In doing research among the vast archives of Watergate tapes, I stumbled across this little gem of a consversation between Richard Nixon and Donald Rumsfeld. The time stamp on the tape is June 22, 1971 between 11:36 am and 12:28 pm. The tape runs only five minutes or so but part of the conversation has been excised from the tape, for reasons unknown to me. The President does most of the talking as Rumsfeld behaves like a sycophant, laughing on cue to the president's jokes and agreeing with the nuggets of wisdom his boss imparts to him.
Nixon is concerned that Spiro Agnew's negative remarks about American black civil rights leaders to the media. Nixon chastises Agnew for his grandstanding to the media and acknowledges Agnew's value as a White House emissary to the media who will even knock back a few drinks with members of the press.
Amazingly Nixon goes on the do a ruthless and brutally honest assessment of his own lack of rapport with the new media. He even acknowledges his own stiff image. Part of Nixon's political brilliance was a keen awareness of how other people perceived him.
Behind closed doors Nixon and Rumsfeld are honestly reflecting their true attitudes about blacks in a manner that is crude and profane. Some would call it an unguarded moment when the president takes off the mask and speaks honestly about his true racial views. It's the dilemma the same Republican Party is mired in 36 years from the day of the conversation. How do Republicans exploit racial attitudes to win elections without appearing to be a overtly racist political institution?
Nixon who was a rabid sports fan, especially football, and had enough knowledge about the accomplishments of Jim Brown or Gale Sayers to appreciate their talent as athletes. Nixon's failure was to believe in the old myth that the talents of black folks were limited to athletic feats or as song and dance men like his good friend Sammy Davis Jr.
Nixon's view of the black race was limited to the attitudes of any other Caucasian male over the age of 30 living in America in the year 1971. Nixon isn't a rabid racist but confines his praise of blacks to sports and entertainment figures to be evaluated on their own merits as performers.
Richard Nixon had a lower opinion of those black Americans who didn't comply with his stereotype, like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. To Nixon almost all civil rights leaders were uppity Negroes with dangerous ideas. Those blacks who refused to comply with Nixon's stereotype were simply dismissed by Nixon as lackeys of the Soviet Union.
Hunter Thompson and Richard Nixon had one thing in common. In the early Nixon years Thompson was a sportswriter with an encyclopedic knowledge of football strategy and history. During his 1968 campaign for president, Nixon summoned Thompson to travel with him on campaign trail on a few occasions to pass the time discussing football. Thompson was stunned by Nixon's rabid devotion to the game and said Nixon had such a commanding knowledge of the game, Nixon would have been happier and far more harmless as a career NFL coach, instead of career politician.
Thompson relates that it was Richard Nixon politicized him as a result of those contacts with him, and we're all better people for Hunter's obsession with Nixon. Hunter's dangerous but magnificent obsession saved many souls in that long journey into heart the darkness of the Nixon years. Hunter saved my soul because the high priest of Gonzo articulated the only rational response to the Nixon years. And Hunter knew the dangers of Richard Nixon first hand and told us that irrationality was the only rational response to Nixon.
Thompson wrote:
Election years are always weird in America, and they always happen in football season. That is a fact of life. The President will always be elected on the first Tuesday in November, for good or ill, and not even Richard Nixon could change it. He hated anything that stood between him and a Green Bay Packers game, especially on Monday nights.
Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts; and on some days, nothing else mattered.
Hunter went on to say that Nixon was a savant in two areas of knowledge: football and politics. Thompson went on with the further caveat on Nixon's brilliant mind---Thompson believed that Nixon had a huge blind spot on matters of ethics and morality because of his own his own indomitable will to be a winner. Thompson saw Nixon as the political embodiment of Vince Lombardi's ethic of "winning is everything.." Once you get into the "by any means necessary" modality of thought you are sowing the seeds of your own destruction.
It was a testimony to Nixon's own indomitable will to power that after losing the presidency in 1960 and losing the race for governor in California to Edmund Brown, 2 years later, Nixon rose from the ashes and ran again. Nixon returned in 1968 to defeat both George Romney (Mitt's father) and Nelson Rockefeller.
In defeating Romney, Rockefeller and finally Hubert Humphrey, Nixon crushed the liberal wing of the Republican Party forever and realigned the Republicans to a Sunbelt strategy of winning presidential elections by capturing the states of the old confederacy, the Midwest Bible belt, the northern prairie states, and most importantly the southern rim of the western states from Texas to southern California which who had earned the recent designation as the Sunbelt states.
Nixon's red state war map is sill used by GOP political strategists in 2007. It's too bad that the Republicans no longer have Richard Nixon's brilliant and demented mind because the demographic shifts in the migratory behavior are finally making Nixon's red state victory map irrelevant 40 years later. The Sunbelt, the Northern Plain states and the Bible Belt are back in play. Nixon would have found an opening reclaim the fallen red state or covert more blue states into red.
For all of his chicanery Nixon would never rig an election. For Nixon the presidential election is the Super Bowl of politics Nixon would never tolerate a fixed election any more than he'd tolerate a rigged Super Bowl. By any means necessary Nixon meant you can clip your opponent, rough up the quarterback, use unnecessary roughness, and run pass interference but never interfere with the tally on the scoreboard just as you never interfere with the tally of the election count.
Nixon was a rogue with honor, George W. Bush is just a amoral demagogue. I respected Nixon because Nixon was able to accept defeat on it's own terms. George Bush has no honor and plays by no rules or codes. Nixon was a brilliant mistake and George Bush is an incompetent imposter.
It wasn't Roger Ailes, Karl Rove or Lee Atwater that developed the Sunbelt/Deep South organizing strategy it was Nixon. Rove, Ailes and Atwater were simply students of Nixon.
That being said in praise of Nixon's brilliant mind for political strategy, there was a sinister downside to Nixon's Sunbelt/Deep South strategy. The strategy was premised on polarizing racial relations by pitting the interests of Caucasian voters against those of African American voters. The legacy of the racial animosity between black and white voters in the South is the poisoned legacy of Nixon's brilliant Sunbelt/Southern strategy that persists in the Republican Party to this day.
The Republicans tell us repeatedly about their color blindness but but the central principle of their presidential war room map rests on the premise of Republican success at maintaining hostile relations between African Americans and Caucasian Americans in the Deep South and the Sunbelt States.
Richard Nixon could have been a contender. And therefore Brando's soliloquy on his own down fall as a prize fighter is a fitting analogy for the corrupted brilliance which led to the downfall of Richard M. Nixon: Nixon could have given Brando's speech himself to comment on his failure as president:
Richard Nixon could have been a contender. Nixon was a kind of surly, profane, brilliant yet self hating Brandoesque political figure. Nixon like Brando played to underdog. Both Nixon and Brando developed a cult worship of the misunderstood hero, which is such a prominent myth of the American collective subconscious.
You know the drill... the movie preview clips always tell us: Only one man can save us all from dangers of lawlessness and unfortunately he's completely insane and has the ethics of a ferret. American worships a demented hero and the rugged individualist who throws the law books out the window and does the right thing...no matter how flat-out stupid the definition of "right thing" turns out to be. The anti-hero which was essentially a screen invention of Marlon Brando's still packs in at the local multiplex cinema long after both Nixon and Brando have been dead and buried.
I'd like to tell you that George W. Bush is the last anti-hero in American politics but the Terminator and the Law and Order guy are waiting in the wings and they beg to differ with my analysis.
Brando's soliloquy on his own down fall as a prize fighter in On the Waterfront has become a fitting eulogy for his own failed brilliance at the end of his career and by extension a sad comment on Nixon's own political failures.
Below is a sidebar piece I wrote for a weekly cultural newspaper in St. Louis during the 2004 presidential elections. I speaks to Richard Nixon's inert talent for political semiotics. Nixon was a master of making the symbolic statement and he honed every detail of his personae to make a statement.
The Power of Political Semiotics
Why Nixon Was Brilliant
Nixon flashes his trademark double victory salute.
RICHARD NIXON flashes the double victory salute which he devised as his own trademark gesture of Churchillian determination during his remarkable comeback campaign for the presidency in 1968. As insignificant as Nixon double victory salute seemed; Nixon's brilliant intent was to co-opt the victory salute which was the peace sign of his anti-war enemies. Nixon knew he was crushing a symbol of power for his critics.
Nixon knew that perception, rather than message was what won elections. To this day every Republican race for office is a battle to assert perception over political content. If the Republicans can avoid discussion of political message and wage the battle on the basis of the moral superiority of their candidate over the Democratic candidate they win an election. Conversely if the Democrats can force the tempo of the debate to focus on their political message over the moral values of the Republican candidate, the Democrats win the race. Every presidential race since Nixon/Humphrey in 1968 has been a battle between perception and message.