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The President's Conservatives: Richard Nixon and the American Conservative Movement

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The President's Conservatives: Richard Nixon and the American Conservative Movement ALL THE PRESIDENT'S CONSERVATIVES: RICHARD NIXON AND THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT. David Sarias Rodriguez Department of History University of Sheffield Submitted for the degree of PhD October 2010 ABSTRACT This doctoral dissertation exammes the relationship between the American conservative movement and Richard Nixon between the late 1940s and the Watergate scandal, with a particular emphasis on the latter's presidency. It complements the sizeable bodies ofliterature about both Nixon himself and American conservatism, shedding new light on the former's role in the collapse of the post-1945 liberal consensus. This thesis emphasises the part played by Nixon in the slow march of American conservatism from the political margins in the immediate post-war years to the centre of national politics by the late 1960s. The American conservative movement is treated as a diverse epistemic community made up of six distinct sub-groupings - National Review conservatives, Southern conservatives, classical liberals, neoconservatives, American Enterprise Institute conservatives and the 'Young Turks' of the New Right - which, although philosophically and behaviourally autonomous, remained intimately associated under the overall leadership of the intellectuals who operated from the National Review. Although for nearly three decades Richard Nixon and American conservatives endured each other in a mutually frustrating and yet seemingly unbreakable relationship, Nixon never became a fully-fledged member of the movement. Yet, from the days of Alger Hiss to those of the' Silent Majority', he remained the political actor best able to articulate and manipulate the conservative canon into a populist, electorally successful message. During his presidency, the administration's behaviour played a crucial role - even if not always deliberately - in the momentous transformation of the conservative movement into a more diverse, better-organised, modernised and more efficient political force. In the process, conservatives consciously and successfully used Nixon in their quest to gain acceptance as the legitimate sparring partners of the liberalism that had hitherto dominated post-1945 American politics. 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 1. NATIONAL REVIEW CONSERVATIVES AND RICHARD 24 NIXON PRIOR TO 1966 2. THE 1968 ELECTION AND THE NORTHERNISATION OF 75 SOUTHERN CONSERVATISM 3. 'ENTITLED TO PREVAIL': NIXON, CONSERVATIVES, 121 AND THE POLITICS OF CIVIL RIGHTS 4. THE HARD CORE AND THE PRESIDENCY OF RICHARD 167 NIXON, 1966-1972 5. NIXON, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, 224 AND THE ORIGINS OF A CONSERVATIVE ESTABLISHMENT 6. 'WE WERE WILLING TO BE USED': CLASSICAL LIBERALS, 268 NEOCONSERVATIVES AND THE RISE OF THE RIGHT-WING POLICY -MAKER CONCLUSION 322 BIBLIOGRAPHY 336 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like that thank the Department of History at the University of Sheffield for its financial support and considerable patience. Without its generosity and tolerance, this thesis would not have been started, never mind finished. Research trips to the United States have also been made possible by grants received from the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and Foundation, and the Royal Historical Society. On these visits the archival staffs of the Hoover Institution, the Library of Congress and Yale University were particularly helpful in assisting my research. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dan Scroop for without his unending patience and supportiveness this project would not have been completed. Special thanks should also be given to Mariangeles Martin Lavin and the late Don Miguel Fernandez Garcia, for in their teaching they were my crucial early guiding lights. I am grateful to my wife for her gracious, razor- sharp comments, unfailing optimism, support and patience. Finally, I would also like to thank my paternal grandfather, the late Antonio Sarias, to whom lowe so much. 4 INTRODUCTION The history of post-1945 conservatism and the political career of Richard Nixon are surely two of the most dramatic tales of defeat and triumph delivered by the politics of the United States in the last three-quarters of a century. During a period of over two decades, both the conservative movement and Nixon himself ascended from a position at the margins of national politics towards the very centre of executive power, an ascent that was punctuated by what proved to be premature obituaries on the political 'deaths' of both parties: in Nixon's case, after the fracas of his 1962 California gubernatorial race, and in conservatism's, during the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's ill-fated presidential campaign two years later. This doctoral dissertation evaluates the relationship between Nixon and the American conservative movement, and examines how the bonds that tied both actors between the Califonian's entree into national politics in the late 1940s and his accession to the presidency determined the character of the relations between the president and conservatism during Nixon's term in office. The following pages also demonstrate that the developments that took place during the Nixon administration helped to bring about the greatest transformation of the post-war conservative movement's make-up and behaviour since its inception during the 1950s, and were therefore instrumental in the ascendancy of the modem conservatism that has dominated American politics since the 1980s. l.THE POST-WAR CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT ... The American conservative movement has always been a fractious and diverse epistemic community, one which plays host to a number of conservative sub-communities and which has evolved significantly over time. As with its constituent elements, the movement at large, was (and remains) made up of politicians, intellectuals and political activists with very different backgrounds and interests, but who are nevertheless bound 5 together by shared ideas and experiences as well as personal relationships.' As this thesis focuses on the conservative movement during the 1960s and early 1970s, no less than seven distinct sub-groups are particularly relevant. Three of these right-wing sub-communities were already present as Richard Nixon's public persona emerged in the immediate post-war years: the National Review or 'hard core' group, though the eponymous journal around which they gathered actually began to be published in 1955; neoliberals or libertarians; and the 'organisational' conservatives, who run the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Such was the importance of these groupings within American conservatism that throughout Richard Nixon's career, the latter was compelled to build up a relationship, even if distant, with each one of them. Two other subgroups - the 'New Right' or 'Young Turk' conservatives and the neoconservatives - emerged during the Californian's tenure in the White House, and his trajectory as president was detenninant in shaping the form in which they did so. A seventh and final group, Southern conservatives, had also been part of the movement since the time Nixon entered politics. As a consequence of the 1964 presidential election, they also became a force of political nature within the GOP in 1968, and it was thanks to the travails of the Republican conservative South that Richard Nixon ever became the Republican nominee for president. This VIew of conservatism as constituted by these distinct groupings is embedded within a well-established academic consensus, but of course conservatism does not necessarily need to be understood or approached in these terms. If anything, each one of these groups emerged at a different time, was driven by particular interests, possessed different behavioural patterns and built a distinct relationship with the other conservative sub-families, I There is a significant and coherent body of literature examining the rise of the early conservative movement. See Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books, 1986); Jose Maria Marco, La Nueva Revolucion Americana (Madrid: Ciudadela, 2007); John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin, 2004); Jerome L. Himmelstein, To The Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of Califomi a Press, 1990). For a useful, succinct overview see James A. Hijiya, 'The Conservative 1960s', Journal of American Studies, 37, no. 2 (2003), pp. 201-227. The existing literature has also been enriched by 'in-house' conservative accounts, such as Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America (New York: Free Press, 1999); William Rusher, The Rise of the Right (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1985). 6 as well as with political actors beyond the conservative community such as the Nixon administration itself. On the other hand, the American 'right' was an even larger, even more diverse entity encompassing not only the groups included in this analysis, but also others of a more moderate quality such as the 'Eastern' Republicans of Nelson Rockefeller, Dwight Eisenhower and the Ripon Society, as well as groupings on the extremist fringes ranging from the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi party to the John Birch Society and Alabama's demagogic governor George Corley Wallace. Some scholars have contemplated the entire
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