I felt that there were a number of unexplored avenues to probe in finding a way to end the war. I believed that we could use our armed strength more effectively to convince the North Vietnamese that a military victory was not possible. We also needed to step up our programs for training and equipping the South Vietnamese so that they could develop the capability of defending themselves. Most important, I believed that we were not making adequate use of our vast diplomatic resources and powers. The heart of the problem lay more in Peking and Moscow than in Hanoi.
As a candidate it would have been foolhardy, and as a prospective President, improper, for me to outline specific plans in detail. I did not have the full range of information or the intelligence resources available to Johnson. And even if I had been able to formulate specific “plans,” it would have been absurd to make them public. In the field of diplomacy, premature disclosure can often doom even the best-laid plans.
To some extent, then, I was asking the voters to take on faith my ability to end the war. A regular part of my campaign speech was the pledge: “New leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific.”
I never said that I had a “plan,” much less a “secret plan,” to end the war; I was deliberately straightforward about the difficulty of finding a solution. As I told the AP on March 14, 1968, there was “no magic formula, no gimmick. If I had a gimmick I would tell Lyndon Johnson.”
Although Romney campaigned vigorously and spent large sums of money—much of which was rumored to have come from Rockefeller—the polls continued to move against him.
I was in the middle of a campaign swing through a number of small towns when Pat Buchanan came up after a speech and said that he had to talk to me alone. He guided me to a nearby men’s room and said that he had just heard from a reporter that Romney was going to hold a press conference and pull out of the race. I was utterly astonished, and I asked my staff to watch Romney’s press conference and fill me in. Their report was in the broad grins they wore when they walked into my room after the broadcast. Personally I was disappointed by Romney’s withdrawal. Even though I had knocked him out of the ring, now I would win without having actually defeated an opponent in the election—and the test of the election was, after all, the reason I had decided to enter the primaries in the first place.
Despite Romney’s withdrawal, we continued publicly to forecast my vote at only 45 percent to 50 percent of the total. While I hoped and expected to win more, I believed it was better to understate the prospects than to overstate them.
On the night of March 12, Pat and I went to a victory celebration at national Nixon headquarters in New York. I was pleasantly surprised when I polled 78 percent of the vote. Even without Romney in the race, my win was hailed as significant, and it dwarfed the handful of write-in votes that had been solicited by some of Rockefeller’s unofficial supporters.
The New Hampshire results changed the political picture for both parties. On the Democratic side, Johnson won with 49.5 percent of the vote, but Senator Eugene McCarthy’s unorthodox antiwar candidacy received a phenomenal 42.4 percent. The media attention and analysis concentrated so heavily on McCarthy that many people got the impression he had actually won—and, for all practical purposes, he had. Four days after McCarthy had shown that Johnson might be defeated, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York announced his candidacy for the nomination. Many of the conscientious antiwar liberals felt that Kennedy was cynically moving in to usurp the fruits of McCarthy’s labors. Liberal New York Post columnist Murray Kempton charged that Kennedy had merely waited until Johnson was “bloodied in New Hampshire,” and that Kennedy was a coward for coming “down the hills to shoot the wounded.”
On the Republican side, Romney’s withdrawal and my victory put pressure on Rockefeller, and on March 21 he called a press conference. I fully expected him to declare his candidacy. Instead he announced, “I have decided today to reiterate unequivocally that I am not a candidate campaigning directly or indirectly for the presidency of the United States.” He said he would “do nothing in the future by word or deed to encourage” a presidential draft and that he had signed an affidavit taking his name out of the Oregon primary. For emphasis he added, “The terms of the affidavit are precise. They plainly declare that I am not, and will not be, a candidate for the presidency.”
Rockefeller talked about the need for party unity, and admitted, “Quite frankly, I find it clear at this time that a considerable majority of the party’s leaders want the candidacy of former Vice President Richard Nixon, and it appears equally clear that they are keenly concerned and anxious to avoid any such divisive challenge within the party as marked the 1964 campaign.”
Governor Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland was watching the broadcast in his office in Annapolis with a group of friends and reporters. Agnew was a sponsor of the National Draft Rockefeller Committee, which had been formed in Annapolis just three days before, and he fully expected Rockefeller to announce his candidacy. Agnew told the reporters that he was “tremendously surprised and greatly disappointed” by Rockefeller’s decision.
The next week I met with Agnew for two hours, and I was impressed by his intelligence and poise. After that meeting he told reporters that he still liked Rockefeller and was not yet ready to announce his support for me. But in speaking of me, he said, “I have high regard for him. He’s the front-runner.”
I had scheduled a nationwide radio speech for Sunday evening, March 31, to outline my views on the Vietnam war. I intended to propose that America vigorously try to convince the Soviet Union to reduce its military support for North Vietnam. I also planned to deliver a sharp critique of the Johnson policy of gradualism on the military front.
On Saturday afternoon, as I was putting the final touches on my speech before the taping, I received word that Johnson had asked the television networks for time the next night. I had no alternative but to postpone my speech.
I spent most of Sunday campaigning in Milwaukee. Because I would be airborne during Johnson’s speech, I asked Pat Buchanan to listen to it and to meet me at La Guardia Airport with a report when I landed.
When Buchanan gave me his report, I was stunned. Johnson had described his latest attempts at de-escalating the war and stressed his personal dedication to obtaining peace. Then he made one of the most unexpected announcements in American political history. He said that he did not believe that he should devote even an hour of his day to any personal partisan causes. “Accordingly,” he continued, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
When reporters clamored for my statement, I flippantly said that this was “the year of the dropouts”: Romney, Rockefeller, and now Johnson. While the dropout label might have been apt for the first two, I was justifiably criticized for thus characterizing Johnson’s action.
The upshot of these events was that the next primary, held in Wisconsin on April 2, was rendered almost meaningless. I won 79.4 percent of the Republican vote, and McCarthy swamped noncandidate Johnson, 56 percent to 34 percent.
Two days after the Wisconsin primary Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The uproar set off by Johnson’s announcement had not yet subsided, and now the nation was about to go through brief but intense agony as shock turned to disillusion, disillusion to despair, and despair to hatred and violence. Within an hour after King’s death, looting and vandalism broke out in Washington, within six blocks of the White House. That same evening scattered and sporadic fighting and looting occurred in New York’s Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Soon disorders were breaking out across the nation. The next day, the rioting and vandalism became arson and death. Seven were killed and over 350 arrested in Chicago as rioters pillaged a long stretch of downtown stores. The National Guard was called out there, as well as in Detroit, Boston, and elsewhere.
On Sunday, April 7, I flew to Atlanta to pay my respects to the King family. I went to their home and met his four childre
n, still dazed over their father’s murder. I saw Mrs. King in her room, where she was resting; I was moved by her poise and serenity. She thanked me for coming, and we talked about my first meeting with her husband, on the occasion of the independence of Ghana in 1957. I told her how impressed I had been by his insistence that the realization of his dream of equal opportunity for all should be accomplished by peaceful rather than violent means. Two days later I returned to Atlanta for the funeral.
The idealism of Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed in his words and actions, was his unique contribution to the civil rights cause. He worked to resist the extremists in the movement, those who wished to resort to violence to reach their goals. Perhaps their pressure sometimes caused him to be more extreme in his public views than he otherwise would have been. Yet one could reason with him. Like his colleagues, he did not enjoy hearing that patience would be required to achieve his goals; but as a practical man, he realized that this was the case. His death left black America without a nationally recognized leader who combined responsibility with charisma. Others were reasonably effective, but none could match his mystique and his ability to inspire people—white as well as black—and to move them.
I canceled all political activity for two weeks after Dr. King’s death. Then I flew to Washington for an April 19 appearance before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. My speech and the lively question-and-answer session that followed went over well, and a few days later I received a letter from Eisenhower.
Dear Dick:
My morning’s paper carried excerpts from your speech before the Nation’s Editors. I think it was superb. Moreover, I applaud your Q. and A. format—it gives you opportunity for spontaneity, humor, and hard-hitting observations.
Casual word-of-mouth reports coming to me about your campaign’s progress are far brighter than a few weeks ago. At first all the self-appointed experts were still saying, “Dick is well prepared for the presidency, but he cannot be elected.” Now, by and large—and my reports come not only from locals but from visitors throughout the country—the refrain has changed to “Of course, Nixon is well prepared for the presidency, now we must see if we can elect him.” This is real progress and if the trend continues it will not be long before doubt has become conviction. . . .
Devotedly,
Ike E
The cheer I received from Eisenhower’s letter was particularly welcome—and timely; within a week Nelson Rockefeller was back in the race against me.
On April 30 Rockefeller convened a press conference in Albany and announced a complete turnaround. He explained that the “dramatic and unprecedented events of the past weeks have revealed in most serious terms the gravity of the crisis that we face as a people,” and declared his candidacy.
Rockefeller made his announcement on the day of the Massachusetts primary. Governor John Volpe, one of my early supporters, had insisted on running as a favorite son candidate. Thanks to write-in votes, Rockefeller managed to squeeze out a half percentage-point victory over Volpe. The victory was embarrassing to Volpe, irritating to me, and a great boost to Rockefeller. All thirty-four Massachusetts delegates went to him, and his campaign got a good send-off.
Rockefeller entered the race too late to have his name on the ballot in any of the remaining primaries. I was certain that his late entry was calculated to spare himself the risk of losing.
With Rockefeller back in the race, I began listening for the faint hoof-beats of another aspiring candidate. Ronald Reagan could not win a two-man contest with me at the convention; but with Rockefeller to chip away at me from the left, Reagan would very likely begin seeing visions of a greater role than favorite son of the California delegation.
Therefore, I was not surprised that Reagan had assented to his name’s being placed on the ballot by Nebraska state officials for its May 14 primary. He disavowed any personal encouragement of the effort, but his supporters mounted a substantial effort on his behalf, including several statewide prime-time showings of a very effective half-hour television documentary. Rockefeller’s supporters launched a write-in campaign and bought 247 television spots and 564 newspaper ads. Despite their efforts, I topped Reagan 70 percent to 22 percent, while Rockefeller limped in at only 5 percent. This was the most competitive Republican primary so far, and I was gratified by the results.
The key primary was now Oregon, the last one I would enter; the June 4 contest in California was Reagan’s—I had decided not to risk dividing the party by challenging his favorite son status. For the time being at least, Rockefeller and Reagan shared a common strategy: to slow me down, brake my momentum, and buy time for a final attack at the convention in Miami Beach. I was worried about Oregon because Reagan’s people were spending heavily in an attempt to make a last-minute sweep. They eventually spent several hundred thousand dollars in the state, and Rockefeller’s forces, seeking write-in votes, did the same.
I doubled my efforts in Oregon, and, unlike Reagan and Rockefeller, I went to the state to campaign. Reagan could not go because he was professing not to be a candidate, and Rockefeller apparently felt he could not afford to because a defeat would look even worse if he had campaigned there.
So Reagan showed his documentary and Rockefeller ran hundreds of ads, but my strategy paid off. I received more than 73 percent of the vote in this final primary test, with Reagan trailing at 23 percent and Rockefeller at 4 percent.
That night in my suite in the Benson Hotel in Portland I had some of the same sense of satisfaction that I had had on election night 1966. It was far from over, but things were falling into place.
In June 1967 Bob Haldeman gave me a memorandum on the use of media in a modern presidential campaign. He stressed that creative thought had to be given to developing ways to use television. “The time has come,” he wrote, “for political campaigning—its techniques and strategies—to move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye.” Haldeman correctly argued that a candidate could make hundreds of speeches during a campaign and still only meet directly with a few hundred thousand potential new supporters. Such a frenetic pace, in the meantime, causes a candidate to “become punchy, mauled by his admirers, jeered and deflated by his opponent’s supporters (and paid troublemakers), misled by the super-stimulation of one frenzied rally after another. He has no time to think, to study his opponent’s strategy and statements, to develop his own strategy and statements. No wonder the almost inevitable campaign dialogue borders so near the idiot level.”
The most important recommendation in the Haldeman memo was to develop new ways to use television.
A group of my advisers spent an afternoon in New York, watching old television news clips from over the years that showed me in a wide variety of formal and informal situations. The goal was to match the candidate with the medium, to determine exactly what manner of presentation would be the most effective. They analyzed each performance and decided that the more spontaneous the situation, the better I came across. This insight led to the decision that I would use the question-and-answer technique extensively, not only in press conferences and public question sessions with student audiences but also in my paid political programming.
In the campaign this evolved into the “man in the arena” concept, in which I stood alone, with no podium, in the center of a stage surrounded by an audience in bleacherlike tiers. In this setting I was asked questions by a panel of private citizens, sometimes joined by local reporters.
In 1968 the South was to be one of the most important regions in terms of winning both the nomination and the election. In 1964 Governor George Wallace of Alabama had mounted an essentially racist campaign in three Democratic Party primaries, and his strong showing embarrassed party leaders. In 1968 Wallace decided to expand his appeal along more generally conservative lines and make his bid via a third party. He was working to get his name on the general election ballot in as many states as possible.
On the Republican side, it was Ronald Reagan who set
the hearts of many Southern Republicans aflutter. He spoke their conservative language articulately and with great passion, and there was always a possibility that Southern delegates could be lured at the last minute by his ideological siren song. Until I had the nomination, therefore, I had to pay careful attention to the dangers of a sudden resurgence on the right. Equally dangerous would be a serious intraparty split that would deliver the Reaganites into Wallace’s camp.
On May 31, I flew to Atlanta for one of the most important conferences of the pre-convention period. The Southern Republican state chairmen were meeting, and I spent several hours over two days with these officials individually and in various groups. There was no pretense about the purpose of my visit: I was doing serious courting and hard counting.
I had invited Senator Strom Thurmond to Atlanta, and he sat in on one of the meetings. Thurmond was a former governor of South Carolina and Dixiecrat candidate for President in 1948 on the States’ Rights ticket. In 1964 he had switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party and supported Barry Goldwater. Now he was among the strongest Republican leaders in the South, and his support was essential to me.
I had been consulting privately with Thurmond for several months, and I was convinced that he would join my campaign if he were satisfied on the two issues of paramount concern to him. The more important of these was national defense. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee he believed that America should be unquestionably first in the world in military power; I agreed with him completely. The second issue was parochial: Thurmond wanted tariffs against textile imports to protect South Carolina’s position in the industry. I reluctantly went along with him on this issue because of political realities, but I told him that we should try first to get Japan and other countries to agree voluntarily to reduce their exports to the United States before we took the tariff route. On civil rights, Thurmond knew my position was very different from his. I was for the Civil Rights Act of 1964; he was against it. Although he disagreed with me, he respected my sincerity and candor. He knew that I would enforce the law, but that I would not make the South the whipping boy.
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