Episode 21: Richard Nixon
Show Notes
Overview:
Today’s episode is all about Richard Milhouse Nixon, the 37th President of the United States. But the real question is…which Nixon?? Among the most mercurial of our presidents, some might say Machiavellian while others would reach for malevolent, Richard Nixon was a man who changed over the course of the more than quarter century he spent at the beating heart of American politics. Or, did he? He came of political age fighting communists, and left the White House with legal fights that would dog him the rest of his days. In one of our first episodes, Eric Foner told us that every president, and perhaps more importantly every historian, needs to ‘get right with Lincoln,’ in order to understand his era and our own. I’d argue that if you want to understand the America of 2021, you don’t have to get right with Nixon, but you do have to get your mind around him.
And wow, did our historians this week ever help us do that. Their conversations were so insightful, in fact, that we are gonna go a bit short on our biographical background and skip our usual conversation so that you can hear more from our guests—plus, we figure you probably already know quite a bit about Tricky Dick.
But here’s the basics. Born in Yorba Linda, California, Richard Nixon always had big dreams and a big chip on his shoulder. A man of driving passions and a driving work-ethic, much of the drive came from pure envy. He didn’t come from money, or have a fancy pedigree like some others, so he had to work harder to get where he wanted—which was straight to the top. He got great grades, first at Whittier College and then at Duke University Law School, but could never seem to crack the big time. After failing to land a job with a prestigious East Coast Law firm or with the FBI, he returned home to California. World War II took him to first Washington, and then to the Pacific Theater. Indeed, here’s something that might help you peer into Nixon’s soul: he made so much playing poker that he came home with enough money to fund his first political campaign: a race for Congress.
He won, and quickly made a name for himself in Washington as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee with a self-appointed mission to ferret out communists buried within the U.S. government. He led the investigation into Alger Hiss, a former state department employee accused of spying for the Soviets, and made a national reputation as a red-baiting firebrand, a House of Representatives counterpart, if you will, to the more notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Nixon joined the Senate himself in 1950, and then two years later joined the Republican national ticket as Vice-President to Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon was the youth on the ticket to Ike’s experience, and then tried to ride his eight years at Eisenhower’s side into the Oval Office himself in 1960. We’ve already discussed that election of course from John Kennedy’s perspective, but Nixon in 1960 is worth pausing a moment over.
Why? Because the election changed him. Or perhaps, revealed him. Eisenhower did him no favors, endorsing him as weakly as a president could, and Nixon was forced to suffer Kennedy’s attacks that his administration had fallen behind in the Cold War. There was a missile gap, and the Soviets were ahead, Kennedy charged.
Here’s the thing: there wasn’t. Eisenhower knew it, Nixon knew it, and historians later discovered Kennedy knew it as well. The United States was actually well ahead of Soviet missile capacity in 1960. Nixon thus faced a choice: disclose a national security secret and expose his opponent, or stay quiet for the sake of the country, even though it might cost him the election.
He stayed quiet. And he lost. He stayed quiet too when reports of voter fraud prompted calls for him to protest the election. But he would not. The country needs to unify around a single president, Nixon argued. Democracy was more important than one man.
So he went back to California, schemed, stayed involved in Republican politics, and won the White House himself in 1968. He won again in 1972, though arguably with quite the different political platform this second time round than the first. In 1968 he ran on his experience and his ability to bring the nation together; in 1972, he ran on division, stoking racial and cultural cracks within the nation to assure himself a second term, no matter the damage his words did to the nation. And, no matter what it took to win in other ways. Caught up in arguably the greatest political scandal in all of American history—Watergate—Nixon’s search for political dirt on his potential 1972 opponents led, by 1974, to his becoming the first and only person to ever resign the presidency. He got out one step ahead of the impeachment posse.
There’s so much we haven’t mentioned: Vietnam, his dramatic Middle East policies, the détente with the Soviet Union, his visit to China, the war on crime, the silent majority, and law and order. Oh, so much about Nixon! So much we want to jump right to it, because our historians this week were, well simply fabulous.
We first talked to Professor Kevin Kruse of Princeton University. An expert on political and urban history, he’s the author of numerous books, but really, let us give you a tip: if you aren’t following him on twitter, you really should.
We the spoke to Martha Jones, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. An expert on citizenship, she talked to us about the role of black women in politics during Nixon’s administration, based on her fantastic new book Vanguard.
Finally, we spoke to journalist Clare Malone, a voice you’ll probably recognize if you’ve followed American politics in the age of Trump, who also knows a thing or two about where Trump came from, and it’s a story with Nixon written all over it.
Together our conversations brought out two themes:
First, that Nixon’s positions on race always reflect the political realities of the moment and what was most likely to help him get ahead.
Second, how Nixon helped reshape political parties, including catalyzing a new generation of African-American women political leaders.
Guests:
Dr. Kevin M. Kruse studies the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America. Focused on conflicts over race, rights, and religion, he has particular interests in segregation and the civil rights movement, the rise of religious nationalism and the making of modern conservatism.
His first book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), won prizes including the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association (for the best first book in Southern history, 2005-2006) and the 2007 Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association. His second book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015), examined the rise of American religious nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and its legacies in American political and religious life.
Professor Kruse has just published Fault Lines: A History of America Since 1974, a trade/textbook with co-author Julian Zelizer. A sweeping history of the past four decades of American history, the book chronicles the origins of the divided states of America, a nation increasingly riven by stark political partisanship and deep social divisions along lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. Co-written with Julian Zelizer, the book tracks not only the course of our current state of political polarization, but also the ways in which an increasingly fractured media landscape worked to aggravate divisions in American politics and society as well.
In addition to these works, Professor Kruse has also served as the co-editor of three collections: The New Suburban History (2006), with Thomas J. Sugrue; Spaces of the Modern City (2008), with Gyan Prakash; and Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012) with Stephen Tuck.
Professor Kruse is currently conducting research for his new book, The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement (contracted to Basic Books). The point man for civil rights for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Doar was a vital actor in countless crisis moments in the civil rights movement — pioneering voting rights lawsuits, personally confronting segregationists at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama, putting Klansmen on trial for the murders of civil rights workers (including the famous “Mississippi Burning” murders), helping craft and implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, literally leading the way in the Selma-to-Montgomery March, etc. Through the previously untapped papers of Doar, he hopes to provide new insights into these civil rights milestones as well as a new understanding of the ways in which the federal government worked (and didn’t work) during the racial revolution unfolding across the South.
After The Division, Kruse will turn his attention to Law and Order: The Politics of Crime and Culture in New York City (contracted to Basic Books). Chronicling the political life of calls for “law and order” in NYC — from George Wallace’s 1968 appearance at Madison Square Garden through 1970s and 1980s scandals like Bernie Goetz and the Central Park Five, from Rudy Giuliani’s “broken windows” policing and the post-9/11 crackdowns, on to Donald Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign announcement at Trump Tower — this book will explore the origins and evolution of a powerful force in contemporary American politics.
Professor Kruse was honored as one of America's top young "Innovators in the Arts and Sciences" by the Smithsonian Magazine and selected as one of the top young historians in the country by the History News Network. He has recently been named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.
Follow Dr. Kruse on Twitter.
Professor Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy.
Professor Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), selected as one of Time's 100 must-read books for 2020. Her 2018 book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), was winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award (best book in civil rights history), the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize (best book in American legal history), the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award (best book in Anglo-American legal history) and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Professor Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many articles and essay.
Professor Jones is a public historian, writing for broader audiences at the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, Talking Points Memo, Politico, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She is an exhibition curator for “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” at the William L. Clements Library, and an expert consultant for museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.)
Professor Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law which bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa in 2019. Prior to her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University.
Professor Jones is an immediate past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and today serves on the boards of the Society of American Historians, the National Women's History Museum, the US Capitol Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Journal of African American History and Slavery & Abolition.
Follow Dr. Jones on Twitter.
Clare Malone is a freelance journalist and former senior political writer at fivethirtyeight. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, the New York Times and elsewhere.