MM#343--Pivotal Tuesdays series: The Election of 1968, part 2

0:07 Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser, flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute and welcome back to another episode in our series called Pivotal Tuesdays. And, in case you have not been keeping up with us, a couple of weeks ago we introduced Pivotal Tuesdays, the framework and the series where we are covering the pivotal elections of the 20th century, namely the elections of 1912, 1932, 1968, and 1980.

0:57 Now, two weeks ago we covered the 1912 election and the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and the radical that he was, and just last week we covered the 1932 election in detail, which was another pivotal election, and when the government, the federal government, its expansion became permanent. This week we are covering the volatile election of 1968, certainly one of our most pivotal elections, for sure. And yesterday we covered part one of the 1968 pivotal election. And I have to make a correction on yesterday's podcast.

1:40 I'm not sure what I was looking at, but I completely got the popular vote totals wrong. I transposed the popular vote, actual number of votes uh, two percentages and I believe I said Nixon got 31.7% of the popular vote. That was incorrect. He received 31.7 million votes. His percentage, however, was 43.4%. And Humphrey received 31.2 million votes, not 31.2%. His actual percentage was 42.7%, which was a difference of 0.7%.

2:27 That was very close. And then Wallace was third with 9.9 million votes and his popular vote percentage was 13.5%. So I'm sorry about any confusion on those stats. I had re-listened to the episode and was taken aback. I was like did I really say that? And I did so. I stand corrected. That is the correction I had messed up. Now if yesterday, in fact, we covered the conventional and the liberal interpretation of the 1968 election and we also cover the most courageous speech ever given, in my opinion, in American politics, and if you're new here and this is your first time listening, welcome.

3:17 But let me catch you up real quick on what we're doing with these Pivotal Tuesdays as a series. So be sure to go back and listen to the 1912 episode and the 1932 episode. But also I want to tell you why our recollections, our describing of these Pivotal Tuesdays are different. We make this absolutely worth your time because you will not, you will not get the humdrum, conventional, liberal reading of history and I mean, yes, I will give you, we will give you and introduce to you the context.

3:57 But we understand that you and ourselves have suffered through the indoctrination of our American history story, that story of hope, from a number of different outlets, and most of them have been liberal. So to make this worth your time, we do compare a conventional liberal take on the election and its after effects and then we get a conservative's take on that same election and its legacy. Stephen Hayward has been our resident conservative historian with his book Politically Incorrect Book of the Presidents, part Two, and Margaret O'Meara is our conventional and liberal historian with her book Pivotal Tuesdays.

4:45 So with that quick albeit somewhat longer but rather quick reintroduction of our weekly Pivotal Tuesday series, normally our question to begin these Pivotal Tuesday series is what happened in the 1968 election. But we answered that yesterday. So be sure to go back and listen to that episode, because we spent a lot of time giving you the context, the events and the facts of the election and to reiterate that just 1968 was a crazy, crazy year. Nixon eventually does win, with 301 electoral votes, like we talked about, to Humphrey's 191 electoral votes, and it's it's a very close popular election.

5:33 Uh, and then, more importantly, this is the first time since 1889 that the president's party, Richard Nixon, did not control either House of Congress, as the Democrats retained both the House and the Senate in 1968. The GOP made gains. They made big gains in the Senate. They took five seats, but they still didn't have a majority. But this year 1968, begins a break of the liberal establishment and the New Deal coalition that FBR built up. And over the course of the next four years, by 1972, we will see the rise of the new left, the more radical left.

6:14 But for now, let's begin our journey with a different question of how did the conservatives view the pivotal election of 1968 and its promise? And so what do we do more precisely? Or what should conservatives say more precisely, I guess, is the question about Richard Nixon and the pivotal election of 1968. Well, let's go to Stephen Hayward's book, the Politically Incorrect Book of the Presidents, part 2. The most significant fact about the Lincoln, most significant fact about Nixon, the Nixon presidency, is that Nixon was a wartime president, arguably the most beleaguered incoming president since Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

7:09 Like Lincoln, nixon wasn't just fighting a foreign foe. The anti-war movement of the left openly wished for America's defeat in the Vietnam War. That he had inherited from President Johnson and liberal Democrats who had supported the war effort under Kennedy and Johnson but were cowered by the revolt of the radical wing of their party. Hence, as Henry Kissinger observed, the new Nixon administration was the first post-war generation that had to conduct foreign policy without the national consensus that had sustained its predecessors largely since 1947.

7:50 By the time Nixon took office in 1969, vietnam had become the nation's longest war, with war deaths surpassing the Korean war total, passing the Korean War total. The US troop level peaked at 543,000 in the spring of 1969, and Nixon shared the nation's frustration but dared not openly show it. That Nixon had advertised a quote secret plan to end the war during the 1968 campaign is commonplace of Nixon lore, but this is a myth largely generated by the wire service story.

8:31 Nixon had said no such thing. Now, ultimately, the peace agreement with North Vietnam proved to be anything but have any teeth to enforce the actual agreement. And had Richard Nixon not been damaged by that time in Watergate, nixon might have been more free to enforce the agreement and its aftermath. Sadly, that did not happen and the Vietnam War and our pullout was absolutely horrific, very similar to the pullout of Afghanistan by President Joe Biden.

9:16 As for Watergate, hayward makes an interesting point that is often missed by most historians. Let's go back to the book. Nixon's guilt in the Watergate cover-up is supposedly well-established fact. What might be called the standard heroic account of Watergate finds its wellsprings in Nixon's much exaggerated paranoia, that is, nixon's supposed fixation with the idea that his enemies were out to get him. And the standard heroic account. Watergate was an epic struggle between the truth-seeking crusaders in Congress, the Justice Department and the media against the villains in the White House, trying frantically to cover up criminal political dirty tricks, complete with a Saturday night massacre when Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox and attempted to close down the investigation.

10:15 Crucial evidence that was mysteriously missing or tampered with, the unexplained 18 and a half minute gap in a key Oval Office tape. Hush money, cash payoffs to Howard Hunt and others, mystery figures Deep Throat, the secret source for the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. And betrayal by the White House counsel John Dean, whose 1973 Senate testimony first implicated Nixon in the cover-up. With Nixon's resignation in August of 1974, the two-year Watergate saga ended in a victory for American constitutional democracy.

11:01 The triumph of a vigilant media and aroused Congress supposedly showed that the quote system works. There is certain narrow truth to the standard heroic account of Watergate. Much of Nixon's behavior and many of his decisions are indefensible, but the standard heroic account leaves out some extremely important context. It conceals the fact that Nixon was a victim of a double standard. In a witch hunt atmosphere in Washington, as Nixon noted, previous presidents had bugged and harassed their political opponents. Lyndon Johnson, for example, had bugged Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964.

11:46 Nixon was right to complain that he was being held to a different standard. The real reason Democrats wanted to destroy Nixon and the reason so many Republicans gladly went along is that Nixon was threatening to take away their political power. To take away their political power and here's where things get quite interesting. No-transcript. I agree with Hayward that much of Nixon's behavior and many of his decisions with Watergate are in fact indefensible by long measure. But once you listen to the other side of the story and what Nixon was threatening to do in his second term by taking away their political power meaning Democrats and Republicans you can see where these most pure congressmen suddenly have an ax to grind with the president.

12:48 Now, just an FYI Hayward uses some quotes directly from Nixon, who was pretty spun up at the time, and when he was talking about how lar, how large S the administrative state is, he did offer up some colorful language which I would try to tame down and clean up as I go. But just a little warning if you have kids and you're listening to this, you might want to pause it here until you only have adults in the car or in the room. Let's go back to our real nugget of wisdom. Going back to the book, it is on precisely this point that all of the accounts of Watergate missed the nature and deeper significance of the political clash that was the backdrop of the affair.

13:35 Watergate changed the operation of government in subtle but profound ways. While sleuths of history continue to hunt for the tantalizing missing details, it is on Watergate's effect on the structure of government that the most important revisionism remains to be done. The reaction to the temporary constitutional crisis brought about by Nixon's misdeeds temporary because he would have gone up, he would have gone from the White House, he would have been gone from the White House by 1977 in any case was a permanent constitutional crisis.

14:17 Congress and the federal bureaucracy were able to usurp powers from the presidency during its post-Watergate weakness by means of the War Powers Act and the Budget Empowerment and Control Act. Watergate didn't just change our standards of ethics and government. It changed the balance of powers laid out in the Constitution. Far from showing that the system quote works, watergate introduced significant new distortions into our system of government that have hobbled all succeeding presidents. Nixon had set his sights on a large project in his second term gaining real control of the executive branch bureaucracy Quote we have no discipline in this bureaucracy.

15:05 Nixon complained to John Ehrlichman at one on one of the White House tapes. We never fire anybody, we never reprimand anybody, we never demote anybody. We always promote the SOBs that kick us in the A Again, I'm trying to clean up the language here. He was starting to refer to many federal programs not as objects to be reformed but as quote failures that should be cut. In his second inaugural address, nixon set out his intention bluntly quote his intention bluntly quote a new era of progress at home requires turning away from condescending policies of paternalism of Washington knows best.

15:47 His first budget proposal in the second term called for eliminating more than 100 programs while holding total spending growth to a relatively parsimious 8%. Nixon was proposing to do nothing less than upend the established political arrangement according to which Democratic administrations expanded government in exciting new, progressive ways and Republican administrations only slowed or at best stalled, but never rolled back the encroachment of government bureaucracy, taxes, spending and regulation on the citizens' lives. Well, now you can see why both Democrats and Republicans wanted the long knives out for President Nixon.

16:37 The long knives out for President Nixon, you have to remember, by 1973, nixon had a landslide win in his back pocket in 1972 with some heavy coattails, so he had the wind at his back. He could have pursued this reigning in of the administrative state. Let's go back to the book, because here's what Nixon wrote. Years later, I had concluded that Congress had become cumbersome, undisciplined, isolationist and fiscally irresponsible, and too dominated by the media.

17:20 What was needed, nixon thought, was to, quote break the eastern stranglehold on the executive branch in the federal government. Nixon's plan to break the bureaucracy required he take on Congress as well. Quote armed with my landslide mandate and knowing that I only had four years into which to make my mark, nixon wrote in his memoirs I plan to force Congress and the federal bureaucracy to defend their obstruction and their irresponsible spending in the open arena of public opinion, nixon wrote in his diary at the time. This is going to be quite a shock to the establishment, but it is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that it submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is Now.

18:19 That sounds quite familiar to many conservatives today a runaway bureaucracy and administrative state that no one could control. Even a president who had just won a landslide couldn't get a hold of that administrative state to reform it. Now, sadly, even by the second term of Nixon's presidency, he had lost most of the conservatives there wasn't that many at the time and his liberal presidency, his liberal Republican presidency, wasn't helping anything domestically and or foreign policy wise. Now how did this tragic tale end? Well, most of us know, let's go back to the book.

19:04 Nixon signaled that he intended, that he intended make the widest use of the Empowerment Act. Quote I have nailed my colors to the mast on this issue. The political winds can blow where they may. On this issue, the political winds can blow where they may. By the beginning of 1973, nixon had impounded funds for over 100 federal programs, each with an interest group or a local constituency behind it. More impoundments were promised to follow if Congress did not get runaway spending under control. Members of Congress in both parties rightly feared that scaling back spending might involve being defeated for re-election. Pork barrel spending was the chief means of reassuring their re-election, and a reduced ability to deliver pork diminished the attachments of the interest who helped keep them in office.

19:57 Hence their fury at Nixon, and hence the reason Watergate quickly became the pretext for destroying the president who was threatening to shut down business as usual in Washington DC. Now Nixon's legacy of the Watergate cover-up will be etched in the American memory because liberal historians and major media by that time could write the history as it was being told, and sometimes even before it was being told. For conservatives. Nixon on the economy he absolutely sucked.

20:39 He took us off the gold standard, he brought wage and price controls back. He did everything that a liberal Republican would do and he had no effect on inflation or getting the economy moving again. And here's the real takeaway from Nixon's legacy. On the domestic front, let's go back to the book for some details. The explosion in spending was matched by an equally dramatic explosion in federal regulation. From an administration that regarded itself as pro-business, nixon created a number of the new alphabet soup regulatory agencies that are constitutionally dubious, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

21:35 The number of pages in the Federal Register, the roster of federal rules and regulations, grew only 19% under Lyndon Baines Johnson, the previous president, but it grew a staggering 121% under Nixon. In civil rights, nixon disbanded the regime of quote affirmative action, racial quotas and set asides far beyond what Johnson had done. In other words, nixon consolidated the administrative state of the Great Society in much the same way that President Eisenhower, whom Nixon had served as vice president, consolidated the New Deal.

22:18 President consolidated the New Deal. Ronald Reagan would run and govern as much against Nixon's legacy as he would against LBJ's, and a number of Nixon administrative creations would cause Reagan the most trouble in his attempts to scale back the size and scope of the regulatory state during his White House years. Did you catch that? Let me repeat that last paragraph for all the conservatives out there, because it's the key takeaway. Nixon consolidated the administrative state of the Great Society in much the same way that President Eisenhower, whom Nixon had served as Vice President, consolidated the New Deal.

23:04 Ronald Reagan would run and govern as much against Nixon's legacy as he would against LBJ's, and a number of Nixon administrative creations would cause Reagan the most trouble in his attempts to scale back the size and scope of the regulatory state during his White House years. Just terrible. The federal rules and regulations grew by a staggering 121% under the Nixon administration. Here's another stat Social spending soared from $55 billion in 1970, nixon's first budget to $132 billion in 1975.

23:51 Threefold increase, massive increases in funding of all the Great Society programs, reagan would later say of LBJ and Nixon's war on poverty. We declared war on poverty and poverty won. How horrific. And the real legacy is we are still dealing with the stranglehold of the federal government to this day as it keeps growing and growing and growing. Now, what about Nixon's foreign policy? Hayward explains, going back to the book, while Nixon was unandoubtedly an anti-communist, he initiated the detente with the Soviet Union that undermined America in the Cold War and emboldened the Soviet Union.

24:41 The arms control treaties Nixon signed, especially the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the ABM Treaty, prevented the US from developing defenses against Soviet missile attack and meant that Ronald Reagan, a decade later, had to spend considerable political capital to begin to reverse American policy on missile defense. The ABM Treaty wasn't finally abandoned until 2001, under President George W Bush. Meanwhile here's the ironic thing of that whole episode A young Dick Cheney is in the Nixon White House and he's pushing for the signing of the ABM Treaty.

25:32 And then, finally, it was not abandoned until President George W Bush, bush 43, of which Dick Cheney was vice president. So thank God that Dick Cheney actually went to school on his own policy. He was pushing some 40 years earlier. Going back to the book. Meanwhile the Soviet Union continued a massive arms buildup throughout the 1970s, openly regarding detente as a diplomatic weapon in their quote class struggle against the West. Nixon's opening to communist China gave rise to the ultimate cliche of counterintuitive politics Only Nixon could go to China.

26:16 Amen, absolutely right. The erosion of America's position in the world under detente would escalate during the presidencies of Nixon's successors, gerald Ford and especially Jimmy Carter. It is possible to speculate that had Nixon survived Watergate, he might have been in a position to hold a harder line against the Soviet Union. On the other hand, nixon's grand strategy and domestic policy, what might be called his attempt to reach a detente with liberalism at home, failed for much the same reason. Henry Kissinger, nixon's most trusted foreign policy advisor, might have been super smart and he might write good books, but detente as a foreign policy was, in the final analysis, just trying to be cute by half.

27:14 It never worked. It never worked, in fact, it never worked anywhere else outside the Middle East, where there was only a modicum of effective results. It would take a real conservative administration and Ronald Reagan to reverse all the promise of the 1970s and to sum up the legacy of the 1968 pivotal election. There was much promise, with a change of administrations from Democrat to Republican, but sadly it would take another 12 years before the American people finally saw hope on the horizon with the 1980, our next pivotal election.

27:57 So in today's Mojo Minute, know that our American history has peaks and valleys and is only in the valleys when you know the American resolve is being tested at its greatest and when you find out what are your core principles, what are those core principles that are worth fighting for and fighting over. As Stephen Hayward aptly summarizes for us quote Nixon despised liberals by largely governing as one, trying relentlessly to ingratiate himself with a liberal establishment, even though he knew instinctively that liberals would never respect or accept him.

28:41 That is our nugget of wisdom from 1968. And we should never fall for it again. As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. In the larger context, america was changing. 1968 was a brutal year for the whole country and the whole world. The American culture was changing and if you talk to anyone from that time period who lived through it, they summarize the whole time period as chaos and crazy. Nothing made sense From the late 1960s to the late 1970s.

29:25 It was a decade when America had lost its confidence. It would take real leadership for America and Americans to gain back that confidence, but it would come back, and it would come back in the form of real leadership beginning in 1980. Now, if you're a conservative, there is no better history book to give you the details of this time period than Hayward's the Age of Reagan, part One, the Fall of the Old Liberal Order. It's a must-have in your library of liberty. Now, sadly, it's not on Audible. It should be, though, but if I have plugged through in two weeks some of the 700 pages of that book, certainly anyone else can Now come back tomorrow, as we have one more topic to cover from the pivotal election of 1968, and that is what in the world happened at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago in 1968.

30:27 We'll answer that question tomorrow. As for now, keep fighting the good fight, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.