of supporting what Nixon called “black capitalism.” It came at a time, several years after Dr. King’s death, when the traditional civil rights paradigm seemed to have broken down amid a changed legal and political climate. Some problems had actually been solved; others remained. But the old-line civil rights leadership seemed unable to grasp the new realities, and the urban violence of the late sixties had exposed the limitations of its approach—while prompting a backlash from whites. Nixon saw support for black business efforts not only as a logical next step in black advancement but as a way to defuse racial tensions.
As Nixon speechwriter Ray Price put it, the rioting and other inner-city violence posed the danger of “hardening attitudes into a simple formula of ‘it’s us against them.’” Price lambasted liberal Democrats, “who, faced with a riot, beat their breasts in a chorus of collective mea culpas,” along with white conservatives, “who don’t recognize the cultural gulf between the ghetto and suburbia.”26
Nixon’s approach sought to bring Republican values of entrepreneurialism to the black community, while also—so Nixon hoped, anyway—reaching out to blacks and demonstrating to them that Republicans also sought their advancement and wanted their support. As a result, the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE), championed by Republicans, put liberal Democrats on the defensive. Instead of a constant drumbeat for government assistance or legislation, here was a different emphasis for black advancement: free enterprise and the American way. Eventually, some liberal politicians endorsed the OMBE. Black capitalism, said Graham T. Molitor, a pollster for liberal Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, was “a stroke of political genius.”27
A good portion of the liberal establishment showed its myopia, however, in harping on the Nixon plan’s limitations. The New York Times argued that the plan ignored institutional discrimination in home sales and wages and failed to fully account for the social, economic, and political concerns of blacks. But Nixon continued, undaunted.
In 1972, after presidential candidate George Wallace once again proved strong in Southern primaries, Nixon showed his newfound confidence in exerting a civil rights agenda—without losing his majority support among whites and even most conservatives. Nixon proposed the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1972, affirming that no state or locality could discriminate in education based on race, color, or national origin, while also making it clear that busing would be regarded only as a last resort.28
Writing thirty years later, in 2002, Patrick Buchanan summarized the administration’s civil rights achievements in the following list. According to him, the administration:
* raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
* doubled the budget for black colleges;
* appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president, including LBJ;
* adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and universities;
* invented “Black Capitalism” (the Office of Minority Business Enterprise) . . . ;
* raised the share of Southern schools that were desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent.29
“The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie,” Buchanan wrote. “Nixon routed the Left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war [Vietnam] into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.”30 Indeed, Nixon showed that civil rights could be advanced in a rational, reasonable way that emphasized cooperation while deemphasizing areas of conflict. His achievements in this area exemplify his nonideological political approach.
Nixon’s social liberalism also extended to the other key group then making demands for inclusion, economic opportunity, and political influence—women. Moynihan played a role here, too, in urging Nixon to get out in front of the issue. “Male dominance is so deeply a part of American life that males don’t even notice it,” Moynihan wrote to the president. “I would suggest you could take advantage of this. In your appointments (as you have begun to do), but perhaps especially in your pronouncements. This is a subject ripe for creative political leadership and initiative.”31
In today’s politics, women’s rights have often been seen as synonymous with abortion—an issue on which Nixon vacillated. He believed that the issue should be resolved by the states, though he called New York’s Cardinal Cooke in 1971 to express support for repealing the state’s liberal abortion law. After the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, Nixon worried that the decision might encourage promiscuity. (Infamously, he was caught on tape saying that abortions were justified in cases of rape or “when you have a black and a white.”)32 Vocal feminists, like Betty Friedan, certainly did not see Nixon as an ally—yet they overlooked the rest of his record.
Nixon also extended affirmative action to women at educational institutions. Perhaps his foundational achievement here was in signing Title IX, prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, in 1972. “It’s hard to exaggerate the far-reaching effect of Title IX on American society,” wrote longtime sports columnist Allen Barra in 2012. “The number of female athletes at the high school level has increased more than tenfold and at the college level, more than twelvefold. . . . The year before Title IX was enacted, there were about 310,000 girls and women in America playing high school and college sports; today, there are more than 3,373,000.”33
Barra concedes that Title IX wasn’t Nixon’s brainchild; it was pushed primarily by Democratic representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii. “It’s almost certain that Nixon signed it into law without considering the potential impact on women’s athletics,”34 Barra wrote, and that’s probably true. But it was part of Nixon’s broader civil rights efforts on behalf of women—including his support for the Equal Rights Amendment (though Nixon did not push seriously to get the ERA passed).35
From 1971 to 1973, Nixon’s administration tripled the number of women working in high-level positions.36 “There is no denying,” wrote Joan Hoff, “as with desegregation of southern schools and public institutions, that Nixon’s advances in civil and political rights for women and minorities far outweighed those of his predecessors, belying the ‘divisive public rhetoric’ his administration employed in the process.”37
Pioneering “Strict Constructionism”
Another reason that Nixon’s civil rights achievements aren’t better recognized is because, in his efforts to appoint “strict constructionist” Supreme Court justices—meaning that they would interpret the Constitution narrowly—civil rights issues were often the backdrop. That was certainly the case with his first two appointments, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, neither of whom made it to the court. Both judges were Southerners, and their nominations have been widely seen as a perpetuation of Nixon’s Southern strategy. Haynsworth would have been the first Southerner named to the court since the civil rights movement, but civil rights and labor leaders helped sink his nomination. Carswell’s nomination imploded on questions of his competence, but also on civil rights grounds: he had given a prosegregation speech in 1948.
The failed nominations were seen as politically damaging, but Nixon was able to rally political support with an angry denunciation of what he saw as bias against Southern judicial candidates. “I have reluctantly concluded,” Nixon told reporters, “that it is not possible to get confirmation for a judge on the Supreme Court of any man who believes in the strict construction of the Constitution, as I do, if he happens to come from the South.”38 He said that the only choice left for him was to nominate judicial conservatives from outside the South, since
