Posted on 07/09/2014 12:24:43 PM PDT by Kaslin
Shortly before Richard Nixon was going to formally announce that he would be running again for president in 1968, Pat Buchanan and Rose Mary Woods, two of his closest aides, presented him with an idea.
"Given the multiple crises confronting the nation -- race conflict, soaring crime, inflation, the war in Vietnam, the mounting Soviet missile threat -- and the difficulty of dealing with them all at once," Buchanan writes in his new book "The Greatest Comeback," "we suggested that Nixon in a single declaration destroy the image of him as a consummate politician and tell the nation 'that the next president should be a one-term president.'"
Nixon dismissed the idea of term-limiting himself. He did not want, as Buchanan relates it, to be "a lame duck from his inaugural."
"In retrospect, Nixon was right," says Buchanan. "Yet when one looks at what he accomplished in his first term and what became of his second, he would today be listed, like Polk, who sought and served but a single term, among the near-great presidents."
Wherever Nixon's merits and demerits place him among American presidents, Buchanan's first-person chronicle of how Nixon climbed back from a humiliating defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election to win the presidency in 1968 is not just a unique and enduring look at one of this nation's most interesting political campaigns but at a decade that changed America forever.
Buchanan left his job on the editorial page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat at the end of 1965 to become an assistant to Nixon, who was then planning to spend 1966 campaigning for Republicans running in that year's midterm elections.
The GOP was then still reeling from Barry Goldwater's 1964 defeat, and the question was whether the party, in 1968, would fall back into the hands of a liberal establishment headed by New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller -- or turn to Gov. George Romney of Michigan.
The GOP did neither, of course. In "The Greatest Comeback" -- which is a page-turning narrative, not an analysis -- Buchanan tells the story of Nixon's 1968 victory from the perspective of a man who travelled with, advised, and was loyal to Nixon, but is nonetheless candid about both Nixon's faults and his virtues.
"When Nixon trusted you he would let down his guard, and I got to know him better than any other boss I ever knew," Buchanan writes.
Buchanan anchored the right flank of Nixon's immediate staff, and part of his job was to help keep the conservative movement -- which had backed Goldwater in 1964 -- in Nixon's camp for 1968.
Beyond that was a longer-term political vision. "The crucial elements of the new majority I had in mind," writes Buchanan, "were the solid centrist GOP base that had stood by Nixon in 1960, the rising conservative movement, to which I belonged, the 'northern Catholic ethnics' of German, Irish, Italian, Polish and other East European descent, and the Southern Protestants, who saw themselves as abandoned by a Democratic Party moving leftward."
In this vein, Buchanan, who would later become President Ronald Reagan's communications director, sent Nixon a memo before the 1968 Republican convention urging that he pick the first-term California governor as his running mate.
"We are going to have to be bold to win this one," Buchanan wrote his boss. "I can currently think of nothing bolder than to put the hero of 'Bedtime for Bonzo' on the ticket."
Spiro Agnew got the nod instead.
Buchanan's book is a great story told by a great storyteller. Along the way are first-person anecdotes that not only reveal how Buchanan's boss plotted and executed what may indeed have been the greatest comeback in American political history, but also how he prepared himself to use the presidency he won to deal with great international problems, including the Vietnam War and U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and China.
Then it could hardly have been imagined that two decades later, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, America would win the Cold War. Or that two decades after that, we would still be fighting a domestic cultural war that first began overtly manifesting itself in our towns and cities as Nixon inched his way toward victory in 1968.
Even though this book ends with Nixon's election, Buchanan makes clear he has only arrived at the middle of the story. Volume two will be set at the White House.
Correction, reread post #54.
Yeah, those are some timely facts.
Got anything else?
Yes, stop wasting my time.
Interesting. Thanks.
I have these conversations because not only do I enjoy talking about, grappling with, and thereby, refining my own views on this stuff, but I'm hopeful others might be following along and gain some insight as well.
:-)
:)
September 29, 2006
Patrick J. Buchanan
How could we level the playing field? Simple. Impose an “equalizing fee” on imports equal to the rebates. Take the billions raised, and cut taxes on U.S. companies, especially in production. Create a level playing field for U.S. goods and services in foreign markets, and increase the competitiveness of U.S. companies in our own home market by reducing their tax load.
U.S. trade deficits would shrivel overnight. And jobs and factories lately sent abroad would start coming home.
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-how-to-bring-manufacturing-back-home-109
No Donna, it’s your turn to reasonably reply and answer substantively to my Posts #16 and #54. If all you can do is make semi-incoherent one liners or copy and paste a Buchanan passage, then forget about it, you’re wasting my time.
Nationalism versus Globalism
A speech by Pat Buchanan
Five years ago, historian Christopher Lasch published The Revolt of the Elites [1995]. It was a book about how our national elite was literally seeding from America. Pointing out the huge and growing gap in income between the elite and the middle class, Lasch argued that a more ominous gap existed in how each perceived America.
The old elite, Lasch wrote, had a sense of obligation to country and community. But the new ruling class, more merit based, brainy and mobile, congregates on the coasts and puts patriotism far down the list in hierarchy of values. Indeed, said Lasch, “It is a question of whether they think of themselves as American at all.”
Lasch did not mention names, but the new elite is not difficult to identify. A few years ago, Ralph Nader wrote to the executives of 100 giant US corporations, suggesting they might show their loyalty to “the country that bred them, built them, subsidised the and defended them.” At the annual stockholders’ meeting, Ralph said, why not begin with a pledge of allegiance to the flag?
Only one company responded favourably. Half did not respond at all. Many sent back angry letters declaring that they were not American companies at all. Motorola denounced the request as “political and nationalistic.” Other companies likened the idea of a pledge of allegiance to loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era. Why were the heads of these corporations so outraged? Because for years they have been trying to sever their bonds to the country of their birth.
In 1997 the head of Boeing told one interviewer he would be delighted if, in twenty years hence no-one thought of Boeing as an American company. “My goal,” said Phil Condit, “is to rid [Boeing] of its image as an American group.”
http://www.spearhead.co.uk/0003-pb.html
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