subjugation, the dual school system of the South, virtually intact two years ago, has quietly and finally been dismantled. All in all, a record of good fortune and much genuine achievement. And yet how little the administration seems to be credited with what it has achieved.
—DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN2
The 2,027 days Nixon spent in office have been remembered most for Watergate, next for foreign policy, and least for domestic reform. I think this order should be reversed.
—JOAN HOFF3
Richard Nixon is many things to many people, but a little more than forty years after his crushing 1972 reelection victory, he is also something few would have imagined: America’s last liberal. That may sound like a stretch, a misunderstanding of Nixon’s presidency and his policies. But if we look back over the last forty-five-odd years, Nixon’s credentials have put him starkly at odds with today’s Republican Party. Though Nixon, and other Republicans in the 1970s, would never have expressed it in this way, our thirty-seventh president was a pro–big government, pro–public spending, and pro–safety net president.
To some extent his domestic liberalism resulted less from deep-seated convictions than from political pragmatism. Because the truth about Nixon is that he was never terribly interested in domestic policy. He once said: “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President. . . . You need a President for foreign policy.”4 To be sure, this perspective sometimes got Nixon into trouble domestically: as I go on to briefly outline, Nixon’s economic policies were scattershot, inconsistent, and not terribly successful by any measure. He lacked a firm foundation in economics, and it showed in his policies. Yet, in other crucial domestic areas—especially civil rights and the environment—he achieved remarkable successes unmatched by any of his successors (and some of his immediate predecessors). In further areas—especially health care and social welfare—he proposed bold, innovative reforms that, while not becoming law, helped to shape the reforms adopted decades later.
What’s striking about all of these areas is how much Nixon’s record plays against the conventional image of him. Nixon’s image today, on racial and civil issues, for instance, is almost wholly negative. It’s an image that he himself did much to create, especially on the White House tapes, in which he is heard saying things about blacks that had they been heard publicly, would have destroyed him politically. And yet Nixon’s record on racial issues is remarkable for its substantive achievements. 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
