President Richard Nixon: One Year Later

...But no one could believe as 1970 approached that the incendiary pseudo-populism of Spiro T. Agnew lacked Presidential sanction and encouragement...

...it was not he who had committed us to a calamitous partnership with the Thieu-Ky cabal...

...That he acquired a heavy stake in his ill-conceived and ill-fated choice of Clement Haynsworth was understandable...

...Once that was accomplished, he could dedicate himself to the larger works of an enlightened Disraeli Toryism (such as Moynihan's welfare reforms) at home and great new breakthroughs toward disarmament, or at least arms reduction...

...His sustained attempts to obstruct and harass the peace protest—an exercise synchronized with Agnew's apocalyptic messages on the media—signify certain fanaticisms wholly at variance with the image of the cool one...

...Had the "Southern strategy" indeed been embraced as the gospel and tactical manual of the Nixon era...

...Nixon's Presidency contains so much disheartening portent of danger...

...Just as Dwight D. Eisenhower negotiated a peace in Korea that the far right would have denounced as "treason" if arranged by Harry Truman, so there seemed reason to foresee Mr...

...This first anniversary has an added poignancy because it coincides with the end of the decade that really began when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon and a new political generation, perhaps most nobly symbolized by the dedicated young men and women of the Peace Corps, stepped forward to replace "the silent generation" of the Eisenhower time...

...for while it explained the irreconcilability of the Hiss cult, there were many—-including, if I may say so, this writer—who did not believe truth had been crucified in that encounter...

...Nothing he can do will' satisfy them," White House visitors were churlishly told by Presidential aides, and even, it was said, by Mr...

...And like most paranoid conditions, his had certain roots in reality...

...It had in fact occurred during Lyndon Johnson's regime...

...Columnists with some access to the inner circles described a deepening bitterness over what was described as an incurable hostility of anti-Nixon diehards...

...His vaunted "pragmatism" did inspire hope that he might be congenial to more audacious innovations in some realms than a defensive Democrat would have been, and there have been a few tentative steps in such directions...

...If the war merely dragged on, the domestic strife would be rendered more turbulent by the polarization now set in motion...

...I know few men of the "opposition" who would have been unprepared to give him full credit for such initiatives, no matter how large the political dividends he might derive from them...

...his entente cordiale with the right-wing South was a matter of record...

...JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and one of its featured columnists...

...If it finally did abandon the dream of "Vietnamization" and make peace in a coalition framework, Wallace would leap to the stage screaming "betrayal" and his audience would have been multiplied by the climate Nixon and his men had helped to create...

...But what was clear, as the first year of the Nixon Presidency drew to a close, was that the war had remained our festering national obsession and that the Nixon "peace plan" at best represented a reduction of American forces in the foreseeable future without a negotiated settlement...

...Nixon's own Secretary of State...

...But the revelations were inescapably destined to intensify the moral anguish of many Americans heretofore disposed to heed Mr...

...but for at least six months the Nixon Administration—and the Thieu government—had suppressed all knowledge of a calamity that transformed into travesty so much of the war's sacrifice...

...he was McCarthy's target rather than co-conspirator...

...The President, we were told, understood that his ultimate success as a national leader would be determined by his capacity to disarm, if not enchant, these large sectors...

...But once it unleashes the furies that lurk in the sub-surface of American life, it may discover that they are far less controllable or subject to early reversal...

...Did Mr...

...Weak and irresolute as he was during much of the McCarthy assault, Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed an ultimate ally of decency and sanity...

...One looks back at this first long year with no new vision of the man, no discovery of hidden resources, but rather with a shock of recognition...

...Not a single sign or word was given to suggest that he and "they" had any common ground...

...It was true, they privately conceded, that Mr...

...He did not come to us pledging a new rebirth of progressivism...

...His thinly-disguised surrender to the Pentagon on the ABM issue, the warnings of his aides that the "peace dividend" will be far less generous and equitable than many civic planners had hoped, the Supreme Court designation of Warren E. Burger and Clement F. Hayns-worth, the quiet emasculation of already submissive regulatory agencies can hardly be called inconsistent with much of his campaign rhetoric...

...Numerous commentators were intrigued by this theory...

...By the last weeks of 1969, the flaws in this game plan had become tragically visible...

...Not in many years has there been an Attorney General who appeared intellectually indistinguishable from J. Edgar Hoover...

...Nixon's effort to "buy time" for his Vietnam policy and thereby avert postwar domestic strife over what might have appeared to be a craven capitulation (even granting that the war was not his own...

...The combination of events and excesses in high Administration places that marked the closing months of Mr...

...But I don't want to beat him over Vietnam...

...Did this explain both his militant postur-ings on Vietnam (accompanied by a "gradualist" withdrawal plan) and his tacit endorsement of Agnewism...

...When the war is over . . . How often one heard the same wistful words from Lyndon Johnson's lieutenants who watched despairingly as his outlines of the Great Society receded and Vietnam became the transcendent priority and preoccupation, tearing apart an Administration and a nation...

...Nixon's appeal for a lowering of voices, the raucous, intimidatory sounds of Agnew and Mitchell drown out any quieter remembrances of 1969...

...Nixon reject it because he was the captive of the ideological dogmas of the Dulles-Rusk era (coalition, in Hubert Humphrey's phrase, means "the fox-in-the-chicken-coop...

...No less striking if less widely observed was the growing distance between the White House and the Negro community...

...if some exaggerated the frailties of the earlier Nixon, it cannot be said that we have seen a new one unfold...

...His books include "The Age of Suspicion" and "Confessions of a Middle-aged Editor...

...In the same terms its appearance of aloofness to the unrest in lower-depth America contains time-bombs grimly described by such agencies as Milton Eisenhower's National Commission on Violence...

...Now it is "the silent majority" that is depicted as the great new force in our politics—a "majority" allegedly hostile to student protesters, black rebels, "Eastern" intellectuals (such as Eric Sevareid of Minnesota) and the restless poor...

...I want to help him get out of there...

...There were those who advanced the suspicion that much of the super-patrioteering of previous weeks had been partially designed to anticipate the impact of dreaded disclosure...

...There were, of course, still Robert Finch, Daniel Moynihan, James Farmer, and a few others (one probably does them a disservice by naming them) who were furtively at odds with the dominant atmosphere...

...But by the time the event took place, it may well have been too late for any meaningful gesture of conciliation...

...the My Lai massacre broke...

...For many of us to whom the Vietnam war had become the deadly poison of our time, there was the hope that Nixon's victory would bring swift, decisive disengagement...

...The rebellion of civil rights lawyers in the Justice Department over the Administration's Mississippi retreat on school desegregation accentuated the sense that Mr...

...The answers remain obscure...

...Any gains that may be made among the rednecks by tacit assurances that their sensibilities are now respected on the highest level can hardly offset the incipient discords in the cities...

...Casualties did not cease...

...Then, as if to warn that this war would forever produce new, unexpected boobytraps, the storm over "At times his Administration seemed a blend of George F. Babbitt and Joseph McCarthy...

...Johnson so often was, by the insistent delusion of the Bunker Establishment and its military associates that the adversary was on the run, and that time was on our side...

...I remember Averell Harriman saying privately in the winter of 1969: "I'll want to beat Nixon in 1972...

...From the time of his early Congressional campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas, his gift for gutter-politics had estranged many who write or think about politics...

...This union of varied discontents and prejudices could not only endanger the GOP's newly won power...

...In thus ostensibly seeking to save us from the intolerance of Wallaceism, a crucial difficulty was that the Administration was inevitably inflaming the darkest emotions of American primitives...

...Mitchell and his Goldwaterite deputy, Richard Kleindienst, had already declared psychological war on those whom they deemed invaders, and finally granted permission for their appearance only in the context of an armed truce...

...But by autumn of 1969 the gaps had become vast chasms...

...It is not really too consequential whether the "Southern strategy" is a design or an improvisation...

...He saw both the Republican Party and the country (to say nothing of his own re-election prospects) imperiled by the Wallace movement, with its appeal not only to the Old South but to large segments of blue-collar workers now dwelling in suburbia...

...Nixon sponsoring a political settlement in Vietnam independent of Thieu...

...Whatever his lack of political literacy and sophistication in dealing with dissidence, Mitchell can no longer be dismissed as a crafty barrister devoid of warm feeling...

...Why else would he have insisted upon denying admission to the United States —for a series of public meetings—to a Belgian Marxist journalist whose entry had been approved by both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and recommended by William Rogers, Mr...

...Nixon had been deeply dismayed by the size—and the future potentiality—of the George C. Wallace vote...

...Nor was there much dispute that John T. Mitchell was proving to be the "strong man" of the Nixon retinue, his counsel prevailing in many areas beyond the domain of the Justice Department...

...One need only recall his outcry against the press—"You won't have Nixon to kick around any longer"—on the bleak morning after his California gubernatorial debacle of 1962...

...Secretary of State Rogers showed a notable compulsion to speak in tones of restraint and rationality ("We are not wedded to Saigon," he even dared to declare once) as if to disassociate himself from the clamor around him...

...Why did he exhibit panic over the peace march—and cause his poor wife sleepless nights by equating the far-out demonstrators at the Justice Department with the advance guard of the Russian revolution...

...Would this revulsion require another re-escalation of the war against dissenters and another frenzy of flag-waving and self-justification...

...Nixon was portrayed by sympathetic cheerleaders as resolved to break the communication barrier between himself and those large groups that had felt most estranged by presenting a candidate and a campaign clearly addressed to the "un-young, the un-black, and the un-poor...

...What was equally clear was that a corollary of this strategy was an offensive against the anti-war movement creating an oppressive national climate in some ways more repugnant than the worst days of the Joseph McCarthy nightmare...

...At times his Administration seemed a blend of George F. Babbitt and Joseph McCarthy...

...But what mattered most was whether he would fulfill his promise to impart dignity and solemnity to national discourse or whether, in the first hours of trial, he would revert to the devices of desperation and distraction he knows so well...

...Later he was to attribute all the enmity to his demolition of Alger Hiss, but in fact this was a convenient revision of history...

...never reached his solitary confinement...

...It seemed a reasonable expectation that he would move to dissolve the ties that so fatally bound us to Saigon and open the way—by open or covert encouragement—for emergence of a coalition regime capable of making peace...

...In that setting, so the President allegedly brooded, his immediate major mission was to defuse and divert the challenge by capturing it...

...For in the age of Agnewism—it does not seem too early to characterize the period—both the President and his Attorney General were plainly accomplices...

...These, above all, are the reasons why the first year of Mr...

...In the beginning Mr...

...For these are essentially manifestations of insecurity and, in the deepest sense, of incapacity to govern...

...Now, nearly twelve months after Mr...

...It was almost as if the President and his entourage had visions of his past opponents kneeling in prayer for his doom and planning morbid celebration of some national disaster that would bring him down...

...He has, one fears, an instinct for high-strung, vindictive combat paralleling that of his client in the White House...

...Nixon himself...

...What they saw primarily in the evolving new Administration was the hand—or the spiritual guidance—of Strom Thurmond, and polls showing Nixon's steady rise in esteem among the diehard segregationists of the Old South heightened their distrust and disenchantment...

...President Richard Nixon: One Year Later by JAMES A. WECHSLER In the early months of the Nixon Administration there were recurrent reports that the new men in Washington believed they had been cruelly prejudged—and misjudged—by liberal critics...

...Many students—and teachers—• might continue to be disaffected and the blacks might grumble, but in the end there would be general appreciation for his operational genius and his long-range vision...

...In times of relative quiescence it is possible for an Administration to tune the level of debate up and down at will...

...Nixon chose to treat this peace procession as if it were a parade of pariahs—and the music of "Give Peace a Chance...

...Some hopeful Republican liberals professed to dispute the conclusion—or at least question whether the course was fixed beyond change...

...Those of us who had watched his advent with apprehension were portrayed as having acquired a vested interest in his failure...

...This may be wild conjecture...

...That the option of coalition existed has been publicly confirmed on many occasions...

...His tendency to panic and regress under fire seems unchanged...

...Six years earlier John F. Kennedy had extended his hand to the Freedom Marchers and thereby transformed what might have been an adversary collision into at least the semblance of an alliance...

...Nixon had indeed handed over his sword to Thurmond during a moment of peril at the 1968 convention...

...Nixon was reported to be in the White House watching a football game...

...It was, they pointed out, consistent with Mr...

...it could, in a period of postwar reaction, lead to a surge of know-nothingism that would threaten the democratic process itself...

...It was most conspicuously reflected in the language and demeanor of such men as the NAACP's Roy Wilkins and the Urban League's Whitney Young—men heretofore praised (and damned) for their role as "responsibles...

...Nixon had shown many symptoms of the ailment before he achieved the Presidency...

...While hundreds of thousands of predominately young Americans marched in Washington in the largest demonstration in our history, Mr...

...Or was he beguiled, as Mr...

...It was not his war...

...Yet it was Harriman whose low-key television commentary on Nixon's November 3 Vietnam speech produced one of Agnew's angriest exclamations...

...the South Vietnamese army showed no great resurgence of fighting morale when informed of its new and heavier obligations...

...The theory is sometimes advanced that the simultaneous presence of Mitchell and Finch represents a deliberate, adroit balancing-act and discredits the notion that the President leans by impulse and habit to the right...

...Once the war is over," it is whispered, "these storms will pass, and the Finches will be a lot more influential...

...To a certain extent all governments suffer from persecution complexes, and Mr...

...For while he had been previously depicted as a bloodless, detached figure consumed only by a selfless desire to protect and enhance the political fortunes of Richard Nixon, there were mounting signs that he was in fact a man of the right, instinctively imbued not only with the passions of the "law-and-order" set but with a Pavlovian repugnance for most manifestations of the liberal tradition...

...he was surely "pragmatic" enough to profit from recollection of how his predecessor had been ruined by this entrapment...

...For one thing, while the "silent majority" might turn its headlights on during peace moratoria to assert its fidelity to the President and to decry the folly—or treason—of the demonstrations, the darkness did not lift in Vietnam...

...Nixon's exhortations for patience...

...It is the story to date, and it seems sadly compatible with the history of the incumbent...

...but the pressures he used in a vain effort to vindicate a blunder indicated again a quality of ruthless tenacity (as well as insensitivity) that are not the traits of a non-aligned legal temperament...

...It is perhaps simplistic to ascribe all of Mitchell's aggressions against the Bill of Rights and the cause of civil rights to the calculated doctrine of the "Southern strategy...

...Nixon's first year were almost a parody of the fears that had been voiced about a Nixon Presidency...

...In any case Nixon's basic assumption about the unalterable intransigence of liberal attitudes toward his Presidency was a neurotic generalization...