by Jill Lepore
A new American history—along with the broadening of research in the social sciences and the humanities more generally—was long overdue. But in the context of the war in Vietnam, questioning academic authority and pointing out the biases of experts began to slip into a cynicism about truth itself. A great deal of university research, not only in engineering and in weapons technology, had been deployed to wage and support the war in Vietnam, a war most Americans deemed ill-judged and many considered immoral. The Cold War had asked many of the nation’s scientists and scholars to turn their research to the pursuit of military and foreign policy aims; the Vietnam War had contorted the academy itself. After the Tet Offensive, Senate hearings into military spending revealed, among many other academic scandals, the extent of Simulmatics’s years of work in South Vietnam, conducting public opinion surveys and analyzing the dreams of Vietnamese villagers as a way of understanding the insurgency, a project not unrelated to the company’s other research, on countering “urban insurgency.” Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, who convened the hearings, denounced social scientists like Ithiel de Sola Pool for failing to provide “an effective counterweight to the military-industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy” and instead having “joined the monolith.” Noam Chomsky, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1969, argued that much of academic life in the United States—the production of knowledge itself—had been suborned for the purpose of waging a grotesque war in which all the courage had been shown by the young, by young soldiers who fought the war, and by young students who protested it. “While young dissenters plead for resurrection of the American promise, their elders continue to subvert it,” Fulbright said damningly, charging the nation’s intellectuals with “the surrender of independence, the neglect of teaching, and the distortion of scholarship,” and accusing the university of abdicating its elemental function, in “not only failing to meet its responsibilities to its students” but in “betraying a public trust.”112
The academy would have its reckoning. Vietnam convinced a great many American intellectuals to withdraw from public life, on the grounds that the only defensible ethical position was to refuse to engage in discussions of policy and politics. But in colleges and universities, revelations about the betrayals of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, and about the complicity of scholars and scientists, easily descended into disenchantment and a profound alienation from the idea of America itself. “I learned to despise my countrymen, my government and the entire English speaking world, with its history of genocide and international conquest” said one sixties radical. “I was a normal kid.”113
In some corners of the left, the idea that everything was a lie became a fashionable truth. Poststructuralism and postmodernism suffused not only American intellectual life but American politics, too. If everything is politics, and politics is a series of lies, then there is no truth. “Suddenly I realized that they did not really believe that there was a nature of things,” the social critic Paul Goodman wrote about his students at the end of the 1960s. “There was no knowledge but only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that physical and sociological research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they were doubtful that there was such a thing as simple truth.”114 And that was before Watergate.
Meanwhile, on the right, a new political wisdom involved a new political math that produced a new and even deeper cynicism. Nixon’s 1968 campaign, with its southern strategy, had been singularly divisive. Almost as soon as he entered office, Nixon began thinking about his reelection, planning a still more divisive campaign that would determine the direction of his presidency. Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority appeared late in 1969. Nixon read it over Christmas and told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, “Go for Poles, Italians, Irish, must learn to understand Silent Majority . . . don’t go for Jews & Blacks.”115 (Haldeman, a Californian, had volunteered for Eisenhower-Nixon in 1952 and had left his job to manage Nixon’s first presidential campaign: he’d learned how to campaign from Campaigns, Inc. “Whitaker and Baxter was the great old campaign,” Haldeman once said, “the granddaddy.”)116
Democrats plotted their own path to a majority, no less interested in market segmentation. Two Democratic strategists, Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, published their own manifesto just months after Phillips’s book appeared. Like Phillips, Scammon and Wattenberg were using computers to study election returns and public opinion polls. In The Real Majority (1970), the two men argued that, in addition to the bread-and-butter issues that had for so long determined how citizens voted, “Americans are apparently beginning to array themselves politically along the axes of certain social situations as well.” The GOP was moving to the right, to capitalize on backlash against civil rights, and some in the Democratic Party were planning to move to the left. Scammon and Wattenberg explained, “Under the banner of New Politics there is talk of forming a new coalition of the left, composed of the young, the black, the poor, the well-educated, the socially alienated, minority groups, and intellectuals—while relegating Middle America and especially white union labor to the ranks of ‘racists.’” This coalition would be a disaster for the Democratic Party, Scammon and Wattenberg predicted, and they argued strenuously against it. “The great majority of the voters in America are unyoung, unpoor, and unblack; they are the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-minded,” they pointed out, and the average voter, statistically speaking, was a forty-seven-year-old Catholic housewife from Dayton, Ohio, married to a machinist:
To know that the lady in Dayton is afraid to walk the streets alone at night, to know that she has a mixed view about blacks and civil rights because before moving to the suburbs she lived in a neighborhood that became all black, to know that her brother-in-law is a policeman, to know that she does not have the money to move if her new neighborhood deteriorates, to know that she is deeply distressed that her son is going to a community junior college where LSD was found on campus—to know all this is the beginning of contemporary political wisdom.
Scammon and Wattenberg recommended that Democrats move to the center though they feared Democrats wouldn’t take their advice, and they were right.117
But Nixon did not ignore their advice. He read an advance copy of The Real Majority three weeks before it was published. The president “talked about Real Majority and need to get that thinking over to all our people,” Haldeman recorded in his notes. “Wants to hit pornography, dope, bad kids.” Nixon said, “We should aim our strategy primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at working-class white ethnics” and “set out to capture the vote of the forty-seven-year-old Dayton housewife.” He decided to change the course of the White House’s strategy in the midterm 1970 elections, halting a campaign against Democrats as “big spenders” and replacing it with a campaign for the votes of blue-collar workers, on the basis of social issues, from marijuana to pornography. He charged his vice president, Spiro Agnew, with pushing Democrats out of the political center by calling people like Edward Kennedy “radical liberals.” Nixon’s staff crafted this argument into campaign rhetoric, urging him to use this message when talking to voters: “Today, racial minorities are saying that you can’t make it in America. What they really mean is that they refuse to start at the bottom of the ladder the way you did. They want to surpass you. . . . They want it handed to them.” Eyeing this state of affairs, political scientist Andrew Hacker announced 1970 “the end of the American era,” arguing that the nation was no longer a nation but a collection of “two hundred million egos.”118
Nixon, whose strength had always been foreign policy, wasn’t much interested in domestic policy, which he largely relegated to his aide John Ehrlichman. He was interested, though, in using domestic policy to better divide his opponents. He called the welfare state “building outhouses in Peoria.” He chose to address unemployment and the growing ranks of welfare recipien
ts with a proposal first made by the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s. His chief domestic initiative, announced in August of 1969, was a guaranteed income program that he called the Family Assistance Plan. It would have eradicated the welfare system and eliminated social workers and many social programs and replaced them with a cash payment to everyone earning below a certain wage level. Unlike the existing welfare program, the Family Assistance Plan provided an incentive for the poor to work; the cash payment rose with income level. When a Gallup poll asked, “Would you favor or oppose such a plan?” 62 percent said they would oppose it.119
During Nixon’s first term, opposition within policy circles grew. Conservatives objected to the Family Assistance Plan because it was a government handout; the Left, especially the National Welfare Rights Organization, objected to it because it wasn’t generous enough (“Zap FAP,” read their placards). Nixon enjoyed watching them battle it out. And, when the time was right for him politically, he abandoned it. Make a “big play for the plan,” he told Haldeman, but “be sure it’s killed by Democrats.”120
Nixon’s machinations with Congress weren’t all that much more cynical than those of some other American presidents. But his commitment to making sure the American people didn’t trust one another really was something distinctive. He often charged Agnew with the nastier part of this work, especially when it came to attacking the press and liberal intellectuals. “Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to the national political scene,” Agnew later said. “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”121
Many of the means Nixon used to discredit and attack his opponents, both at home and abroad, involved abuses of power that had become commonplace during the Cold War, when anticommunist hysteria and the urgency of national security had triumphed over judgment and the rule of law. Other Cold War presidents had used the CIA to conduct covert operations abroad, the FBI to spy on American citizens, and the IRS to audit political opponents. But Nixon got found out, partly due to his own paranoia, insecurity, and recklessness. And the proof of his duplicity, in the form of tape recordings made in the White House, brought a new kind of historical evidence not only into the archives but into the public mind, a species of evidence much more intimate, and unchecked, than the collection of self-conscious memos and self-serving memoirs that chronicle most presidencies. The tapes would ultimately lead to impeachment proceedings, and Nixon’s resignation. But they also altered how Americans understood the presidency, since they altered the historical record, granting a view of even the most casual conversations, which very frequently revealed Nixon’s bigotry, suspicion, and mean-spiritedness. Consider a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman about the television talk show host Dick Cavett in June 1971:
HALDEMAN: We’ve got a running war going with Cavett.
NIXON: Is he just a left-winger? Is that the problem?
HALDEMAN: Yeah.
NIXON: Is he Jewish?
HALDEMAN: I don’t know. He doesn’t look it.122
FDR had holes drilled in the Oval Office floor to allow wires for recording press conferences. Truman had used a microphone hidden in a lampshade on his desk. Eisenhower had recorded conversations in the Oval Office, and bugged his own telephone. Kennedy and Johnson used a recording system installed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Nixon, after his inauguration, had ordered Johnson’s system dismantled; he didn’t like having to remember to turn the switch on and off. Still, his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had secretaries listen in to meetings and take notes. In the end, a recording system seemed simpler than a fleet of secretaries, but because Nixon wanted the tapes to serve as a full and accurate chronicle of his presidency, he wanted a system that turned on automatically, at the slightest noise. Early in 1971, Haldeman installed a new, secret tape recording system that was voice-activated, and highly sensitive, to record meetings and telephone conversations in the Oval Office, the Lincoln Sitting Room, and the Cabinet Room. (Only Nixon and Haldeman knew about the system; Kissinger and John Ehrlichman were among those who did not.)123
During the very months that Haldeman was arranging for the new recording system at the White House, Daniel Ellsberg, a defense analyst, had been trying to find a way to release to the public a 7,000-page, 47-volume study of the war in Vietnam that had been commissioned by Robert McNamara in 1967, not long before he announced his resignation. The Pentagon Papers, as the report came to be called, was a chronicle of the lies and blunders of one administration after another in pursuing an ill-considered, cruel, and wanton campaign in Vietnam. Ellsberg, who had worked on the report, had made a set of photocopies in hopes that their exposure would bring an end to the war. Beginning in 1969, he had tried to gain the interest of members of Nixon’s administration, including Kissinger, to no avail. He had tried to get a member of Congress to leak the report, without success. He finally approached the New York Times early in 1971; the paper began publishing excerpts of the report on June 13. “Four succeeding administrations built up the American political, military and psychological stakes in Indochina,” the Times reported, introducing the chronicle of a decades-long conflict that the U.S. government had conducted to maintain “the power, influence and prestige of the United States . . . irrespective of conditions in Vietnam.”124
The Pentagon Papers did not indict the Nixon administration; the study ended in 1968. If anything, the release of the papers strengthened Nixon’s hand, allowing him to blame Vietnam on Kennedy and Johnson. But Nixon’s aides understood the implications of the leaked study. “To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook,” Haldeman told him. “But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment.” Nixon, who harbored deep fears of being found out—about anything—became convinced that Ellsberg’s leak to the Times was part of a conspiracy against him, “a Jewish cabal,” as he described it, “the same media that supported Hiss.” His aides did not disabuse him of this theory. Kissinger, a German Jew, warned him, “If this thing flies, they’re going to do the same to you.” Kissinger convinced Nixon to ask the Justice Department to forbid the Times to publish any further portions of the report. While that case made its way to the Supreme Court, the Washington Post began publishing the papers. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that the publication of the papers could continue; the Justice Department nevertheless proceeded with charges against Ellsberg.125
Faced with the possibility that their political opponents were gaining power, other presidents had simply called up J. Edgar Hoover and put the FBI on the case. But after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Hoover had grown cautious about engaging in unlawful surveillance and other, still less licit, tactics. The Nixon administration was left to do its own dirty work, much of which it also managed to capture on tape, as when, in July 1971, Nixon ordered his staff to blow up a safe at the Brookings Institution to find files about Vietnam that would embarrass Johnson, a measure motivated by nothing but malice, since he had been out of office for over two years.126 The administration also established a Special Investigations Unit, headed by a zealot and former aide of Ehrlichman’s named G. Gordon Liddy, who was subsequently sent to work for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP, popularly known as CREEP). On Saturday, June 17, 1972, Liddy directed five men to break into the offices of Lawrence O’Brien, the DNC chairman, at the Watergate Hotel, to steal documents and repair wiretaps that had earlier been placed on office phones. After finishing that job, the burglars were supposed to proceed to the headquarters of the George McGovern campaign, on Capitol Hill, to do much the same, but they never got there, because they were arrested at the Watergate Hotel. Nixon hadn’t known about the break-in before it happened, but six days later, on June 23, he was captured on tape discussing a cover-up with Haldeman.127
While the Nixon administration conducted its cover-up in secrecy, secure in its expectation that the p
resident could use executive privilege to prevent anyone from ever hearing anything on its tape recordings, the Nixon reelection campaign proceeded. In November 1972, Nixon won 61 percent of the popular vote and became the first presidential candidate to win forty-nine states, losing only Massachusetts and Washington, DC, to McGovern. Both Nixon’s neediness and the way his hunger for approval was fed by his aides are richly illustrated in a conversation he had with Kissinger following McGovern’s concession speech, which Nixon considered too scanty in its acknowledgment of his own victory. Nixon called McGovern a “prick.”
NIXON: Don’t you agree?
KISSINGER: Absolutely. He was ungenerous.
NIXON: Yeah.
KISSINGER: He was petulant.
NIXON: Yeah.
KISSINGER: Unworthy.
NIXON: Right. As you probably know, I responded in a very decent way to him.
KISSINGER: Well, I thought that was a great statement. Year after year the media were harassing you. All the intellectuals were against you and you’ve come around—
NIXON: That’s right.
KISSINGER: —and had the greatest victory.128