How Did We Get Here? by Robert Dallek

Author:Robert Dallek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Richard M. Nixon

America in Crisis

Johnson’s decision not to run again opened the way for other Democrats to seek the presidency. By June 1968, the party’s front-runner was Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother, former attorney general and now senator from New York. Winning the California primary largely assured his nomination, though it will always remain uncertain because he was shot and killed by Sirhan B. Sirhan, a Palestinian migrant to the United States who saw Kennedy as an advocate of Israel and an enemy of Palestinian rights. At the Democratic convention that summer in Chicago, marked by street riots protesting America’s continuing war in Vietnam, the party nominated Hubert H. Humphrey, former Minnesota senator and Johnson vice president who, despite dissent from Johnson’s Vietnam policy, was identified with the unpopular president and his failing war.

Humphrey’s opponent was Richard Nixon, whose service as a congressman, senator, and vice president made him readily recognizable. It was surprising that in a time of considerable domestic turmoil—riots in inner cities, marches and violent opposition to the Vietnam War, when a French travel agent advertised “See America While It Lasts”—that the country would turn to two of its most familiar political figures as possible successors to Johnson. It spoke perhaps to the eagerness among many for some reassurance that the nation could sustain its system of government.

Richard Nixon could not measure up to the test of character usually required of a presidential candidate: He had a reputation as “Tricky Dick,” someone who had lied to the public in his runs for the House and the Senate. And like Joe McCarthy, he was notorious for a history of character assassination, exceeding the underhandedness of LBJ. But his long career in national politics could help him restore public order. To begin with, he was seen as an ordinary American. He was born and grew up in Southern California where he attended public schools and Whittier College, a school with four hundred students twelve miles east of Los Angeles, and close enough to his home where he could live and save money on dormitory fees. He excelled in his studies, debating, and school politics, winning election as student body president in his junior year. In 1934, at age twenty-one, he graduated and won a scholarship to Duke University School of Law. Despite a fine record at Duke, which made him third in his class at graduation in 1937, he could not find a position in a distinguished law firm while the Depression continued to beset the country. Instead, he returned to Southern California, where he took a job with a local law firm.

Although he became a partner in the firm in 1939, he was never keenly interested in law practice. After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Nixon, following fourteen months in Washington at the Office of Price Administration, joined the navy, where he served until September 1945, when he accepted an invitation to run in 1946 as the Republican nominee for a House seat from California’s twelfth district.

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