513. America in '68: Nixon's Great Comeback (Part 6)

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I see another child tonight. He hears the train go by at night, and he dreams of faraway places where he'd like to go.
It seems like an impossible dream, but he is helped on his journey through life. A father who had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade, sacrificed everything he had so that his sons could go to college.
A gentle, Quaker mother with a passionate concern for peace, quietly wept when he went to war. But she understood why he had to go.
A great teacher, a remarkable football coach, an inspirational minister encouraged him on his way. A courageous wife and loyal children stood by him in victory and also in defeat.
And in his chosen profession of politics, first there were scores, then hundreds, then thousands, and finally millions worked for his success. And tonight, he stands before you, nominated for President of the United States of America.
The unmistakable tones, one might say, Dominic, of Richard Milhouse Nixon, your great hero, accepting the Republican presidential nomination at Miami Beach on the 8th of August 1968. Well.
And how do you think I did with that? I think you did well, actually. You did very well.
I don't think Nixon broke down at all while doing that speech. No, so it's an impressionist impression.
Yes, it is. I'm evoking the sense of the maudlin, the self-pity, the melodrama inherent within Nixon's oratory.
You captured the inner man. That's what I was trying to do, yes.
So that is textbook Nixon, isn't it? Because some people listening to that may consider that excruciatingly manipulative.

Yeah, some might.

Indeed, nauseating.

But other people might think it brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

Brilliantly crafted.

He kept out checkers, his dog, this time, didn't he?

He didn't mention checkers.

And the thing is, there were always more of the latter, the people who thought it was brilliant,

than the people who thought it was nauseating.

And that is why Richard Nixon was one of American history's great winners. You doesn't just win the presidency once, he wins it twice.
And we've gone all through this story of 68 without really talking about Nixon. And the funny thing about the 68 story is that he is often a little bit overlooked because he is the big winner after all the chaos and the excitement of the year, the things that draw most people's attention, the assassinations, the yippies, the Vietnam War, all that kind of business.
Because his campaign is very deliberately boring, isn't it? Yes. And actually that becomes a slight problem towards the actual date of the election.
But that's his goal, isn't it? But his campaign works, right? In the long run, yeah. The champion of middle America, he pulls off one of the great comebacks in American history, but not an uncontroversial victory.
So we will come to that, to the conspiracy theories that surround it. But perhaps we should start, Tom.
We did episodes on Watergate back in the very early days of the rest of his history. But for those people who didn't listen to those, remind ourselves about Richard M.
Nixon. I noticed you called him, you said he was my hero.
I wouldn't quite say he was my hero. No, I was being ironic.
I do have a tendresse for Richard Nixon. I find him endlessly entertaining and fascinating.
Nixon, as he would be the first to tell you, came from a very poor family in Yorba Linda, California in 1913. Quaker family.
And he's a genuine meritocrat. I mean, he really does pull himself up by his bootstraps.
He goes to Duke Law School. He's in the Navy in the war.
He goes to Congress. And he can't go to Harvard, can he? Because he can't afford the fees or something.
Right, exactly. He can't go to the East Coast.
At least that's what he says. And of course, he wears that very heavily.
And he always talks about the East Coast Ivy League people who look down on me because I only went to Whittier College and Duke Law School, all this stuff. He made his name in Congress as an anti-communist, very aggressive, very partisan, got into the Senate.
The Democrats hated him. They always thought he was underhand, far too pugnacious, far too belligerent, a nasty man, I think is what they thought.

He became Eisenhower's vice president.

You mentioned Chequers, the dog.

That's how he got public attention by doing this TV broadcast in which he talked, the

girls love the dog and they're going to keep him.

Because he'd been given by a donor.

Yes, exactly.

Then he lost the 1960 election to Kennedy.

I remember when we did our Kennedy series, we talked about the Nixon-Kennedy debates and how unbelievably impressive they are by modern day standards. They're so articulate, serious, thoughtful, well-informed.
And actually Nixon and Kennedy got on all right. I mean, there were stories of them going back to Washington from debates in the train.
Yeah, on the train when they were young men. Doing the fat and things.
When they were young men. Exactly.
Nixon is a smart guy. And actually, if you're not fighting a campaign against him, he's not a terrible company.
You know, he's very well-read. He's serious.
He's self-improving, all of this. So, you know, he's in a different league from a lot of his successes, I think it's fair to say.
Then, having lost in 1960, he lost the race for governor of California, his home state, in 1962. And then he snapped and he showed the ugly face of Nixon.
So he snapped at the press after losing. Just think how much you're going to be missing.
You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference. There's kind of a real bitterness to him.
And self-pity, one might say. And self-pity.
And the papers printed his obituary and they basically said he's done, he's out. That's the end of Richard Nixon in politics.
So Nixon then went off to New York, and he became a Wall Street lawyer. He lived on Fifth Avenue.
His daughters were debutantes. I mean, they genuinely had debutante balls in Manhattan in those days.
Maybe still do, I don't know. Hangs around in country clubs with country club Republicans.
He works for Pepsi. He's a sort of corporate ambassador.
So he goes off to European and Asian capitals and meets bigwigs. And he's still very well connected.
Does he find this a bit demeaning that he's not representing kind of vested corporate interests rather than Uncle Sam? He says to his friends, he finds it degrading to be doing this on behalf of Pepsi. Now, everybody who knows anything about Nixon will know the side of Nixon, the dark side, the insecurity about his background, the brooding, vengeful nature, the social awkwardness, the inability to forget slights, all of this kind of stuff.
He is, I think, I mean, the one reason I find him so interesting and in a weird way, a little bit endearing, is I think he's the embodiment of all the worst banal traits that we all have, or at least all of us, and the rest is history. Speak for yourself.
Yeah. But actually, there's a side of Nixon that comes out now, which is perhaps a more admirable side.
He hates this new life in the legal business. And he says to his friends, if I have to keep doing this, I will be dead, mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four years.
I find it so boring. And some of his friends are actually worried that he would give into depression.
So the pioneering black baseball player, Jackie Robinson, wrote him a letter. You are good for politics, good for America.
Don't let the critics cause you to give up your career. Billy Graham, who has made a few cameo appearances in this series.
There are a few men whom I have loved as I love you. It would be the greatest tragedy I can think of for you to turn to drink or any of these other escapisms.
What's he thinking about? Yeah, what's he thinking about? Anyway, Nixon doesn't. They underestimate the thing about him.
He's very hardworking. He's actually quite resilient.
And he spends these years reading Edmund Burke, Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche. He's a serious person, Nixon.
He's not just the sort of the joke in the bowling alley in the White House. And there's also a sort of melancholy to him.
So he sits alone on his 52nd birthday in his study in New York, writing these resolutions on a pad. Set great goals, daily rest, brief vacations, knowledge of all weaknesses, better use of time, begin writing book, articles, or speeches on provocative new international and national issues.
And Nixon loves a resolution. There's the sense that you get also with Johnson and with Wallace, that none of them can really function without politics.
That without politics, they feel that they're not really themselves. Completely there is.
Yeah, absolutely. Because actually, if you wanted to fix Nixon's life, you would say, come on, you've been vice president.
That's not bad. Settle down and make loads of money as a New York lawyer, corporate lawyer.
You'll be laughing. You'll have a brilliant life.
And you won't have people shouting at you and you won't be being nasty to people and stuff. And it'll be great, but he can't, he's got the itch, you know, must give speech on an important international issue, this kind of thing.
So actually he throws himself back into it. He despises the politics of Barry Goldwater, libertarian, much more right wing in 1964, but he works for him anyway and works hard for the Republican Party candidates.
So a bit like Hubert Humphrey with LBJ, that both of them are biding their time, but also having to suck up stuff they don't agree with to display their loyalty. To an extent, yeah.
I mean, Nixon is really, Nixon works what people call the kind of rubber chicken circuit. The rubber southern chicken.
Exactly. If it's Friday night, he's there in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a Holiday Inn, making a speech to the Chamber of Commerce.
That's his idea of a brilliant night out. So in the mid-60s, he visits hundreds and hundreds of groups, especially in the South, because he recognizes that the South is the new battleground for the Republicans.
You know, he can make a lot of gains there, basically. And he's always very clever.
He is conservative, but he's never too conservative. You know, he's never racist, but he intimates to Southern audiences.
There's too much federal interference and this kind of thing, but he kind of soft law and order. Yeah, law and order.
He's clever in how he packages it. So by 1967 or so, he's got a lot of credit with ordinary Republicans.
Loads of credit. He's the beaten guy who came back, dusted himself down, and has put in the hours in the most unglamorous places possible.
And people like a comeback. They do.
Makes for a good story, doesn't it? Great American story, right? Yeah. So he says to his family, you know, I'm thinking about running for president, and they are devastated.
His wife, Pat, who at this point is transmogrified from being in the sort of early 50s, a slightly generic kind of smiling American housewife, now looks like the most miserable person on the planet, like utterly downtrodden. Because he's off every weekend touring the South or whatever.
I think life with Dick quite hard work okay you know he's always off reading edmund burke and talking about disraeli which he does and plotting political comebacks and actually that's not really the life that she wants because what does she want she wants country clubs and stuff i think she probably prefer the country clubs yeah i mean who wouldn't right i, being a presidential candidate's wife is awful. Because their daughters are very glamorous, aren't they? Tricia and Julie.
Yeah. Yeah, they're very glamorous.
And so people would often say, how is it that Richard Nixon has such glamorous daughters? I think it greatly redounds to Nixon's credits, of course. But...
Well, having two lovely daughters. People say that of you, Tom.
Let's be frank. Anyway, Pat is persuaded by their friends in California.
Come on, you can't stand in the way of Dick's dream. So he cranks up his campaign and it's going to be run, and this will be a big thing in his administration.
It's run by people who are not really part of the Republican Party apparatus. They're his own loyalists.
They're his own creatures. And so that's another reflection of the fact that he is congenitally suspicious.
Exactly. That he wants to surround himself with his own creatures.
Yes. So he's got these Californian guys, people who know the Watergate story will know the names, H.R.
Haldeman, John Ehrlichman. They had been friends since UCLA.
Haldeman is an advertising man. They are all about the packaging and the presentation.
And traditional Washington insiders distrust and dislike them. They say, who are these guys on the West Coast? You just care about the media.
But they are incredibly loyal to Nixon personally, which is really important to him. Now, he's got a couple of problems.
Number one, he is seen as a loser because he has lost two elections on the bounce. So he needs to prove he can win.
And he says from the beginning, I'm going to enter every single Republican primary, where a lot of people at this point are picking and choosing. I will enter and fight in every single state because he's confident that all that rubber chicken circuit work will pay dividends.
But also it shows his energy, right? And his commitment to the entirety of the United States. Exactly.
The second problem is his image as a terrible person,

as a terrible human being.

So people have always seen Nixon as very aggressive,

as a divider and not a uniter.

So Nixon, to use his own scornful phrase,

he decides to present Nixon as nice guy.

So this is where he's going on sandy beaches in his...

Smart shoes.

Smart black shoes.

Exactly.

Smiling. Just a regular guy.
With a sort of... Rictus grin.
Hideous grin. Yeah.
But also his politics. So his politics at this point are centrist politics.
He's Mr. Normal, a bit 1950s.
You know, the cities are in flames. It's all kicking off under the Democrats.
Wouldn't it be better to get back to life in the mid-50s? That's what I, Dick Nixon, stand for. No mad experiments, no ideological crusades, apple pie, the white picket fence.
I'm home, honey. All that.
Exactly. So on Vietnam, for example, where he'd previously been a hawk and he had previously been very, you know, let's fight this war, let's do this.
After the Tet Offensive, he says to his speechwriters, it's pretty obvious we're not going to win this on the battlefield.

This is a right mess.

So his line is, peace with honor.

That was just brilliant, isn't it?

Because what does that mean?

Yeah, it doesn't mean anything at all. But when he says that to people, peace, but with honor, they say, oh, that's exactly what I'm like.

I love that.

Brilliant.

Love it.

And actually, the amazing thing is that if you look at the press in 1968, all the coverage, they are persuaded. You know, everybody says, oh, Dick Nixon, we were quite hard on him.
He's matured. You know, we've kicked Dick Nixon like a dog, but actually he's not such a bad guy.
So Theodore H. White, who wrote The Making of the President in 1960, the great book on presidential campaigns, and had been really hard on Nixon, said, you know, he's hollow, he's a plastic man.
He says, Nixon is now a softer, more mellow, more self-confident, more amusing, well-to-do lawyer statesman. I find him a good man now.
Norman Mailer. So, Norman Mailer, like you, Tom, was very impressed by Tricia and Julie.
Norman Maillor, at this point, always writes about himself in the third person. This is in Harper's Magazine.
It's like Julius Caesar. Like Julius Caesar.
Nothing in Maylor's prior view of Nixon had ever prepared him to conceive of a man with two lovely girls. Was it even possible that Nixon was a good man, not a bad man? And my favorite one of these is Dr.
Hunter S. Thompson.
Are you a fan of his writing, Tom? I don't know. I've never read him.
Okay, so he's the fear and loathing in Las Vegas man. He had a great relationship with Nixon.
Oh, he's the one who said he was so crooked that he wouldn't be able to put his pants on straight. Exactly.
We read him in the Watergate episode. Yeah, we did.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1968, For years, I've regarded Nixon's very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American dream.
He was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. I've had reviews like that.
Just a question. I mean, I know that Nixon, you know, Watergate and everything.

Yeah.

All of that.

But the reactions to him in the 60s do seem in excess of what he's done up until that point.

I mean, he doesn't seem...

No, that's the weird thing.

Doesn't seem that bad.

I mean, relative to some of the other characters that we've been talking about in this series.

So it's partly because of anti-communism. It's partly because of his role in anti-communism and what's perceived as red baiting.
He had gone for a couple of kind of democratic favourites, most famously a guy called Alger Hiss. And Nixon had actually, I think it's fair to say, exposed him as being, if not a traitor, then at least a fellow traveller.
But it seems more than a political reaction. Yeah, it's snobbery.
At least it, but it's a kind of visceral reaction to him as an individual, that he just seems horrible. I think it's that people feel he embodies what they dislike most about mass culture, mass society.
He's common, he's vulgar, he's aggressive, he's partisan. You know, I do think there's a fair bit of social and cultural snobbery.
He's also, they regard him as charmless, as awkward, socially awkward, as graceless. Malinois.
Yeah, Malinois, exactly. Anyway, Hunter S.
Thompson, who had said all that, actually ends up sharing a car with Nixon in the 1968 primaries. They end up talking about American football.
Nixon is a real nerd and he knows all the details of where the players went to college and stuff. Hunter S.
Thompson is absolutely bowled over by this. He says of Nixon, the new Nixon is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow.
I went to New Hampshire expecting to find a braying ass and I came away convinced that Richard Nixon has one of the best minds in politics. People are like, wow, brilliant.
But by the time he comes to write about Watergate, he's changed his mind again. Changed his mind again, exactly.
So Nixon does have rivals. There's a guy called Nelson Rockefeller.
Very rich. He's quite impressive.
Very impressive. Governor of New York.
He comes up, he has that brilliant phrase about Vietnam that America is a commitment looking for justification. Oh, right.
That's a good nice phrase. Well, he's an impressive and a smart guy, but he's a rich East Coast establishment divorcee and he is regarded by the conservative grassroots as basically, what do they call them? A rhino, Republican in name only.
And yet another limousine liberal. So Rockefeller, not sure whether to enter.
He gets Mitt Romney's father, George Romney. He was the big car executive, CEO of American Motors.
He was the head of the Mormon church in Detroit, governor of Michigan. He runs in Rockefeller's stead, but everybody thinks that Ropni is an idiot.
He came back from a trip to Vietnam and said, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anyone can have from the generals. And everybody says, oh, well, if you're going to be brainwashed by the generals, you're obviously a complete fool.
You can't go around saying you've been brainwashed as a presidential candidate. That's mad.
Unless you're the Manchurian candidate. Yeah.
What Eugene McCarthy said about George Romney. He says, why did I need a brainwash? A light rinse would have been sufficient.
Very good. So Romney pulls out.
Nixon's got a sort of, he can cruise through the primaries. And then he gets to Miami Beach, the convention.
And the big threat to him is actually Ronald Reagan, our old friend. So Ronald Reagan at this point, no, that noise that he's making is more hard edged.
It's a kind of law and order noise. Yeah, it's more gravelly maybe.
So Reagan is the darling of the South because they see him as the candidate of law and order, crime, not friendly to civil rights, all of this. And if he can persuade the Southern delegations to abandon Nixon, Reagan might have a shot at the nomination.
So Nixon has to work really hard on the South. And he basically enlists this bloke who is actually, I think it fair to say not one of my favorite people in american history he's the senator of south carolina strom thurmond strom thurmond was a senator until about 2020 or something i mean he sounds like a super villain from a marvel comic he was a senator still when he was about 170 years he wasn't he? Yeah.
He had built his career on segregation. It would astound people to hear that in the final days of his life, it turned out he had at least one out of wedlock, mixed race child, which perhaps puts his segregationism into a slightly different context.
Anyway, Thurmond, Nixon reaches out to Thurmond and says, come on, be my salesman with the Southerners.

And Thurmond says, great, will do.

So Thurmond arranges for all the Southerners to meet Nixon.

And Nixon says to them, listen, I know Reagan is your favorite, but you can get what you

want from me.

I know you don't like the road that America has taken.

I will appoint more conservative judges.

I will call off the federal government. I will stop pandering to civil rights groups.
He says, in particular, I will give you a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance familiar to our American listeners, but probably not outside America, of school busing. That means integrating schools by busing black children to white areas and vice versa to create a mix across the city.
White parents hate this with a passion. And Nixon says, I don't agree with it and I won't do it.
And they think, great. You know, he doesn't do this in George Wallace style terms.
He does it purely in terms of pragmatism. He goes out of his way to say, you know, I'm not a racist and all that stuff, but it works.
He defeats the Reagan rebellion. South falls in behind him and he is clearly going to win the nomination.
But there's one more sop to the South and a very entertaining one. He has to pick his vice president and he picks my favorite of all America's vice presidents, Spyro Agnew, the governor of Maryland.

Now, Spiro Agnew was pretty much a nobody.

They did some brilliant Vox Pops in Atlanta on the day he was picked, asking people in

the street, what do you think about Spiro Agnew?

And the three replies that stand out are, it's some kind of disease.

It's some kind of egg. And he's that

Greek that owns that shipbuilding firm, i.e. Aristotle and Asis.
Spiro Agnew is indeed

Greek extraction. He'd been a centrist, moderate governor of Maryland.
But after the riots in the

spring of 1968, he invited Baltimore's black leaders to come to the state capital. And he'd

basically given them a massive harangue. And he had said, it's all your fault that this has happened.
You haven't done enough to criticize the Hanoi visiting, catawalling, riot inciting, burn America down, black radicals. They were really cross about this and they all walked out.
And Agnew was then deluged with letters from the voters of Maryland saying to him, what a brilliant man you are.

Well done. Fantastic.
And is that why Nixon basically picks him? This is why Nixon picks him. Because he's a border state and because he's been tough on black civil rights leaders.
And this is great from Nixon's point of view. Because Nixon's strategy is all about what we would now call middle America, or he would later call the great silent majority.
So his biographer, his most recent biographer, John A. Farrell, describes these are people who they watch NASCAR, they watch the NFL, they go to church, they volunteer for the Boy Scouts, they think Bob Hope is very funny, they think John Wayne is tremendously cool, they know people whose kids are fighting in Vietnam.

They are the salt of the earth, ordinary middle Americans.

Indeed have volunteered to fight in Vietnam.

Or indeed have volunteered to fight in Vietnam.

Exactly.

You know, they like to spend their weekends fishing and hunting and driving around and their pickups.

Chevys.

Yeah, and just Chevys, all of that stuff.

And I think Nixon's superpower is that he gets them. He instinctively gets them.
He doesn't have to think about it. He doesn't need a poll.
He just knows, because he's one of them to some degree, what middle Americans are frightened of what they want. And that's why that speech that you began with, as more curious as people might find it, it is a masterpiece of its kind.
Because he starts, he says, when we look at America, we see its cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night.
We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad, all this. And then he says, we hear the Americans crying out in anguish.
Did we come all this way for this? And then he says, listen to another voice. It is the quiet voice and the tumult and the shouting.
It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. They're not racists or sick.
They're good people. They're decent people.
They work and they save and they pay their taxes and they care. Now, again, a lot of people listening to that may say, God, nauseating.
But loads of people think, oh, brilliant. He gets me.
I'm one of those people. I like to think I'm one of those people.
I mean, he's not offering any hard policies there, though, is he? No, he's not at all, because he's offering his peace with honor in Vietnam. Who knows what that means? And he says, no more disorder at home.
We'll listen to the still, quiet voice of the ordinary Americans. And what does that mean in practical terms? Doesn't mean anything, but it's got a great peroration.
I follow Americans. The long dark night for America is about to end.
The time has come for us to leave the valley of despair and climb the mountain so we may see the glory of the dawn, a new day for America and a new dawn for peace and freedom in the world. I mean, that is a ripoff of Martin Luther King.
It's clearly a total ripoff. Who would have thought that Richard Nixon's speechwriters...
It's like the monkeys ripping off the Beatles. Yeah.
Or is Nixon the Beatles? And is Martin Luther King... I don't think so.
Is Martin Luther King ack a bilk? Don't think so. But here's the thing, right? This is my favorite bit about this.
It's been a tremendous success, the Republican convention. Nixon, the man of middle America, not extreme, all this.
He's come forward and he's their choice of president. He's a massive favorite to win the election.
But here's the window into Nixon's soul. So afterwards, he's absolutely buzzing, as he always is after these.
He wants to talk. He won't go to bed.
He obviously doesn't want to talk to Pat. He's got no interest in talking to Pat.

So at 1.30 in the morning,

he calls the speechwriter and later columnist,

William Sapphire.

And he says,

come to my suite for a drink.

So Sapphire comes up to Nixon's suite.

Nixon's standing there,

kind of staring out of the window,

lost in thought.

Looking intense.

Looking intense.

And he says to Sapphire,

they won't like their speech, will they? Is he from Somerset? They all like that speech. It's like the John Adams voice that we did.
They call me intelligent and cool with no sincerity, and then it kills them when I show them I know how people feel. I could write a speech like that, and they hate me for it.
Yeah, that's the thing. He says they won't like it.
The New York Times and those boys. Theo, get your bleeping machine ready.
F*** them, says Nixon. None of them could write a speech like that and they hate me for it.
Now, it's kind of bonkers on the most triumphant night of his career that he is sunk in this terrible self-pity and he goes on like this for an hour and a half. Sapphire gets away at three o'clock in the morning and And the last thing he hears as he leaves the apartment is Nixon saying rather plaintively to his secret service bodyguard, do you know anywhere where I could get a glass of milk? That is Nixon.
So not groovy. That is Nixon.
That is what a brilliant man he was. So he leaves the convention on an absolute high.
Then three weeks later, as we heard last time, things get even better for him. The Democrats self-immolate in Chicago, the violence, the chaos at the convention, all of this.
He now has a double-digit lead in the polls. It seems that he can't be stopped, that victory is inevitable.
But is it? Is there a twist in the tale, Tom? Is there a twist in the tale? Well, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll find out.
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Visit asket.com. Hello and welcome back to the final section of our epic on America in 1968.
And Dominic, we are in the presidential campaign. It's Humphrey against Nixon.
And Nixon, I mean, he's in a good place. He's in a really good place.
Miles ahead. Humphrey's trailing.
He's being heckled by anti-war protesters everywhere he goes. Dump the hump.
Calling him a murderer. I mean, it's awful for him.
Brilliant for Nixon. But you hinted at a twist in the tale.
So is there a twist in the tale? Tom, there's more than one twist. I've got as many twists as you can take.

It's a corkscrew.

It's a roller coaster.

Like Nixon himself, right?

Yeah.

So crooked, he's like a corkscrew, he can't take his own pants off.

Yes, pretty much.

He can't screw his pants on straight.

That's right, yeah.

Of course, he should have had George Wallace's pants in the Wallace episode.

Do you recall?

The shiny pants. There's a lot of pants-based action in this.
That's America, though, isn't it? That's just America. Malcolm Turnbull as well, losing his pants.
No, it wasn't Malcolm Turnbull. Malcolm Fraser.
Malcolm Fraser, sorry. Yeah, apologies to Malcolm Turnbull.
In Memphis, Tennessee. Come on.
We've clearly been recording this for too long, so we're just free-forming. Gibbering.
Right. So Nixon's plan, because he's so far ahead in the polls, he's going to fight a very tightly controlled, very conservative campaign, not throw it away.
So like carrying a Ming vase, that strategy. Exactly.
And the reason it's worth dwelling on Nixon's campaign is that it is the prototype, really, for all subsequent presidential campaigns. So the key person is Haldeman.
Haldeman, H.R. Haldeman, who ends up becoming his White House kind of chief of staff.
Haldeman was a Christian scientist. He's a very crew cut, very square kind of bloke.
He worked for J. Walsh Thompson ad agency in Los Angeles.
And Haldeman said, we're going to break with all previous political campaigns. We will, and I quote, move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye.
So not a million miles from Abbie Hoffman, who likewise has a sense of the power of television. I mean, that's what I find so interesting about this series, the kind of unexpected crossovers from left to right and from the countercultural to the very, very mainstream.
I don't actually think that's a ridiculous comparison at all. I think that awareness of the sort of Marshall McLuhan kind of era.
Yeah, all of that. The medium is the message.
Hoffman and the Yippies did believe it. And Haldeman and Nixon absolutely believe it.
So Haldeman says, look, all presidential candidates waste their time going on these rallies like Robert Kennedy had been doing. This is a complete and utter.
You just get knackered, you get cross, you know, what's the point? Just do one event a day for form's sake, left to Haldeman, Nixon would have done none, and do everything else on television. And the way they do the TV, they get a guy called Roger Isles, who ends up becoming the founding CEO of Fox News.
Isles designs these shows where Nixon stands in this kind of little arena surrounded by voters and he answers their questions and they pay for 10 of these on network TV. And Iles said, look, the way this works is basically, even if you don't support Nixon, subliminally, you end up rooting for him because he's surrounded by people.
They're all sitting. He's standing.
He's like, it's like he's at bay in an arena. So like Tony Blair's masochism strategy.
Tony Blair's masochism strategy is precisely this. He is alone.
He is standing while all others are seated. He is surrounded by people looking into the pit at him.
And most people would think of that as a nightmare. That's what Eiles says.
Now, Eiles tells this to a young writer called Joe McGuinness. Joe McGuinness is in his early 20s, and unbelievably, he gets complete access to the Nixon campaign.
And he writes a book about it called The Selling of the President, which is a wonderful book to read if you're interested in this campaign or campaigning generally, because never before had anyone lifted the lid on the extraordinary cynicism of a presidential campaign. So Isles has this wonderful monologue to his staff and he says to them, our candidate, people think he's really boring, a pain in the ass.
They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a book bag, who was 42 years old the day he was born. They figured that other kids got footballs for Christmas.

Nixon got a briefcase and he loved it.

Of course, George Wallace would have thrown him into the river

with that briefcase.

Is Nixon listening to this?

No, Nixon is obviously not.

Yeah, he's just sitting there looking miserable

while they're talking about it.

Oh, they're dumping on Dick Nixon again.

I'll say he looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight. He jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up, and he starts running around saying, I want to be president.
Wow. And this is the guy who's rooting for Nixon.
Yeah. Anyway.
So they basically know this, and they package Nixon. They sell him.
One of Nixon's ad directors said to Jeremy Guinness, we've deliberately set out to make our ads, and I quote, cheap and vulgar, to appeal to the lowest common denominator of American taste. But that's fascinating that Nixon's own propagandists have a certain kind of snobbish contempt for him.
Yeah, of course. I know.
It is extraordinary. And actually, the thing about the ad guy, if you look at the Nixon ads, they are unbelievable.
Because they're not cheap and vulgar, they are brilliant. They are these kind of avant-garde montages.
You should watch them, Tom. Well, I have.
They're a bit like a kind of Doors video. They're like people screaming.
It's like Apocalypse Now. Yeah.
It's creating the sense of disorder. And then at the end, it projects Nixon as the only solution to all this.
So kind of shots of people sobbing in the streets, being hit over the head by cops, GIs in Vietnam. And then the slogan, the tagline is, this time, vote like your whole world.
That's how it's Somerset again. Go with it.
Go for it, Dominic. This time, vote like your whole world depended on it.
I mean, that is how Americans speak, let's be honest. Well, that's how the Founding Fathers spoke.
So if it's good enough for the Founding Fathers, it's good enough for them. So anyway, listen, back to the ads.
All this raises a crucial question, and this is the question that academics are most interested in. This is a key moment in the Republican Party's move to the right, Nixon's embrace of a law and order campaign.
And is it, as many historians believe, all about racism? Because of course, this is against the backdrop of so many riots, of the kind of fragmentation of the civil rights movement, but also of the Wallace campaign, because Wallace is making so many similar sounding arguments. So here's the interesting thing.
We know that Nixon did say racist things in the White House. I mean, he's on tape doing it.
That said, his record actually up to this point is pretty good. He'd supported the Civil Rights Act, fair housing and this kind of thing.
We heard him sampling Martin Luther King in the previous half. He has this thing, doesn't he, where he's always saying, I see a day, which is obviously a kind of riff on I have a dream.
Yeah. And he repeats it over and over again in a kind of cod Martin Luther King way.
Yeah, but that's just rhetorical larceny. I don't think he's deliberately trying to avoid it.
Do you not think, I think that in the wake of Martin Luther King's murder, to echo his rhetorical style so overtly, I mean, you can't think that people aren't going to notice it. And you're kind of making a point with it.
I'm not so sure because I think in the 50s and 60s, that style is very common among politicians. So Kennedy spoke in a very repetitive, not I have a dream.
But Norman Mailer noticed it. Norman Mailer said he is copying Martin Luther King.
Copying Martin Luther King. He's suddenly begun it.
And he says it's basically it was since King's assassination. That's interesting.
I think the real question though is is he just blowing a dog whistle? So he says to his aides you know I'm not just going to copy Wallace. We're going to have to be more sophisticated than Wallace.
But at the same time he is competing for voters with with Wallace in the sort of sunbelt states, the border states and so on, or places like Florida or the Carolinas, with this message of strong defense, traditional values, opposition to school busing, law and order. And some historians now, when you open a book about this campaign, will say, this is just coded racism.
Nixon is getting into the gutter with Wallace. Now, at one level, I think that is actually a little bit unfair because I think it is completely legitimate to worry about law and order, given that the crime figures have gone through the roof.
And frankly, hundreds of people have been killed in riots since 1964. Nixon's ads don't show black rioters.
They only ever show white rioters. In his speeches, he never ever mentions race, really.
He never says anything racist. So you could say, well, you know, he's been very harshly treated.
On the other hand, there is no getting away, I think, from the fact that law and order is also code for black unrest in the inner cities. And Nixon isn't campaigning in a vacuum.
He's campaigning in a world in which Reagan and Wallace are saying similar things. And we know from Haldeman's notes that Nixon was actually quite cynical about this.
Right. Well, cynicism is the word.
Yeah. Isn't it? So Haldeman writes, Irish, Ital, Pole, Mex are afraid of Negroes, need stronger position on this, must do something, must dry up Wallace's vote.
And then there's an infamous account of Nixon himself rehearsing a TV ad. And the TV ad ends with him saying, the heart of the problem is law and order in our schools.
And then he finishes the rehearsal and then he says to himself, yep, that hits it right on the nose. It's all about law and order and the damn Negro Puerto Rican groups out there.
I mean, clearly his aim in the most cynical sense is to triangulate. Yeah, that's the word.
Yeah. To appeal to the Wallace constituency.
And yet at the same time, I mean, he is articulating progressive sentiments, isn't he? And he is echoing the language of Martin Luther King. So from a campaigning point of view, I mean, not necessarily a moral point of view, but from a campaigning point of view, it's a brilliant strategy.
Yeah, it's very effective. I mean, by the way, for the people who were raising their eyebrows when you said progressive sentiments, he says, we can't become two nations, one black, one white.
We must move with compassion and conviction to bring the American dream to the ghetto. And then there's an amazing speech that he gives to white voters in suburban Philadelphia.
We will be giving similar kinds of progressive speeches, won't we, to the audience in Philadelphia when we arrived there to do our show. Nixon says to this audience, you're very fortunate.
You're very affluent people. But in the great cities of America, there is, quote, terrible poverty.
There are poor people. There are people who haven't had a chance, the chance that you've had.
And he says to them explicitly, you can't sit in your houses and just be comfortable with your lot. This won't be a good country for any of us to live in until it's a good country for all of us to live in.
And that talk, you know, the passage from the acceptance speech that I began with, that child, which is Nixon himself, is counterpointed to children who don't have the chances that he had. Yes, exactly.
So that's the brilliance of it. This is what makes Nixon so fascinating, is that I can't think of many other characters in modern American history, or indeed British history, who are so good at sending different messages to different audiences at the same time.
And which can only be heard, in a sense, if your ear is attuned to the dog whistle, I suppose. Exactly.
This is a brilliantly cynical campaign. But there is a problem you alluded to earlier.
It's actually very boring compared with the Democrats. Nixon's just going around in the sanitized atmosphere of the TV studio.
As Joe McGuinness said in The Selling of the President, it's as though, basically, he was in an astrodome where the wind would never blow, the temperature never rise and fall, and the ball never bounce erratically on the artificial grass. And the press start to point this out and they become basically bored with him.
Yeah, well, if they're following the Democrats, they're bound to be bored following Nixon. And actually, as we get into the autumn, Humphrey starts to inch back.
The economy, you know, is still pretty good. He's still got the big democratic machine.
He's got the unions on his side, if he can fire them up. He's running out of money, Humphrey, and he spends his last half a million dollars on the 30th of September to buy network time for a speech he's giving in Salt Lake City.
And in this speech, he just thinks, sod it, I'm going to go for it. And he breaks with LBJ in the speech.
On Vietnam. On Vietnam, he says, I will stop the bombing of the North.
For the first time, he goes against the administration's policy. And that actually breaks the logjam, as it were, because it ends the protests against him.
Liberal donors start to give him money. The unions are now worried about George Wallace making inroads among kind of blue-collar Democrats.

So they start cranking up their machines.

And as we get into October, there's a sense that all the time the ground is shifting.

Suddenly, day by day, Humphrey's eating into Nixon's lead.

Aren't parallels starting to be drawn with Harry Truman's famous victory against Thomas G. Dewey?

Yes, exactly.

That actually, do you know what?

Humphrey has all the momentum suddenly because he's been written off and stamped on for so long.

Thank you. Truman's famous victory against Thomas G.
Dewey. Yes, exactly.
Then actually, do you know what? Humphrey has all the momentum suddenly because he's been written off and stamped on for so long. And now the story is he's pulled it out at the last minute and the polls are narrowing all the time.
And Nixon actually says to his aides, events, events could kill us in this. And of course, this brings us back to the issue that's been there all through this series, which is Vietnam.
And this takes us to the great conspiracy theory about Nixon's victory. Vietnam has been a stalemate, an incredibly bloody stalemate all year.
The North Vietnamese lost tens of thousands of men in the Tet Offensive, and they've been licking their wounds. But at the same time, 17,000 American servicemen will lose their lives in 1968, the worst, bloodiest year of the war.
Johnson's sitting there in the White House. Now, his attitude is very complicated.
On paper, he ought to favor Humphrey, his vice president, but Johnson is a dreadful bully and he kind of enjoys stamping on Hubert. And as part of him, I think that would be, you know, if Hubert loses, he couldn't care less, really.
He thinks Hubert is just a dead loss. So the Nicta book is all over the fact that LBJ wants Nixon to win.
How much credence do you give to that? I think a little bit of credence, actually. I think LBJ is genuinely torn because, as we said before, LBJ and Nixon are similar personalities.
Nixon, we know that he is short. He promised LBJ, I will uphold your policy.
I I will never criticize you. And he doesn't, does he? And he doesn't.
And there's a lot of stuff in that Luke Nick book about Billy Graham as a go-between between the two men, which I think is true. So LBJ is torn.
He's a lifelong Democrat. Of course, he wants his allies to win.
On the other hand, of the two, Humphrey and Nixon, I think he has more respect for Nixon, because he has no respect for Humphrey at all. So he's undecided.
And all autumn, people are wondering, Lyndon Johnson is still the president. Is he going to intervene in the race? Is there going to be an October surprise that will change the whole narrative? And then on the 31st of October, Halloween, the bombshell comes, Tom.
So there's just five days to go till the election. And LBJ goes on TV and he says, there's going to be a total bombing halt.
We're stopping because a peaceful settlement to the war could be at hand. I'm going to send a US delegation to Paris for peace talks in a week's time.
Everything has changed. And this is an amazing moment, right? The war could be over.
Bombing could be over. The bloodshed.
And is that going to be the thing that swings it for Humphrey? But it's what happens next that is one of American political history's great conspiracy theories. So just to lay it out, Nixon undoubtedly knew and had known for weeks that LBJ was working on a peace deal.
The conspiracy theory. Nixon was frightened that this would cost him the election and he worked secretly to destroy it.
And the way he destroyed it was by using a woman called Anna Chenault, who was nicknamed the Dragon Lady. So she was Chinese born.
She'd been married to an American general who had commanded a group of fighter pilots, Chinese and American fighter pilots in the Second World War. Anna Chenault is a big society hostess and Republican fundraiser, very active in anti-communist circles, loads of contacts in Southeast Asia.
And the conspiracy theory runs like this, that Nixon got her to contact South Vietnam's president, Thieu, and told him, I'll get you a better deal. Don't go to Paris for the peace talks.
Do what I tell you and you'll be all right with me. Thieu did as he was told.
He didn't go to Paris. The peace talks fell apart.
The peace chance was gone. It was Nixon who destroyed it, breaking the Logan Act of 1799.
Not the Logan Act. The Logan Act, which forbids private citizens from making diplomatic links with foreign governments.
So it's treason. LBJ knew it was treason, but he didn't go public because he didn't have concrete proof and he didn't want to taint Nixon's ascension to the presidency.
And so Nixon got away with sabotaging the peace deal and stole the election. And thousands of people died unnecessarily.
What a terrible thing for Nixon to have done, Tom. Is it true? No.
I don't think it is true. Okay.
I don't think it is true. And neither does Luke Nicta.
Right. He doesn't either.
First of all, it is true that Nixon's campaign was in touch with Anna Chanel. No doubt about that.
He met her at his Park Lane apartment. He met her with the South Vietnamese ambassador.
She's the kind of woman who loves a presidential candidate though, isn't she? Totally she is. She's always hanging.
She's a society hostess. Exactly.
She says that Nixon promised her that he would make sure Vietnam gets better treatment from me than under the Democrats. I think he probably did promise her that.
No doubt in my mind he promised her that. I also do think it's true that he said to her, it'd be brilliant if you could be a go-between between me and Saigon.
Because we know that because Haldeman wrote notes about it. Keep Chenault working on SVN, South Vietnam.
We also know, beyond doubt, that Lyndon Johnson knew that Nixon was in with this Anna Chenault, because we have a record of him talking to a friend of his from the Humphrey campaign on the 1st of November. Nixon is in deep telling Thieu and all of them not to go along with me on anything.
Thieu thinks that we will sell him out and Nixon has convinced him and this damn little old woman, Mrs Chenault, she's been in on it. That's very much LBJ.
But I think the caveats, however, are too great. So the first caveat is Nixon having contacts with South Vietnam is completely natural and reasonable.
He has been to Saigon multiple times since the 1950s. He already has contacts there.
It's not weird that he has contacts with the South Vietnamese leadership, given that he's ahead in the polls. He's going to be president very shortly and his country is engaged in South Vietnam, it would be bizarre if he wasn't in touch in some informal way with the South Vietnamese.
Don't you think? I mean, it obviously stands to reason that he would be talking to them. I guess.
I think he did use Mrs. Chennault as an intermediary, but I don't think she's as important as everybody thinks.
Including Mrs. Chennault.
Yeah. She bigs up her own role.
She likes to think she's terribly important. But I think Nixon probably has many intermediaries and she is merely one.
And above all, the conspiracy theory completely misses the point. The South Vietnamese were never, ever, ever going to go for Lyndon Johnson's deal anyway.
And as it happens, what I think is the last word on this was published only a couple of weeks ago in the journal Diplomatic History by a historian, David L. Prentice.
And he dug into the South Vietnamese sources that other historians have ignored. So to cut the long story short, he says, listen, President Thieu was never, ever going to go along with the peace deal that had the Viet Cong around the table with him in peace talks.
That was like an absolute red line for him. Also, President Hsu already thought the Democrats and Humphreys are a waste of space.
He doesn't even want to bond the North. I want someone who will bond the North.
So President Hsu already thought Nixon would be much better than him. He doesn't need Nixon to tell him.
He doesn't need Mrs. Chennault to turn up with a message.
He's never going to go to Paris for these peace talks, and he's always going to sink the deal. But how come LBJ didn't know that? LBJ was slightly being deluded, I think, by his chief negotiator, Avril Harriman, who was a very keen Democrat and basically said, my priority is actually to get Humphrey elected.
So I think he's getting confusing signals from his own people, LBJ. I think LBJ has also deluded himself into thinking he has more agency and more control over the South Vietnamese than he does yeah and I think you know the Americans have a long history in this of deluding themselves about what's happening in Vietnam and also denying the South Vietnamese any agency any agency and I think this is what this conspiracy theory does, right?

It says it's all on Nixon that the piece failed.

The South Vietnamese are never going to sign this piece.

Don't delude yourselves.

When do people start talking about this conspiracy?

Is it post-Watergate?

Yeah, yeah, around about Watergate, I would say.

So 70s.

People are talking about it in the 70s.

And of course, what happens is people are primed to believe the worst of Nixon.

Democrats love the thought of having an excuse where they lost, right?

Yeah.

It's because we were cheated by this terrible man.

I don't doubt that Nixon is sending signals to South Vietnam, but I think they're completely irrelevant. I don't think they're why he wins the election at all.
Anyway, let's get to election night. It's the 5th of November, 1968.
Nixon's in the Waldorf Astoria, New York on the 35th floor. Nixon being the great family man that he is, has booked separate rooms for himself and Pat and his daughters.
And he basically doesn't want to watch it with them. He said to them, I'm frightened I'm going to lose again.
And they said, we can't take the disappointment. I think that's fair enough.
They're going to be off in a separate room. So he being Dick Nixon,

every other presidential candidate sits with their closest friends,

their aides,

got like Doritos or whatever.

Nixon sits on his own in the dark

with his yellow pad

writing resolutions to himself.

But it prepares you for the worst.

It does.

Well, that's his mentality.

I think that's what I'd do

in his shoes.

I mean, you wouldn't want

to be Hillary Clinton,

you know, with a massive great party, balloons and everything. I mean, that would be terrible.
Of course. On international television.
And that's what most presidential candidates do. They have the party ready.
Nixon is a man who hates parties anyway. So, I mean, he's never going to be into a party.
So the first returns start to come in. Wallace, the Wallace story.
We kind of wrap that up in the Wallace episode. But just to remind people, he only won five states and 10 million votes.
His support has been squeezed by both Humphrey and Nixon. So actually, Nixon is going to fight off Wallace in Tennessee, in the Carolinas, in Florida and Virginia, in the sort of outer southern states.
However, bad news for Nixon. Humphrey has also eaten into Wallace's support in the North.
Basically, the blue collar union members are coming home, some of them for the very last time, to the Democrats. They're giving the Democrats one last chance in your Michigans and your kind of Rust Belt states and so on.
So it's very, very close. You get to midnight.
Humphrey is actually just ahead in the popular vote vote and it's going to come down to the same four states that decided it in 1960 when nixon lost that's california ohio illinois and texas unbelievable tension great drama tom yeah pat nixon is in the bathroom being sick because she's so nervous literally sick literally sick wow by the early hours of the morning nixon and humphrey are now neck and neck they're about 43 percent each texas goes for humphrey pennsylvania goes for humphrey new york goes for humphrey but nixon is ahead in california in ohio in illinois and at last the news from chicago mayor daly wow he he pops up again Mayor Daley has been sitting on these boxes not releasing the results because presumably he wants the Democrats to win he does yeah I think he does want the Democrats to win Mayor Daley has a slight history perhaps of playing fast and loose with ballot box security and finally he releases the fair to say. And finally, he releases the results from Chicago

and they send Nixon over the top in Illinois

and they give him the presidency.

So out of more than 70 million votes cast,

he wins by just half a million.

The margin is half a million votes.

And he's done it.

He has banished the memories of all his defeats

and he has pulled off one of American history's great comebacks. So there is a second act in American political life.
Exactly. He goes down the hall at eight o'clock in the morning or so.
Glass of milk. To tell his family.
This is the first they've heard of it. Because they've been locked up in their room.
Vomiting in the bathroom. Hat can't believe it.
She says, oh, Dick, are we sure of Illinois? And he says, we are sure of Pat. And she bursts into floods of tears.
And then he comes downstairs to greet the media. It's midday in the Waldorf Astoria.
And we always like a bit of moving Nixon rhetoric. We like some syrup, don't we? We like a bit of syrup.
So this is what he says. I saw many signs in this campaign.
I don't want to degenerate into the Somerset voice again. Some of them were not friendly and some of them were very friendly.
But the one that touched me the most was the one I saw in Deshla, Ohio, at the end of a long day of whistle-stopping. A little town, I suppose.
Five times the population was there in the dusk, almost impossible to see. But a teenager held up a sign, bring us together.
So that definitely happened. And that will be the great objective of this administration.
We want to bridge the generation gap. We want to bridge the gap between the races.
We want to bring America together. And so, Tom, the Nixon golden age begins.
Because, spoiler alert, bringing America together is exactly what Nixon succeeds in doing. All Americans united in the conviction that he should resign after Watergate.
That's not even true. Is it not? No.
No, people were still rooting for him after Watergate. Yeah, there's still people who said, come on, Dick Nixon's got a very bad press.
We all, you know, do the odd thing we don't, you know, we're not too proud of. Oh, okay.
So yeah, Tom, that's the... So that's it.
I just mentioned Watergate because you've heard six episodes on America in 1968. But if you simply can't bear, you know, drawing a line under this, if you'd like to hear more Nixon, you can go and listen to the two episodes that we recorded, oh, about 73 years ago on Watergate.
Domin dominic again at his absolute best as he has been

in this series so thank you very much dominic for all of that your unparalleled expertise and thank you everyone who has listened maybe uh tom i think we should have uh dick nixon himself to play us out bye-bye bye-bye Nixon now, Nixon now.

He's made the difference.

He's shown us how.

Nixon now, Nixon now.