Richard Nixon served as the 37th President of the United States from 1969 until his resignation in 1974. Elected to America’s highest office in the tumultuous 1968 presidential election, Nixon’s presidency is one of the most contradictory in the country’s history. Progressive reformer or reactionary racist? Peace frog or warmonger? Fiery populist or isolated introvert? In short, you can make a case for him being all of these things at once.
Nixon’s life is a lesson in resilience and perseverance; Nixon was no quitter, and had a public life spanning from the 1950s until his death in 1994. Remarkably, Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s 2016 presidential ticket was the first successful Republican ticket not to include either Richard Nixon or a member of the Bush family since 1928, which tells you something about Nixon’s staying power.
My guest for this conversation is Lilly Goren (@gorenlj on Twitter), professor of political science at Carroll University in Wisconsin. Lilly’s next book, about the politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is coming out later this year.
Richard Nixon served as the 37th President of the United States from 1969 until his resignation in 1974. Elected to America’s highest office in the tumultuous 1968 presidential election, Nixon’s presidency is one of the most contradictory in the country’s history. Progressive reformer or reactionary racist? Peace frog or warmonger? Fiery populist or isolated introvert? In short, you can make a case for him being all of these things at once.
Nixon’s life is a lesson in resilience and perseverance; Nixon was no quitter, and had a public life spanning from the 1950s until his death in 1994. Remarkably, Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s 2016 presidential ticket was the first successful Republican ticket not to include either Richard Nixon or a member of the Bush family since 1928, which tells you something about Nixon’s staying power.
My guest for this conversation is Lilly Goren (@gorenlj on Twitter), professor of political science at Carroll University in Wisconsin. Lilly’s next book, about the politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is coming out later this year.
Hello and welcome to the hated in the dead with Tom Leeman before we proceed with today's episode, I'd like to direct you towards another podcast I've been listening to a lot recently. UCL is uncovering politics is a brilliant podcast investigating many different political debates here in Britain and in the wider world and is chaired by my colleague at UCL constitution unit, Alan Rennick. With my friends, James cleaver and Colin Kelly, helping Allen research and prepare episodes. Later latest episode examines Shifting Paradigms within the Politics of Climate Change. Like the hated in the dead, uncovering politics is on Apple podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. So do check it out. Today's episode of the hated and the dead concerns the 37th President of the United States, Richard Milhouse Nixon, elected to America's highest office in the tumultuous 1968 presidential election, Nixon's presidency is one of the most contradictory in the country's history. Though Nixon scored impressive victories in foreign affairs, he led America through one of its most psychologically turbulent periods. The Watergate scandal, which ultimately saw Nixon resign the presidency amid fears of his imprisonment in 1974. Whilst his presidency saw the enactment of progressive civil rights and environmental legislation, Nixon often derided proponents of racial equality, and the cleaner environment, as subversives who threatened the internal security of the United States. Nixon is without doubt one of the strangest people ever to claim the mantle of leader of the free world that he faces stiff competition for that crown. In spite of this, Nixon's life is a lesson in resilience and perseverance. Nixon was no quitter, and had a public life spanning from the 1950s until his death in 1994. Remarkably, Donald Trump and Mike Pence his 2016 ticket, was the first successful Republican ticket not to include either Richard Nixon are a member of the Bush family since 1928, which tells you something about Nixon staying power. My guest for today's conversation is Lily Goren, professor of political science at Carroll University in Wisconsin. Lily's next book about the politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is coming out later this year. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to introduce Richard Nixon. Hi, Lily, how are you? I'm fine. How are you? I'm great. Yeah, I hope the weather is slightly better in in Wisconsin than it is in London. Today is a beautiful day here in Wisconsin, so bad to hear. Richard Nixon is sort of the ultimate divisive American president. He split opinion before his time in office, he was president between 1969 and 1974. He split opinion whilst he was in office, and he still splits opinion today. I want to open with one of the more famous quotes of his political career. I'm just going to read it. He said, I leave you gentleman now. And you will write it you will interpret and that's your right. But as I leave you, I want to know, just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because gentleman, this is my last press conference. Nixon said those words in 1962. Can you explain why he was saying those words? And the stage that Nixon was at in his career, when he said that, oh, Nixon's career was one of sort of rehabilitation on any number of fronts and over any number of times. And in in 1962, I believe that particular you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, was in relation to a last gubernatorial race in California, when he was running against Jerry Brown senior I believe. And Jerry Brown Jr. has recently served as California's Governor again. But Nixon had run unsuccessfully in 1964 President and then he'd gone back to his home state of California and had run for governor and had lost and so he basically was saying to the press that they would no longer have him to kick around anymore in 1962. But yet we know he comes back. Yes, I suppose the The interesting part about him saying this is my last press conference is that it was far from his last press conference. It as you said he'd lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. He didn't last this particular California Governor's race. Two years later, he'd been born in California in 1913. He grew up in the state. How important do you think his growing up in California on the west coast was? Do you think it had much of an effect on his politics? I'm not sure how much of it how much of an effect it had on his politics, I think it had an impact on his conception of where he was positioned within the Republican establishment as a, as a politician as a candidate, that he wasn't from the East Coast, particularly when he was moving into politics. And that he had this upbringing in Yorba Linda, California, which, you know, most people haven't heard of, except that Richard Nixon was born there. So it wasn't as if he was coming from Los Angeles, or San Diego or Sacramento. And so I think that his his experience growing up in California, was one where he was very active in politics. And when I tell my students, you know, California is the heart of the Republican Party. They're like, what? Like, let's say, Well, who are the presidents who have come from California, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And they are, of course, befuddled by our current concept of California politics. But in Nixon's time, of course, the West was fairly Republican. And he was part of that kind of approach to politics, that was coming out of the sort of western part of the United States, which was still a bit of the frontier in a certain sense. There's so much that's controversial about Nixon, I sort of organised this episode in a slightly different way, which is why I've come in at the this, what seems like a fairly a fairly important point in Nixon's career, which is probably as low point or one of them 1962. The Democrats were in the White House at the time from 1961 until 1969, first under John F. Kennedy, who was of course, assassinated in 1963. And then under Lyndon Johnson, who was elected president in a landslide in 1964. I suppose the two issues that dominated Johnson's presidency were civil rights on the kind of domestic front and the war in Vietnam. In terms of foreign policy, those two issues, I think, explain. Or they help to explain the reemergence of Richard Nixon onto the political stage in the later part of the 1960s. What was Nixon doing during the Johnson presidency, he was essentially licking his wounds, in a certain sense. And I would add on if we are thinking about the sort of Kennedy Johnson years and administration, particularly the Johnson period, not only civil rights in Vietnam, which are very important, but also Johnson's push with regard to the Great Society, and a lot of the social welfare policies and regulations that were part of the social, that were part of the Great Society, which was, you know, to some degree to eradicate poverty in the United States, and so forth. And so Nixon had been in the Eisenhower administration, which had preceded the Kennedy and Johnson year, so he had been vice president for eight years. So we had had this experience, he, of course, had been elected to the House in the Senate before he was vice president. And during his periods. Also, at that point, he was involved in a lot of the anti communist pursuits. So he had this kind of background of being very active in politics, having won national election as the Vice President on the the Eisenhower ticket, and then he loses in a very, very close race to John F. Kennedy. And, you know, of course, there's a lot of discussion about if you watch the debates, or if you listen to the debates on the radio, who you thought won, because of the presentation, physical presentation of Kennedy versus Nixon, versus the audio presentation of Kennedy versus Nixon, and Nixon, whatever anybody else may have to say about him was very smart man. And so there he may be divisive, but he was also very intelligent. And and so Nixon was also not only intelligent in understanding policy and understanding, ideas and concepts, but he also was a tactician, in terms of politics, and sort of thinking Through various sort of moves in terms of like, if this happens, then that happens in politics, which also gotten him into trouble on a number of occasions. So we have this sort of Johnson period, you also have unified government in the house in the Senate during this period of time. And so in a certain sense, the Republicans are kind of in the wilderness. But again, not extensively until you get to the landslide in 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost rather dramatically to Lyndon Johnson, but Barry Goldwater's loss was, to some degree, an asset for Richard Nixon in his coming 1968 campaign, and the sort of reconstruction and evolution of the Republican Party that was sort of going on during some of this time. If we go to the next election, 1968 1968 was an immensely important year in the history of the US, as it was in the wider world with the Prague Spring, the Paris student riots, and the event that changed Nixon's political fortunes, arguably more than any other that you came in the January of 1968, with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, why was this such an important event in US politics? Well, the Tet Offensive was also a problem for Lyndon Johnson, and the searches that had been going on that were supposed to lead to the collapse of the North Vietnamese. And so the very complicated situation with regard to the US involvement in Vietnam, which continued to increase in terms of people who were being sent over there, and also, the sort of disasterous move in terms of getting Americans out of South Vietnam, officially, was part of what sort of set up the situation where Nixon was running against, not Lyndon Johnson, in 1968, because Johnson ultimately withdrew himself from continuing to run for the nomination for the Democrats, although he was technically constitutionally able to run for another term, because when he had taken over from Kennedy, and this was also just kind of the start of a lot more agitation around Vietnam, in the United States in the streets. And then, as you note, there are a number of other things that transpire in 1968, including Martin Luther King's assassination, and riots that follow that, as well as, essentially demonstrations against the war and the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968. In Chicago, that also led to riots. And the Democratic Party really kind of having a fight within it about how to deal with Vietnam, and how their candidates were going to deal with it as well. I suppose that in the 60s, because of his losses, in 1960, and in 1962, Nixon might have been seen by some people as sort of yesterday's man. By 1968. I'm intrigued that this picture that you've painted of a sense of American politics, kind of being out of control, with the American involvement in Vietnam, going quite badly. The assassinations of the assassinations of Martin Luther King of Robert Kennedy, JFK, his brother as well, I think a month after MLK. I'm intrigued. Why was it Nixon that was able to exploit this situation, because it's not as if Nixon was the only Republican in America. You had other Republicans running for president that year, George Romney, Mitt Romney's father, Ronald Reagan in his first run of three, why Nixon? Well, Nixon, again, you have to look at Nixon as having run and been elected on the national ticket. So everybody knew who Nixon was. So you're right about him being yesterday's man, but he was also well known. And, and, you know, in my assessment of Nixon, as a political scientist, and as somebody looking at the political history of the time, Nixon and his his, his political strategists, Kevin Phillips, who was really important in in a lot of this developing story. It looks at the sort of landscape and is able to start to capitalise on the responses to Johnson's Great Society and also the fissures within the Democratic Party. Nixon is is very anti communist. It's also, you know, one of the positions that he had taken, he had been part of the, the sort of Red Scare thrust with Roy Cohn in in terms of looking for communists all over the place, and trying to find them in the early 1950s. He had been very involved in that. And what Barry Goldwater had done when he ran and lost so badly was look at the southern states in the United States. That was the quote at that point, solid democratic South, and basically sort of say, and there's a famous quote that Goldwater gives it, go about going hunting where the ducks are. And so Goldwater is coming from the sort of libertarian frontier concept of the Republican Party. And he looks at the dynamics in the United States, and basically says, the people, the white people in the south, are quite conservative. And we should essentially make a marriage with other people who share our approach to politics, which is very conservative. And of course, white southerners in the south wouldn't vote for Republicans, because that is the party of Lincoln. But Goldwater campaigned in such a way as to not necessarily advocate for people to vote for him, but to vote against, essentially, the policies that were coming from Washington, DC, and campaigned on the kinds of ideas of quote, states rights, and law and order, which Nixon then capitalised on, and was much more successful in in, in being able to integrate the white southern voters, to move them to at least vote against Democrats, as opposed to voting for Republicans. And this became known as what Nixon and I think, though the words were by Bill sapphire, the late columnist from the New York Times, called the silent majority. And and so while George Romney was positioned to some degree as a more moderate candidate, and Ronald Reagan had not yet been elected to significant public office, at this point, that you have Nixon who has run unsuccessfully, as, as we know, for governor, Governor of California, but has been successful in his run with Eisenhower. So he's a known person. And in certain in a certain sense, there's a this period of time when people were not necessarily set out to pasture. Even though he said he didn't need wouldn't have neck Nixon to kick her out anymore in 1962. That, you know, he was not necessarily done in politics and politics was not necessarily done with Richard Nixon. Nixon ended up winning the 1968 presidential election against Johnson's Vice President Hubert Humphrey. To some extent, the idea of Southerners not it wasn't that southerners were voting for Republicans, but they weren't voting for the Democrats. That bought out to be true because most of the southern states didn't vote for Nixon, they ended up voting for George Wallace, who was a sort of third party populist candidate. But that was enough to tip the balance in favour of Nixon. In the end, he became president on January the 20th 1969. The biggest issue he faced when he came in was the war in Vietnam, which was ongoing, there was still American troops in Vietnam. What did he want to do about Vietnam, upon entering office? This is what I when I was just talking about Nixon this semester with my students in the class on the presidency, they were surprised to see that he had campaigned on getting the United States out of Vietnam in 1968. And yet, we didn't immediately leave Vietnam, interestingly enough, and some of what happened after Nixon became president, we included what became known as the secret bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos to try to destroy what was being called the Ho Chi Minh trail of support for the North Vietnamese communists. But again, there was this question about why these bombings needed to be secret, as opposed to having them made public to the American people as part of the essentially attack on the communists in North Vietnam. And so there was negotiation that happened. And there was actually negotiation that happened before Nick then became president with regard to trying to make some deals before he was sworn in. And that became known to the Johnson administration. And also, Johnson kept that information classified. But Nixon knew that Johnson had the information. So Nixon enters office, and I just talked to Garrett Graff, about his new book on Watergate. And as he explains it in the book, and in our conversation, he Nixon comes into office in 1968, essentially, with a quote, Original Sin already, at the centre of the campaign that got him elected to office. And in terms of what he did, sort of in the first few months of 1969, he comes out with this policy of vietnamisation of what he calls peace with honour. The war in Vietnam was kind of a wider a flashpoint of the wider Cold War, the confrontation between a capitalist West led by the United States and the Communist East led by the Soviet Union. How do you think Nixon saw the world? How do you think he saw international politics? Well, I mean, his interests were more in international politics than they were in domestic politics. And this is one of the points that many biographers and scholars have noted in terms of, you know, what Nixon was willing to sign in terms of domestic policy legislation and what he was really interested in in terms of foreign policy. But I think to answer your question, that Nixon's perspective, in terms of foreign policy was very much a binary, at the same time that he was somebody who understood nuance. And so while there is, you know, sort of the casting of the Soviet Union and communism as evil, and destructive, and again, he was going after communists in the 1950s, who were supposedly in the State Department, and it had infiltrated the, the federal government, that he at the same time, wanted to negotiate deals with, I would say, our enemies, or those of those who were opposed to Western ideas, capitalism and democracy, because we're talking about the Soviet Union, and most of the countries that were in the Soviet sphere than the Warsaw Pact, it was not just that they were communist, economically, it was also that they were totalitarian regimes. And so that Nixon was very much interested in, you know, sort of protecting the West, and seeing the hit seeing the world through these kinds of this kind of perspective. But he also understood sort of politicians and and the people who were in power, and to some degree, his idea of negotiation, and nuance, which also a lot of which was executed or pursued by his National Security Adviser slash Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were to you know, sort of capitalise on the capacity to understand people's connection to power. And so he did see the sort of good and bad, but he also understood politics and power. This sort of, following of power, led to one of the most famous decisions of his presidency, which was to sort of embrace China, which was at that time, probably world power, number three, also communist but arguably had an even worse relationship with the Soviet Union than then the United States did. Nixon flew to China in 1972, and met the leadership of the Communist Party there. China is now very much engaged in the world, but it wasn't really engaged in the world at all in 1972. Can you explain a bit as to why that was such a significant move in the Cold War politics of the time? And what it led to? Yeah, I mean, this is the quote, opening with China, right. And so if we conceptually think about China, which also calls itself the Middle Kingdom, as being sort of closed to the rest of the world, particularly the Western world, this was the sort of opening in terms of the first American President to visit China was Richard Nixon. And not only did Nixon sort of want to sort of have this relationship between the United States and China, but he also saw absolutely 100% as a means of sort of getting at the Soviet Union. Even even as you Note the two countries were both communist countries. But China had a different concept in in a number of ways they talk about communism with Chinese characters. And, and that the Soviet Union and China were not necessarily natural allies. And Nixon was able to capitalise on the tension between China and the Soviet Union. And, and by having this kind of wedge of the United States, making an alliance, if you will, or at least engaging with China, that also was a shift in terms of pushing on the Soviet Union, and moving China away from the Soviet Union, even though it wasn't necessarily close to the Soviet Union, although they are closer geographically. But that is sort of in terms of power politics. And, and I also think in in this regard, when we think about, you know, life in the United States, or life in the West, at this point, so much of what we use in our everyday lives, is made in China. And prior to this engagement in 1972, we didn't trade with China. And most of our Western allies didn't do a lot of trade with China, perhaps, maybe some tea for you all in Great Britain. But there wasn't, there wasn't a lot of trade going on between West and China. And as a result of that, you have this change this shift that that essentially blossoms China into a trading partner. And then it becomes the itself grows into a different form of communism, with regard to integrating capitalism inside of communism, over time, to make it into this, you know, sort of economic behemoth that it is now. Yes, thank you. I think something that's quite interesting in the way that Nixon deals with foreign policy is there's a huge gulf between how he talks in private and what he actually does. I mean, if you if you read what Nixon said, or listen to what Nixon said, because obviously later, his tapes were made public, he sounds really quite unhinged in the way that he talks about the Vietnamese, the Vietcong, the Soviets, it's full of explosives, full of threats of nuclear war. But actually, his sort of his strategy of bringing China closer to the Soviet Union did lead to the Soviet Union becoming much more willing to sort of extend their own overtures to the Americans and did lead to drama to a more peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union during his time. What do you think of this sort of bizarre interplay between his rhetoric and his actions? It's quite an interesting foreign policy, but actually, also, to Nixon's credit, quite a successful one, in some ways. Yeah, there any number of Nixon's foreign policies that are fairly successful in this regard in terms also in regard to the Middle East, which was also sort of being a proxy for the greater power politics dynamics between the United States and the Soviet Union during this time. But Nixon, you know, it listening to any of the tapes, also listening to the Johnson tapes that were recently sort of made public, there's a lot of expletives that presidents seem to use, even though they knew they were being recorded. And there's also, you know, slurs what we consider to be slurs and an inappropriate valuing of, of different countries and peoples. And so you, you have this kind of the reality of Nixon's conversations with his advisers. But again, at the same time, you have Nixon as somebody who understands these political international political dynamics on a very sophisticated level. And, and it wasn't that he thought, Okay, we'll go to China and see what happens. It was that the United States making a overture to China and having engagement with China will have an impact on the Soviet Union, and will potentially push the Soviet Union in particular directions that will in fact, bring them around possibly to being more engaged with the United States and less antagonistic. And so this is The way that Nixon also thought about us relationships but sort of global strategic relationships, that there's always, you know, sort of the the way that I didn't want to say Machiavellian in terms of bad qualities, but the way that Machiavelli talks about how do you understand how countries operate with one another, where their weaknesses are, where their strengths are and what you can you as a leader, or from Machiavelli's comments, you as a prince can sort of understand and take from your, your sort of perspective at a much grander level. And so yes, communism was considered bad and our enemy, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we can't work with Communists. And but at the same time, this is often also suggested, the only person who could have had the opening with China had to be somebody who was super anti communist. And Nixon filled those shoes, too. Because anybody else who was seen cooperating with China would have been seen as weak and soft. Yeah, yeah. I think what you're describing, essentially, in international relations talk is is, is the work of a realist. Right, right. I mean, it's worth noting, noting that he wasn't it wasn't John Lennon, I mean, the the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, that started sort of in the early 70s, was extraordinarily violent. I think that Nixon ordered the dropping of more bombs than all of the sides that had dropped bombs in World War Two, if we turn to Nixon's domestic presidency. This is the other side of the coin, but as you've alluded to, it's a it's a side of the coin that I think that Nixon devoted much less time into. But the sort of divisions that we see in American politics in the modern era, it could be said, I think emerged in the Nixon era, really, the intense polarisation protests spilling over into into rioting and violence. And this idea that the President is kind of shielding ordinary Americans from a sort of internal enemy, the left, these all tie Nixon and Trump together, can you go into Nixon's paranoia over what he saw as domestic conspiracies against because I don't think you can really understand Nixon without considering that. Many, many years ago, I was teaching Nixon at the same time that I was teaching in a politics and literature course, Richard the Third. And if you ever want to really understand Nixon, I would say read Richard the Third or see the production of it, because the connections are extremely clear in terms of sort of having acquired power, and really being concerned about how it might be taken away, and who's out to get you. And obviously, Richard, is a more complicated character that Shakespeare is basing on some historical record and inaccuracies. But that Richard Nixon, from, in a certain sense, from the beginning of his political engagement, always saw himself as an outsider. He was an outsider in politics, and he was an outsider in the Republican Party. He was an outsider in the Republican establishment. I mean, and I'm not going to get into the sort of psychological makeup of who Richard Nixon was, because I am not a psychological scholar in that regard. But Nixon, you know, never felt like the people around him who were part of this establishment, this, in his mind, a kind of imagined establishment that he was not part of he had gone to Harvard, he had gone to Yale. He was kept from California. He wasn't from New York, or the East Coast. And so this feeds into it, as well as his period, his time when he was running to be the nominee with Eisenhower. And there were critiques made of him and accusations made with regard to essentially impropriety improper use of funds. And he made a very famous speech, this is the so called Chequers speech in 1952, to essentially say that he had not used any money inappropriately, and if he had, he would give it all back except for the gift of His dog checkers that had been named by his daughters. And so this is Nixon From the beginning, sort of fighting against what people are accusing him of doing in terms of improprieties. And then you have Nixon, who, again is sort of taking on what he sees as the liberal establishment of the media. And so we get the narrative with regard to the left wing media, and the liberal media is coming out of Nixon's, sort of, and again, he's not necessarily basing this on actual facts. He's basing it on conceptions that he also thinks are going to play with regard to voters. And this is again, the silent majority. And his his vice presidential candidate, what he runs in 1968. Spiro Agnew sort of takes the fight in a bigger way. It particularly to the press, and everything that you ever heard Donald Trump saying about the media sphere, Agnew probably said it first 1968. And so you have this, you know, sort of divisiveness that is sort of moving into taking on the media, taking on the press, at the time, as part of the problem as part of sort of liberal conspiracy or sort of liberal elites who are opposed to Nixon were opposed to sort of the policies that he was pursuing. And so you, you also have the sort of liberal elite, academics, and and policy experts, who were also people who he was critiquing. And so there's a lot that feeds into sort of this thinking that Nixon and the Nixon administration in the Nixon campaign sort of puts forward as part of its sort of approach to thinking about who the voters are, and who he needs to capture as voters. For him when he's running. There's quite a famous quote from a movie critic called Pauline killed in 1972. She said, I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon, where they are, I don't know, they're outside my Ken. But sometimes, when I'm in a movie theatre, I can feel them. And the use of the word then fails to conceal a real sense of contempt on the part of many other liberals, for Nixon, and also for Nixon voters, which is another obvious parallel with the Trump era. How do you think the people that view that voted for Nixon viewed him? You've talked about how Nixon viewed his voters, but how did they view him? What did they like about him? Well, again, if you think about Nixon, in terms of his political biography, he, you know, he has he did attend Duke law school, he was very smart. He got good grades. He comes from a very poor beginnings in Yorba Linda, California. And, you know, at some point when he was young, his parents actually lost their house, and they had to move. And, and so he also was a naval officer. So he has this military background. That again, if you start thinking about the parallels to somebody like JFK, there's, you're seeing that JFK is much more elite than Nixon, but you know, they were both in the military. And they both had these experiences. And Nixon gets into politics. And he, you know, he's elected to the Congress, and he's elected to the Senate. So people see somebody who's a competent politician, and they see somebody also who is campaigning, in a certain sense, you know, to some degree pushing back on the New Deal, the Great Society, and that, you know, the the disruption that the United States was experiencing, particularly in the late 1960s, with regard to race riots that were transpiring with regard to the protests against Vietnam, that Nixon was promising, in a certain sense, you know, that he would provide stability and, you know, would would essentially re secure the United States now, of course, he he is he's campaigning on law and order, which are also codewords particularly in the southern states. And, and so that there is this idea that there For the voter who sees who's looking at Nixon, and again, he's coming out of the Eisenhower administration. So Eisenhower, a war hero, who had been elected to two terms in Congress, the first Republican in quite some time, that Nixon is also playing on that basis. That if you want to think about in terms of what the voters saw in him, that they saw, they were able to see somebody who was going to, you know, sort of lead the country in this kind of more stable, trying to quell a lot of what people were starting to see on their television screens with regard to what was going on in the streets. But the other thing to think about in terms of Nixon's election in 1968, and his administration, is that Nixon gets elected. And again, he he is he's pretty solidly elected. And then and then he wins in a landslide in 1972, is he is confronted with what we now know, as our sort of regular situation. But he's the first president to have essentially a divided government. So the folks in the House and the Senate are all Democrats, the majorities in both the House in the Senate and the federal level are Democrats, and Nixon is Republican. And so we start to see, in a certain sense, this divisiveness of the two parties and their elected officials, you know, to some degree coming at each other from opposite set sides, instead of having your party in the majority in the House, the Senate and the White House as well. I mean, even though he was sort of seen as safeguarding the country against the left, by the people who voted for him, and he was seen as a figure of stability, one of the intriguing things about Nixon's domestic goings on was that they weren't that conservative, even by the standards of the day, in some ways, he desegregated America's schools, he set up the Environmental Protection Agency, he signed the Clean Air Act. But he also showed great resentment at doing those things, even as he was doing them. I've seen quotes attributed to him before saying things like, I can't believe I'm doing anything for the left. For the environmentalists, we shouldn't be doing anything for these n words, you know, really often quite violent, racist language. How do you explain the disconnect between his own views on race and the environment? And which were pretty right wing? And some fairly liberal policies on those issues? Was it this the fact that he had a divided government? Or was it just the fact that actually he wasn't that interested in a lot of this stuff, and that it was just, that's cool red meat. I mean, I think it's a little bit of both, in that he does have a Congress that is not in his hands. And so he has to deal with what Congress is going to pass along to him. And the Democrats had pretty big majorities in both the House and the Senate at this time. So he didn't, you know, he wasn't looking at a 5050 Senate, as we have right now and have had, you know, essentially, really close Senate's for a long time. And you didn't have to some degree, the sorting into more ideological, consistent camps, also with regard to the folks who were in the house in the Senate. And so one of the things that, you know, he's often said about, you know, signing the, the EPA into existence and signing Title Nine is that he signed what Congress gave him because if he didn't, then they would push a more extreme version of it. And that would override, you know, that, that and they would be able to override a veto. And so he saw himself in a certain sense as standing athwart more liberal policies, by, you know, sort of taking what Congress passed along to him. And while not necessarily supporting it himself, don't not really having a recourse because he kind of he kind of sort of saw strategically, one way or another, something like this is going to be put into effect, do we have a more moderate version of it? Or do we have something that's more extreme or more, you know, say always say liberal. And so that was part of it. And he wasn't that interested in these policies. And and so he didn't necessarily spend a lot of time negotiating with Congress on these policies, working with Congress on these policies, you know, he sort of knew that they were going to come and that he could sign them or veto them. But he wasn't he wasn't sort of crafting a sort of working relationship over something like the Clean Air Act with Congress. Let's move to Watergate. For the uninitiated, What happened in the Watergate buildings during the 1972 election, the Watergate buildings, were housing the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the time. And the so called plumbers, had done this in a couple other places, they'd broken into Daniel Ellsberg psychiatrists office to bug his psychiatrists off fix, and Ellsberg was responsible for exposing the Pentagon Papers with regard to what the United States was actually doing in Vietnam, as opposed to what we had been told we were doing in Vietnam. And so what you have going on in the Watergate is essentially this plot, again, of going into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, possibly looking for incriminating evidence with regard to candidates, but also setting up bugging, you know, sort of recording capacity to find out what the strategies were. And, of course, what happened was the security guard in the Watergate building, which was new at the time, found that there was tape over some of the locks, so that you could get in and out. And he sort of follow that up. And so the the so called plumbers, who were led by g, Gordon Liddy, and Howard Hunt, I believe that they, they were sort of caught in the in, in doing whatever this things that they were doing inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and they were subsequently accused of breaking in the famous break in, and then, you know, sort of what transpired next with regard to like, who was paying them, which is also part of the connection back to the sort of Nixon White House, as well as famously and I love to tell my students this, the committee to reelect the president, and if you use the acronym, it is actually creep. So, whenever I put that on the board, my students actually do laugh, because I sort of like this is kind of funny. And and so the committee to reelect, the President had a lot of cash. And this is also where we end up in the United States with the evolution of our campaign finance laws that come out of the Watergate break in and as well as contribution laws, because part of it was where did the money come from, and there was some discussion about if it had come from foreign entities. And nobody was keeping track of where the money was coming from coming from and, and so forth. So that's essentially just a, you know, a really brief on the specific Watergate break in, but the Watergate break in was not the only one. To cut a sort of Long Story Short on what happened next, the break in and the fact that Nixon had basically ordered a break in in order to find out a Democratic Party strategy was eventually uncovered by journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post's and it led to Nixon eventually having to resign from the presidency in August 1974. Basically, if he hadn't resigned, he would have very likely been impeached from office. Could he have ever survived Watergate Do you think? Um, well, this is, you know, this is famously also what Roger the late Roger Ailes said, If there had been a, a sort of non non liberal media, then Nixon could have survived the impeachment. But it's not just the impeachment because, you know, in my lifetime now, I have experienced three impeachments and one move to impeachment because Nixon was never impeached. But they were preparing the the impeachment in the House of Representatives at the time that he chose to resign. And one of the reasons he chose to resign was because the delegation of Republican senators came to Nixon and said, not only are you going to get impeached to the house, but there are enough votes to convict you in the Senate. And you're going to be the first president to ever get convicted in an impeachment and then you're you know, and then there may be criminal charges that follow from that. And so, what we've seen in the Clinton impeachment and the to Trump impeachment is that they have a Are they the two presidents have been impeached, but in no time were they convicted, and the only other president who was impeached, Andrew Johnson, who was Lincoln's vice president was also not convicted. So Nixon was going to be this president who was going to be not only impeached, but then convicted, because they had done sort of whip count in the Senate. And he thought that he could not necessarily survive, and he might very well end up in jail. The thing that's always sort of baffled me about Watergate really, is that Nixon won the 72 election in like the biggest of all time, he went every state apart from Minnesota, the Democrats, Massachusetts, excuse me, sorry. The Democrats were nowhere in that election. He didn't have to do it. Did he? He'd have one anyway. Yep. So this was just pure paranoia. There was not really any electoral advantage in him doing this. This this is the ultimate show of what a paranoid to use your word creep. Next, and what I didn't say he was a creep. I said, the committee's really like the president. But certainly there's at least some of what at least some of that is some of why that's amusing is that Nixon was a bit of a creep in and stuff. Yeah. And so it is a strange sort of situation where you see that, you know, the expert, he won, he didn't want to buy a huge margin in 68. But he won a solid victory. He had lost by a very slim margin in 1960s. against Kennedy, and there's a lot of discussion about whether or not there was, you know, some crafty things going on in a couple of states with regard to the votes there because it was very slim majority in a couple of states, for Kennedy in 1960, but 1968, Nixon wins. And he, he has a, you know, he's has a fairly successful first term. And so moving into the reelection season. No, it probably was not at all necessary to bug the Democratic campaign headquarters to find out what they were talking about strategically or otherwise, in order to win reelection. And yet, he not only okay that, or was involved in the process that said this was, you know, this was fine. But sort of, again, there are other things that the Nixon administration is doing that are scandalous. And building on that. You have Spiro Agnew, the Vice President, who is involved in a completely separate bribery scandal that had been going on since his days as Governor of Maryland, that he continued while he was vice president, and the Justice Department is bringing charges against Spiro Agnew who actually makes a deal with the Justice Department, and is sort of given a very light sentence. So he would leave, because there was some concern that they had the Watergate charges sort of going on on one side and the Spiro Agnew charges going on in another side. And if both the President and the Vice President are sort of resigning or convicted of crimes, then you have this weird sort of like the Speaker of the House, who's a Democrat becomes president. And, and even the Democrats were concerned about that, in terms of understanding, like, Would anybody take the presidency seriously by this person who wasn't elected to it, who's not the vice president or the president? And you have a lot of machinations going on in the Justice Department, and elsewhere around multiple scandals. I suppose the other thing is that if you if you if you widen the lens a little bit from just political scandals, if you look at some of the other things that Nixon did when he was president, I know his his, he was, to some extent quite successful at pulling big levers in foreign policy. But if you look at the bombing of Cambodia, you know, the killing of some people think millions of Cambodians. The fact that he we haven't even discussed this, the fact that he scuppered a peace deal in 1968, Lyndon Johnson's peace deal in order to help him win the presidency the first time around because he was worried that if it looked as if the war was coming to an end, he'd lose. Compared to these things. Watergate is a pretty minor thing. I mean, what do you think it tells you about the way the presidency is looked at and just American politics more Jen? really that Watergate is the thing that he's remembered for? Well, I mean, I think part of it is that something like this should not affair that you're talking about the this scrapped peace deal didn't hasn't become public until only recently. And so many Americans at the time and even over the years didn't necessarily know about that scandal. Not all that many people know the details about Spiro Agnew, he just kind of left office, and there was something going on there. And so, you know, you have Yes, you have all these other scandals that sort of WERE GOING ON THE SECRET bombings that were going on with regard to the Nixon administration, but that Watergate was the one that broke through to the public, in part because it was not just followed by Woodward and Bernstein, it was followed by a number of reporters from the LA Times. And and the New York Times that were sort of, again, sort of looking at the different components of what was involved in Watergate, from the campaign donations to who these people were they were connected to the CIA who broke into the Watergate and should the CIA be doing stuff like that, and was their foreign money coming in. So that Watergate, the break into the to the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building is like a component of larger scandals that are connected to it in terms of campaign finance and campaigning in general Nixon, to bring this to a close, Nixon died in 1994. He did go some way to revitalising his image, he left the White House at a time when his approval rating was in freefall. If you look at his rankings now, though, they're still not very good. He generally comes near the bottom, and of the 45 people who have served as president of your country, if when people have compiled these lists, and the lists are out there. If Watergate hadn't happened, we have to assume that he would have reached the end of his second term in 1977. Without resigning, how well would he be thought of if the if the resignation and Watergate hadn't happened? I mean, what do you think he'd be remembered for most? Would it be the China trip? Would it be ending US involvement in Vietnam, which he did? Would it be this southern strategy in elections, which has resulted in the Republican Party becoming much more electorally successful? Since 1968? Nixon minus Watergate, what's the what would the legacy be? Well, it is a hypothetical. But of course, again, there's that wasn't the only scandal. And so it's hard to sort of subtract Watergate. Yes, Watergate was the thing that sort of broke the camel's back. But would any of the other scandals have come out in a second term, and I also have all of these conversations with my students about the 22nd Amendment and the sort of the fact that you can't run for president again after the second term. And oftentimes, we have second term two term presidents who have a scandal in their second term. So Hamilton's argument for perpetual re eligibility may actually have some legs. But that, you know, you have, again, you don't just have Watergate, yes, Watergate does lead to Nixon being in this sort of hot water that he is unable to get out of. And he doesn't think he can survive and impeachment. And, you know, at the same time, we've just seen Donald Trump who survives to impeachments. And, and you know, and he still is the leader of the Republican Party, I mean, Nixon leaves office and he is not the leader of the Republican Party, he sort of goes quietly into the night a little bit, and then slowly comes forward to try to rehabilitate his reputation as a kind of elder statesman. And he does that fairly successfully. And so but he has he has this really chequered story of the administration, because there are these successes with regard to his domestic policies with regard to particularly for foreign policy. But Nixon became so enigmatic in our culture. The David Greenberg has this book called Nixon's shadow, the history of an image. And I think it's so very apt to think about not only Nixon as The president or connected to Watergate, but you know, the sort of he was like a meme before there were memes. And that not only do we have the, you know, the you don't have Nixon to kick around anymore, of course you have, you know, I am not a crook with his, you know, you have Nixon with his V for Victory fingers. And of course, when I was growing up, I was growing up during the Nixon era, some of my cousins had Nixon dartboards, that, you know, it was very much an integration of Nixon as this kind of, you know, dark shadowy guy. And again, this is the Kennedy Nixon comparison, in 1960, if you saw him on television, he always kind of looked a little bit dark, because he had this five o'clock shadow that he really could never be rid of. And so it's just even the projection of the image that Nixon was, that sort of comes with also his, you know, his commentary on things. And he is willing to, say divisive things, either in private or occasionally in public. That, you know, he is sort of the basis for this moving and shifting within the Republican Party. And the the integration of the Southern strategy that really sort of plays on racism, and moving people who are not fond of black people in southern states to sort of vote for politicians who are sort of winking and nudging and saying, you know, I got your best interests at heart, because I'm willing to sort of go in this direction. So all of that is also tagged into Nixon. It's not just you know, Richard Nixon as President of the United States, with Watergate or without Watergate. It's also like where he sort of operated in our psyche. As television was sort of projecting images, more people had televisions, and hid his particular presentation of himself and who he was. He was not a populist hero. That was not how Nixon projected himself, even though he comes from this sort of very populist, if you will, kind of background but he, you know, he was learned. And he was he was smart, and he was educated. And, and he also was a tactician and strategist. Yeah, it's interesting how populists are often don't have these kinds of very effervescent personas. Enoch, Powell, I don't know if you've heard of him, the British politician who's doing a podcast on soon is somebody quite similar and opposite contemporary of Nixon's, Lily, thank you very much. I really enjoyed that. If people want to find out more about Nixon or more about the work that you've done about Nixon, and presidential, politics, and gender politics more generally, I know that you're, you're you've dedicated a lot of your career to that. Where can they go? Well, I have some work on the sort of gender politics and the presidency, and popular culture, a book called Women in the White House, where I sort of trace the integration of women and people of colour in popular culture, and then you know how we ended up with Barack Obama. That book was published by University Press of Kentucky, in 2012. And, you know, in terms of Nixon, Nixon shadow, as I said, this book by David Greenberg is really excellent. And another one that I really like, and I think talks about this as well as reinventing Richard Nixon cultural history of an American obsession by Daniel Frick. Both of those are really good books on Nixon, not only the president, but also Nixon, kind of the idea. And so I recommend all of those. I do have a new book coming out in November on the politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So anybody who has some interests in popular culture, and the behemoth that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that will be out from the University Press of Kansas City, November. Thank you, Lily, cheers. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to the hated in the dead. 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