“Heart and eyes … filled to overflowing,” Vivian L. Uhlig listened closely as President Richard M. Nixon spoke about the war in Vietnam on the evening of 3 November 1969. Still grieving for a son killed in Vietnam nearly two years earlier, Uhlig felt a deep connection with the President as he sought to explain the United States’ role in the conflict. Writing to Nixon the next day, she told him, “I could feel your strong, inner emotions, your honesty, and your great concern for our men in Vietnam and for our country.” Both she and her husband were “comforted some-what [sic] with the knowledge that you aren't going to withdraw our troops and let this great country go down in defeat” because, she wondered, if “we give it all over to the communists now – for what and why did my only son die?” Furthermore, “if we just give up now, the faith in our government will really suffer a shattering blow,” so Uhlig urged the President not to “let the pressures of the kooks and cowards and the ever-lasting misleading news media get you down.”Footnote 1
Uhlig's letter was one of thousands to arrive at the White House in the days and weeks following Nixon's speech. In many ways, it was exactly the type of response White House officials had hoped for: not only did it indicate an emotional connection between the President and the writer, but it also framed Nixon's policies as strengthening the nation and marginalized his opponents. While Uhlig's was likely sincere, many of the letters and telegrams on Nixon's Oval Office desk would more accurately be described as part of a larger “astroturf” – or false grassroots – campaign organized by the White House. That the speech is remembered as inspiring a groundswell of support, rather than as an early astroturf project, reflects just how effectively administration planners hid their involvement. Even so, they were not entirely successful and Jonathan Schell and other contemporary observers did notice the close ties between the White House and some of the President's more vocal supporters.Footnote 2 Still, their success in blending grassroots responses with ones orchestrated in the White House meant that the speech would serve as a model for future public-opinion projects. The focus in this case was the Vietnam War, but it was far from the only issue about which the administration sought to influence public attitudes. In part modeled on the successful alliance between the White House and the Christian right under both Nixon and Dwight David Eisenhower, these efforts sought to give administration officials control over their outside allies while maintaining the image of autonomous, independent support.Footnote 3
Beyond the still relatively novel use of astroturf organizing, administration efforts surrounding what is now remembered as the “Silent Majority speech” encompassed the full range of public-opinion tools available to the President at the time. Although seen by Nixon and many on his staff as proof of the effectiveness of going above the heads of the media and speaking “directly” to the people, the Silent Majority speech should instead be remembered as a powerful demonstration of the importance of planning and control in the Nixon Administration. Not only was the impressive response a result of carefully coordinated White House efforts, but the speech also enabled Nixon and his staff to mobilize the President's supporters and create a self-identified “Silent Majority” in opposition to the antiwar movement. With this first success in late 1969, all of the pieces later to become hallmarks of the administration approach to public opinion were in place – albeit often in a less sophisticated form. And because it was the first attempt, the detailed plans provide us with a clear view of almost the entire process, with privileged access to nearly every element of the administration's decision-making process.
Although it is fully documented – often in great detail – in White House records, historians and other scholars frequently overlook the full scope of the White House project to mobilize domestic support for the President. At first glance, that so few studies focus on the administration's careful efforts to mobilize supporters suggests that the White House was truly successful in hiding its links to pro-war demonstrations and activists, but the reality is more complicated. Like many reporters at the time, Jonathan Schell noticed the close relationship between the administration and its supporters and discussed it in some depth in his 1976 The Time of Illusion, exposing Nixon's determination to manage public opinion and the central role of popular attitudes in the waging of the Vietnam War.Footnote 4 Schell convincingly explains Nixon's fixation on domestic support as being a logical offshoot of the US policy of nuclear deterrence, which in turn was contingent upon US credibility both at home and abroad. But, perhaps because Schell's broader discussion of the costs and dangers of an overreliance on credibility and nuclear issues overshadows his valuable insight into Nixon's domestic public-opinion projects, relatively few scholars have engaged with the public-opinion side of his argument. Richard Reeves and other biographers do examine how Nixon's personality – particularly his worst traits – shaped his administration's approach to protesters, but even these studies overlook the very methodical way Nixon and his aides sought to reshape domestic debates over the Vietnam War.Footnote 5 Michael J. Allen and Sandra Scanlon are closer yet, but their work focusses on Nixon's relationship with his outside allies – the POW/MIA movement for Allen and the Conservatives for Scanlon – and the ways non-White House activism both strengthened and constrained administration efforts to manage domestic public opinion.Footnote 6
The tension between grassroots supporters and the Nixon White House certainly did not have a single cause, but the administration's determination to control public opinion was doubtless a contributing factor. The detailed planning for the 3 November 1969 speech offers us a first glance at the ways in which the administration sought to manage as much of the popular response as possible. These efforts are acknowledged by historians of the domestic side of the war, but discussion of the President's attacks against the antiwar movement tend to overshadow examinations of his more proactive attempts to rally domestic support. Even amongst these studies, the 3 November 1969 Silent Majority speech is only discussed within the context of administration responses to the October Moratorium protests, Agnew's attacks on the press, or the November Mobilization protests.Footnote 7 By instead examining the speech as a key turning point in the administration, we can better understand the full extent of White House concerns about public opinion. For, at the same time as domestic opposition to the US war in Vietnam increasingly played a role in the conflict itself, the war was reshaping the political calculus at home.
Throughout, credibility was central. Not only did it determine the effectiveness of US foreign policy more broadly, but it shaped both US and North Vietnamese calculations throughout the war. As domestic opposition undermined the US negotiating position, rallying support became increasingly vital and Nixon soon believed that the very office of the presidency was under attack. Understanding the Vietnam War public-relations campaign waged by the White House, therefore, helps us to better appreciate the lengths to which officials from Nixon down were willing to go to seize control over domestic debates. In contrast to the well-documented campaign against the antiwar movement, the public-opinion campaigns were proactive efforts to rally supporters. Rather than attempt to win over the hearts and minds of opponents, these efforts to identify, organize, and mobilize outside support for Nixon's Vietnam policies sought, instead, the image of support. The goal was to create the image of a groundswell of support for Nixon and his policies which would, therefore, encourage still more support. Public demonstrations and counterdemonstrations were central to these plans, requiring officials to look beyond the White House, and the resulting projects combined grassroots activism with outside surrogates, all closely supervised by administration officials.
BUILDING THE WHITE HOUSE PUBLIC-OPINION APPARATUS
Certainly not the first administration to seek to manage popular views and the President's image, the Nixon administration was set apart by the scale and scope of their efforts. The expansion of polling within the White House is well documented and Nixon took full advantage of the systems and techniques established by his predecessors.Footnote 8 Similarly, Nixon's use of outside supporters and proxy organizations was not new to his administration as Presidents since Theodore Roosevelt had actively sought to influence public views.Footnote 9 Both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt actively sought to influence wartime attitudes through the Committee for Public Information (CPI) during World War I and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA) in the lead-up to World War II. Unlike the groups and public-opinion campaigns discussed in this article, these earlier organizations did not try to hide their ties to the White House. Indeed, CPI was effectively a government agency during World War I while the legitimacy and influence of CDAAA was rooted in its chairman's close relationship with Roosevelt.Footnote 10 Although a far cry from the sophisticated manipulation of public opinion under modern presidencies, these groups paved the way for the Vietnam-era innovations of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as both men sought to rally the US public behind an increasingly unpopular war.
Nixon and his staff were determined to build on Johnson's limited successes, most notably the creation of the Citizens Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam, and their first priority was the identification and organization of outside supporters – particularly those willing to speak out on the President's behalf. Under the direction of White House staffers, such individuals were mobilized to promote administration initiatives essentially on demand. Foremost among these was an amorphous group referred to as the “Nixon Network.” These Nixon loyalists from across the United States, many of them Republican Party members, were selected for their willingness to send congratulatory or critical letters to the media depending on whether or not the coverage in question was favorable to the President. During the 1968 presidential campaign, this group was relatively informal, with staff requesting that friends and acquaintances send letters timed to strengthen candidate Nixon's position in the polls. After Nixon's victory, the program evolved to support the President's policy agenda as well as attempts to influence popular perceptions of the man himself.Footnote 11 Indeed, the Network (or at least its coordinator) moved to the White House when Jeb Stuart Magruder accepted a position as a special assistant to the President in 1969. Learning from initial public-opinion successes, Magruder and Haldeman agreed that his role would be “unobtrusive” in order to avoid the impression that Nixon sought to manipulate public opinion even as his primary responsibility was to “enable the merchandising of the Presidency to proceed as smoothly as possible.”Footnote 12
Managing these networks of outside supporters was a complex task involving officials from across the White House – particularly from the offices of the press secretary and Congressional liaisons, and the newly formed White House Office of Communications – all supervised by Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, a former advertising executive. Among the most powerful officials in the Nixon White House, Haldeman monitored the daily operations of all White House offices, ensuring that the President's staff stayed on-message and pushing Nixon's pet projects along. As a result, Haldeman and his staff were actively involved in the administration's myriad public-opinion projects. He and Deputy Assistant to the President Alexander P. Butterfield managed these projects through much of 1969, until Charles W. Colson became special counsel to the President and domestic liaison. Colson would eventually become a White House powerbroker in his own right, but in the early months of Nixon's administration these responsibilities were divided between the White House Office of Congressional Relations, led by Bryce Harlow, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, and Director of Communications Herb G. Klein.
THE FIRST TEST: THE MORATORIUM, 15 OCTOBER 1969
Facing its first major challenge in the early autumn of 1969, this de facto White House public-opinion team worked to link disparate groups of supporters – grassroots organizers, Republican loyalists, and conservative activists – to counter a resurgent antiwar movement. This more structured approach was a result of Nixon's request for better coordination of White House public relations, rather than continuing to “slide along with what I fear is an inadequate … amateurish response.”Footnote 13 The President was particularly concerned with preparations for the 15 October Moratorium antiwar protests, part of a series of protests intended to highlight the more moderate elements of the movement.Footnote 14 Nixon and his aides recognized that, if successful, the peaceful, broad-based demonstration would normalize opposition to the war – undermining the administration's work to marginalize the movement – and so were anxious to limit its scope and effectiveness. They therefore set out to organize counterdemonstrations and letter-writing campaigns around the Moratorium, with Nixon's September suggestion to Haldeman setting the tone: “I wonder if you might game plan the possibility of having some pro-administration rallies, etc. on Vietnam on 15 October, the date set by the other side. Inevitably, whenever we plan something, they are there to meet us; perhaps we can turn the trick on them.”Footnote 15 Nixon clearly intended for his staff to take a very active role in mobilizing domestic support – up to and including directing seemingly grassroots activism.
This approach reflected a central tenet of the administration – control – and the success of these initial attempts shaped the administration's approach to public opinion for the rest of Nixon's presidency. Reflecting the importance of this project, anti-Moratorium planning was centered in Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman's office. Haldeman was the President's gatekeeper and internal spokesman so his active involvement underscores how important it was to Nixon – and therefore the administration more broadly. Haldeman delegated the day-to-day operations to Butterfield, his deputy, and White House political aide Charles West.
Working quickly in early October, they coordinated a patriotism campaign publicly championed by established outside organizations including the National Rifle Association, the American Security Council, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and other veterans’ groups.Footnote 16 Thus, as antiwar activists participated in the Moratorium on 15 October 1969, Nixon allies organized counterdemonstrations and proudly displayed the US flag on their homes, automobiles, and jacket lapels; someone even parachuted into Washington, DC, landing on the National Mall.Footnote 17 That same day, Citizens Committee for Peace with Security (CCPS) members placed newspaper advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers across the country urging their fellow citizens to “Tell It to Hanoi” by writing to Congress and the President to voice their support for administration policies and their opposition to the antiwar movement.Footnote 18 While private individuals officially sponsored these ads, the idea for both the ads and their message originated in the White House. Demonstrating the close cooperation between the ostensibly grassroots organization and the White House, an administration aide reported that when told of plans for countering the antiwar movement, “The signers of the ‘Tell It to Hanoi’ ad … responded, to a man, even before they knew the details.”Footnote 19 The results were impressive: about forty thousand letters as of 27 October 1969,Footnote 20 well exceeding the yearly average for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.Footnote 21
Informed of the impressive results of the Tell It to Hanoi campaign, a delighted Nixon scrawled, “Tell [Chicago businessman Jack] Mulcahy, et. al. good job! from RN” on the memo, a request carried out days later.Footnote 22 Beyond gratitude for their work countering the Moratorium, the President and his staff appreciated that their efforts strengthened the image of broad-based support for Nixon's policies in the face of significant, organized opposition. Even so, White House political aide Charles West, the veteran and patriotic groups liaison, warned, “we have no reason to be satisfied or smug.”Footnote 23 Instead, West pushed for greater White House preparation in advance of the November Mobilization protests. In addition to expanding the patriotism and flag promotion campaigns of the Moratorium, he urged the White House to build a “quiet, responsible, well-organized, private-sector, grass-roots program.”Footnote 24 Casey, the head of CCPS, agreed. The future CIA director wrote to Nixon in late October urging the President to create a “counter force … a nationwide committee,” to challenge domestic critics and promote the President's interpretation of events. Both Casey and West were confident that existing supporters would flock to such an organization, with Casey noting that they had “only to be activated and supplied with material.”Footnote 25 Which was exactly what the White House would come to do over the next few years, starting with their effort to mobilize supporters following the President's 3 November speech.
LAUNCHING A MOVEMENT: NIXON'S ADDRESS TO THE NATION
As part of this project, Nixon's staff sought “new … ways to put across to the American public what we are trying to sell” and to find “something constructive for the silent Americans to do … promoting the idea of patriotism and support of the Administration.”Footnote 26 Internal planning quickly coalesced around using Nixon's 3 November speech as a “launchpad” for a domestic pro-administration, pro-Vietnam movement. But even as planning invoked the idea of a movement, staffers – as well as the President – were primarily concerned with the image of support. How many people would speak out? How many articles about flag-waving supporters would run in the newspapers? Although some prescient advisers, such as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Marshall Green, disagreed that “bright ideas or gimmicks” would solve the public-opinion challenges facing the administration,Footnote 27 much of the pre-speech planning centered around just such quick-fix solutions and few in the White House expected the speech to make the case for continued US involvement in Vietnam.
In the end, Nixon's speech energized his base and cast the antiwar movement as un-American. Hardly a new political strategy for such an experienced Cold Warrior, framing political opponents as unpatriotic would become an important part of the administration's campaign to influence domestic public opinion. Such tactics were not new to the Cold War either, but the McCarthyism of the 1940s and 1950s – particularly then-Congressman Nixon's dogged pursuit of Alger Hiss – occurred during a formative period in Nixon's political career and undoubtedly influenced both his personality and his approach to political opponents. Building on this experience as well as his reading of the national mood, Nixon recognized that by linking support for his policies with “traditional American values,” he could, as historian Tom Wells notes, “rally the honest Americans and discredit the bad ones.”Footnote 28 In fact, former Deputy Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin later admitted that the White House submitted questions to be included in a post-speech Gallup survey explicitly intended “to ‘validate what the President said’ and to ‘isolate the Vietnam protestors.’”Footnote 29
First, though, Nixon and his staff had to prepare the ground for the reaction they sought as the popular response was critical to the success of the larger project to reclaim the initiative in the domestic debate. Aides therefore worked to organize outside supporters – many of whom were active in October's anti-Moratorium effort – to ensure that they spoke out and stayed on-message in the days following the speech. Having delegated the support program, Nixon focussed on writing the speech itself; treating it, as speechwriter William Safire remembers, “with the seriousness of an inaugural.”Footnote 30 Although one would expect Klein and the Office of Communications to have taken the lead on speech promotion, Klein's unwillingness to politicize his role meant that he was on the margins of White House planning for 3 November.Footnote 31 Rather, Butterfield managed the project from Haldeman's office much as he had the counter-Moratorium effort in October. He supervised a core organizing group drawn from across the White House, including members of the White House Office of Communications, the White House Congressional Liaison Office, and the Republican National Committee. Members of this group collaborated with outside allies to coordinate the anticipated response to the speech, working throughout October and November to ensure that the expected response materialized. Kept informed of these plans, the President sent a list of requested post-speech actions to his chief of staff in late October which moved easily between the political stratagems of earlier Presidents and his own, hyper-secretive approach.Footnote 32 Reflecting the President's demands, his staff drew up a detailed plan for the speech, ranging from monitoring network and print coverage of his speech to securing “favorable comments” from outside supporters such as friendly members of Congress, sympathetic state and local politicians, and Republican Party loyalists whose backing was “of vital importance” for Nixon and his staff.Footnote 33
As part of this program, Jim Allison and Dick Garbett at the Republican National Committee (RNC) coordinated Republican Party involvement. Also working with the state and local Republicans was Harry S. Dent, a political adviser to both Nixon and Senator Strom Thurmond, tasked with conveying to state governors, regardless of party affiliation, the importance of mobilized state and local political endorsements of Nixon's policies. Lyn Nofziger and Bryce Harlow in the Congressional Relations Office worked to secure approval on Capitol Hill – both by encouraging Senators and Representatives to make favorable statements and by pursuing Nixon's request that friendly legislators sign a letter or petition immediately after the speech.Footnote 34 Nixon's request, and the resulting item in the official White House game plan, were very specific: securing at least 250 Congressmen and fifty Senators willing to sign a letter drafted by the White House.Footnote 35 Nofziger laid the groundwork for such a letter with House and Senate leaders such as Representative Gerald Ford, Senator Hugh Scott, and others, but an independent initiative to support the President overtook this particular project, much to the chagrin of White House planners. Although Nixon and his staff knew that the bulk of the President's political assistance would come from Republicans, they still hoped to recruit Democrats. Allison, Garbett, Dent, Nofziger, Harlow and other staffers therefore strove to make sure that local allies understood the importance of bipartisan support for Nixon's position following the speech at all political levels, necessitating the public involvement of as many Democrats as possible.Footnote 36
Public endorsements from politicians were useful, of course, but for Nixon's speech to truly spark a national movement, his words had to be embraced at all levels of domestic society. Klein's work in the White House Office of Communications was key here as media coverage of the speech would frame the national narrative on both Nixon's policies and the impending antiwar protests. Similarly, the coordination of political surrogates was vital, as Nixon could not afford dissent from within his own party – or within the political elite more generally – if he was going to convince the nation and the North Vietnamese that he spoke for the majority. Butterfield therefore devoted much of his time in the weeks surrounding the speech to planning and coordinating grassroots endorsements of the President and his Vietnam policies.
These plans depended on enthusiastic presidential boosters such as William Casey and the Citizens Committee for Peace with Security (CCPS). Continuing the work started in October, the group planned a similar petition campaign to echo the President's message on 3 November and would, of course, again request that their fellow citizens “Tell It to Hanoi” rather than protest in the streets.Footnote 37 To this end, political aide Charles West reprised his role as White House liaison with “veteran and patriotic groups,” attending a meeting of New York allies on 27 October 1969 intended to “organize an informal ‘united front’ to carry on activities to support the President in his Vietnam program.”Footnote 38 As some of these individuals had ties to Democratic Presidents, their coordinated efforts would bolster Nixon's claims to represent majority, rather than solely Republican, opinion. Further seeking to expand the domestic response to the speech, aides solicited the involvement of labor and veterans’ organizations; the US Chamber of Commerce; think tanks and citizens’ groups; the Boy and Girl Scouts of America; sororities and fraternities; student organizations and leaders; and astronauts, athletes, and other celebrities.Footnote 39 White House staffers and outside partners would facilitate local preparations, including laying the groundwork for “newspaper advertisements; speeches by officials … community rallies; [and] resolutions” echoing the themes of Nixon's speech. Footnote 40
COUNTERDEMONSTRATIONS AND WAVING THE FLAG
Such active and visible outside participation was vital to White House plans to link a pro-Nixon, pro-Vietnam position with a larger campaign to promote patriotism across the country. Butterfield and Haldeman therefore assigned the task of planning a “revival of the ‘World War II’ type display of patriotism” to political strategist and special White House counsel Harry Dent.Footnote 41 To be effective, White House plans required significant advance planning, and still more astroturf organizing, to supply enough “U. S. Flag lapel buttons and red, white, and blue bumper stickers featuring whatever slogan is agreed upon” for distribution to cooperative organizations and individuals, and at “service stations nationwide.”Footnote 42 In this way, the flag, a symbol of the nation itself as well as of individual patriotism, would become a marker of support for Nixon, thereby linking the man and his office with broader national loyalties. Administration officials did not attempt to tie these patriotic activities with specific policies or even with the Vietnam War, but planned instead for surrogates at the local, state, and national levels to inform the “nation that those supporting the President should display automobile lights during daylight hours, wear lapel buttons, and fly the American flag daily” in the weeks after Nixon's speech.Footnote 43
Additionally, Special Assistant to the President Jeb Magruder was tasked with informing the Nixon Network's “‘wires and letters to the editors’ apparatus” of the “support-the-President campaign scheduled to begin November 4th and run through the subsequent 12-day period” and ensuring that participants were fully informed of the preferred messages and themes.Footnote 44 As the White House planned to use the response to the President's speech to support their argument that Nixon – and not the antiwar movement – represented the national view of US involvement in Vietnam, it was vital that they have evidence of popular support for the President. Patriotic flag-waving was useful, but aides knew that letters and telegrams would provide a striking visual indication of domestic approval of the President's policies. These and other letter-writing and petition campaigns played a central role in White House plans for the speech response. To this end, appointment secretary Dwight Chapin suggested to Butterfield that telegraph company Western Union run ads following the President's speech encouraging individual telegrams to the President, Senators, and Representatives in the guise of a “public service campaign.”Footnote 45
Confident of success, a late October draft of post-speech plans anticipated a “barrage” of letters and telegrams in the forty-eight hours immediately following Nixon's televised address.Footnote 46 Such “fantastic loads of mail” would, in turn, be used by White House officials to demonstrate broad, popular embrace of Nixon and his policies.Footnote 47 Pre-speech game plans therefore directed Butterfield to prepare a schedule for “get[ting] continual follow-up stories out to the press,” emphasizing that “all letters and wires [are] enthusiastically supporting the President.”Footnote 48 In addition to planting news stories, with Klein's cooperation, aides anxious to explicitly connect the speech and the planned explosion of pro-Vietnam and pro-Nixon activities expected their outside allies to use slogans such as “something like ‘We Support the President’, but perhaps catchier, with a little more dash.”Footnote 49 That men in the White House, up to and including the President, were concerned with the slogans used by outside supporters speaks to the overarching fixation on control underlying much of Nixon's presidency. Not only that, but it speaks to their confidence and certainty that they could, indeed, manage public opinion in the same way as they did the inner workings of the White House. Their determination to oversee all facets of the response stemmed from their recognition that public opinion had the potential to constrain the President's policy options and as well as from Nixon's own fixation on his public image and persona.
This focus helps to explain the level of detail in White House planning – up to and including the best location for banners during the demonstrations expected to follow Nixon's speech. Specifically, the game plan notes, “Their banners and signs will stand out especially well if displayed from the backs of trucks and the upper sides of buses.”Footnote 50 Such counterdemonstrations during the Mobilization were critical to the success of White House plans to undermine their opponents and reinforce the President's message. Of course, White House aides were not alone in their efforts to counter the antiwar movement. Even as Haldeman and Butterfield solicited suggestions from White House aides, grassroots organizers were preparing for a series of patriotic events and displays during what they described as “National Unity Week” – encompassing both Veterans’ Day on 11 November and the Mobilization protests scheduled for 15 November. As Sandra Scanlon has shown, these grassroots demonstrations were indeed intended to counter the antiwar movement, but were not organized at White House request. Even so, White House officials hoped to use them to further promote the idea of a pro-Nixon, pro-Vietnam constituency following the 3 November address.Footnote 51 The parades and associated activities explicitly targeted those Americans who, in founder Edmund Dombrowski's view, supported the President but were reluctant to take to the streets.Footnote 52 Promoting local – rather than national – activism, National Unity Week dovetailed smoothly with White House hopes for counterdemonstrations and other public declarations of popular approval for the President.
Even so, the autonomy of the organizing groups – the Committee for a Week of National Unity and the National Committee for Responsible Patriotism – was unfamiliar to White House aides accustomed to total control. Butterfield and other officials therefore worked closely with their grassroots counterparts to align plans for National Unity Week with the administration program, primarily by providing informational and organizational assistance. White House staffers sought to ensure the success of the program, including “at least a moderate level of Flag waving and other visible rallying of the masses to the support of the President.”Footnote 53 Such displays on Veterans’ Day and during the Mobilization protests would, as Nixon requested, “get across the point that not all of the crowd is anti-Administration.”Footnote 54 Again, rather than actually work to change the minds of their opponents by making the case for continued US involvement in Vietnam, Nixon and his staff instead sought to mobilize just enough enthusiasm to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the antiwar movement. Rallying supporters – in effect, preaching to the converted – was an easy way to shift the tone of the domestic debate without wrestling with the serious questions and criticisms of the antiwar movement. Nixon's speech on 3 November, therefore, did not aspire to change minds but rather sought to give his allies a cause, a rallying point around which to gather, and a useful way to frame their support for the President and opposition to the antiwar movement.
SILENT NO LONGER
In the pursuit of these objectives, Nixon's speech reviewed the history of US involvement in the conflict and explained the steps he had taken to end the war. He asked his audience of eighty million Americans to put aside discussions of the rightness or wrongness of American involvement in Vietnam and instead work together to find an answer to the “question facing us today[, which] is now that we are in the war, what is the best way to end it?”Footnote 55 Throughout the speech, the President framed the choice in Vietnam as between a rapid withdrawal without “regard to the effects of that action” and a “just peace” via negotiations and Vietnamization. By presenting the options as such a stark either-or proposition, Nixon attempted to obscure the fact that his Vietnamization policy was essentially a slow, irregular withdrawal and therefore not a dramatically different solution to the one proposed by the war's opponents. In doing so, their goal was to “seize the day and break the back of the sell-out movement.”Footnote 56
After reviewing US involvement in Vietnam and his own plans for achieving peace with honor, Nixon acknowledged that “[h]onest and patriotic Americans have reached different conclusions as to how peace should be achieved,” but this conciliatory tone soon hardened, and Nixon ended his speech with a more divisive appeal:
I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny these days. But I feel it is appropriate to do so on this occasion … And so tonight – to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans – I ask for your support … [F]or the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris. Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.Footnote 57
This invocation of a “great silent majority” not only gave the speech its popular title, but would give shape to an amorphous group of citizens who, whatever their doubts about the Vietnam War, were not willing to take to the streets in open opposition to the government. Nixon knew well that this group of Silent Americans existed – he spoke of a “Silent Center” in the 1968 campaign and his own staff had identified “Middle America” as a crucial constituency early in 1969 – and he appealed to them confident that his staff's planning would result in a visible embrace of his position.Footnote 58 Throughout his speech, the President blamed North Vietnamese intransigence for undermining the peace process and emphasized American innocence, good intentions, and patriotism in his request that the nation unite around his policies. Although Nixon did not explicitly claim that Vietnam was another “war to end all wars,” the parallel was clear to an audience used to viewing international relations through the lens of the Cold War. Effectively, the speech presented the Vietnam War as an extension of American ideals, one in a long line of military conflicts fought to protect and promote freedom around the world. Wrapping himself in the flag, Nixon's speech made clear his expectation that patriotic citizens would support him – and, by extension, the US in Vietnam – while implicitly questioning the patriotism of those who continued to criticize his policies. The President's rhetoric, therefore, sought to transform Vietnam from a controversial domestic issue into, if not a national crusade, at least a policy people could support.
And support it they did. A Gallup telephone poll conducted immediately after the speech reported that seventy-seven percent of respondents approved of Nixon's Vietnam policies, compared to fifty-eight shortly before the speech.Footnote 59 Furthermore, of the seventy percent of respondents who heard the speech, only six percent were critical of the President's position when contacted by pollsters the night of 3 November.Footnote 60 This response strengthened administration efforts to secure public endorsements starting with what Haldeman later described as “a long night of phone calls.”Footnote 61 Ostensibly requesting individual assessments of the President's performance, these calls were also a way to nudge prominent and influential individuals to embrace – and ideally promote – the President's position as publicly as possible. Additionally, staffers such as Haldeman and his assistant Butterfield, as well as Dent, Klein, and Magruder from the Office of Communications, and Harlow and Nofziger from the Office of Congressional Relations, started work on the pre-planned activities outlined above. And as aides solicited outside assistance, Nixon adherents in Washington, DC and across the country spoke out. This combination of genuine, grassroots enthusiasm and a carefully planned post-speech response coordinated by the White House blurred the line between grassroots and astroturf responses to the point where it was all but impossible to tell where one stopped and the other began. Controllable, reliable support such as that described in White House planning for the speech is very different from the dynamic, changeable support of disparate groups rallying around a popular idea. The White House sought to harness that energy, and redirect it into more contained forms. Although Nixon and his aides were confident that the speech would mobilize supporters, they still refused to fully trust those supporters, demonstrating that they sought more than simple support. This mistrust of organic support campaigns extended to established political allies, up to and including the President's Congressional supporters.
For the most part, there was little novelty in the White House approach following the speech as Presidents had long looked to Congress to endorse their positions. At the same time, the White House sought an unprecedented degree of control over Congress – and, indeed, with all outside sympathizers. As discussed, early White House planning for the 3 November speech tasked Lyn Nofziger with drafting a letter to be signed by a group of Democrats and Republicans. Having laid the foundations before the President's speech, Nofziger was still surprised to find that Nixon's Congressional allies took the initiative proposing almost identical resolutions in both the House and the Senate shortly after Nixon's speech.Footnote 62 Recognizing that a truly self-directed initiative would have more credibility than one organized by the White House – no matter how secretly – Nofziger informed Magruder (who in turn informed Haldeman) that the resolutions effectively made the earlier plan “moot.”Footnote 63 Haldeman, however, disagreed and scrawled his critique in the margin of the memo: “We should have been on top of this and moved first. The letter would have been more effective, faster.”Footnote 64 His response indicates that the priority for Haldeman was an immediate, public endorsement rather than any change in the substantive views of Senators or Representatives.
Although perhaps frustrated with the results of White House planning in Congress, Haldeman was delighted with the response to the speech as measured by the telegrams, letters, and phone calls that flooded into the White House. Even though administration officials had spent the past weeks working to ensure just this result, Nixon recalled that “it was one thing to make a rhetorical appeal to the Silent Majority – it was another to actually hear from them.”Footnote 65 All told, the White House received 126,555 letters and telegrams, while other administration offices received an additional 55,945 pieces of mail in favor of the President's position over the following month.Footnote 66 Subsequent analysis of the mail sent to the White House in the days following Nixon's speech by political scientist Brendan Rottinghaus shows a significant increase over the previous week, with the number of favorable telegrams – more expensive to send than letters – alone going from 193 before the speech to 1,919 the following week.Footnote 67
White House officials intended to use this total – as well as the powerful visual image of the Oval Office full of piles and bags of letters and telegrams – to influence public perceptions of domestic attitudes toward the President and his Vietnam policies. Their success in turn enabled them, as Rottinghaus notes, to “mischaracterize certain segments of the American public” and their views on US involvement in the Vietnam War.Footnote 68 To this end, Butterfield worked with members of the Tell It to Hanoi Committee, the Citizens Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam, veterans’ organizations, local business groups, and individual supporters with impressive results. The White House mailroom was overwhelmed in the days and weeks following the President's speech with letters, telegrams, and petitions encouraging the President to “Keep believing in us – ‘The Silent Americans’ – and we will continue to believe in you.”Footnote 69 Others linked the President's position with the ideals of “honor and duty and sacrifice … deeply ingrained in the heritage of America which they sustain.”Footnote 70 Similarly, Vivian Uhlig invoked the memory of her dead son and encouraged Nixon to stay the course in Vietnam because “if we just give up now, the faith in our government will really suffer a shattering blow.”Footnote 71 Agreement between the administration and the Silent Majority that the success of the opposition would result in national decline and humiliation further isolated the antiwar movement.
Staffers tasked with replying to these letters and telegrams reinforced the administration goals for the speech by repeating the core themes agreed upon in the pre-speech planning. As a result, the White House message was clear: “Thank God there are good people like you who believe what this country stands for and who believe in the President … You have a right to speak up. These kids who come to Washington don't.”Footnote 72 This moment of frankness encapsulates the White House approach to public opinion – essentially that the rights and privileges of citizenship were not distributed equally. Instead, White House officials linked full citizenship with an embrace of a particular kind of patriotism – one which deferred to the President, celebrated an idealized vision of the United States, and therefore explicitly excluded the antiwar movement.
Further strengthening the White House vision of citizenship and patriotism, broad participation in pro-Nixon, pro-Vietnam parades and demonstrations on Veterans’ Day and during the Mobilization protests offered further evidence of the resonance of the Silent Majority. Growing out of both White House planning and grassroots organizing, these events gave the Silent Majority a chance to speak – and be heard. Aides were particularly anxious to frame the turnout at these patriotic events as an explicit endorsement of Nixon and his policies – even though, as Sandra Scanlon has shown, participation stemmed from a range of motivations not always including agreement with the President.Footnote 73 Even so, aides used news coverage of National Unity Week, Veterans’ Day, and the anti-Mobilization protests to prove the efficacy of their planning – even if only to each other. Forwarding a particularly glowing late November Newsweek article to Haldeman, Butterfield estimated that between five and six million people participated in the organized Veterans’ Day rallies alone.
Beyond the numbers, though, the article's coverage demonstrated the success of patriotism promotion campaigns both before and after the 3 November address. Not only were there colorful reports of patriotic events honoring the casualties of Vietnam and other wars, but many explicitly endorsed Nixon and “the ultimate rightness of the nation's course.”Footnote 74 For most, there was no room for compromise or a loyal opposition: “AMERICA, read the ubiquitous signs, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.”Footnote 75 Although many of the events had been planned well in advance of Nixon's speech, Newsweek explicitly linked these activities with the speech and highlighted the fact that for many participants, the popularity of the Silent Majority label proved that so-called “traditional values” remained central to national identity. This interpretation was strengthened by participant claims that the pro-war demonstrations proved that “the silent majority has become very vocal indeed” – and argued, media portrayals to the contrary, “there are more of us patriotic Americans than those pro-Hanoicrats.”Footnote 76 Even while acknowledging organizing efforts by the Department of Defense and Veterans Administration, particularly the distribution of 100,000 “Veterans Day kits,” the author was careful to point out that many participants “turned out without any nudge from official Washington.”Footnote 77 This broad involvement effectively demonstrated both the resonance of these ideas and the administration's success in obscuring its role in organizing and promoting National Unity Week.
The undeniable popularity of the Silent Majority idea and Nixon's patriotic appeals blurs the line between true grassroots campaigns – such as the initial organizing drives of the Committee for a Week of National Unity and the National Committee for Responsible Patriotism – and the manufactured, astroturf support engendered by White House planning and surrogates. It is impossible to say with absolute certainty where one ends and the other begins, but White House records demonstrate a clear – albeit sometimes incoherent – operation to control outside allies. Butterfield's often fruitless attempts to track the letters generated by the planned petition campaigns offer an interesting perspective on both White House planning and the uneven cooperation from outside supporters. Unlike the always-obliging CCPS, a newer ally, Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered in the month following the speech. Initial White House plans had called for Perot to sponsor a series of advertisements following the speech, but Butterfield struggled to keep him on-message despite countless “not so gentle” reminders of the original agreements and promises.Footnote 78 The resulting tension between promises, plans, and reality consistently frustrated White House officials even as they aggressively promoted the idea of a “Silent Majority” enthusiastically supporting the President's policies. Although grassroots support did not always live up to White House hopes, the letters, telegrams, statements, and demonstrations were a powerful weapon in the battle for public opinion.
THE SILENT MAJORITY
Nixon knew the importance of public opinion, had known it since long before his arrival in the Oval Office. Furthermore, he knew the potential for a single speech to rally supporters and public sympathy – powerfully demonstrated by the success of his 1952 “Checkers Speech” both in explaining his finances and in convincing Dwight David Eisenhower to keep him as his running mate. The President therefore doubtless expected his 3 November speech to shift the domestic debate. Even so, the popular response, a combination of White House planning and genuine sentiment, far exceeded White House expectations. Contrary to Haldeman's late October expectation that the speech “would under normal circumstances be very effective, and probably buy us another couple of months,”Footnote 79 it instead gave individuals frustrated by inaction and disgusted by protest a way to articulate their views. By emphasizing support for the President rather than an explicit endorsement of the Vietnam War itself, aides significantly expanded potential participation, as many who felt that the President's policies were either too hard or too soft ultimately preferred Nixon when the alternative was the antiwar movement.
Such individuals were the primary audience for both the speech and most of the post-speech outreach and mobilization projects. Chief of Staff Haldeman would later admit to historian Tom Wells, “The silent majority thing, we really did crank up … We aided and abetted that activity, we encouraged it, and we had people volunteering to develop it.”Footnote 80 These White House projects effectively built what Haldeman described as a “countercampaign to the peace march stuff … to give people who did believe in us a way of overtly rallying to the cause.”Footnote 81 He later explained the significant administration role in creating this response by pointing out that most of them “weren't … activists, so you needed to help them along.”Footnote 82 Framing astroturf organizing as simply “helping” supporters along indicates the degree to which the White House officials blurred the lines between genuine and programmed support in both their actions and the way they viewed their supporters. For Haldeman and others, there was little difference between the two, with the end result of visible displays of support being the only true measure of success. By separating support from policy positions, White House planning ensured maximum embrace of the President's views, and as a result the “Silent Majority” phrase gave Nixon partisans a useful way to identify themselves without explicitly endorsing the President's Vietnam policies.
Yet, even as Nixon prepared to ask the “great silent majority of [his] fellow Americans” to support US involvement in Vietnam and as aides created detailed game plans for securing an enthusiastic response, no one in the Nixon White House expected that the phrase “Silent Majority” would form the basis of the movement they hoped to inspire. Safire later recalled that when questioned about the phrase, the President “shrugged – if he had thought it would be picked up, he said, he would have capitalized it in the speech text.”Footnote 83 In fact, initial plans chose Safire's “The President's Crusade for Peace” as the official theme for the coordinated response campaign, with early follow-up memoranda emphasizing this phrase through 6 November.Footnote 84 However, by late November Haldeman had informed the staff that all public-opinion programs, “As a general rule … should be tied to the ‘Silent Majority’ over and over.”Footnote 85 In so doing, White House officials hoped to use the popular resonance of the Silent Majority idea to unite disparate groups and individuals while transforming debates over US policy in Vietnam into questions of patriotism and loyalty to the President.
White House officials therefore promoted selected letters and telegrams – such as Uhlig's – invoking the themes of patriotism, national pride, and international obligation as a way of encouraging those with similar views to claim membership in the Silent Majority as well. Framing dissent as unpatriotic and un-American, Nixon and his staff cultivated a strain of American nationalism which had not only enabled the excesses of McCarthyism, but also contributed to the rise of the nativist Know Nothing Party in the nineteenth century, as well as less formal attempts to use patriotism and citizenship to isolate perceived threats. Having given the antiwar movement's opponents “something to be for,” administration aides hoped the idea of belonging to the Silent Majority would encourage increased activity on behalf of the President's Vietnam policies.Footnote 86 As his supporters embraced this idea and used their self-proclaimed membership in the Silent Majority as a reason to stop being silent, Nixon could claim that he, not his critics, spoke for the majority of Americans.
Building on this success, Nixon told Haldeman, “we have a great thing going for us in the ‘Silent Majority’ … be sure we take all possible steps to capitalize on this.”Footnote 87 In response, Butterfield reported that ”publicizing the phrase nationwide” and promoting identification with the idea of the “Silent Majority” were already a top priority.Footnote 88 As the initial influx of letters and telegrams demonstrated its popularity and his staff anticipated a “second barrage of wires and letters to the President,” Nixon requested a “battle plan on … promoting the ‘Silent Majority.’”Footnote 89 Crucially, he was not only thinking in terms of maintaining the response to his 3 November speech, but he particularly wanted a “long range plan for maintaining the momentum on what has become obviously the byword for the Administration at this point in time.”Footnote 90 Specifically, Nixon hoped to ensure that popular identification with the Silent Majority was interpreted as an endorsement of himself and his policies.
Haldeman therefore frequently reminded the staff of the President's request that administration “activity should be tied to the ‘Silent Majority’ over and over … always.”Footnote 91 Although Nixon would later claim that responses to the speech were a result of having “hit a responsive chord in the country,”Footnote 92 it is clear that the White House played a far greater role in influencing public opinion than is currently understood. These efforts ensured that the speech, and the apparent success of White House planning, marked an important turning point in the administration's approach to public relations. In the short term, the speech rallied the President's supporters and enabled Nixon to claim that the change in popular attitudes demonstrated to the North Vietnamese that they “could no longer count on dissent in America to give them the victory they could not win on the battlefield.”Footnote 93 But its long-term implications are far more significant: the speech gave the administration a way to organize and mobilize its outside allies into a highly visible alternative to the antiwar movement. Much of this success was due to aides’ diligent work creating a shared identity which would ensure the survival and growth of the Silent Majority.Footnote 94
Even so, and despite the resonance of the Silent Majority idea within the American electorate, active and visible support waned over time. In part, this decline was a natural consequence of Nixon's speech having inspired many citizens to speak out for the first time. While their opinions did not change in the months following the speech, most felt that their letter to the President or participation in National Unity Week had been a sufficient demonstration of their views. Without the constant reminder of an opposing view created by the Moratorium and Mobilization protests, the urgent need to publicize their own views faded. In many ways, the administration fell victim to its own success, as the growing popularity of Vietnamization contributed to popular views that the war was winding down, making individuals on both sides of the debate less inclined to speak out.Footnote 95 Mail tallies through mid-February 1970 led Nixon to note, “it seems that our silent majority group has lost its steam,” encouraging his staff to transition from a somewhat haphazard approach to public relations to a more structured and proactive one.Footnote 96
Key to any attempt to reclaim the initiative would be the systematic categorizing and tracking of pro-Nixon groups and individuals. By 1972, Colson successfully identified – or created – pro-Nixon groups of almost every stripe, including groups targeting over thirty distinct ethnic groups, but he never quite succeeded in quantifying the Silent Majority in the same way.Footnote 97 Anticipating its electoral significance, the first White House request to track its supporters came from the conservative speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan in the midst of National Unity Week.Footnote 98 Haldeman reassured him that Perot had promised to put the names “on tape” so the White House would soon benefit from the computer technology behind Perot's fortune.Footnote 99 Unfortunately, as with many of Perot's promises, the tapes never appeared, leaving Haldeman to request that Colson initiate a similar study of the 3 November letters in conjunction with a study of those favorable letters and telegrams sent to the White House after Nixon's April 1970 announcement of US and South Vietnamese incursions into Cambodia.Footnote 100 Haldeman further requested “a plan for how to mobilize the Silent Majority” in both the 1970 mid-term elections and the 1972 presidential campaign.
Ultimately, although aides did not doubt the existence of the Silent Majority, the reluctant conclusion was that there was “no practical way” to analyze or quantify it.Footnote 101 Even so, with Time magazine having named the Middle Americans its Man and Woman of the Year, the pro-Nixon, anti-antiwar constituency seemed to have come into its own.Footnote 102 Late 1969 success in translating identification with the Silent Majority into support for Nixon's Vietnam policies led White House officials to prioritize “expanding and strengthening our identification with the Silent Majority”Footnote 103 – as did the popularity of Vice President Spiro Agnew's attacks on the media, which, as a Wall Street Journal editorial observed, “‘supplied a focus for the inevitable reaction’ of the ordinary American who is regularly dismissed with utter contempt by the self-styled ‘thinking people.’”Footnote 104 Through these efforts, White House officials took advantage of domestic frustrations with both the antiwar movement and social change and upheaval.
CONCLUSION: BEYOND THE SILENT MAJORITY
Nixon and his aides gave themselves much of the credit for the outpouring of support following the 3 November speech, but White House organizing only partially explains the rise of the Silent Majority. With his speech, the President sought to mobilize his supporters to take to the streets and speak out in support of his policies – and in opposition to the antiwar movement. He succeeded because he was able to frame or position Vietnam as part of a larger narrative of US victories and commitments abroad – essentially, to link the quest for credibility with larger ideals of US national identity. The White House planning analyzed here was crucial in ensuring that the shape and form of the response best served the President's political goals, but would not have achieved such a response without the deep grassroots embrace of the President's words. Many of those listening to Nixon's words on 3 November 1969 were almost as frustrated with both the stalemate in Vietnam and the upheavals at home as they were with their apparent inability to do anything about the situation. Nixon's speech gave them a sense of purpose and a way to redirect their frustrations into something useful and, as most of the self-identified members of the Silent Majority were not activists themselves, their newly found political energy and voice easily followed the channels dug by Nixon's staff before the speech. In this way, aides preemptively shaped the popular response to the speech, but their overwhelming success led them to quickly forget the important role of inchoate political energy and sentiments. That combination of popular desire, White House planning, and presidential rhetoric would not be repeated – despite countless administration attempts – until the 1973 announcement of Nixon's long-promised “peace with honor.” In between, Nixon and his staff frequently sought to influence public opinion to suit political goals without consideration of the realities of grassroots sentiments.
Without that link between White House plans and popular attitudes, administration efforts rarely lived up to expectations, but aides repeatedly misjudged the reasons for their public-relations failures. The Silent Majority speech marked a turning point in White House public-opinion campaigns, yes, but it was an organizational and political turning point and not a change in how administration officials viewed these events. Essentially aides continued to see speeches and other public-relations events as purely political tools. And thus, rather than seek to harness and direct existing sentiments – as they managed to do so brilliantly in 1969 – they instead sought to use these projects to change or shape public opinion itself. While the core membership of the Silent Majority, as well as conservative activists, loyal Republicans, and others, often responded enthusiastically to these projects, on-demand support from the broader population was less reliable. And their inability to change course reflected both their priorities – visible support rather than changed attitudes – and their conviction that ideas alone would not change public opinion. And as Nixon more aggressively sought to protect and promote national and presidential credibility, his efforts drifted further and further from the concerns of the broader population.
At the same time, the Silent Majority was – and still is – a powerful symbol in domestic political debates. Giving voice to those convinced that they have been isolated and marginalized will always be an effective way to rally support, but it brings with it the very real risk of significant national divisions. Nixon's coded appeals – to the Silent Majority as much as for “law and order” – reflected his determination to use such division for his own advantage. He could have used the speech in November 1969 to attempt to bring the nation together, but instead chose to make an emotional appeal to a “great Silent Majority,” effectively dividing the population into patriotic citizens who supported the President and radical revolutionaries seeking to destroy the foundations of society. That he succeeded owes as much to the belief amongst his target audience that they had been silenced by an un-American antiwar movement as to exhaustive White House planning in the days and weeks surrounding the speech, and reminds us that astroturf is most convincing when surrounded by the real thing.
