The Nixon Effect. Douglas E. Schoen
Few Americans know that the president’s school desegregation legacy dwarfs that of his Democratic predecessors. When Nixon ran for president in 1968, nearly 70 percent of black children in the South attended all-black schools. By the time he left office in 1974, just 8 percent did.5 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former Nixon White House aide, lamented “how little the administration seems to be credited with what it has achieved.”6
On issues of social welfare, Nixon was emphatically not a Barry Goldwater conservative. He attempted to institute one of the most far-reaching plans of social welfare ever in the United States: the Family Assistance Plan. The plan was designed to expand welfare benefits and job-training programs, but more importantly, to provide all Americans with a guaranteed annual income. He pushed for a national health care plan to require employers to buy health insurance for their employees and to subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. Nixon’s version of national health care was far more liberal than Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s—and it in fact failed because of Democratic opposition, not lack of support from Nixon’s own party. (Ted Kennedy later said that opposing Nixon’s health care plan was one of his biggest political regrets.)
Nixon was the nation’s first—and, some would say, its only—“environmental president.” He was not only a fervent supporter of the Clean Air Act, the first federal law designed to control air pollution on the national level, he also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. The creation of the EPA was part of a broader environmental agenda embodied in the Natural Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which some refer to as the “natural environment’s Magna Carta.” NEPA set forth unprecedented ecological goals and targets and required the use of environmental impact statements—documents that describe anticipated environmental effects, positive and negative, of proposed policies.7 With NEPA, Nixon instituted a systematic national environmental policy, which would include the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. These decisions clearly represented a significant expansion of a government mandate to oversee areas of economic and civic life that were previously lightly regulated. The Nixon environmental regulatory framework would face fierce opposition were it being debated today.
Finally, Nixon also ended the military draft. Ending the nation’s system of military conscription single-handedly weakened the main impetus of the antiwar movement, dramatically calmed down social tensions, and ultimately put the US military on a much stronger footing. If a Democratic president had done that, there would be monuments to him in every state in the country. Yet for Nixon, this major reform is somehow regarded as an afterthought.
As I previously suggested, Nixon himself had much to do with his negative image. Yet he serves as perhaps the most dramatic example of how one must separate private behavior—and tape-recorded conversations—from actual policy. What made Nixon so divisive domestically was that while his governance was mostly centrist, and sometimes flat-out liberal, his politics were much more confrontational. The dichotomy is best illustrated in a pair of quotations attributed to Attorney General John Mitchell: In one instance, Mitchell told reporters, “This country is going so far to the Right you won’t recognize it.”8 Another time, Mitchell warned people: “You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say.”9
Indeed, however rough, even callous, Nixon and his men could sound in their public rhetoric, the administration’s policy record was one of innovation and substantive achievement. Mitchell’s “watch what we do” comment, in fact, was made, fittingly, to a group of disappointed activists for civil rights—and no area illustrates the Nixonian tension between words and deeds more dramatically.
Civil Rights
Nixon’s enduring image as a political villain, his appeal to the silent majority of mostly middle-class Americans, and especially his notorious Southern strategy—all of which I’ll discuss at length in later chapters—have contributed to a widespread view that his record on racial matters is poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whatever the complexities of Nixon’s racial politics, his policies achieved far more than those of his great rival, John F. Kennedy, who dragged his feet on civil rights until near the end of his time in office. Nixon’s record on race today would qualify him, again, as a liberal.
“The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect,’” wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon’s counselor for urban affairs, in a memo that would become as infamous as it was misunderstood. “The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.”10 What Moynihan was urging was not a retreat from government concern for minority advancement but less public attention to the highlighting of disputes between the races. Critics have often portrayed Moynihan’s statement literally, as a proposal to “neglect” blacks, and Nixon’s Watergate image and his own comments about race in the Oval Office tapes fed that impression. In some areas, Nixon gave them fuel for their conclusions.
Consider the tortured subject of busing, on which Nixon struggled to define a clear public position. Nixon was on the record opposing the forced busing of school children for the purpose of integration. At the same time, he tried to make clear his civil rights record, which had been strong throughout his career. As vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon helped lead support for the 1957 Civil Rights Act—for which Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to thank him. Nixon opposed segregation. In a 1968 interview on Face the Nation, presidential candidate Nixon said that “no funds should be given to a district which practices segregation.”11
Some brief background: When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was drafted, Vice President Hubert Humphrey proposed amendments banning the act from ever being interpreted as one that required forced busing. Humphrey wanted to outlaw segregation, but he opposed forcing integration according to race. Republican Senator Jacob Javits expressed similar views. However, by 1966, the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) had mandated that the success of desegregation efforts could be measured by numbers—that is, by how many children had been integrated. In certain areas, the only way to satisfy those targets was through busing.
The integration of schools was upheld by the Supreme Court’s 1968 ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, which ordered an immediate end to de jure segregation.12 The busing views were further bolstered in the Court’s 1971 ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which ordered the school district to desegregate, allowing it to redraw districts, if necessary, and also to use busing. These two rulings effectively brought an end to de jure segregation—that is, segregation by explicit arrangement—in the South though they did not address de facto segregation, which was common in the North and West, not so much as a matter of law but as a result of residential patterns. Now several lower courts began to mandate busing as a means to eliminate de facto segregation as well.13 Backlash to busing grew across the country, especially in suburban districts in the North and West.
Nixon did not see busing—forced integration—as a solution to racial inequality, let alone as a way to foster harmonious relations between whites and blacks. In addition, he objected to it on the grounds of community control. After the Swann ruling upheld the constitutionality of busing, Nixon asked Congress to pass a moratorium on new court-ordered busing rulings—which would not affect those already in place. The moratorium made it through the House but not the Senate. Throughout the first half of the 1970s, busing continued to be a hugely divisive issue socially and politically, sparking parent protests, sporadic violence, and even the firebombing of school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. By 1974, reflecting the new public mood, the court had ruled, in Milliken v. Bradley, that federal courts could not bus between school districts unless they could prove that these districts were deliberately drawn up so as to create segregation.14
Liberals at the New York Times and elsewhere blamed Nixon for his resistance to busing, but they somehow missed the astounding success he was having desegregating American schools, which was busing’s main goal. When Nixon entered the White House, the desegregation of Southern schools was proceeding at a snail’s pace. The fact that