Richard Nixon angrily denounced therapists both in public and in private. In 1966, he said to a writer: “People go through that psychological bit nowadays. . . . That sort of juvenile self-analysis is something I’ve never done.” In 1970, he told his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Elliott Richardson, that psychologists were “quacks” who “live off the rich.” When Richardson unwisely suggested to his boss that group therapy for poor people should be considered, Nixon shot back that ministers and priests used to perform that function. Nixon was also irritated by the many “psychohistories” of his presidency, calling them “pure baloney.” Part of this hostility may have been a subterfuge or been due to his own experience; Nixon himself had been in therapy with Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, a prominent psychiatrist and author, since 1953.Footnote ¹

But for all his denouncements, Richard Nixon probably contributed more than any other political leader to establishing a new therapeutic relationship between the White House and otherwise alienated groups and individuals. This relationship resembled in some ways the psychotherapeutic techniques of Carl Rogers called, variously, nondirected, client-centered, and Rogerian therapy. The necessity of the psychotherapeutic relationship occurs when the client is alienated from society; the purpose is reintegration. The therapist attempts to build a relationship with the client on the basis that the client is permitted to freely express feelings and the practitioner responds with a calculated empathy, recognizing the patient’s distress, and offering acceptance. Using three examples of drug policy, affirmative action, and Nixon’s dealings with what he called the “Silent Majority,” this article will demonstrate that Nixon employed a similar technique for dealing with groups that had become dangerously alienated from American society as an alternative to traditional methods of political leadership.Footnote ²

Therapy and therapeutic intervention as a means of social control was not new, at least in relation to individuals, when Nixon took office. Pioneered early in the century, therapy as a technique for so-called psychological maladjustments not only swept the nation, but therapeutic techniques and language had progressively infected American culture after World War II. Nor was it new in relation to the political culture, as Ellen Herman has shown. Psychological reassurance has been part of political discourse for many years; one has only to think of Franklin Roosevelt’s admonition that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.” Nor is it new to observe that therapeutic relationships have in some ways replaced political relationships. In the 1970s, Christopher Lasch noted that the therapeutic outlook threatened to displace politics. More recently, James L. Nolan wondered “whether the dalliance between the American political order and the therapeutic cultural ethos is a phenomenon of more widespread proportions.” British sociologist Frank Furedi observed: “The therapeutic ethos represents not so much an alternative to religion as to the political ideologies that reflected, questioned specific social, moral, political and economic institutional interests and commitments in modern times.” But this article is the first to examine the creation of therapeutic relationships to replace political relationships by Richard M. Nixon.Footnote ³

Why Nixon? Nixon’s specific contribution to this process was to establish direct relationships between the federal government and citizens, circumventing the institutions upon which his predecessors had relied in order to deal with the legitimacy crisis. Before the late 1960s, Americans had related to the federal government through institutions and organizations established largely in the New Deal and postwar periods. When Americans wished to communicate to the White House, they did so through their local party organizations, unions, churches, businesses, clubhouses, parent-teacher associations, and other organizations like the Elks or Kinsmen. Through these institutions, Americans related to one another and to the federal government. Likewise, politicians addressed individual Americans through these organizations. But before Nixon was elected, a legitimacy crisis ensued, undermining not just the authority of the federal government but also these many organizations and institutions. Whereas Lyndon Johnson was unwilling to jettison the existing institutions, Nixon responded to frustration and alienation among Americans, acknowledging the legitimacy of their complaints. By doing so, he reintegrated them on the basis of their specific complaint. In this way, Nixon became, despite being, as Gary Wills observed, an inherently “postwar man,” the first “postmaterial” president.Footnote ⁴

THE CRISIS

First, it is necessary to delineate the crisis that Nixon faced upon entering office. A number of observations from different perspectives drawn in the early 1970s noted the “postmaterialist” nature of societies throughout the Western world. In an influential article, political scientist Ronald Inglehart, building on psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” pyramid, noted that in times of less scarcity, a new set of values “relating to need for belonging and to aesthetic and intellectual needs,” rather than economic needs, would predominate. Whereas Inglehart sought to track the likely political implications for such changes, similar ideas had occurred to many observers from 1957, when economist John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society, onward. Economist Herbert Daly discussed what he called the “stationary state” (and what has been referred to more recently as the “zero-sum” state) in 1969: “The stationary state would make fewer demands on our environmental resources, but much greater demands on our moral resources.” In a nation that since World War II had relied on economic growth to promote social cohesion and even a sense of identity, these changes had important effects on governance and policy.Footnote ⁵

It was not so much actual scarcity as imagined scarcity that characterized the crisis. More subtle and intangible than the riots and rebellion that characterized the Johnson era, the crisis of the early 1970s was a crisis from within caused by the removal of the raison d’être for governance in the United States—the provision of boundless opportunity to all Americans. It affected both the formal structure of the state and the various institutions—political parties, business, unions, educational institutions, and the like—through which Americans related to government, to others, and to themselves. The problem that made renegotiating of the relationship between citizen and state necessary was best characterized by political theorist Jürgen Habermas as a legitimation crisis.Footnote ⁶

The term “legitimacy”—virtually unknown before 1950—became a widely discussed subject in the late 1960s. Seymour Martin Lipset provided an early rehearsal of the discussion in a work first published in 1959: “The stability of any given democracy depends not only on economic development but also upon the effectiveness and the legitimacy of its political system. . . . Legitimacy involves the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society.”Footnote ⁷ The true crisis of legitimacy, however, occurred from the mid-1960s, when civic participation began a period of decline that has not yet abated. As the Harris poll chart below shows, the most vertiginous decline in faith in institutions came during the last years of the 1960s.

Proportion of Americans Expressing a “Great Deal of Confidence” in Leadership Institutions (percent)

Note:

Chart reproduced from Wolfe, The Limits of Legitimacy, 310.

As Gunnar Myrdal noted, the authority of these institutions operated as a pyramid; the federal government sat at the apex, the institutions were in the middle, and citizens were at the bottom: “When the man on the street acts through his orderly collective bodies, he acts more as an American, as a Christian and as a humanitarian than if he were acting independently.”Footnote ⁸ Thus a crisis of authority among institutions ultimately threatened the federal government, which had depended on the institutions to mediate its relationship with citizens. The classic political model was the New Deal arrangement, whereby citizens asserted their strength through ethnic or union or clubhouse organizations and the federal government responded with patronage.

The most direct alienation was experienced in relation to African Americans. Black Americans in the 1960s looked to the civil rights movement to voice their concerns and Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders’ influence in the Johnson White House in particular is well known. But even before most of the rioting, many understood that alienation was a growing problem. A panel dealing with democracy in Lyndon Johnson’s ill-fated 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights noted with concern that “the old basis for such (political) organization—the ward clubhouse and the organization of job-holders—is decaying or eliminated” and called for a discussion on the psychological dimensions of citizenship. Another panel at the same conference, revealing existing informal mechanisms for relationships with government, announced: “The concentration of Negroes in overcrowded areas decreases their political representation in city councils. This, in turn, reduces patronage posts and the exclusion from a fair share of the ‘spoils system’ discourages participation in ward organization.” The same report went on to suggest that besides the danger of riot was the danger that nonparticipation of blacks in the electoral process would “deal a serious blow to effective government in the urban North.”Footnote ⁹

The Kerner Commission, or the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, set up by Lyndon Johnson to investigate the causes of rioting in the 1960s, spent much time, after it had surveyed the wreckage in the inner cities, musing over the less tangible problems affecting inner cities. A letter from David Ginsburg, the executive director of the commission, stated at the outset that “the basic theme of our work is that we must recognize and deal with the fact of deep political alienation in the ghetto.” The concern was that none of the institutions through which most Americans related to their government appeared to work—or even to exist—for black Americans. The authority of the police in ghetto areas hardly existed. Ginsburg continued: “What kinds of instruments (other than the police) are available for easing community tensions? For example, we are looking preliminarily at the role of Human Relations Commissions, the possibility of establishing new grievance machinery (perhaps modeled after labor mediation services); and the ombudsman idea.” The experimental approach of the Nixon administration was foreshadowed by officials close to Johnson. In order to maintain some sort of control over ghetto areas, the commission toyed with the fairly ludicrous idea of community policing roles for street gangs such as the “White Hats” in Tampa, Florida, the “Rebels with a Cause” in Washington, D.C., and the “Blackstone Rangers” in Chicago. Such was the desperation to maintain some sort of presence in ghetto areas that the Community Action Project actually hired the Blackstone Rangers to help police some areas of Chicago in 1968.Footnote ¹⁰

Nixon comprehended the breakup of the New Deal coalition and used the divisions to his own advantage in 1968. As he took office, however, the disaffection that he had helped to sow showed no signs of abating. By the end of the decade, pundits began noting that other groups—some ostensibly as the result of what they felt was undue attention to the problems of African Americans—were also alienated. Journalist Pete Hamill penned an article entitled “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” which was published in New York Magazine on April 14, 1969.Footnote ¹¹

Nixon sought to distance the White House from the existing government agencies, which, though ostensibly taking orders from the president, showed signs of obstreperous independence. He expressed his frustration with the bureaucracy when he said of the army, somewhat ruefully: “Only place in the govt where they say ‘yes sir’—Everyone else says: “yes, but—”Footnote ¹² In the summer of 1971, Nixon complained: “We’ve checked and found that 96 percent of the bureaucracy are against us; they’re bastards who are here to screw us.”Footnote ¹³ Nixon also sought to circumvent Congress, especially after it failed to approve both his appointees to the Supreme Court. As Melvin Small comments, “Nixon faced an iron triangle of bureaucrats, lobbyists, and members of Congress who together could either alter or sabotage programs. . . . Of most concern was the permanent bureaucracy, many of whom were liberals or Democrats.”Footnote ¹⁴

NIXON’S ANTI-DRUGS CRUSADE

Despite a lack of any electoral prospects in the ghettoes, they had to be governed; as Nixon often noted, he was the president of all Americans. The question was how to extend government influence in the ghettoes, how to establish common areas of concern that might reestablish the authority of government. The existing structure seemed to be failing; Nixon worried about the rise of the Black Panther Party—which J. Edgar Hoover warned him was the number-one threat to the nation’s security—which was beginning to set up an infrastructure in the ghetto.Footnote ¹⁵ Some point of contact or commonality had to be set up.

Nixon’s initial interest in drugs as an issue seemed to be in its ability to galvanize Americans into an anti-drugs crusade; not until 1971 did the drugs issue evolve into a therapeutic point of contact within the ghettoes. Upon taking office, Nixon attacked the “scourge” of drugs. While a real problem for many families and individuals, particularly in poor areas, Nixon clearly hyped the problem. Edward J. Epstein noted the way the administration calculated the total number of heroin addicts, rivaling the infamous message of crime figures. Figures released showed an alarming rise in the number of heroin addicts, from 68,000 in 1969 to 315,000 in 1970 to 559,000 in 1971. Nixon declared somewhat dramatically in March 1970 that “the scourge of Narcotics has swept the younger generation like an epidemic.”Footnote ¹⁶

However, this “rise” came about because the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs decided to reinterpret the 1969 data, which were collated by a compilation of reports by local police departments. Instead of simply adding together all the reported addicts, the bureau estimated those missed by local police departments by first quadrupling, then octupling, the number of known addicts. As Epstein noted: “Evidence emerged that by 1971 there was actually a reduction in addicts.” Dan Baum concluded that drugs were such a tiny health problem as to be “statistically insignificant,” pointing out that more people choked to death on food or died falling down the stairs in the United States each year than succumbed to illegal drugs.Footnote ¹⁷

Why was there this manufactured “epidemic”? Katherine Beckett identifies the motive behind Nixon’s declared “War on Drugs” as the need to fulfill the anticrime agenda. The federal government had little power to tackle crime except in a few areas, of which narcotics control was one. The war on drugs was thus “a last-ditch attempt to reduce the crime rates to which the administration itself had drawn so much attention.”Footnote ¹⁸

Nixon did, however, express a genuine horror at the destructive capacity of drugs. Some of his notations in the voluminous news reports sent to him each day indicate the issues that moved the him. In December 1969, Nixon was obviously affected by the story of the death of twelve-year-old Walter by heroin use. Nixon scrawled “Moynihan—note” and later “terrible.”Footnote ¹⁹ Nixon’s drug “czar,” Jerome H. Jaffe, remembered about his boss: “It’s clear that he had very strong feelings about it. He felt that drug use really eroded the fabric of society. It wasn’t just that this policy was a way to reduce crime. . . . I felt that it wasn’t just for political purposes that he wanted to do this.”Footnote ²⁰

If the major concern was to lower crime rates, a therapeutic approach was at least an imaginative method. Rather than a straightforward, Reaganite “just say no” or a simple law-and-order crackdown, Nixon increased expenditures most of all in prevention. A critic of Reagan’s war on drugs, Leif Rosenberger, noted: “In all the Nixon administration devoted $3bn to anti-drug activities, and most of it was finally being spent more wisely on prevention and treatment.”Footnote ²¹ Nixon reorganized the federal anti-drugs effort to emphasize treatment as an alternative to prison, hardly the actions of someone solely concerned with his law-and-order image. The period from 1971 to 1975 was, as Karl J. Besteman has noted, “the most fruitful and productive in federal history” in establishing and expanding drug-treatment services. Other books go even further in praising the Nixon administration’s efforts.Footnote ²²

Nixon initially persisted in his attempts to involve the public in an all-out assault on drugs. On March 11, 1970, he announced an expanded federal program to combat drug abuse. He created a National Clearinghouse for Drug Abuse Information and Education, “giving the public one central office to contact.” Nixon said that he hoped for “close cooperation” with “concerned citizen groups” and planned a campaign involving a television series. He also met with the heads of the major media corporations, calling on them to use drug themes in their existing television series. On October 27, 1970, Nixon signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Prevention and Control Act of 1970. In his accompanying statement, he urged that “the message needs to get through that this nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among young people.”Footnote ²³ Some citizens groups did come on board. The Kiwanis Clubs began “Operation Drug Alert” after Nixon’s pronouncement, but, as Nixon aide Charles Colson observed, groups like the Kiwanis Clubs were “already on our side.”Footnote ²⁴

In 1971, however, Nixon’s policy switched direction. Bringing the issue into the public eye, Nixon exposed divisions among practitioners on how best to treat the problem. Even after the 1966 Narcotics Addict Rehabilitation Act, federal agencies were either hostile or at least skeptical about providing methadone for addicts and treatment as an alternative to prison. Advocates for psychosocial programs within the treatment community derided methadone treatment as a “magic bullet” that ignored underlying problems such as unemployment and housing. Vocal groups of recovering heroin addicts called it irrational and a threat to the therapeutic community movement. Some minority activists described it as a government effort to control the behavior of young black men. Regarding domestic policy, Nixon had told his aides upon taking office that “just ‘cause it’s new doesn’t mean it’s right—but if it’s old, it’s wrong.” Having had some time to consider the issue, the president gave this new policy direction on drugs a green light.Footnote ²⁵

Perhaps influencing Nixon’s policy decision may have been the possibility of extending influence within the ghettoes. Whereas Nixon’s war on drugs had little relevance for most suburban areas, his efforts proved more fruitful in the ghettoes. Indeed, in 1971 the administration began to concentrate on the ghettoes, emphasizing treatment alongside the more traditional law-enforcement techniques. Members of alienated communities, cynical about the very purpose of government, might be made to see the courts and other officials as positive forces within their communities. An awareness about the destructive nature of drugs within African American communities crept into radical discourse in the early 1970s. Clayton Riley, the arts editor of Liberation, showed the potential of the issue in a piece printed in the New York Times in January 1971: “While we take time to program the destruction of the ‘pig’ (‘Off him’) and cheer the small inconveniences we construct against whitey’s existence, and even as we walk tall in a new and valid sense of our own beauty, the Mighty Horse gallops through our neighborhoods; heroin arrives as the genuine ruler of our lives.”Footnote ²⁶

The Nixon administration was made aware of the various informal groups formed to fight drugs. At a time when the old institutions were crumbling, the administration paid attention when new groups seemed to be forming spontaneously. The National Urban League noted in a letter to the president in 1972 not only that the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party had both run effective anti-drug campaigns in the ghettoes, but: “During the last two years we have witnessed the development of a relatively large number of community based drug fighting groups. . . . Some remain in existence often affiliating themselves with new city and state funded programs brought into the community as a result of their own efforts. Most, however, disappear within a few weeks.”Footnote ²⁷

Spontaneously emerging community groups attracted the attention of many and seemed to be an answer to the alienation. Here were communities reaching out for assistance. Rather than the Nation of Islam or the Black Panther Party, the government, armed with resources, would provide a point of contact, a mutual concern, with ghetto residents. The Congressional Black Caucus, an influential and newsworthy group of black congressmen and women, opposed Nixon on nearly every front. However, in a long and mostly haranguing document, released on April 16, 1971, outlining recommendations on civil rights issues for the administration, drugs became a rare piece of common ground. Six of the recommendations concerned drugs, including the first. “We strongly urge that drug abuse and addiction be declared a major national crisis.” Whereas most of document attacked the administration, labeling, for instance, the Philadelphia Plan a “cruel delusion,” praise was reserved for the administration’s drug policies. A response, compiled by presidential aides, was able to boast that the proposed budget in fiscal 1972 tripled the amount spent in 1969 for drug treatment and rehabilitation centers in urban areas.Footnote ²⁸

In the ensuing “Report to the Nation,” released by the Black Caucus in response to the president’s response on May 24, 1971, the caucus took the credit for stimulating the White House’s interest in the issue of drugs. “We are gratified too that our presentation concerning the drug crisis has stimulated the Administration’s interest as the space accorded this issue in the White House document reflects.” Presidential aide Brad Patterson felt able to report that “the Black Caucus grudgingly had kind comments on the drug responses” and thought “the Administration was making some progress in this area.”Footnote ²⁹

Accordingly, on June 17, Nixon stated that “America’s public enemy number one is drug abuse,” announcing that he was launching a “new all-out offensive” on drugs but, importantly, concentrating on ghetto drug problems rather than middle-class drug use. He asked Congress for $105 million “to be used solely for the treatment and rehabilitation of drug-addicted individuals.” He also established the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP) with overall responsibility for all federal rehabilitation, treatment, education, training, and research plans. Jerome Jaffe was appointed Special Consultant to the President for Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and placed in charge of SAODAP.Footnote ³⁰

In 1972, the Treatment Alternative to Street Crime (TASC) was formed under the auspices of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and SAODAP. The first TASC project opened in Wilmington, Delaware, in August 1972. Some of those arrested for nonviolent offenses and who tested positive for drug addiction were given the option of treatment instead of prison. Successful completion of the treatment usually resulted in dropped charges. By the next year, thirteen projects were initiated in eleven different states. By 1978, the number had risen to seventy-three projects, and by 1982 there were 130 TASC sites in thirty-nine states.Footnote ³¹

As James L. Nolan notes, there is no real evidence that this approach to the reduction of crime is effective. But it does allow the state a new method of social control by concerning itself not only with behavior but with feelings, relationships, and other elements of what was formerly a purely private world. The social workers who had previously employed such techniques had been usurped by the courts and police, who after 1971 had taken on social worker roles. This new, nurturing role for the police and courts afforded a new sense of authority. Control was extended into the private sphere of emotions, family relationships, and private behavior.Footnote ³²

On a more abstract level, Nixon transformed the relationship between federal government and the ghettoes. During the long, hot summers of the 1960s, ghettoes were known as repositories of seething anger and the government was seen as the enemy. By focusing on a pathological problem like drugs, the angry man with the Molotov cocktail in his hand became instead a pathetic figure with a syringe. The government moved from oppressor to therapist-in-chief.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AS THERAPY

How can affirmative action be considered “therapeutic”? After all, it ostensibly deals with tangible things like jobs, college places, and contracts and does not offer counseling per se. However, compared with the demand for “affirmative action” by the civil rights movement, the civil rights efforts of the Johnson administration, and even measures called for by cynics like the Black Panthers, the way the Nixon administration enacted affirmative action can be considered therapeutic on several levels.Footnote ³³ Affirmative action under Nixon became therapeutic when it identified first African Americans and later other groups by the damage that occurred to them rather than as self-conscious masters of their own fate. Validation of that identity was subject to recognition of the authority of the recognizer. But, as political scientist Theodore Lowi noted, the role of the government shifted too when “federal policy became a matter of indemnifying damages rather than righting wrongs.”Footnote ³⁴

It is worth keeping in mind that, as Dean Kotlowski put it, Nixon was truly the “sire” of modern government-enforced affirmative action. Although the courts and bureaucrats in the federal agencies helped to push these policies (sometimes a little too enthusiastically in the eyes of the Nixon White House), it had been Nixon who took a policy dropped by Johnson, dusted it off, and made strenuous efforts to ensure its successful passage through Congress in late 1969. It was also Nixon who revitalized contract compliance machinery and extended affirmative action into educational institutions and local government. Importantly, Nixon offered affirmative action status to those other than African Americans and used the policy as a channel of communication and perhaps even a political asset, despite the fact that he criticized the Democratic Party in the run-up to the 1972 election as the “quota party.” This was something espoused by the more conservative members of the administration. Charles Colson, for instance, who had protested vociferously against the Philadelphia Plan and continuously called for the resignation of Arthur Fletcher,Footnote ³⁵ suggested a “Philadelphia Plan for Hispanic Americans” to the President in 1971, implying that he objected to special treatment for African Americans rather than to special treatment as a principle. Although Nixon acted in parallel both to the internal logic of earlier policies and activism within the courts and federal bureaucracy, his political leadership ensured that affirmative action based more on recognition of victim status than of providing resources became the dominant policy model.Footnote ³⁶

That affirmative action was considered a potentially useful channel of communication to otherwise alienated Americans can be seen in the rapid extension of this policy model. Several times, the issue of whether to include white ethnics within the affirmative action remit was discussed. As early as January 1970, administration officials Harry Fleming and Peter M. Flanigan debated whether those with ethnic backgrounds should be included within the affirmative action remit.Footnote ³⁷ Later, with little or no lobbying by the groups involved, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, issued new guidelines in January 1973 to cover discrimination against persons because of religion or ethnic origin, including “members of various religious and ethnic groups, primarily but not exclusively of Eastern, Middle, and South European ancestry, such as Jews, Catholics, Italians, Greeks, and Slavic groups” in their remit.Footnote ³⁸ Also in 1973, affirmative action was extended to the physically and mentally handicapped. The evidence shows that the issue of the employment of the mentally handicapped, at least, stemmed from existing affirmative action programs.Footnote ³⁹ In 1974, again foreshadowed in Nixon’s program of affirmative action for what were then called Hispanic-Americans, non-native speakers of English were added.Footnote ⁴⁰ Later it was decided that affirmative action would deal only with “unchanging physical characteristics.”Footnote ⁴¹ But the principle whereby groups relate to the federal government through recognition of their oppression had been established.

Affirmative action on jobs was only one of the ways in which Nixon attempted to relate first to ghetto residents and then to the black community in general. The story of affirmative action on contracts tells a similar story. Disappointed with the initiatives by business to integrate African Americans, such as Plans for Progress, Nixon attempted to integrate them directly with “Black Capitalism” and then with the Office for Minority Business Enterprise. While attempting to create self-reliance and launch black business, Nixon created entrepreneurs of a different sort, who would wear a badge of oppression in order to secure a contract.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AS INSTITUTIONAL THERAPY

The therapeutic ethos implicit in affirmative action also reveals itself—albeit, more abstractly—if we imagine not African Americans or even other American identities on the couch but institutions such as employers, business, unions, churches, clubs, political parties, schools, higher-education facilities, and others of the myriad organizations that were meant to defeat racial inequality. In the 1950s and 1960s, the responsibility to expunge American society of racism was taken on by these institutions and instilled within white Americans. But through affirmative action, these institutions were given permission to be institutionally racist, granted the “sick” role, and relieved of their moral responsibility to combat racism in themselves and white society. Instead, affirmative action became like one step on a twelve-step road to recovery of the sickness of their racism. By admitting to the therapist the charge of institutional racism, they allowed the government access into these institutions, via regulation, that would formerly be protected from government interference. Thus, Nixon transformed institutional racism from a political problem to an illness.

The institutions that Gunnar Myrdal identified as the most important instruments to integrate African Americans within American society were, after 1966, increasingly accused of being either not being fully committed to resolving racism or part of the problem itself. Stokely Carmichael, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader who leapt to fame with the cry of “Black Power!” at a demonstration in 1966, and Charles Hamilton, a black political scientist in their 1967 publication, Black Power: “The second type [of racism] is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable. . . . [It] originates in the operation of established and respected forms in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first [overt] type.” This point was echoed in the Kerner Report on the pervasive rioting in inner cites during the 1960s. It noted grimly in an often-quoted passage that “white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Rather than the solution, the real problem of racism, it seemed, was within these institutions.Footnote ⁴²

Affirmative action was a serious step because it admitted that these institutions could not, by themselves, provide blacks with equal access to jobs, contracts, or college places. It implicitly admitted the “sickness” of institutional racism and acknowledged that these institutions were part of the problem, not the solution. Not only that, but affirmative action imposed government controls onto the minutiae of hiring, firing, awarding contracts, and accepting students, a prerogative that had been jealously guarded by business and unions in particular. Until 1969, when Nixon set up the Philadelphia Plan, the first enforced affirmative action program, the government, despite having the machinery in place to do so, preferred to cajole business and unions into voluntarily hiring more African Americans. But when it enforced affirmative action, the government also absolved these institutions of the moral responsibility given them in the postwar period.

Although many business people and trade unions appeared to chafe at the imposition of mandatory affirmative action plans in the early 1970s, they quickly became reliant on government to micromanage their human relations systems. For instance, in 1973, Jersey Central Power and Light decided to lay off two hundred workers, but it had contracts both with a union and with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. In order to clear up the confusion, it asked a federal court to review its list one by one. Both groups remain firm champions of affirmative action today.Footnote ⁴³

This therapeutic quality of affirmative action for those most affected by it has so far been missed. Again, Nixon was at the forefront of government intervention into the innermost chambers of industry, local government, universities, and other institutions—the “consciousness” of these institutions, as it were. Such mundane and prosaic legislation as the Revenue Sharing Act invaded institutional life by being the first piece of legislation to audit using civil rights criteria, forcing recipients of federal aid to prove that they did not discriminate by implementing affirmative action plans and providing detailed information about the number of ethnic minorities in their institutions. When the act was finally signed into law on October 20, 1972, the newly created Office of Revenue Sharing gained power over all aspects of the program being funded through nondiscrimination provisions in the act. For example, if money was used to buy police cars, nondiscrimination provisions of the Revenue Sharing Act then also extended to employment practices, police protection services, treatment in jails, and other functions of the police department. The act provided for auditing, including “possible failure to comply substantially with the civil rights provisions of the law.” Every university with government contracts or that accepted student recipients of government aid must provide a detailed affirmative action plan. But these institutions no longer acted out of any ostensible moral responsibility; instead, they simply complied with the law.Footnote ⁴⁴

Thus, through affirmative action, Nixon offered therapy for institutions, which, like drug users who accept drug treatment in lieu of a prison sentence, accept the charge of institutional racism and agree to take on the “treatment program” set up by the federal government. Although initially some were resistant, these institutions are now willing partners, as the institutional support for the University of Michigan in the recent Gratz v. Bollinger affirmative action case testifies.

WHITE VICTIMS: THE SILENT MAJORITY

We might stretch the therapeutic model further but not to the breaking point by looking at Nixon’s relationship with the “Silent Majority.” Here Nixon provided a calculated empathy and recognition of the distress and alienation of those who had formerly been described as working-class or ethnic Americans but who had, with the demise of the political institutions referred to above, lost their identities. Rather than the approach of liberals, who fearfully pointed to a “white backlash” and shunned what they saw as reaction against the civil rights agenda, Nixon accepted as valid the seething rage of this group, but, unlike George Wallace, who directed it against the civil rights movement and blacks in general, he directed it inward. Telling the white working class that it had been “kicked around” and ignored, he encouraged self-pity and further estrangement. Who better to coach self-pity than Richard Nixon?

The raw material of this group already existed in the 1960s. Specifically, the American working class had been a recognizable entity during World War II and before, holding an honored and important position, as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted in 1970: “Radicals fought over his allegiance, the Democratic Party was happy in his support, one could even see workers portrayed in the movies by men such as Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, [and] Clark Gable.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In the postwar period, though, the concept of the worker was downgraded. Those who had been at the center of Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition found their identity undermined by a combination of factors.

Nixon recognized the importance of the unions, which offered institutional protection and some identity to workers, as an institution, but he attacked them even as he promoted the interests of the Silent Majority, the “hardhats,” and others.Footnote ⁴⁶ He had undermined them with the Philadelphia Plan and by imposing wage-and-price controls in 1971. Again, Nixon circumvented unions and spoke directly to their members, establishing a new identity not as masters of their own destiny but as victims. According to Nixon, they were not victims of the vicissitudes of the economy or of a concerted campaign by the Nixon administration to drive down construction wages, but of the noisy few who got all the attention.

The “forgotten man,” a phrase used by Franklin Roosevelt to refer to members of minorities, had been applied to white union members alienated from their unions in the 1950s, but no one had politically tapped into this alienation before the Goldwater campaign. In one of the few successes of his candidacy, Barry Goldwater attacked “crime” and tolerance for criminals, funneling resentment toward the civil rights movement without actually naming it. In the run-up to the 1968 election, Nixon went a step further and made alienation itself an identity. He experimented with a number of terms, but thematically all were contrasted with activist protestors. In one of his radio speeches in 1968, Nixon called for a new “alignment of ideas,” which included Republicans, “New Liberals,” the “New South,” “Black Militants,” and a fifth element, “a non-voice, if you will.” “That is the silent center, the millions of people in the middle of the American political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Silence of course implied the unwillingness or inability to speak up without Nixon to make it obvious even to themselves what they wanted. Silence also reflected the loss of orientation through which this group might understand its political interests. If they did not know what was bothering them, perhaps Nixon could help them articulate their feelings.

At this stage, Nixon had no idea how significant the formulation would be. In 1970 he reflected that “the most significant line of the speech was the one that dealt with ‘silent Americans.’” Certainly he repeated it often, pledging in his 1968 acceptance speech to represent “the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.”Footnote ⁴⁸ He clearly hoped to develop a meaningful, activist counterweight to the demonstrators that dogged him. At a meeting discussing campus disorders on March 18, 1969, Nixon ruefully concluded: “Students and faculty must recognize what the real issue is; only if they take the responsibility on each campus will the problem be solved. The great mass of students must stand up and be counted since a denial of their point of view is really an issue.”Footnote ⁴⁹

On November 3, 1969, Nixon made a speech on Vietnam in which he appealed to the Silent Majority of Americans. It contained no new policy but an appeal to Americans to support Nixon’s continuing efforts to find an honorable end to the Vietnam War. It was essentially a rebuff to those who both predicted and called repeatedly for immediate withdrawal, to the peace demonstrators. “And so tonight—to you the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Indicating that Nixon pushed on an open door, the speech generated much interest in the American public. Nixon modestly recalled: “Very few speeches actually influence the course of history. The November 3 speech was one of them.” The White House mail room reported (wrongly) that it generated the biggest response ever to any presidential speech, with fifty thousand telegrams and thirty thousand letters. True, eager aide Charles Colson had manufactured many, but no one could deny that the speech had a large effect.Footnote ⁵¹

A constituency united only in its silence and alienation from existing political life was, not surprisingly, difficult to mobilize. Nixon evidently thought that this constituency was only momentarily silent and would coalesce into a self-generating force. He and his team tried many ways of coaxing the Silent Majority to speak. Shortly after the speech, Nixon told his aides, “I hope we can use every possible device to keep this very real asset from wasting away.”Footnote ⁵²

The concept of “Silent Majority” was evidently something to which many Americans now related. The files show that there were many versions of the Silent Majority. The Black Silent Majority Committee appeared alongside the awkwardly titled Spanish-surnamed Silent Majority and a Chinese group called itself the Silent Minority.Footnote ⁵³ Nixon had opened up a therapeutic practice and the line for his services extended outside the door, patients identifying their silence as evidence of their need for attention. Such lines were testament to the pervasive need for Nixon’s services—alienation did not end at the ghetto.

Nixon was not alone in his endeavors. Time magazine recognized the Silent Majority as “Man and Woman of the Year” in 1969.Footnote ⁵⁴ The National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (NCUEA), developed in 1969, presented the complaints of blue-collar Americans in language more redolent of African Americans: “These ‘middle Americans’ earning their ‘moderate income’ are often the victims of a stereotype—the hardhats, the silent majority, racists—and all too often they can find only rhetoric about the ‘forgotten American’ and little concrete, constructive response to their legitimate needs.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Note the therapeutic term “needs” creeping into the discourse, replacing “demands.” This group, sometimes referred to generally as “white ethnics,” was a key target group for politicians of all stripes in the early 1970s. In his article “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” Pete Hamill noted the victim status of at least a segment of the Silent Majority: “The working-class white man sees injustice and politicking every-where in this town, with himself in the role of victim. . . . The working-class white man spends much of his time complaining almost desperately about the way he has become a victim.” Nixon certainly noticed this trend. He had a memo sent to Daniel Patrick Moynihan asking him to analyze the article, saying: “I find this to be a very disturbing article. What is our answer?”Footnote ⁵⁶ As indicated above, the fact that Colson was put on the case indicates the seriousness with which Nixon took these new groups.Footnote ⁵⁷

BUSING

In the run-up to the 1972 election, Nixon offered very little materially to the “silent majority,” but his symbolic appeals stood out. Despite bringing in wage-and-price controls in 1971, Nixon increased support among blue-collar workers in 1972 through a series of gestures. He publicly disavowed quotas, accusing the Democrats of being the “quota party,”Footnote ⁵⁸ and hired prominent labor leader Peter J. Brennan as Secretary of Labor. However, his most important gestures to the Silent Majority concerned the busing of children in order to integrate schools.

Here was an apparent conspiracy from above and below that attacked the innocent—the bewildered white schoolchild turned away from that important American symbol, the neighborhood school, and bused across the city. Not only was this child’s education put at risk, but the control of the neighborhood was taken away from those who lived there. So much did this iconic victim appeal to blue-collar Americans that the candidate who appeared to be most against busing in an election in the early 1970s gained an immediate advantage.

Generally opposing busing, Nixon had hedged his bets on the issue, supporting the Senate’s removal of anti-busing provisions in an education bill eventually passed in the spring of 1971. He took a much firmer stand against it in the summer of 1971.Footnote ⁵⁹ In January 1972, the Richmond decision ordered busing across city boundaries into the suburbs. Nixon finally delivered his busing speech on March 16. In it he called for an immediate congressional moratorium on the federal courts to prevent them from ordering any further busing.

The effort was entirely political. It had been from the start. In February, Nixon had noted: “Busing has become #1 Domestic issue. . . . Dems are squirming.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Accordingly, shortly after the speech, Nixon launched the “Busing Roadshow,” with an all-star cast including Pat Buchanan. Their job was to convey Nixon’s hostility to busing. By May, Nixon was fairly confident that the strategy was working. He told Colson: “Blue collar vote will decide election. Fed Courts will reelect RN. . . . Busing may be the ‘crossing bridge’ for Blue Collars. Cannot muddle this issue; have to be clear.”Footnote ⁶¹

And the strategy did work—aided by Wallace’s decision to run for Democratic Party candidate, potential candidate Edmund S. Muskie’s apparent tears on the campaign trail, eventual candidate George McGovern’s self-destructive campaign, and of course the sterling efforts of the Campaign to Re-elect the President (CREEP).

The longevity of an anti-busing campaign was limited because the steam went out of the campaign for busing. African Americans and liberals became increasingly divided on whether busing was a good strategy. The National Black Political Caucus condemned busing in 1972 as “racist” and “suicidal.”Footnote ⁶² In 1978 influential sociologist James Coleman, the thinker behind the 1967 Coleman Report, recanted his earlier view that black children’s performance would improve in majority white schools.Footnote ⁶³ This rejection of integration began to be reflected in legal decisions. The 1974 Supreme Court Decision Milliken v. Bradley held that suburban public schools outside Detroit did not have to participate in a metropolitan busing plan, greatly limiting the ability of lower courts to insist on busing plans.

Having been berated as crudely racist by a hostile national media, many whites who objected to busing sought individual solutions, either moving out of inner-city areas to the suburbs or sending their children to Catholic and private schools. The steam went out of the anti-busing movement throughout the 1970s.

The busing issue, however, helped transform the Silent Majority, nursing its sense of disappointment and focusing its resentment. Ronald Formisano, in an interesting book about the busing crisis in Boston in the mid-1970s, noted the appropriation of the symbols of the civil rights movement by the anti-busers. Anti-busing rallies “frequently broke into chants of ‘No! No! We Won’t Go!’ echoing the draft resisters who protested the Vietnam War.” Pat Russell, leader of Powder Keg, the local ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights, a Boston-based anti-busing movement) chapter, shouted, as she led a mothers’ march: “If Martin Luther King could do it, so can the women of Charleston.” The women then sat down in the street and sang “We Shall Overcome.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The form of 1960s liberation struggles—bereft of any progressive content—survived.

The cry of “police brutality” was generally heard on civil rights marches, anti-war demonstrations, and hippie “happenings.” The Silent Majority doubtless cheered the police when they attacked protesters outside the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968. However, when Boston’s Special Tactical Force went in against the anti-busing protesters, that was exactly the cry they uttered.Footnote ⁶⁵ The backbone of the nation, as administration officials had called blue-collar Americans, became victims of police repression, in need perhaps of therapy to overcome their “trauma.”