IT was to be Richard Nixon’s last rally—and they wanted to make it splendid for him.
He had campaigned across the country the day before—in Chicago, Tulsa and Providence. This afternoon, Saturday, November 4th, 1972, he left the White House at 1:35 under clear blue skies, to prop-stop on his way home to vote in California. An hour’s flight brought him in over the red earth and slash pine of the Piedmont to his first stop—a rally at Greensboro, North Carolina. He alighted to deliver the Presidential embrace to two obscure Republican candidates, for Senate and Governor, and was exhilarated when, returning to his plane, the crowd broke through the barriers—cheering and rushing him, snatching off one of his cufflinks in the crush. At dusk he paused again to speak at Albuquerque, the setting sun shafting shadows over the iron-gray mountains until, as he spoke, there he was alone in the darkness, silhouetted in floodlights. And then it was off again in the night for Ontario, California, twenty-five miles from his boyhood home, Whittier, for the last rally ever of Richard Nixon, candidate.
Everything his advance men could do had been done before he got there. But the rally was more than what they had prepared. Cowbells were clanking, hooters sounding, holiday horns blaring as his black limousine rolled down the roped-off lane from the plane toward the platform. There were perhaps 20,000 in the high stands and on the folding chairs, another 10,000 spilling over onto the field, and now they squeezed against the ropes—pounding on his car, clanging bells, squirting noise in his face. Somewhere in the distance a dozen bass drums were booming to the rhythm of clapping, but their thump-thud-thump was all but lost in the shrieks, the squeals, the roar of the crowd. It was a family crowd, and for the first time in a Republican rally in 1972 I noticed that blacks were present, too. The crowd surged, the car crawled, and he stood and waved while the roar rose higher and the crowd caught the thump of the bass drums and began to chant, “Four More Years, Four More Years, Four More Years.” Little boys in colored football helmets were snatching drifting balloons from the air and cracking them pop-open, with the subdued crack of gunshots. A little Indian boy in a bright orange jacket sitting on his father’s head almost tumbled into the President’s car. The Secret Service ran ahead, pushing and shoving a way through the crowd that strained at the ropes of the lane. The car began to roll faster, and you could look up and see the panorama. Rallies in America are, by now, almost a thing of the past. There has been no tidal flooding of hundreds of thousands of people into the streets since Lyndon Johnson barnstormed New England in the fall of 1964, in the days before Americans learned how much easier it is to watch the candidates on evening television than in the street. But tonight was the old pageant, like a torchlight parade of Chicago Democrats, and was to be remembered as a moment of politics in passage: the arc lights criss-crossed the night sky with shafts of red, white and blue visible for thirty miles, the grandstand flags were repeated like tiny petals in the hands of thousands of youngsters. On the floodlit platform glistened what appeared to be an acre of bands—twenty-four of them, one learned later. The fan-bells of the tubas glistened like medallions in the distant rows—brass, gold, silver, blue and white. And the drum majorettes, a full corps of them in the uniforms of all the local high schools, were high-kicking with the music, pompoms in red and purple and green bouncing, shakos dancing. Then the music faded, and while the roar slowly died down, Richard and Pat Nixon were advancing to three tangerine-colored seats set alone on the forestage where Governor Ronald Reagan waited for them.
Richard Nixon had started here in Ontario, California, twenty-seven years ago—with some unremembered speech against Congressman Jerry Voorhis in the then 12th California Congressional. He had come a long way between that beginning and this return. One hoped now to catch a moment of poetry, or nostalgia, or even the sentimentality that could have been expected from Richard Nixon years ago. This crowd, if crowds have a personality, ached to cheer or cry. “No one loves Richard Nixon” had been one of the dominant clichés of American pohtics for years; but this crowd loved Richard Nixon, as did millions of others.
He came on easily, with no histrionics. He began by saying he had come that day from North Carolina, the home state of writer Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe had written that “you can’t go home again”—but this crowd, he said, proved Wolfe was wrong. It was here, exactly twelve years ago, at one o’clock in the morning before the election in 1960, he recalled, that he had held his last rally of the campaign against Kennedy; California had been good to him that year. And he hoped he had kept the faith.
Then he settled into this, the last of his countless thousands of rally speeches, discarding his text, and this reporter watched the man he had followed for so many years in American politics. The Nixon of other years used to approach the rostrum on his toes, and, once there, his body-sway was an entertainment. His hips used to weave; sometimes one leg would curl up behind him; his hands would flail, weave, jab with an imaginary uppercut at his opponent. In emotional moments his eyes would close. His rhetoric would slash, pound, wander back through his boyhood and memories; he was, at one stage, the easiest public bleeder in American politics except for Hubert Humphrey; and at his peak he could arouse his partisans to frenzy.
Now there was neither frenzy nor sentiment in this Nixon, the President—and listening to him was a perplexity. So much in this man was persistent, consecutive, carrying through twenty-five years of national politics. The phrases floating over the sound system were part of what one had to recognize now, finally, as an unshakable philosophy. The key phrase, for example, tonight was, “I bring you Peace With Honor, not Peace With Surrender.” He had first phrased it twelve years ago, against John F. Kennedy in 1960, as “How to Keep the Peace Without Surrender.” And then his exhortation, the same as far back as one could remember, “Vote for What’s Best for America”; and all the other phrases coming from the sound system: “Keep America Strong,” “Strengthen the Peace Forces against the Crime Forces.” They were old, all heard so often they had slipped from conscious retention.
Only in retrospect did one realize how much the substance of the man had changed. Not simply the newly grave, flat, unemotional tone of his voice, but the thinking. One could imagine him here, at his first rally, a freshman in politics, flogging the Democrats, as all Republicans did that postwar year, over the meat shortage and the meat prices and the meat rationing. One could imagine him, even better, inveighing, as he was to do for so many years, against the peril of Communism—above all, against the peril of Red China. But tonight, what his last rally heard was a statement of the essence of his case for re-election, as if he were a lawyer presenting a brief in court: He had brought peace. When he came to office, he said, 300 Americans a week were being killed in Vietnam; we had been on a collision course to greater war. Had he not acted, he told them, “we would have gone down the road to inevitable confrontation and nuclear confrontation and the end of civilization—I could not let this happen.” And of China, yesterday’s red menace, he was telling them, “Think of what it means fifteen years from now if they have a nuclear capability and there is no communication between us … nations of different philosophy must meet at the conference table.”
The speech was simple, clear, forceful, but un-ringing. He was his own man, the President; he was not beseeching, or courting, or politicking; he was simply explaining.
But now he was coming to the end of his remarks. He gripped the lectern firmly with both hands and leaned forward, the wind ballooning his jacket out behind him. “Here in Ontario,” he said, “in November, 1945,1 held my first rally. Tonight as I speak to you in Ontario, it is the last time I will speak to you as candidate for any office—and this is the best rally. Thank you. Thank you.” The old Nixon would have twanged every sentiment, would have tried to bring tears to the eyes, would have explored the limits of nostalgia. One waited for more. But he was through—like that, his last farewell to the stump.
It was a moment before the crowd realized that this last speech was over. And then, though wanting more, more, they cheered against the rising sound of the clanging, the singing, the beating of the drums. Nixon strolled across the platform shaking hands with old friends, occasionally reaching down to sign an autograph, his gravity gone and a wide, very boyish grin creasing his face. Then, abruptly, he vanished, leaving through a side gate to the helicopter that would lift him to San Clemente. There, that weekend, he would be studying the cables from Vietnam and, all by himself, putting the finishing touches on his personal plan for reorganizing the American government.
Of his re-election he had no doubt, nor did anyone else. He could spend the next few days at ease, carving a new outline for the next Presidency, imagining how he could make American government work if the power came to him in the measure he expected, and how America, by his design, could carve a new peace in the world.
Neither he nor anyone on his staff that weekend could conceive that the affirmative plebiscite on the Nixon record, so obviously swelling, would leave him so vulnerable and so isolated in the term to come. Very shortly, however, Richard Nixon was to become more powerful and more solitary than he had ever been before in his life—but that was not to happen until Tuesday, voting day.
On Tuesday, November 7th, the schedule called for him to board Air Force One at El Toro Marine Base in California, for the flight back to Washington, at 10:20 A.M.
Dawn had come four hours earlier through a low overhanging mist, the sun staining the undersides of the cloud bars pink. By voting time a cluster of fifty people—schoolteachers and schoolchildren, early-rising retirees and housewives—had already gathered at the Concordia Elementary School, a sand-colored stucco schoolhouse less than a mile from the President’s Pacific seaside home in San Clemente. There, at exactly seven, a little boy shrilled, “Ooh—there’s his big limousine now,” and the black limousine was rolling along the oval drive lined by dwarf palms, cypresses and pines. At 7:01, as the President and Mrs. Nixon stepped out, Judge Mary Stamp stood before him, raised her hand in ceremony and said, “Hear ye, hear ye, the polls are now open.”
Voter Number One of Precinct 48/146’s 545 enrolled voters was thereupon handed his pink, newspaper-size ballot and the little blue electronic stamp which makes the balloting results machine-readable, and disappeared into Voting Booth Two. There were no less than twenty-four propositions and bond issues on the ballot in Congressional District 42 in California—two local, twenty-two statewide. Running the gamut from plebiscites on pot, pornography and the death penalty to the preservation of California’s coastal beauties, the ballot reflected concerns which had scarcely been shadows on the mind when Richard Nixon had entered politics twenty-seven years earlier. Now he took his time—five minutes and twenty seconds—in examining and voting on each’proposition. Then he lingered to be photographed, handed out White House pens to the election clerks, autographed a picture thrust at him and, eleven minutes after his arrival, was en route back to his office in the summer White House.
By this time, in the East millions of voters had been balloting for hours; and as he was going through his mail with Rose Mary Woods, his secretary, she was interrupted by a telephone call. It was the first published tally on the wires: Dixville Notch in New Hampshire had voted 16 for the President, 3 for McGovern. Four years earlier Dixville Notch had voted 8 for Humphrey, 4 for Nixon. The President, as Miss Woods recalled, said nothing—only smiled, then went back to the mail. Miss Woods keeps ready a sampling of the more human mail gleaned from the torrent that floods the White House—letters from children, from bereaved parents of soldiers, from well-wishers, in the hand-scrawled style that yields the beat of emotion. When the President is not too busy, he enjoys reading such letters. And this was what he did that morning until his helicopter came to the pad outside his gate to take him to El Toro Marine Base, where Air Force One waited to carry him back to Washington.
/Air Force One was airborne at 10:24, climbed over the tawny Santa Ana Mountains, rose over the huge Irvine ranch, nine times the size of Manhattan, cut quickly through low-hanging fog and in ten minutes was cruising at 33,000 feet over the desert, en route to Washington.
Except for Henry Kissinger, those admitted into the privileged forward compartments were all veterans of a similar flight made exactly four years before on Election Day, from Los Angeles to New York. In 1968 the mood had been both somber and comradely, the mood halfway between apprehension and anticipation, the plane festooned with balloons. The candidate that year had exerted himself to show the characteristic consideration that binds his personal followers to his career—sending for them and their wives, in groups of two and three, to thank and soothe them. Now he sat alone in the forward compartment of Air Force One; and the conversation in the compartments behind was laced with nostalgia and recall.
Air Force One, the President’s plane, invites little conviviality. It had come into service in 1962 for John F. Kennedy, had been altered somewhat by Lyndon Johnson, then again been re-configured to suit Richard Nixon’s personality. Johnson, a public man, had occasionally worked behind a plate-glass window so that anyone admitted forward to the working area could see the President of the United States doing his job. Now the plane reflected Richard Nixon’s compulsive wish for privacy, and was severely hierarchical in configuration; he was invisible. The crew, the half-dozen rotating members of the press pool and Mrs. Nixon’s hairdresser occupied the tail compartment, and none of them could go forward beyond it. Next forward came a staff-and-VIP guest compartment, decorated with two maps, one of America, the other of the world. Forward again came the working area, with its lounge, typewriters, desks and reproduction machines, served by the operational hard core—Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Ziegler. (It was in this area that Lyndon Johnson had stood and taken the oath of office on November 22nd, 1963, the blood-soaked Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him.) Forward of the working area came the President’s territory—a reception lounge for important visitors, usually occupied by Mrs. Nixon, the décor of the lounge all gold and blue, with bowls of fresh-cut flowers and hard candies adding color. Then a Presidential office; and finally the President’s personal lair, no bigger than a Pullman compartment, where he could work alone at a tiny desk, from the one easy chair; or, when he chose, open out the folding bed and take a nap. Forward of that compartment were the Secret Service men, and yet farther forward, in the nose of the plane, a fifteen-foot panel of winking lights, buttons, switches, teletype and coding machines which reached to the signal consoles in Washington and the Pentagon and patched the President, if he chose, into every corner of his country and the globe, or, as Commander-in-Chief, to each of the nine Specified or Unified Commands of the Armed Forces. No one ventured forward from the rear of the plane to staff territory without permission; and no one on the staff, except Haldeman and Ziegler, ventured forth from staff territory to President’s territory without being asked.
The mood was placid, “like coming home from an easy win at a football game,” said someone contrasting it with the tension of the flight of 1968. There was Ziegler, constantly on the phone, relaying incoming press reports. Each Election Day, election officials in every state are asked by the press how the voting is going; and, invariably, every official reports that the voting is heavy and his state will set a record. So, today, too, officials were proclaiming that this election would set a record. All such predictions are true; given the growth of American population, each election turns out a larger total number than the election before. But over the past twelve years the percentage of those Americans eligible to vote who actually choose to vote has been dropping; and thus the record vote of 1972 was to turn out to be, in percentage terms, the lowest since 1948.
Champagne was served with a Mexican-American lunch and someone noted that it was the same which Nixon had taken with him for the Peking trip in February—a Napa Valley California champagne (Schwansberg 1970). Restlessly, Henry Kissinger paced the aisles, entertaining friends with his raconteur’s flair, telling stories of a visit to Lyndon Johnson in Texas. Johnson had apparently mistaken him for a German dignitary (Kiesinger?) and lectured him on the Teutons of the Southwest. LBJ’s home district was a German enclave; and had been the only district to side with the Union in Texas during the Civil War because, said LBJ, “Germans and Negroes have a natural friendship”; and, again, LBJ had told Kissinger how he had caused picnic tables, instead of hot-dog stands, to be installed around the LBJ ranch “because Germans are people who like picnics.” Then Kissinger retired to the seclusion of the operations section to work out chess problems. In the working compartment forward they were playing a game, guessing how the nation’s newspapers would handle tomorrow’s story, inventing headlines. Ziegler brought the guests his favorite—the Washington Post, said Ziegler, would probably banner the elections as “MC GOVERN SWEEPS D.C.,” with a subhead reading “Nixon Carries Nation”
Finch, the oldest veteran on Nixon’s staff, was musing about the Cabinet changes to come, and the need for the President to address himself to the Watergate problem immediately after the election; but he did not see the President on the plane except in the presence of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the Watergate affair was not brought up.
The plane bore few problems. There was a complication created by a technicians’ strike at CBS which might make it necessary for the President to decide whether to cross picket lines when he went to the Shoreham Hotel that night to address jubilant Republicans. But that was settled before the plane crossed the Mississippi. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler, Finch discussed what should be their victory line, and the tone of the Republican spokesmen who would have to fill time on the air in what they felt would be a runaway election. They would be generous to the press this time—if asked, they would say they had had a fair shake; they would talk policy and issues, taking their text from the President’s fourteen radio campaign speeches; and they hoped that when the night’s returns were in they would be able to claim a “functional majority” in Congress. There seemed no doubt of this majority; shortly after eleven the UPI flash to the plane from the East had read, “At mid-afternoon, the first incomplete compilation of national returns gave Nixon 216 votes to 26 for McGovern—a majority of 89 percent.” And down below, as the plane moved effortlessly across the Rocky Mountains, the face of the land was serene, snow-powder reaching down the slopes to the Plains states. There was nothing to be noted different from any other day in the land below when its people vote except, if one stretched the imagination, the highways seemed more bare than usual.
It was about half an hour before we touched down at Andrews Air Force Base that I was asked forward to the President’s territory. He was sitting alone, the shades half drawn in his tiny cubicle, his hands neatly crossed over his knees, which were bent up so his feet could rest on the desk; beside him on the floor was a briefcase, with the familiar yellow legal pads on which he had just been scrawling.
He motioned me to the other chair in the cubicle, and I began by recalling the story he once told me of his flight back in 1968 when he had taken Mrs. Nixon and his two daughters aside, warned them privately of his fear, cautioned them against tears if he lost. The President nodded; it was different, yes. But he was in no mood for reminiscence—or jubilation, or euphoria. He had been working on his way back, and his tone was flat, matter-of-fact. Yes, people were saying this was going to be a landslide. “But what’s a landslide?” he continued. “Down there”—waving with his hand to the window and the people below—”who remembers landslides, or electoral votes? Who remembers what Harding got? Or how Roosevelt did against Landon?”
What was important about this one, he explained, was that he thought he might have “shifted allegiances” this year. “Just think of the shift in the South,” he said. People were going to say he got the South by racism; he knew what they were saying, but “You know what did it? Patriotism, not racism.” Not only the South was shifting, but others—workingmen and Catholics, too. The Republican Party used to be a WASP party, he recalled, and he used to talk about it in the old days with Len Hall, who came from Nassau County. Len understood. You used to go to a Republican dinner in those days and there wouldn’t be an Irishman or an Italian or a Jew there. If you could shift those allegiances permanently, then this landslide meant something. The trouble with McGovern was he took those people for granted—”You can’t take people for granted any more,” he said.
Vietnam was uppermost on his mind, it appeared, and he talked about that. “I never shoot blanks,” said the President, “not when it comes to dealing with China or the Soviet Union.” And he wasn’t shooting blanks with the American people either, not when it came to Vietnam. He had the peace he promised; he would show it. The press disagreed with him so much, he knew, were so completely against his policy that they couldn’t follow what he said. “I make my share of mistakes,” said the President, “but one of their mistakes, because they disagree with me so much, they play right into my hands.” He would have peace, he knew it.
I drew the conversation away from Vietnam and tried to bring it back to “Out There,” where voting was still going on. Could he recognize the face of the country from the air? “I always recognize Chicago,” he said. “I remember riding back from the West after the election in 1960, and coming over the mountains where we did so well, and seeing Chicago, and I thought of all the time I put in there and then how poorly we’d done.” Then he brought the talk sharply back to today, to this election. Ten years ago, he said, who could have foreseen that we’d be doing better in New York than in California? This majority building up down there was a national majority, a real national majority. The West might be weaker than the rest of the country, but the South would be just as good as the rest of the country. Then a quick review: Oregon might be a surprise. So might Wisconsin. Michigan was always a tight state. He felt he would probably lose Massachusetts. But he would take South Dakota, McGovern’s state, and West Virginia, Kennedy’s state, and he relished the thought. His own guess was that he would probably get between 57 and 60 percent of the popular vote.
What were the key points in this year’s campaign? I asked. “The election was decided the day McGovern was nominated,” he said flatly; “the question after that was only how much. McGovern did to his party what Goldwater did.” Then he ticked off the key dates and turning points of this victory: The day Wallace was out of the race, that came first. Then, the trip to Peking. Next, the decision of May 8th to blockade Haiphong and bomb Hanoi. Next, the trip to Moscow. Next, the economic decisions of the summer of 1971. And again he came back to the phrase that was holding him at the moment. He had tried to “shift allegiances.”
The plane was now coming down under the overcast that had covered the country from the Mississippi to the Alleghenies, and lights of cities and towns were beginning to flicker, but he was paying no attention to the panorama below, he was off making his own points—that it wasn’t going to be easy, even with a landslide.
“John Connally called up last night and he said to me, ‘No two people have suffered more than you two. But there are as many things to bother you on the upside as on the downside. Too many people are going to say, now that he’s won, he can do anything.’” The President reflected on Connally for a minute, and said he knew about Roosevelt’s troubles after 1936’s landslide. But he, Nixon, knew the names and the rules of the game. “I’ve always been fascinated by Disraeli and Gladstone,” he continued. “Disraeli became Premier the second time when he was seventy years old, and he called Gladstone an exhausted volcano.” He, Richard Nixon, was not an exhausted volcano. This second term was not going to be the fizzle of an exhausted volcano. He wanted me to know that he was going to be shaking the administration up; from Cabinet level all the way down, there would be new people, new blood, new ideas. But foreign policy seemed more important to him: “There are so many great things to do yet,” he said, “if we can pull off the European Summit Conference!” Maybe his new relationship with Brezhnev would help. He was winding up now on the nuances of foreign policy, his favorite game, but as he began to detail his thoughts, the plane was coming down, and there, out the window, was the luminescence of Washington, all its floodlit shrines showing, glowing, disappearing, dissolving to runway lights. Then the plane’s wheels were bumping ground and he was trying to sum it up, to compress all the great steps to come next, and the things he had already done. “It’s just beginning,” he said. “The first steps a baby takes are always the most exciting—maybe he grows up to run the mile in 3:50. We may make—we may break 3:50 in the second term, but …”
And now the staff was trying to ready him for departure, the camera lights outside flooding the fuselage of the plane, his helicopter waiting to take him to the White House, where the raw vote totals and key-precinct results would be pouring in to measure the allegiances he had hoped to shift.
It had taken only four hours and fifteen minutes to fly from Southern California to Washington. When he had first made that flight after his first election twenty-six years ago, it had taken thirteen hours. If the supersonic plane—which he privately hoped to set on the drawing boards in his second administration—came about, then the flight from coast to coast would take an hour and a half or two hours, less time than it had taken Dick Nixon in his boyhood to travel from Whittier to downtown Los Angeles and back.
So much had the world changed.
And he had helped change it.
But there would be much more known about the change later that evening than the simple fact of the Nixon landslide.
He dined alone with his family that night, and then, as the returns began coming in, he secluded himself, solitary again, in the Lincoln Bedroom on the third, or private, floor of the White House, with his briefcase and yellow pads, to receive occasional telephone reports from his two vote-analysis rooms, in the White House lobby and at the Shoreham Hotel. His family and his intimates sat in the long, gloomy hallway which Presidents use as their third-floor reception room; there they cheered the results that came in. They offered to send a portable television to the President where he sat by the fireplace, thinking his own thoughts, but he refused it.
There was still routine and ceremonial to go through to close what, in any man’s life, had to be his greatest day. First was the ceremonial appearance on television for the nation, shortly after eleven o’clock and McGovern’s concession, and he concluded: “I would only hope that in these next four years we can so conduct ourselves in this country, and so meet our responsibilities in the world in building peace in the world, that years from now people will look back to the generation of the 1970’s at how we have conducted ourselves and they will say, ‘God bless America.’” Then, after midnight, came a quick sortie to the jubilant Republican workers’ gathering at the Shoreham Hotel, to thank them. Then, back to his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building, where he was joined by Bob Haldeman and Chuck Colson. They ordered a snack from the White House mess and idled the hours away until almost three in the morning as they sifted the late returns.
Their mood was relaxed, with the happy, spent energies of a great enterprise brought to conclusion, their planning now visible in solid votes that would go down in history. But the President had several annoyances beneath the warmth of victory. For one, his mouth bothered him—he had broken a crown at dinner; his dentist would have to fit him with an emergency temporary crown the next day when he was to be so busy; he feared that he had been stiff in his appearances on television because his mouth bothered him. He was also annoyed by the telegram he knew he had to send to McGovern; several drafts had been made and he had rejected them either as too curt or too effusive; he wished to be correct toward McGovern, but what rankled him beyond charity was McGovern’s comparing him to Hitler: this he could not forgive. At length, speechwriter Pat Buchanan was located and summoned to the Executive Office Building to draft a message which would have the proper balance of magnanimity and coolness; but that message would not go out until the next morning. Then, finally, there were the returns themselves as they trickled into the hideaway office. These were more than an annoyance—they were a perplexity. The returns on the Presidential race itself could not be better, as large as his planning had ever hoped for. But the returns for his party, the Republicans—these were almost incomprehensible. Even under his personal joy and satisfaction, the President was bothered; the results nagged; he would talk about his unhappiness the next day at his Cabinet session; but it would take weeks before it sank in on him that, despite this personal triumph, despite all his talk of team and team spirit, he remained essentially alone.
The paradox of the returns had been building almost since he arrived back at the White House that evening at six o’clock. An hour before the national networks went on air to begin describing the riddle, the paradox had already been apparent to those who had access to the returns from the early states. Kentucky, for example, had gone overwhelmingly for Nixon, as expected, by 64 percent; but in the race for U.S. Senate, former Republican Governor Louie Nunn was running behind State Senator Walter (“Dee”) Huddleston, Democrat. New Hampshire also was going for the President by 64 percent—yet Senator Thomas Mclntyre, Democrat, was easily holding his seat against Nixon loyalist and former Governor Wesley Powell. In Vermont, the President was sweeping the state, but a young Democratic latecomer, Thomas Salmon, was apparently carrying off the Governorship. In Alabama, Where the President was scoring a 72-percent majority, one of his favorite candidates for the Senate, Republican Winton (“Red”) Blount, was being plowed under by long-term Democratic Senator John Sparkman.
It grew more contradictory as the evening wore on, for now added to the losses in the toss-up races were Republican losses where Democrats, in this year of Nixon’s triumph, were ousting solid Republican Senatorial incumbents. As the President sat with Haldeman and Colson, his two closest political advisers, the news dribbled in—a sour under-taste to sweet victory. Margaret Chase Smith! An absolute fixture in the Republican firmament—being defeated by a newcomer Democrat in Maine. And J. Caleb Boggs of Delaware, of whom it was said he had shaken half the right hands in the state in his thirty years of public office, being defeated for the Senate by a young man, Joseph Biden, Jr., who would reach the Constitutional Senatorial age of thirty only a few weeks before he was due to take office. And Colorado—Nixon carrying Colorado by 63 percent while Gordon Allott, the party’s third-ranking Republican Senator, was being put under by an ex-Republican turned Democrat only two years before.
Other results were to shape themselves in final figures later the next day, an almost crazy contrast between the Nixon/McGovern race for the Presidency and the Republican/Democratic contest for Congress. Nixon was swamping McGovern in Minnesota; but liberal Senator Walter Mondale was mounting a contrary landslide for re-election as Democrat. Iowa was giving Nixon a 210,000-vote margin, but dumping Senator Jack Miller, Republican. Ohio was giving Nixon an 883,000-vote margin!—but liberal-reform Democratic Governor John Gilligan had captured the Ohio lower house with a Democratic majority for the first time since the right-to-work hassle of 1958. The President was carrying the city of Atlanta—but that city’s Congressional district, with a white majority, was electing its first black Congressman since Reconstruction, Democrat Andrew Young.
The old rule of thumb had it that for every percentile a President won over 55 percent, he could expect to drag in at least ten more Congressmen on the rising tide. But not in 1972. Nixon was picking up only thirteen Republican Congressmen nationwide, not nearly enough to shake the Democrats’ grip on the lower House; and he was, in this year of landslide sweep, actually losing two seats in the Senate. Scholars had described well the growth of ticket-splitting among Americans in the sixties,1 but the 1972 explosion of ticket-splitting was unprecedented. Nixon would have to face in his second term not only the same harassment, recalcitrance and adversary control of Congressional committees as he had in his first, but also that phenomenon which perplexed all serious students of politics—the break-up of the traditional party system of America.2 Translated out of figures and historic analysis into personal problems, it meant, simply, that Richard Nixon, as he had been all his life, would be still a solitary.
Of all those who, in the weeks thereafter, reflected on the election of 1972, perhaps the solitary President understood it best. It meant that if he were to make his mark on history permanent, he would have to do it with greater individual boldness, with greater personal exercise of authority, than any victorious President before him. And that, in turn, meant that he would still be running, as really he always had been running, against the personality and work of Franklin Roosevelt.
Richard Nixon, when he muses about the great Presidents of the past, pays obeisance, as all do, to Lincoln and Washington, the mythic heroes of the line. When he comments publicly on the modern Presidents, his formal admiration goes either to Woodrow Wilson or to Theodore Roosevelt. But anyone who has talked to Richard Nixon, over a period of years and privately, knows that, without ever avowing it, he has been running against Franklin D. Roosevelt since he began campaigning for office. He speaks of Roosevelt not with bitterness or disrespect or anger—but in a way that makes clear in all conversation that his own measure of himself is a measure against Franklin Roosevelt. Both men have seen the problem in the same way: how to make the system work—at home as abroad. In Richard Nixon’s mind, in the way he has of keeping scores, as
he does with baseball, football or voting results, only he and Franklin Roosevelt in all American history have run for national office—Presidency or Vice-Presidency—five times. The easy record reads that Roosevelt won four, lost one, and Richard Nixon won four, lost one. Roosevelt, of course, scored heavier, but between them, these two men go down as the most enduring American politicians of the twentieth century, and they span a period of fifty years of continuing American revolution.
Yet they are entirely different. Roosevelt had come of the patricians and rarely soiled himself with the nitty-gritty of mechanical politics. Roosevelt campaigned in another time, almost in another country. Large of vision, buoyant of spirit, steeped in history by family and blood, the lordly Roosevelt left it to his lieutenants to deal with the wards, the townships and regional power brokers, then pasted up his electoral votes, as he did the stamps his dealers brought him, in his album. It was quite clear always to Roosevelt what he was dealing with and what he had to do—and he did it easily.
Richard Nixon has always done it the hard way. The scar tissue had grown thick over him by the time of his re-election, a rigid self-discipline controlled the outbursts of emotion for which his enemies so long mocked him. But the hurt was there—for the remembered humiliations as well as the grudging later praise. By November of 1972, he had become far more his own man than Roosevelt ever was. Yet, paradoxically, this left him weaker—what he proposed to do, he would still have to do the hard way, alone.
Roosevelt brought with him to his exercise in political creations an entire party. Nixon came to the Presidency first as a marginal winner, and next, in November of 1972, as a spectacular personal victor, but stripped of control of both Houses of Congress, denied any tolerance by the “best thinkers” in American opinion. In his first term, with virtuoso personal diplomacy, he had perceived, then dismantled, the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt in world affairs; and then rearranged that world with a skill that the old grand master would have regarded with approval. In 1972, he had run, at home, against the coalition of forces Roosevelt had bequeathed his Democratic Party. At the personal executive level he had dismantled that coalition by what he called a “shift of allegiance.” Yet, somehow, he had been unable to dismantle the Democratic Party itself.
Thus the great paradox. Obviously, in the politics of 1972, two entirely different stories are intertwined. There is the story of Richard Nixon, and how he, as President, read the nation’s mood, to win the greatest margin of votes in American history. But then there is the rival story, of the various Democratic parties, whose inheritance from the Rooseveltian past had given them one of their greatest grass-roots vietories at local and state level across the country—but whose choice of national leader to oppose Richard Nixon totally failed to catch the spirit of the times.