HIS 359
The Nixon Years (Annotation)
Robert McCoy
• Timothy Conlan. New Federalism: Intergovernmental Reform
from Nixon to Reagan. The Brookings Institution, 1988.
p.1
Federalism Reform and the Modern State
Since taking office, one of my first priorities has been to repair the machinery of government and to put it in shape for the 1970s. . . . The purpose of all these reforms is . . . to make government more effective as well as more efficient; and to bring an end to its chronic failure to deliver the services it promises.
Richard Nixon, 1969Television Address on Federalism
Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address
p. 76
The National Dimensions of Nixon's New Federalism
During the Nixon presidency the 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.
P.19 Rationalizing policies were at the heart of Richard Nixon's domestic agenda. Throughout his six years in office, Nixon made repeated efforts to reform and streamline the plethora of federal assistance programs to states and localities, to improve program efficiency, to decentralize decisionmaking, and to restrain--but not halt--the unbridled growth of public programs. Many means were employed to gain these ends, notably, grant consolidation, general revenue sharing, and an assortment of intergovernmental management initiatives.
Although the Nixon administration's policy objectives remained relatively constant, its strategy for achieving them did not. Initially, the administration relied on block grants and revenue sharing to implement its broad plan for management-oriented reforms in intergovernmental relations. These initiatives grew out of the tradition of incremental administrative reforms that extended back to the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
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• Richard M. Nixon:
Politician, President, Administrator,
Book by Leon Friedman, William F. Levantrosser; Greenwood Press, 1991. page 275
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15 MICHAEL P. JR. BALZANO INTRODUCTION As I was looking at the program and noting the titles of some panels convening today--Social Welfare, Defense, Military Policy, Foreign Policy, the Protest Movement, Watergate Revisited, etc.--I could not help but think about the interrelationship between the presidential policies that are being discussed in those panels and that of the role of the Silent Majority. Dr. Friedman commented earlier that one of the dichotomies plaguing scholars' writing about the Nixon years was the controversy over Nixon's policies on the one hand and Nixon's unexplained electoral landslide on the other. Today I would like to shed some light on that dichotomy. I will argue that Nixon's overwhelming victory was not in spite of his controversial policies, but because the vast Silent Majority agreed with Nixon on the issues. Further, I will argue that the Silent Majority's endorsement of Nixon's policies was not silent. It was quite vocal in its support and activist in its behavior. In my view, the relationship between this panel and the other panels discussing socalled "controversial" presidential policy is that the Silent Majority more than counterbalanced the antiwar protesters and social activists seeking to stop Nixon's policies. In short, it was the Silent Majority that gave Nixon the support needed to pursue those policies. THE NEW MAJORITY Before I begin, I want to offer some thoughts on the title of today's panel. This panel should be placed in historical context and retitled the "New Majority," as opposed to the "Silent Majority." During the sixties, the titles of two widely read political books contained the word "majority." Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg authored The Real Majority, a sociopolitical treatise on the average -259- |
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Richard
M. Nixon: Politician, President, Administrator,
Book by Leon Friedman, William F. Levantrosser; Greenwood Press, 1991
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.
p.361
19
The Supreme Court Under Siege: The Battle over Nixon's Nominees
JOSEPH CALLUORI
Throughout the 1968 primaries and the presidential campaign, Richard Nixon chided the Supreme Court for "hamstringing the peace forces" in their fight against rising lawlessness. 1 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. The fate of his nominees, however, demonstrates the legal and political checks on the president's ability to control the composition of the Supreme Court.