Chapter 1
October 1973: Nixon’s Revenge
Among the White House visitors the first lady greeted that day was a group of eighty pages led—I’m sure she was leading, even then—by twelve-year-old Virginia Lamp of Omaha, Nebraska. The pages were costumed in—try to picture this—red, white, and blue top hats, and over their white dresses they wore blue sashes emblazoned with the theme of that week’s conference: “Forward Together.”
Forward together. I get a chill down my spine imagining the future Ginni Thomas, future wife of extreme-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, flown to Washington from Omaha the day before on a special charter flight, thrilling to the power of those words. Even then, one can have no doubt, she was vowing to spend her lifetime acting on them—within five years she would be back in Washington as a summer intern, inspiring this prediction in a newspaper: “Don’t be surprised if you see Virginia Lamp’s name on a ballot someday.” At Westside High School in Omaha, young Ginni was pictured as a senior in 1975 working the phones for the Republican Party, and urging other girls to organize for the GOP, this in a post-Watergate era following Nixon’s humiliation and resignation when all Republicans carried the whiff of shame. Another yearbook photo captured the future Washington power player as a cheerleader holding a shield and doing the splits with the caption, “Warrior woman: Ginni Lamp.” To a normal citizen in a democracy, the words “Forward Together” are an anodyne call to engagement. To an individual predisposed to fanaticism, both capable and willing to bend rules to her will, they are program code calling for a lifelong commitment to imposing her hard-right ideology on the rest of us.
In my lifetime I’ve watched Nixon go from admired statesman, grinning broadly, if a little too broadly, as he swung his arms wide in 1971 to shake the hand of the leader of Communist China, Zhou Enlai, launching the adage “Only Nixon could go to China”; to a horrifically disgraced outcast, balefully shuffling toward Marine One in August 1974 when he resigned the presidency, rather than attempt to defend himself against the dirty tricks of Watergate and its cover-up; to years as a symbol of lust for power gone wrong, of the age-old truth that absolute power corrupts absolutely, an international outcast whose Christmas bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War was increasingly seen as a war crime; to a slow, partial rehabilitation, through penning thoughtful volume after thoughtful volume in his San Clemente mansion in Southern California with its view of the Pacific Ocean; to, most astonishingly, over the past decade or two, something like total erasure, or excision, from U.S. collective memory. Trump henchman Roger Stone, who had a massive and decisive role in plotting the January 6, 2021, attempted short-circuiting of democracy, proudly wears a tattoo of Nixon, a fact too often dismissed as a kind of sick joke, but in fact the joke is on all of us: The legacy of Nixon’s willingness to inject a sickness and depravity into the heart of American politics haunts us to this day in ways large and small. The particulars need to be revisited, and need to be retold, as a warning, again and again.
To put the influence of Nixon in context, it’s worth focusing on the seminal impact of his so-called Law and Order campaign of 1968, in which the man who lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960, trying to play by the rules, resorted to early dog-whistle politics. Nixon was not subtle in appealing to racists and reactionaries, seeking to make the most of the chaos of the times, including the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the June 1968 murder of my hero Bobby Kennedy in California, and the August 1968 eruption of crude violence outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, with its memorable footage of police clubbing protesters.
To contemporary readers, the former Rolling Stone journalist Hunter S. Thompson is mostly known as a rowdy, self-parodying partier played by Johnny Depp in the film version of his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In the 1960s, Thompson made his name as an acute observer of Nixon. “It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise,” Thompson wrote during the Nixon presidency. “Our Barbie-doll President, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children, is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close.”
Nixon’s 1968 election as president represented a broader mobilization of reactionary elements who viewed the progress of the Civil Rights Movement and the social experimentation of the 1960s with the open horror of those who fear that which they do not understand. Nixon was famously square. He was uptight and uncool. And he was fake: His stiff, ingratiating manner bespoke a façade pasted on to convince those willing to be too easily convinced, all in the service of darker motives. Nixon was an avatar of going overboard on pushing back against the perceived freedom of the 1960s counterculture, and not for any good reason, except fear, self-hatred, and unchecked power lust. He helped open the gates to a broader mobilization of reactionary elements, who saw in the 1960s social movements a potential threat to their own privilege and monopoly on power, which required holding others down.
When Eugene B. Sydnor Jr. of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce approached his neighbor and friend in Richmond, Virginia, corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr., with an ambitious request in 1971, during Nixon’s first term, it hardly seemed the conditions were ripe for a momentous document that would reshape the American right and with it American politics as a whole. The Chamber of Commerce is not generally thought of as a revolutionary organization, and Powell’s career to that point seemed devoted to being a stalwart of the American Bar Association, a civic activist in his local community, and to making a healthy living in corporate law focused on mergers and acquisitions and defending Big Tobacco.
If Americans remember Powell at all, it is likely as a courtly, bespectacled old-school conservative justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, to which he would soon be appointed by Nixon. But first there was an urgent task at hand. The assignment was for Powell to take the substance of conversations Powell and Sydnor had been having and write it all up into a memo, marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” outlining an aggressive, some might say radical, plan to mobilize vast resources on behalf of American business interests in response to perceived and actual attacks from the political left. Sydnor likely got more than he bargained for.
Powell’s anticommunist, anti–New Deal salvo was blunt about being a sweeping response to the protest movements of the 1960s surrounding women’s rights, consumer rights, and the Vietnam War. Powell had been chosen to tour the Soviet Union in 1958 and write up a twenty-four-page report for the American Bar Association on Soviet legal and educational institutions. He seemed to be writing with honest emotion in pushing the paranoid fear of the “destruction” of American free enterprise in the face of growing anticorporate sentiment. “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell’s thirty-three-page memo began. “We are not dealing with episodic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.”
Powell’s memo identified the ultimate threat to the U.S. way of life not as Soviet Russia, Communist China, or Fidel Castro’s Cuba—but Ralph Nader, who, Powell explained had the gall to speak out against corporate executives for, as explained in a Fortune magazine article, “defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer.” Also high on Powell’s list of villains: Charles Reich of Yale, author of The Greening of America, a totem of the 1960s counterculture.
Having identified the enemies, Powell appealed: “The time has come—indeed it is long overdue—for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it…the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.” A good deal of the memo spells out Powell’s concerns with the liberal tilt of college campuses and national media outlets. Powell recommends “balancing of faculties,” “equal time” for conservative speakers, and, more ominously, the monitoring of textbooks and media reports for ideological deviance from the conservative line. “Monitoring,” as in censoring.
Powell was going all in. In reaction to the onslaught, he recommended building long-term infrastructure to advance business interests. “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through united action and national organizations,” he wrote. Powell prescribed nothing less than a massive propaganda effort in defense of the interests of the business community and right-wing political forces. The liberal establishment would be challenged, met, and ultimately defeated by a new conservative counter-establishment. On the one hand, Powell argued, the right needed to build and fund its own alternative think tanks, advocacy organizations, media outlets, watchdogs, and academic beachheads to get out the word, while on the other hand infiltrating mainstream elite institutions—academia, media, mainline business organizations—with right-wing propaganda. Confrontation was the watchword.
Powell’s sentiments about the judiciary merit special attention. In particular, Powell argued that business’s battles should be fought in the courts. In what would become an influential passage under the headline “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts,” Powell sounded the alarm that it was time to dramatically step up “exploiting judicial action” for years to come. “Under our constitutional system, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change,” he wrote. “Other organizations and groups, recognizing this, have been far more astute in exploiting judicial action than American business…. Labor unions, civil rights groups and now the public interest law firms are extremely active in the judicial arena. Their success, often at business’s expense, has not been inconsequential.”
Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, as astute an observer of the courts as there is in American politics, sees Powell’s hidden hand in the court-packing scheme of the organized right. As the senator explained in a May 2021 Senate floor speech, “The battle lines were drawn. Indeed, the language in the Powell report is the language of battle: ‘attack,’ ‘frontal assault,’ ‘rifle shots,’ ‘warfare.’ The recommendations are to end compromise and appeasement…. The secret report…may have launched the scheme to capture the Court.”
The Powell Memo, very much a product of the Nixon years, quietly ushered in a distinctly different era of organizing on behalf of the American right. The memo resonated with its intended audience. Scholars have documented that in the wake of the memo, right-wing funders and business interests stepped up to Powell’s challenge and tens of millions of dollars quietly began to flow into such efforts to build infrastructure, independent of the unreliable Republican Party, in a wholesale reorientation of conservative philanthropy. The memo’s essentially radical nature, couched in the blandness of its Chamber of Commerce context, would unleash a fervent strain of extremism that, coupled with the allocation of resources to build mostly anonymously funded institutions that could develop ideas and talking points, such as the Heritage Foundation think tank and the Federalist Society, would power the effort to transform the court and with it the character of American life.
It’s taken years of prodigious research to identify these core donors. Early funders of the right-wing network—motivated by an antitax, antigovernment ideology—included the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an electronic parts fortune out of Milwaukee; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, created by the parents of Pittsburgh banker Richard Mellon Scaife; the Searle Freedom Trust, money from the sale of G. D. Searle, the pharmaceutical giant; and the Charles Koch Foundation, established from the personal fortune of Charles Koch of Koch Industries, a multinational conglomerate. For these and other donors on the right, this was less about philanthropy in the traditional sense and more akin to a business proposition. Their self-interested investments—including in the capture of the courts—helped their bottom line.
Two months after the memo was complete, Nixon appointed Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court. Nixon had campaigned on appointing pro-business, law-and-order judges who would strictly interpret the law, and he sought out a white Southerner as part of his Southern Strategy to polarize racial issues and attract white votes. Powell didn’t disappoint, becoming a reliable conservative vote on the court led by Chief Justice Warren Burger. Powell ruled in favor of the death penalty, struck down affirmative action programs, and upheld sodomy laws. One deviation from the conservative line came on abortion, as Powell joined the 7–2 majority decision in Roe, apparently stemming from an incident during his tenure at his Richmond firm, when the girlfriend of one of Powell’s office staff bled to death from an illegal self-induced abortion.
Powell had previously declined a Nixon invitation to join the high court two years earlier, not wanting to take a pay cut from his lucrative law practice and thinking his background in corporate law ill-prepared him to adjudicate the complex cases that would come before the court. But in 1971 he agreed, now believing that taking the post was his public civic duty. What had changed? Perhaps a newfound sense of purpose and clarity of mission he felt having articulated his strong feelings in the Chamber memo. We don’t know if Nixon’s vetters saw Powell’s memo. The Senate did not. According to a column running in The Washington Post shortly after Powell’s confirmation, Jack Anderson, remarking on the memo’s “militant” tone, reported, “Senators, therefore, never got a chance to ask Powell whether he might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice and to influence the court on behalf of business interests.”
In fact, once on the court, Powell did just that, playing an important role in paving the way for business interests to fund political activities. In a series of decisions on money in politics in the 1970s and 1980s, Powell wrote or joined majority opinions that chipped away at the government’s ability to restrict political spending, allowing unlimited amounts of unregulated and often untraceable corporate money to pour into the political system. In effect, Powell wrote the plan of attack and then paved the way for its implementation.
As Sheldon Whitehouse connected the dots in a Senate floor speech decades later:
In his years on the Court, Lewis Powell made good on the secret recommendations that he had made to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce five months before joining the Court. He showed that “an activist-minded Supreme Court”—his words—could be that “important instrument for social, economic and political change”—his words—that he had proposed. He opened a lane for unlimited money into politics, enabling what his secret report had called “the scale of financing available only through joint effort.” He bulldozed aside bars on corporate spending in politics so corporations could deploy, just as his report had urged, “whatever degree of pressure—publicly and privately—may be necessary.” And he allowed advocacy organizations to spend their treasuries in politics, opening the way for the “organization,” “joint effort,” and “united action” he had called for in his report through “national organizations.”
The plan of action was apparent. All that was needed was the personnel, the foot soldiers, to push this reactionary movement forward. The Nixon White House, channeling the fervid power of the scheming and devious imagination of the Top Man himself, proved to be a breeding ground for new strains of political perversion, all dressed up as respectable, whose influence and pathology would play out over decades.
Flash back to Saturday afternoon, October 20, 1973, when the famous special prosecutor of the day, Archibald Cox, appointed by Attorney General Elliot Richardson to investigate the June 1972 Watergate break-in, stepped in front of TV cameras at the National Press Club in Washington. Cox was there to explain why he was holding his ground in a standoff with President Nixon. The president was resisting a Cox subpoena to surrender nine taped conversations Nixon had made at the White House. Cox announced he would call for a court order to enforce the subpoena.
“I don’t feel defiant,” Cox said. “In fact, I told my wife this morning I hate a fight. Some things I feel very deeply about are at stake…. I am certainly not out to get the President of the United States.”
At the White House, Cox’s remarks were seen as “insubordination.” White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who would memorably reappear on the national stage when Ronald Reagan was shot, called Richardson and told him to fire Cox.
“Well, I can’t do that,” Richardson said. “I guess I’d better come over and resign.”
That put Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus in charge. He, too, was asked to fire Cox, and resisted on principle. “Your Commander-in-Chief has given you an order!” Haig scolded him. Ruckelshaus was writing out his resignation letter when the White House beat him to the punch and dismissed him.
The two departures meant the next man in line was the solicitor general of the United States, forty-six-year-old Robert Bork, a flamboyantly ideological former Yale Law School professor (whose first appearance in The New York Times came in a May 1970 article headlined “Free Enterprise Radicals Score Federal Control”). The White House sent a limousine to fetch Bork and bring him over to be sworn in as acting attorney general, a position he would hold for more than two months.
Bork, highly ambitious but in no way stupid, had an inkling of how bad it would look to be the one to fire Cox after two others had refused. “I was thinking of resigning,” Bork insisted in an interview later in 1972, but added, “not out of moral considerations. I did not want to be perceived as a man who did the President’s bidding to save my job.” Bork, however, did the president’s bidding, allowing Nixon to place himself above the law, and fired Cox. “I had some time to think about it since,” Bork insisted in 1972. “I think I did the right thing.”
Nixon praised Bork as one of the “best” men at the Justice Department and, according to Bork’s memoir, offered to appoint him to the Supreme Court as a reward for his loyalty. Nixon, of course, didn’t last long enough in office to make good on the promise. Bork soldiered on, working in the Nixon Justice Department with two brilliant lawyers who, along with Bork, would go on to be the key movers behind the Federalist Society, the group that would be founded in 1982 by law students, and whose organizing of right-wing lawyers on college campuses, and later nationally, would move the nation’s courts decisively to the right. Bork’s compatriots were Harvard Law School graduates Laurence Silberman, who was appointed assistant attorney general by Nixon in 1974, and Antonin Scalia, recruited into the administration by Silberman, who served in the influential Office of Legal Counsel at Justice. Within a decade, all three would be elevated to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan.
When Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, the group stayed on, working closely with a former legislative aide to Kentucky senator Marlow Cook: Mitch McConnell. As McConnell tells the story, he watched and learned. “I would have found my job wholly unsatisfying if it weren’t for the chance to encounter, above the stacks of paper, some of the nation’s best conservative minds—Robert Bork, Laurence Silberman, Antonin Scalia—legal luminaries who were all serving in the department at the time,” McConnell gushed in his memoir, The Long Game. “We’d hold nearly daily staff meetings, where I’d get a chance to hear them speak. As a younger guy who felt as if I knew nothing about the law, I never opened my mouth. At the time, knowing squat about most legal matters, feeling as if I’d escaped the purgatory of practicing law, I was lucky to be in their presence.”
McConnell would emerge four decades later as the most consequential Republican Senate leader in generations. As the legislative partner to the Federalist Society, McConnell would use his position as majority leader to cover up controversies and bend Senate rules like a pretzel to jam through the confirmations of one-third of the current Supreme Court. This, McConnell believed, would be his legacy. Court control would get the organized right the “kind of America we want,” McConnell said.
It’s fascinating to consider what lessons these appointees—especially the wounded Bork, perhaps less so the impressionable Ford guy, McConnell—were teaching each other about power, how to wield it, how to maintain it. In their later broadsides against the hated liberal establishment that hounded Nixon from office—the Democratic pols, the news media, the legal establishment, academia, Hollywood—one can see a seemingly bottomless desire to avenge Watergate, and make people forget the shame, by any means possible. Indeed, both Silberman and Bork would play important roles in the 1990s in the right-wing campaign to hound Bill Clinton from office on trumped-up charges. As they somehow convinced themselves, this was tit for tat and poetic justice.
The election of Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, with his earnest promise that he would never lie to the American people, derailed the plans of Nixon’s men to advance their careers in the judicial sphere. They all wanted to be federal judges, politicos donning black robes. Bork and Scalia went back to teaching at Yale and the University of Chicago, respectively, where they would bide their time, awaiting a Republican restoration. Silberman decamped for a high position at Crocker National Bank in California, where he began to insinuate himself into the Reagan entourage. And McConnell, for his part, returned to Kentucky to run successfully for local office, beginning his steep climb up the greasy pole of electoral politics.
The Nixon White House looms in history as the crucial breeding ground where a paranoid, self-justifying, and ruthless style of right-wing politics was spawned. To the country at large, the scandal of Watergate was a national embarrassment that led a sitting president to slink out of the White House to a waiting helicopter and resign in shame. “Tricky Dick” Nixon became an archetype of the sleazy, depraved politician, a man whose actual gifts as a geostrategic thinker and statesman were undermined by his sick self-pity. For the nation, shaken deeply by the scandal of Watergate, Nixon’s dark side loomed as a kind of wake-up call, a warning to steer away from power-mad schemers; but to his right-wing loyalists, the takeaway from Nixon’s demise was the opposite. He was felled not by sleaze, not by ruthless amoral scheming, but by a lack of will to go all in on hardball politics.