RICHARD NIXON

LAST OF THE MODERATE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS

JOHN R PRICE

ROTHERMERE AMERICAN INSTITUTE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

M AY 11TH, 2011

Thank you, Professor Bowles and thank you, Warden Markwell of Rhodes House. I also am delighted to see Sir Colin Lucas here. Colin had a transformative Vice Chancellorship of the University and went on to an important tenure as Warden of Rhodes House. I am so pleased that Professor Paul Madden, the Provost of my college, Queens College is also here, as is the Harmsworth Professor. I am appreciative of the opportunity this evening affords me on many counts. First to express my gratitude for then Vice Chancellor Patrick Neill, now Lord Neill of Bladen, having tapped me in the mid 1980s to become the founding Chairman of Americans for Oxford. The fourteen years I spent as Chairman or President of AFO were deeply satisfying. Secondly, to express my respect and appreciation for the scope and importance of the Rothermere American Institutes work on American studies and its close relation with Rhodes House. Thanks to Nigel for the launch and congratulations on his recent appointment. Finally, I wish among those present might have been my tutor, and later Provost of Queens, Geoffrey Marshall. He was a delightful, energetic teacher, at the same time both very traditional but embracing the new, such as the work he and Butler did in statistical election analysis. Professor Bowles tells me that there has been a good deal of recent revisionist work done by historians on Richard Nixon. I will speak tonight not as an historian so much as a participant. In my law school course on evidence, we were taught that an accident scene or contract negotiations produce many and often vital differences in recollection and description of what happened. All I can offer you in any useful detail is my view based on my time in the fray.

INTRODUCTION Only a few weeks ago, at the Nixon Library in California, a new exhibit on Watergate was unveiled. Yet again, the political scandal which caused the resignation, for the first time ever, of an American President, was noted. Yet again the question comes of how to weigh the accomplishments of the Nixon presidencyseparating them from the burden his reputation took on. I intend today to explore whether Richard Nixon should be in historys annals as a moderatein fact the last moderate Republican president. It is a relatively easy case to make that he was a strategist. Ronald Reagan was a strategist, too. But they were of very different views about government and its responsibility.

My fascination with Nixon is how he married an uncanny political skill with broad tenets most of which put him in a place occupied by the moderate or even liberal members of his party and in the center of American politics. Nixon represents an activist presidency, not one devoted to disassembling the national government. FIRST, I will look at the dynamic within the Republican Party as it shifted its footing through the decade of the 1960s. SECOND, I will concentrate on domestic policy. This is not just because it is the area with which I am most familiar. It is the area with which the public is least familiar. Within domestic policy, I will dwell on just a handful of initiatives. Some of these became law; some did not survive the battles in Congress. Some Nixon managed to roll out within his executive power under existing law. Nixons basic view was that government has a role to assure opportunity to people. What they make of that is up to them. It sounds like a basic conservative, individualistic outlook to be sure. But Nixon understood that there was want and hunger and that government could not abdicate its responsibility. In his dramatic proposal for welfare reform, his major expansion of food stamp assistance to needy families, his effort to break open trade union jobs to blacks and other minorities and his breathtaking proposals for health insurance coverage, Nixon proposed transformative programs. Following the Miami Republican convention in summer of 1968, I went off to a respite in the US Virgin Islands, licking my wounds, since I had been working for the unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination of Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, as head of the delegate intelligence unit. We kept dynamic files on the 1333 delegates and their alternates, and, at the last, desperately tried to suggest weak or opportunistic points for attack or cajoling. To no avail, as the strategy of an implicit Rockefeller/Ronald Reagan axis to halt Richard Nixons nomination on the first ballot failed. [In his memoir speaking of the morning after election Nixon recounts Rockefeller calledto congratulate me. When I told him that I understood his disappointment, he laughed and said Ronnie didnt come through for us as well as we expected.] The man who had come within a whisker of the presidency eight years earlier had through tenacity and skill earned another chance.

ENCOURAGEMENT FROM AN UNUSUAL SOURCE On my return to New York I was approached to join the general election campaign, as part of Nixons studious effort to be inclusive of various elements of the party as he turned to Hubert Humphrey and the fall campaign. I was encouraged to accept by a remarkable source, whose encouragement rang with later irony.

It was my new boss at the Brooklyn, N.Y., community development organization from which I had taken leave to work for Rockefeller. That boss was John Doar, later famous as the head of the staff in the U. S. House of Representatives which managed the attempt at impeachment of the President. I had breakfast with him on Flatbush Avenue at Juniors, noted for its cheesecake. When I asked him whether I should join Nixon, he asked, Youre a Republican arent you? He then forcefully added, Why be squeamish about working for Richard Nixon. Just look at the other party..its Dick Daley [Chicago, big city machine Democratic politics], Dave Dubinsky [ILGWU union head] and John Connally [Southern Democrat]. Of course you work for Richard Nixon! John was a Republican who came to Washington when Eisenhower formed the Civil Rights unit within the Justice Department. President Kennedys brother, Bob Kennedy, held him over and promoted Doar to Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Years later, in late 1973, as Watergate emerged in news stories, Doar came to an event at the New York bank where I by then worked. With characteristic bluntness, he asked, Did you know any of those fellows? Some. Did you have anything to do with this? No. I left in December, 1971. Some of these birds deserve to be on the third tier at Leavenworth [Federal penitentiary]. This indicates many things, not least among them that John was by 1973 hardly an impartial figure to be selected to run the ultimately 104 strong staff for the impeachment effort. More interesting to me, though, is how Doars comments in 1968 and 1973 make key points about the nature and, of course, the unhappy arc, of the Nixon presidency. It was Doars unspoken premise that Nixon was warp and woof of the Eisenhower wing of the Republican Party. Nixon had opted for Eisenhower in the tense 1952 nomination contest. Nixon was contemptuous of the John Birch Society conspiracy theorists who deemed Eisenhower a dupe of international communism if not a communist himself. In various debates within the Eisenhower administration, Nixon was squarely in line with moderate positions on social policy and often, according to some, even more liberal. To smooth his path to the 1960 nomination, Nixon had struck a concordat with Governor Rockefeller known as the Fifth Avenue Compact. The party however, had begun its metamorphosis, and this deal, in the view of the Taft wing of the party, was a sell-out. It kindled the Goldwater vow at the convention that summer to take back the party from the moderates. To borrow from a British idea, Nixon, despite his hard line anticommunism, to them had irrevocably joined the Wet wing of the party. The next few years saw great increase in conservative activism, with the creation of the American Conservative Union, the Young Americans for Freedom, and other groups. At about this same time, in 1962-63, a Republican group emerged whose conscious model was the Bow Group within the Tory Party here in Britain, and it aspired to help the Republicans to be the party of ideas and of ideas being realized. The group viewed the Democrats as intellectually insolvent by this time. It was not long before it took the name of the Wisconsin town, Ripon, in which the Republican Party had its organizational meeting in the 1850s.

It was no accident that this group harkened back to the founding of the Republicans. By 1962, the civil rights movement had emerged as a politically and morally significant factor in contemporary America and was a prominent fault line. Peaceful demonstrations were met with brutality, even murder. President Johnson sent a bevy of measures to Congress finally to enforce meaningfully the constitutional protections which had been put in place immediately following the Civil War. The Ripon Society watched with mounting concern as the conservative movement began attempting to marry the Republican Party to areas and candidates resistant to civil rights. The symbolism of the prominent South Carolina Senator, Strom Thurmond, becoming ever more cozy with Republicans was powerful. Thurmond had run as a segregationist for President in 1948, carrying all Dixie; he had conducted the longest filibuster in the history of the US Senate, against the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and was staunchly opposed to the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, as was Barry Goldwater. Ripon issued a statement, called A Declaration of Conscience on July 4th, 1964 in front of the schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. This was just days after Goldwaters and Thurmonds votes against the Civil Rights bill, and just days before the San Francisco convention where the moderates were to make last ditch efforts to keep Goldwater from the partys nomination for President. I was present at Ripon and went on to San Francisco, where I worked for Rockefeller staff and the moderate group in what was a dramatic, emotional climax to the 1964 nomination battle. The second night in the Cow Palace auditorium, I stood at the base of the speakers podium with Nelson Rockefeller standing about twenty feet above me, facing a hostile convention. He spoke to them of the bomb threats to his California primary campaign headquarters. When there was a chorus of boos, he said, You may not like to hear it ladies and gentlemen, but its the truth. Immediately in front of me was the California delegation, pledged to Goldwater, and in yellow Mae West jackets and cowboy hats. They stood on their chairs yelling curses at Rockefeller, and those in the front row spat in his (and my) direction. Several nights later, I listened to Goldwaters acceptance speech including the phrase Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice at which the convention erupted with approval. It was anticlimactic when Strom Thurmond crossed the aisle on September 16, 1964 and campaigned for Goldwater, now as a Republican. Nixon also supported Goldwaters effort in 1964 even though Nixon supported the 1960s civil rights bills which Goldwater had not. (Interestingly Nixons maternal great grandfather, an Indiana farmer and a Quaker, ran a station on the noted Underground Railway for runaway slaves during the pre-Civil War period). Nixons campaign rhetoric four years later was in consequence of the fact one of the paths to the 1968 nomination lay in the help given Nixon by Strom Thurmond to keep at bay the poaching by Ronald Reagan of southern delegates, which, if successful, might have kept Nixon from that first ballot victory.

THE TOP OF THE GREASY POLE Early on the morning after election polls had closed, the new President was looking tired but radiantly happy. It was a vastly different outcome from eight years earlier. Then, Nixon was urged to contest the election, but did not want to put the nation through another Tilden-Hayes ordeal. This time he had reached the top of the greasy pole as Disraeli put it, and he was going to govern. He had already thought through many themes of his prospective administration. Some ideas had been percolating for years, notably the China relationship and its role in the triangular balance with the Soviet Union. Foreign policy to the side, a riveting question about Nixon was how he saw himself in relation to the New Deal. Nixons views are nuanced, and interesting.

NIXON AND THE NEW DEAL On one level, Nixon saw himself as the book end of the New Deal period. He noted to Daniel P. Moynihan and me when the two of us met with him on October 24, 1969, You know, the reason Hubert Humphrey lost the electionwell, one of the reasons anyway was that he was the last of the New Deal. While the President knew most Congressional leaders in his party wished to inter the New Deal, he showed many signs of respecting some of its significant accomplishments. He had 10 years earlier cautioned Eisenhower Cabinet members that our fellows should not take positions on existing social programs like Social Security which could be seen by many people as hurting them. This was not just counting numbers for an election. Nixon had a deep connection with those who were struggling to make ends meet. I will spend time on the policy implications of that.

A GOVERNMENT THAT WORKS But first lets look at his interest in the mechanisms of government. He showed very early how different he would be from those more ideological politicians who followed him in the Republican Party.

Anecdotes abound with his distaste for bureaucracy. Yet he was not going to starve the beast with tax cuts. He was not going to do away with government, but to reform and retool it. His conviction that he would spend some of his capital as a newly elected President to make government structures work is consistent with a moderate worldview.

STRUCTURAL REFORM Nixon asked Daniel Patrick Moynihan to create, for domestic policy making, a structure like the National Security Council. Before Inauguration, I undertook a study for them of how the NSC operated (its Eisenhower formality and structure had atrophied), and how or whether other Cabinet Committees potential had been realized in the domestic policy arena. Two examples of the latter were found. Neither had worked. The reason was ultimately simple: absence of the President. I concluded my memo by saying Cabinet members are heliotropicthey like to turn and face the Sun and not each other. It is imperative that the President preside at the meetings. So he did. By his first Executive Order, on January 23rd, 1969, he created the Council for Urban Affairsin essence the Domestic Cabinet members. He chaired the Council personally for twenty one of the twenty three meetings from its creation until, by Act of Congress, it became the Domestic Council in July of 1970. It was interesting that this personal involvement of the President cut against the grain in that he was a very private decision maker. Yet, during this period of almost two years, there were occasions when it appeared these meetings were, for this former lawyer, the oral arguments, after reading the briefs (Council documents) in advance. There were moments of impish interest and fun, Socratic questioning by Nixon, and some genuine thoughtful discussion. Underlying it all was strong and analytic staff work. Legislatively to formalize this domestic Cabinet was a recommendation of the Ash Council, named for Roy Ash, CEO of Litton Industries, whose mandate was to recommend the creation or rationalization of structures which would make government more efficient, and would update the way in which emergent issues would be addressed. This was an analogy to the Hoover Commission which had, in the Eisenhower era, done an exhaustive examination of government organization. The Ash Council also recommended a more broadly supervisory Office of Management and Budget and the creation of the Environmental Protection Administration. 1969 also saw the creation in the White House of the National Goals Research Staff. The NGRS was to look at projections of demographics, social indicators, and the economy. For the first time, it creates within the White House a unit specifically charged with the long perspective

Management attention was also given the very gritty work done in the field by government. On the agenda of the first CUA meeting was an item on the Oakland Task Force Report. This was Public Administration course 101 for the Cabinet. The delivery of services from various departments in the field was often done without coordination, or even knowledge of related programs. Over the next year, Nixon made coterminous the regions in which all Federal domestic departments worked, and created Regional Councils to encourage coordination and mutual awareness. Much later came his sweeping Reorganization Plan. This was a massive proposed restructuring of the Departments and agencies to try to house similar or related activities under the same roof. Intimations of this came with the creation in 1970 of the Environmental Protection Administration, which pulled some 44 different programs from all over the government together to be housed in a new, focused environmental entity. In 1972 Nixon proposed to Congress that four long established Departments (Treasury, State, Defense and Agriculture) be kept basically intact, but that the rest be overhauled functionally into four departments. Congress did not approve. The Congressional Committees would not brook such an upheaval in their jurisdictions. Acting on his own after Congress balked, in early 1973, Nixon named super Cabinet members with oversight of more than one department, giving them offices in the Executive Office Building. It lasted not long at all. (Not much longer than the ill-fated effort to dress White House guards for State ceremonies in a fashion not unlike Groucho Marxs attendants in the film, Duck Soup.) Politics also had an impact on the creation of the regional councils which we have discussed [supra]. Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington state, trading for his vote on the ABM treaty which Nixon wanted ratified, insisted that Seattle be the site of one of the co-located regional headquarters for the government. Voila! Politics also was responsible for the creation of the Cabinet level Rural Affairs Council in autumn of 1969. Farm state senators pushed for recognition of their concerns at the highest level. Pat Moynihan groused about its pending creation in a memo to H.R. Haldeman (the Presidents Chief of Staff):

Moynihan was fascinating, truly the intellectual in politics and successful at both. We look at Michael Ignatieff in Canada this past week by sorry contrast. A vivid image of Moynihans dual role stays with me from many years ago, an anecdote involving Oxford. It was Thanksgiving week in the United States, and on the Monday and Tuesday of that week, Senator Moynihan had floor managed the Surface Transportation Act in the Senate. From there he came to Oxford, where I happened to be that week, and where I heard him deliver the Cyril Foster lecture at the university. It was an extended treatment of the impact of ethnicity and was later published as Pandaemonium. It is remarkable that one man in the space of a week could accomplish both. Moynihan is an important ingredient in Nixons policy mix and strategy.

THE JOBS AND INCOME STRATEGY Nixon was not just about form or efficiency of government. He went right to substance. The list of Nixons initiatives and successes is long and diverse. From the Environmental Protection Administration, to the all volunteer military, to the 18 year old vote, to creation of the Office of Child Development, to the abolition of chemical and biological weapons, to pension reform, to taking the Post Office out of politics, to Native American Policy Reform, to Home Rule for the District of Columbia, to unprecedented federal support for the arts and humanities, the list goes on and on and is startling. I will talk about a handful. The cluster of Nixons domestic programs which came together under his jobs and income strategy, was potent. His almost immediate expansion of the food stamp program to help poor families, his elimination of federal income tax on those below the official poverty line, his dramatic proposal for income support for all those Americans, working or unable to work, who were poor, all were the work of a man who wanted deeply to assist those in need. His answers to poverty were different from his predecessor. Ironically, he embraced a welfare reform which President Johnsons administration had shied from, thinking it too radical and dramatic. Let us start then with welfare. Welfare rolls, especially in urban areas like New York, had been exploding during the 1960s. President Johnsons response was to declare a War on Poverty. Money went to advocacy groups or to government employees doing community organizing. Schools were turning out graduates for careers in social service work. Nixons war on poverty was to be money in the hands of the poor themselves; it was to completely rework the welfare system. The Social Security Act in the 1930s had created programs which by now had a myriad of regulations: they were administered in different ways in each state, with different eligibility rules, and dramatically different benefit levels. They contained incentives to break up families with low incomes, because benefits would not be paid if a father was in the home and working. All in all a system which left many out, and which invited gaming.

Some years earlier, in 1962, the Chicago free market economist Milton Friedman had called for a program of income transfer to those who were indigent, including those who were working, but whose wages were still leaving their families below the poverty level. He called it the Negative Income Tax. At the same time liberal economists such as James Tobin at Yale were coming to a similar conclusion. I was at a dinner in New York with Nixon and half a dozen financial types in January of 1968 and mentioned to him that I, when research director at the Ripon Society, was struck by how there had been conservative, or libertarian, and liberal convergence on this idea. He did not like the term negative income tax, did not pick it up at the time, and never used the phrase, but after the election, the welfare issue was quickly engaged. Nixon formed a transition task force whose recommendations were cautious. Things might have remained there except for the presence of Daniel P. Moynihan and the degree to which he and the President found themselves in harmony.

Moynihan in 1969 was of enormous importance in Nixons domestic initiatives. He joined the White House from his post as head of the HarvardMIT Joint Center for Urban Studies. An active Democrat, he attracted Nixons attention with a speech he gave to the Americans for Democratic Action, a sort of College of Cardinals of the liberal community, in which he urged that liberals and conservatives need find common cause in the preservation of institutions under siege and fight extremism together. As they came to know each other, there were many ways in which the President and Moynihan were joined. Both had a bias against elitists which always smoldered and occasionally erupted (Nixon on the rejection by the Senate of his Southern nominees for the Supreme Court, [Clement Haynsworth and then Harrold G. Carswell]; Moynihan, relevantly here, in resentment against blind political opposition to Nixons remarkable programs for the poor). Both wanted a complete overhaul of welfare and both believed that the poor needed money or the opportunity to earn it. Under the aegis of the Council for Urban Affairs, the welfare issue began to be hammered out. Moynihan framed it as part of a contrasting philosophy of government to the traditional liberal idea of providing services to the poor, and insisted to a responsive Nixon that the poor dont need case workers, but jobs and income. As Pat so colorfully put it, the former approach was feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses. Nixon resonated with the philosophy of work and income. By August 1969 when announced, the welfare proposal included the working poor and set a national minimum level of support at $1600 per year for a family of four. Nixon himself had insisted on a strong requirement of work for those receiving assistance. In this way he felt and maintained that his proposal was not a guaranteed income. A battle royal had been fought for months on this within the Administration, with Vice President Agnew, among others, in opposition. A Camp David meeting was held with the Cabinet and senior staff, just days before the August 8th, 1969 unveiling. The Vice President expressed his continuing antipathy to it. Nixon told Moynihan and me later that he had made his decision in favor of the Family Assistance Plan, or FAP as it was called, three months before its announcement. He had allowed a debate to go onto give people time to grasp what it was we were trying to do. Speaking of the Camp David Cabinet meeting, he said it had been historic: We broke the backs of some of the Cabinet, but they came around. The FAP went to the Congress where, over the next two years, it was passed twice by the full House of Representatives. It languished in the Senate despite Nixons efforts to win over liberals by twice raising the proposed floor level on payments. By April of 1971, Nixon was tiring of trying to push reluctant Senators. He also in his side view mirror was watching Ronald Reagan who was contemplating challenging him from the right for the 1972 nomination. From the beginning, many of the conservatives on the Hill had been in strong opposition to FAP.

Moynihan meanwhile was working to persuade the liberal community that they ought not be in opposition to a liberal proposal simply because it was Richard Nixons. He and I briefed a meeting of the Civil Rights Leadership Council, including heads of most of the liberal lobby groups in Washington, and he pleaded with them to little avail to support the President. The President himself started out in firm support, excited support, for his program. He told Moynihan and me that, This is the most revolutionary social program since Woodrow Wilson. On Christmas Eve, 1969, I took into the Oval Office the head of the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health. His report was being turned over to me for implementation and this was a formal handoff with the President putting his blessing on it. In a reflective mood late afternoon that December 24th, the President said to me, Family Assistance is terribly important to get passed. You know, of course, that every year there will be a battle in Congress about raising the floor [on family income maintenance payments under FAP]. The Republicans will oppose itand yet the increase will pass. But, the important thing is that we will have established the principle. It was not to happen. Another part of the jobs and income strategy did indeed become law, with major positive impact on the poor. Before Nixon took office, a food program for the poor was in place in most, but not all, counties. Some 440 of the nations 3,000 plus counties did not offer either a distribution of food to the poor, or food stamps which could be bought and used to buy food at grocery stores. On May 6th, 1969, the President sent a message to Congress with a revised food stamp program. From the 7 million Americans served at the time of the message, his proposal would now reach 16 million citizens. And this DID happen.

He noted in his message that the Food Stamp program is complementary to a revised welfare program [The Family Assistance Plan]. Actually the Food Stamp program was a variant on the negative income tax, as it would provide food stamps at no cost to those in the very lowest income brackets and it would provide food stamps to others at a cost of no greater than 30% of income. And, there was more to the jobs and income strategy. The President was advised that tens if not hundreds of thousands were subject to Federal income tax liability even when another arm of the Government, the Social Security Administration, categorized them as below the Poverty Level. He found this indefensible and successfully sought revision of the tax code to exempt such families from tax. In a remarkable and revealing segment of an address to that White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health, he spoke with passion. This subject also evokes vivid personal memories. I grew up in the Great Depression. I shall never forget the hopelessness that I saw so starkly etched on so many facesthe silent gratitude of others lucky enough to enjoy three square meals a day, or sometimes even one. He goes on to say Our job is to get resources to people in need and then to let them run their own lives.

NIXON AND MINORITIES

As noted, Nixons focus was on jobs and income. This had implications for his priorities when it came to his relations with minorities. He very early embraced a program of assistance to create more minority owned businesses and consequent job opportunities. The tools for the new Office of Minority Business Enterprise involved government contract set-asides and preferences. After a very slow start, results of the Minority Business Enterprise initiative were reasonable. A more visible and controversial act of Nixons was the Philadelphia Plan which in effect set employment quotas for minoritiesin the instant case in the construction trades. Johnsons administration had decided to drop their tentative plan just before the handover to Nixona situation not unlike its failure to move forward on an ambitious welfare reform leaving it to the Republican to do so.

NIXON AND CIVIL RIGHTS In the Eisenhower years, Nixon had chaired a task force on opening up defense contracting and jobs for minoritiesaffirmative action if you will, which continued as an important element of the new Presidents labor policy and was one of his legacies. The Nixon effort to open up job opportunity was the civil rights vehicle for the administration, in the words of Art Fletcher, the Assistant Secretary of Labor who put the Philadelphia Plan together. It was consistent with long held views by Nixon, including his 1960 backing to end local labor union discrimination.

Nixon had supported every major piece of civil rights legislation from the 1950s through his election as President. Neither Goldwater, nor Reagan, nor George H. W. Bush had supported the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. Despite this consistent support, Nixons emphasis on jobs as the core civil right, rather than school desegregation, and his rhetoric in the campaign meant his opening relations with the established civil rights leadership in 1969 were uneasy. When Benjamin Hooks, then head of the NA ACP went to see the new Attorney General, John Mitchell, and complained about what he had heard, Mitchell said to him that was campaign rhetoric, and he [Hooks] should watch what the administration would do. A disastrous meeting took place in April, 1969 with Ralph Abernathy, the heir to Martin Luther Kings organization. (Nixon had enjoyed a reasonably good relationship with King). Moynihan had organized a meeting of the entire Council for Urban Affairs: the whole domestic Cabinet, the President, and the Vice President. Abernathy came in with a vengeance, and then went on to brief the White House Press Corps in an excoriating exhibition. Moynihan had told me of his bitterness in the past about Roy Wilkins (a prominent civil rights leader) behavior on the occasion of the famous 1965 Moynihan Report on the Negro Family. Wilkins called me to tell me that he thought I was absolutely right in my analysis of reasons for the breakup of the Negro family. He then had a press conference where he called me a racist! The Abernathy meeting was the nadir of relations with the established civil rights leadership.

Despite this frostiness, the ground game in the most pressing issue of civil rights was successful. There had been really no progress in school desegregation since the Brown decision in 1954. Another court decision, Holmes v. Alexander, in 1969, called for immediate action. After lengthy debate internally, the decision was made to proceed in a way which, in Secretary of Labor George Shultzs words, would manage the traumatic process of transition. The President formed a Cabinet committee and named the Vice President Chair, and Shultz Vice Chair. Vice President Agnew said he wanted no part of this, declined to participate, and kept lobbying the President to disengage. As he had with the welfare reform, and as he would once again with the Presidents 1971 health care reform, Agnew was in firm opposition to the Presidents course. At times watching Agnew I thought that Nixon must have felt a bit like Dr. Frankenstein. Yet Nixons view, in his memoir, is of an Agnew who was useful in reaching a group of the voters whom Nixon found important. He was impressed when Agnew found his own voice, and his account of his acceptance of Agnews resignation is sympathetic. For all the politics in trying to reach the Wallace vote, and in trying not to have the South feel disinherited, the course adopted of meticulous effort with local black and white Southern leaders for voluntary compliance, worked. In a meeting in New Orleans of bi-racial leadership from the seven Southern states involved, Nixon said implementation must be non-violent, and that all had a stake in that. Once again, in Shultzs words, A sense of determination in a joint, compelling enterprise filled the room. In the words of NYTimes columnist Tom Wicker, a year or so later, Theres no doubtthat it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administrations desegregation effort. Halting and uncertain before he finally asserted strong control, that effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.

A RADICAL HEALTH CARE PROPOSAL Before concluding, we must look at another Nixon initiative, health care reform (Family Health Insurance Plan or FHIP). Here, as with the attempt for Family Assistance (FAP), most of the proposal did not become law. Yet, the ambition of it was remarkable and, as with FAP, some important elements did become law. In a message to the Congress on February 18, 1971, Nixon proposed a partnership between the Federal Government, the private insurance industry, hospitals, medical schools and the medical profession. Like FAP for welfare payments, the Family Health Insurance Plan [or FHIP] would provide a national floor under health insurance, and national eligibility standards in lieu of the Medicaid program which varied widely (and still does) from state to state. Given the debate around Obama Care which still leaves tens of millions unreached by insurance, Nixon was radical and proposed that all employers with one or more employees be required to provide standard health insurance

to their employees and their families. While this later got modified so that employers of ten or more employees faced the mandate, this was Nixons opening mark. There would also be under FHIP basic health insurance protection to all low income families with children not covered by employer plans. No cost-sharing would be required for poor families or individuals. The supply side was addressed as well, with major efforts to get medical students trained and out practising, particularly in poorly served areas like rural counties or inner cities. Other medical vocationsallied health personnel--were encouraged as was the growth of ambulatory care. Standards were to be established to upgrade care in nursing homes. Preventive medicine was at the heart of the concept, with strong support going to socalled Health Maintenance Organizations [HMOs] whose financial incentives lay in sound preventive practices. It was up to the employee as to whether they chose an HMO or the traditional providers. A National Health Education Foundation was to be established to alert people to ways to protect their own health. In a wonderfully dramatic Nixonian move, the National Cancer Institute was enacted and within a year it was located at 64 acre Fort Detrick, MD, where, until months earlier, when Nixon abolished the program, the US Army secret effort to build germ warfare offense and defense had been housed. Soon 2400 researchers were there doing work on the molecular basis of cancer. This was not just a moderate plan. It wasand would be viewed todayas a radical plan. It was offered not just because Nixon thought Ted Kennedy might be the Democratic candidate and wanted a proposal to blunt what Kennedy would offer in his life-long quest for comprehensive health care. Nixon had offered, as early as 1947 while a Congressman, a broad health care proposal, spurred in some part perhaps by the lengthy and expensive suffering of his two brothers and their deaths. Again there are the deep experiences of childhood informing the progressive policies of a President. As the debate continued, Nixon spoke of health care reform in his last radio message, November 3, 1972, before his re-election. Efforts by Nixon and his new Secretary, Casper Weinberger, continued to push use of the private insurers and pools for self-employed, or high risk, or employees in small firms. This effort by Nixon and then Secretary Casper Weinberger continued into 1974. Senator Kennedy said on many occasions, that one of the greatest regrets of his career was that he had not been able to work out a deal with Nixon for something both of them deeply desired, though their approach had greatly differed. Instead, efforts have in the 40 some years since hit the third rail under Clinton, and now are the subject of violent opposition in the partly finished work of Obama and the last Congress.

WAS NIXON A MODERATE? PROGRESSIVE? RADICAL? In conclusion, I believe a case is readily made that Nixon was a moderate in his analytic style and weighing of policy options. He was also moderate and non-revolutionary in his disposition to see government as important in helping address social problems. Looking at his program catalog, we are tempted to go well beyond that. Nixon liked the element of surprise; he loved also citing his historic firsts. But more than surprise, many of the initiatives we have discussed today were sweeping, were major departures, and were from a strategy of dealing with poverty, inequity and want. Also his environmental initiatives which I have not talked of, looked at the broader question of what we now would call public goods. Theodore Roosevelt was obviously close to Nixons thoughts, as he quoted TR in the emotional morning of his August, 1974, resignation and departure. While Nixon spoke to us about having launched the greatest social reforms since Woodrow Wilson, he might have cited TR.

NIXONS SUCCESSORS If that makes Nixon more of a progressive than a moderate, what then of his successors?

Temperamentally one might argue that Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, and for that matter Reagan were moderates. Certainly, they lack the Shakespearean mix of light and shadow which Nixon had. But substantively, to me the Ford presidency is a continuation of Nixons. Ford proceeded with Salt II, and other Nixon initiatives. He did attempt to secure catastrophic health insurance coverage but could not even get a hearing on his proposals. Perhaps most crucially, he was pushed hard by the inexorable rise of the right, and Reagans ambitions. The drive of the Republicans into the South was proceeding, and the issues which Nixon had pushed were no longer the leading edge for the Republicansif they ever were. Ford had to drop a leading symbol of the moderates, Nelson Rockefeller, from the ticket in 1976 in order to keep Reagan from using the issue as a crowbar to wrest the nomination from the incumbent President, so strong was the conservative surge. Reagan was the soft spoken, usually genial radical. Bush 41 is interesting. He was starting an elective career in Texas as it was beginning its transition to a Republican state based on attracting disaffected conservative Democrats. Many of his earlier impulses, like favoring family planning, or open housing, quickly gave way in light of his ambitions, or were so indecisive as to be unclear. He was undoubtedly of much the same mind as Nixon on foreign policy and often consulted him. Look at the mobilization for the Gulf War in 1991, and his support for a united Germany. But he was, having joined Reagans ticket in 1980, not easily going to escape. I think the most compelling quick analysis of George H. W. Bushs position in American politics was one given by Richard Nixon to a friend of mine in late summer of 1988. Following the Democratic convention, Dukakis had climbed in the polls against Bush. Nixon said the Dukakis lead was temporary, just a post-convention bounce. Nixon predictedthis is late summer 1988 mind youthat Bush would win, as the third Reagan term, and then he would lose in 1992. Nixon surely was one of the most absorbing, intelligent, prepared, and complicated persons ever to hold that office. But, again, back to the sad arc of Nixons presidency. John Doars staff for the impeachment grew to 104, the same number as the guns on HMS Victory, which Admiral Lord Nelson used when he brought down another towering historic figure. Moynihan captured the sadness of it even before the final act. In an entry in his diary on March 1, 1974, while still in India, Moynihan notes: It hardly matters. The presidency has departed Richard Nixon as the Mandate of Heaven was withdrawn from Chinese Emperors. Thank you.