Tethered Swimming

On Thursday, 8 August 1974 Richard Nixon announced his ultimate humiliation to the nation. The next day he turned in his signed resignation letter, boarded the green helicopter one last time and flew off the national political stage for the rest of his life. Gerald Ford was sworn in at noon and five minutes later went on nation television where he memorably proclaimed, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” Yesterday was the thirty-fourth anniversary of that speech. Gerry was wrong, the nightmare wasn’t over then and it isn’t over now, but we’re getting close.

The median age of the United States today is roughly thirty seven, which means that approximately half of the country is now too young to have any memory of President Nixon. But it is Nixon and all that he begat, Watergate, wiretapping, the Southern Strategy, the culture wars, appeals to “law & order”, executive privilege, and the end of the Vietnam War, which still dominates our politics and our thinking. He is the father of our political discourse, the man who brought the long American tradition of apocalyptic politics into the modern era.

Nixon died in 1994, just a few months shy of the twentieth anniversary of his final defeat. In commemoration, Hunter S. Thompson penned a goodbye for Rolling Stone a copy of which sits on The Atlantic Monthly’s website. An excerpt:

He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon’s style — and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.

The Low Road. That’s a pretty concise way of putting it. A less concise, albeit better documented, account is Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. Reading the book with the benefit of decades of hindsight is like watching a dazed crash survivor stagger away from his car and right into oncoming freeway traffic. The poor fuck was so happy to have survived the initial impact it never occurred to him that there might be a second. He never had a chance and neither did we.

Perlstein opens his book with the 1966 Watts riots in Los Angeles, and with good reason. Watts was the first public crack in the post war dream. That famous photo of triumphant joy - the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square - happened in an America that openly repressed its minorities and saw women as little more than decorative brood mares. It took twenty years for that dream to be revealed for the selective illusion that it was, and when it died it died hard.

The traumas that began in the sixties, and have never really ended, are a kind of national adolescence. The world is not as neatly ordered as children assume and coming to grips with that is often accompanied by violence, irrationality and cold, stark terror. Children have to learn to do things they don’t want to do, not because some ultimately loving parent told them to but because that’s just the way the world is. It was childish for men to assume that all women would be unpaid domestic sperm receptacles the same way it was childish for white people to assume that everyone else would forever accept second class status, legally (the South) or merely de facto (everyplace else).

The violence, the irrationality and that cold, stark terror made themselves real in events as famous as Roe v. Wade, Kent State, Loving v. Virginia, Stonewall and Woodstock and in unknowable little incidents between regular people. It made itself real to ordinary Americans every time an ex-Little League champ came back from college with long hair and bloodshot eyes, every time a non-white family moved to a white neighborhood, every time strange music played in a previously peaceful household, every time a business or a school became integrated; in short, every time the future looked less like Leave it to Beaver.

The culture wars, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, these were radical changes to the status quo and many Americans felt as if they were being forced to embrace changes they were never asked about in the first place. Nixon harnessed the fear and resentment aroused by those movements; his disciples are still doing it today. But those fights, and the politically potent feelings that go with them, are fading right along with the generations that fought them.

Here’s a little back of the envelope math to go along with the fact that only half of all Americans are old enough to remember President Nixon:

1973 (End of Vietnam War) - 18 (Draft Age) = 1955 (Latest a Drafted Combat Vet Could Be Born)

2008 (Today) - 1955 (Last year a Vietnam Vet could be born) = 53

Fifty three years old, that’s the absolute youngest an actual Vietnam vet can be, and those numbers are conservative, the bulk of Vietnam veterans are approaching or past sixty. That’s old, that’s senior discount at the movies old. The people whom Nixon used to turn the White House into a Republican stronghold are dying out.

The Republicans won four of the five presidential elections from 1972 to 1988 by an average of 14.7% of the popular vote and a staggering 442.5 electoral votes. That’s not just victory, that’s dominance. The one election they lost in that time saw Jimmy Carter squeak by the Man Who Pardoned Nixon by only 2 percentage points and a scant 57 electoral votes. Obviously this is selective data, the Democrats won in 1992 and 1996 after all. But would even a politician as preternaturally talented as Bill Clinton have been able to get elected without Ross Perot drawing almost 19% of the vote? We’ll never know the answer to that, but at the very least it puts a big, fat asterisk next to the 1992 election. As for 1996, well it’s damn near impossible to dislodge a popular incumbent.

That’s brings us up to 2000, an election which Bush the Younger famously lost but won. In a year when the incumbent party had presided over years of peace and prosperity, the budget was in actual surplus and the opposition already held Congress he shouldn’t have even had a chance. But through an almost impossibly unlikely combination of his opponent’s incompetence (both before the election and afterward in Florida), sheer luck and legal chicanery he took office just in time to have the political Excalibur of 11 September 2001 fall into his lap. Despite the huge advantages of incumbency (which we now know were illegally inflated), a superior get out the vote organization, and superior financial resources he only managed to eek by John Kerry in 2004. This is like a champion sprinter collapsing across the finish line - victorious, to be sure - but only hundredths of a second ahead of an overweight, untrained opponent who ran the race with a donut in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.

The balance has clearly shifted and we are now at the moment of great decision. It is foolish to proclaim this election “The most important in American history” or even “The most important since X”. Those are debatable even with fifty years of hindsight. But this is the election that can finally kill Richard Nixon and his wicked legacy. The destruction that man’s politics have wrought on this country are incalculable and we are now at the proverbial fork in the road.

John McCain and Barack Obama, setting aside their campaign themes, their chattering surrogates, and their individual styles we are left with two symbols. There is McCain, the Vietnam hero who was being tortured while most of the rest of the country’s current elite were doing bong rips and getting laid. Then there is Obama, the first major presidential candidate we’ve had who was unquestionably too young for Vietnam, a man who is an almost direct product of the culture wars that his elders fought.

Obama is, on paper, tremendously vulnerable to the types of attacks that kept the White House Red for so very long and by such huge margins. Because of his name, his skin and his education one could not design a candidate less appealing or more threatening to Nixon’s great Silent Majority. But there he is, ahead in every measurement we have.

We’re not talking about the end of bad things. An Obama victory won’t instantly solve all the problems of Bush the Younger; it won’t stop neoconservatives from plotting to bomb Iran or scheming to start a new Cold War with China; it won’t make the world safe for homosexuals, abortions or minorities.

What we are talking about is the final end of the story lines and cultural wars of the 1960s and 70s, the end of the forty year arc of the baby boomers and their wars over everything from feminism and civil rights to swearing on television. Even Vietnam, the real war that exploded the Democratic Party and gave us President Richard Nixon, is now fading from memory. In that sense there is no better opponent than McCain; he is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, the perfect symbol of the old entrenched order and all of its hypocrisies.

It is difficult to conceive of such a sea change, not only in the results of our elections but in the issues, rationales, and emotional appeals that stand behind them. Nixon’s politics have been incredibly effective and long lived, but no one gets to beat biology. We don’t yet know if what comes next will be better or worse, but it will be different.