RICHARD NIXON: The Man Behind The Mask by Gary Allen Liberals Get The Action, Conservatives Get The Rhetoric While in a particularly expansive mood one day, Richard Nixon's Senate floor leader, the very Liberal Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, boasted to a reporter: "We [Liberals] get the action and the Conservatives get the rhetoric."' This yeasty admission of the Nixon Administration's Liberalism in action doubtless would have come as a distinct shock to most of the 32 million citizens who voted for Richard Milhous Nixon for President of the United States in 1968. They expected Conservative actions to follow the laudable Conservative rhetoric of the campaign. The Nixon campaign landed many a strong verbal clout on the snout of squishy-soft Liberalism, whose permissive policies at home and abroad had brought the country to the brink of a nervous breakdown from frustration, if not financial, moral, and military collapse. While stumping the hustings, candidate Nixon promised again and again "new leadership" that would restore law and order, stop aid and trade with our Communist enemies, terminate the ceaseless war in Vietnam, scuttle unworkable socialist spending programs, dash virulent inflation, restore fiscal sanity, stuff the genie of big government back into the bottle, and, in-general, "throw the rascals out." Liberal columnists, widely believed to be Mr. Nixon's implacable enemies, have seemed both surprised and highly pleased at the "New Nixon," who gives the Conservatives the rhetoric and the Liberals the action. One of the tip-offs came even before the election in an amazing column by the late Ralph McGill, formerly a staunch enemy of Richard Nixon. McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution and a nationally syndicated columnist, was a member of the semi-secret Council on Foreign Relations, called "the CFR," otherwise known as "the invisible government" or the "Eastern Liberal Establishment." (The CFR will be dealt with in greater detail in Chapter Three.) McGill, one of America's most vocal anti-anti- Communists, wrote in a column titled "All Civilized Persons Are Indebted To Nixon": An important change has come to Richard Nixon. The nation, and, for that matter, civilized persons everywhere, are in his debt. Nixon has changed his once rigid views about the necessity to maintain relations and a dialogue with the Communist world, including Red China, when that now chaotic country has a government that can be responsive. He did so because the facts have changed. Nixon built his political career on opposition to Communism. He had made himself the darling of the Birch-type mentalities, and of all the various extreme right-wing nut organizations that carry on witch hunts and character assassination in the name of anti-Communism. The New Nixon policy was made public before his nomination at Miami. He said in a press conference that he had "revised" some of his earlier views, largely because the Communist world itself has shifted in new directions. Nixon suggested further that the era of "confrontation" with the Communist world has ended. It has been replaced, he believes, with an era of negotiations. Whoever is President, he said, in the next four and eight years, "must proceed on the assumption that negotiations with the Soviet world, negotiations eventually with the leaders of the next superpower, Communist China, must take place. This is a change that has come about, and therefore, your policy must change." Nixon said, with admirable candor, that his 1960 acceptance speech, with its inflexible position against any talks with the Communist world, "would be irrelevant to the problems of today." "As the facts change," he said, "any intelligent man does change his approaches to the problems. It does not mean that he is an opportunist. It means only that he is a pragmatist."2 The "New Communists" proceeded to embarrass the "New Nixon" by shortly thereafter breaking their non-aggression treaty with Czecho- Slovakia and invading that country to brutally crush an apparent move toward independence. Shortly after the election, Liberal columnists were gloating that Nixon could do more for Liberalism simply because he was a Republican who was widely believed to be a Conservative. Robert J. Donovan of the Los Angeles Times observed in an article titled "Nixon Will Protect the Center From the Left and Right": He knows he cannot make strides at home until he gets rid of the burden of the war. He has promised to end the war. His associates say he is aware that in order to do so he may have to make unpopular concessions that only a new President and only one who, like himself, feels safe against charges of being "soft on communism" would risk making. As one of his closest friends explained recently, "The American people know Dick Nixon wouldn't sell the country out to the Communists." Or as Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R.-N.Y.) was quoted as having said the other day, "I'm confident that Nixon will end the war . . . if Humphrey would do what Nixon is going to do on Vietnam, Humphrey would be shot or impeached. Nixon will end the war."3 Widely syndicated Liberal columnist Sydney Harris was not exactly downcast at the thought of a Nixon Administration: It is probably better for the nation that Nixon was elected than Humphrey, for social realities will force Nixon to do pretty much the same things Humphrey would have done, but Nixon will encounter less bitterness and opposition than Humphrey would have Look magazine's Washington correspondent Richard Wilson wrote in his newspaper column: A rather impressive list has accumulated of things that are not going to be done in the Nixon administration: The Office of Economic Opportunity (poverty program) is not to be abolished. The 10 per cent income surtax is not to be dropped. The Johnson budget is not to be cut substantially. Southern public schools are not to be permitted to squirm out of ending segregation through freedom of choice plans. A significant rise in the rate of unemployment is not to be encouraged as a concomitant of arresting inflation. Consumer-protection activities are not to be abandoned. The "security gap" in national defense is not found to be as wide as it appeared last October. If such policy decisions seem at variance with Nixon's stance in the presidential campaign, it is because so many people had formed a different idea of what the Nixon administration would be like. If there is to be no significant change in budgetary policy, no significant change in tax policy, no significant change in economic policy, then much of what was said during the campaign can be classified as the usual political bombast.s Columnist Wilson noted that "the agony in Nixon's early days is among Republicans who think their legitimate interests aren't being protected, while the ecstasy is among Liberals and Democrats who have discovered that Richard Nixon isn't half as bad as they expected."6 Stewart Alsop, old warhorse of the Fabian Socialist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), told his Newsweek readers in a column titled "The,Demonsterization of Nixon": Something very important has happened during Richard M. Nixon's first month as President: a great many people who supposed or at least suspected that Mr. Nixon was a sort of human monster have discovered that he isn't. All these assorted Nixonophobes now find themselves puzzled and discomfited. For where is the Richard Nixon they so happily hated? They may find him again, of course - honeymoons always end. Yet the sudden, sharp fading of Nixonophobia seems to be more than a function of the usual Presidential honeymoon. It could be a basic and perhaps even a permanent change in public attitudes toward the new President . . . . It is interesting to speculate on the reasons for the change. For one thing, President Nixon, as a suspected monster, gets a lot of credit for not being a monster. He gets credit for not doing all sorts of things that a President Humphrey, for example, would have got no credit at all for not doing - not abandoning the cause of school integration; not instituting a witch-hunting "clean-out" of the State Department; not demanding "clear-cut superiority" in nuclear weapons as a condition of negotiating with the Russians. President Nixon, in short, gets credit for not doing things candidate Nixon hinted he might do. Later, Alsop was to joyously crown Mr. Nixon "The Great Pre- Emptor": The President's basic political technique is now entirely obvious. He appeases the right with reassuring rhetoric, conservative appointments and such gestures as the unleashing of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and the veto of the HEW bill. At the same time, he busily pre-empts, purloins, or filches air the major issues of his natural enemies, the liberal Democrats. There are plenty of examples of the President in action in his role as The Great Pre-Emptor. A national minimum income was just burgeoning forth as a major liberal Democratic issue when the President snatched it away. The draft lottery bore the Kennedy brand before the President captured it, and so did tax reform. The "New Federalism" was the brainchild of Robert F. Kennedy, but it has now been legally adopted by the President. And so on.8 Since Mr. Alsop is a Liberal, he naturally found all this highly praiseworthy as he continued: . . . In short, Mr. Nixon has turned out to be a far better politician than most political journalists (again, including this one) thought him to be a year ago. He may turn out to be a better President, too. To be a good President it is first necessary to be a good politician. Moreover, the issues that Mr. Nixon has preempted from the liberals are good issues - they involve doing things that badly need to be done. Perhaps, to be fair, that is also a reason why The Great Pre- Emptor has pre-empted them. Alsop was also pleased that Conservatives are neutralized through this policy of giving the rhetoric to them while the Left gets the action: "The rhetoric has had a marvelously soothing effect on the Republican right; there has been hardly a peep from Senators Goldwater, Tower, Thurmond and company." After all, what can these men say? They went far out on a limb to support Mr. Nixon in 1968 and they are now in a highly embarrassing position. Few have gushed over the New Nixon as has the nationally syndicated columnist Roscoe Drummond, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Establishment. Drummond began even before President- elect Nixon took office, by declaring RMN to be a "secret liberal": The most significant political fact of the hour is now so evident it can't be seriously disputed: President Richard M. Nixon is a "secret liberal." He may not welcome the description. He resists labels and sees himself as a pragmatist, a problem-solver - neither liberal nor conservative - who wants to do what needs to be done. But Nixon is already proving himself a liberal-in-action if not a liberal-in-theory - and this is what counts. The evidence: Lyndon Johnson initiated and Congress approved the largest volume of social legislation of any president in history. And Nixon prepares to carry forward every major Johnson measure. During the eight Eisenhower years 45 new welfare programs were passed. During the Eve Johnson years some 435 welfare programs were passed and Nixon is not proposing to dismantle them. He is proposing to build on them and his goal is to make sure they achieve their purposes more effectively. Finally, Nixon has committed his administration to a big open- ended increase in Social Security benefits by advocating that they be boosted regularly to match higher living costs. But the fact remains that Nixon is not going to disrupt, decrease or dismantle the vast, help-people, help-the-states programs he inherited from the Great Society any more than Dwight Eisenhower did those he inherited from the New Deal. Ike accepted the reform of the New Deal as part of the fabric of modern society and cites as his proudest. presidential achievement the extension of Social Security to cover more than 12 million more people.9 Six months later, after Mr. Nixon announced his Family Assistance Plan, a thinly disguised Guaranteed Annual Income, which he had opposed during the campaign, the dumbfounded Drummond was predicting that Richard Nixon, of all people, might go down in history as the FDR of the 1970s: Whatever happened to conservative Richard Nixon? Here he is in the lead for the most far-ranging, groundbreaking, daring social-welfare reform since the early years of the New Deal. The President has seized the initiative on the most crucially needed domestic reform and has stolen the best clothes of the Democratic liberals. Strange to contemplate but the time may come when people will think of Richard M. Nixon as the Republican Franklin D. Roosevelt of the 1970s! But none of this alters the fact that conservative Richard Nixon is acting to carry out an immensely liberal concept and liberal program. How liberal? If you define modern liberalism as a willingness to use the federal government to achieve major social ends, the President's new Program is very liberal . . . . 10 Drummond also told his sophisticated Liberal readers in such papers as the notoriously Leftist Washington Post to ignore the fact that Democrats have to denounce Nixon as a Conservative for political purposes: Despite epithets from liberals, the record of the Nixon administration thus far is on the progressive side in both policy and action. It is much more midroad than conservative and perhaps even a little left of center. The labels don't matter. What does is whether the President is acting wisely and effectively. It is doubtful if Nixon's Democratic critics are doing themselves much good politically. It doesn't do the administration any harm to be called conservative by its opponents, particularly when it isn't very conservative. And the conservatives have no place to go except to Nixon. 1 1 Drummond also bulldoggedly noted that Mr. Nixon on Vietnam, contrary to all past promises, has seized the Eugene McCarthy plank out of the 1968 Democratic National Convention: The areas of agreement between the responsible doves and President Nixon are far greater than many realize. This is revealed by two facts. All the leading Democratic doves voted for the minority Vietnam plank at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Today Nixon is carrying out every provision of that plank and - at points - more. The dove-supported Democratic plank advocated "phased withdrawal" of all foreign troops from Vietnam. Richard Nixon has gone further . . . . 12 Mary McGrory, Liberal femme fatale of the Washington Star, noted early in the game (in the February 11, 1969 issue) that loyal Republican Congressmen were in for short shrift: Innocently, [Republicans] assumed that they would have their pick of choice jobs for their friends and instant access to the White House. They are getting fewer plums and fewer calls . . . . The Republican members [of Congress] have not yet addressed themselves to the first policy moves of the President which seem likely to please the Americans for Democratic Action more than Strom Thurmond. Miss McGrory was also all atwitter at the fact that a Republican had done the unthinkable and appointed an officer of the ultra-Leftist Americans for Democratic Action, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as a Presidential advisor. She wrote: "Moynihan . . . knows that his basic idea about the poor, money, work and family is now on its way, respectable Republican doctrine at last." 13 It was the Family Assistance Plan, drafted largely by Moynihan, that evoked the greatest surprise and the loudest cheers from the portside pontificators. The Washington Star's Carl T. Rowan, a former JFK appointee, wrote: Imagine someone telling you 20 years ago that a Republican president would ask the federal government to guarantee a minimum annual income to every family. You would have laughed your informant out of town. Especially if he told you that this Republican would advocate a welfare program that covered 25 million Americans instead of 10 million and cost $10 billion instead of $5 billion. Yet, after months of debate within his administration, President Nixon went on nationwide television to make just such a revolutionary proposal to the American people. la Earlier Rowan had pointed out: "Richard M. Nixon is clearly not what he said he was, not what Democrats feared he was, nor even what Republicans hoped he was during the presidential campaign. 15 Even the New Republic, for fifty years the voice of intellectual socialism, was gleeful to welcome Nixon and his Family Assistance Plan to the ranks of the creeping socialists: . . . President Nixon informed the Neanderthal men that he had accepted and would assert creeping socialism, the principle of the Federal Government guaranteeing a minimum income to all disadvantaged Americans. 16 Even Joseph Kraft, probably the most far-out Leftist among syndicated columnists, has had words of praise for RMN's Liberalism. Kraft, a member of the Establishment's Council on Foreign Relations and a man who recently praised Lenin as having "transmitted to the Communist world the ideals of equality and progress and peace," 1' was particularly impressed by the President's hypocrisy in repudiating campaign promises: . . . the Administration's slow start has made it possible to fob gently off into oblivion some of the least enlightened things said and done during the campaign. Attaining nuclear superiority over the Russians has been replaced by going for "nuclear sufficiency." Crude notions of trading a little more unemployment for a little less inflation are only an echo. So is non-enforcement of the laws against segregation. And "law and order" sounds like a quaint slogan of the same vintage as "54-40 or Fight" and "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too." 18 Rank and file Republicans would be most shocked at the consistent praise heaped upon Mr. Nixon by the New York Times' house savant, James Reston. Reston, also a member of the CFR, is regarded as the official "unofficial spokesman" for the Eastern Liberal Establishment, now that Walter Lippmann has retired after fifty years of laundering the minds of the American public. Reston praised the President for "wiping out the old political stereotypes of Richard Nixon the partisan politician, the darling of the professional anti-communists." 19 Reston later wrote a column congratulating the President, after his first five months in office, on "a good beginning." Among the things that particularly pleased the Liberal sage of the Potomac were Nixon's appointments, which he termed neither "political nor ideological." Reston described these men as "competent modern pragmatists, who may not be very imaginative, but who are more interested in the facts and the national interests, than in the conservative theories or political interests of the Republican party." zo This naturally ignored the fact that most people in voting for Mr. Nixon did so believing that they were voting for Conservative theories to cure the disastrous effects of the Liberal theories that had held sway for nearly forty years. Of course, many Republicans fail to understand why Democratic Administrations have the privilege of being partisan and of building the Democratic Party at every turn, while the Republicans must be constantly non-partisan and always make concessions in the direction of the Liberals. In the same column Reston told his more sophisticated readers that the name of the game is "The Conservatives get the rhetoric, the Liberals get the action": Nixon has, of course, said a lot of things that please the hawks, the Republican conservatives, and the authoritarians who want to be militant in Vietnam and on the campuses and in the cities, but he has acted prudently, and stuck to his priorities on ending the war, controlling the inflation and moving toward an accommodation with Moscow on the control of military arms and the reduction of military budgets. Even his support of the antiballistic missile system, which looked so hawkish, was probably a move toward an arms control accommodation with the Soviet Union . . . . Reston also provided us with an analysis - in this case an accurate one - of why the country constantly moves to the Left, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in office: President Eisenhower acquiesced in all the New Deal reforms the Republicans opposed in the 30s and 40s, and [so did] Nixon as his deputy. He came to office as a minority president, accused of being a war-monger who was indifferent to the internal social and economic problems of the cities and the races, but he is now arguing for peace, and social justice - talking like a conservative but acting like a progressive. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. makes the same point in his study of "The Tides of National Politics." The chief liberal gains of the past, he says, "generally remain on the statute books when the conservatives recover power . . . liberalism grows constantly more liberal, and by the same token, conservatism grows constantly less conservative . . . ." This may not be true of the conservatives like George Wallace who are out of power, but it seems to be true of Nixon. He is zig-zagging to the left. 21 If Liberals like Reston can convince Conservatives that it is somehow ungentlemanly ("you can't turn the clock back") to undo the damage done by previous Leftist administrations, then the Republicans are doomed to meekly promising to administer socialism more efficiently. This, of course, is exactly what is happening and the Liberals love it. Observed Reston: All the President's ambiguous and even contradictory statements of foreign and domestic policy have been analyzed here with the greatest care. One day he is saying the Vietnam war may be one of our "finest hours," and the next he is withdrawing American troops from the battlefield. One day he is submitting to the conservative instincts of the American Medical Association or placating the southern senators on the school integration guidelines, and the next he is supporting welfare state policies he had opposed over the last 20 years. 22 Like other Liberals, Reston was ecstatic over Nixon's guaranteed annual income plan: The main thing about President Nixon's proposals for dealing with poverty in America is that he recognizes the government's responsibility for removing it. He has been denouncing the "welfare state" for 20 years, but he is now saying that poverty in America in the midst of spectacular prosperity is intolerable and must be wiped out . . . . A Republican president has condemned the word "welfare," emphasized "work" and "training" as conditions of public assistance, suggested that the states and the cities be given more federal money to deal with their social and economic problems, but still comes out in the end with a policy of spending more money for relief of more poor people than the welfare state Democrats ever dared to propose in the past. This is beginning to be the story of American politics . . . . . . . And now on the most controversial question of domestic policy, he changes the rhetoric, the philosophy and the administration, but proposes more welfare, more people on public assistance, which will take more federal funds than any other president in the history of the Republic . . . . Nevertheless, Nixon has taken a great step forward. He has cloaked a remarkably progressive welfare policy in conservative language . . . . 23 Reston concluded this column by claiming that Nixon believes that Americans favor the Marxian concept of redistributing the wealth: He has repudiated his own party's record on social policy at home and even his own hawkish attitudes abroad, and this tells us something both about the President and the country. For he has obviously concluded that the American people are for peace abroad and for a more decent distribution of wealth at home, and the chances are that this will prove to be both good policy and good politics. Actually most Americans realize that by "peace abroad," Mr. Reston means further appeasement of the Communists' global power grab, and that the poor can only be helped through gainful employment, which the plan promises, but which nobody seriously thinks it will deliver. The other side of the "welfare state" coin at home is the acceptance of a softer attitude toward Communism abroad, on the basis that it is somehow changing and has mellowed. Reston wrote in the August 6, 1969 Long Beach Press-Telegram: The tide is going out. The President is turning around, waving to the right one day and to the left the next - but the overwhelming impression in the capitol is that he is consciously zig-zagging toward peace in Vietnam and an accommodation with Moscow . . . . Washington is more sensitive than New York or other places to the general direction of Presidents and politics. It is more interested in the over-all tendencies of Presidents than in the day to day White House statements, and it seems to feel that Nixon is now engaged in a delicate retreat from his hawkish and anti-Communist record of the past. By September 30, 1970, Mr. Reston, in what may have been an effort to get Liberals to look at what Nixon does and not what he says, was telling readers of the Press-Telegram that Mr. Nixon was desperately attempting to "liberate himself from his conservative and anti-Communist past": . . . It is true that Nixon rose to power as an anti-Communist, a hawk on Vietnam, and an opponent of the New Deal, but once he assumed the resonsibilities of the presidency, he began moving toward peace in Vietnam, coexistence with the Communist world of Moscow and Peking, and despite all his political reservations, even toward advocacy of the welfare state at home. Nixon's policies toward Social Security, welfare payments, arms control and coexistence with the Communist world are quite different from the policies he supported when he was a congressman, a senator and vice president under Eisenhower. He has been struggling between his political prejudices of the past and his responsibilities as President, and he has moved in the last two years toward an accommodation with his old adversaries both at home and abroad. This has not been easy. He is still torn between his old anti-Communist cold war instincts and his new presidential duties. He has been arguing for arms control, he has been supporting the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, he has been supporting the reconciliation of the West Germans and the Soviets, he has been approving .more trade between the Western and the Communist worlds - most of the time against the prejudices of most of the conservative Republicans who supported his bid for the'presidency in the first place. The likelihood is that Nixon is going to be President for the next six years. He is at a critical point in his career. He has been trying to liberate himself from his conservative and antiCommunist past, and work toward a progressive policy at home and a policy of reconciliation with the Communists abroad . . . . Although there were hints during the 1968 campaign that this was what Mr. Nixon was up to, only the most sophisticated conservatives, who were familiar with Mr. Nixon's background as a sometime member of the Eastern Liberal Establishment's CFR, could interpret the message. Most of the campaign rhetoric dealt with strengthening America in its dealings with the Communists and a casti= gation of the policies of past inadequate leadership, which had led us from one disaster to