Yaolee Chen

HIS 359 (Class Discussion)

The Nixon Years

1. The Silent Majority in the 1968 presidential election was the blacks, but the New Majority in the 1972 election was those who supported his anti-war policy.

2. Richard Nixon’s goals and achievements in economic: Richard Nixon response for the elder program and the unemployment program more than JFK or LBJ.

From 1969 to 1972, the president and his chief advisers recommended the federalization of assistance to the needy aged and handicapped, the indexation of Social Security payments to reflect increases in the cost of living, and the expansion of aid to students wishing to enter institutions of higher learning. The administration also proposed an expanded program of aid to low income families and considered recommendations of a special presidential commission for changing the form of federal assistance to elementary and secondary schools. But, neither of these proposals was enacted.

3. Nixon’s planned to stop the war and put the money on the welfare programs. He designed a “New Federalism”, which is:

[T]he federal government dramatically increased entitlement expenditures, enacted new regulatory statutes, created a federalized program of income assistance payments to the elderly poor, established the first major public employment program since the New Deal, and launched an aggressive program of wage and price controls to regulate the entire national economy. (Timothy Conlan. New Federalism: Intergovernmental Reform from Nixon to Reagan. The Brookings Institution, 1988. p.76)

4. The election of 1972 was a landslide was because “The 1972 Nixon reelection campaign was the first presidential campaign to experience large-scale, effective disclosure of the sources of campaign funding and the last to rely for its financing on large-scale private contributions” (Leon Friedman, William F. Levantrosser Richard M. Nixon: Politician, President, Administrator, Greenwood Press, 1991)

The events surrounded the break-in at Watergate were: the Vietnam War, Students Movement, Women’s Movement and the hostiles from the leaders in the White House:

From the Court, to white southerners especially, Nixon implied that the Court had gone too far in attempting to redress the claims of blacks and other minorities. Having campaigned against the Court, President Nixon could plausibly argue that voters had given him a mandate to change the personnel and, consequently, the ideological direction of the Supreme Court. He ultimately claimed the exclusive right to determine who sits on the Court.

From the Congress,

. . save in times like the extraordinary Hundred Days of 1933 -- times virtually ruled out by definition at mid-century -- a President will often be unable to obtain Congressional action on his terms or even to halt action he opposes. The reverse is equally accepted: Congress is often frustrated by the President. (Richard E. Neustadt, in Presidential Power)

I have watched the Congress from either the inside or the outside, man and boy, for more than 40 years, and I've never seen a Congress that didn't eventually take the measure of the President it was dealing with. (Lyndon B. Johnson, in impromptu remarks to departmental lobbyists, January 1965)

What crisis ensured:

6. Watergate was an aberration and the entire epixode was a part of a larger pattern of abuse of power: