The Greatest Honor History Can Bestow...
[Part 1 of an ongoing series]
1969-1971:
Richard M. Nixon ✞/Spiro T. Agnew (Republican) [1]
'68 def. Hubert H. Humphrey/Edmund S. Muskie (Democratic), George C. Wallace/Curtis LeMay (American Independent)
1971-1971: Spiro T. Agnew/Vacant (Republican)
1971-1975:
Spiro T. Agnew */John G. Tower (Republican) [2]
'72 def. Edmund S. Muskie/Daniel K. Inouye (Democratic), John Lindsay/scattered (Independent Republican)
1975-1975: John G. Tower/Vacant (Republican)
1975-1976: John G. Tower •/Melvin R. Laird (Republican) [3]
1976-1976: Melvin R. Laird/Vacant (Republican)
1976-1977: Melvin R. Laird (Republican)/Ellsworth Bunker (Independent) [4]
1977-1981:
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr./James E. Carter (Democratic) [5]
'76 def. Melvin R. Laird/George H. W. Bush (Republican), Wally Hickel/Pete McCloskey (Independent Republican)
[1] Before Richard M. Nixon's tragic death, commentators spoke of the death of John F. Kennedy as a watershed moment, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The two certainly had a lot of similarities beyond both running in the 1960 election. Both were big dreamers who left behind unfinished legacies - Kennedy with civil rights and the space program, Nixon with ending the Vietnam War, getting the economy on track, and ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment. Both of them were ready young, with Nixon being elected to the Vice Presidency at 39 and Kennedy being elected to the Presidency at 43. Both of them fought adversity on their way, Kennedy with his health problems and the headwinds of anti-Catholic prejudice and Nixon with his family's modest means. Both of them were staunch anti-communists, foreign policy wonks, strong politicians.
Both of them died tragically, Kennedy shot dead in a Dallas motorcade and Nixon bleeding out on a Bethesda operating table as doctors tried to remove a clot from the President's left leg, a consequence of his chronic phlebitis. Both of them left behind the image of a martyr - Kennedy shot dead by a Communist and Nixon refusing to seek medical attention as he fought to see peace in Vietnam, détente with China and the Soviet Union, and prosperity at home - even as later historians re-evaluate their legacies. Both left tricky situations for their successors, Kennedy with Vietnam and civil rights and Nixon with both of those same things and an economic crisis atop them.
It would be reductionist to call Richard Nixon the Republican Jack Kennedy. But it wouldn't exactly be wrong.
[2] But Spiro Agnew was certainly no Lyndon Johnson. His presidency was white lower-middle-class alienation made manifest, the backlash to the civil rights movement and the welfare state in the hands of a genuine believer rather than someone like Nixon, who wanted to use that anger but didn't share the motives of his voters. Agnew neutered the EPA Nixon had established, closed off the possibility of détente and a Presidential visit to China, tore up plans for desegregation, and tried in vain to stabilize the dollar and keep the good economy of the '60s running into the era of balance-of-payments issues and the Nixon shock. But none of it worked, not really. As the President went into the 1972 election, with Ed Muskie well ahead of him in every poll and Pete McCloskey looking like Agnew's Gene McCarthy (they even sounded similar), a man from the Committee to Re-Elect the President came to his office.
In the end, it wasn't Vietnam that brought Agnew down, with Vietnamization coming at the cost of thousands or millions dead in bombing campaigns and famine and the collapse of the rickety dictatorship that was South Vietnam as the President blocked refugees to save American jobs. It wasn't stagflation, the two-headed giant that stomped on the American economy and destroyed jobs and regional economies even despite Agnew's genuine efforts, causing poverty and crime and sickness and death. It wasn't the bribes he took in Maryland or in Washington, or even the blackmailed journalists courtesy of CREEP and the Plumbers who covered them up. It wasn't the subversion of the Muskie campaign or the engineered shambles of the Lindsay campaign.
No, it was Greece. Agnew hadn't started the Papadopoulos dictatorship, but even under Nixon he had openly supported it and met with its leaders. And when he became President, he backed Papadopoulos - until he seemed weak, at which point he backed a coup against him, "like Kennedy did to Diem". And after all the blood - of the students of Greece's universities, of the purged naval officers, of the dissidents and poets hauled into the police headquarters on Bouboulina Street and the ESA facilities - America had enough, especially after Vietnam.
Mark Hatfield and George McGovern got together again to put forward another resolution demanding the US get out of Greece. When Agnew blithely ignored it, Congress dusted off the articles of impeachment left from Wright Patman's failed attempt. Agnew fought to the bitter end, but only served to alienate more and more of his former supporters. In the end, he did go quietly.
[3] The Presidency of John Tower was a curious one. One of the earliest Republicans in the South to reach high office, and one of the few Southern politicians of his generation not to openly race-bait - but also a key opponent of the Civil Rights Act. An intellectual, who came from academia and brought Savile Row suits and a thoroughgoing Anglophilia with him from the London School of Economics.
But by 1975, he was less well-known for his record, an undistinguished one of conservatism and support for more military spending, and better-known for his slow collapse over the course of his Vice Presidency, turning to drink and perhaps to corruption. Maybe it started with the divorce. Or maybe the pressure of knowing that history would not regard Spiro Agnew's #2 well got to him. But by the time he was inaugurated, John Tower was not considered a respectable enough figure to steer the ship of state through the impeachment of a sitting president.
Many people wanted him to resign immediately. Tower himself, perhaps, wanted to resign immediately. But that would have put Tip O'Neill, the Speaker who leapfrogged over Carl Albert and Hale Boggs to win his office specifically promising to impeach Agnew, in office. And to a restive nation and a party afraid that Agnew would start hollering about a coup, making O'Neill or the Democrats who supported him look like it was a simple matter of self-interest or a partisan power-grab was simply not acceptable.
So over the winter of 1975 - as the Ioannides regime retrenched in the hopes of becoming "Franco on the Aegean", as a Falangist coup against the new King of Spain devolved into another Civil War, as Indira Gandhi's seizure of power in India came to a bloody end and the alliance of convenience between traditionalists and Marxists had to be negotiated, as Chairman Mao's health declined more and more - the government of the United States was focused on negotiating an end to its own crisis of leadership.
[4] Melvin Laird was not the top choice to resolve those problems. Secretary of Defense under Nixon and part of Agnew's term, he had backed the Agnew Doctrine, though he had chosen to leave the Cabinet after the 1972 election. But he was a Nixonite without the baggage of most other Nixonites, and that seemed to count for something at least.
His presidency was one focused on putting out fires. The Spanish debacle saw American recognition of the royalists - any Americans concerned about the lack of democracy were mollified by the fact that the other options were Francoites and Marxists - but no direct aid, and pressure more towards bringing the parties to the negotiating table than anything else. Such was the Laird Doctrine, and it paid dividends - Nixon's old Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, became a national hero in Namibia for brokering South African recognition and withdrawal in the São Paulo Accords, while the Chinese leadership crisis ended with no aggressive actions, at the very least. Some saw the hand of the CIA in the new Indian constitution, with the Hindustani Federation built on nationalist and liberal lines and little influence from Sundarayya's input, but open intervention (or even the hint thereof) was out of style.
It seemed like that would be it for the Laird administration, and for the Republican Party's 8-year spell in government. Laird had ruled out running for the nomination, and after a spirited campaign, another Nixon loyalist who had gotten out while the going was good - former Texas Governor and "Democrat for Nixon" John Connally - was in the hot seat. After Agnew and Tower, Connally was considered the inevitable loser, but he was likely to at least give a respectable performance. Immediately to his left was Wally Hickel, yet another former Cabinet member but one who had resigned in protest even before Nixon's death, running as an "Independent Republican" to return the party to its Eisenhowerian roots - his running mate was former primary candidate Pete McCloskey, fired up enough by Agnew's abuses of power to run against him in '72 and ratfucked out of his House seat in retaliation only to come back as an independent two years later. And next over from there was Arthur Schlesinger, already the anointed inevitable 41st President, the court historian of Camelot who ran as a sort of appeal to the better angels of the American nature, or of the heavenly choir of public opinion that, in Schattschneider's immortal words, "sings with a prominent upper-class accent." It was all laid out so neatly - Laird would retire as a statesman without having to seek approval from the voters or spend time campaigning, and American politics would return to normalcy.
Except that Connally went down over milk money (of all the things), and the Republican National Convention nominated Laird after a messy panic. As Laird criss-crossed the country - on a reversion-to-the-mean economic bounce from the Agnew years, and looking into a bright future. Laird could almost believe he would win.
[5] But instead, it was Arthur Schlesinger. A historian and the son of a historian, the dorky-looking academic and critic of the "imperial presidency" seemed like a safe pair of hands. On a platform of making the United States less of a hegemon and more the "first among equals" of the free world through diplomacy and trade, of bringing about peace at the home front through a renewed War on Poverty, of pushing to bring minorities into a common American identity through demanding both tolerance from the majority and assimilation from minorities, of stopping the inflationary spiral that was just beginning in 1976, and most of all of bringing the power of the Presidency under control, Schlesinger won a solid majority of the popular vote and a borderline landslide in the Electoral College.
How did it go so wrong? Part of it was Schlesinger's inexperience with government. He had seen it, but from the outside, and he staffed his administration primarily with academics - though sometimes, as with Secretary of the Treasury John Kenneth Galbraith, they turned out to be competent and on-the-ball, other times that very much did not happen, as with Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Lewis Mumford. Often the flaw was not merely that the academics were out of touch but that they sought to fit humans into their models rather than fitting the models against actual humans - new Secretary of Energy Alvin Weinberg, in alliance with Vice President Jimmy Carter, responded to the outcry over nuclear power after a partial meltdown at the Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant near South Bend, Indiana, by pushing to make nuclear construction less subject to public pressure.
And often the problem was conventional wisdom. "Schlesinger", a later historian wrote, "had seemingly come to the conclusion, after decades of studying government, that the possibilities of government were limited to a really quite narrow space." He talked a big game about peace abroad, but when the Republican Party quietly torpedoed negotiations over the Panama Canal, he let Richard Holbrooke talk him into an unexpectedly bloody and contentious "intervention" there aimed at deposing Roberto Díaz. He talked about a renewed War on Poverty, but that turned out to largely just mean tax credits on new housing and more funding for school lunches. And the only part of his cultural agenda that passed, restricting immigration, was the only part palatable to the right wing.
It was no surprise that Noam Chomsky, who had been criticizing Schlesinger for a decade and a half, announced he would be running as a third-party candidate. It wasn't much of one when Frank Church announced a primary run against Schlesinger - Church had been a critic of the administration ever since it had become clear how many of Schlesinger's promises were hollow. When Ted Kennedy very pointedly refused to endorse Schlesinger's re-election, that raised a few eyebrows. Then Church nearly won the primary in New Hampshire and did win the primary in Wisconsin, then Schlesinger didn't clinch the nomination until Pennsylvania against Church and a last-minute push by former Texas governor Ben Barnes. The campaign rallied a little after the conventions - Schlesinger defeated his robotic opposite number, Illinois Senator Donald Rumsfeld, there, and then even received a bit of an October Surprise when a memorandum from Rumsfeld's service in Treasury under Laird surfaced in which he plotted to deliberately overheat the economy to try to win the 1976 election.
It wasn't enough, not nearly. Schlesinger hadn't even won his first state before crucial victories in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York pushed Rumsfeld over the edge - in the end, he was limited to Minnesota, Hawaii, and DC. But the final ignominy came when the Electoral College voted. Thanks to a shock win by Noam Chomsky in Massachusetts and two faithless electors in Hawaii, Schlesinger didn't even have the honor of placing second in the electoral vote.