The George W. Bush years were even more contentious. Bush’s wars reawakened the split between Republican hawks and Democratic doves that had first surfaced in the Nixon years. Like Nixon, Bush possessed a seemingly limitless capacity to derange Democrats with fury and political resentment. The result was a party pushed further and further left until, by 2008, it nominated Barack Obama, its most liberal candidate since Franklin Roosevelt. During Obama’s presidency, the polar split between the parties has grown even wider. Obama became the first president ever to pass major domestic legislation without a single vote from the opposition party, and he presided over the first downgrade of US credit in history when, in the face of a debt default, he was unable to make a deal with Republicans until the very last moment.
In short, polarization—between the two parties, between competing visions of the country, and between Red and Blue America—is a lasting legacy of the Nixon years. Even as we begin to look beyond Obama, the same Nixonian dynamics between parties seem likely to shape the playing field.
Those dynamics are often cultural as well as political, as Americans well know—and more than any other politician, Richard Nixon articulated the fundamental division in the ongoing American culture war: that between “elites” and ordinary Americans. It would not be an overstatement to declare that Nixon is the father of the culture war.
Nixon coined the term the “silent majority” to refer to the ordinary, hardworking, tax-paying Americans, or as he described them the “forgotten Americans—the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators,”21 who felt under siege by the political and social tumults of the late 1960s. He first identified this group in a November 3, 1969, speech on the Vietnam War. Where his attacks on the media and intellectuals had redefined populism’s targets, his recognition of the silent majority redefined populism’s heroes—not as the proletarians or impoverished farmers of an earlier era but as the ordinary middle-class Americans, some in cities, some in suburbs, who were trying to live decent lives and who were contemptuous of political agitators.
Nixon’s identification of the silent majority had a long and deeply personal pedigree. While attending Whittier College in the 1930s, Nixon was already fighting his own culture war. He started an alternative student organization, the Orthogonians, or “straight shooters” (a made-up term using ortho, the Latin prefix for “straight”) to counter the elitist Franklins (the liberals), who didn’t accept him for membership (because, he suspected, of his humble origins). From this episode flows much that would come later: his instinctive suspicion, as a young congressman, of Alger Hiss, upon the former FDR aide being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and denying having been a Communist; his instinctive sense that Whittaker Chambers, the Time magazine editor and former Communist, was telling the truth about Hiss’s Communist past; his resentment and jealousy of John F. Kennedy and the whole Kennedy crowd; his distrust of the Ivy League media and professoriate; and his powerful identification with modest Middle Americans and all Orthogonians, people like his father—even though he had almost as little in common with these people as did most of his political rivals. But these were the identifications, and they have endured.
The Master Campaigner and Strategist
More than any other politician, Richard Nixon designed the political strategy, communications, and tactics—including the television ads and message management—that national politicians are still using to get through to voters and win elections.
Nixon’s explosive television ads—like his 1968 commercials that bluntly raised the issue of crime, his skillful repackaging of his image, and his disciplined message management forged the modern campaign-strategy model for the presidency. The Nixon political strategists and communication team pioneered a shrewd, fearless, and just-short-of-incendiary style of political communication.
The team included twenty-six-year-old wunderkind Roger Ailes, the media consultant who had helped make talk show host Mike Douglas into a “national icon of square chic.”22 Ailes and his team recreated the Nixon brand via television—the very medium that had sunk Nixon’s presidential hopes against Kennedy in 1960. They achieved this by using staged campaign events to put Nixon in the most flattering light and play up a sympathetic image: the “New Nixon,” as the slogan had it, was a common man at peace with himself, not the haunted, nervous character of the 1960 presidential debates against Kennedy or the suspicious-seeming figure dubbed “Tricky Dick” by his political enemies. The New Nixon was determined to bring America’s polarized electorate back together behind shared goals. Ailes and his team produced a series of pioneering, made-for-TV “town halls,” in which Nixon took questions from mostly friendly audiences and got his message out to millions around the country. The town halls, although seemingly spontaneous, were actually tightly choreographed; New York Times reporter James Reston called them “masterpieces of contrived candor.”23
The town halls’ influence on political communications strategies and tactics remains foundational to this day. Staged political events have become so routine that the authenticity of any seemingly spontaneous incident is immediately questioned. (The presidential “town hall” debate, a staple of the debate season during recent election cycles, often provokes accusations on both sides about questions being “planted” by attendees who may be secretly working for one of the campaigns.)
The Nixon communication team’s true genius, though, was for televised campaign ads, in which they made heavy use of attacks on Democrats. The 1968 Nixon campaign broke new ground for negative campaigning, elevating the art of political attack to a new level. Nixon’s ads often featured ominous voice-overs and music set against images of the unrest around the country, a subject with which Americans had become all too familiar. In the most memorable ad, directed by filmmaker Eugene Jones, a montage of still photographs showing scenes of unrest was accompanied by angry, disturbing music. The ads tapped into Americans’ sense that the country was plunging into chaos.24 Even viewed today, the ads retain their power and sophistication.
Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign was not as confrontational as the first, as is befitting to an incumbent, but it was equally as shrewd. Nixon used his ad campaign to portray himself as a successful world leader and to depict his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, as a dangerous radical. Pro-Nixon ads touted Nixon’s accomplishments and also tried to humanize the president, showing him dancing with his daughter at her wedding and playing piano with Duke Ellington. These folksy touches would soon become prerequisites in political campaigning, mastered most notably by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and to some extent by George W. Bush. Yet, the anti-McGovern ads continued to build on the 1968 imagery, playing on voters’ fears of McGovern’s dovish tendencies: one ad showed the image of a hand sweeping away toy soldiers, planes, and warships, depicting the opponent’s plans for scaling back American military power. Another ad suggested that, under McGovern, nearly half of Americans would be on welfare.
Part of the effectiveness of this messaging owed to the Nixon team’s skilled writers, especially Pat Buchanan and William Safire, who excelled at different things. Safire was urbane and witty—he coined Vice President Spiro Agnew’s phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” to describe the liberal press—while Buchanan’s eloquence was for pugnacity and aggression. As a team they were the perfect combination to capture the sense of alienation and resentment of Nixon’s silent majority.
And, in an early sign of the “dirty tricks” for which the Nixonites would become infamous, Nixon’s team staged incidents at campaign rallies, in which protesters attempted to shout down the president and were then removed by police, to the cheering of crowds. In a typical incident, Nixon was speaking at a campaign event when a handful of antiwar veterans started chanting, “Stop the bombing, stop the war!’” Unflustered, he paused, then turned to look into the cameras.
“I have a message for the television screens,” Nixon said. “Let’s show, besides the six over here”—pointing to the demonstrators—“the thousands over here.” He gestured to the large crowd, which included schoolchildren, who now began shouting, “Four more years!”