It was nearly five o’clock in the morning when the meeting finally ended. As I headed out, I passed Nixon, who was standing alone. He shook my hand. Then he said something I wasn’t expecting.
“You’ve got an easy district,” he observed. “I’d like to have you come with me [on the campaign trail], and I want to talk to you about it.” I told Nixon I was willing to do what I could to help. I also pressed the case against picking a Southern candidate for vice president.
Nixon thought for a moment. “Don, I’m afraid we’re all going to have to give a little on this one,” he said.6
When I got back to my hotel room near dawn, Joyce, typically, got right to the point. “Well, who is it?” she asked.
“You won’t believe it,” I replied. I told her it looked to me that it would be Volpe or Agnew with an outside possibility of Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon. Hatfield was a friend, and of the three the one I would have preferred. He had been suggested by the Reverend Billy Graham. Joyce thought for a moment and then, with a puzzled look, asked the question that the entire world would soon echo: “Agnew?”
When Nixon announced Governor Agnew’s selection the following day, he said he had based his decision on three criteria. First, Nixon claimed, Agnew was qualified to become president. Second, he said Agnew would be a good campaigner; and third, if they got elected Agnew would be able to manage domestic policy.7 To my knowledge, Agnew was not particularly noted for those qualities. More than anything Nixon seemed pleased that he had selected someone so unexpected, catching everyone off guard. And indeed the choice of Agnew was so startling that it stunned even Agnew.8
Though I remained impressed with Nixon, I found his selection process disappointing. The weakness of his vice presidential choice eventually caused great problems for him down the road. Nixon’s real criterion did not seem to be competence or experience but rather finding someone who did not elicit opposition from any quarter. His intent may have been to preempt criticism, but if so, it was shortsighted. That no one spoke against Agnew was not an indicator that he had no flaws, but rather that no one yet knew of his shortcomings.
In late August, the Democrats held their nominating convention in Chicago. The Nixon team asked me, as the only local Republican congressman representing part of Chicago, to join what they called the “Republican listening post.” The plan was to be ready to exploit in the media whatever openings the Democrats might offer.* We were located at the Chicago Conrad Hilton Hotel. Our group consisted of a young Nixon speechwriter and future Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist, Bill Safire, another top speechwriter and talented rising star named Pat Buchanan, Republican Governor John Love of Colorado, and me.
As it turned out, we didn’t have to do much, if any, truth squadding. The Democrats suffered through one of the worst conventions in modern history. Inside the convention hall there were heated debates over the Vietnam War and attempts to cut off the microphones of some of the speakers. Outside, thousands of demonstrators gathered in protest marches—including a large crowd in Grant Park across the street from our hotel. From our windows we could see demonstrators holding candles or carrying signs protesting President Johnson and the Vietnam War. Joyce came into the city to join us, and we watched from our hotel room. After a while we decided to go down and see what was happening up close. Joyce and I talked a reluctant Governor Love, a dignified man from an earlier generation, into going into Grant Park with us.
The majority of protesters were not anarchists, revolutionaries, or violent. Most were young, not much older than our eldest daughter. I understood their point of view, since I had my own concerns about the conduct of the war. But there were troublemakers sprinkled among the groups that were looking to incite a showdown with the police.
Later that night, when we were back in the hotel, Joyce and I looked out of the windows again. The demonstration began to take a less peaceful turn. Some in the crowd started to attack the police, hoping to provoke a violent confrontation that would garner press attention. The vastly outnumbered Chicago police tried to keep the crowd under control. Finally, the police deployed tear gas. The gas filled the lobby of the Hilton and eventually made its way through some lower floors. As the situation grew more tense, some officers took tougher actions. Police in robin egg blue helmets charged into the demonstrators, wielding night sticks and dragging some of the troublemakers to police vans. Other officers pinned people against the wall of the Conrad Hilton and, in the process of subduing them, some hotel windows were broken.9 The agitators in the crowd responded with more violence.
As the rioting continued, members of our listening post checked in with Richard Nixon and reported on what was happening. The unfolding disaster in Chicago understandably captured his attention. He asked a number of questions and expressed dismay at the level of violence. Like many politicians, Nixon was interested in gathering information about his political opponents—a few years later, of course, the country would find out just how interested.
The harmful aftereffects of the chaos in Chicago lingered for months. It cast an unwelcome shadow on the Democratic convention and on Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. What the country saw on television was ugly, and the political fallout was substantial. What I witnessed left a painful memory and a lingering sense of sorrow about what had happened in Chicago, one of America’s great cities and my hometown.
I was struck by the fact that Nixon was running against a Democratic opponent who in many ways was his opposite. Aptly labeled “the happy warrior,” Humphrey was upbeat and engaging. He was also tough. Reciting the litany of previous incarnations of a new Nixon persona in 1952, 1956, 1960, and 1962, Humphrey noted, “Now, I read about the new Nixon of 1968. Ladies and gentlemen. Anyone who’s had his political face lifted so many times can’t be very new.”10 I had a feeling a Humphrey-Nixon debate would not help our side.
The Nixon campaign agreed—the candidate had not forgotten his difficulties debating John F. Kennedy in 1960. That September, Bryce Harlow, a friend and well-known Washington figure, came to my congressional office. Harlow was working hard on the Nixon campaign. He told me that Nixon did not want to give Humphrey the chance to debate and to untether himself from the unpopular Johnson. Furthermore, Democrats in Congress, at Humphrey’s and LBJ’s urging, were proposing to suspend the equal time provisions so that Governor George Wallace would be able to participate without any other third-party candidates. Wallace, a segregationist candidate from Alabama, was running for president as an independent. His candidacy promised to siphon support from Nixon in the south, and like Humphrey he was quick and entertaining in a debate format. Harlow told me Nixon was disinclined to give Wallace any airtime and that he considered it unfair for just one third-party candidate to be included.
Harlow asked me to help stop the suspension of the equal-time provisions that would have allowed for the three-way debate. I thought we had substantial common interests on the issue: I agreed with Harlow’s political assessment that a three-way debate was the worst scenario for Nixon, and I disapproved of the Democrats’ last-minute attempt to jury-rig the rules. I also thought this might be an opportunity for my group in Congress to get some attention for the issues we wanted to advance. “Rumsfeld’s Raiders” were pushing a reform package that included measures popular with the public, such as campaign finance reform and a ban on the use of political contributions for personal enrichment.
As Harlow set himself up in Ford’s minority leader office, just off the House chamber, we crafted a campaign of legislative maneuvers to stall the suspension of equal-time provisions. Any member could stop business in the House of Representatives by requiring the clerk to call the roll in order to have a majority of members (a quorum) present. So before the debate legislation came up for a vote, one of us would ask for a quorum call and the rest of us would work to ensure that there were never enough members present on the House floor for debate or votes to continue. From noon on October 8 until well into the next day our group arranged
for thirty-three consecutive intentionally unsuccessful quorum calls.
This was not well received by the Democratic Speaker of the House, John McCormack. He threatened to send out the Capitol police force to physically round up members and lock them in the chamber. At one point, Congressman John Anderson of Illinois was barred from leaving the House floor—leading to a bizarre scene in which a member of Congress was pounding on the doors of the House chamber, shouting that he was being held hostage by the Speaker.
In addition to the repeated calls for a quorum, we also managed to arrange votes on a series of amendments to the legislation that dragged things out even further. LBJ must not have been pleased. We were outmaneuvering the legislative master himself.
Before we were done, we kept the House in session all night in what became the longest continuous session of the U.S. House of Representatives since the battle over the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Some of the tradition-conscious Republican leadership considered our efforts unseemly, but Minority Leader Gerald Ford stood apart and cheered us on. Our effort was dubbed “The Longest Night.”
Our goal was to delay the bill because we knew we did not have the votes to defeat it. We were trying to hold out for two days so Senate Republicans could make a similar effort and prevent the bill from being voted on before Congress was set to adjourn on October twelfth. It worked. The bill was shelved indefinitely. Humphrey and Nixon never debated, nor did Governor George Wallace. Our efforts caught Nixon’s attention, and the candidate let it be known that he was grateful for our assistance.
A week later, Nixon invited me to accompany him on a campaign swing through the South and Midwest, where I got to know him a bit better.11 Despite his somber, pensive, and businesslike demeanor, Nixon showed himself to be an engaging stump speaker. He worked at it, meticulously preparing his notes beforehand. At one point he became so involved in his speech that he nearly fell off the crate he was standing on.
Toward the end of one flight, Nixon called me into his private compartment. Then fifty-five, his hair, touched with gray, was receding. He got right down to the business of the campaign and asked me where I was scheduled to speak over the closing weeks. I told him I was going to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
“That’s good,” he said, putting on his master political strategist hat. “Stay out of Illinois.” Though he might have been elected president in 1960 if Illinois had tilted to him over Kennedy, Nixon seemed to think he would win the state this time.
On the next leg of our trip we had a longer conversation.12 Nixon was relaxed as we spoke. He seemed to want to know more about me—he asked me if I smoked, and I told him I did smoke a pipe. He expressed irritation at the campaign and what he considered to be Humphrey’s attempts to characterize him as a racist. “If I did that to Humphrey I’d never hear the end of it in the press,” Nixon mused. “Do you think I should debate him?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied.
He told me his advisers were telling him to hit Humphrey harder in his speeches. I told him I thought he was doing fine. Humphrey was a likable character, and I didn’t think that being harsh to him would be a good strategy. Later Nixon received kudos in the press for appearing on the popular entertainment show Laugh-In—something of a precursor to Saturday Night Live—and saying the show’s catch phrase, “Sock it to me!” The fact that Nixon was willing to appear on the show demonstrated to many of his critics that he was able to take himself less seriously and have a little fun.
As Nixon had predicted, the election was close—his victory margin was less than 1 percentage point, making the 1968 presidential election one of the tightest in American history. Richard Nixon had risen from the political grave.
CHAPTER 8
The Job That Couldn’t Be Done
“For the past five years we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed, programs for the cities, programs for the poor,” Nixon observed in his convention speech in Miami.
“And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence, and failure across the land.” To cheers, Nixon said it was time “to quit pouring billions of dollars into programs that have failed in the United States.”1
One of the chief targets of the Nixon speech was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which had started under John F. Kennedy as a small set of experimental programs run out of the Executive Office of the President. The agency had been lassoed by his successor, LBJ, as part of what he grandly called his War on Poverty.
Under Johnson, who thought on a mammoth scale, OEO ballooned. At one point it administered Community Action Programs, Head Start, the Job Corps, Legal Services, and the Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA (a domestic Peace Corps) as well as programs to help senior citizens, Native Americans, migrants, neighborhood health centers, and drug treatment centers, plus others, a number of which evolved into their own independent activities over time.
As a member of Congress I voted against the 1964 legislation that established the Office of Economic Opportunity.2 I was uncomfortable with OEO programs being run out of the Executive Office of the President rather than being housed in the relevant cabinet departments and agencies. It seemed like another layer of bureaucracy on top of the existing department bureaucracies.
As OEO grew during the Johnson administration, so did its opposition. When Nixon took office, it was clear that Johnson’s lofty goal of eradicating poverty was failing. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent, and it proved difficult to identify and track progress. There was also an air of radicalism in some of the OEO programs. When I first walked through the OEO offices I saw posters of the Marxist Che Guevara proudly displayed on the walls. In some parts of the country taxpayer dollars were going to radical and violent “Black Power” groups. An additional controversy was that OEO provided funds to community groups, intentionally bypassing the locally elected governors and mayors. This led to resentment of OEO by state and local officials of both political parties.
Though Nixon ran on a platform hostile to the OEO, he decided after his election he would not abolish it outright, but instead would try to reform it. Racial tensions were high, and many groups had their hopes set on the success of OEO’s mission. Nixon thought OEO might somehow be redirected into more realistic and effective activities. When he was searching for someone to run the agency, now the scourge of most conservatives in his base of support, Nixon turned to his top domestic policy aide, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for suggestions.
Pat Moynihan was creative, entertaining, and one of the smartest individuals I had ever met. As the saying went, Moynihan wrote more books than most people had read. He had applied his considerable intellect to the Department of Labor during the Kennedy administration, and later had written on Lyndon Johnson’s vision of the Great Society. A Democrat with an independent streak, he was now working for Kennedy’s old rival, Richard Nixon, as an expert on urban and minority affairs.* I thought it said something laudatory of Nixon that he saw the merit of bringing Moynihan into his confidence.
Moynihan had keen political instincts. Who better, he proposed, to run an agency disliked by Republicans in Congress than…a conservative Republican from Congress? Pat knew I had voted against OEO but that I had supported civil rights legislation and had shown an interest in tackling reform. He strongly recommended that Nixon appoint me. It was an unorthodox choice.
My reply to the request from the new president was also unorthodox: “No.” I was not thinking about leaving Congress at the time, though I was still tangling with the old guard. In early 1969, for example, I had run for chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. I thought I had support all lined up when, at the last minute, my longtime nemesis Minority Whip Les Arends persuaded Bob Taft of Ohio to run against me. Taft won by one vote, but I still enjoyed my work and wasn’t much interested in joining the Nixon administration in an assignment that seemed almost destined to fail.
Nixon’s aides continued to press me as
they put together their new administration. I continued to resist. Finally, I wrote a straightforward, detailed memo to the Nixon team outlining why I was not the right choice to run OEO:
1) The probable reaction to the appointment of a white, Ivy League, suburban, Republican Congressman from the wealthiest Congressional District in the Nation, with little visable [sic] management experience and little public identification with poverty problems, and who voted against the poverty program when it was first proposed would be harmful for the Nixon Administration….*
2) The job that the Administration wishes to have done on OEO, as I understand it, is the liquidation of the Johnson poverty approach. The development of the Nixon approach to these problems would essentially be the responsibility not of OEO but of [other] Departments….
3) In a political situation, which this is, it would seem that the best approach would be to use a person identified as a liberal when one wishes to retrench and reorganize.3
I figured I would not hear about Nixon’s proposal again. Then one Sunday that spring, as Joyce and I were having dinner with our kids, the telephone rang. Before long I was talking to President Nixon. It was the first time a president of the United States had called my home.
“Don,” Nixon said, “I want to invite you and your wife down to Key Biscayne to talk.” I told the President I would be willing to meet with him in Florida, where Nixon occasionally vacationed. When we got off the phone I told Joyce about the conversation.
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