Cross-posting this over from the Sea Lion Press forums, but I’ve been re-reading Rick Perlstein’s wonderful Nixonland for the past couple of days and I’m really intrigued on what an earlier Nixon Presidency would look like.
The first few chapters of Nixonland give some intriguing insight to Nixon’s 1960 campaign - Nixon tacked hard to the center that year in a bid to shake off the almost thuggish reputation he got over his years in Congress and in Eisenhower’s Administration to make himself more “electable.” While he made some half-hearted sops to the civil rights movement during this period, Nixon openly reversed his anti-union positions from a few years prior and worked to make himself more palatable to organized labor. He openly tried to distance himself from conservatives within the GOP (itself culminating in the YAF attempting to draft Barry Goldwater at the 1960 RNF), and I’m sure most people here are familiar with how Nelson Rockefeller basically wrote the Republican platform that year.
What would Nixon do once in the White House - follow the points laid out in the Treaty of Fifth Avenue and alienate the increasingly influential conservatives, turn hard to the right at the risk of whiplash, or (what I think is the most likely) try and find the Nixonian middle-ground? I’d imagine Nixon would start playing the demagogue come 1964 assuming Dr. King and other major civil rights leaders begin agitating for an end to segregation, and that’s not even addressing how Nixon’s foreign policy would play into that.
The first few chapters of Nixonland give some intriguing insight to Nixon’s 1960 campaign - Nixon tacked hard to the center that year in a bid to shake off the almost thuggish reputation he got over his years in Congress and in Eisenhower’s Administration to make himself more “electable.” While he made some half-hearted sops to the civil rights movement during this period, Nixon openly reversed his anti-union positions from a few years prior and worked to make himself more palatable to organized labor. He openly tried to distance himself from conservatives within the GOP (itself culminating in the YAF attempting to draft Barry Goldwater at the 1960 RNF), and I’m sure most people here are familiar with how Nelson Rockefeller basically wrote the Republican platform that year.
What would Nixon do once in the White House - follow the points laid out in the Treaty of Fifth Avenue and alienate the increasingly influential conservatives, turn hard to the right at the risk of whiplash, or (what I think is the most likely) try and find the Nixonian middle-ground? I’d imagine Nixon would start playing the demagogue come 1964 assuming Dr. King and other major civil rights leaders begin agitating for an end to segregation, and that’s not even addressing how Nixon’s foreign policy would play into that.
Sorry, just stirring.