Part 30 (1/2)
Nixon told his team to get to work putting the Rosow Report's insights, ”even if only symbolic,” into action. Peter Brennan, and Thomas Gleason of the International Longsh.o.r.emen's a.s.sociation, vice president of the AFL-CIO executive committee, were summoned to the White House on May 26-the day the Dow reached a new yearly low, nine days after the Cooper-Church amendment pa.s.sed a Senate committee. Brennan presented the president with an honorary hard hat reading COMMANDER IN CHIEF COMMANDER IN CHIEF and left a four-star hard hat to present to General Creighton Abrams, the American commander in Vietnam, and promised continued patriotic marches: ”The hard hat will stand as a symbol along with our great flag, for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country.” Nixon eventually made Brennan secretary of labor. One member of the delegation said, ”If someone would have had the courage to go into Cambodia, they might have captured the bullet that took my son's life.” The president choked up. Sweet triumph: who could be more Democratic than union leaders? and left a four-star hard hat to present to General Creighton Abrams, the American commander in Vietnam, and promised continued patriotic marches: ”The hard hat will stand as a symbol along with our great flag, for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country.” Nixon eventually made Brennan secretary of labor. One member of the delegation said, ”If someone would have had the courage to go into Cambodia, they might have captured the bullet that took my son's life.” The president choked up. Sweet triumph: who could be more Democratic than union leaders?
The Republican business cla.s.s, small-town America, backyard-pool suburbanites, Dixiecrats, calloused union members: now it was as if the White House had discovered the magic incantation to join them as one. Nixonites imagined no limit to the power of this New Majority: ”Patriotic themes to counter economic depression will get response from unemployed,” Haldeman wrote in a note to himself. Then no one would be a Democrat anymore. Then no one would be a Democrat anymore.
Tuesday, November 3, 1970, Nixon decided, would be the day of his apotheosis. Of the thirty-five seats at play in the Senate, twenty-five were held by Democrats. And just as Nixon had figured out that most Democratic congressmen swept in on Lyndon Johnson's coattails in 1964 could be swept out in 1966, the new Democratic senators elected in 1964 were vulnerable in exactly the same way. Add in the Senate election in New York, where the Rockefeller appointee Charles Goodell was up for election for the first time: the New York Conservative Party was going to run a candidate against him-William F. Buckley's brother James-and Clif White would be running his campaign. Conservative Harry Flood Byrd would be running as an independent in Virginia. A net s.h.i.+ft of seven seats in these races would produce a pro-Nixon majority-for a conservative Supreme Court nominee, against the quislings who wanted to sabotage him in Vietnam.
He would finally get to be president. president.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.
Purity RICHARD N NIXON RANG UP THE CURTAIN ON THE 1970 1970 ELECTION ON ELECTION ON May 28, two days after entertaining the hard hats in the White House, in the stadium where the University of Tennessee's Volunteers played football. Billy Graham was holding one of his ten-day crusades and had ”invited” the president to speak on Youth Day. It all was an exceedingly ingenious political contrivance. There was a student uprising, so Nixon would listen to students-on a playing field he controlled, where if they booed him, they'd be booing America's Pastor. May 28, two days after entertaining the hard hats in the White House, in the stadium where the University of Tennessee's Volunteers played football. Billy Graham was holding one of his ten-day crusades and had ”invited” the president to speak on Youth Day. It all was an exceedingly ingenious political contrivance. There was a student uprising, so Nixon would listen to students-on a playing field he controlled, where if they booed him, they'd be booing America's Pastor.
First, the Nixon people got Graham invited to a campus-one big enough to make an impact, but pacific enough to forestall embarra.s.sment. The University of Tennessee in Knoxville, in the heavily Dixified eastern corner of the state, was perfect: a rah-rah wonderland, ”Big Orange Country,” where stores that sold Playboy Playboy were raided, and students sat segregated by fraternity at football games. were raided, and students sat segregated by fraternity at football games.
And Billy Graham's crusade, you see, just happened to coincide with the day UT's chancellor had invited President Nixon to speak for the university's 175th anniversary.
All concerned had to explain their way past the murmurs of protest that the Crusade, and the university, were being politicized. d.i.c.k Gregory and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. had been banned as campus speakers; the administration said they were too political. Back then, students received a court order demanding an open speaker policy-and now the chancellor used the court order as reason why he couldn't exclude Nixon, as Graham a.s.sured all and sundry there ”will not be anything political, I hope, in his visit.” (Every Beltway insider knew that Billy Graham was the most politically sophisticated preacher since William Jennings Bryan.) Then there were those who were opposed to a public educational inst.i.tution and a president facilitating so ma.s.sive a call to Jesus. The conservative Knoxville Journal Knoxville Journal dispatched that objection by explaining that Nixon's intention was not religious but ”to get closer to today's college students.” The university, compounding the bamboozlement, said Graham was merely a customer renting the stadium-though the university president had signed a pet.i.tion inviting him and led the ”offertory prayer” soliciting funds, and the Knoxville mayor sang in the choir and issued a proclamation to all city employees to renew their commitment to G.o.d. For liberals who doted on procedural niceties, the whole thing was an affront-”the rape of this university,” said one. That was a win-win situation from a political perspective: let the liberals bicker against patriotism and piety at a moment of moral crisis. That set the table for the rally perfectly-for putting such conflicts on display was more than half the point of this exercise. dispatched that objection by explaining that Nixon's intention was not religious but ”to get closer to today's college students.” The university, compounding the bamboozlement, said Graham was merely a customer renting the stadium-though the university president had signed a pet.i.tion inviting him and led the ”offertory prayer” soliciting funds, and the Knoxville mayor sang in the choir and issued a proclamation to all city employees to renew their commitment to G.o.d. For liberals who doted on procedural niceties, the whole thing was an affront-”the rape of this university,” said one. That was a win-win situation from a political perspective: let the liberals bicker against patriotism and piety at a moment of moral crisis. That set the table for the rally perfectly-for putting such conflicts on display was more than half the point of this exercise.
The day arrived. There were fewer than a hundred protesters, which was perfect; the drama wouldn't have worked unless there was some some dissidence. They were but a drop in the ocean of one hundred thousand Silent Majority communicants, many in white dress s.h.i.+rts and ties. In the stadium-c.u.m-Baptist-church, the tatterdemalion outcasts became as the early Christians. dissidence. They were but a drop in the ocean of one hundred thousand Silent Majority communicants, many in white dress s.h.i.+rts and ties. In the stadium-c.u.m-Baptist-church, the tatterdemalion outcasts became as the early Christians.
A pacifist professor planned a pageant of nonviolent protest: dissidents would join the march down the field at the invitation to receive Christ, then kneel and hold up the two-fingered peace sign at the altar. They marched to the stadium in a mock funeral procession, carrying biblical injunctions on their signs. These were confiscated at the gate as potential weapons. Police circulated Tennessee statute TCA 391205-prohibiting disruption of a religious service-and photographed the picketers.
A student tried to bring in a loudspeaker. Cops ostentatiously escorted him out of the stadium across the length of the football field, to roars. (”Outside slime!” one lady screeched.) A congregant wearing a crucifix pin was offered an antiwar pamphlet. He retorted, ”Stick it up your a.s.s.” A cop rubbed his service revolver; it reminded a liberal Eastern reporter of masturbation. The protesters' resolve for a silent vigil began to break down.
Nixon's motorcade arrived. The Fellows.h.i.+p of Christian Athletes guarded the stage at the twenty-yard line; thereupon sat an array of Republican officeholders and candidates, including thirty-eight-year-old Knoxville congressman William Brock III, whom Nixon had personally recruited to run against Senator Albert Gore, who had voted against the ABM, for the anti-Vietnam amendments, against Haynsworth and Carswell-and had conspicuously not been invited. His absence softened him up for Brock's general election strategy: to zero in on the votes the devoutly Baptist Gore had dared to tender against the late Senator Dirksen's school-prayer const.i.tutional amendment.
President and Mrs. Nixon strode down the field with the Reverend and Mrs. Graham. A two-minute ovation drowned out the protesters' ”One, two, three, four, we don't want Nixon's f.u.c.king war.” A black minister offered the opening invocation, a prayer for ”our beloved president.” Graham took the pulpit and could have ignored the barely audible jeers. But that wasn't the point. Instead, he addressed the jeerers. ”I'm for change-but the Bible teaches us to obey authority.... In this day of student unrest on the campus, here on one of the largest universities in America tens of thousands have been demonstrating their faith in the G.o.d of our fathers!”
The protesters started chanting, ”Politics! Politics! Politics! Politics!” ”Politics! Politics! Politics! Politics!”
Graham continued, ”All Americans may not agree with the decisions a president makes, but he is our president.”
A Baptist ministry student leapt up: ”Get out of Vietnam!” An usher ran to subdue him but tripped; a woman whapped the protester with an umbrella.
The president began his remarks: ”As one who warmed the bench for four years, it's finally good to get out on the football field here at Neyland Stadium. And even if we're on the twenty-yard line, we're going over that goal line before we're through.”
The demonstrators responded with the old football cheer: ”Push'm back, push'm back, wa-a-aaay back!” Ma.s.sed together, they were easy to spot: they were the ones not wearing white dress s.h.i.+rts and ties.
Nixon made the interruption the text for his sermon: ”Billy Graham, when he invited me to come here, said that this was to be Youth Night. He told me that there would be youth from the university, from other parts of the state, representing different points of view. I am just glad that there seems to be a rather solid majority on one side rather than the other side tonight.”
The congregants roared their delight. The president talked about all the young people who worked for him-”the largest proportion of staff members in responsible positions below the age of thirty of any White House staff in history”-because young people ”have something to say and I want them in the high councils of the government of this country.”
He said he was for all those n.o.ble reforms young people were for.
”But I can tell you, my friends, that while government can bring peace, that while government can clean up the air, that while government can clean up the streets, and while government can clean up the water and bring better education and better health, there is one thing that government cannot do....
”America would not be what it is today, the greatest nation in the world, if this were not a nation which had made progress-under-G.o.dddd”-he drew out his words like a preacher. ”If we are going to bring people together as we must bring them together, if we are going to have peace in the world, if our young people are going to have a fulfillment beyond simply those material things, they must turn to those great spiritual sources that have made America the great country that it is.”
”Bulls.h.i.+t! Bulls.h.i.+t! Bulls.h.i.+t!” cried the heretics, once more drowned out by the pious.
Billy Graham took to the pulpit and introduced the Negro singer Ethel Waters. She called Nixon ”my blessed child.” She, too, chose to address the protesters: ”Now, you children over there, listen to me! If I was over there close enough, I would smack you, but I love you and I'd give you a big hug and kiss!” A piano tinkling behind her, she referred to the president as if he were Christ: ”He belongs to everyone who wants to receive and accept him.”
The Reverend Billy Graham began his altar call with a warning: ”If you come for any other reason, you are in danger of blasphemy, and that's one sin that cannot be pardoned.” Some d.a.m.ned themselves to h.e.l.l nonetheless: they displayed the peace symbol. Many more raised their index finger to the sky-Christ, the one way to peace.
The flock streamed for the exits; the cops stood by and arrested eight of the protesters for disturbing public wors.h.i.+p. The local newspaper critiqued the ”unspeakable nastiness of a handful of undisciplined brats” and gave over the letters page to public outrage over them for days. The student newspaper editorialized, ”There was no need for the demonstrators to try to interfere with the prayers or hymns at the service. Their purpose was to communicate their feelings to Nixon, not to alienate Billy Graham or those who were there to partic.i.p.ate in the crusade.”
That made the student editors either exquisitely naive or gifted Republican publicists: the protesters couldn't couldn't make their feelings known to the president without also alienating the partic.i.p.ants in the crusade. That was the whole point. make their feelings known to the president without also alienating the partic.i.p.ants in the crusade. That was the whole point.
And the drama had come off like a charm. Time Time called it ”one of the most effective speeches he has yet delivered.” called it ”one of the most effective speeches he has yet delivered.” Newsweek Newsweek termed it ”a suitably evangelistic ending for a Presidential week that started out seemingly beyond redemption.” By the time the crusade was broadcast nationwide, the political juice from disruption having been squeezed suitably dry, the protests were edited out, leaving just the president looking presidential, addressing his fellow Americans, uniting the youth and Silent Majority in reconciliation. The Tuesday following, the first day of exams, Knoxville police squads cruised campus armed with photographs and fifty-seven arrests warrants, s.n.a.t.c.hing protesters from street corners. One teaching a.s.sistant was contacted by a dean's office to get his address to ”update department files”; the cops arrested him at home. Leonard Garment turned off the bad public relations with a wire requesting they wait to complete the arrests until the semester was over. Billy Graham released a statement: ”Certainly a President of the United States should be allowed to attend a ball game, entertainment, or a religious service without it being interpreted as political.” termed it ”a suitably evangelistic ending for a Presidential week that started out seemingly beyond redemption.” By the time the crusade was broadcast nationwide, the political juice from disruption having been squeezed suitably dry, the protests were edited out, leaving just the president looking presidential, addressing his fellow Americans, uniting the youth and Silent Majority in reconciliation. The Tuesday following, the first day of exams, Knoxville police squads cruised campus armed with photographs and fifty-seven arrests warrants, s.n.a.t.c.hing protesters from street corners. One teaching a.s.sistant was contacted by a dean's office to get his address to ”update department files”; the cops arrested him at home. Leonard Garment turned off the bad public relations with a wire requesting they wait to complete the arrests until the semester was over. Billy Graham released a statement: ”Certainly a President of the United States should be allowed to attend a ball game, entertainment, or a religious service without it being interpreted as political.”
And thus the curtain was raised on the most active White House campaign for an off-year election since 1938.
The sharp point of the spear was the vice president. Spiro Agnew began the year with a stature-enhancing state visit to Asia. In Manila for the second inaugural of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Agnew experienced a rite of pa.s.sage: his limousine was attacked by leftist students, just like Nixon's in South America. Then Agnew made a frenetic tour of Lincoln Day dinners, just as Nixon used to do. ”The liberal media have been calling on me to lower my voice and to seek accord and unity among all Americans,” he would say. ”Nothing would please me more to see all voices lowered...to see an end to the vilification, the obscenities, the vandalism, and the violence that have become the standard tactics of the dissidents who claim to act in the interests of freedom. But I want you to know that I will not make a unilateral withdrawal and thereby abridge the confidence of the Silent Majority, the everyday law-abiding American who believes his country needs a strong voice to articulate his dissatisfaction with those who seek to destroy our heritage of liberty and our system of justice.
”To penetrate the cacophony of seditious drivel emanating from the best-publicized clowns in our society and their fans in the fourth estate, yes, my friends, to penetrate that drivel, we need a cry of alarm, not a whisper.”
Agnew carried the torch through the South after the scuttling of Haynsworth and Carswell via ”the most nebulous set of trumped-up charges ever contrived by the labor and civil rights lobbies and their allies in the news profession.” In Columbia, Strom Thurmond said of 1966's civil rights candidate for governor of Maryland, ”South Carolina will favor Spiro Agnew for president in 1976.”
Listeners especially enjoyed his savage ”humor”-the story of how he had argued with the president when Nixon decided to convert the White House swimming pool into a pressroom: ”I resisted his insistence that the water be drained out”; his worry that, playing golf with George McGovern and William Fulbright, ”I just might accidentally tag one of them with a golf ball. And then he might respond the way they usually do to aggressive and brutal treatment. And I hate to be kissed on a public golf course.” b.u.mper stickers reading SPIRO OF '76 SPIRO OF '76 were added to a growing shelf of Spiro kitsch pro and con: record alb.u.ms of Agnew speeches; the ”Spiro T. Agnew U.S. History Challenge” board game; Spiro ”mouthwash” that was actually a bar of soap. His face, so sloping and planar, was something of a caricaturist's dream-one more similarity to his mentor Nixon. Some people thought he looked like a ferret. Some people thought he looked like a Roman emperor. were added to a growing shelf of Spiro kitsch pro and con: record alb.u.ms of Agnew speeches; the ”Spiro T. Agnew U.S. History Challenge” board game; Spiro ”mouthwash” that was actually a bar of soap. His face, so sloping and planar, was something of a caricaturist's dream-one more similarity to his mentor Nixon. Some people thought he looked like a ferret. Some people thought he looked like a Roman emperor.
In April he recalled how the New York Times New York Times's Tom Wicker ”made a lugubrious lament that those were 'our children' in the streets of Chicago giving the Bronx cheer to the Conrad Hilton. To a degree Wicker is right-and the fact that we raised some of the crowd that was out there in Grant Park is one of the valid indictments of my generation. But precisely whose children are they? They are, for the most part, the children of affluent, permissive, upper-middle-cla.s.s parents who learned their Dr. Spock and threw discipline out the window-when they should have done the opposite. They are the children dropped off by their parents at Sunday school to hear the 'modern' gospel from a 'progressive' preacher more interested in fighting pollution than fighting evil-one of those pleasant clergymen who...has cast morality and theology aside as not 'relevant' and set as its goal on earth the recognition of Red China and the preservation of the Florida alligator.”
He referred to ”the score of students at Cornell who, wielding pipes and tire chains, beat a dormitory president into unconsciousness.” (The new president of that beleaguered inst.i.tution released an angry statement: ”No such incident even remotely fitting this statement has ever occurred at Cornell University.” The vice president's office was pleased to issue a correction: ”The beating of a dormitory president by students wielding tire irons and chains occurred this month at the University of Connecticut rather than Cornell. It was at Cornell University this month that the African Studies and Research Center was destroyed by fire, probably arson...by SDS and the Black Liberation Front with no action taken against them.”) And that ”the next time a mob of students, waving their nonnegotiable demands, start pitching bricks and rocks at the student union, just imagine they are wearing brown s.h.i.+rts or white sheets-and act accordingly.”
Three days later Agnew appeared on the cover of Life Life magazine: ”Spiro Knows Best: Stern voice of the silent majority.” magazine: ”Spiro Knows Best: Stern voice of the silent majority.”
Three days after that, the Kent State killings happened.
Agnew had a speech scheduled for that night to the American Retail Federation. He changed nothing, l.u.s.tily reading his swipes at liberal elites ”all too willing to believe that the criminal who throws a bomb at a bank is a hero and the policeman who gets killed while trying to stop him is a pig” exactly as written.
A week after the Kent State killings, the adjutant general of the Ohio National Guard backed off from any claim that his men had been fired at by a sniper; the FBI said that guardsmen had been in no imminent danger; a new photo surfaced confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt that the closest students were so far away from the guardsmen that Willie Mays couldn't have thrown rocks at them. The order-loving son of Greek immigrants was earning a reputation as part of the problem. A columnist for the conservative Was.h.i.+ngton Star Was.h.i.+ngton Star wrote, ”Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, at his unmuzzled worst, is a danger to the country, not because of his own rhetorical excesses or crudity of thought, but because of the response which his aggressiveness produces.” Four hundred faculty members in Ma.s.sachusetts voted to invite Agnew to speak at their campuses so that he could be indicted for crossing state lines to incite a riot. And when, by the middle of May, weeks pa.s.sed without a public appearance, the press reported that the president had applied the muzzle. Then, six days before the president's Billy Graham speech, at a $500-a-plater in Houston, Agnew said, ”Lately, you have been exposed to a great deal of public comment about vice-presidential rhetoric and how I should 'cool it.'...Nowhere is the complaint louder than in the columns and editorials of the liberal news media of this country, those really illiberal, self-appointed guardians of our destiny who would like to run the country without ever submitting to the elective process as we in public office might do.” wrote, ”Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, at his unmuzzled worst, is a danger to the country, not because of his own rhetorical excesses or crudity of thought, but because of the response which his aggressiveness produces.” Four hundred faculty members in Ma.s.sachusetts voted to invite Agnew to speak at their campuses so that he could be indicted for crossing state lines to incite a riot. And when, by the middle of May, weeks pa.s.sed without a public appearance, the press reported that the president had applied the muzzle. Then, six days before the president's Billy Graham speech, at a $500-a-plater in Houston, Agnew said, ”Lately, you have been exposed to a great deal of public comment about vice-presidential rhetoric and how I should 'cool it.'...Nowhere is the complaint louder than in the columns and editorials of the liberal news media of this country, those really illiberal, self-appointed guardians of our destiny who would like to run the country without ever submitting to the elective process as we in public office might do.”
The venom in the address he went on to deliver so stunned expectations that the New York Times New York Times republished it in full. republished it in full.
He excoriated the ”wild, hot rhetoric” that ”pours out of the television set and the radio in a daily torrent,” from the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Life, Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Life, and the and the New York Times, New York Times, working together to ”tear our country apart.” He quoted Jerry Rubin on the Kent State campus ”one month prior to the confrontation that brought the student deaths there”: ”Until you people are prepared to kill your parents, you aren't ready for revolution.” And even so, he thundered, James Reston, in his May 10 column, ”saw fit to equate working together to ”tear our country apart.” He quoted Jerry Rubin on the Kent State campus ”one month prior to the confrontation that brought the student deaths there”: ”Until you people are prepared to kill your parents, you aren't ready for revolution.” And even so, he thundered, James Reston, in his May 10 column, ”saw fit to equate me me with Jerry Rubin as an extremist.... And yet they ask with Jerry Rubin as an extremist.... And yet they ask us us to cool our rhetoric and lower our voices!” to cool our rhetoric and lower our voices!”
Houston Republicans screamed their acclaim.
His claim about Reston, whose May 10 column mentioned neither the vice president nor Jerry Rubin, was a brazen lie. Reston had focused the piece, instead, on his delight that more and more students were rejecting protest and working within the political system. The lie made political sense; Reston's column was about the electoral consequences of a surge of students working for Democratic congressional candidates, and Princeton's decision to cancel cla.s.ses for a few weeks in the fall so students could work on campaigns. Agnew's job, on behalf of his president, was to shove such developments onto the ”anarchy” side of the polarization ledger.