And then there were the wage and price controls. Not that I’m a fan of the tool, but can you imagine how that would be received today?

  20. 20.

    Little Boots

    April 10, 2011 at 7:35 pm

    @Rick Perlstein:

    yes, I definitely see big differences, particularly in intelligence, but I see Walker just totally playing that “us” against the elites card for all it’s worth. He may have been wrong to pick teachers as the “elite” but it is that same nasty instinct, and that same unbending crush my enemies spirit, most enemies being in his head, that strikes me as very similar.

  21. 21.

    licensed to kill time

    April 10, 2011 at 7:35 pm

    I suppose this is true of any powerful person, but the extent to which Nixon’s personal demons drove his policy is fascinating, in an awful kind of way. His watching Patton over and over again as he prepared to invade Cambodia, playing the tough guy and wanting to “Blow the hell out of them!” was just…creepy.

  22. 22.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 7:38 pm

    @Rick Perlstein: I’ll have to wikipedia, then! (pause)

    Ah, he did do it.

    On another subject- I’m also fascinated, in a car crash kind of way, with your depiction of Dick and Pat’s relationship. Are there any books out there that attempt to explain the Nixon marriage?

  23. 23.

    Rick Perlstein

    April 10, 2011 at 7:40 pm

    Yes, Nicole, a brand new biography of Pat:

    http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/brepat.html

  24. 24.

    Anne Laurie

    April 10, 2011 at 7:42 pm

    @srv:

    Good times.

    Not even in retrospect.

    So many (mostly) innocent “how much could it matter?” choices that ended up being toxic sinkholes…

    Hand to goddess, my dad’s Port Authority friends & co-workers had a joke about preventing the completion of the WTC with the punchline “But where will we find a sky-diving rat?”

  25. 25.

    Rick Perlstein

    April 10, 2011 at 7:44 pm

    Anne, love that WTC story of yours. I’d never heard about that.

  26. 26.

    Rick Perlstein

    April 10, 2011 at 7:44 pm

    Anne, love that WTC story of yours. I’d never heard about that.

  27. 27.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 7:44 pm

    @Rick Perlstein: Thank you! I’ll definitely check it out. Nixonland has been a really great read for me in that my Baby Boomer father has enjoyed talking to me about the era as I make my way through the book. I’m sorry my granddad is not alive, as, while a lifelong Democrat, he was socially conservative in that small-town way and I’d like to have heard his perspective.

  28. 28.

    Rick Perlstein

    April 10, 2011 at 7:44 pm

    Love it so much, in fact, I said it twice.

  29. 29.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 7:53 pm

    For more on the WTC and NYC in those days pick up “Let the Great World Spin,” by Colum McCann.

  30. 30.

    Anne Laurie

    April 10, 2011 at 7:53 pm

    @Rick Perlstein:

    I would say Nixon was a man of his time (or ahead of his time—a true leader that way) and Walker a man of his. I don’t see any particular match there. And Nixon’s about 10 times smarter and more strategically and tactically shrewd.

    I did see quite a bit of Walker & his gang in the Chicago 7 judge & prosecutors, though. Proud, “connected” Men of Honor who’ve put in their time as low-level thugs, keeping the voting tallies low in the ‘wrong’ precincts & greasing the way for bidnizmin (from the neighborhood Rotary to the Koch brothers) to steal public resources for private profit. Now they’re ready to sit back and divide the richest spoils between them, and suddenly these low-life teachers and union members think they have the “right” to show up and bitch about “rule of law” and “contracts”? HOW DARE THEY NOT KNOW THEIR PLACE! Judge Hoffman & the Fitswalkers would be soul brothers, if any of them had a soul…

  31. 31.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 7:55 pm

    @licensed to kill time: It was such a mess, the war, the economy, and the cultural divide. I understand that Nixon’s demons led to decisions that look awful in hindsight, but being in that climate, it is hard for me to see how it would have resolved differently if Nixon wasn’t the president. No Watergate, but even Watergate seemed like our democracy in action, checks and balances that work. I just cannot imagine such a correction (honest hearings) occurring today. Is it everyone’s belief that if we had just retreated from Vietnam, everything would have been better? It seems the big mistake was getting involved in that conflict in the first place, and after that, if you cannot win, it is not going to be easy to step away. (Iraq and Afghanistan, anyone.)As a pacifist and part of the working class that was sending boys I grew up with to kill and be kill, I did want the war to end, but there were many who felt it could still be won, and we did leave a lot of people we had promised to support in a horrible position when we pulled out. What leader is eager to make that decision? No matter what they say when they campaign.

  32. 32.

    WereBear

    April 10, 2011 at 7:57 pm

    @Rick Perlstein: Thanks for that! Even as a child, (which was when I first saw her,) Pat Nixon’s face created the most amazing angst in my heart.

    As a complimentary volume, I picked up David Halberstam’s The Fifities at a library sale, and was stunned at how the Republicans have changed so little… dirty tricks, secret shoring up of McCarthy, the witch hunt of Oppenheimer. The same things they did in the ’70s and what they revel in doing now.

    I mean, you gotta look at actual Communists to find such complete disregard for the facts and such willingness to ruin human lives for propaganda purposes. Why is this a fringe act on the Left, and so accepted on the Right?

  33. 33.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 7:59 pm

    @NeverRepentAmarillo: WE could have done a hell of a lot better job getting people out than we did. See “Decent Interval” by Frank Snepp.

  34. 34.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 8:06 pm

    @WereBear:

    Even as a child, (which was when I first saw her,) Pat Nixon’s face created the most amazing angst in my heart.

    An image I remember is from her funeral- TIME, I think it was, printed a photo of Nixon weeping. It was, I think, the most honest expression I’d ever seen on his face, and it was such grief.

  35. 35.

    licensed to kill time

    April 10, 2011 at 8:08 pm

    @NeverRepentAmarillo:

    I think one of the themes that runs through the Vietnam war was that each person who made decisions about it seemed to have done so with their focus mostly on how it would affect their own political career, how it “would look” to America and the world, and with very little regard to how it would affect the people of Vietnam and the men and women who were sent there to fight it. A series of incremental steps that just mired us deeper and deeper into a quagmire. It would have taken extraordinary courage to just get out at any point, but I have to think that it would have been worth it at any one of those decision points.

  36. 36.

    WereBear

    April 10, 2011 at 8:12 pm

    @Nicole: Nixon apparently had very few friends (gee, wonder why,) and probably lost 90% of his emotional support with her passing.

    I realized later she must have been an extraordinary person, but at the time, I figured her for a Thorazined puppet, much as I now see Laura Bush.

  37. 37.

    JPL

    April 10, 2011 at 8:12 pm

    Although I did not read the book, I have enjoyed reading the comments. Rick and Anne your insights have been great.

  38. 38.

    Damned at Random

    April 10, 2011 at 8:13 pm

    Paranoid and constantly looking to consolidate power, but Nixon reads pragmatic compared to some of the Republican political stars of the present.

    The way our political system operates, I guess I’m just glad all our high level elected officials aren’t warped obsessives

  39. 39.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 8:15 pm

    @Anne Laurie: This is exactly what I am trying to reconcile. With what was going on in the world and country then, and what we face now, it seems the rule of law has taken a bigger hit now than then. It seems more Americans are willing to overlook spying on citizens, intrusive security, ignoring habeas corpus, etc. All because of fear of terrorism. As bad as 9/11 was, it wasn’t anything like the Cuban missile crisis, the riots, the assassinations, the feeling like the country was being torn apart from within. As for the divide, you could argue then that both sides were arguing for their view of community , they just had big differences in what that meant. Now it seems one side is arguing for the individual over the community. It was a painful time, but we got through that. The mess we are dealing with now, I don’t see how we get out of it, when your fellow citizens wish to cede their rights to the government and at the same time tear down any safety net the government might provide. It is the worst of both worlds.

  40. 40.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:15 pm

    @licensed to kill time: Dean Rusk claimed that he voiced his reservations, based on having BEEN in a land war in Asia with Stillwell, to LBJ once and then went about doing his job.

  41. 41.

    Anne Laurie

    April 10, 2011 at 8:16 pm

    @Nicole: Pat Nixon was really an anti-icon to a lot of us nascent feminists in the early 1970s… the living, heartbreaking incarnation of what a terrible thing it was to be The Traditional Political Wife, even when you “won”. Pat should have been happy in a raw-figures tabulation; she married a young striver that she obviously loved & who loved her(as much as he could love anybody); she had two beautiful daughters who never Made Trouble and who married well; she travelled all over the world, got to be First Lady & ended up in a rich gated community… but she was so blatantly miserable every step of the way. Even Laura Bush, for all the Xanax jokes (and who could blame her?) came off as a woman who sold herself into the nearest thing America has to a Sicilian Mafia family, with a pretty clear idea of the compensation she’d get for the hell she’d have to go through — but Pat Nixon didn’t seem to have made that kind of cold-eyed bargain. If she’d been 20 years older, I think she’d have ended up as the wife of a successful Manhattan lawyer; and if she’d been 20 years younger, she could’ve been Michelle Obama. But she did serve as a warning to a lot of young women that we couldn’t rely on “picking the right husband” as the only (best) road to Success…

  42. 42.

    Little Boots

    April 10, 2011 at 8:16 pm

    @JPL:

    me too, falling behind on the book, but the discussions are still always interesting.

  43. 43.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:17 pm

    @NeverRepentAmarillo: I disagree, I still think is was worse then.

  44. 44.

    WereBear

    April 10, 2011 at 8:19 pm

    @Anne Laurie: But she did serve as a warning to a lot of young women that we couldn’t rely on “picking the right husband” as the only (best) road to Success…

    You are so right, this was a classic example on how women were supposed to channel their own ambition into Husband Choosing and Husband Husbanding.

    And the margins were drawn with concrete…

  45. 45.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 8:20 pm

    @Damned at Random: Many start with exalted purposes, but I am not sure there are many humans immune to the lure of power.

  46. 46.

    Omnes Omnibus

    April 10, 2011 at 8:23 pm

    @stuckinred: George Ball and Bill Bundy come to mind as people who raised doubts, concerns, and arguments.

  47. 47.

    licensed to kill time

    April 10, 2011 at 8:24 pm

    @stuckinred: You just know that there were many people full of reservations who held back…the worst, I think, would be those who just never spoke up at all. And the War Machine rolled on.

  48. 48.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 8:27 pm

    @Anne Laurie: Though I rage at the past 30 years of trickle-down bullshit, rotting of our infrastructure and the rise of conservative politics, I am so, so profoundly grateful to have grown up in the aftermath of the Women’s movement of the 1970’s. My mother died when I was ten, so I never had a relationship with her where I could ask her about her choices in life, but from what I remember of her, I’ve often thought she would have been so much happier had she been born just a few years later than she was. My dad told me they married ten days before her 21st birthday because she was terrified of being an old maid (at 21!) and she stopped working at 25 when she had kids. But if ever there was a person who would have been happier with a job, I think it was my mother (and I think the rest of us would have been happier, too, as her highly critical eye would have been focused on the office and not on her husband and kids).

  49. 49.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 8:28 pm

    @stuckinred: Well, the Wisconsin protests are giving me a glimmer of hope. And Rachel Maddow on TV. Maybe I was just exposed to folks that were more politically aware and active then. Plus, living in Amarillo exposes me to peculiar mindset that can lead to pessimism.

  50. 50.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:31 pm

    @licensed to kill time: My buddy’s father Tom Hughes was very outspoken inside the government.

  51. 51.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:33 pm

    A Retrospective Preface Thirty-five Years Later

    by Thomas L. Hughes, Director of INR 1963-69

    Inside the government at that time, this anomaly was associated with George Ball’s celebrated, and, many thought, lonesome opposition to the war from his perch as Undersecretary of State and “devil’s advocate.” Since then, we have learned that similar opposition was repeatedly expressed, orally to the President and/or in memos written for his eyes only, from a much larger circle of Washington heavyweights. At the supporting levels inside the government, there apparently were many others in the war machine who also were quietly dubious but publicly silent.

  52. 52.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    April 10, 2011 at 8:35 pm

    I had heard of Kent State, of course, but I was stunned to read about the reaction to it. I can’t find the stats just now, but IIRC about 60% of the country said the students were to blame? I suppose the guy who said he would see his own sons mowed down if they disobeyed orders was reacting to a hypothetical, but it was still a chilling exchange to read. I’ve often wondered how that shooting didn’t provoke a massive public reaction, reading about it in context of the fear and the anger and the Chicago 7 trial, the lack of outrage makes sense historically, if not morally.

    Like Anne Laurie, I had never heard of the Hard Hat riots, but this quote just jumped off the page: “I’m doing this because my brother got wounded in Vietnam, and I think this will help our boys over there by pulling this country together.” From 1970 to 2005, it’s just amazing that so many people think wars in distant, foreign lands are won or lost by how we, as a country, feel about them.

  53. 53.

    Damned at Random

    April 10, 2011 at 8:37 pm

    I remember watching the Bob Hope specials with my family and thinking he wasn’t funny – but I scanned the crowds hoping to spot somebody I knew.

    These 3 chapters were horribly depressing. Again, I didn’t remember how extensive the campus violence was – the Peoples Park and Kent State incidents I recall, of course, but most of it was just forgotten. I remember the Chicago 8 (or 7) trial being a circus, artists drawings of Bobby Seale tied to his chair – but I didn’t remember what a jerk Judge Hoffman was.

  54. 54.

    licensed to kill time

    April 10, 2011 at 8:39 pm

    @stuckinred: “quietly dubious but publicly silent”.

    “All that is needed for the forces of evil to succeed is for enough good men to remain silent”.

  55. 55.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 8:40 pm

    @stuckinred: And that is kind of my point. There were powerful people who publicly put their reputations on the line to fight for what they felt was right and today, not so much. Continuation of the Bush tax cuts? And it doesn’t even stir a conversation in the wider public sphere? Security theater? Threatening to dismantle Social Security. Saving the banks with your tax dollars (and capital is crucial, don’t forget), but letting the banksters run off with truly staggering bonuses?

  56. 56.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:40 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: You don’t think Kent and Jackson State provoked massive public reaction?

    Just five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. Ray Price, Nixon’s chief speechwriter from 1969–1974, recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, “The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That’s not student protest, that’s civil war.”

    I posted this last week, and I’ll probably post it next week. Here’s some reaction to the Calley verdict at Ft Benning.

  57. 57.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:41 pm

    @licensed to kill time: And some were not.

  58. 58.

    licensed to kill time

    April 10, 2011 at 8:43 pm

    @Damned at Random:

    I remember watching the Bob Hope specials with my family and thinking he wasn’t funny – but I scanned the crowds hoping to spot somebody I knew.

    I loved the story about the sign held up at one of his Vietnam shows that said “Welcome, Bing Crosby”. Ha!

  59. 59.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:44 pm

    \@NeverRepentAmarillo: And my point is that there were some powerful people who stepped up but not many.

  60. 60.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:47 pm

    @licensed to kill time: Motherfuckers set up a camera tower when I saw him at Xmas 68 and half of us couldn’t see the dames! Good thing we had to check our weapons at the gate! He did have one good joke though:

    ” I hear the boys back home are wearing long hair and wearing skirts”

    big laugh

    “Don’t laugh, if you’d thought of it you wouldn’t be here”!

  61. 61.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 8:48 pm

    @licensed to kill time: Yes, my fear is that when Ryan’s plan is hailed as “serious”, and anything further left than the center right is considered fringe, and with the attempt at voter suppression and mostly folks being so busy just trying to get through one more day, with no time for political awareness, not news, not reading. At least then, there were only a few TV channels with the news on all the big three at the same time and newspapers everywhere and Life magazine in the doctor’s office, with the awful pictures of what was going on.

  62. 62.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 8:49 pm

    The “quietly dubious but publicly silent” never ends. When it started to become clear to even the biggest rah-rah Bush supporters that there were no WMD in Iraq, no one (or very few) were willing to say what that meant- that men and women were dying for nothing. Even now, I feel an air of, “mention that their lives are being wasted and it means you hate the troops” when it’s actually the opposite. But I think we, as a nation, are unwilling to really own up to, even beyond the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, which we don’t count because they’re brown, we continue to murder our own men and women. For all of the hatred that the Right currently flings against the “government” there’s still a real division in their minds between the “Government” and the military. And a refusal to really accept that our nation throws our soldiers’ lives away for nothing. Because what does that say about our supposedly God-preferred country?

  63. 63.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:52 pm

    @Nicole: It says were just like everybody else.

  64. 64.

    stuckinred

    April 10, 2011 at 8:53 pm

    And now, the conclusion of Mildred Pierce! Bye. Keep up the fire.

  65. 65.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 8:54 pm

    @stuckinred: True enough. And I feel like a stupid, dumb coward for all the times I’ve backed off from saying “they’re dying for nothing” since 2003. It’s stupid and cowardly of me to worry about protecting someone else’s feelings when it’s actual human lives. I’m a fucking coward.

  66. 66.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 9:01 pm

    @stuckinred: I agree with that and it is the same today, but I am not worried about the powerful acting powerful; they always do. It is the ordinary folks that worry me. The powerful are getting awfully good at appealing to fear, sound bites, cultural, racial and economic divides and we (collectively) are falling for it.

  67. 67.

    Nicole

    April 10, 2011 at 9:01 pm

    And now this coward is off to watch Mildred Pierce. Thanks for a good club, Anne Laurie!

  68. 68.

    licensed to kill time

    April 10, 2011 at 9:03 pm

    @Nicole: The people I won’t say that to are the soldiers themselves, even if I believe it to be true. Because really, how do you look at a person who is putting their life at risk and tell them it’s useless?

    I have a young neighbor who joined the military because he couldn’t find a job. He knew somewhat how I felt about the current wars but once he signed up I never spoke to him about it again. He’s on his way to Afghanistan now.

    I just think how lonely and awful it would feel to think that all the danger and risk and pain were for nothing.

  69. 69.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 9:06 pm

    @Nicole: And how many protested when the government officials at that time were calling any dissent “supporting the terrorists”? As awful as the Nixon years were, in spite of what Agnew and Nixon were spewing about dissent being unpatriotic, there was dissent and it was reported. The mainstream media wouldn’t even touch the antiwar protests when Bush was president. It’s like they didn’t exist.

  70. 70.

    Anne Laurie

    April 10, 2011 at 9:09 pm

    @NeverRepentAmarillo:

    There were powerful people who publicly put their reputations on the line to fight for what they felt was right and today, not so much.

    Part of the evil genius of Nixonland — the political concept, not the book — was that people like Roger Ailes realized how cheap & easy it would be to just buy ‘the media’ wholesale. There’s always been a historical tension between the ‘official’ press and the lowly reporters on the ground, but during the 1960/70s America’s Permanent Ruling Class realized they could consolidate all the local news outlets, promote advanced degrees as a ‘requirement’ for Journalism, give a tiny fraction of those nosy parkers with typewriters & cameras a courtier’s entree into the least important of their cocktail parties, and thereby neuter almost every outlet of criticsm. It was always possible for Serious Media to ignore us DFHs and other rabble-rousers, but today every would-be Bernstein (Woodward was always a tool) is looking at $100,000 in student-loan debt on one hand and Fox News on the other. Best analogy I can come up with, these days, your credit rating makes it more likely than ever you’ll need to sell your soul, but “fortunately” there’s the equivalent of Craigslist for you to do so.

  71. 71.

    Anne Laurie

    April 10, 2011 at 9:13 pm

    Thanks everybody for participating! Same time next week?

    If we do two chapters next week — “Purity” and “Agnew’s Election” — we’ll be at the end of Book III. Then there’s just 9 more chapters, 3 further weeks, to wrap this long sad journey up.

    One more month! Sound good to you all?

  72. 72.

    NeverRepentAmarillo

    April 10, 2011 at 9:13 pm

    @Anne Laurie: And thus, my pessimism.

  73. 73.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    April 10, 2011 at 9:17 pm

    @Anne Laurie: Yep, same time next week, sorry I missed it tonight. I even got caught up in the book, too!

  74. 74.

    licensed to kill time

    April 10, 2011 at 9:17 pm

    @Anne Laurie: muy bueno, gracias!

  75. 75.

    HRA

    April 10, 2011 at 9:19 pm

    I passed on reading Nixonland. I enjoy reading the comments on it.

    Pat Nixon, I believe, grew up in the time when women were much less assertive. They had a certain role to fulfill in a marriage and they stuck to it religiously. My mother was one of them.

    Kent State was a horrible to watch. At first, you could not believe what you were seeing.

    In a special area not available to even those of us who work to get the books in the stacks of our U. libraries, there are a great amount of books that were burnt in various degrees during the student protests on the original campus. Some took over the administration buildings and some went out to destroy what they could find on the campus. That campus still exists and there is a newer one which was built to specifics if there should ever be a riot again.

  76. 76.

    Elia Isquire

    April 10, 2011 at 9:37 pm

    Hey Rick, don’t know if you’ll see this but just wanted to say that Nixonland is one of my absolute favorite books (Before the Storm, too!) and that I’m a real admirer of your work. Are you currently writing online anywhere with any frequency or are you devoting yourself to the third book or other projects? I can’t wait for the third book, btw. The contrast between Nixon and Reagan in terms of personality is fascinating and I’m looking forward to what you’ll do with it.

  77. 77.

    hitchhiker

    April 10, 2011 at 9:38 pm

    I was 18 in 1970, living in northwestern lower Michigan (now home to Michael Moore) and longing to somehow escape which, somehow, I did. All 3 older brothers in the military, 2 in Vietnam. We were the stereotypical working class low information family, lots of kids and dependent on my dad’s union electrician job plus my mom’s nightshift ER nurse to keep paying the mortgage and buy more spaghetti.

    Nixonland — thank you for it, Rick — enrages me on so many levels, but it’s fine writing and a good history. The callous, self-serving decisions over and over and over again, paid for so dearly by my own brothers and their lost friends. Our whole country held by the throat of R.M. Nixon’s ongoing adolescent “traumas.”

    I became obsessed with Nixon’s administration in the mid-70’s, after I realized that not just Woodward and Bernstein had written a book, but that so many others had as well. I didn’t know what grad school was back then, but I essentially made a one-person, comprehensive, self-taught seminar for myself. All those points of view! Even Jeb Stuart Magruder had written a book. I read all of them.

    Nixonland is yet another look back onto those days, filling in the backstory of my young adult life. I’m just so grateful.

  78. 78.

    Andrew

    April 11, 2011 at 12:15 pm

    An image I remember is from her funeral- TIME, I think it was, printed a photo of Nixon weeping. It was, I think, the most honest expression I’d ever seen on his face, and it was such grief

    A friend of mine watched the CNN footage of Nixon sobbing, turned to her husband and said, “He’ll be dead in a year.” And he was.

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