1969: United States

Presidency

In his inaugural address, President Richard M. Nixon asked the American people to lower their voices, to search for unity instead of divisiveness, for harmony instead of discord. The speech struck a responsive note in an exhausted nation that had just lived through a year of violence and turmoil unmatched in recent history. In addition, the country wanted to believe the best of their new president. They wanted to believe that he would end the tragic war in Vietnam and that he would restore new confidence to a battered and frustrated people.

Nixon's cabinet fitted his image of a low-key, almost bland administration that would undertake no new crusades or adventures. Probably the best-known appointee was Governor George Romney of Michigan, whose overly sincere and underintelligent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination had fallen flat in 1968. Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird had achieved a reputation in Congress as a tough infighter, but he was hardly known to the public. The critical jobs of secretary of state and secretary of the treasury went to such faceless figures as William P. Rogers, a former attorney general and Wall Street lawyer, and David M. Kennedy, a Chicago banker. The attorney general was John N. Mitchell, a partner in Nixon's New York law firm. Mitchell emerged as one of the president's closest advisers, even though Nixon had only known him a short time; he proceeded to become an influential and conservative voice in the administration. Probably the most outspoken liberal on the team was Robert H. Finch, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, an old Nixon confidant and former lieutenant governor of California. It quickly became clear, however, that Mitchell held most of the high cards when it came to the battling within the administration.

Nixon's honeymoon lasted for a number of months. His critics remained quiet, giving him a chance to organize his administration and get the feel of his new job. But after a while signs of restlessness appeared. People began to question whether the placid public posture of the administration masked a certain indecisiveness and lack of direction. When Nixon did make a few decisions, they quickly stirred up controversy.

The first important test of the administration involved the antiballistic missile (ABM), a new defensive-weapons system proposed by the Johnson administration to guard the nation's major cities. After a lengthy review, the president decided to go ahead with the ABM but remove the missiles from populated areas. The ensuing debate showed just how much the country had changed since Nixon had served as vice-president in the 1950's. Just a few years before, every financial request from the military had sailed through Congress with little debate. But this time, the opposition exploded. They questioned whether ABM was feasible, whether it would accelerate the arms race, whether it was worth the billions of dollars that could be used for other purposes. A new spirit of iconoclasm, epitomized by the campaigns of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy and the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, had infected the Senate as well as substantial segments of the electorate. The final tally was 50 to 50, and only Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew's vote gave Nixon the victory.

The next great controversy involved the desegregation of public schools in Mississippi. The Johnson administration had decreed that all school districts receiving federal aid must desegregate their facilities by September 1969. The Nixon administration, led by Attorney General Mitchell, announced it was relaxing those guidelines. Some observers saw the move as a payoff to Senator John Stennis, the influential Mississippi Democrat who had managed the ABM bill, and Senator Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Republican who had helped Nixon win the party nomination in Miami. Others felt that the decision revealed a 'Southern strategy' on the part of the administration. Nixon and Mitchell, the critics said, had decided that they could win the 1972 election and build up Republican strength in Congress by ignoring the liberal Northeast and appealing to the South as well as conservative areas of the Midwest, the Mountain states, and California. Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the administration and insisted that Southern school districts integrate immediately. But the administration had made its political points.

Two key appointments also indicated the direction of the administration. Secretary Finch wanted to nominate Dr. John Knowles, administrator of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, as assistant secretary of health, education, and welfare, but the American Medical Association and Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen objected strongly to his liberal leanings. Finch was overruled.

During the spring, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned under heavy fire for dubious financial dealings. Nixon nominated as his successor Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., of the fourth circuit court of appeals. Judge Haynsworth, a native of Greenville, S.C., was immediately attacked by labor and civil rights groups for his consistently conservative record on the bench. Then it was disclosed that the judge had ruled on several cases involving companies in which he owned stock. Senators who had attacked Justice Fortas were reluctant to apply a double standard to Judge Haynsworth; and when the judge was caught in several inconsistencies during his Senate testimony, the opposition mounted. President Nixon placed his prestige on the line and his pressure on a few arms, but in November the Senate defeated the nomination, 55 to 45, with 17 Republicans voting against the president.

Meanwhile, Nixon seemed intent on not overexerting himself. He took frequent trips to Florida and to Camp David in Maryland for short respites and spent an entire month in midsummer in San Clemente, Calif., where he had purchased a Spanish-style estate overlooking the Pacific. Such commentators as Time magazine remarked that the president 'has not, in fact, worked hard enough at the job.'

Yet in his first six months Nixon made several moves that drew praise from even his fiercest foes. Perhaps his most innovative proposal was to revamp the welfare system and provide a guaranteed, if rather meager, income for every family. He also instituted a plan whereby contractors doing work for the federal government would have to hire a certain percentage of Negroes. In November, talks opened with the Soviet Union in Helsinki, Finland, on limiting the deployment of strategic weapons.

But the critical issue facing Nixon—and the country—was always Vietnam. It was the issue of Vietnam, above all, which had won the presidential election for Nixon. Lyndon B. Johnson had withdrawn from the race when the country turned against his war policies; and Hubert H. Humphrey, his chosen successor, had never been able to eradicate the stain of association with the president. During the 1968 campaign Nixon had insisted that he had a plan to get the United States out of Vietnam, but he never revealed it. He merely allowed himself to benefit from the opposition to Johnson and never put forth concrete ideas that could have been subjected to criticism.

But when he became president, Nixon was forced to set his own course on Vietnam. As the months went by, it became increasingly clear that there were two impulses struggling within him. On one hand, he realized that it was politically necessary to end the war. Opinion polls verified what many observers had already sensed: the public felt the killing and the suffering had gone on too long with no apparent end in sight. Thus, Nixon announced that the United States no longer considered a military victory feasible and started slowly withdrawing combat troops.

On the other hand, Nixon was a man of his times, a man of the cold war, of anti-Communist crusades, and of American chauvinism. He was a man who believed in American power and American righteousness, a patriotic man who held fast to the verities of American life which were under increasing assault by the radical left. Everything in his background indicated that he would agree with President Johnson that the war was necessary and right. Thus, when Nixon visited American fighting men in Vietnam, he said the war represented the country's 'finest hour.' And at the Paris peace talks his representatives took a firm position which some critics felt was not flexible enough.

For about eight months the Vietnam doves were silent. Most of them believed Nixon had to end the war for his own political advantage, and they were prepared to give him time to move toward a settlement. But as the summer ended and as Congress reconvened and college students went back to school, something seemed to snap. Suddenly the criticism of Nixon escalated. He was not moving fast enough, the critics said; some even doubted whether he had a coherent plan to end the war.

Much of the attention focused on Moratorium Day, October 15, a day designated by antiwar activists for peaceful protest against the fighting. When the day came, millions of citizens across the country joined rallies, marches, and demonstrations to register their feelings.

The Nixon administration, increasingly peevish at the mounting dissent, staged a counterattack. Vice-President Agnew launched a series of vituperative speeches in which he branded the dissenters 'impudent snobs' and 'ideological eunuchs.' He followed with attacks on the news media for their 'liberal' and 'eastern' bias. On November 3, the evening before election day, President Nixon went on nationwide television to explain his Vietnam policy. His basic plan, he said, was to 'Vietnamize' the war by turning over most of the fighting to South Vietnamese troops. But he made it clear that the withdrawal of American troops would be proportionate to the ability of the Vietnamese to defend themselves—a formula some experts felt would result in an almost indefinite extension of the American presence in Southeast Asia.

But while he expressed his desire to end the war, Nixon also displayed other attitudes. He stressed that the United States was defending South Vietnam and other Asian countries from Communism; that if the United States withdrew precipitously, its word would no longer be trusted; and that such a swift pullout would result in a bloodbath in South Vietnam. He lumped all opponents of the war in with a fringe of violent extremists and equated support of his own policies with 'honor' and 'right.' Despite the demonstrations, he declared, a great 'silent majority' of Americans backed him up. 'Johnson's war,' said Senator J. William Fulbright after the speech, had become 'Nixon's war.'

To many observers, the speech was rife with contradictions. The man who had asked the people to lower their voices and unite behind him had raised his own voice and appealed for polarization by condemning his opponents. The man who had said he would never be swayed by public demonstrations of opinion happily displayed thousands of favorable telegrams the morning after his speech. The man who said the war was vital to the future of Southeast Asia stressed his plan to end it. Above all, his critics said, the president was 'dealing with the politics of the problem, but not the problem itself.'

The president was clearly betting that most Americans agreed with him. Yes, they were tired of the war. But they also wanted America to 'save face,' to preserve its prestige among other nations, to avoid the humiliation of even a veiled defeat. As the year ended, Nixon was probably right. About 250,000 people marched on Washington on November 15 to oppose the war, but polls showed that 77 percent of the country supported the president's policies, and his personal popularity reached a new high. There was, however, considerable evidence that much of Nixon's support was based on the belief that he would move quickly to bring American troops home. It was by no means certain how long this 'silent majority' would stay patient while its sons continued to march off to war and to death.

In early December, the House approved an administration-sponsored resolution supporting the president's efforts to negotiate a 'just peace' in Vietnam. The 333-to-55 vote came after extensive controversy over whether the resolution was to be interpreted as an endorsement of the principle of free elections in Vietnam or of the administration's Vietnam policies, both past and future.

Politics

The 1968 election had left the Democrats a feuding and chaotic party. Nixon and the Republicans had been able to chip away a large segment of the lower-middle-class vote that had traditionally gone Democratic. No longer poor, the 'forgotten Americans,' as Nixon called them, were no longer concerned with the New Deal legacy of social legislation. Yet they were hardly comfortable, especially in a period of inflation, and they deeply resented the rising obstreperousness of the black militants and radical college students.

One man who stood a chance of winning back these voters to the Democratic column was Senator Edward M. Kennedy. An outspoken liberal on many issues, he also possessed a magic name and considerable personal charm. At the start of the year he made a bold decision and wrested the job of majority whip away from Senator Russell Long, one of the Senate's most powerful committee chairmen. Few observers doubted that he would be an automatic choice for the presidential nomination in 1972. Senator Edmund S. Muskie, who had made a favorable impression as Hubert H. Humphrey's running mate, toured the country early in 1969 and came away thoroughly discouraged; Kennedy had it in the bag.

Then one night in July, Kennedy was attending a cookout on Chappaquiddick Island off Martha's Vineyard. Four friends and five girls who had worked in his brother's campaign in 1968 were also there. At some point in the evening, Senator Kennedy left the party with one of the girls, Mary Jo Kopechne. While driving on a dark and badly marked road, his car barreled off a small bridge into a pond. The senator emerged shaken but unharmed; Miss Kopechne drowned.

The incident looked bad enough. What was Kennedy doing with an unmarried girl on a lonely road while his pregnant wife stayed home? But the senator's actions after the accident compounded the damage. He failed to report the crash until the next morning, and some stories said that he had tried to convince one of his friends at the party to take the blame. After several days, he appeared on television to give his side of the story but only made matters worse with an unfortunate speech that left many questions unanswered. During the speech he asked his constituents in Massachusetts to help him decide whether to resign from the Senate. The response was overwhelmingly favorable and he returned to Washington, but it was months before he regained his confidence and began to assert himself. What remained doubtful was whether the country would regain its confidence in him. To most experts, he was out of the running for 1972 and possibly for good. Suddenly the presidential ambitions of Senator Muskie, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, and Hubert Humphrey, who was planning to run for a U.S. Senate seat in 1970, were revived.

Elections.

This was a contradictory year for elections— an understandable result at a time when many people seemed troubled and uncertain about their lives. Early in the year, several mayoral candidates won elections by promising law and order in big cities bothered by growing crime rates and racial resentments. In Minneapolis, a former policeman, Charles Stenvig, upset the candidates of the two major parties with a tough-talking campaign against 'crime in the streets.' In New York, Mayor John V. Lindsay, one of the staunchest champions in public life of black aspirations, was defeated for the Republican nomination by John J. Marchi, an obscure state senator and outspoken conservative. In the Democratic primary, Mario A. Procaccino, a product of the old-line machine, also used a law-and-order pitch to defeat four liberals for the nomination, including former mayor Robert F. Wagner and writer Norman Mailer. In Los Angeles, Mayor Sam Yorty baldly appealed to racial fears in defeating City Councilman Thomas Bradley, the first Negro ever to run for mayor of the nation's third largest city.