10. AMERICA SHIFTS TO THE HUMANIST LEFT

CLOSING THE TURBULENT 1960s

The November 1968 elections:  Nixon to the White House.  The selection of Richard Nixon as the Republican Party's candidate at their National Convention was a huge contrast – by way of the quiet order in which it was conducted.  And that atmosphere helped immensely to bring out Vet voters, tired of all the political commotion consuming their country.  Thus it was that Nixon won the election, drawing 43.4 percent of the popular vote to the Democratic Party's candidate Senator Hubert Humphrey's 42.7 percent (Third-Party Southern Democrat George Wallace with 13.5 percent), although the electoral college vote was strongly in Nixon's favor 302 to 191 (Wallace with 46).

This was hardly what the Boomer activists and their intellectual mentors wanted.  These two social sectors were so ideologically opposed to Middle America at this point that they seemed totally unable to accept the verdict of the vote.  How in the world could "Public Enemy Number One" have managed to get himself into the White House?  They would do everything possible to nullify his presidency.

The making of Richard Nixon.  Nixon was born in 1913 in Whittier, California, a very Quaker community, to a family which was also Quaker. Family tragedy made life hard for young Nixon, a younger brother having died in 1925 and an older brother also badly ill with tuberculosis.  In fact, a Harvard Club prize he was awarded because of his excellent grades he was not able to use, because the family could not afford the rest of the Harvard education costs, due to the expense of the older brothers' medical treatments.  Thus Nixon attended the local Whittier College, and then, with a substantial scholarship, Duke Law School, graduating summa cum laude ("with highest honors") from the latter in 1937.

However, despite these accomplishments, with his older brother having died in his senior year in college, and with the Depression in full force and law jobs hard to find upon law school graduation, Nixon's Quaker faith was tested in the extreme.  From this point on, that faith would remain a very private matter.

In returning home to California to practice law there, he met and two years later (1940) married a local school teacher, Pat Ryan.

Then with America's entry into World War Two, the Nixons moved to Washington, for him to take a job in the growing D.C. bureaucracy, with him then being able to leave this unloved work to become a lieutenant in the Navy.  He would see service in the South Pacific as an administrative officer, serving in that role until 1946, although he would remain in the Naval Reserves, rising in rank over the years, until his retirement as commander in 1966.

In that year 1946, he was urged by the local Republican Party to run for Congress, defeating the Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis, and thus beginning his Washington political career.  We have already noted his work in Congress with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), investigating the Communist presence within Washington's own officialdom, automatically making him an enemy of self-identified intellectuals who felt he was unfairly attacking those of their particular social profile.  They would never forgive him for what he did in those post-war years.  But his work did bring him to the attention of the Republicans who brought him alongside Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential campaign, which the two won, making Nixon now U.S. Vice President.  And Eisenhower put him to work doing some travel and diplomacy for him, especially in the effort to cultivate a "thaw" in America's Cold War with Russia.

This put him in position to run as Republican presidential candidate in 1960 when Eisenhower completed his second term as president. And he came very close to defeating the more charismatic Kennedy, but ultimately failed in the effort.  He then ran for California governor two years later.  But found that California press coverage was very negative, making him furious about the treatment he received by the press.

Then he went into some kind of wilderness years.  But he used the time fruitfully to visit the larger world, meet with a grand variety of leaders of other countries, and learn first-hand the more subtle ways of the world – and the politics and cultures that made for such variations.

Nixon's political "Realism."  In this, he would become very much a supporter of the idea of Realpolitik, the German term applied to the varied use of diplomacy, bluff – and, when absolutely necessary, very carefully calculated economic and military assault (war) – in reference to the strategies of Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who skillfully used all these techniques to assemble a new German nation in 1870.  Thus Nixon found himself replacing his older approach, mostly ideological (which America largely follows in its own domestic and foreign politics), with the subtleties of a chess player, who sees diplomacy as a game of power, and careful power moves in support of a very carefully measured "national interest," rather than all-out crusades for this or that grand political ideal.

And now as president, he would strengthen this approach to his duties in appointing the Harvard professor and political Realist, Dr. Henry Kissinger, as his National Security Advisor, then also as his Secretary of State.  And the two of them would go at the international problems facing the country in quite new ways, opening the doors to better relations with both Russia and China, and also re-strategizing America's involvement in Vietnam, something unfortunately that most Americans, including most importantly his dedicated "Liberal" opponents in Congress, in the press, and in the world of academics, would never quite understand.  And America (and Southeast Asia) would suffer horribly because of this lack of understanding.

Nixon, the Christian.  Nixon's tendency to keep his religious faith private meant that although he definitely knew the Bible well, was a man of prayer, and spent a lot of time before God seeking divine counsel, little of that appeared in public.  He even held Sunday worship at the White House itself, calling on pastors of a wide range of faith to lead these services^[1] – though clearly his favorite was Norman Vincent Peal of New York City's Marble Collegiate Church.  And he was especially close, on a very broad basis, with the evangelist Billy Graham, with whom he met often for prayer and discussion.

But he also understood deeply the role that Christianity has long played in American life.  For instance, in his 1972 Thanksgiving Address he emphasized the fact that Puritan founder John Winthrop was most correct in identifying America as God's "city set upon a hill," that it was important to follow the Puritan heritage in being "the light of the world," and that it had always been America's call by God, and source of the country's greatness, to provide spiritual leadership to that world.  He also stated that every American president had found cause to turn to God, ultimately leaving office with a very deep religious faith.

Sadly, though Nixon personally was a man of very high moral self-discipline (thanks to his Quaker upbringing), his moral credentials would come to be measured in history solely on the basis of the Watergate scandal, where his paranoia about the public treatment he got from the Leftist Congress and press led him to get involved in an illegal coverup of what some of his subordinates had done quite unnecessarily during his 1972 reelection campaign.

Thus Nixon's personal tragedies continued to follow him, all the way through even his White House years.  Thus Nixon is still today not really remembered for all the ways he served his country extremely well as president.  It seems instead that he will always be remembered by generations to come as Nixon, the evil president.