their political goals remain to institute an expansionist social welfare state and a pullback from American military commitments abroad.
Moreover, relations between the parties have deteriorated steadily since the end of the Nixon era, in no small part due to the scorched-earth political tactics that he and his team unleashed.
One of Nixon’s longtime political adversaries, Democratic senator Adlai Stevenson, described what he called “Nixonland” as “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win.”20 Nixon’s approach to politics—being obsessed with leaks, at war with the media, determined to cripple political foes—was something like war, in that opponents were not just seen as misguided or wrong but, in fact, as evil and dangerous. It’s an approach that has become the operative outlook of both parties today. (The obsessive secrecy of the Obama administration is a vivid example.)
Its genuine criminality aside, the lasting legacy of Watergate is less noted: it is the key event in shaping today’s intense partisan polarization. Our Red-and-Blue political map—the outline of mutually incompatible Americas that don’t understand one another and have mostly stopped listening to the other side—was forged in the Nixon White House.
As a young lawyer, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton served on the Watergate Committee investigating the impeachment charges against Nixon. Congress eventually voted to bring those charges, but before it could proceed, Nixon resigned from office. Twenty-four years later, some saw a Watergate redux—“payback,” some called it—when conservatives in Congress marshaled enough votes to impeach President Clinton. Clinton was only the second Democratic president to win the election since Nixon, and the first Democratic president to win two terms since FDR. It was impossible to watch the Clinton impeachment drama unfold and not consider the lingering political bitterness that Watergate created.
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.
