Nixonland

Ratcheting up the machinery:

Ronald Reagan’s administration prepared for the 1969/70 school year by asking the FBI to help in its “psychological warfare campaign” about student radicals. J. Edgar Hoover responded enthusiastically — “this has been done in the past and has worked quite successfully” — and dispatched his number two man, Clyde Tolson, to help…
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Senator Sam Irvine, the North Carolina conservative and civil libertarian, learned that Treasury Department officials checked library lists to see what books certain suspicious Americans read, that HEW kept a blacklist of antiwar scientists, that the Secret Service was asking government employees to report anyone with an interest in “embarrassing” the president.
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… The Nixon administration tapped an attorney in the Justice Department, William Rehnquist, to write a memo justifying expanding the program to spy on any antiwar activity. Soon, one thousand undercover agents in three hundred offices nationwide were compiling dossiers on such groups as the NAACP, ACLU, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Clergy & Layman Concerned about Vietnam.

Kissinger and Ehrlichman hosted seven student leaders in the WH Situation Room. They represented 273 student government officers and student newspaper editors who had signed a pledge of draft resistance. Ehrlichman said, “If you guys think that you can break laws just because you don’t like them, you’re going to have to force us to up the ante to the point where we give out death sentences for traffic violations.“

“Every American has a right to disagree with the President of the United States, and to express publicly that disagreement. But the president of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of the country have the right to make up their own minds and form their own opinions about a presidential address without having the president’s words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested” by “this little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address, but more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues of our nation.”

That last was Spiro Agnew, starting his campaign against the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’. Of course, Roger Ailes was already embedded in the White House, taking notes (or writing scripts). If the President does it, then it is not a crime…

Of course, I could be reading too much into this. How do you remember those times? What do you think?

NIXONLAND, Week 10: “Trust”, “If Gold Rust”, “Presidential Offensive”Post + Comments (111)

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?

NIXONLAND, Week 9: “Winning”, “The First 100 Days”Post + Comments (135)

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.
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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.
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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?

NIXONLAND, Week 8: “Violence”, “From Miami… “, “Wed. 8/28/68”Post + Comments (96)

He wondered why he had to go into all this. “I assumed any superintendent would issue instructions to shoot arsonists on sight and to maim the looters, but I found out this morning this wasn’t so and therefore gave him specific instructions.” [Mayor Daley] added, “If anyone doesn’t think this is a conspiracy, I can’t understand.”

Daley really had a gift for vocalizing the unconscious projection, didn’t he? There were many who saw ‘a conspiracy‘, but quite a few assumed it was The Authorities against the rest of America. I know that Conspiracy Theorizing as a way of life is usually credited to JFK and the grassy-knoll chalkboarders, but Dallas was just a point — it was the ‘twin’ assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy that turned those bullet points (sorry) into a line of thought.

I was ensconced in a blue-collar, very white NYC parish in 1968, so all I (or, I think, most of my parents’ generation) knew about Dr. King’s assassination was what we could read in the newspapers. While there certainly wasn’t much sympathy for the civil rights crusaders among those cops, firemen, civil servants, small-business workers & their wives (estimate: 50% Irish-Catholic, 35% Italian-Catholic, 5% other Catholic, 10% Jewish), I also recall an outspoken fury at the “dumb Southern rednecks” who condoned the assassination — it was seen as allowing their temper at a personal annoyance to potentially spark a much more dangerous outpouring of violence.

And, of course, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination locked that fear into a permanent state of mind. Everybody in my neighborhood “knew” it was going to happen, after the fact — “They had to take out one of OURS to balance the scales”. The only question was whether Sirhan Sirhan was the tool of “the Coloreds” or of the Elite than ran the country and the world as their private fiefdoms. And if the simplest explanation was that a shadowy ruling class was running the rest of us for a puppet show, the remaining issue was: Should you drop out of the system entirely, give up on all hope of political action (such as, for instance, voting) as a way of improving one’s chances? Or should you do whatever it might require to join the ruling class’s shock troops, and “get yourself a piece of the action”?

NIXONLAND, Week 7: “The Sky’s the Limit”Post + Comments (73)