Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [47]
Nixon also sought to steal George Wallace’s thunder by appropriating his law and order race codes. In his 1968 campaign, Nixon selected Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland as his running mate. Agnew was a surprise pick whose chief qualification was his notorious accusation that black leaders in Baltimore had been complicit in the city’s devastating race riots.20 With Agnew by his side, Nixon reinvented himself as a gunslinging lawman who would save America from dangerous criminals with harsh prison sentences and pithy slogans like “Nixon’s the One.” Of course, the dangerous criminals were implicitly black, and their victims implicitly white. Richard Rovere, a political journalist at the New Yorker, wrote of the Nixon-Agnew law and order campaign:
It is becoming clearer with each passing day that the principal issue this year will be, in a word, race. Nixon and Agnew may insist that they are not using a “code” term for race when they speak of “law and order,” but race is what voters, Negro and white, understand it to mean, just as they did in 1965.21
Law and order was only one element of Nixon’s evolving race strategy. Welfare reform was the second. In 1969, journalist Pete Hamill captured the growing sense of resentment among working-class whites in an article titled “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” The men that Hamill interviewed were fed up with hearing that “400-years-of-slavery bit.” One disgruntled white ironworker seethed:
None of them politicians gives a good goddam. All they worry about is the niggers. And everything is for the niggers. The niggers get the schools. The niggers go to summer camp. The niggers get the new playgrounds. The niggers get nursery schools. And they get it all without workin’. . . They take the welfare and sit out on the stoop drinkin’ cheap wine and throwin’ the bottles on the street. They never gotta walk outta the house. They take the money outta my paycheck and they just turn it over to some lazy son of a bitch who won’t work. I gotta carry him on my back. You know what I am? I’m a sucker. I really am. You shouldn’t have to put up with this. And I’ll tell ya somethin’. There’s a lotta people who just ain’t gonna put up with it much longer.22
A White House advisor forwarded the article to Nixon with the observation that “the bitterness of the urban white worker . . . is a social and political fact of first-rate importance.” Nixon agreed and ordered his speechwriters to craft a welfare reform speech that would appeal to “working poor and tax payers” as opposed to “welfare recipients, unemployed, blacks.”23 Later, Nixon would tell his chief of staff, “The whole problem is really the blacks . . . The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” In case his race prejudice wasn’t obvious enough, Nixon gratuitously added, “There has never in history been an adequate black nation . . . they are the only race of which this is true.”24
One of the people who crafted Nixon’s white persecution narrative was an advisor and speechwriter named Pat Buchanan. Buchanan had been a journalist before joining Nixon’s administration, and he would later become a famous political pundit and third-party presidential candidate. Paunchy, jowly, and a little bit goofy on the surface with an egotistical, amoral, mean-as-hell core, Buchanan has always reminded me of Gene Hackman