Prior to Watergate, journalists, scholars, and numerous politicians had predicted that Nixon would be a cautious, if not actually a "do-nothing, caretaker" president. Moreover, few listened in 1969 when he said that he intended "to begin a decade of government reform such as this nation has not witnessed in half a century." And most of us scoffed when in 1971 his speech writers came up with the grandiose phrase, "the New American Revolution," to describe his domestic programs. 1 Yet during his first term in office, Nixon actively pursued fiveareas of domestic reform: welfare, civil rights (including not only desegregation and voting rights, but also additional rights for women and , economic and environmental policy, and reorganization of the federal bureaucracy."2 Ultimately, these domestic programs may be remembered longer than his currently better known activities in the realm of foreign policy, and they may even minimize his negative Watergate image.
Nixon embarked on a systematic risk-taking course in both foreign and domestic policy that attempted to update American Federalism through government reorganization and revenue sharing, to revamp the entire welfare system with the idea of a guaranteed annual income (which he preferred to call a negative income tax), to dramatically expand spending for both environmental and social service programs, to set in promote a "grand design" for U.S. diplomacy based on the Nixon Doctrine, on devaluation of the dollar and other foreign economic policies, on ending (after widening) the war in Vietnam, and on establishing rapprochement with China and détente with the USSR.
From the moment Nixon assumed office, the liberal and radical press, many individual Democrats, and a few liberal Republicans interested in domestic reform, concentrated their attention on his personality and political ethics. They did this, not because Nixon's persona during his first years as president offended them any more than usual, but, in part, because his early substantive programs and specific domestic priorities threatened to co-opt their own positions on a number of issues. They might have endorsed or "accepted" some of these plans and ideas from a president they liked and trusted, regardless of party, but not from "Tricky Dick."
In some instances, blatantly ignoring facts that normally would have made such legislative and administrative innovations appealing to them, Nixon's long-standing opponents refused to support certain of his domestic programs, even though they represented, according to Daniel Patrick [Pat] Moynihan, the "natural constituency" for most of his domestic policies. If Nixon's domestic reforms were often opposed, as political scientist Paul J. Halpern has noted, by those who "never even bothered to get the facts straight,"3 it may well have been because many liberals simply could not believe that Nixon would ever do the right thing except for the wrong reason. Thus, they seldom took the time to try to determine whether any of his efforts to make the 1970s a decade of reform were legitimate, however politically motivated. Consequently, they never accepted him in the role of a catalyst for domestic reform.
The country had elected only one other Republican president since the onset of FDR's reform administrations over thirty years earlier. Consequently, due to the vacuum created by the breakdown in the New Deal consensus, Nixon faced unprecedented opportunities for changing domestic. He also faced the traditional problems of presidential governance; in this instance, exacerbated by bureaucratic pockets of resistance from an unusual number of hold-over Democrats. Such resistance was not new, but its magnitude was particularly threatening to a distrusted Republican president who did not control either house of Congress.
Another problem both Nixon's legislative and administrative attempts at domestic reform encountered was the fact that initially his advisers could not agree on how to present a package program to the public and Congress. Although reform became the "watchword" of the administration by the end of 1969 no one, including the president was satisfied with the way in which publicity and coordination of his domestic reform program had been handled. This is different from saying that Nixon had no coherent domestic program, as many still do. His interregnum task forces permitted him to hit the ground running on several different domestic reforms as his comprehensive address to the nation on August 8, 1969 indicated. That he did not have this in place by his first hundred days in office, is often unfavorably compared with Franklin Roosevelt, who faced a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1933 and a Congress more willing by to deal with Great Depression on an emergency basis. That there was little coherence (or as it turned, consistency) to FDR's initial New Deal legislation, is usually forgotten by those making this comparison. Yet even Nixon worried about reaching his first hundred days in office without conveying to the public a coordinated domestic program. Typically, Nixon's concern over the failure to convince Congress and the public about his comprehensive reform program stemmed from a more fundamental worry that it would hurt the image of the United States abroad and thus negatively reflect on his major concern—foreign policy.4
To counter the built-in partisan opposition, particularly to his legislative, as opposed to administrative, actions for reform Nixon began to cajole his staff March and April, 1969, about setting harder deadlines for suggestions about domestic programs, about ways to incorporated constructive Congressional ideas into such programs, and, most importantly, about coordinating publicity on domestic issues. To this end an informal team, known as the "Five O'Clock Group," began meeting daily in Haldeman's office to discuss various the next day's publicity opportunities and public relations problems in general. Their suggestions ranged from persuading Cabinet members to be more "passionate" about administrative policies to writing letters and making complaint calls about unfavorable comments by columnists, television commentators and even those made on satirical television programs like the Smothers Brothers. The "Five O'Clock Group" was apparently composed of Haldeman (or his representative), Raymond Price, Dwight Chapin, and various representatives from both the press and legislative divisions within the White House.5
In talking about his domestic initiatives with me, Nixon insisted that all of them reflected his own background and association with the progressive wing of the Republican party.6 Aside from the improbability of such an assertion, his domestic reforms were far from conservative by Republican or Democratic standards. When I asked him what he considered his most important achievements in domestic policy, he singled out his success in desegregating southern schools and his Supreme Court appointments (Warren E. Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William H. Rehnquist), still insisting that Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr. would have been his best choice had he been approved by the Senate, neglecting to mention that this nomination demonstrated his handling of relations with Congress at their worst. Nixon also included on his list of significant "firsts": his initiatives on the environment and space, and his declared (and well financed) wars against cancer, illegal drugs, and hunger.7
Ignoring all of his Supreme Court nominees, Nixon closest aides usually placed revenue sharing and environmental and land-use policies higher on the list of his domestic achievements than the former president did himself. According to John Ehrlichman, this continuing difference of opinion arose from the fact that Nixon paid more personal attention during his first term to those domestic issues with "political juice," such as cancer research, labor legislation, drugs, crime, taxes, desegregation, and welfare, than he did to economic matters involving revenue sharing, housing, hunger, transportation, and consumer protection, or environmental and general health concerns. On those "gut" issues that Nixon considered "potent political medicine," he became actively involved in policy formulation; the rest he delegated to others, especially Ehrlichman—even the controversial subjects of campus unrest and antiwar demonstrations.8
As for his domestic mistakes, Nixon told me wage and price controls, which he said he only supported at the time because it looked as though Congress would take this initiative to control inflation if the White House did not, and the automatic cost of living adjustments (COLA) for Social Security recipients. He said that COLAs made sense at the time but not in light of the run-away inflation after he left office.9 Of course, many have logically claimed that wiretaps, the creation of the "plumbers" unit within the White House to plug information leaks and ultimately conduct break-ins, the harassment of individuals on an "enemies" list, and even the mere consideration of the "Houston Plan" for institutionalizing surveillance of suspect groups and individuals were all domestic mistakes.10 While such activities cannot be constitutionally or morally justified, my research has shown that most of them originated in connection with Nixon's foreign, not domestic, policies and therefore are not specifically relevant to his federal reform programs, except that such key White House political aides as Ehrlichman were intimately involved with many of these domestic covert activities, as well as with several positive domestic reforms.
Nixon remained personally convinced, however, that supporters of environmental legislation could be divided into two groups: those who were actually opposed to private enterprise and those who were not. When it came down to "a flat choice between smoke and jobs," Nixon privately and publicly made no bones about favoring jobs and a strong economy. Instinctively he never became an environmentalist; pragmatically, however, he did. As a result, Nixon always insisted that OMB's cost-benefit analysis be brought to bear on EPA's decisions as well as on other executive branch agencies—a practice environmental activists still hold against him. He continues to believe that the unusually detailed recommendations he made in his first State of the Union address in January 1970 represented a "moderate" position designed to appeal to the second procapitalist group of environmentalists. In this message he called for $10 billion for cleaning the country's water supplies and stricter air pollution regulations. Subsequently Nixon made thirty-six environmental proposals and proclaimed the first Earth Week in April 1971.11
By the summer of 1971 the New York Times was praising Nixon for having evolved into an environmentalist. Indeed, the Clean Air Act of 1970 which the administration supported remains the "most controversial and far reaching effort to control air pollution." Other environmental legislation supported by the administration (as a result of Ehrlichman's and Whitaker's inside cajoling included: oil spill, pesticide anti-ocean dumping, noise control, and state coastal zone management. There were only two flaws in Nixon's pro-environmental stance and both are still typically remembered while his positive record which "has yet to be improved upon by any president," must be resurrected from Watergate dimmed memories.12
The first major area in which Nixon did not appear to fully support EPA actions concerned obtaining compliance from the big four automobile companies for emission control standards. The second flaw usually cited in Nixon's environmental record was his veto of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 and attempt to impound appropriated by Congress under this legislation.
With considerably less pressure than environmentalists, African-American and women's groups brought to bear on him, Nixon endorsed an enlightened self-determination policy for Native American Indians that changed the direction of policy as continued from the New Deal through the Great Society.
Until Nixon's administration national policy had followed primarily an integrationist approach aimed at terminating tribal ties. After appointing Louis R. Bruce, a Mohawk in favor of self-determination, as commissioner of Indian affairs, Nixon quickly moved to change federal Indian policy by declaring in a special message to Congress on July 8, 1970, that the federal government would assist Indians in pursuing "Self-determination. . . without the threat of eventual termination." In this address the president assured "the Indian that he [could] assume control over his own life without being separated involuntarily from the tribal group."13
Nixon's determination to strengthen the Indians' sense of autonomy without threatening their sense of community became even more evident when he asked Congress to repeal the 1953 House Concurrent Resolution which had endorsed integration at the expense of self-determination. Ironically, this legislation dated from the time Nixon had been vice president. As president, however, he effectively ended the policy of forced termination of tribal status and turned over more decisions about Indian policies to the elected tribal governments, and appeared to have lived up to earlier praise from Bruce Willkie, the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), who said in the fall of 1970 that Nixon was "the first U.S. President since George Washington to pledge that the government will honor obligations to the Indian tribes." Around the same time Navajo tribal head Peter MacDonald, one of the few Native American Republicans, declared that Nixon should "be viewed as the Abraham Lincoln of the Indian people."14
Nixon's official reversal of federal Indian policy ultimately led to the enactment of a number of bills which strengthened tribal autonomy and land claims. Most prominent among them were returning in 1970 the sacred Blue Lake to the people of Taos Pueblo; negotiating the federal agreement in 1971 with the Florida Miccosukee tribe, one of the least assimilated groups in the United States, acknowledging its right to control its own affairs; restoring the previously terminated Menominee Tribe to federally-recognized status (the Menominee Restoration Act of December 22, 1973).15
Instead of reacting punitively to increased Indian militancy on the part of young "Red Power" militants who took over Alcatraz Island in 1969, Wounded Knee in 1973, and caused $1.5 million dollars in damage at the Bureau of Indian Affairs' (BIA) national headquarters in 1972 and 1973, Nixon increased the budget of the BIA by 214 percent and requested a total, all-agency budget of $1.2 billion for Indian affairs in fiscal year 1973, an increase of $300 million in two years. Funds for improving the health of American Indians doubled during his first term in office. In addition to intervening on behalf of Native Americans in land disputes, Nixon initiated, and Congress passed, legislation strengthening existing tribal governments, restoring previously terminated tribal status, and financing tribal commercial development. For example, his administration established the first special office of Indian Water Rights; signed a bill authorizing the Secretary of Agriculture to make direct and insured loans to Indian tribes though the Farmers Home Administration; fostered tribal commercial development through the Indian Financing Act of 1974; made special arrangements for presenting to any federal court the Trust Council's position defending Indian natural resources rights; filed a landmark Supreme Court suit to protect Indian rights in Pyramid Lake; and pledged that all available BIA funds to arranged to fit priorities set by tribal governments themselves.16
Even though passage of the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act occurred after Nixon had resigned as president, it remains a testimony to the fact that he, indeed, had set in motion much more than his own "New Deal" for Native American Indians—many of whom viewed this measure, which finally provided for direct contracting between the tribes and the federal government to administer former BIA programs, as the most significant piece of legislation since the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.
Nixon's far-sighted attempts at welfare reform provided him with his first disillusioning experience as president in the areas of government reorganization and bureaucratic policy making. What he thought he learned turned him away from cabinet government in pursuit of a corporate presidency. The president's failure to restructure the welfare system made him all the more determined to restructure the entire executive branch of government. In this sense the demise of welfare reform became an impetus for general reorganization of the federal bureaucracy.
The final defeat of Nixon's Family Assistance Program (FAP) in the Senate in 1972, however, led to some very impressive examples of incremental legislation that may not have come to pass had it not been for the original boldness of FAP. Congress finally approved, for example, Supplementary Security Income (SSI) on October 17, 1972 even though this had originally been included in his August 8, 1969 major address on domestic programs, including his welfare proposals. Unlike FAP, SSI sailed through Congress even though it also represented the Nixonian idea of federalizing part of the U.S. welfare system and posed many administrative problems because it would replace existing state and local programs.(This program did not go into effect until January 1, 1974 and by that time had been modified several times by Congress largely to protect Medicaid recipients from loss of eligibility because of changes in other government assistance programs.)17 SSI constituted a guaranteed annual income for the aged, blind, and disabled.
The passage of SSI and the defeat of FAP can only be explained in negative political terms. First, it offered some immediate relief to states with budget problems. Second, the aged, blind, and disabled were more "deserving" in the minds of Congressmen than welfare mothers. Finally, SSI attracted little publicity and was not touted as a "welfare reform" or a guaranteed annual income.18 An added bitter pill to those who believed FAP was the fact that the Senate before delivering a coup de grace to welfare reform in October 1972 had passed new legislation requiring AFDC mothers "upon penalty of loss of benefits" to register for work when her children were old enough to go to school. This work requirement (so disputed by all sides in the FAP debate) went into effect July 1, 1972—four months before the same Senate killed FAP. Clearly, partisan politics prevailed to the detriment of America's poor.
The demise of FAP also led Nixon to support uniform application of the food stamp program across the United States,19 better health insurance programs for low-income families, increased federal funding for students from low-income families, and automatic cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) for social security recipients to help them cope with inflation.
In addition to successful legislation that federalized aid to the old and handicapped, and the COLA for social security, the Nixon administration succeeded in expanding aid to education, through revenue sharing programs, the creation of the National Student Loan Association to aid students from low income families attend colleges and universities, a Career Education Program to aid community college in teaching "critically needed skills, and finally through the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities. When Nixon's increased funding for elementary and secondary beginning with the Education Amendments of 1972 are added to Nixon's other social welfare spending programs the percentage of such expenditures increased from 49 percent of the GNP 1965 to almost 60% in 1975.20
From the first to the last budget for which the Nixon administration was responsible; that is, from 1970 through 1975, spending on all human resource programs exceeded spending for defense for the first time since the Second World War. Funding for social welfare services under Nixon grew from $55 billion in 1970 to almost $132 billion in 1975 making him (not President Johnson) the "last of the big spenders" on domestic programs. This represented an increase from 28 percent of all federal outlays to 40.4 percent, compared to a decrease in defense spending in the same period from 40 percent of all federal outlays (or $78.6 billion) to 26.2 percent (or 85.6 billion).21
Perhaps the domestic area in which Watergate dimmed or skewed memories of the Nixon years more than anywhere else was civil rights. This is understandable because in the course of his one-and-one-half terms in office many in the country became rightly concerned with the violation of the civil rights of those the administration deemed "enemies," especially antiwar demonstrators and others suspected of opposing the its policies. However, long before investigations brought these actual and rumored violations to light, few wanted to give Nixon, who appeared to wear so uncomfortably the affirmative-action mantle of LBJ, any benefit of the doubt on this issue. Yet he proved an unexpected agent for change even in this most difficult area of domestic reform.
Most Americans have long since forgotten, or never bothered to check, that as vice president Richard Nixon had been a stronger supporter of civil rights in the 1950s than either Eisenhower, Kennedy or Johnson. When he presided over the Senate his rulings consistently favored those who opposed the use of filibusters to block civil rights legislation and he chaired a committee on government contracts that oversaw enforcement of nondiscrimination provisions of government contracts, recommending in his final report the establishment of "a positive policy of nondiscrimination" by employers which he later supported as president. Nixon told me that he supported civil rights for blacks and equal rights for women not because it would "help" members of either group, but because "it was fair" and good for the nation because it prevented "wasted talent."22
Enforcement of school desegregation had already been painfully sluggish since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), decision. By 1968 only twenty percent of black children in the South attended predominately white schools and none of this progress had taken place under Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy. Moreover, the most dramatic improvement under Johnson's administration did not take place until 1968 because HEW deadlines for desegregating southern schools were postponed four times by LBJ following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. However, by the spring of 1968 a few lower court rulings and finally the Supreme Court decision in Green v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 438 (1968), no longer offered any president the luxury of arguing that freedom-of-choice plans were adequate for rooting out racial discrimination or that de facto segregation caused by residential pattern was not as unconstitutional as de jure segregation brought about state or local laws.23
Despite the bitterness of the battle in Congress and between Congress and the Executive Branch after Swann, the administration found itself forced into a somewhat impressive statistical record on school desegregation. In 1968, for example, sixty-eight percent of all black children in the south attended all-black schools and forty percent of black children in the entire nation attended all-black schools. By the end of 1972, eight percent of southern black children attended all-black schools and a little less than twelve percent nationwide.24 Comparative budget outlays are equally revealing. President Johnson expended $911 million for civil rights activities, including $75 million for civil rights enforcement during the 1969 fiscal year. For the fiscal year 1973 the Nixon administration's budget called for $2.6 billion in total civil rights outlays, of which $602 million was earmarked for enforcement through a substantially strengthened Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).25
Although the EEOC was specifically created to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it took over a decade to make the commission effective. During that time, administrative guidelines evolved for enforcing affirmative action. Two Johnson administration executive orders were particularly important. In 1965 Executive Order No. 11246 prohibited racial, religious, and alienage employment discrimination by federal contractors, and in 1967 Executive Order No. 11375 added sex to this list. Executive Order No. 11478 issued by Nixon in 1969 strongly exhorted federal agencies "to establish and maintain an affirmative action program of equal employment opportunity for all civilian employees," and during his administration the EEOC conducted the first compliance reviews of hiring policies toward women by institutions of higher education receiving federal grants. By August 1972 over 350 sex discrimination suits had been brought against such schools across the country.26
While Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had employed the term "affirmative action," it "did not have much bite" until the Nixon administration announced a revised "Philadelphia Plan" in 1969 requiring federal contractors in the construction industry to hire minority workers. Secretary of Labor George Shultz later extended this plan to nine other cities. Shultz also issued the first guidelines requiring businesses with federal contracts to draw up "action plans" for hiring and promoting women.27 In other words, not until the Nixon administration did "affirmative action" begin to become synonymous with "civil rights." When the Rehnquist court decided in City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson, 109 S. Ct. 706 (1989) that "set asides" for minority construction workers were unconstitutional, much to the surprise of most Americans, legal specialists recalled that they had been initiated with the Philadelphia Plan twenty years earlier by the Nixon administration.
General revenue sharing became the most popular and substantive form of Nixon's New Federalism. The 1972 State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act set up a program for matching federal and state funds through revenue sharing that ultimately distributed $83 billion to states and local government units between 1972 and 1986 ($16 billion or almost one fifth under Nixonian budgets for 1973 through 1975). This bonanza to governors and mayors in the long run "helped to build the modern Republican party." At the time, it also played an extremely important political role in reconciling Nixon with Nelson Rockefeller and with other recalcitrant and skeptical individual GOP governors and mayors, except for Ronald Reagan in California, who opposed this new spending program then and later as president.
Most importantly, by 1972 the EEOC staff had risen from 359 in 1969 to 1,640 and its budget from $13.2 million to $29.5 million. Nixon's civil rights enforcement budget for fiscal 1973 represented an eight-fold increase over Johnson's for fiscal 1969. Enforcement funds for fiscal 1974 doubled those of 1972 with the EEOC budget increasing from $20.8 million to $43 million and the budget for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department increasing from $10.7 million to $17.9 million.28 These figures confirm that the Nixon administration put money into civil rights enforcement although its mouth was not always on the cutting edge of this controversial issue.
Nixon's support for small businesses dates back the creation of the Small Business Administration (SBA) under Eisenhower. While campaigning for his party's nomination 1969 he wrote to the president of the National Association of Small Business Investment Companies reiterating his commitment to "to closing the small business equity gap" and praising the success of the SBA.Despite the SBA's bad reputation for mismanagement and defaulted loans,29 it was Nixon's belief in its purpose that apparently led him to expand the concept to include "blacks, Mexican-Americans, Puerto-Ricans, [Native American] Indians, and others," with the creation of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) by Executive Order 11458 in March 1969.
The Office of Minority Business Enterprise may have generated too much grassroots expectation that went unfulfilled in the short run increased the cynicism of civil rights leaders during Nixon's first term in office, but as with desegregation of southern schools the statistical results are impressive considering that the first year-and-one-half of OMBE's existence was largely "exhortational." By mid-1972 before Stans left the Commerce Department to head Nixon's re-election campaign, he had established over fifty SBICS, largely with corporate funding of $18 million. By fiscal 1974 the budget for OMBE increased to $242.2 or 3000 percent.
Independent 1981 surveys by Nuestro Business Review and Black Enterprise "showed that 45 of the top 100 Latino businesses had been formed between 1969 and 1976" indicated that 56 of the top 100 black firms had been established "between 1969 and 1976, 30 of them in the years of 1969 through 1971 when the federal minority enterprise program was being launched." In 1985, one thousand black businessmen (and women) gave a testimonial dinner in honor of Nixon and Stans for establishing the OMBE (now the Minority Development Agency.
Except for abortion and the ERA (which he had always supported more strongly before becoming president), on other women's questions Nixon proved much more liberal than expected. During the Nixon first term, for example, Congress approved the Equal Employment Opportunity Act; Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, and prohibiting sex discrimination by educational institutions receiving federal aid. Nixon personally insisted that Congress broaden the U.S. Civil Rights Commission mandate to include sex discrimination and amend the 1971 Revenue Act making child care expenses tax deductible when both parents worked. In addition, Congress attached a number of antisex discrimination provisions to such federally supported programs as health training, revenue sharing, Appalachian redevelopment, and environmental protection—all of which Nixon approved.30
Underneath these invigorated civil and political rights programs several facts stand out. The Nixon administration 1) desegregated southern schools; 2) significantly increased funding for the enforcement of both group and individual civil rights; 3) achieved court approval of goals in hiring practices rather than quotas; and 4) clearly transformed the power and responsibility for civil rights to a court-enforced approach based on recommendations of permanent government affirmative agencies within the executive branch. That these achievements did not endear Nixon to conservatives of either party goes without saying, and like his welfare program, they also did not ingratiate him with Democratic liberals, civil rights leaders, or union leaders in the North. While scholars differ on the reasons why, there is no denying, as with desegregation of southern schools and public institutions, that Nixon improved civil and political rights for women and minorities far outweighed those of his predecessors, belying the "divisive public rhetoric" his administration employed in the process.31
Nixon remains the only modern president whose personality, rhetoric, and image can be used with impunity to dismiss or ignore his concrete achievements, especially in the area of expanding civil rights enforcement in particular, and domestic reform in general. Like most modern presidents, some of his positions on these issues were determined as much, if not more, by his choice of advisers, than his own views or personality or personal views. Nowhere is this more evident than with respect to Nixon's radical domestic proposal for reforming the welfare system of the United States. All his Republican and Democratic successors in the Oval Office from Ford through Bush, Jr., including Carter and Clinton, were all more conservative on domestic reform than the thirty-seventh president of the United States—Richard Nixon.
The negative perceptions regarding Richard Nixon personally, as well as many of his international and national initiatives, have gone through several stages since August 1974 when he became the only president in U.S. history to resign from office. At first liberals, in particular, and Democrats, in general, had a heyday castigating the former president for fulfilling their dire prophecy about him as the most evil, venal, lying, potentially dictatorial aberration ever to occupy the White House. In the course of the 1980s, this Watergate view of Nixon, which ostracized him from mainstream politics, began to be replaced by a more nostalgic view of the man—not among mainstream Republicans who, if anything, became more conservative under Reagan and Bush, Sr. than Nixon ever thought of being—but among some of his long-standing left-of-center opponents. Finding themselves in a state of disarray over how to combat the conservative backlash of the 1980s—the length and depth of which they had not foreseen in 1974 when Nixon resigned in disgrace—many liberals began openly praising his legacy of "rational and systematic pursuit of a new world order," and wishing that they had his farsighted domestic legislation, especially on welfare and environmental issues, "to kick around" again.32 Almost thirty years after his resignation, Nixon's progressive stance on many of the country's domestic problems remained one of most positive aspects of his administration, as both parties moved far to the right of his reforms on social service spending and affirmative action.
Read Fred Graboske's response.
ENDNOTES
1. Ramparts, November 17, 1968, p. 35 (first quotation); Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1969, p. 14; April 30, 1969, p. 1; National Review, February 25, 1969, pp. 159-160. For the origins and use of these political slogans see: Richard P. Nathan, The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), pp. 17, 32 (ftnt. 5), 98, 100 (ftnt. 2); Public Papers of the Presidents: Richard Nixon, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970), p. 789 (second quotation); and 1971 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 95 (third quotation. The refusal of liberals or radicals to give his domestic programs any credence at the time is best represented in Alan Gartner, Colin Greer, and Frank Riessman, eds., What Nixon is Doing to Us (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
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2. In addition to Nathan cited above, few scholars gave Nixon credit for significant domestic reform. The only survey of Nixon's domestic reforms did not appear until 1991. Unfortunately, with the exception of my article on welfare and Hugh Graham's on civil rights, none of the articles in this collection are based on original research from documents in the Nixon Presidential Papers because the articles were first presented at the 1987 conference less than a year after these papers began to be released. See, Leon Friedman and William F. Levantrosser, eds., Richard M. Nixon: Politician, President, Administrator, (New York: Greenwood, 1991).
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3. Unpublished paper by Paul J. Halpern, "Personality, Politics and the Presidency—The Strange Case of Richard Nixon," dated August 1, 1973, in the Fawn M. Brodie Papers, Marriott Library, Special Collections Department, University of Utah, Salt Lake, Utah.
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4. Nixon to Ehrlichman, October 10, 1969 (expressing concern about the foreign perception of U.S domestic policy), President's Personal Files [PPF], White House Special Files [WHSP], Nixon Presidential Material [NPM], National Archives and Records Administration [NARA], Alexandria, Virginia.
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5. Meeting of "Five O'Clock Group," April 13,14, 1969, Haldeman Notes, Box 43; Nixon to Ehrlichman, January 25, February 5, March 1, March 13, 1969 Nixon to Ehrlichman, Arthur Burns, Bryce Harlow, March 12, 1969, Nixon to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, April 14, 1969, PPF, WHSF, NPM, NARA. John Taylor, administrative assistant to the expresident until 1990, to author, November 29, 1969.
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6. Author's interview with Richard Nixon, January 26, 1983. As early as 1958 Nixon said essentially the same thing to Stewart Alsop. A portion of that interview can be found in the Saturday Evening Post, July 12, 1958. The entire unedited transcript is in Box 42, Brodie Papers.
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7. Author's interview with Nixon, January 26, 1983. Recently released documents about his Supreme Court appointments can be found in The Nixon Presidential Materials Project [NPM], White House Central Files [WHCF], Subject Files: Federal Government [FG] - Organizations, [EX]ecutive FG 51A Boxes 3 and 4, National Archives and Records Agency, Alexandria, Virginia [hereafter cited as Boxes, EX FG 51A, WHCF, NPM, NARA].
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8. Author's interview with John Ehrlichman, April 9, 1984; and John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 207-208. In 1972, Nixon's own list of "gut issues" was much smaller than it had been in 1969, including only "cost of living, busing, drug abuse, and possibly tax reform as it relates to property taxes." See Nixon, Memoirs, p. 671.
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9. Author's interview with Nixon, January 26, 1983.
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10. Schell, Time of Illusion, pp. 111-116. For Nixon's rationale of the "Houston Plan," see: Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 473-476.
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11. William Safire, Before the Fall, p. 592 (first quotation); DuBridge to Nixon, February, n.d., 1969, Author's interviews with Nixon and Raymond Price, January 26, 1983; and Wicker, One of Us, pp. 508-514. Memoranda on the increasing political importance of the environment are concentrated in Box 4, Whitaker Files, SMOF, WHCF, NPM, NARA.
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12. New York Times, July 13, 1971, p. 33, July 20, 1971, p. 12; Wicker, One of Us, p. 511 (first quotation), 518 (last quotation); and "Nixon's First Four Years," Press Release, December 14, 1972, Box 19, POF, WHSF, NPM, NARA.
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13. Nixon Public Papers, 1969, pp. 564-76 (quotations at 566); New York Times, July 12, 1970, p. 4; U.S. News and World Report, September 14, 1970; Commonweal, September 4, 1970, p. 432. In general Nixon's recently released papers are excellent on Indian policy. See: Boxes 1-3, [Ex]ecutive Indians Affairs, [EX IN], and Boxes 8, 14, 75-76, Bradley H. Patterson, Jr. Files, SMOF, WHCF, NARA, NPM.
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14. "White House Fact Sheet," August 18, 1972, Finch Papers; Willkie quoted in U.S. News and World Report, September 14, 1970, p. 700; and Kilberg to Nixon, November 16, 1970, MacDonald quoted in Garment to Nixon, November 20, 1970, EX IN, Box 1, WHCF, NPM, NARA.
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15. New York Times, June 13, 1971, p. 111, December 3, 1970, pp. 1, 40, December 16, 1970, p. 25; and Wicker, One of Us, p. 520.
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16. "White House Fact Sheet," August 18, 1972, Finch Papers; Garment to Dennis J. Banks, October 12, 1972, EX IN, Box 2, WHCF, NPM, NARA; and New York Times, April 14, 1970, p. 18, July 12, 1970, sec. 4, p.3; Washington Post, August 23, 1973, p. G7; U.S. News and World Report, September 14, 1970, p. 68. See also, Raymond V. Butler, "The Bureau of Indian Affairs; Activities Since 1945," The Annals (March, 1978), pp. 50-60; Vine Deloria, Jr., "Legislation and Litigation Concerning American Indians," The Annals 436 (March, 1978), pp. 86-90.
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17. Nixon, Public Papers, 1969, p. 640; and Congress and the Nation 1973-1976 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1977), 4:408.
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18. Patterson, The Welfare State, pp. 35-36.
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19. Food stamp appropriations increased from $610 million in 1970 to $2.5 million in 1973, although if the 1971 version of Nixon's FAP had passed it called for giving cash payments to welfare recipients instead of food stamps. See, Congress and the Nation (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1973), 3:628.
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20. For details see Carl Lieberman, "Legislative Success and Failure: The Social Welfare Policies of the Nixon Administration," in Friedman and Levantrosser, eds., Richard Nixon, pp. 113-115, 118-120; and Alfred M. Skolnick and Sophie R. Dales, "Social Welfare Expenditures, 1950-1975," Social Security Bulletin, 39 (January 1976): 6, 12.
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21. Jodie T. Allen, "Last of the Big Spenders: Richard Nixon and the Greater Society," The Washington Post, February 24, 1984, p. A15; Total Federal Outlays, Defense Expenditures, and Defense as Percent of Total Federal Outlays—U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1975 (96th edition.) (Washington, D.C.: 1975), p. 314; Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1979 (100th edition.) Washington, D.C.: 1979, p. 364; Transfer Payments—Special Analyses, Budget of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 1975 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), p. 13; and Special Analyses, Budget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 1977 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 31.
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22. A. James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981), pp. 174-175; President's Committee on Government Contracts, Final Report to President Eisenhower, Pattern for Progress (Washington, D.C., 1960), p. 18; and author's interview with Nixon, January 26, 1983.
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23. Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 151; Washington Post, July 4, 1972, pp. A11-12; Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change, pp. 176-178.
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24. Statistical Abstract of the U.S., p. 151.
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25. "White House Fact Sheet," August 18, 1972, Finch Papers.
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26. Ibid.; Federal Register, 34: 12985.
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27. Samuel H. Beer, "In Search of a New Public Philosophy," in King, editor, New American Political System, p. 35 (quotation); "White House Fact Sheet," August 18, 1972, Finch Papers; and Nathan, Plot That Failed, p. 16.
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28. "First Four Years," Press Release, December 4, 1972, Box 19, POF, WHCF, NPM, NARA; and Business Week, March 24, 1973, pp. 74-75.
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29. Nixon to Elliot Davis, NASBIC president, July 11, 1968, Finch Papers; Garment to Nixon, April 20, 1970, Box 2, EX HU2, WHCF, NPM, NARA; Washington Post, June 8, 1981, p. C15 (Jack Anderson column); and Graham, Civil Rights Era, p. 314.
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30. "Nixon's First Four Years," Press Release, December 14, 1972, Box 19, POF, WHSF, NPM, NARA.
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31. Graham, Civil Rights Era, p. 445-449, 475 (quotation).
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32. Jodie T. Allen, "Last of the Big Spenders," Washington Post, February 24, 1983, p. A15.
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