The Wars of Watergate (14 page)

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The war that had consumed much of American life and energy for three years festered like an open wound. Nixon’s great achievement through that fateful year of 1968 was that he skillfully skirted the issue and moved to his more comfortable law-and-order terrain. With Wallace in the race, Nixon easily seized the “moderate” ground.

During the New Hampshire primary campaign, Nixon repeatedly pledged “to end the war and win the peace in the Pacific.” But when Humphrey and reporters pressed him to reveal his “plan,” Nixon deflected the questions, insisting that he would not reveal his bargaining position in advance. Finally, he commissioned a speech on the subject but privately told the writer that “there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite.” The Nixon camp scheduled the speech for radio delivery the evening of March 31, when Johnson announced his intention not to run again. The prepared text proposed subduing Hanoi by offering Moscow some vaguely conceived “mutually advantageous cooperation.” But when Nixon learned of Johnson’s plan to address the nation the same night, he canceled his own speech. The President’s efforts at negotiation gave candidate Nixon the perfect excuse for declining to offer his own views.
He
would not undermine “the American position,” and therefore would say nothing.
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A few days later, he polled nearly 80 percent of the Wisconsin Republican primary vote.

With the war on ice as a political issue, Nixon deftly turned to the profitable and resonating issues of domestic peace and effective governance. America was in trouble, he said, “not because her people have failed, but because her leaders have failed. And what America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people.” This political leader recognized no malaise, no inner failings or contradictions in the American system; that kind of negativism was not for Richard Nixon.

Nixon strategists assembled an array of devastating statistics demonstrating skyrocketing crime and violence in America since 1960: murder up 34 percent, assault 67 percent, narcotics violations 165 percent, and home burglaries 187 percent. Nixon chided Attorney General Ramsey Clark, quoting him as having said that the crime level had risen “a little bit, but there is no wave of crime in this country.” Nixon sensed that the nation thought otherwise. The lesson was clear: the nation could no longer afford such leadership as it had with Johnson and Humphrey. The first order of business for President Nixon, he promised, would be a new Attorney General, “to restore order and respect for law in this country.” Nixon conceded that law enforcement was primarily a local responsibility, but he pledged that his Administration would create the necessary “public climate” in order “to win the war” against crime.

Most important, Nixon argued that the family, the church, and the school
were the effective sources of moral civic order. Admittedly, the familiar institutions had fallen short, but Nixon implied that the present Administration had failed to provide them with the necessary encouragement and support.

Nixon recognized in crime and morality a basic concern of the unorganized, inarticulate segments of society. More crucially, he acknowledged their existence. Accepting his party’s nomination on August 8, Nixon pointedly decried the new wave of political protest. He insisted that a president must listen not only to the “clamorous voices,” but also to the “quiet voices.” He promised to go beyond the “wail and bellow of what too often passes today for public discourse” and find the “real” sentiments and purposes of the people. Here was the unheeded “great, quite forgotten majority—the nonshouters and the nondemonstrators, the millions who ask principally to go their own way in decency and dignity, and to have their own rights accorded the same respect they accord the rights of others.” There was no law and order when the courts weakened the “peace forces as against the criminal forces.” However commendable it was that judges dedicate themselves to the great principles of civil rights, they must also recognize, Nixon said, “that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.” It was time, he urged, “for some honest talk” about the problem of order.

The code language was not so subtle when Nixon complained about and promised to end the plague of “unprecedented racial violence.” The Humphrey camp recognized Nixon’s target, and the Democratic candidate softened his talk about “justice”—the generic word for the demands of the disaffected and deprived—and struggled to offer voters some balance between reform and stability. On October 2, Humphrey promised to ensure order and end the nation’s turmoil. “As President, I would stop these out-rages at whatever cost.” Still he dodged Nixon’s contention that poverty and crime had no relationship.
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The Silent Majority had found its voice. Nixon shrewdly transformed the prevailing preoccupations with war and race into the ever more appealing concerns of order and civility. In his special way, he conveyed the message that he was for those virtues, virtues that had been emasculated or disdained by his opponents. He seemed to promise to “do something” about the present crisis. It did not hurt Nixon that on the very night the Republicans balloted to nominate him in Miami, local blacks rioted and four died.

Nixon’s retreat into silence on the war issue further distanced him from potentially hostile, dangerous media contacts. The CBS reporter covering him would finally get a moment alone with the candidate as the campaign plane was descending. Then in two minutes he would have to hasten to his seat for landing. The tactic was well known by accompanying journalists,
who labeled it the “three-bump interview.” Reporters repeatedly pressed Nixon with shouted questions about his “plan” for peace, but got no response. Media people knew that there was no plan, but they were in their “let’s be fair to Nixon” mode. In other words, a reverse-intimidation situation existed. Seventeen years later, Richard Nixon finally admitted that he had no plan, that his program for peace was only campaign talk.
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Peace, even the immediate expectation of peace, might well have favored Humphrey and the Democrats. On September 30, Humphrey made his mini-break from Johnson’s control. In a televised speech from Salt Lake City, he offered to stop the bombing of North Vietnam if the enemy offered some evidence that it would restore the demilitarized zone separating the two Vietnams. However qualified his position, Humphrey immediately was perceived as the candidate willing to halt the bombing. By October, negotiations seemed to promise some breakthrough toward peace, one that would be accompanied by a bombing pause. Nixon shrewdly anticipated such a move, saying he would not object if the end of the bombing produced some change in the North Vietnamese position—a stance not much different from Humphrey’s. Nixon hinted that political opportunism was at work in the negotiations. On October 27, he appeared on
Face the Nation
and charged that attempts at peace negotiations were linked to an effort to elect Humphrey. Reporters quickly pointed out that Nixon had ended his self-imposed moratorium on discussing peace negotiations in the campaign. After doing precisely that, Nixon of course denied it. On the last day of the month, President Johnson told congressional leaders that he would stop the bombing and that peace talks would resume in Paris on November 6. Nixon’s suggestion that political cynicism prompted the Administration’s action received support, as more than two-thirds of the telegrams sent to the White House after the President’s announcement were critical in one way or another.
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The last-minute Vietnam developments, accompanied by cooling passions among the warring Democrats, dramatically chipped away at Nixon’s earlier lead. Nixon had enjoyed a fifteen-point Gallup poll advantage over Humphrey in mid-September. By Election Day, they were almost dead even. Nixon had gained nothing in nearly two months. He commanded a 43 percent rating in the September poll, and that is the percentage he received on November 6. All the imagery, all the contrivances of his campaign organization, changed nothing.

The election outcome uncannily mirrored the ambiguity so characteristic of Richard Nixon. He had won; that was for certain. But the closeness of the result underlined the deep divisions within the nation. Nixon won with a plurality of less than a half-million votes. He had captured 43.4 percent of
the vote, while Humphrey had finished with 42.7 percent. (George Wallace attracted most of the remainder. Nixon, in his memoirs, expressed a belief that Wallace’s votes would have gone mostly to him and thus would have effectively given him an overwhelming mandate.) Nixon had lost almost 2.5 million votes from his 1960 total. Even more striking was the fact that only 61 percent of the eligible voters turned out in 1968, a decline of 3 percent since 1960. Division was not the only malaise: apathy, even cynicism, pervaded the electoral process.

This time, however, the pain of defeat belonged to someone else. Richard Nixon knew Hubert Humphrey’s private anguish as no one else could. Perhaps in Humphrey’s case the might-have-beens and could-have-beens were even more sharply etched than they had been for Nixon in 1960. Humphrey must have winced at his recollection of Johnson’s 1964 remark, “I just knew in my heart that it was not right for Dick Nixon to ever be President of this country.” His heart and mind had apparently changed by four years later, for the President did precious little to help his ostensible heir apparent.

Nixon cleverly exploited the delicate relationship between Johnson and Humphrey. The Republican candidate met Billy Graham in Pittsburgh on September 8 and asked him to deliver a confidential message to the President. Nixon passed the word that he would never embarrass the President after the election, that he would continually seek his advice, and that he would ask Johnson to undertake special missions to foreign countries. He assured the President that when the Vietnam war was settled, he would give Johnson a major share of credit and do everything to ensure the President’s place in history. A week later, Graham delivered the message and recorded that the President warmly appreciated and was “touched” by Nixon’s gesture. His last words were that he intended “to loyally support” Humphrey, but if Nixon were elected, he would “do all in my power to cooperate with him.”
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A year after the election, Humphrey chastised himself for not having maintained his identity and for not having held fast to his own beliefs and principles. “I ought not to have let a man who was going to be a former President dictate my future,” he wrote to a friend. Some close to Johnson believed that LBJ expected Nixon to win and that his “opinion of his Vice President was … not very high.” So Johnson deserted Humphrey, whom he often professed to love and admire. Nixon, the implacable enemy of Johnson’s friends Truman and Rayburn, somehow was deemed the more deserving, the more reliable beneficiary. Johnson, for his part, thought it a miracle that Nixon’s election did not set off major demonstrations.
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The counterrevolution of 1968 had partially succeeded. But it was not the one set in motion by the Left earlier in the decade. America was lurching rightward. The revolt inspired by the Left against the war turned into a challenge against established authority in general. Those dismayed by the
turn of events, shocked as they were by the pervasive turmoil and near anarchy, drifted to Nixon, convinced that he offered a respite. Perhaps as many as 97 percent of black voters supported Humphrey, but the Democratic candidate captured only 35 percent of the white vote. Three of every ten white voters who had supported Johnson in 1964 voted for either Nixon or Wallace in 1968. Humphrey received nearly 12 million fewer votes than Johnson had in 1964.
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There is no explanation for the reversal other than the volatile political-social climate. Nixon’s campaign positions in 1968 differed little in programmatic content from Goldwater’s in 1964; Nixon simply offered a moderate front and less provocative rhetoric. Americans voted against social disorder and, they hoped, for social peace. Liberalism seemed routed. The hammer blows from both the Left and the Right had left it discredited and in disarray. Only the Right now could command respectability and votes. That right-wing breakthrough in 1968 prefigured the next four presidential elections.

Just after noon on November 6, Humphrey conceded defeat, and Nixon followed with his victory speech to the nation. He delivered paeans of praise for his rival and his predecessor and pledged anew to fulfill his promised goals. But there was one new tone. At the end of his remarks, he recalled a teen-age girl in Deshler, Ohio, who held up a sign saying “Bring Us Together.” And that, the President-elect added, “will be the great objective of this administration at the outset, to bring the American people together.” His Administration would be an open one, bridging the gap between the parties, races, and generations.

It was a disingenuous pose, given the calculated campaign strategy of bringing
some
Americans together while deliberately exploiting divisions elsewhere; even the homily was wrapped in deception. The young girl, daughter of a Methodist minister, had actually held a much more partisan sign, one really befitting the Nixon appeal: “LBJ Taught Us, Vote Republican!” The child reflected the nation’s volatility and mercurial political allegiances more than anything else, for her real choice had been Robert Kennedy.
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Ambrose Bierce once described the American president as “the leading figure of a small group of men of whom—and of whom only—it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for president.” “None of the above” may really have been the electorate’s choice in 1968.

Oppositions do not win elections; governments lose them. That, coupled with a perverse retaliation against the excesses of Lyndon Johnson—
ressentiment
, the French call it—squeezed Nixon to power. Perhaps Nixon’s long-awaited triumph was a negative one, one in which people essentially voted against the opposition and the past. Nevertheless, the victory and power were his, freely won and freely given by those who chose to participate. That verdict could not be denied.