The Nixon Effect. Douglas E. Schoen
Texas attorney general Will Wilson,15 future Mississippi senator Trent Lott16—and most important, South Carolina senator and former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.17 Thurmond’s support would be crucial in the 1968 election. In addition, some formerly Democratic representatives became the first Republican congressmen from their states since Reconstruction.18 And other prominent Southern Democrats eventually became Republicans, such as Texas governor John Connally.
Unlike Goldwater, who came out explicitly against the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, Nixon did not question these legislative achievements. Instead, he appealed to Southern whites’ concerns about the effects of broad-ranging liberal reforms as well as the federal government’s impositions on local authority. Nixon threaded the needle between accepting existing federal legislation—especially legislation narrowly tailored to protect basic rights—and opposing the newer efforts with more expansive goals, like forced busing and desegregation mandates. He spoke out against Washington’s attempts to direct state Republican parties that were more conservative on civil rights. “Washington cannot dictate,” Nixon said to state parties. He sometimes couched his positions as a defense of the two-party system: “I will go to any state in the country to campaign for a strong two-party system, whether or not I agree with local Republicans on every issue.”19
He carved out nuanced positions on civil rights court decisions. He spoke of Brown v. Board of Education as settled law, but he also said that the federal government, under a strict reading of the Constitution, had only limited ability to enforce it.
The Southern strategy is widely regarded today as racist, even by many Republicans. (Few Democrats seem as eager to condemn their own party’s exploiting of the Solid South for a century, at a time when the region was immeasurably more racist and more violent than it was by the time Republicans began winning there.) For many liberal critics, Nixon’s commercials from 1968 on crime, in particular, only strengthened the impression that the candidate was using race to stoke white fears—and win white votes.
“It is time for a proper look at the problem of order in the United States,” Nixon said in a voice-over for his most provocative ad. As quick-cut photos of urban crime scenes, bloody faces of protestors, police, and conflagrations splashed across the screen, Nixon intoned: “Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change. But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence. Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.” As the frightening imagery continued, Nixon concluded: “So I pledge to you: we shall have order in the United States.”20 The use of the word “order,” not to mention the use of the phrase “civil right” in a different context than black rights, leaves room for interpretation about the ad’s intentions.
However, in my view, the Southern strategy was far more nuanced—politically and ethically—than its liberal critics have long maintained. Certainly Nixon and his men were, at minimum, politically unsentimental; at such a delicate moment in the nation’s social history, to forge ahead with the Southern strategy so unapologetically was, at the least, opportunistic. Nixon’s own reputation for private racism—his statements about blacks on Oval Office tapes, for example—and the hard-boiled attitudes of his men, like Patrick Buchanan and Kevin Phillips, didn’t alleviate that impression. Phillips was prone to saying things like: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with local Democrats.”21 But from a purely arithmetical standpoint, Phillips was right.
On the left, the Southern strategy’s notorious reputation was enshrined by Lee Atwater, who said in an infamous 1981 interview:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N–ger, n–ger, n–ger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n–ger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites . . . “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N–ger, n–ger.”22
These are offensive and shameful formulations—but they shouldn’t obscure the fact that Nixon had no desire to run a campaign based on racism. Whatever his private views of blacks may have been, he could not afford to alienate more liberal Republicans in the rest of the country. Nixon’s own civil rights record in Congress had been strong. Martin Luther King Jr. had even called to thank him for his support of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Moreover, as noted in chapter 1, Nixon would go on to achieve substantial—even remarkable—progress on civil rights, from massive school desegregation to the promotion of black entrepreneurship.
Perhaps the most vivid testimony to Nixon’s true intentions comes from White House Communications Director Pat Buchanan, who worked closely with Nixon on his 1968 presidential campaign and was at the center of the historic strategy developed that year:
Among the malevolent myths about Nixon is that he set out to build the Republican Party in Dixie on a foundation of racism. That is not the man I knew and it is the antithesis of what I saw. While Nixon approved of my writings on law and order, he expressed an emotional empathy with black Americans. It was in his DNA. His Quaker mother’s family had been active in the Underground Railroad in Indiana. On coming to Congress he agreed to Adam Clayton Powell’s request to be part of a five-man team that would take the floor to answer the racist rants of Mississippi’s John Rankin. His record as vice president, working behind the scenes for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for which Dr. King sent him a personal letter of gratitude, marked him as a progressive. I recall him storming out of his office in a rage one morning over a story he had read about an Alabama town that had refused to bury a black soldier killed in Vietnam in its whites-only cemetery. . . . Nixon’s visceral recoil at what he thought was a moral outrage was genuine and unforgettable.23
Indeed, far from a crudely racist appeal, Nixon’s Southern strategy should be seen as an instrument of political realism—one, that, like all pragmatic efforts, has more- and less-salutary elements. Nixon and his men were going where the votes were, as politicians have always done, and saying what they say to secure those votes. Indeed, as Joan Hoff and others have argued—I think persuasively—Nixon deserves less credit for formulating a Southern strategy than for recognizing one—that is, he saw that a political realignment was already in force, and he capitalized on it.
Buchanan continued:
What the Left never understood, or would never accept, is that Nixon brought the South into the Republican column not because he shared their views on segregation or civil rights. He did not. What we shared was the South’s contempt for a liberal press and hypocritical Democratic Party that had coexisted happily with Dixiecrats for a century but got religion when conservative Republicans began to steal the South away from them. The Goldwater-Nixon party in which I enlisted was not a segregationist party but a conservative party. Virtually every segregationist in the eleven states of the old Confederacy and every Klansman from 1865 to 1965, belonged to the party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.24
Hoff pointed out how, before October 1960—when Jack Kennedy, in her view and Nixon’s own view, “grandstanded” by telephoning the jailed Martin Luther King Jr.—both King and Jackie Robinson “had openly praised Nixon above all other presidential candidates in 1960 for caring about the race issue.”25 Indeed, the Southern strategy is another instance of Nixon running to the right but also governing from the center. Nixon’s conservative critics would excoriate him for doing exactly that throughout his presidency.
The journalist David Frost, who got to know Nixon well, viewed it that way:
Nixon was among the most sophisticated presidents ever to seek higher office in the USA and clearly he discerned the elements of what Kevin Phillips called “the Emerging Republican Majority.” Nixon did what he could to capture the process and speed it along. Clearly he succeeded.