Nixon Knew Best The GOP Gets Out Its Cloth Coat

It’s time to think about Richard M. Nixon again--and not just because the most enduring major politician of late 20th-Century America is returning to his native California and the national spotlight for the dedication of the Nixon Library this week. There is a growing sense, after the Reagan decade of mink coats, leveraged buyouts, Scaasi gowns, junk bonds and J.R. Ewing socioeconomics, that maybe it is time for both U.S. politics and GOP culture to re-embrace Middle America, cloth coats, Joe Six-Pack and policies that play in Peoria. Corny as they were, those were Nixon’s themes.

Too many Americans have forgotten the enormous difference between Nixon, whose political career relentlessly invoked his own middle-class origins and loyalties, and Ronald Reagan, who hit the 91% top income-tax bracket in Hollywood during World War II--and shifted his economic allegiances as he shifted financial altitude.

Reagan campaigned against welfare queens, saying government wasn’t the solution, it was the problem; Nixon--perhaps naively--spent the second year of his presidency working with now Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) on a guaranteed annual income for the poor. The Reagan Administration, pursuing survival-of-the-fittest ideologies, gave rise to America’s most overt homelessness wave since the Depression; in 1989, Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said, “the Nixon Administration was the most important in advancing the anti-hunger fight in America” because of its efforts in the food-stamp program.

At the same time, the national GOP--the people and beliefs in the White House--has changed far more than rank-and-file Republicans realize. The “New Majority” and “Forgotten American” sociology of the Nixon years gave way to the Midwestern Rotary and Big 10 Alumni Assn. Republicanism of Gerald R. Ford. That, in turn, gave way to the nouveau-riche glitz and stretch limousines of the Reagan Era and, now, to the tennis-and-trust fund, old-money Episcopalian culture of George and Barbara Bush. The Forgotten American seems, once again, a dim memory.

Over the last four years, Nixon has clearly re-emerged from--although hardly overcome--the disgrace of Watergate. Sixteen years after his 1974 resignation, his picture is back on the cover of the news magazines. Despite the implicit--or explicit--moral caveats, his foreign-policy skills draw bipartisan admiration and his analyses of global events are solicited before those of Ford, Jimmy Carter and Reagan.

Transcending Watergate has been far easier for Nixon in diplomacy and international relations, where Realpolitik reigns supreme, than in domestic policy. Yet he is probably getting some help from historical revisionism.

The 16 years since Nixon’s resignation have not been kind to the political morals and techniques of Nixon’s two Democratic predecessors--John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The latter, in particular, has been recently savaged--perhaps over-abused--by biographer Robert Caro for skulduggery and campaign practices that make Nixon look like a boy scout. And John F. Kennedy, while in the White House, was so confident of being beyond scrutiny that he shared a girlfriend with mobster Sam Giancana--and her autobiography details more than one example of political malpractice. None of this exculpates Nixon or suggests that three straight “Imperial Presidency” wrongs make a right. But it takes some edge off.

Nixon’s role in beginning a new political cycle is also relevant. Even before America’s 1990s chagrin over everything from greed to savings-and-loan scandals scraped further luster off the Reagan presidency, it was clear that Nixon had been the principal architect of the GOP White House cycle that began in 1968, and continues today. The Presidents who have come into office at similar political and historical watersheds engaged in some of America’s harshest legal and institutional confrontations.

Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, to name two, took extreme measures that brought charges ranging from unlawful behavior to unconstitutional action and even dictatorship. Lincoln, to deal with the Civil War, suspended citizens’ right of habeas corpus, while Roosevelt, incensed that his key regulatory legislation was held unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, tried to pack that court. Had either of these embattled leaders faced an opposition Congress--along with an angry press--they, too, might have been confronted with impeachment proceedings. And the disorders Nixon faced in 1971-72--riots and distemper reaching from inner cities and campus quadrangles to the Washington Mall--were not much short of a second Civil War. Partly because he did face an opposition Congress, Nixon’s watershed claimed a President.

But it didn’t stop the cycle. By the end of Bush’s term, the GOP will have held the presidency for 20 of the 24 years since Nixon was sworn in. This puts Nixon in the category--however much academicians will cringe--occupied by the other political cycle-starters of U.S. history: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, William McKinley and Roosevelt. Nixon doesn’t put himself on this kind of list--because Watergate did happen and he can never escape it. Yet the parallels are real, because only these Presidents--along with Nixon--saw their parties take sweeping control of the White House for most of the next quarter century.

Another intriguing aspect is how Nixon fits in not only with the beginning of the post-1968 GOP era, but with its possible wind-down in this decade. The record of how Republicans have shaped new presidential cycles beginning in 1860, 1896 and 1968 has involved little-understood national unity themes. That is because the Republicans, with their middle-class commercial nationalism, seemed better able to stand for the interests of the United States. Democrats allied themselves with cultural and regional peripheries--the Southern slaveocracy in 1860, the agrarian populist movement of 1896 and the campus dissidents, urban rioters and anti-war demonstrators of 1968. Nixon’s election that year, and reelection in 1972, brought victory for these broader interests--even though he was forced out of office in 1974.

Nixon’s watershed politics were also apparent on another dimension: anti-elitism. America’s realignment Presidents have often had to fight elites, be they Dixie planters or Philadelphia bankers, and Nixon was no exception. From the beginning of his political career, winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946, Nixon fought or offended cultural and foreign-policy elites: by his actions against Ivy Leaguer and accused spy Alger Hiss in the late 1940s; the middle-class “cloth coat” appeal in his famous 1952 “Checkers” speech; his late 1960s criticism of the “Eastern Liberal Establishment” and foreign-policy elite for their loss of nerve in Vietnam; and his calls for shaping a “new Establishment” in the 1972 election. What is less understood is his kindred skepticism of economic elites and of conservatives who oppose a regulatory role for the federal government.

While Reagan pushed sharp tax-bracket reduction for upper-income groups during the 1980s, that was not Nixon’s sentiment during his years in office. Reagan wanted to re-enact the Roaring ‘20s boom under Calvin Coolidge, and he hung Coolidge’s picture in the White House. Nixon, by contrast, recalls in his latest book, “In the Arena,” that his shopkeeper father voted for Robert M. La Follette, the third-party Progressive presidential candidate, in 1924, because he thought Coolidge was too much for the rich.

This has been a recurrent feature late in GOP presidential cycles. Broader, earlier loyalties erode as Republican capitalist ideology goes into overdrive. The Reagan ‘80s, like the Coolidge ‘20s, were heydays of this sort, when the rich got a lot richer. But, in a television interview this spring, Nixon said the growing gap between “haves” and “have-nots” in the United States could be a major threat to continued Republican retention of the White House--especially if an economic downturn comes.

Since Watergate, Nixon has rarely given domestic-policy advice to his party--but maybe it’s time. The Economist, Britain’s financial weekly, recently noted that if the GOP wished to tap America’s changing mood, “they can dig out that old Republican homespun coat that Mrs. Nixon used to wear.” It’s cloth, not homespun, but the sentiment’s correct.