At the top of Joy Reid's MSNBC show on Oct. 16, anti-Trump pundit David Frum trotted out a couple of false comparisons based on the ridiculous myth that Richard Nixon was some sort of high-minded political figure who cared about bringing people together. In reality, Nixon was the most profoundly divisive political figure of the post-World War II era, whose initial relative political harmony and consensus politics he did much to help destroy. Although Watergate effectively derailed his own specific plans, Nixon’s infamous “Southern strategy” planted the seeds that effectively destroyed the party of Eisenhower.
Folks like Frum may truly despise Donald Trump, but whenever they cite Nixon approvingly, they are nonetheless praising the foundations of Trumpism — as Trump himself clearly recognizes, with his repeated invocations of Nixonian tropes — “law and order,” “silent majority,” secret plans, enemy lists, rants against the media, and so forth. For all their weeping, they will never be able to rebuild the GOP of old, the party that more or less led from Abraham Lincoln to Ike, so long as they remain in such deep denial about the history of its destruction. That morning, Frum gave a clinic on precisely what not to do.
First, Frum revived the myth of Nixon's noble refusal to contest the 1960 election, as a way of denigrating Al Gore’s conduct in 2000.
First, I would like to stipulate here that Richard Nixon had much better grounds for complaint in 1960 than Al Gore did in the year 2000, because Gore lost in the courts, but there wasn't any suggestion of voter fraud or poll fraud, which there was in 1960.
Of course, the 2000 election was actually stolen, as John Nichol’s “Jews for Buchanan” makes clear, while GOP spin doctors like Frum were busy normalizing the theft. This retrospective false Nixon comparison is just more of the same, with grander historical pretensions. But it’s a common myth among today’s conservatives. After last week’s presidential debate, it was trotted out once again by Nixon acolyte Hugh Hewitt, a former Nixon ghostwriter and founding executive director of the Nixon Library, where he tried to deny access to "unfriendly" researchers. After claiming Trump had won “14 out of 15 rounds” in the debate, Hewitt went on:
Richard Nixon in 1960 had a legitimate case to contest the election and chose not to do so, because to have done so would have been to undermine the democracy. Nixon did a noble thing.
This is flatly false. The 1960 election result was contested by the Republican National Committee, but Eisenhower compelled Nixon, his vice president, to public silence.
A few minutes later, Frum cited Nixon again as an exemplary figure, in order to knock Hillary Clinton:
Hillary Clinton has a big strategic choice, or had a big strategic choice, and we can see the choice she made. The choice she had was to do what Richard Nixon did in 1972, facing a weak opponent, say, "I'm going to broaden my message and try and win the middle. Or does she continue to look over her left shoulder at the Bernie Sanders voters and steer in that direction. She's clearly said, 'I'm going to use the weakness of the Republican nominee as my opportunity to go as far left as I can in order to avoid trouble within my own party.’”
This, Frum went on to say, would result in “a convulsive situation after the election” that would all be Clinton’s fault. To her credit, another conservative guest, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, disputed Frum’s claims about Clinton. But no one spoke up to defend Gore against Frum’s mischaracterization, or to question Frum’s false claims about Nixon. But those lies about Nixon’s campaign conduct are symptoms of a much deeper delusion that’s directly implicated in facilitating the rise of Trump. So it’s well worthwhile to set the record straight.
In 1960, Nixon wanted to dispute the election openly, but Eisenhower’s opposition — along with that of Attorney General Bill Rogers — prevented him, as historian David Greenberg (author of “Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image”) told me in an interview during the 2000 election struggle. Nonetheless, the RNC, led by Sen. Thurston Morton of Kentucky, called for recounts in 11 states, all of them futile. “Top-level Republicans were involved, and the matter dragged on for weeks,” Greenberg told me. “As late as Nov. 23, there was a prediction that Illinois was going to switch.” But in the end only one recount succeeded — in Hawaii, the sole state where Democrats requested a recount.
“Of course, most of them probably didn't really think they could win,” Greenberg told me. “But they did think they could taint Kennedy's victory and deprive him of the so-called mandate, which they felt was necessary in order to govern successfully. They could also get their own rank-and-file exercised about this and have a great issue to run on in 1962 and 1964.” Sound familiar? It should. Some version of that same delegitimizing playbook has been trotted out every time a Democrat has been elected since then. (Conservatives still like to pretend Bill Clinton only won because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy in 1992, for example, even though Clinton led George H.W. Bush in every poll during Perot’s temporary withdrawal from the race.)
Folks like Frum may be horrified at Trump’s ranting about a “rigged election,” but Frum’s comparison of Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Nixon in 1972 is just a more pretentious way to achieve the same delegitimizing ends. In 1972, the real story was quite different than Frum suggests. Nixon’s strongest intra-party challenge came from anti-war Congressman Pete McCloskey, who dropped out after getting only 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. An opponent to his right, John Ashbrook, stayed in to the end, but only garnered 5 percent of the primary vote.
By contrast, Bernie Sanders got 43 percent of the Democratic primary vote this year, running on issues that have broad popular support, despite what pundits might think. So the primary race comparison utterly fails. Nixon did try to claim the center in the general election against George McGovern, but only after intense meddling in the Democratic primary to sabotage centrist Democrats, meddling that ultimately intertwined with the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, which eventually led to his resignation.
Nixon was not the public-spirited statesman in either 1960 or 1972, just a clever political operator devoted to creating a high-minded false impression. And Frum is happy to keep promoting it, only furthering the clouds of confusion surrounding Nixon’s legacy and his role in laying the groundwork for Trump.
Naturally, Nixon didn’t destroy the party of Eisenhower alone, any more than Andrew Jackson destroyed the 1820s “Era of Good Feelings” single-handedly. As I wrote here in a recent review of anthropologist Peter Turchin’s new book “Ages of Discord,” the 1950s "were a cyclic echo of the 'Era of Good Feelings' around 1820, when social discord was at a low ebb.”
Both eras of relative social harmony reflected deep historical trends leading up to them, then reversing and leading to decades of growing social discord. No individual actor — even the most memorable presidential figure — can be held responsible for cyclic ebbs and flows of such conditions. Yet, they can give history a distinctive configuration, the consequences of which will either complicate or facilitate the efforts of those who follow them. And that is precisely what Nixon did: he helped divide the country and he helped destroy the party of Eisenhower.
Nixon’s divisiveness dates back to his earliest Red-baiting congressional campaigns. Sen. Joe McCarthy became the lightning rod, but it was Nixon and his staff who did all the prep-work that made McCarthy’s first crusades possible. While McCarthy always went for grabbing the headlines, Nixon was far shrewder: He knew it was usually better to have his enemies in the headlines, being smeared, while he shaped the stories from the shadows. That guile served him well by landing him in the White House as Eisenhower’s vice president.
The 1950s were a time of high institutional trust and consensus, which had eroded somewhat by the time Nixon returned as president in 1969. Still, Nixon’s profound, instinctive divisiveness and distrust of the existing order was sharply at odds with the spirit of the times, and had to be muted, misrepresented or denied in public.
Nixon constantly scripted himself and others to create his desired reality — but he could never actually believe in it himself. “I am not a crook,” he famously said, knowing with dead certainty that he was. Not only did he want to “reorganize” government, he wanted to reorganize and restructure the entire political landscape — even create a new party, or at least a new party name. This was an idea that grew on him during the 1970 midterms. His famous “Southern strategy” was only part of it.
In December 1970, after being impressed with former Texas governor John Connally, a Democrat, Nixon began “focusing on the possibility of a Nixon-Connally ticket in 1972,” writes biographer Richard Reeves. This would be “a combination geared to Republicans and conservative Democrats, giving shape and voice to the new American majority he was sure existed.” Nixon brought Connally into his cabinet as secretary of the treasury and subsequently, Reeves writes, “Hour-long weekly meetings with the Treasury Secretary were a fixture on the President's schedule and one of their favorite topics of conversation was ‘the New Party,’ the coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats that would be introduced in 1972 with a Nixon-Connally ticket and then nominate Connally for president in 1976." Nixon ultimately decided he couldn’t dump Vice President Spiro Agnew “without exploding his own party,” but he gave Connally a prominent role as head of “Democrats for Nixon.”
Nixon repeatedly reinvented his political persona, the subject of Greenberg’s “Nixon’s Shadow.” We take it for granted nowadays that politicians carefully craft their images, but it was Nixon who taught us that. As his own self-created commodity, Nixon could further detach himself from unwanted party affiliations, another way he helped erode the GOP’s institutional foundations and create the template for Trump.
Nixon also gave us a whole galaxy of destructive political figures who first gained prominence working with or for him: Roger Ailes, Robert Bork, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are just four prominent examples. The people he spurned or cast aside were equally telling — Eisenhower-style Republicans like Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, fired in the "Saturday Night Massacre," or Interior Secretary Walter Hickel, fired after his private letter arguing for the need to communicate with young Americans, rather than alienating them, was leaked.
Of course, the hyper-extroverted Donald Trump — who only seems fully alive in the media spotlight — is dramatically different from the deeply introverted Nixon, who spent countless lonely hours in the White House writing and rewriting scripts for himself. But that simply reflects the ripening of the fruit that Nixon planted so long ago. Set aside the style, and think instead of their actions. It’s not just that Trump has a liking for things Nixonian. He has a similar wounded schoolboy outlook on life. His whole worldview is drenched in Nixonian resentment: He constantly rails against elites, and sees people in terms of group membership and stereotypes.
Even their relationships with the media are similar. Trump’s recent rantings against the media are textbook Nixon, but so is the way he ignores how much the media fueled his rise in the first place. A Harvard study has found that Trump’s favorable pre-primary media coverage was a crucial factor in his success. Not only did he get more free media than any other candidate, it was broadly positive, and came in advance of any other sign that he was a viable candidate: “When his news coverage began to shoot up, he was not high in the trial-heat polls and had raised almost no money. Upon entering the race, he stood much taller in the news than he stood in the polls. … Trump is arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee.”
Nixon too owed his rise to a favorable media, as I described here last November. His bitter lashing out at the press after losing the California gubernatorial election in 1962 is well-known — “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” But that wasn’t the whole story:
What few people realize is that Nixon’s anger and bitterness were partially fueled by having once benefited enormously from extremely favorable press treatment, a key part of the story told by author/journalist/blogger Greg Mitchell in his 1998 book, “Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, 1950.” Particularly important was GOP kingmaker Kyle Palmer, the top political writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times. “Without the journalist’s promise of support, Nixon may have never run for Congress in ’46 or for the Senate in ’50,” Mitchell wrote. “They had an almost father-son relationship.”
Both Nixon and Trump conceived of themselves as outsiders, fighting for “the little guy” against spoiled, privileged elites. What neither of them realized was just how spoiled they were — accustomed to fawning press coverage they came to regard as “fair and balanced,” their natural heritage. Anything approaching the tough critical coverage that virtually all their enemies had endured for years sent them into fits.
They’re not alone, of course. The entire conservative media universe exists, in large part, to shield its heroes from unpleasant facts. Hugh Hewitt is part of that media universe, and Frum spent years inside it as well. The fact that they both trotted out the same 1960 Nixon myth within days of each other illustrates how it works. Both of them may believe they are recalling Nixon’s nobility by way of a warning to Trump. Perhaps they are. Trump, after all, has none of Nixon’s deep Machiavellian grasp of political details. He’s much closer to the authoritarian thuggishness of Agnew or Joe McCarthy. Trump lacks Nixon’s skill at reinvention, but already his surrogates are trying to reinvent him as a guardian of electoral integrity.
So it goes. As long as the Republican Party remains within Richard Nixon’s shadow — unwilling to confront his legacy in the harsh light of day — it will remain mired in contests over who can tell the most convincing lies.
Shares