It all began in Des Moines…on November 13 of ’69….There, Ted Agnew was born again.
—BRYCE HARLOW, 1982
The Washington Post hates Richard Nixon, and Nixon hates the Washington Post, and they are locked like two scorpions in a bottle….
—THEODORE H. WHITE, 1973
My memo to the President on November 5 was among the most consequential I ever wrote. It began by playing to Nixon’s justified rage over how the networks had dismissed his Silent Majority speech, which he believed was the best and most crucial of his presidency. My memo began:
The contrast between the network reception of the President’s address and the public’s reception offers us a golden opportunity to move in earnest now against the commentators. That opportunity is now enhanced by the report of distorted coverage of the Democratic convention in Jack Anderson’s column today. We ought to follow up now.
An effective battle plan it seems to me would be this:
First, a major address by the Vice President (which I will be happy to draft) that calls for a national debate on the influence of a tiny handful of men elected by no one….We could use the Democratic Convention distortions, the horrible quotation by [ABC anchor] Frank Reynolds during the last days of the campaign against RN, and the [ABC National News Editor] Bill Lawrence commentary after the President’s speech….
I told the President I had supportive quotes from the dean of liberal columnists, Walter Lippmann, an adviser to presidents since Wilson, backing up our case about network power. After listing a series of collateral attacks to be undertaken after the Agnew first strike, my memo concluded:
…if we can put together a three-week offensive on this one subject—the result will be to terrify the networks; and to discredit their reporting in the minds of millions of people. But it ought to be concerted, coordinated, and it ought to be done in the public arena. While the commentators talk to tens of millions, we normally make one-on-one phone calls of complaint.
I had sent the memo to the President through Haldeman. The original came back with Haldeman’s handwriting, in bold red from a Flair pen, declaring my memo “Confidential.” In the upper right-hand corner was the launch order: “Pat, let’s go! P is all for it. H.”
“P” was the President of the United States. I sat down to write the speech, which would go through four drafts, and to contact my friend the Vice President. Agnew had already been alerted by Haldeman and was delighted to receive the assignment and comply with Nixon’s desire to deliver the payback to our tormentors. He had long been an object of press derision himself. On October 19 in New Orleans, he had brought a Republican gathering to its feet by declaring, “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Agnew’s phrase, “effete corps of impudent snobs,” I told Nixon in my media memo of October 27, “had roughly the effect of dynamiting an outhouse next to a Sunday school picnic.”
Fortunately, no one else in the White House was aware of what was afoot, for many would have been appalled at the idea of an attack on the networks by a vice president they thought should never have been selected and should be put on a short leash. They would have gone to Nixon to kill the speech.
When I sent the triple-spaced, twenty-page final draft to the West Wing, I was called to the Oval Office. There sat Nixon, in coat and tie, fountain pen in hand, reading glasses on, going over the speech line by line, like a rim man on a copy desk, silently adding a phrase here, cutting a word there. As he quietly read I heard Nixon mutter, “This’ll tear the scab off those bastards!”
I burst out laughing. Nixon did as well. He took off his glasses, and we talked of the impact of what was coming down at the Midwest Regional Republican conclave in Des Moines. Here are Haldeman’s notes, reported on four decades later by Jules Witcover: Nixon “[w]orked over some changes with Buchanan and couldn’t contain his mirth as he thought about it. Will be a bombshell and the repercussions will be enormous, but it says what people think.”
In one passage I had written of the concentration of power “in the hands of a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Reading this, Nixon took his pen and scribbled in three words after “no one”—the blunt phrase “licensed by government.” This was jolting. The words seemed to carry a threat that we might cancel TV licenses. But because the President had written it, I did not cut it out, but embellished it, depicting “a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.” I would have preferred the implied threat not be there, but I was more concerned about preserving what I saw as the cadence and poetry of the speech.
On November 12, the day before the speech, I sent the final draft to Haldeman, who said the President might want a last “look.” My cover memo added, “It has been toned down a bit—but perhaps matured and improved a bit. It lost a bit of the raw anger—but I think everyone should still be in the shelters by 6 p.m. Thursday.”
The day of the speech, I sent Agnew’s chief of staff, Stan Blair, a memo containing “two paragraphs that were recommended, rather, the thoughts that were recommended; the words are PJB’s.” These “thoughts” came straight from the President. There were few in the White House who knew the Agnew speech was coming, and none whose thoughts I would have transmitted to the Vice President at that late hour save those of the President himself.
One Nixon thought was that there should be a “wall of separation” between network news and commentary. The second was that Agnew should mention that Congress, where 300 House members and 59 senators had endorsed the Vietnam policy Nixon enunciated on November 3, had received the speech “with a warmer reception than the networks.”
A Nervous Afternoon
At the end of the speech I had included this thought: “Whether what I say to you tonight will be heard at all by the nation is not my decision; it is not your decision: it is their decision.” Reading that taunt in the text, which we had sent over to all three networks in the early afternoon, ABC, whose anchor Frank Reynolds had been singled out in the speech, though not by name, announced it would carry the Agnew Des Moines speech live.
I was stunned. This was going to be huge. To relieve the tension, I told my secretary, Sally Brinkerhoff, I was going up to the University Club. While doing my lengths in the pool, I got a call that NBC and CBS were also going live.
The Vice President would be given an audience of 50 million for a sustained polemic indicting the networks for biased and irresponsible stewardship of their power over American public opinion. No White House had ever launched an attack of this magnitude on the press. The potential for a backlash was enormous. The networks were not going live with Agnew’s speech because they thought the nation would rally to the indictment the Vice President was delivering against them. They surely felt Agnew would come across as a malevolent censor of the free press. But, as with Nixon’s Silent Majority speech, the network executives, anchors, and commentators had misread America.
Des Moines
Agnew’s address began with a recitation of the network attacks on the President’s speech of November 3 as soon as it ended:
Every American has a right to disagree with the President of the United States and to express publicly that disagreement. But the President of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of this country have the right to make up their own minds and form their own opinions about a Presidential address without having a President’s words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested.
When Winston Churchill rallied public opinion to stay the course against Hitler’s Germany, he didn’t have to contend with a gaggle of commentators raising doubts about whether he was reading public opinion right, or whether Britain had the stamina to see the war through.
Agnew then went to the heart of his indictment: A tiny group of men, elected by no one, living in New York and Washington, had achieved monopoly control of the most powerful means of communication known to man. They were exploiting this power to shape national opinion to advance their own ideological agenda and to stir up opposition to a war policy the commander in chief was seeking to persuade his countrymen to support. These men did not represent a majority as was clear from the support the nation had given the President’s November 3rd address, which they had disparaged. These men were an unrepresentative elite, outside the American mainstream. And their monopoly of control over the presentation of news, information, and ideas was a grave matter that should be of intense concern to the American people.
The speech was a national sensation. Scores of thousands of telegrams, phone calls, and letters poured into the White House, backing the Vice President—and into TV stations and the networks denouncing their biased coverage. Agnew was swiftly put on the cover of Newsweek and Time. Time’s cover, headlined “Counterattack on Dissent,” also featured network anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and Frank Reynolds. Theodore H. White called Agnew’s speech “one of the most masterful forensic efforts in recent public discourse.”
Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, claimed Agnew’s speech was “an unprecedented attempt…to intimidate a news medium which depends for its existence on government license.” Julian Goodman of NBC called it “an appeal to prejudice….It is regrettable that the Vice President of the United States should deny to TV freedom of the press.” CBS commentator Eric Sevareid said he felt as if Agnew had thrown “a pail of garbage at him.” Thomas Hoving, New York mayor John Lindsay’s cultural commissioner, said that the Agnew speech “leads us as a nation into an ugly era of most fearsome suppression and intimidation—the beginning of the end for us as a nation…the most shocking use ever of political power.” The International Press Institute in Zurich declared that Vice President Agnew “represented the most serious threat to freedom of information in the Western world,” apparently more serious than that posed by the Greek colonels who had recently conducted a coup d’état in the birthplace of democracy.
At around 3 a.m. the day after the Des Moines speech, still exhilarated, I drove out to Andrews Air Force Base to travel as a guest of the Vice President on Air Force Two to Cape Canaveral for the launch of Apollo 12. I had taken my seat, when a Catholic priest came aboard and sat down across from me. Our recognition was mutual and instantaneous. This was Father Joseph R. Sellinger, S.J., president of Loyola in Baltimore, who was building that small Catholic college into the university upon whose grounds his statue stands today. But to me he was “Joe” Sellinger, dean of students, who a decade before had expelled me from Georgetown after a brawl with two police officers from “Number 7,” as we called the local precinct. Father Sellinger slipped into the seat beside me and confided that the FBI, during the full-field investigation of me for my White House position, had come to see him about the episode, and he had done his best to minimize its seriousness.
When Agnew came aboard, he walked back to my seat, reached out his hand, and, with a huge grin, boomed, “Gangbusters!” He was rhapsodic about the Des Moines speech. When we got down to the Cape, Sim Fentress of Time sidled over and said, “Word is out you wrote the Spiro speech.” I neither confirmed nor denied it. He said Ron Ziegler, when asked if I had had a role, said Pat Buchanan “may have, and I think did have, some thoughts.”
President Nixon, too, was elated with the Des Moines speech. As Haldeman related in his diary, “P was really pleased with VP speech last night (attacking TV network newscasters) and feels [Agnew’s] now become a really good property and we should keep using and building him.” But many White House staffers were appalled. Len Garment vehemently objected to Agnew’s ridicule of Averell Harriman as reminding him of “Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner…under some heavy compulsion to justify his failures to anyone who will listen.” Garment and Price urged Nixon to go on the networks and deny that there was any threat implied.
Between the Nixon and Agnew speeches, the story of My Lai broke, the massacre by US troops of “at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville.’ ” The journalist who broke it was Seymour Hersh. Platoon leader Lieutenant William Calley would alone be convicted of the atrocity.
On November 15, the day after the Apollo 12 launch, in the largest antiwar demonstration in US history, the New Mobilization, 375,000 people descended on the Monument grounds. After speeches on the mall, five thousand radicals peeled off to besiege the Justice Department. “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” they chanted, as they pulled down the Stars and Stripes and raised the Viet Cong flag on Constitution Avenue. We kept them two blocks from the White House with a barricade of buses, lined up, bumper to bumper, around the White House complex. Going downstairs in the EOB that Saturday to buy a pack of cigarettes, I told a friend, “I ran head-on into the 82nd Airborne.” Whether these were the 82nd or not I do not know, but they were booted paratroopers ready to take on the radical protesters should they get inside the White House perimeter.
Attorney General John Mitchell, observing from his fifth-floor office balcony, was visible to the mob below. As his wife, Martha, related, John said, “It looked like the Russian Revolution.” When the crowd began to get out of control, it was doused with tear gas and scattered. Window smashing was reported across downtown Washington. But, as with the Days of Rage in Chicago that October, America was growing disgusted with these anarchic radicals. And as Middle America recoiled from these leftists, more and more it identified with the President and Vice President who defied them.
A White House Staff Backlash
I was now working on a follow-up speech for the Vice President to deliver before the Alabama Chamber of Commerce. The targets were the New York Times and Washington Post. On November 17, I had written Stan Blair, sending along a draft and urging that he not let word out of what we were up to: “Incidentally, no one in the West Wing or my floor—with the exception of two people on my staff—know I worked on this draft. Maybe we can do better with security this time.” But the day before the speech in Montgomery, word spread through the White House senior staff and, as Haldeman’s diary reveals, panic ensued. Wrote Jules Witcover:
The draft of Agnew’s speech was so hot that some cool heads in the White House ran up a caution flag on the day before it was delivered in Montgomery, Alabama, with the New York Times and the Washington Post, two old Nixon nemeses, targeted. Haldeman’s entry for the day warned: “Huge problem late today as Ziegler tells me of the VP’s speech for tomorrow night, a real blast, not just at TV, now he takes on newspapers, a lot of individuals and the kids again. Pretty rough, and really does go too far. Problem is Agnew is determined to give it and won’t listen to Ziegler or Klein. Blair said, ‘Only I could turn it off,’ so I said he should. Now we’ll see what happens.”
Witcover’s rendering of what happened the day of the Alabama speech accords with my own. According to Witcover:
Haldeman’s diary entry on the day of the speech reflected the concern: “Day starts deep in the Agnew problem as we try to decide what positions to take. Finally E [Ehrlichman], Harlow and I agreed the original speech would be harmful, to a substantial degree. So we told P about it (since Blair had made it clear to me that nothing short of P would cause VP to make any change). P agreed, after I skimmed through the objectionable area, then said the only way to handle was through whoever had written it….P looked at the first page and said obviously it was Buchanan.”
When I got to Haldeman’s office, he wanted the speech killed. I told him that would be an act of weakness and cowardice. The press would say the White House had shut down Agnew, who had wanted to follow up Des Moines with a blast at the Times and Post. This would be taken as a White House admission that we thought Agnew had gone too far, that Des Moines had been a blunder, that we had gotten cold feet. We would be retreating, pulling back off the beach. I said that if the Montgomery speech went ahead, it would be seen as a White House statement that we stood by Agnew and Des Moines and were not backing down. And if we went ahead with the Montgomery speech, I said I would talk to the veep and we would shut down the offensive on the media. Haldeman claimed the speech contained personal attacks. It did not. I had simply included the wildest of the quotes from commentators and network executives after the Des Moines speech. The Vice President was going to mock these quotes. To save the speech, I told Haldeman, I would use the quotes, but not identify who had made them, such as Frank Stanton and Julian Goodman. Haldeman agreed. I was relieved and elated.
Early in the afternoon, Ward Just, who had been wounded as a war correspondent in Vietnam and had traveled with us in the primaries of 1968, called. He was now editorial editor of the Post. He asked for a copy of the Agnew speech. I told Ward I would get one over to him in time for the Post to get the story on page one, but not in time for him to write an editorial. The Post ran the full text of the Montgomery speech the next morning, as did many newspapers. Carried live on public television, Agnew zeroed in on the concentration of press power:
I am opposed to censorship of television or the press in any form. I don’t care whether censorship is imposed by government or whether it results from management in the choices and presentation of the news by a little fraternity having similar social and political views. I am against—I repeat, I am against censorship in any form.
But a broader spectrum of national opinion should be represented among the commentators of the network news. Men who can articulate other points of view should be brought forward.
And a high wall of separation should be raised between what is news and what is commentary.
And the American people should be made aware of the trend toward the monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power in fewer and fewer hands.
Agnew then singled out the Washington Post Company:
But a single company in the nation’s capital holds control of the largest newspaper in Washington, D.C., and one of the four major television stations, and an all-news radio station, and one of the three major national news magazines—all grinding out the same editorial line—and this is not a subject you have seen debated on the editorial pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times.
For the purpose of clarity—before my thoughts are obliterated in the smoking typewriters of my friends in Washington and New York—let me emphasize I am not recommending the dismemberment of the Washington Post Company.
Agnew then quoted an editorial in the New York Times attacking him for his criticism of campus demonstrations:
He [that’s me] lambasted the nation’s youth in sweeping and ignorant generalizations, when it’s clear to all perceptive observers that American youth today is far more imbued with idealism, a sense of service, and a deep humanitarianism than any generation in recent history, including particularly Mr. Agnew’s [generation].
The Times editorialist had led with his jaw. The Vice President had commanded a tank company and earned four battle stars and a Bronze Star fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He responded with a tribute to his contemporaries, who would come to be called, in Tom Brokaw’s phrase, the Greatest Generation:
[W]hatever freedom exists today in Western Europe and Japan exists because hundreds of thousands of young men of my generation are lying in graves in North Africa and France and Korea and a score of islands in the Western Pacific.
This might not be considered enough of a “sense of service” or a “deep humanitarianism” for the “perceptive critics” who write editorials for the New York Times, but it’s good enough for me; and I am content to let history be the judge.
Denying he was condemning the new generation, Agnew quoted Edmund Burke, who had said of the Americans that he would not know how to “draw up an indictment against a whole people.” But Agnew blistered radicals “who march under the flags and portraits of dictators, who intimidate and harass university professors, who use gutter obscenities to shout down speakers with whom they disagree, who openly profess their belief in the efficacy of violence in a democratic society.” He cited the commentaries of some of the better and braver minds of that low, dishonest decade like Sidney Hook, George Kennan, and Walter Laqueur. “Those are men more eloquent and erudite than I,” said Agnew. Their “names were not drawn at random from the letterhead of an Agnew-for-Vice President Committee.”
The Agnew speeches in Des Moines and Montgomery are described and quoted here at length, for they are among the best I wrote in those years and had lasting impact. The networks never recovered from the Des Moines attack on their credibility, arrogance, bias, and elitism. After Des Moines, like the politicians and officeholders they covered, they, and their reportage and commentary, were fair game for critical analysis and counterattack. By their reaction the networks and newspapers would show they had been affected. Op-ed pages blossomed in the establishment press. CBS and the other networks began to bring forward conservatives to do commentary. “Instant analysis” after presidential speeches became more balanced. Talk would begin of creating a conservative network. Institutionalized media criticism, with groups like Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media, would arise. One network correspondent came to see me off the record to ask what it was I wanted them to do. I had no doubt he was an emissary. Howard Simons of the Washington Post asked me to suggest op-ed pieces for his newspaper.
Instead of turning the other cheek—LBJ had reputedly said, “You can’t get into an argument with people who buy ink by the barrel”—we had wheeled, counterattacked, and called on the nation to stand with us—and against them. By “them” we meant the networks and dominant liberal press, from the Boston Globe to the Providence Journal to the New York Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer to the Washington Post to the Atlanta Constitution to the Los Angeles Times. For the Nixon administration, there was no going back now. We had broken it off. We had crossed the Rubicon.
For me, these were the best of times. The President had stopped offering olive branches to the antiwar movement and come out fighting on November 3, calling on his countrymen to stand with him for peace with honor.
In Spiro Agnew I had found a fighting ally in the White House, a man with guts and humor, willing to give back as good as he got, who did not flinch from battle. He relished it. While he edited everything I wrote, he would take almost all of what I wrote, then add, subtract, and shape. And Agnew, who had an authoritative presence, could deliver a speech better than anyone in the administration, and he was content to let me do the writing. Even today, rereading Agnew’s speeches half a century on, I can see my lines, phrases, paragraphs, citations. That is more difficult to do in the Nixon speeches. Writing for Nixon, I would tell friends, was like Jacob wrestling with the angel—to exhaustion. Nixon would go through draft after draft until it was hard to find anything of mine left in his rhetoric. But then, he was the President.
With Agnew it was different. I could spend days crafting speeches on subjects on which we agreed, and he would deliver them with only modest changes. And now that he was a household name, the Tribune of Middle America, media coverage was terrific.
In the battle to control America’s agenda, the media were our true adversaries. Senator Mike Mansfield, Democratic majority leader through the Nixon years, and John McCormick, Democratic Speaker of the House, were not formidable opponents. Younger liberal Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Birch Bayh were our real antagonists on the Hill. But more so were their media allies, who were the filter through which we had to go to reach the people. We saw the media as a distorting lens. Our objective was not to censor or silence them. That was impossible. What we could do was raise doubts about their motivation, veracity, and wisdom, as they raised doubts about ours. What we could do was strip them of their pretensions to be selfless defenders of the common man, and identify them as what they were, “a small unelected elite” wielding its power to direct national policy toward its own ideological and political ends. Agnew’s populist and contemptuous phrase about “an effete corps of impudent snobs” was taken, not altogether incorrectly, as inclusive of the national press. Agnew closed his speech in Montgomery on a personal and a defiant note:
It is not an easy thing to wake up each morning to learn that some prominent man or some prominent institution has implied you are a bigot, a racist, or a fool.
I am not asking any immunity from criticism. That is the lot of the man in politics; we would not have it any other way in a democratic society.
But my political and journalistic adversaries sometimes seem to be asking something more—that I circumscribe my rhetorical freedom, while they place no restrictions on theirs.
As President Kennedy once observed in a far more serious matter, this is like offering an apple for an orchard.
We do not accept those terms for continuing the national dialogue. The day when the network commentators and even the gentlemen of the New York Times enjoyed a form of diplomatic immunity from comment and criticism of what they said is over. Yes, gentlemen, that day is past….
When they go beyond fair comment and criticism they will be called upon to defend their statements and their positions just as we must defend ours. And when their criticism becomes excessive or unjust, we shall invite them down from their ivory towers to enjoy the rough-and-tumble of political debate….
Agnew ended his address in the first capital of the Confederacy by quoting the abolitionist editor of the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison: “I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard.”
What did the President think of the Vice President’s speeches and actions? Had it not been for Nixon, there would have been no Des Moines speech and no Montgomery speech. For much of the White House staff wanted Agnew muzzled, and had recoiled at the Montgomery address as soon as they heard of it and read it. Ray Price tried to get it toned down and objected to an Agnew attack on the Washington Post and New York Times in Alabama. As Witcover wrote, some aides, looking back at the choice of a vice presidential nominee in Miami Beach, “felt that Nixon…‘had created a Frankenstein monster.’ ”
But the President did not agree. After another Agnew speech he liked, Haldeman noted in his diary: “P really pleased afterwards with the VP’s attitude and approach. He really relishes taking on a fight, and he does it very well. P is concerned though about letting Buchanan run loose with VP because he’s almost too willing to take up the cudgel.”
After my having spent four years in his service, Nixon knew me well. He knew I was more conservative than anyone else close to him, and that I believed in a politics of confrontation. Too much so, I think Nixon felt, though he had himself been the bayonet of the Republican Party in vice presidential days. Nixon saw me as a loyalist and a man of the right, but did not see himself as a Goldwater or a Reagan. And he did not want me, or his Vice President, to start fights he did not wish to engage in, on issues he did not care about, or for us to be seen as what the Nixon presidency was all about.
“Robespierre of the Great Silent Majority”
In News Media Analysis No. 9, on November 24, I summed up for Nixon what we had achieved: “Those who were laughing three weeks ago are now writing columns about the danger of Agnewism…he has become the acknowledged spokesman of the Middle American, the Robespierre of the Great Silent Majority….”
“Right!” Nixon scribbled on my memo. On December 15, however, I urged Nixon to husband the great resource Agnew had become: “When you have a champion prize fighter you never let him engage in…barroom brawls. Our Terrible Swift Sword ought to be used somewhat sparingly….”
That fall, Nixon hit 68 percent approval in Gallup, a level he would reach again only once, when our POWs came home. At year’s end, in a Gallup survey, Nixon was the Most Admired Man in America. Billy Graham was second. Vice President Spiro Agnew, an object of mockery only months before, was now the third Most Admired Man in America. Teddy White notwithstanding, November 1969 was “the Making of the President.”
Nixon had begun his presidency in a spirit of compromise with his magnanimous inaugural. He had extended Johnson’s bombing halt for a year. He had announced a major withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. He had sought to negotiate an honorable peace that would leave it up to the South Vietnamese to determine their future. But he had been met with Hanoi’s intransigence and mass demonstrations by the antiwar movement to break his presidency.
He had not defunded the Great Society, but had proposed his own Family Assistance Plan, which would have provided a guaranteed income for the working poor. He had traveled to Europe to shore up relations with the NATO allies, and to Romania on the first trip by a US president behind the Iron Curtain. The astronauts of Apollo 11 and 12 had walked on the moon. Nixon had promised to “bring us together.” It was not his fault that he had failed. Yet, not until Hanoi’s intransigence seemed to offer no hope of a negotiated peace and the mass demonstrations, egged on by the academic, cultural, and media elites to break his war policy and presidency, did Nixon turn around and fight. And not until then did Agnew take on the Nixon haters and Nixon baiters in the national press. We didn’t start the fire.
Unbroken
On November 30, when the smoke cleared, I wrote the President:
Now, with the polls showing presidential popularity rising, with clear political victories in New Jersey and Virginia, and with [Senator] Fulbright and friends calling off hearings [on the war], it is apparent to one and all—that we have clearly won the “fall campaign.”
Our adversaries in the press and on the Hill had believed that Nixon would not fight and that the nation was with them and wanted out of Vietnam now, no matter the consequences. “What set the stage” for our victory, I said to Nixon, “was that brief period—a month or so after the return from San Clemente—when both magazines [Time and Newsweek] were writing about Nixon’s worst week, and Nixon on the defensive, and when the doves in the nation and the Senate seemed to be riding the crest of a wave.”
Our adversaries had misread the nation—and Nixon had read it right.
“Excellent analysis,” Nixon wrote me back. Broder, whose column “Breaking of the President” had inspired me to write the October 8 memo to the President imploring him to go to the country to save his presidency, would write at year’s end:
If one had to identify a crucial moment for the President in his first year, it would be his handling of the October and November anti-war demonstrations. They were, in a fundamental way, an effort by the intellectual elite to obliterate the 1968 election and take from the President his mandate to govern.
With few exceptions, the men and women who can claim to be the country’s important thinkers lent their names, their counsel and their prestige to the mass demonstrations against his policies in Vietnam.
But their effort to “break the President” failed—and its failure has left the protesters more isolated in their opposition than ever before.
The intellectual community has come out of this with deep wounds, and self-doubts that are as serious as they are well motivated.
Saville Davis of the Christian Science Monitor echoed Broder:
The line held by the President is a precarious one. The political wars of the Nixon era have only begun. But one thing is clear: Richard Nixon is not going to spend all his time cultivating a quiet voice behind the iron fences of the White House. If challenged, he will come out and fight….
In the liberal tents there are a good many surprised people who had thought the President was soft and vulnerable and ready for a pushover.
What had happened in the four years since I had joined Nixon at the end of 1965 was epochal. The Political Establishment, the elite that had ruled the nation since 1933, had been broken on the wheel of Vietnam.
In 1964, the conservative movement to which I had belonged since college had dethroned the GOP’s eastern liberal establishment of Tom Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller, which had been dictating our nominees since before I was born. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to take us to war in Vietnam had received a unanimous vote in the House and an 88–2 vote in the Senate. Yet, four years after his triumph, LBJ, the president who had won the popular vote by 25 points, could not travel to an American city or a college campus without fear of hostile demonstrators shouting him down, and the nominee of the nation’s majority party could muster only 43 percent of the vote in 1968. Now, as the sixties passed into history and a new year and new decade began, the most reviled figure of the postwar era save Joe McCarthy had routed the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and exposed its sponsors among the academic, media, and cultural elite as wildly out of touch with the country in whose name they presumed to speak. As 1969 came to a close, with Nixon’s approval rating at 68 percent, only 19 percent disapproved of his handling of the presidency.
We were in the catbird seat. The “Great Silent Majority” speech of November 3 and the Agnew speeches of November 13 and 20, in the teeth of the most massive antiwar demonstrations in American history, had put us there. But while the establishment had lost the mandate of heaven and could no longer speak credibly for America, as an adversary it had to be respected. And its media arm had not lost the ability to wound and kill its enemies, should they stumble and fall. We have “scorched the snake, not killed it,” said Macbeth. In his memoirs, Nixon would write, “I had thrown down a gauntlet to Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and the Washington establishment and challenged them to engage in epic battle.”
November 1969 was the First Manassas of that epic battle. A third of a century later, Robert Novak, in his memoir, acknowledged my role and ceded me significant credit: “Nixon assigned Pat Buchanan to help Agnew’s speechwriting. Overnight, Spiro T. Agnew become hero of the Right, supplanting a Ronald Reagan bogged down in California state government.”
As the year ended, I sent the President an analysis Kevin Phillips had worked up on the victory of William Cahill in New Jersey. It confirmed our thesis. Nixon had won New Jersey in the presidential election of 1968 by 61,000 votes. Cahill had taken the governorship just a year later by 500,000. The ex-FBI agent had made marginal gains over Nixon among Jewish voters and black voters, but among Catholics, Cahill had surged. Half of New Jersey voters were Catholic, and Cahill had gotten 60 percent of them.
I wrote to President Nixon: “Let the press squeal about a ‘Southern Strategy’ all they wish. What they don’t seem to realize is that in addition to adding Southern Protestants by the tens of thousands to the New Majority, we are making it a national one by adding as many Northern Catholics.”
The Counterrevolutionary
An observer of politics once said that your best candidate is a minority who looks, dresses, and carries himself like a WASP. Irish Catholic Jack Kennedy was one. Senator Ed Brooke, an African American, was another. Spiro Agnew, a Greek immigrant’s son whose father had shortened the family name from Anagnostopoulos, was a classic. Handsome and silver-haired, he dressed immaculately and carried himself like a West Point cadet.
In early 1970, I worked with the Vice President on a series of speeches that addressed the revolution in thought that had converted the elites who commanded the heights of the culture—the universities, the media, the arts, the churches. What had taken place was a “revolution within the form.” Outwardly, our institutions appeared the same, but inwardly their orientation was wholly new. Protestant churches had set aside preaching and teaching the Gospel of salvation to embrace a gospel of social revolution. Agnew lacerated the National Council of Churches for having “cast morality and theology aside as not ‘relevant’ and set as its goal on earth the recognition of Red China and the preservation of the Florida Alligator.”
In Des Moines, exactly five months after his November 13, 1969, speech on the networks, Agnew spoke against the lowering of standards in college admissions. He decried the degradation of college degrees in the name of a new egalitarianism, calling them “bargain basement diplomas.”
Agnew spoke of the tragedy of Dunbar High, an elite black school in D.C. that had sent more graduates on to college than any other public school in the city. It had been converted into a neighborhood school. By 1970, Dunbar was ranked last among D.C. high schools in sending its students on to college.
In 1971, Marco DeFunis, a Sephardic Jew in Seattle, was denied admission to Washington University Law School, though his grades and test scores were superior to those of three dozen others—black, Hispanic, Native American, and Filipino—who came in under separate and lower standards. DeFunis fought his rejection up to the Supreme Court and was able to enter and graduate from WULS. Yet, despite Nixon’s political triumphs, academic and conservative protests, and lawsuits brought before the US Supreme Court, the machinery of reverse discrimination ground on for four decades. A new form of racial injustice was replacing the old, and we failed to stop it.
Long before they became an issue nationally, Agnew had rejected racial and ethnic quotas and affirmative action and endorsed the idea of an academic meritocracy, citing Thomas Jefferson’s concept of a “natural aristocracy.” Long before it was declared a “culture war,” Agnew was leading a counterrevolution, a counterreformation, not to destroy the universities, the media, or the churches, but to expose what was happening to them while America slept.
While the Vice President spoke up for the meritocracy, others, like Labor Secretary George Shultz, were imposing goals and timetables for the hiring of black workers in the building trades. Under the “Philadelphia Plan” that Nixon praised in his memoir, black employment on federal contract jobs was to rise from 4 to 26 percent between 1969 and 1973. This meant racial preferences for black workers, while discriminating against white applicants who had discriminated against no one. The white working class was being made to pay for the segregationist sins of elites, which they had not committed.
From Nixon to today, affirmative action, though voted down in nearly every state where it has been put on a ballot, has been applied to the hiring and promotion policies of universities, businesses, unions, and government. As the beneficiaries have expanded to include women, Hispanics, Native Americans, and the handicapped, the only minority left against whom it is legal, and commendable, to discriminate, is that of white males. During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the media awoke to discover that America’s white working class had been in the economic doldrums for decades, and was in social decline, with suicides, alcoholism, spousal abuse, and family breakups soaring. Moreover, that working class wanted to overthrow the establishment. What did the elites expect, after their half century of systematic discrimination against white males, and, by extension, their wives and kids?
On April 28, 1970, in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, speech I drafted, Agnew laid down rules he believed essential to saving America’s colleges and universities, then under siege unlike at any other time in American history:
To most academicians the traditional enemy has always been on the Right. The sixties showed how pitifully unprepared the academic community was for an assault from its ideological rear.
They had best learn how to deal with it, for their survival is at stake. One modest suggestion for my friends in the academic community; the next time a mob of students, waving their non-negotiable demands, starts pitching bricks and rocks at the Student Union—just imagine they are wearing white sheets or brown shirts—and act accordingly.
In July 1970, liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. took to the pages of the New York Times to deliver some second thoughts. “The Amazing Success Story of ‘Spiro Who?’ ” began with an admission: “After 16 months, no one can question the force of Spiro T. Agnew’s personality, nor the impact of his speeches…nor his astonishing success in transmuting himself…into a formidable political figure.” To what did Arthur attribute Agnew’s “astonishing success”? Agnew, said Schlesinger, is appealing to the darkest impulses of the American spirit:
[T]he emotional power of his utterance comes from his success in voicing the hatred of the American lower middle class for the affluent and the articulate, for the blacks and the poor, for hippies and Yippies, for press and television, for permissiveness and homosexuality, for all the anxieties and disruptions generated by the accelerating velocity of history.
Schlesinger could not admit that America agreed with Agnew about the failure of the political, cultural, and intellectual elite to which he belonged, or that the people could be right in the verdict they had reached. To admit that would be for Schlesinger to indict himself, his colleagues, and his class for having failed the nation.
The party of the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson had inherited Dwight Eisenhower’s America, a land of comparative peace and prosperity, and enacted all the programs of the New Frontier and the Great Society. And what had they wrought? After their eight years in control, America’s campuses were exploding, the cities were burning, their party had split into warring tribes, and it had been repudiated for having sent half a million Americans into a war ten thousand miles away they could not win or end. The left could not concede that it had lost America because it had failed America, and that Agnew spoke for the heart of America. And the Vice President did love to lay the wood on.
In “The New Majority,” a speech I drafted that Nixon loved, Agnew said of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, he “hasn’t said anything new or interesting or clever in five years; his intellectual well dried up the day after Walter Lippmann stopped writing his regular column.”
Senator Fulbright some months ago said that if the Vietnam war went on much longer, “the best of our young people” would be in Canada. Let Senator Fulbright and Senator [Fred] Harris go prospecting for their future party leaders in the deserters’ dens of Canada and Sweden; we Republicans shall look elsewhere.
Indeed, as for those deserters, malcontents, radicals,…SDS, PLP, Weatherman I and Weatherman II,…yippies, hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike—I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of Americans I saw in Vietnam.
A memo came to me from the West Wing, reporting that the President was “pleased” with both comments. Yet there remained, as I warned Nixon after Agnew’s November offensive, the danger of overkill, of Agnew being perceived as a common scold. By summer, that point had been reached. In a “Dear Pat” letter I sent on to the Vice President, columnist Jack Kilpatrick wrote:
Between us girls, I suggest the time is at hand for throttling down the Hon. Spiro. I am one of his great fans, as you know, just as I am a great fan of black-eyed peas; but there comes a point at which even the most ardent worshiper of the black-eyed pea has had all the black-eyed peas he can take for a while. Agnew is beginning to suffer from over-exposure. Don’t let him get to be a repetitive bore.
The Real War
Few in that time better understood or described what this conflict was about than Theodore H. White. In The Making of the President 1972, his chapter “Power Struggle: President Versus Press,” begins thus:
What lay at issue between Richard Nixon, on the one hand, and the adversary press and media of America, on the other, was simple: it was power.
The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion, and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about—an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins….
And when the press seizes a great issue to thrust on the agenda of talk, it moves action on its own—the cause of the environment, the cause of civil rights, the liquidation of the war in Vietnam….
Power lies in control of the means of communication, said Arthur Schlesinger. And the great causes White lists—the environment, civil rights, pulling out of Vietnam—were causes primarily of the left. People who can stop wars and sustain revolutions not only have an agenda. They have power.
When the “adversary press” wailed that we had threatened their First Amendment rights, they were applying for martyr status, and deceiving the public. We could not muzzle them. Nor had we a desire to do so. But we could and did use our freedom of speech to strip them of their bogus claims to objectivity and to expose them as every bit as ideological and political as were we. In the 1960s, the press had sailed serenely under a false flag of neutrality, claiming immunity from the kind of attacks that they themselves routinely delivered for their causes and comrades. After Des Moines and Montgomery, their credibility would never be restored. They would come to be seen as having axes to grind like everyone else. Their immunity came to an end, but their power endured. As White writes:
[T]he adversary press…questioned [Nixon’s]…understanding of America; they questioned not only his actions but the quality of his mind, and his honor as a man. It was a question of who was closest in contact with the mood of the American people—the President or his adversary press? Neither would yield anything of respect to the other—and in Richard Nixon’s first term the traditional bitterness on both sides approached paranoia.
By 1972, we would win the struggle with the adversary press for the hearts and minds of the American people.