1968 - Mark Kurlansky [210]
To the astute observer, Nixon’s strategy, the new Republican strategy, was first presented at the Republican convention in Miami when he chose Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew. Many thought the choice was a mistake. Given Rockefeller’s popularity, Nixon-Rockefeller would have been a dream ticket. Even if Rockefeller wouldn’t accept the number two spot, New York mayor John Lindsay, a handsome, well-liked liberal who had helped write the Kerner Commission report on racial violence, had made it clear that he was eager to run as Nixon’s vice president. Conservative Nixon with liberal Lindsay would have brought to the Republican Party the full spectrum of American politics. Instead Nixon turned to the Right, picking a little-known and not much loved archconservative, with views, especially on race and law and order, that were so reactionary that to many he seemed an outright bigot.
Agnew, sensitive to the unusually hostile response to his nomination, complained, “It’s being made to appear that I’m a little to the right of King Lear.” The press took the obvious follow-up question, Why was King Lear a rightist? Agnew replied with a smile, “Well, he reserved to himself the right to behead people, and that’s a rightist position.” Quickly the smile vanished as he talked about the reception he was getting in the party and press. “If John Lindsay had been the candidate, there would have been the same outburst from the South and accolades from the Northeast.” This was exactly the point. Agnew was part of a geographic strategy, what was known in politics as a “southern strategy.”
For one hundred years, southern politics had remained frozen in time. The Democratic Party had been the party of John Caldwell Calhoun, the Yale-educated South Carolinian who fought in the decades leading up to the Civil War for the southern plantation/slave-owning way of life under the banner of states’ rights. To white southerners, the Republican Party was the hated Yankee party of Abraham Lincoln that had forced them to release their Negro property. After Reconstruction, neither party had much to offer the Negro, so for another century white southerners stayed true to their party and the Democrats could count on a solid block of Democratic states in the South. The point George Wallace was making in his independent runs for president was that southern Democrats wanted something different from what the Democratic Party was offering, even though they were not going to become Republicans. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was expressing the same idea as early as 1948 when he ran against Truman as the candidate for president for a party significantly named the States’ Rights Party.
In 1968 Thurmond, Abe Fortas’s harshest interrogator, committed the once unspeakable act of becoming a Republican. He was an early supporter of Nixon’s and worked hard for him at the Miami convention after getting Nixon’s promise that he would not pick a running mate who was distasteful to the South. So Lindsay had never really been in the running, though he didn’t know this.
In 1964, after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, close associates said he was depressed and talked of his having just signed over the entire South to the Republican Party. This was why he and Humphrey had adamantly opposed seating the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic convention. The inconsistent support from the president, attorney general, and other government agencies that the civil rights movement experienced was the result of an impossible juggling act the Democrats wanted to perform—promoting civil rights and keeping the southern vote.
Many white liberals and blacks, including Martin Luther King, had always been distrustful of the Kennedys and Johnson because they knew these were Democrats who wanted to keep the white southern vote. John Kennedy, in his narrow