On a Wednesday evening in July 1967, two white Newark policemen arrested a black cabdriver and beat him so badly that he could not walk. As they dragged him into the Fourth Police Precinct on Seventeenth Avenue, they were spotted by residents across the street, and news of the brutality soon spread around the city. A few protesters hurled rocks at the Fourth Precinct that night; and the next evening a larger crowd assembled, along with some expectant TV trucks. A woman with a crowbar stepped out of the crowd and began to smash the windows of the police station, and suddenly people were running down the streets, looting Almor Furniture, Morris’s Dress Shop, and any other establishment that appeared to have a white owner. Molotov cocktails were hurled into the ransacked premises; fires soon spread over a dozen blocks; and the city fathers hit the panic button. New Jersey state troopers and the National Guard were summoned to restore order, and the result was a shooting spree far worse than the looting spree. A ten-year-old was killed by a stray bullet that hit him behind the ear. A mother leaning from her window was mistaken for a sniper and slain by a bullet to the neck. Finally, on Monday, July 17, the governor withdrew his men, after more than four days of battle.1
That same Monday, fifteen miles east of Newark in the very different setting of Manhattan, a baby-faced political operative named Pat Buchanan was hammering out a memo to his boss, Richard Nixon. He began by introducing an economist, Alan Greenspan, “a most level-headed and bright fellow.” Then he explained that he had sought out Greenspan’s counsel on “the Negro thing”—shorthand for the riots that had been breaking out sporadically since the summer of 1965, when the Los Angeles district of Watts had witnessed thirty-four deaths in six chaotic days. Buchanan had asked Greenspan how Nixon, already an undeclared contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, could propose economic assistance that might assuage black rage while still sounding fiscally responsible. Greenspan had answered with bracing libertarian purity. “He said flatly that the Negro problem is not an economic problem and it is dangerous to think of its solution in financial terms,” Buchanan reported.2
Three years after the excitement and disappointment of Barry Goldwater’s campaign, Greenspan was wading into politics again—this time much more deeply. Around the time the Newark riots started, a Columbia University professor named Marty Anderson had suggested that he join the small group of advisers clustering around Nixon, and Greenspan had jumped at the opportunity. He had met Anderson, who was ten years his junior, when the younger man attended one of his objectivist lectures on the Economics of a Free Society; they had gone out for coffee afterward with Ayn Rand, and Anderson had observed how Rand deferred to Greenspan on all matters economic.3 Over the next three years, Greenspan had found in Anderson a like-minded libertarian and, unusually for such a loner, a close friend; perhaps it helped that Anderson was an independent spirit, too, and that he shared Greenspan’s experience of growing up with separated parents. By 1967, Anderson and Greenspan were starting to write a book together—a statement of libertarian economics based on Greenspan’s lectures—and were hanging out on weekends with Anderson’s girlfriend, Annelise, a hip, miniskirted doctoral student who wore her hair hanging loose to her waist. The trio would tool around in Greenspan’s convertible Cadillac and listen to music in his latest trophy acquisition: an apartment in the brand-new, ostentatiously opulent United Nations Plaza. The skyscraper had been constructed by Alcoa, a consulting client. In exchange for buying in early, Greenspan had secured a bargain.4
When Anderson landed a position as domestic policy adviser to Nixon in the summer of 1967, the book collaboration with Greenspan had to be shelved. But Anderson asked his friend to comment on his first policy paper, a recommendation to abolish the military draft.5 As libertarians, Anderson and Greenspan had no trouble agreeing that conscription was an odious imposition on freedom, and after their successful partnership on that first paper, Anderson proposed that Greenspan meet the other members of the fledgling Nixon team to see if he could join the effort. By coincidence, Nixon’s chief talent scout turned out to be Leonard Garment, a lawyer who had played jazz with Henry Jerome at the same time as Greenspan, more than two decades earlier. With both Garment and Anderson behind him, the stars seemed to be aligned; and soon Greenspan found himself sitting across an ill-lit restaurant table from Pat Buchanan, the young chief of staff, and explaining his views on the economy, the federal budget, and the “Negro thing.” Buchanan was there with Ray Price, a Nixon speechwriter, who was struck by a line that Greenspan tossed out, suggesting that Nixon should move the nation “not left, not right, but forward.”6 The phrase seemed to reveal an appetite for trite political catch lines, suggesting that Greenspan aspired to be much more than a dry business economist. But dry he certainly could be. He held forth slowly and solemnly, not so much speaking as declaiming. During the course of that introductory dinner, he suffered his new acquaintances to endure a long lecture on the gold standard.7
Looking back on this period, Greenspan cast his involvement with Nixon as an unplanned adventure, a coincidental by-product of his friendship with Marty Anderson. “If it were not for Anderson, I may have made a lot of money being a private economist but that would have been it,” he said, suggesting that he would not otherwise have ventured the career leap from New York to Washington.8 Yet the tone of Greenspan’s objectivist lectures indicates that he had been itching to turn his libertarian philosophy into a political program; and his bond with Anderson, a man who quixotically rang doorbells for Goldwater’s campaign in the unpromising territory of the Upper West Side, further suggests that he was ready to do electoral battle if the right opportunity presented itself. His reputation as a private economist was still growing—he was the “kind of person who knew how many thousand flat-headed bolts were used in a 1964 Chevrolet and what it would do to the economy if you took out three of them,” as a marveling acquaintance put it.9 But having succeeded financially, and having completed the project of thinking through his Randian ideas, Greenspan was ready to add a new dimension to his life. Lacking the family responsibilities that anchor many adults as they pass their fortieth birthday, he needed the next challenge.
Besides, if Greenspan felt strongly about politics at the time of his Randian lectures, he felt even more strongly by 1967: in the intervening years, Lyndon Johnson had led the country on a course that made Kennedy look conservative. In the span of a single Congress, in 1965–66, Johnson had signed laws committing the government to provide health care for the poor and elderly as well as funding for education and the arts—all abominations to a libertarian. Johnson had also pushed Kennedy’s economic policies to their logical extreme. In 1964 he had delivered a powerful fiscal stimulus by signing tax cuts into law, and he had proceeded to bully the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates as low as possible. When the Fed made a show of resistance, Johnson summoned William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman, to his Texas ranch and physically shoved him around his living room, yelling in his face, “Boys are dying in Vietnam, and Bill Martin doesn’t care!”10
If the tax cuts and low interest rates caused inflationary pressure, Johnson believed he could deal with it with more bullying and manipulation. When aluminum makers raised prices in 1965, Johnson ordered up sales from the government’s strategic stockpile to push prices back down again. When copper companies raised prices, he fought back by restricting exports of the metal and scrapping tariffs so as to usher in more imports. The president battled uppity prices for household appliances, paper cartons, newsprint, men’s underwear, women’s hosiery, glass containers, cellulose, and air conditioners; when egg prices rose in 1966, he had the surgeon general issue a warning on the hazards of cholesterol in eggs.11 It was just as libertarians had feared. The fine-tuners’ ambition to achieve “full” employment while containing inflation was driving them to pile intervention upon intervention.
Meanwhile, the mood of the nation was shifting, reinforcing Greenspan’s sense that politics was calling him. After the prosperous harmony of the 1950s and the heady optimism of Kennedy’s New Frontier, American society seemed to be coming apart at the seams. The dignified pacifism of the early 1960s civil rights movement had given way to the Black Power rhetoric of Stokely Carmichael, who in 1966 stood up in Canton, Mississippi, and declared, “The only way we are going to stop them from whuppin’ us is to take over. We’ve been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin.’”12 The women’s rights movement was growing more radical, too: the early 1960s literary feminism of Helen Gurley Brown and Betty Friedan was making way for a more flamboyant variety which, by 1968, would involve the ritual dumping of girdles, bras, high-heeled shoes, false lashes, hair curlers, and other objects of female “enslavement” into a “freedom trash can.”13 Half a world away in Indochina, an American force that had numbered under a thousand in 1960 exploded to a half-million troops by the summer of 1967, pushing the cumulative death toll for American servicemen above ten thousand.14 With draft notices going out to an average of a thousand college-aged men each day at the war’s peak, university campuses became a hotbed for antiwar agitation that soon spilled out from the ivory towers and into the streets.15 “Never have the young been so assertive or so articulate, so well educated or so worldly,” Time marveled in declaring the under-25 crowd its “Man of the Year” in 1966.16 The question was whether this rambunctious new force would shatter the establishment that had borne it.
To a libertarian business consultant now entering middle age, this cultural revolt was not appealing. Greenspan dressed himself each morning in a crisp white dress shirt and a neatly pressed dark suit, not tie-dyes or bell-bottoms. He kept his hair short and swept straight back from his forehead like the matinee idols of his youth, and his idea of a late-night jam session involved playing Bach and Beethoven on the clarinet to the accompaniment of a piano and violin.17 “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” was not his thing; he hailed from a generation in which people smoked pipes—and put tobacco in them.18 Besides, his mind was molded to an era far older than the one that he was born into. A man who revered the rugged individualism of the nineteenth century could not be in sync with the sixties.
Barely ten minutes’ walk north from Greenspan’s office, the cityscape itself screamed out that his ideals were in retreat, routed by a tide that was anathema to him. By the summer of 1967, the warren of social service agencies surrounding City Hall was doling out antipoverty funding “like a corner candy store,” as even the city’s welfare commissioner conceded.19 The relentless growth of welfare spending was muscling out other parts of the budget, forcing the city to economize on police equipment and teacher salaries. Meanwhile, across City Hall Park, construction equipment chugged away on the early stages of a colossal $200 million Civic Center project financed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, another Johnson creation.20 Beneath the blades of the bulldozers patrolling the site lay the remains of handsome nineteenth-century Greek Revival and Victorian structures razed to make way for collectivist modernity.21 For Greenspan or any other conservative who might have gazed upon the rubble, the metaphor would have been obvious.
• • •
Ten days after the end of the Newark riots, Greenspan followed up on his dinner with Nixon’s advisers. “I should like to outline a policy position which I believe could be very effective for Mr. Nixon,” he announced in a memo. Over the next two pages he rehearsed his libertarian creed, attacking the Johnson administration’s policies for distorting the economy, stoking civil strife, and weakening America’s international standing.22 The root of the problem lay in the economics of the New Frontier, which Greenspan had criticized before: reckless budget deficits compelled fine-tuners to meddle with prices to keep the lid on inflation. But the habit of intervention had recently taken on a new dimension, Greenspan insisted. Welfare schemes were not only expanding, and thereby stoking deficits and inflation; they were breeding an entitlement mentality, a self-pitying expectation of government handouts, the opposite of the sturdy nineteenth-century self-sufficiency that Greenspan idolized. Each new government program reinforced the presumption that government should help, which in turn created more pressure to increase welfare spending. “Once the principle of massive government assistance to any special group in the society is accepted, there is an open-ended expectation from all groups which can never be fulfilled,” Greenspan lamented. Lyndon Johnson’s inflation was not just a monetary problem; it was a state of mind, a crisis of too many social demands chasing too few possible providers of social services.
With the violence in Newark still fresh in his mind, Greenspan pitched the Nixon team on his theory of its causes. Material deprivation was not the source of the disturbances: “The average Negro family income in the United States would be considered modest affluence in virtually every other area of the world,” Greenspan insisted. What ailed America’s black population was not so much poverty as antipoverty efforts—“massive hand-out programs” which “have the ultimate effect of only degrading the Negroes as individuals and have led to the current upsurge in racism and class antagonism.” And if the cause of the riots lay in inflated expectations of what government could deliver, the riots would intensify so long as liberals set the tone. “If the summer of 1967 is bad, the summer of 1968 is bound to be worse,” Greenspan predicted.
Not everyone on Nixon’s team shared Greenspan’s perspective. Ray Price, who in his past career as a newspaperman had penned an editorial endorsing Johnson over Goldwater, recoiled at his opinions. “Frankly, I don’t think this Greenspan memo adds up to a hell of a lot,” he wrote to Buchanan in August. “He seems to posit the political debate as a simple choice between ‘government handouts’ and ‘freedom of the individual,’ with ‘principle’ of course equated with individual freedom. If every Federal program for education, jobs, etc., is simply viewed as another handout, we might as well give up on this old land of ours. Freedom, yes; but freedom has many facets, and freedom from government is only one of ’em. Freedom from want and freedom from fear, freedom of movement, freedom to develop one’s capacities, etc., all are among the freedoms we have to try to develop. . . . I think Greenspan’s notion of ‘principle’ is too much one of dogmatic rigidity.”23
Price’s reservations did not deter Greenspan. He had an effective ally in the conservative Buchanan, who, at the tender age of twenty-eight, was already showing the pugnacious will that would make him a formidable populist presidential candidate and entertaining TV brawler. Buchanan took delivery of Greenspan’s memo, underlined large portions of it, and where Greenspan urged Nixon to “convey an image of principle” rather than offering handouts, he wrote “good” in the margin. Then he forwarded the missive to Nixon with a cover note: “This fellow is an economist and a budgetary expert but more than that he is a sound thinker on a number of subjects.” In early August, Buchanan followed up by sending Nixon two Townsend-Greenspan client letters, which fiercely denounced Johnson’s budget policies as duplicitous and inflationary. On August 14 Nixon wrote to Buchanan, saying that “I think I should have a talk with Allen Greenspan.”
A few days later, Greenspan walked into the lobby of 20 Broad Street, immediately adjacent to the New York Stock Exchange and just three blocks from his office. He made his way up to the twenty-fourth floor, to the offices of Nixon Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Mitchell, the nearly century-old white-shoe law firm that had taken in the former vice president following his defeats in the 1960 presidential and 1962 California gubernatorial elections.24 Nixon was ensconced in a lush corner office. Keys from major cities in Europe and Asia lined the walls; commemorative gavels rested on the walnut furniture; a gargantuan globe stood imposingly to one side, as if set there by an exhausted Atlas.25 Behind Nixon’s desk chair, a gallery of signed photographs from various heads of state filled an immense wooden cabinet, suggesting an old man stuck in past glories, not an ascendant candidate looking toward his next victory.26
Nixon greeted Greenspan and skipped past the introductory chitchat. He lobbed a series of probing questions on economic policy at his guest, the words flowing out of him in perfect sentences. In response, Greenspan launched into a long discourse on the federal budget, philosophizing about how statistics on taxes and spending could tell stories about the political styles of various presidents. As the conversation continued, each man grew increasingly impressed by the power of the other’s intellect.27 Nixon could see that Greenspan was a walking encyclopedia of statistical wisdom, the source of numbers and facts that would lend his candidacy authority. Greenspan could see that if he had ever harbored doubts about Nixon’s potential, he should dismiss them straightaway—this was no washed-up politician grateful for the company. And yet there was something about Nixon that still left Greenspan with an odd feeling. The candidate’s syntax was too exquisite; his attire was too impeccable; there was an impression of stiffness.28 Eight years earlier, on a visit as vice president to Moscow, this same Nixon had had the panache to hold an impromptu “kitchen debate” against Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev before an array of flashbulbs. But now, in the comfort of his own office, he seemed almost wooden. Sincerity, Greenspan would learn, did not come easily to Nixon.
• • •
Beyond the calm of the candidate’s office, America was broiling. The Newark violence was only one of forty-six riots in that summer of 1967.29 A total of eighty-one people died in the mayhem, and the destruction of property ran into the millions of dollars.30 Polls suddenly found “crime and lawlessness” rocketing toward the top of citizens’ concerns, displacing the cost of living and unemployment.31
Undeterred by the moderates on the campaign staff, Greenspan pressed his libertarian diagnosis more forcefully than ever. In a four-page memo to Nixon in late September, he blamed the urban riots squarely on the Great Society programs.32 Government handouts represented a tacit admission of guilt by white Americans for the supposed exploitation of blacks, he charged; but no such exploitation was taking place—blacks who worked for white-owned companies or shopped in white-owned stores were freely choosing to do so.33 By offering federal programs to make up for alleged exploitation, whites were guilty of claiming to be guilty when they were really innocent. They were providing black radicals with an excuse. “Any attempt in the present context on the part of the whites to improve the situation by handouts has been read as a sanction for violence,” Greenspan contended.
Greenspan’s communications with Nixon in these first few months would have made Ayn Rand proud of him. Like Rand herself in 1964, he was supporting a Republican presidential contender while also attempting to steer him in a libertarian direction. He was not always succeeding, to be sure. On September 26, the same day that Greenspan sent his riots memo, Nixon published his own reaction to the urban violence in Reader’s Digest.34 Echoing Greenspan, Nixon argued that the riots were not simply the result of poverty; they reflected a nationwide decline in respect for authority and the rule of law. But if Nixon’s diagnosis resembled Greenspan’s, his prescription veered in a different direction. Whereas Greenspan wanted to get government out of the inner cities and empower local businesses with tax cuts, Nixon called for the hiring of more and better police officers.35
Snubbed but undeterred, Greenspan made a bid to take his arguments public. At the start of November, he proposed to Nixon that he be allowed to draft an article on “What’s Wrong with the Great Society” for publication in the Harvard Business Review “or some equivalent.”36 The article would convince readers that the Great Society was fundamentally “degenerative,” that it was a cynical vote-buying scheme targeted at specific voting blocs, and that it would lead inevitably to budget deficits, inflation, regulatory controls, and “a divided, wretched social order.” Again, Greenspan’s proposal was ignored; Nixon was not about to embrace Greenspan’s libertarian principles wholeheartedly. There was a reason why he balanced conservative advisers such as Buchanan and Marty Anderson with liberals such as Ray Price; the country had moved steadily to the left, and he was not going to win the presidency on a platform to restore the nineteenth century. Somehow, the Depression of the 1930s had increased Americans’ appetite for government; and yet the opposite of the Depression in the booming 1950s and 1960s had further increased their appetite for government. Nixon could attack the Great Society at the margins, but a full-frontal assault would be electoral madness.
At the beginning of 1968, Buchanan asked Greenspan to write a statement for the campaign on farm policy. Federal subsidies to agriculture were among the more egregious special-interest handouts, and Greenspan cogently explained the laissez-faire case for ending them. The Nixon campaign followed its usual procedures, circulating the draft statement to its allies, and pretty soon Greenspan was on the phone with Buchanan.
“The Dakota wolves are after me,” Buchanan remembers Greenspan saying. The lead wolf was Karl Mundt, a formidable South Dakota senator who reacted furiously to anything that threatened to reduce subsidies for his state’s farmers.37
Buchanan briefed Nixon on the standoff. Greenspan had written a forthright anti-subsidy memo, and now farm-state senators were howling for his blood.
“They wouldn’t be after Greenspan if he hadn’t messed something up,” Nixon responded.
Taking his cue from the candidate, Buchanan set out to repair the damage by writing a brand-new statement on the future of the nation’s farms, this time praising subsidies effusively. Having composed something suitably emphatic about Nixon’s unshakable commitment to agriculture, Buchanan made a trip to Washington to deliver his text to the Dakota wolf in person.
The senator called him in and sat him down. “Read it,” he ordered.
Buchanan read the statement, which ended with a gushing quote from William Jennings Bryan’s celebrated address to the Democratic National Convention in 1896. Bryan’s oration is remembered as the Cross of Gold speech—the most famous attack in American history on Greenspan’s beloved gold standard—but it was also a hymn to the heartland, to the men who break their backs to feed the soft people of the cities. Without the farmers of the heartland, the portly financiers of New York and Chicago would be forced to raise livestock in their living rooms. “Destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country,” Bryan thundered.
“That’s a wonderful speech,” the wolf said, and dispatched Buchanan from his office.38
• • •
Humiliated by the Dakota senator, Greenspan might have given up on politics and returned to a life of lucrative business and Randian pamphleteering. But he did not. Money interested him only so much, and Rand’s Collective was losing its allure; the cult was heading for a messy split, precipitated when Nathaniel Branden embarked on a romance with a young actress, causing the jilted high priestess to denounce him in a furious open letter. In any case, Greenspan had caught the political bug. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged might have retreated from an unjust society and left it to rot, but Greenspan was discovering that counseling the potential leader of the free world could be an addictive habit.
The presidential contest was just getting interesting. Nixon moved his campaign operation out of his law firm toward the end of 1967, and his people found quarters in Midtown; they were taking on new staff, preparing for the candidate’s formal announcement. The new premises on Fifth Avenue were makeshift, with cardboard-quality walls; but the chaos and improvisation only added to the excitement.39 Policy positions, draft speeches, advertising strategies, and logistical preparations flew about the office, and the buzz and throb of a major presidential bid echoed within every campaign aide who dreamed of working in the White House. One day the sympathetic Time journalist Nick Timmesch came by with the news that George Romney was running hard in New Hampshire, and Nixon risked falling behind if he did not jump in soon. On another occasion, Clare Luce—the writer, ambassador, seductress, and grandest of New York’s grandes dames—paid a surprise visit to the campaign office, fizzing with wit and elegance.40 The Nixon team threw a Christmas party at the Lombardy Hotel, and Greenspan showed up with a stunning woman on his arm. Her name has been swallowed by time, but she was enough to cause campaign colleagues to recalibrate their view of him.41
On January 31, 1968, just hours before the filing deadline, Nixon crossed the Rubicon. He plunged into the primary race, promising a crowd in New Hampshire the next day that he would address problems “beyond politics.” His staff moved into more comfortable offices at 450 Park Avenue, with some overflow space across the street; and with this new phase of the battle, fresh opportunities opened. Marty Anderson headed out on the road with the candidate, leaving a vacuum at headquarters that Greenspan filled eagerly. With the exception of Fridays, when he was needed at the Townsend-Greenspan office to make sure the weekly mailings went out to the clients, Greenspan began to spend much of his time at Nixon’s headquarters, preparing memos and updates for the traveling team on domestic and economic policy.42 The campaign command center featured a teletype machine, a primitive fax machine, and a red phone reserved exclusively for calls from Nixon’s field team. Whenever the candidate stopped for a few hours at a motel, Greenspan would hurry to get draft press releases and talking points across to Anderson before he headed off for the next rally.43
Some Nixon advisers drew salaries as high as $3,000 per month—more than $20,000 per month in 2015 dollars. Greenspan refused to be paid anything at all, a measure both of his substantial wealth and of his desire for independence.44 But even without pay, he put his shoulder to the wheel, expanding his remit beyond economic and domestic policy and into the territory of opinion polling. Committing not only himself but his employees to this challenge, he set the Townsend-Greenspan team to work collecting the results of state and local polls; then he compared the latest readings with past trends and extrapolated likely numbers for states that had not been surveyed. It was a classic Greenspan data-sleuthing exercise, with the twist that his consulting firm had recently acquired its first computer. The futuristic IBM 1130 was the size of an office desk and boasted eight kilobytes of memory, a fraction of the capacity of a modern smartphone but positively thrilling to the pioneer geeks of the mid-1960s. An hourly employee at Townsend-Greenspan would transfer reams of raw polling data onto punch cards, then feed the cards into the majestic new machine, which strained and grunted for two hours before noisily spitting out an intricate matrix of columns and rows on sheets of perforated paper. The computer was used so extensively that the operator once logged ninety-six hours in a single week. He clocked up so much overtime pay that Kathryn Eickhoff, a salaried employee, grew irritated that he was earning more than she was.45
Greenspan’s opinion-poll analysis boosted his standing in the campaign, inoculating him from the danger that his impractical libertarian views might marginalize him. Armed with his computer printouts, he became the man who knew; he could instruct Nixon’s advisers on how they were faring in each state, which issues would sway voters most in which region, and what the likely outcome would be in terms of the popular vote and the balance in the electoral college. Starting in the 1950s, computerized forecasts had been used by news organizations to aid in reporting elections, and John Kennedy’s advisers had used computer simulations to test how voters felt about the candidate’s Catholicism.46 But Greenspan pushed the art of polling analysis further; and when it came time for the Republican convention, in August 1968, his prediction that Nixon was the likeliest among Republicans to capture the White House may even have persuaded wavering delegates to throw their votes to him.
• • •
On the evening of Thursday, April 4, 1968, a shot snapped the truce in America’s inner cities. As he stood on the second-floor balcony of a Memphis motel, Martin Luther King Jr. was struck by a sniper’s bullet to the jaw, which shattered several vertebrae and severed his jugular vein. The death of a black civil rights leader at the hands of a white man reignited urban riots, culminating in the arrest of some twenty thousand people. To Nixon and his supporters, their calls for tougher law enforcement had been richly vindicated. But on the night of the assassination, a politician with a different perspective was emerging on the national stage. Having declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, Robert F. Kennedy was on a plane, bound for Indianapolis.
Bobby Kennedy learned of King’s shooting from a reporter on his aircraft. Once he landed, the Indianapolis police chief entreated him to stay out of black neighborhoods for fear of a riot, but Kennedy proceeded directly to a wind-blown lot surrounded by tenements, wearing his dead brother’s old topcoat to protect him from the elements.47 Standing before an audience of a thousand, he pulled out a few crumpled handwritten notes from his pocket and accepted the grave duty of informing the crowd of King’s killing. As they gasped, Kennedy assured them he could feel their loss; after all, his own brother had been assassinated. Then he continued:
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black. . . .
The speech left Kennedy’s staff weeping. It succeeded with his audience, too; people later said that Indianapolis was spared destructive riots by Kennedy’s inspired performance. The candidate, for his part, appeared grim but strong; few others in the nation had been forced to reckon with a political killing in the intimate way he had. After his speech in Indianapolis, Kennedy flew to Washington, D.C., where he toured a riot-torn section of the city, again defying advisers who warned him that his presence among looted and burning buildings might not be received kindly.48 He attended King’s funeral in Atlanta, viewing the body and marching in the procession. “Well, we still have Robert Kennedy,” one of King’s close supporters, John Lewis, later recalled telling himself.49
Watching the news from New York, Greenspan could barely contain himself. On April 8, the day before King’s funeral, he sent a memo to “DC,” a code name for Nixon that the campaign had adopted to preserve deniability if the documents fell into the hands of journalists. Greenspan accused Kennedy of “attempting to cash in on the tragic events of recent days by fostering guilt among the whites and accordingly presenting himself as a moral leader.” Beneath his guise of righteousness, Kennedy was ducking his duty to come out and say clearly that violence was unacceptable. “He must be called on this,” Greenspan insisted. “Does RFK consider violence in a free society morally justified or not? This is not an issue for vagueness or equivocation. It is important to tell the Black Power militants they are wrong. . . . It is not possible to be too strong on this issue.” In Greenspan’s eyes, the problem with Kennedy mirrored the problem with liberals in general—although they might pay lip service to nonviolence, they nevertheless accommodated violence by rushing to suggest that the rioters had fair cause to be angry. Cranking up his indignation to maximum volume, Greenspan went on: “[T]he Black Power militants are wrong. There is no conceivable moral justification for violence in a free society. This is not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”50
It was one of those moments when Greenspan’s libertarian views got the better of his judgment. On questions of statistics, he was relentlessly empirical—ideology was subservient to data. But occasionally, when he strayed beyond the realm of numbers, he was less good at evaluating the evidence before his eyes: thus he had denounced all antitrust law, despite the concentrated nature of the economy in which he worked; and thus he was traducing Robert Kennedy. Far from equivocating on violence, Kennedy had actually spoken out the day after King’s assassination, lamenting that Americans “seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity.”51 And far from siding with the radical black leaders, Kennedy was in fact reviled by them. “The honky from honky Lyndon Johnson to honky Bobby Kennedy will not co-opt Dr. Martin Luther King,” Stokely Carmichael told reporters the morning after King’s assassination; “Bobby Kennedy pulled that trigger just as well as anybody else.”52 In assailing Kennedy, Greenspan was picking on the wrong target. If anyone was seeking to cash in politically on the shocking events of April, perhaps it was Alan Greenspan.
Nixon was too savvy to take Greenspan’s advice; he never attacked Kennedy for his actions after King’s killing. But he did adopt another Greenspan idea—a push for “black capitalism” in the inner cities. At campaign events, he lamented white America’s attempts to assuage its guilt by buying off black Americans with an escalating array of social programs. “We have reached a point at which more of the same will only result in more of the same frustration, more of the same explosive violence, and more of the same fear,” Nixon argued in one April speech, hewing closely to Greenspan’s thesis that government aid and ghetto violence were caught in a vicious cycle.53 Nixon would then lay out Greenspan’s program of stimulating inner-city businesses with tax breaks—there would be credits to build housing, train low-skilled workers, and encourage businesses to locate in poor urban districts. This new program for black capitalism would replace the handout culture of government programs, fostering a sense of ownership and pride, and removing the frustrations that bred violence.
Nixon’s embrace of Greenspan’s ideas about black capitalism signaled that the fight with the Dakota wolves had been forgiven. Taking this cue, Greenspan’s ally, Pat Buchanan, resumed his efforts to expand Greenspan’s influence. On May 18, 1968, Buchanan prepared a memo for Nixon, reporting on a mutiny at the campaign’s Park Avenue headquarters. The cause of the trouble, Buchanan insisted, was Dr. Glenn Olds, a liberal academic best known for helping to create a domestic counterpart to the Peace Corps. As a favor to one of Nixon’s business supporters, this Great Society professor had been given a role in the campaign, and he was developing all kinds of schemes that Buchanan found preposterous. The professor spoke of “doubling and tripling” the research staff to assist him in his head-hunting efforts, declaring that he meant to identify 2,500 people to man a future Nixon administration—“To Olds, his authority apparently is very great,” Buchanan wrote tartly. Several members of the research team were threatening to quit if Olds was kept on, Buchanan asserted. “They speak of him as a ‘totalitarian liberal’. . . . What they want is for Alan Greenspan—who will quit his job and go to work full-time—to be named Director of Research-Domestic Policy.” Buchanan touted Greenspan as “a committed RN man, a hard worker, willing to give up his job. He has the confidence and support of everyone in research and they like the guy. . . . I do recommend that in any choice between the once-seen Olds and the often-seen Alan Greenspan, we come down on the side of Greenspan.”
Nixon signed off on the promotion, and Greenspan was installed as the campaign’s director of domestic policy research.
• • •
Some two weeks later, on June 4, Robert Kennedy won California’s Democratic primary. The results came in around midnight, and the candidate addressed his jubilant supporters in the ballroom of a Los Angeles hotel. Afterward the hotel manager led him off toward another room where the press awaited him. As Kennedy walked through the hotel’s kitchen area, down a corridor narrowed by an ice machine, he stopped to shake hands with a busboy, and in that moment a Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan stepped down from a low tray stacker and rushed forward and shot him. To many Americans, Kennedy’s assassination marked the end of an era, burying the nation’s postwar sense of possibility and progress. “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not,” Kennedy had declared during his campaign.54 At his funeral in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his younger brother Teddy quoted those words. The liberal cause had lost its leader.
Once the initial outpouring of grief faded, a cold fear possessed Americans. Assassinations had felled two national figures in two months, not to mention a president five years earlier. The nation was in the grip of shootouts between the police and the militants of the new Black Panther Party, firebombings by segregationist Ku Klux Klan vigilantes, strikes by labor unions, and protests by student radicals. Television viewers reacted by making ratings hits out of shows that stressed law and order, such as Bonanza and Gunsmoke. At Nixon headquarters on Park Avenue, the Secret Service determined that the candidate’s office was insecure—he was a setup for a rifle bullet from the building across the street. The campaign moved Nixon into a room with less exposure, and the paneled office that had been prepared for him was assigned instead to the communications director. For the first few days, the communications man went uneasily about his work, glancing nervously out of the window.55
Nixon was well positioned for this climate of fear; he had been preaching authority over anarchy since the riots of the previous summer. But he faced a challenge from his right. George Wallace, the former Alabama governor now running as a segregationist independent, was haranguing the nation with a coarse version of Nixon’s law-and-order policies, and working-class whites were flocking to him. “If I ever get to be President and any of these demonstrators lay down in front of my car, it’ll be the last car they ever lay down in front of,” Wallace growled, while lambasting welfare mothers for “breeding children as a cash crop.”56 Polls taken during the spring of 1968 showed Nixon losing several percentage points to Wallace nationwide, while in the states of the Deep South, Wallace was ahead of him. Riots in the ghettos following Kennedy’s shooting only made Wallace stronger.
At the end of June, Greenspan’s polling simulations convinced him that Nixon had to confront Wallace directly, though he was careful not to advise his boss to get down in the gutter. On July 4, he counseled Nixon to calibrate his statements so that they would “be loud enough for the George Wallace leaners to hear us, yet protect ourselves from charges of distortion.”57 “I suggest that rather than follow the George approach (which RN could never effectively emulate in any event) that we turn GW’s simplisticness into ‘Amateurism,’” Greenspan wrote in another memo, three days later. “While the local sheriff approach of ‘knocking heads’ may seem an emotionally satisfying solution to any particular riot, it will not bring tranquility to the streets of the nation. It will not allow the housewife to go shopping without looking over her shoulder.”58
The following week Buchanan seized on Greenspan’s polling results. In a memo dated July 13, 1968, he focused directly on Nixon’s tactical dilemma: should he tack to the center, in an effort to steal votes from Democrats, or should he move right to siphon votes from Wallace? Nixon’s moderate advisers favored the first route, not least because Nixon’s support among Jewish and black voters languished in the single digits. But Buchanan gave the polling data a quite different spin. “All this endless talk we have been getting about RN losing unless he gets the Negro and Jewish vote is a pile of crap,” he railed. “Since 1964 the Negroes are lost to the Republicans for a generation,” he went on, referring to Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act; and “slobbering over the Israeli lobby is not going to get us anything.” If blacks and Jews mattered, it was not because Nixon could win votes from them; it was merely that “the Negro loud-mouths are given access to the public communications media by a guilt-ridden establishment—and the Jews control that communications media. We don’t want to antagonize these people—they can damage us. But they’re not our voters; and if we go after them, we’ll go down chasing a receding rainbow. The Irish, Italian, Polish Catholics of the big cities—these are our electoral majority—they, and the white Protestants of the South and Midwest and rural America.” Capping off this outburst, Buchanan advised what he had often advised before: he pleaded with the candidate to listen more to Greenspan. It was vital, he insisted, “that Alan Greenspan be instructed to analyze the results of our polls.” Evidently, Buchanan felt confident that Greenspan would support his ethnic strategy.
The morning after he fired off his memo, Buchanan set off with Greenspan for a meeting with the candidate.59 Together with several other members of the Nixon staff, they assembled at New York’s Marine Air Terminal, boarded a small chartered plane, and flew east over Long Island. Landing at East Hampton Airport, they switched to some waiting cars and drove on to Montauk, a small finger of land pointing out into the Atlantic. At the end of a winding dirt road, they reached a hilltop bungalow guarded by a pair of Secret Service men with walkie-talkies and sunglasses. More agents could be seen patrolling the scrub pine woods around the house. The visitors were shown into a glass-enclosed porch with a sparkling view out to the ocean.
Nixon entered, took a seat in an armchair, and propped his foot against a coffee table. He opened the meeting by laying down a rule: no discussion of running mates. Then he analyzed his campaign’s prospects. In his failed presidential bid in 1960, he had sewn up 96 percent of the Republican vote, and he would need to do equally well this time. But since the King funeral three months earlier, the Wallace vote among Republicans had leaped from 2 percent to 8 percent. Nixon was losing twice as many Republicans as he could afford; meanwhile, Wallace was stealing away independent voters whom Nixon also needed. In California in particular, Wallace supporters seemed likely to tip the state. If Nixon did nothing to check the insurgent, he faced electoral disaster.
Nixon went around the semicircle of advisers, a dozen or so men arranged on long couches. Each spoke for a few minutes, grappling with the question of how to attract the Wallace voter. As the Nixon speech-writer Richard Whalen later put it, intellectual voters wanted to know what the candidate thought about policy questions, but the lower-middle-class suburbanite wanted to know how the candidate felt about what he saw as moral issues. Yet if Nixon was going to show his feelings, he would have to shed his high-minded composure, and the establishment press would immediately denounce him. There was no easy solution to the candidate’s predicament.
Feeling boxed in and frustrated, Nixon let loose a stream of invective. The blacks were against him. The Jews were against him. He cursed the whole world bitterly, and for a while his advisers paused to let him vent. To most of the men gathered around the candidate, there was nothing particularly shocking about this outburst. “Look, it was a very tense time; the idea that the guy blows up . . . So what?” Buchanan shrugged later.60 But recalling this encounter years after the fact, Greenspan painted it as a turning point in his relationship with the candidate. “I saw a side of Nixon that absolutely devastated me,” Greenspan said. “I had known him for months, worked with him for months and I had never heard a four-letter word come out of his mouth. He was always in a suit, a conservative lawyer from southern California, very smart. And then I saw this guy, who spewed out four-letter words that, having been in the music business, even I hadn’t heard. And I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is a Jekyll and Hyde.’”61 The way Greenspan tells it, the meeting in Montauk decided him against taking a job in the administration after the election. “From that day forth I felt very uncomfortable and there wasn’t even the slightest attraction to going in,” he said.62 “It so disturbed me that after the election, when I was invited to join the White House staff, I said, ‘No, I much prefer to go back to my job.’”63
Nixon’s performance that Sunday in Montauk was no doubt upsetting. Greenspan was a libertarian, an egalitarian, an instinctive opponent of social prejudice of all types; it cannot have been easy to stomach Nixon’s vicious paranoia. But the idea that Greenspan made a principled decision to distance himself from Nixon is wrong. He had been perfectly happy to work closely with Buchanan, hardly a fount of racially inclusive views, and his polling analysis supported the theory that appeals to ethnic whites would be effective. Moreover, far from disengaging from the candidate in the weeks after Montauk, Greenspan redoubled his efforts to secure his election.
• • •
At the start of August 1968, Nixon descended on Miami Beach for the Republican convention. To television viewers, the setting at the Fontainebleau Hotel might have looked vaguely familiar—it was where James Bond had cheated death in the movie Goldfinger.64 The Nixon operatives installed their candidate in a nearby Hilton, commandeering the top four floors and barricading the corridors with chicken wire fences covered in campaign posters. Thanks to some lobbying by Buchanan, Greenspan was squeezed into a room at the Hilton that he shared with another staffer. He wandered the corridors with his polling simulations to hand, eager to help wherever possible. At one point, Kathryn Eickhoff flew down from New York to bring him the latest printouts from the IBM 1130.
Having refused to discuss running mates at Montauk, the candidate announced his choice at the convention. Nixon was himself a robotic campaigner—a fellow Republican described him as “a walking box of circuits”—and he was far too insecure to elevate a man who might eclipse him. Even so, Nixon’s selection made headlines for its blandness.
“I’m going to mention two words to you,” a TV reporter told unsuspecting pedestrians after the running mate had been announced. “You tell me what they mean. The words are: Spiro Agnew.”
“It’s some kind of disease,” said one man.
“It’s some kind of egg,” ventured another.
“He’s a Greek who owns that shipbuilding firm,” declared a third.
The running mate himself would not have batted an eye. “Spiro Agnew,” admitted Spiro T. Agnew, “is not a household word.”65 The Washington Post dubbed Nixon’s selection of Agnew “perhaps the most eccentric political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula named his horse a consul.”66
Greenspan was among those who regretted Nixon’s choice of running mate. He favored the hero of the right, California governor Ronald Reagan. But he was enjoying politics too much to be put off, and he was coming to understand that he must soft-pedal his conservatism. Ten days after the convention, on August 18, he became the subject of his first political newspaper profile, and it was not altogether welcome. The Washington Post columnist Hobart Rowen riffled through Greenspan’s objectivist writings, quoting the lines that dramatized his distance from America’s mainstream. “The entire structure of anti-trust statutes in this country is a jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance.” “In the absence of the gold standard there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.” “The welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society.” Rowen strung the quotations together without comment, save for a final zinger: “It is strange to find a man somewhat to the right of McKinley as a key economic adviser to the new Nixon. Or is it?”67
A few days after the Post profile appeared, it was the Democrats’ turn to stage a nominating convention. In anticipation of disturbances, seven-foot-tall barbed-wire fences surrounded the Chicago convention hall; bulletproof sheets of metal boarded up the gaps between pillars at the hall’s entrance. But none of this was quite enough. For three days and three nights, rioters taunted the police, yelling “Fuck you, LBJ,” “Sieg heil,” and “Pig, pig, fascist pig.” Thus provoked, the security men clubbed, Maced, and gassed the demonstrators, assaulting photographers and reporters for good measure.68 Nixon’s point man in Chicago, a young congressman by the name of Donald Rumsfeld, relayed the action unfolding below his hotel window. “They’re breaking bones! Omigosh, look at that!” he told Nixon’s political director by telephone.69
Nixon was delighted. To many working-class Democrats, the rioters were spoiled kids who had evaded the draft, loafed their way through college, and now traveled to Chicago to chant vulgarities at the very law enforcers who protected them. From the perspective of living rooms in small factory towns like Warren, Michigan—where one survey found only 4 percent of households thought the police had been “too rough”—such self-indulgence deserved a few good lumps; if this was what the Democratic Party had come to, they wanted nothing to do with it.70 Opinion polls quickly registered the Chicago effect—a Townsend-Greenspan simulation showed Hubert Humphrey collecting only 11 electoral votes to Nixon’s 461 in the wake of the convention.71 Just one year earlier, when Greenspan had visited Nixon at the Rose law firm, pundits were barely admitting that Republicans had a shot at recapturing the White House. Now Greenspan found himself aboard a campaign that was heading for a landslide.
The day after the Democrats wrapped up their convention, Greenspan took stock of the political landscape. In another memo to DC—the Nixon code name—he thought his way onto the candidate’s wavelength by invoking his previous presidential run in 1960. Then, Nixon’s opponent, John F. Kennedy, had called for “a hopped-up America thrusting ahead to New Frontiers,” Greenspan recalled. But now the national mood had turned. “The polls tell us that the country would like nothing better than to return to the quiescent, dull, ‘boring,’ environment of the 1950s.” Given the mood of the nation, the bland and anonymous Spiro Agnew was an inspired choice for running mate, Greenspan maintained: “Charisma and pizzazz may be heavily discounted political assets.” Nixon had positioned himself wisely as the man who could get the country back on track. “The remarkable performance of RN during the Republican Convention as a man of stability, coherence, and leadership has been quite effective,” the memo insisted.72
Greenspan had come a great distance since his memos of the previous summer. Then he had fantasized about a “return to true liberalism.” Now he was flattering the boss and parsing the polls for him. Whereas Ayn Rand had urged Barry Goldwater to stand up for libertarian principles in the fall of 1964, Greenspan now stressed that, to blunt the Democrats’ attacks, Nixon should “not imply opposition to existing special interest welfare legislation.”73 Politics dominated Greenspan’s thinking; much of his memo was devoted to positioning Nixon between Humphrey and Wallace, and to strategizing about how Nixon might carry off cosmetic shifts in his posture—shifts that would be “a matter of stress rather than content.” In mid-September, Greenspan went so far as to warn Nixon of the political risks in specific proposals to cut government spending.74 He was no longer the ideologue that Hobart Rowen imagined.
Greenspan still had one more lesson to learn, however. Not long before Election Day, a reporter quoted him as saying that Nixon “would be willing to take slightly more unemployment in the short run” for the sake of lower inflation. This doubtless reflected Greenspan’s view—his critique of the New Frontier rested on the conviction that the Democrats were trying to push unemployment down too far, a folly that would ignite inflation and fail on its own terms. True to his new political persona, and betraying his old Randian one, Greenspan quickly disowned the quotation, insisting that his words had been taken out of context.75 But the damage had been done. Humphrey seized the opening to excoriate Nixon for being willing to accept less than “full” employment. The Nixon men turned to Arthur Burns, Greenspan’s professor from Columbia, to cast his student overboard. “I can say categorically,” Burns told the Washington Post, “that this does not reflect Mr. Nixon’s position. This world of ours won’t accept anything but a full employment policy.”76
• • •
Humphrey caught up with Nixon in the lead-up to Election Day. The race was too close to call after the polls closed, and the outcome remained uncertain throughout most of the evening. Around nine o’clock the next morning, Nixon climbed out of bed in his pajamas in the campaign’s suite at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan.77 Turning on his television set, he found that the networks were calling the race in his favor; though the popular vote was remarkably close, he had won decisively in the electoral college. Having rallied resoundingly to Lyndon Johnson four years earlier, the American people had now repudiated him.
Nixon set up his transition headquarters at the Pierre in New York, the scene of Greenspan’s wedding reception sixteen years earlier. Katharine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, and the Greek royal couple were among the tenants at the Pierre, and Nixon moved into a kingly private suite with a fireplace and large French mirrors and an office with a fruitwood dining table.78 Two banquet rooms with crystal chandeliers were converted into a briefing room and workstations for the press; and in a sign that budget cuts were not necessarily at the top of Nixon’s agenda, the cost was passed along to federal taxpayers.79 Meanwhile, Nixon’s lieutenants busied themselves with the big question of the moment: which campaign adviser would land which job in the new administration.
In the days following victory, the campaign’s chief of staff dispatched a special assistant to take the temperature of key advisers. After a week, the assistant reported back. Bill Safire, one of the campaign speechwriters, wanted a role on the president’s staff: “He is quite willing and ready to sell his business to take such a position,” the assistant reported. Marty Anderson, Greenspan’s fellow libertarian, was willing to quit Columbia University: “Highly pleased with the prospect of a role in research at the White House,” the assistant’s memo noted. So it went on down the list—each campaign aide was as eager as the other. The only exception was the first name on the assistant’s note. Alan Greenspan, the assistant reported, “is basically not interested in a government position except, as he put it, one or two that would be presumptuous for him to mention. By this, I take it he means Secretary of the Treasury or Director of the Bureau of the Budget.”80 The first guess was on the mark. Looking back on this period, Kathryn Eickhoff recalls that Greenspan secretly aspired to no less a role than that of Treasury secretary.
Whatever his misgivings about Nixon, Greenspan was ready to work for him. But he was not going to Washington for just any job; his life in New York was too lucrative and fulfilling. He had run his consultancy since the age of thirty-two. Now, aged forty-two, he was happy to adapt himself to the commando atmosphere of a campaign, but he was not prepared to be a cog in the bureaucracy of government—he would have to be a big shot. The Nixon men, for their part, were not convinced that Greenspan was sufficiently reliable to be given one of the top jobs. He had offered loyal political counsel in the campaign’s last stretch; but his early libertarianism was not forgotten, and his truthful gaffe about full employment hurt him. Though he had labored mightily to turn himself into a political animal, Greenspan had begun his conversion just a little late; and Nixon had never really grown to trust him. It was a lesson that Greenspan would later take to heart as he advanced in Washington.