Who was the real Richard Nixon? There are sides to him that get overlooked, like that he had a deeper understanding of foreign affairs than any other US President. But it's hard to see the light for the shade and the tragic fall that overshadows everything.Don's guest today is Professor Nicole Hemmer whose latest book is "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s".Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Tim Arstall. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: Who was Richard Nixon before his presidency?
But before he served as president from 1969 to 74, his resume in Washington was so vast, we spent a part one of this interview on his prior jobs. Member of the House of Representatives from California in the 1940s. His rise as a Cold War hawk. Danach wurde er in den Senaten bezeichnet, bevor er als Vizepräsident von Dwight Eisenhower im Jahr 1952 ausgewählt wurde.
Nixon war ein politischer Komet, der über die Firmamenten unseres föderalen Governments schießt. Und das Remnant dieses Komets ist noch heute eine Geschichte. Es ist wichtig zu verstehen, warum. Es hat viel zu tun mit der immer kritischen Balance der Macht in Washington. Professor Nicole Hemmer is our returning guest. She is a professor of political history at Vanderbilt University.
Her latest book is Partisans, the conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s. Hey, Nikki, thanks for coming back. Great to be back with you. Those 1990s partisans in your book cut straight from the Nixon fabric, aren't they?
Boy, are they ever. And many of them, you know, worked within the Nixon administration. So there's a lot of overlap.
Genau. Der Mann ist noch mit uns. Also in unserem vorherigen Episode, wir wurden in 1968 von Nixon ausgewählt. In der Räumlichen Mitte von Vietnam, LBJs Wahl, nicht zu fahren, die schrecklichen Verbrechen, MLK Jr. und Robert Kennedy, Reize in den Städten. Es gibt einen tectonischen Schiff in der nationalen Politik in Amerika.
Ein Drittpartei-Versuch von George Wallace und dem neuen GOP-South in der Face of the Civil Rights and Call for Law and Order. Nixon schlägt sich in die White House, um den demokratischen Vize-Präsidenten Hubert Humphrey und Wallace zu töten. Und hier sind wir. Was ist die veröffentlichte Vision seines Präsidentschafts? Er ist der neue Nixon, oder?
Er ist der neue Nixon. Er wird nicht so alt sein wie Nixon. Du erinnerst dich an ihn als den typischen schiffigen Kerl aus den 1950er und 1960er-Jahren, den verletzten Nixon der frühen 1960er-Jahre. Aber der neue Nixon wird populär und mehr wichtig sein. Right. The silent majority played a big part in this, right, in his mind. Very much so.
Nixon understood American politics as being on the one hand this very loud, noisy, protesting minority that was clamoring for attention and was getting all of the attention. But actually they disguised this silent majority of white, middle-class Americans who were
Und er sah diese Amerikaner als nicht nur seine Basis für Unterstützung, sondern die Amerikaner, die er am meisten benötigte, während er im Büro war.
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Chapter 2: What were Nixon's key challenges during his presidency?
He is expanding this war and not shrinking it.
Very much so. And that expansion of the war has two components that are really unpopular. The first is that he's expanding it in the first place. And so, you know, he's come in promising he's going to end this war and instead it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And also that he's doing it secretly. Yeah.
That had been one of the major issues in 68 during the Tet Offensive, was that the generals had been promising one thing, we're about to win this war. And then facts were playing out on the ground where people were like, well, but the Vietnamese that we're fighting are much, much stronger than we had been told.
And so the American people already had this perception they were being lied to about the Vietnam War. And the expansion of the bombing into Cambodia only reinforces that sense.
Am I right to say, you know, at the outset of this conversation, we're really dealing with executive power here as a huge theme in the story of Richard Nixon's presidencies, of course, you know, with Watergate later on. But it also plays a part in all of these foreign policy moves that he will have.
As the president, it has come to this point where American power sits in the White House more than ever before.
This is the story of the Cold War Presidency, that it accrues more and more and more power in all sorts of ways, through the intelligence agencies, through the ability to wage war, through just the growth of the executive state. You end up having power because so much is focused on foreign policy and strategies for nuclear war.
So much of that power sits in the executive and rests on the person of the presidency. So Nixon is really the heir to power.
Well, there are those who would go even back to FDR for sure, you know, as far as that kind of thing. And this is the issue today we're talking about. Anyway, when the truth about Vietnam and Cambodia comes out, of course it triggers protests. This is also happening because of the draft and all the rest. Kent State is a huge event, most notorious among many, many protests. Am 4.
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Chapter 3: How did Nixon approach the Vietnam War and what was Vietnamization?
Und in Wahrheit gibt es einen Weg, uns zwischen diesen zwei kommunistischen Supermächten zu triangulieren und sie zu verbinden und mit China zu öffnen, obwohl es eine kommunistische Regierung hat. Und so bringt er eine wirklich studierte und erfahrene Außenpolitik. Es endet einfach nicht sein, dass es sein Legitimum ist, weil von allem anderen.
But that had happened as he was a Vice President. He was really Ike's man on the ground as far as these foreign trips go.
He logged so many tens of thousands of miles crisscrossing the globe as Vice President. And really thought that that was going to be the launching pad for him to become President in 1960. That he could say in this very fraught moment across the globe, here was somebody who had this real experience. and could lead the US through this very precarious moment in the Cold War.
He doesn't get that shot in 1960, but then in 1968 he finally has his hand on the wheel and is eager and excited to reshape global politics.
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Let's talk about the opening of China. Some context for anyone who doesn't understand. The Chinese Communist Revolution happened between Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek back in 1949, right after World War II. The rise of Mao and Communist China then leads to our military confrontation on the Korean Peninsula, the Korean War. Das ist alles Teil 1 von dem, was später Vietnam wird.
Nicht in einem Millionenjahren würde Richard Nixon, der Cold War-Hawk der 1940er und 50er Jahre, jemals mit Mao zu Tee trinken. Aber das ist genau das, was 25 Jahre später passiert. Es ist verrückt. Das ist das Unglaubliche an diesem Kerl. Und er muss für die Tatsache, dass er sich verändern kann, gewonnen werden. Und das war eine enorme Reise für diese Persönlichkeit.
There's this saying that comes after the opening of China, which is, only Nixon could go to China. And what that saying means is that only Nixon could do it without being red-baited by Richard Nixon. Because had an earlier president tried to do it, Nixon would have accused them of being communists. That's where he sort of built his reputation.
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Chapter 4: What role did executive power play in Nixon's foreign policy decisions?
Aber für Menschen, die ihre Karriere investiert haben, in die Bildung dieser föderalen Agenzen, die Verständnis, dass es auf dem föderalen Niveau gerecht werden musste, um es zu machen, dass es konsistent und fair ist, aber auch, um sicherzustellen, dass es die neuen Regeln der Zivilrechts-Ära folgt. Making sure that money was getting to Black residents and to women and to Latino residents.
This was part of the understanding that federal control meant fairness and that state control meant something else. And for Richard Nixon, who had run on the Southern Strategy, he was more interested in having that state control than federal control.
But that's a question. I mean, was that political calculation or was that truly his belief? Because in fact, he does amazing things with the federal government in oversight and regulation. He creates the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA is Richard Nixon.
I think that especially first term Richard Nixon is someone who understands he has to compromise. Republicans do not control the Senate and the House. They're still in the Great Society era. And when he moves, he has to move strategically. And so he doesn't say, let's dismantle the welfare state. He says, what about this idea of having a guaranteed annual income?
Oder der föderale Regierung gibt Menschen einfach Geld und sie finden heraus, wie sie es so sparen. Oder sogar für etwas wie eine affirmative action, eine liberale Politikidee. Nixon verabschiedet es, aber er verabschiedet es bis zum Ende, um die Unionen zu verringern. Und so eine der Dinge, die Nixon in seinem ersten Termin macht, ist, dass er versucht, herauszufinden, wie man
liberal means to reach conservative ends so he does oversee things like the development of the environmental protection agency but his ultimate goal is to have a more conservative federal government he just doesn't have a lot of space to do that in his first term where he's barely eked out of victory and is working in what is clearly just like a more liberal america
Yeah, well, he sure gets it in his second term. I mean, the 1972 is a startling election that really people don't talk about very much. And I was fifth grade or something like that. So I was alive well enough to know that it was an extraordinary fact of life that Richard Nixon had taken this government over in 1972. You know, George McGovern was barely in contention.
Und als Ergebnis hatte er ein gigantisches Mandat, alles zu tun, was er in seinem zweiten Termin wollte. Das ist das versteckendste Ding von allem für mich. Weißt du, warum er any of these things that they did behind the scenes and then tripped themselves up from such a gigantic accomplishment.
I think the important starting point has to be that the Watergate affair, the scandal, starts during the 1968 election before that big landslide happened. Nixon had, of course, in 1968, as we've mentioned... Ich glaube, das ist ein sehr, sehr wichtiger Punkt. Be careful reading your own tea leaves, I suppose.
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Chapter 5: How did Nixon respond to the Kent State protests and public dissent?
Yeah. The body count of the Nixon administration is not something that can be set aside. The chaos and the destruction that his administration caused in pursuit of those loftier goals. The loftiness of the goals does not excuse the criminality on the world stage and then the criminality at home.
I think one of the lasting legacies of the Nixon administration is that he did have a lot of supporters, people who felt that he was unfairly prosecuted and persecuted through Watergate and who then spent the next several decades trying to create a world in which the next Republican president wouldn't be held responsible if he committed crimes in pursuit of his goals.
And that's the world we live in now. And so, you know, I think that you can tally things up on a ledger. About the good and the bad of the Nixon administration. But I think we have to take into account the destructiveness of that legacy, which, you know, Nixon probably couldn't have foreseen that he would have loosened the constraints on presidents going forward.
That wasn't, I think, what he saw as the lesson of his presidency. But nonetheless, we are living in the world that Richard Nixon created. And looking around right now, it doesn't feel like a very good world to live in.
He was the tipping point of executive power in the American presidency. That's my quick thumbnail on it. He pushes those limits that are, as you say, currently being tested today. Just a reminder to listeners, you can find a lot more about Nixon in our archive. The Watergate episode I mentioned, episode 139. His trip to Moscow to meet Nikita Khrushchev, episode 84. And there are others.
I mean, this guy... It's been my pleasure. Thank you. Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Bye for now.
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Vielen Dank.
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