"I would have made a good Pope." - Richard NixonWhether Student Body President of a small West Los Angeles liberal arts college, or fighting anticommunist saving the world for democracy US Senate candidate against a popular California incumbent after World War II, Nixon played the underdog to the hilt. Former Navy officer Nixon set his post-law school sights on politics, upsetting a stalwart New Dealer in Loma Linda, his home town suburb of Los Angeles. Nixon rode the tails of fear and ignorance into the U S Senate, allied himself with Joe McCarthy and made national headlines in the Alger Hiss trial. It mattered little to Nixon whether Hiss was guilty. The thing was to get him. Eastern Establishment Republican bosses commended Nixon's tenacity when putting together the favorite son candidacy of Eisenhower, supreme commander in the Normandy landing ending Hitler's regime. Nixon, not a good ally to anyone, even offended Eisenhower, who moved to dump Nixon after his first term for someone more conducive to his own kick back tendency to let the store manage itself. Nixon later as President was obsessed with office micromanagement.
With the close of the 1950s and Sputnik overhead the world girded for confrontation with the Soviet Union. Anticommunist Nixon groomed himself for the contest with his Kitchen debates with Khrushchev during a cultural exchange. The stage was set for adversity between East and West. Nixon could not as underdog be the fair haired boy courting the leading lady. John F Kennedy took the spotlight and crowned himself King of Camelot. The sun set on this street fighting man from LA until Nov 22, 1963 when Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas on a peacemaking trip to visit running mate Lyndon Johnson's backroom southern politicians he desperately needed, with growing Southern unrest, to support his re-election. It was never to be. Nixon came out of his stable. Voters' surprised swing to the right alarmed Eastern Establishment Republican power brokers enough to bring Nixon back into the fold as the New Nixon, the Old South with a smile, pinning their hopes for 1968's contest between Nixon and the Southern mastermind of the Senate under Eisenhower - Lyndon Baines Johnson. With Martin Luther King's death the nation was not yet prepared to stop its thirst for martyrs, Johnson resigned, leaving the Democratic nomination battle between latecomer and dreaded rival Robert F Kennedy and Gene McCarthy (no relative) Within 10 weeks, after an unprecedented upset within Democratic Party ranks, RFK died on a hotel kitchen floor.
Still their gods wanted blood. Nixon would have his day. Riding tides of Democratic confusion, youth rebuffed by Democratic Party hawks and conservative Republican opposition to the Civil Rights struggle, Nixon made his appeal to the Silent Majority claiming a secret plan for victory in Viet Nam. People bought the ploy. Wanting a peace candidate to end the strife at home and abroad they placed underdog Nixon at the helm of state. It was his finest hour. No sooner was he in power than trappings of covert activity and counterinsurgency at home surfaced, turning J Edgar Hoover loose on his dreaded nemesis, civil rights activists, charging Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers like an attack dog. Death followed Poor Richard everywhere. Police gunned down sleeping Panthers in Chicago's West Side. 6 months later Nixon attacked Cambodia. Amidst overwhelming campus protest students were gunned down during a peaceful assembly, killing 4, permanently maiming 2. Sanctuary was broached. The movement singing 'all we are saying is give peace a chance' and originating love-ins and be-ins from Haight Ashbury to Woodstock suddenly collapsed. What Bull O'Connor couldn't do to Martin Luther King with dogs and hoses the Ohio National Guard did with M-1 steel jacketed bullets.
Nixon, no longer the underdog, revived middle America from its stupor. They took unbridled liberty to attack the Movement physically and intellectually. Vice President Spiro Agnew played point man in renewed red-baiting and hate mongering to which Nixon was accustomed and in which he rode to power. The end was not in sight. The New York Times released the Pentagon Papers. The facade of winning in Southeast Asia was revealed! Victory was a hoax! The left, vilified and aghast, replaced fallen leaders with George McGovern. For Nixon, at the height of popularity and an assured shoo-in for re-election, this wasn't enough. He'd get those commie pinko hippies if it was the last thing he did. Nixon, doing so much from Affirmative Action to the Environmental Protection Agency to detente, never understood why the world didn't love him.
The Great Communicator: Ronald Reagan
All the world's a stage and all the people players. Depression midwest farm boy Ronald Reagan, sportscaster, movie star, politician, rode the range roughshod over any adversary. The world loves wholesome, homespun heros. Small town boy Reagan was made for the role, starring in college plays instead of studying economics his father sent him to school for, emerging on the national scene as Depression survivor, later as glamorous Hollywood star. As a post-college radio sportscaster he soon learned to ad lib lulls in the game. Later, his star rising in film, Reagan again relied on Irish gab to entertain in Hollywood's finest homes, endearing himself to the star studded set to become, after World War II service, head of the Screen Actors Guild. Here he developed his taste in politics.
McCarthy's witch hunts dragged Hollywood's best writers and producers into Congressional hearings to name names and places. The Depression ne'er-do-well or socialist agitator was on the carpet for what was 10 years earlier a popular if minor preoccupation. Communism was an evil empire, as Reagan said 30 years later. Reagan avoiding implication of inappropriateness hosted the General Electric Theater and Death Valley Days, guided steadily right by Nancy's father, a long time John Bircher. Wealthy midwest landowners now populating Orange County brought this popular TV star to the attention of Republican power brokers. Fate lent a hand televising the Kennedy - Nixon debates, putting the new medium square in service of national politics. Reagan took a cue from Kennedy by nominating, as Kennedy did Stevenson in 1956, Arizona's conservative senior senator Barry Goldwater for Republican candidacy in 1964. The stage was set to take the spotlight away from the Eastern Establishment and bring home Republican gold, electing Reagan as California's Governor in 1966. From then on Reagan, wanting center stage, never faltered. With 1964's UC Berkeley's Free Speech uprisings to 1965's Watts riots the advantage of sensational headlines played into the hands of this former radio announcer filling empty moments with crisp remarks or funny lines. The press loved him. After defeating the Democrats' strongest candidate, Governor Edmund Brown, Reagan could do no wrong. Close on his heels came the Viet Nam War and the outcry against Johnson's draft calls in the first few months of Reagan's tenure. Playing to the crowd, Reagan taunted students with jibes of disloyalty, playing on familiar McCarthy era Republican themes and winning middle American hearts as a hardline no-nonsense chief executive managing the State College and University system, itself protesting Johnson's War.
Following Nixon's 1968 defeat of apologist Hubert Humphrey, Reagan made national news using California's students as a foil to advance his loyalist reputation with the party (he was a registered Democrat before the McCarthy era) Students bent the media to their own program, using movement politics and protest as street theater. After Nixon fell from grace with Watergate Reagan broadcast on radio after his second term as Governor, launching a new era in conservative politics at local and regional levels with his taxpayers' revolt. With passage of fellow Southern Californian Howard Jarvis' Proposition 13 Reagan set the agenda for the national forum emerging prior to 1980's Presidential election. The Iranian hostage crisis dogged Jimmy Carter all the way to the polls. Reagan again manipulated the media, revolutionizing TV as a political leadership tool, a lethal weapon for a beguiling, inoffensive Cold War trooper steering the Republican Right into the White House for 12 years. Enjoying every minute of his life's greatest role, Reagan left an indelible imprint on political showmanship and image making, setting a new era of conservatism.