January 4, 1971: Nixon Using Progressive Ideas as Smokescreen for Political Realignment Hopes

Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, one of the most conservative members of the Nixon administration, is appalled at the president’s priorities for the upcoming year, which features increased human resource spending, education and health care reform, wage guarantees, and plans to withdraw US troops from Vietnam. Buchanan writes: “Neither liberal nor conservative, neither fish nor fowl, the Nixon administration… is a hybrid, whose zigging and zagging has succeeded in winning the enthusiasm and loyalty of neither the left nor the right, but the suspicion and distrust of both…. Truly, the liberals went swimming and President Nixon stole their clothes—but in the process we left our old conservative suit lying by the swimming hole for someone to pick up… . Conservatives are the n_ggers of the Nixon administration.” Nixon responds by scrawling in the margin of Buchanan’s memo, “You overlook RN’s consistent hard line on foreign policy.” What Buchanan either fails to grasp or ignores, according to historian Richard Reeves, is that Nixon feels he has enough support among hardline Republican conservatives like Buchanan; he now wants to win the loyalty of conservative Democrats and mainstream Republicans, and drive the Democratic Party ever farther to the left. Reeves will also note: “He also had a secret: he did not much care whether or not this new agenda passed. The idea was to make it look and sound good enough to keep Congress and the press busy so that he could concentrate on his own driving dreams: the realignment of American politics and of world power structures.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 294-295]