1968 - Mark Kurlansky [211]
Lyndon Johnson—they didn’t even let him talk for the first six months. It took him six months to learn how to say Nee-Grow.
“Nig-ger-a-o . . .”
“O.K., ah, let’s hear it one more time, Lyndon now.”
“Nig-ger-a-o . . .”
After the Civil Rights Act, white bigots, if not blacks and white liberals, had no doubt about where Johnson stood. In the 1964 election Johnson defeated Goldwater by a landslide. Republicans bitterly blamed northern liberal Republicans, especially Nelson Rockefeller, for not getting behind the ticket. But in the South, for the first time, the Republican candidate got the majority of white votes. In a few states, enough black voters, including newly registered voters, turned out, combined with traditional die-hard southern democrats and liberals who hoped to change the South, to deny Goldwater a regionwide victory. But the only states that Goldwater carried, aside from his home state of Arizona, were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Now Nixon was realigning the party. “States’ rights” and “law and order,” two thinly veiled appeals to racism, were mainstays of his campaign. States’ rights, from the time of Calhoun, meant not letting the federal government interfere with the denial of black rights in southern states. “Law and order” had become a big issue because it meant using Daley-type police tactics against not only antiwar demonstrators, but black rioters as well. With each black riot, more white “law and order” voters came along, people who, like Norman Mailer, were “getting tired of Negroes and their rights.” The popular term for it was “white backlash,” and Nixon was after the backlash vote. Even that most moderate of black groups, the NAACP, recognized this. Philip Savage, NAACP director for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, called Agnew and Nixon “primarily backlash candidates.” He said that having Agnew on the ticket “insures the Republican Party that it will not get a significant black vote in November.”
In 1968 there were still black Republicans. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the only black senator and the first since Reconstruction—a moderate social progressive who served with Lindsay on the Kerner Commission—was a Republican. The Democratic Party had not yet become the black party. It was the nomination of Agnew that changed that. Most of the 78 black delegates to the Miami convention, out of a total of 2,666, went home either unwilling or unable to back the ticket. One black delegate told The New York Times, “There is no way in hell I can justify Nixon and Agnew to Negroes.” A black Chicago delegate said, “They are telling us they want the white backlash and that they don’t give a damn about us.” The Republican Party lost its most famous black supporter when Jackie Robinson, the first black to break the color line in Major League baseball and one of the country’s most highly respected sports heroes, announced that he was quitting Rockefeller’s Republican staff and going to work for the Democrats to help defeat Nixon, calling the Nixon-Agnew ticket “racist.”
Accurately defining the political party division of the future, Robinson said, “I think what the Republican Party has forgotten is that decent white people are going to take a real look at this election, and they’re going to join with black America, with Jewish America, with Puerto Ricans, and say that we can’t go backward, we can’t tolerate a ticket that is racist in nature and that is inclined to let the South have veto powers over what is happening.”
One of the advantages of Agnew as a running mate was that he could run a little wildly to the right, while Nixon, statesmanlike, could strike a restrained pose. Agnew insisted that the antiwar movement was led by foreign communist conspirators, but when challenged on who these conspirators might