The battle that was taking place on Buster Drive in Warren was but a small sideshow to the images playing on the nightly news and would soon be eclipsed by the devastating violence that would erupt a few miles away in Detroit in July. But what would transpire over the coming days and months and years on Buster Drive would actually have profound consequences for race relations in America and shape the national political landscape in ways that are still being felt today.

A telegenic housing secretary with presidential ambitions would use the Baileys’ plight to launch a bold plan to desgregate all of America’s suburbs.

Local officials in Warren, stoked by the rage of their white constituents, would stymie his efforts, even though it meant forfeiting millions of dollars of federal aid.

A Republican president facing reelection would torpedo his secretary’s plan, empowering the white middle-class voters he considered crucial to his victory.

Those voters, in turn, would make this corner of suburban Detroit the unofficial capital of America’s white middle class, and shape the strategy of presidential hopefuls of both parties for decades to come.

Ultimately, the whites-only fortress of Warren and surrounding Macomb County would crumble, overwhelmed by the consequences of self-defeating choices made decades before. Like suburbs across the country, it would become more diverse—and increasingly Democratic. But it would retain the scars of unhealed racial fault lines first laid down in 1967—a de facto segregation that would make Macomb County a prime target for populist conservatives bent on appealing to white working-class voters. Few suburbs would suffer the same headline-making unrest or the targeted federal scrutiny as Warren. But its prominent role in the massive demographic and political shifts of the last half century would ensure it remained an important bellwether heading into the 2024 presidential election when, once again, Macomb County would find itself a political battleground for the nation’s all-important suburban vote. 

But before any of that could happen, the Baileys had to outlast the mob.

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Sean Howe | Longreads | May 2019 |  15 minutes (3,853 words)

In November 2018, after the Secret Service seized the security credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, the White House Press Secretary stated the reason for the revocation was that the administration would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Within hours, attorney Ted Boutrous responded on Twitter:

“This sort of angry, irrational, false, arbitrary, capricious content-based discrimination regarding a White House press credential against a journalist quite clearly violates the First Amendment. See Sherrill v Knight (DC Cir 1977).”

Boutros didn’t elaborate on the case’s importance — he was about to prepare arguments for his new client, CNN — and while Sherrill v. Knight isn’t well-known, it dragged on through three presidential administrations and involved multiple government agencies, and made history as likely the only significant legal decision that began with a pie.

* * *

On May 13, 1970, a stretch limousine painted with the red, blue, and gold of the Viet Cong flag pulled into Washington, D.C. Its passengers — one in costume as a reverend, another as a nun, and another as a member of the Puerto Rican activist group the Young Lords — piled out and made their way toward the New Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

The man dressed as a preacher was Thomas King Forcade, a squirrely ex-Arizonan with a degree in business administration and a fondness for race cars. Forcade had abruptly joined the counterculture with a 1967 phone call from Phoenix to New York City, volunteering to work for the Underground Press Syndicate, a national consortium of hundreds of regional — and mostly leftist — independent papers. Amid the chaos of cultural shifts and growing political upheaval, publications like the Berkeley Barb and the East Village Other covered the growing subcultures of America that the establishment media often dismissed or ignored. These underground papers catered to and connected longhair freaks and militant intellectuals to a degree that unsettled authorities while also providing the network of communication necessary for political strategy. These were the sorts of ideas that didn’t make their way into Reader’s Digest or Life or the New York Times.

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UPS also diligently cataloged a growing trend of attacks on the underground papers themselves. Offices were firebombed in Texas (Space City) and California (The Los Angeles Free Press); the windows of an editor’s car were shot out in Wisconsin (Kaleidoscope). These journalists were also continuously harassed by law enforcement and government agencies, which used narcotics (a 10-year sentence for a Michigan editor who possessed two joints) and obscenity as common pretexts for arrest.

During a two-year period at UPS, Forcade’s responsibilities had grown, necessitating the decision to take the organization mainstream and move to New York. In the interim, Forcade hired an ad agency to procure national sponsors and help negotiate a deal with Bell & Howell for microfilming rights, both of which brought in more income than papers had seen before. And so, on this May day, Forcade was scheduled to speak at a presidential commission on obscenity.

Inside the hearing room, the group of UPS staffers, with the cooperation of local radicals, broke out a cardboard box and passed sample copies of newspapers to attendees. When Forcade was called to address the commission, he lowered his wide-brimmed black hat and read a thousand-word statement about the underground press in a fast, low voice:

Forcade punctuated his speech with a periodic refrain of “Fuck off, and fuck censorship!” During a momentary silence, the 3-year-old pig-tailed daughter of one participating couple repeated the phrase and punched the air with her closed fist. As nervous laughter subsided, Forcade cued a cassette recording of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” and recited a list of papers victimized by censorship. But the song outlasted the list.

“Do you have anything more to say?” the chair of the commission asked over the strains of Dylan, but Forcade insisted that the music was part of his testimony. Only when Otto Larsen, a member of the commission, interjected and challenged Forcade’s charges of “McCarthyesque witch hunts and inquisitional hearings” did the costumed priest approach the rostrum.

“I think I have the material in my box to explain that,” he said. Reaching inside, underneath a pile of papers, he produced a cottage cheese pie, which he hurled into the face of Larsen as cameras flashed.

Forcade’s actions made front-page headlines across the country. In Los Angeles, an underground newspaper editor complained that his own testimony had been overshadowed by the stunt. But America had enough of seriousness: Only a week earlier, peaceful protest against U.S. bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia ended with four students at Kent State University killed by the National Guard. Campus strikes were still active at hundreds more colleges around the country. The levity of a pieing was required.

* * *

The fourth estate was under siege in 1970. Reports surfaced about federal courts serving subpoenas to the New York Times, Time, Life, Newsweek, and other outlets to demand notes, tape recordings, and even testimony from journalists. Even more distressing was that the corporate owners often complied with these demands. In New York, Detroit, Albuquerque, and Washington, D.C., intelligence and law enforcement agents were caught posing as journalists or photographers. The Chicago Tribune reported that the Army had videotaped rallies from a truck emblazoned with the name “Midwest News.” Meanwhile, Vice President Spiro Agnew toured the country giving speeches filled with anti-media rhetoric. He frequently targeted large newspapers and networks, but on occasion, he would attack the UPS papers, like the Quicksilver Times: Agnew claimed that its distributor “may be contributing to the maiming or death of other human beings.”

At the end of the year, the 20th Century Fund, a New York–based research foundation, formed a Task Force on Press Freedoms to investigate the U.S. government’s assaults on the free press. The think tank invited Forcade, equipped with his inside knowledge of underground papers (not to mention his pie-hucking notoriety), to serve on the committee along with such old-guard luminaries as Mike Wallace and George Reedy. Forcade traded his all-black suit for an all-white one — though he didn’t resemble Tom Wolfe as much as he did the ghost of a riverboat gambler. He wrote to friends that he was going to learn “the ways in which the media has been fucked over by the government.”

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In May 1971, Forcade headed to the District of Columbia and established a three-person UPS news bureau, applying for a White House press pass in the process. For the first time, he vowed, the radical media would cover the president. As it turned out, Forcade arrived in town just in time for the most flagrant journalistic suppression of the era, when courts imposed restraints on the Washington Post and New York Times, both of which were attempting to print the leaked documents known as the Pentagon Papers.

* * *

If it was anything like an esprit de corps that inspired Forcade’s quest for press credentials, such camaraderie was short-lived. He learned that a prerequisite for a White House pass was membership in the Congressional Press Galleries; when that body’s standing committee presented him with arcane admission requirements— which required UPS to have a telegraphic service, prior State Department approval for foreign member papers, and a plan to file stories daily — Forcade lashed out at what he called “a group of puppet journalists.”

“On the same day when everyone was weeping and crying about the repression of the New York Times,” Forcade wrote in a statement, “they were actively carrying out the same repression — preventing access to news — upon the underground press.”

Among those objecting to Forcade’s admission to the august body was Luther Huston, a reporter from Editor & Publisher who had previously tangled with Forcade.

Back in November 1969, three days after charges — under his given name of Gary Kenneth Goodson — of possessing LSD in Phoenix were dropped, Forcade attended a Sigma Delta Chi journalism convention in San Diego. On the morning of a panel he had agreed to attend, he was again arrested, this time on charges that he desecrated of an American flag (it was rolled up like a bandana around the brim of his hat). The convention host bailed him out, but when the hatless Forcade returned, he stormed a different panel — one already in session and attended by Huston — and tore into the establishment press.

“While people are being beaten, starved, and killed,” he raged, “you fill the pages of your rags with the news of bake sales and debutante balls.”

Then he turned on the audience and accused them of setting him up for arrest. He grabbed a water glass from the panel table and hurled it at a press table in the back, where it narrowly missed Huston.

Two years later, then, in September 1971, it was with some bitterness that Huston found himself reporting that, “by a 3-to-2 vote, after weeks of controversy, the Standing Committee of Correspondents has admitted to membership in the Senate press galleries a newsman who once threw a pie in the face of a member of the U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.”

* * *

In mid-November 1971, several months after he had applied for the first-ever press pass for an underground paper, Forcade received a call from Fred Graham, the New York Times journalist leading the Task Force on Press Freedoms. Graham revealed that the Secret Service had now denied Forcade’s application to cover the White House. Neither Forcade nor Graham knew the reason why — the Secret Service agent assigned to Forcade’s case wouldn’t return calls, and a department spokesman would only say that its decision was “on the basis of certain information.”

Graham made sure the story appeared in the next day’s edition of the Times, under a headline blaring, “White House Bars A Radical Reporter.” Upon reading it, a secretary for the American Civil Liberties Union wrote a letter inviting Forcade to join Robert Sherrill, a Nation journalist who’d once socked a governor’s press secretary in the jaw, in pursuit of access rights.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect: A few days later, the Task Force delivered its final report, which included a call for an end to the harassment of the underground press. When asked by reporters about his fight for a press pass, an unchastened Forcade announced a plan to park a van across the street of the White House and monitor activity at the mansion with binoculars. (He may have undermined his argument when he boasted to a writer from the Washington Post that not only was he was a former Weatherman and White Panther, but he also owned two guns.)

Back in D.C., Forcade filed mischievous reports from the Senate Gallery, which were then published in UPS member papers. He wrote about pilfering Senate stationery and placing underground papers in press gallery reading rooms, noting that “nobody will openly read them. They take them to the bathroom instead. It is a lot of work hauling the papers back to the reading table from the bathroom every day.” He introduced himself to children on field trips as “the Senator from Woodstock Nation.”

These articles painted a much different picture of the Washington press corps than the one conjured in, say, All The President’s Men. Reporters had become thoroughly paranoid and resigned to the idea that their office phones were tapped. Midnight visits by the FBI, who would check in on stories in progress, were the norm. “A reporter told me how one time he remained standing a moment too long,” Forcade wrote, “and was firmly planted in his seat by Secret Service goons.”

And then there was the paranoia that Forcade himself tried to cultivate. After a former UPS employee was arrested in connection with the bombing of a Capitol Building bathroom, Forcade’s dispatches became brazen with allusions: “I spent one Friday at the Capitol Building, familiarizing myself with the layout,” he wrote, and, “the Capitol building is wide open for another bombing.”

Forcade’s reporting on the 1972 State of the Union Address, which he covered from the press gallery of the House, read like a taunt:

I was sitting above Nixon and behind him, about 50 feet away, when he gave his speech to the joint session of Congress. In front of me, all within 100 feet, were the entire Supreme Court, the entire Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Senators, the members of the House, and most of the Ambassadors…. As I stand listening to Nixon’s jive, I can’t help thinking that one good bomb would wipe out the entire military, executive, legislative, and judicial hierarchy, and that if that bomb went off, I would go too. Even with wall-to-wall Secret Servicemen, I felt a little unsafe.

Three days after Nixon’s speech, the NYPD pulled Forcade over, booked him for altering his license plate, photographed him, and released him.

* * *

As Forcade continued to report with a guerilla-like zeal, the ACLU appealed and re-appealed for Sherrill and Forcade’s White House credentials. No one would go on the record with the reason for the denial, though the parties involved could read between the lines: At one point during the two years of appeals, a letter from the Department of the Treasury (which oversaw the Secret Service) referred to the New York Times‘ coverage of Forcade’s now infamous pie incident.

In the midst of the ACLU’s legal maneuvering, Forcade shifted his focus to other pursuits. He formed a Yippie splinter group called the Zippies, who staged various demonstrations — one included a stolen giant portrait of LBJ — at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. On the final night of the RNC, police stopped the flatbed truck Forcade was driving and extracted a five-gallon can of gasoline — fuel for a sound-system generator — and what appeared to be a few homemade candles, all of which they classified as “illegally manufactured and unregistered destructive devices.” He was eventually acquitted of the charges, but the stress of the grand jury indictment shook Forcade. Reeling from the consequences of public radicalism, he quietly began working on launching another magazine, one that might foment a different kind of rebellion, and make some money too. “The ‘movement’ was over,” he later explained, “and I needed something to keep from killing myself out of boredom.”

The ACLU, though, was busy, finally filing Forcade v. Knight in April 1974. Included in the lawsuit was a signed affidavit by Forcade, explaining that the pie incident “was a juvenile prank which, in hindsight, I believe was foolish. … I have no intention of disrupting any press conference, including those at the White House, and I am surprised and shocked to find that the Secret Service and the White House consider me a ‘threat to the physical security of the President and/or his immediate family,’ and I am particularly distressed at their refusal to give me any opportunity to demonstrate that their evaluation is not true. My exclusion from the White House is a serious infringement on my work as an alternative press reporter, and therefore I respectfully ask the Court to grant me relief.”

The day the case was filed, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Richard Nixon to turn over audio recordings that had been taped in the Oval Office. Installation of the taping system had been the responsibility of Al Wong, the same Secret Service agent who wouldn’t return Forcade’s phone calls.

By that time, Forcade had assembled the first issue of the pro-marijuana magazine High Times. Marketed as “a lavish magazine devoted entirely to psychoactive drugs and other highs,” its debut issue featured an interview with a “lady dealer,” the latest market prices on illegal substances, and a cover photograph of a woman about to ingest mushrooms. Before the summer was over, i>High Times #1 was a rousing success, selling out its print run of 20,000 issues, and Richard Nixon — Forcade’s bête noire — had resigned.

Another presidential administration would have to resolve Forcade’s lawsuit, but not before ACLU lawyer John Shattuck, the suit’s primary litigator, finally received Forcade’s Secret Service and FBI files — one week before he was scheduled to testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee on surveillance in January 1975. Naturally, he included excerpts of Forcade’s files as exhibits.

The files were damning, and packed with confirmations of surveillance, disinformation, and provocation that stretched over years:

• Forcade’s Arizona Air Guard records, obtained by the FBI, included the August 1969 psychiatric exam ordered after his LSD possession arrest, after which he received, surprisingly, an honorable discharge.
• Records of toll calls Forcade made were obtained “without legal process” by the Secret Service.
• Also without legal process, the FBI obtained the credit records of a printer who had worked with Forcade.
• During the 1972 Republican National Convention, an informant had advised the bureau that a “Wanted: Tom Forcade” handbill (which suspiciously included Forcade’s NYPD mug shot) had been passed out in Miami, attributed to the fictional “Anti-Heroin and Hard Drugs Committee.”
• Other informants had reported on Forcade in Long Island, while federal agents interviewed Forcade’s mailman in Manhattan and a gun salesman in Phoenix and infiltrated political meetings he attended in Miami.

One revelation had consequences for an entire city: In Madison, Wisconsin, the police department’s “Affinity Squad” had spied on Forcade and other local activists in conjunction with the Secret Service. After Forcade’s files were released, the mayor of Madison decided to unveil nearly the entire cache of the Affinity Squad’s files, which totaled 9,000 pages. That sort of unlicensed surveillance and federal overreach led to various lawsuits, and eventually the city found itself paying out thousands in settlements (one such settlement was for $22,000).

* * *

It was another 18 months before a D.C. circuit judge finally ruled on Forcade v. Knight, deciding that the Secret Service would have to make public specific standards for issuance of press passes to the White House. If a press pass was denied, the judge ruled, the applicant would be entitled to rebut any information that had disqualified them. The ruling was a blow for the government. Its best argument to keep Forcade away from the White House, it turned out, was a report that the FBI had received from a confidential informant in Detroit, before that 1972 State of the Union speech:

[Redacted] advised the subject stated he was trying to obtain a White House press pass and, if successful, he will conceal a gun in his camera and shoot the president.

[Redacted] added that the subject has been dealing in the sale of marijuana and is an extremely unstable person.

Since there were no other witnesses to the alleged threat, the name of the Detroit informant would have to be disclosed for the report to be admissible — and thus to justify the continued denial of Forcade’s press pass.

There was yet another delay of several months before an appeals court upheld the ruling: “Notice, opportunity to rebut, and a written decision are required because the denial of a pass potentially infringes upon First Amendment guarantees.” The battle, which had lasted through multiple presidential administrations, was over, with neither of the reporters ever testing the case’s ruling.

* * *

The landmark case is known as Sherrill v. Knight because, in the final stretch of the appeals process, Forcade withdrew from the suit. He’d been distracted by charges from another grand jury, this one brought by the Special Narcotics Courts of the City of New York, which had subpoenaed his High Times employees. [1] The “extremely erratic behavior” described in his FBI file flared up: He fired the staff of High Times, ripped telephones from the office walls, and ordered the magazine shuttered — only to reopen it days later. And he had a growing fear that someone was out to get him: His lawyer advised him that his former smuggling partner had cooperated with the government two employees of High Times’ distributor were shot at, and another’s car was bombed. It was, in an awful symmetry of violence, an echo of the early days of the underground press.

In November 1978, Forcade died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 33 years old.

* * *

Much as the underground press provided a forum for the New Left and counterculture of the 1960s, High Times served as the national message center for the 1970s movement to bring marijuana to the mainstream. During Forcade’s four years publishing the magazine and funding the marijuana lobby, possession of small amounts of cannabis was decriminalized in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon. The first Americans began receiving marijuana for a medical condition. High Times editorials from those days seem almost prophetic now: warning against the corporate interests that would descend upon legalized weed, and noting the ways in which international drug wars could serve as cover for imperialist adventures. (Forcade’s own extralegal activities have a legacy as well, but that information has mostly lurked in government agency records, in the memories of tight-lipped collaborators, and in the research files of my forthcoming book about him)

The repercussions of Forcade’s battle for press rights have been similarly enduring. In the early 1990s, archival research revealed that during the discovery process of the ACLU’s lawsuit, the FBI had twisted information from one source to justify surveillance of John Lennon; contrary to the bureau’s claims at the time, the feds had privately concluded that Lennon did not, in fact, plan any “revolutionary activities”. Twenty years after Forcade’s fight began, the bureau exonerated the ex-Beatle.

Last November, lawyers for Cable News Network v. Trump cited Sherrill v. Knight in their argument that the White House had no authority to arbitrarily deny access to “White House press facilities.” What began as a foolhardy ban by the Trump administration was swiftly revolved: The White House folded in its attempt to muzzle oppositional journalism and restored Jim Acosta’s credentials.

That wasn’t the White House’s final attempt to restrict press access: On May 10, news spread that the White House had revoked the press credentials of dozens of journalists. In response, the free-speech advocacy organization PEN America filed a brief opposing the government’s motion to dismiss its First Amendment lawsuit against Donald Trump — a lawsuit first filed last fall and one asserting that the administration of the 45th president had violated the constitutional freedoms of the press.

Who knows what a discovery process might yield? Attempts to stymie journalism in the United States often have a way of backfiring. Long before the White House Plumbers broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel, which led to the airing of various crimes of the Nixon administration, Tom Forcade wondered aloud, “I don’t know what’s going on in the White House that they don’t want to let me in. It must be terrible.”

* * *

Sean Howe is the author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (Harper, 2012) and a forthcoming biography of High Times founder Thomas King Forcade.

Editor: Matt Giles
Fact checker: Sam Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

^{[1]For reasons that remain unclear, the investigation was eventually squashed.↩}

More than 40 years ago, Richard Nixon subtly changed the modern presidency. During past administrations, the American news media had always been referred to as “the press,” but Nixon, whose contentious relationship with the nation’s newsrooms was longstanding, tweaked that policy, and began labeling the press as “the media,” a term he felt sounded more ominous and less favorable. As Jon Marshall wrote in 2014 for The Atlantic, Nixon was the first president to exclusively use this term, and while subsequent presidents were similarly at odds with those whose job it is to hold the country’s chief executive in check, none were as vitriolic as Nixon.

Donald Trump has come the closest, evidenced by this week’s post-midterm election press conference — his first in months — which quickly went off the rails moments after his opening remarks, devolving into presidential rants accusing those assembled of perpetuating hoaxes while advancing bogus claims of “racist” questions peddled by the “fake media.” The surreality of the conference was part-carnival, part-grand guignol, but it wasn’t without historical precedent: Asked how to “change” the tone of the country, Trump claimed that it “begins with the media — we used to call it the press.” He didn’t credit Nixon, but the connection was readily apparent, even more when the administration followed up by barring CNN reporter Jim Acosta from the White House, revoking the press credentials of the veteran reporter and gadfly.

White House aide grabs and tries to physically remove a microphone from CNN Correspondent Jim Acosta during a contentious exchange with President Trump at a news conference. https://t.co/ogHhRsO0AI pic.twitter.com/WZbbP5Jwq5

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 8, 2018

Acosta had the temerity to first question the dog-whistle issue of the caravan and then follow-up by asking about Robert Mueller’s probe; in the process, he shielded the microphone from a White House aide attempting to censor him. The government’s decision was outlandish, perhaps, but not all that surprising — Masha Gessen had predicted a similar action in the New York Review of Books just two years earlier, and second, Nixon kept a master list of his “enemies,” dozens of which were members of the press and one specifically whom he banned.

When Stuart Loory wrote a January 1971 article for the Los Angeles Times about the cost to taxpayers of maintaining Nixon’s Western White House in San Clemente and a vacation property in Key Biscayne (which, between the years of 1969 and 1972, would later be revealed to amount to $218,676 — or $1.3 million in 2018), he likely expected pushback from the White House. After all, Loory had written a column for the paper just six months earlier examining the supposed effectiveness of Henry Kissinger, then the special presidential advisor on foreign affairs (as Louis Liebovich recounts in Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press, aide Herbert Klein complained about the coverage to then publisher Otis Chandler). What Loory didn’t expect, though, was to be banned from the White House, which, despite his reputation — the reporter had an illustrious career, working for the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and finally CNN — he summarily was.

All presidents have a detente with the news media, but Nixon’s relationship was especially fraught, which was strange considering the politician enjoyed widespread — and often favorable — coverage. During the first 18 months of his administration, Nixon received more airtime that his three predecessors did during a span of 16 years; his early press conferences were described by the media as “tour de force[s].” Nearly 80 percent of the country’s newspapers endorsed Nixon for president in 1960 and 1968, and a whopping 93 percent did so again in 1972. But Nixon felt that the media had forever turned against him when he previously was a representative and then senator from California, and he could never shake that sense of enmity. In December 1972, he told Kissinger,

Never forget, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy…write that on the blackboard 100 times.

The distrust filtered throughout his administration: As vice president, Spiro Agnew was instructed to give speeches attacking the media, referring to reporters, editors, and publishers as “small and unelected elite” who possess “broad…powers of choice” and “decide what forty to fifty-million Americans will learn of the day’s events in the nation and the world.” According to Agnew, there was “a widening credibility gap…between the national news media and the American people.”

Lawsuits were threatened whenever the phrase “Tricky Dick” appeared in print. Reporters’ phones lines were repeatedly tapped. The Internal Revenue Service was directed to investigate tax returns filed by Seymour Hersh and other journalists whom the White House disliked. Publishers, like Katharine Graham of the Washington Post, were menaced:

And these were just mild reactions: before organizing the Watergate break-in, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt discussed murdering Jack Anderson, a muckracking journalist, to end leaks that were damaging the administration and deflect any further criticism. One option was smearing his steering wheel with LSD (presumably so he would hallucinate while driving and crash his car), while the other, said Liddy, was more direct — “I would have knifed him or broken his neck.”

But Anderson and his fellow colleagues were never banned from the White House like Loory, who, according to Nixon, committed the cardinal sin: “They say, ‘But it’s the responsibility of the media to look at government generally, and particularly at the president, with a microscope.’ I don’t mind a microscope, but, boy, when they use a proctoscope, that’s going too far.” The consequences for being on Nixon’s enemies list weren’t career-ending for Loory — the president resigned from office in August 1974, and by then, the reporter had already moved on, teaching public affairs reporting at the Ohio State University before his decade-plus career at CNN — but what will happen to Acosta and the current American press is far less certain.

Like Nixon, Trump has managed to marginalize the media, creating an effective foil; in essence, the media is the heel to Trump’s spray-tanned face. But he’s also managed to shift the media to the sidelines, something which Nixon could never accomplish, and according to RonNell Andersen Jones’ and Lisa Grow Sun’s recent paper, “Enemy Construction and the Press,” that transformation— from necessary evil (in 1976, a study found that while Americans believed the press wasn’t always “cordial,” they were “crucial middlemen”) to just evil — will haunt not only this current presidential administration but also all future commanders-in-chief:

Beyond these more traditional rationales for enemy construction, however, lurks one of the most insidious potential consequences of declaring the press to be the enemy of the people: constructing the press as an enemy can pave the way for the invocation of Schmittian exceptionalism that justifies limitation on press freedoms and thus subverts the important watchdog, educator, and proxy roles of the press. This undermining of vital press functions, in turn, damages the democracy and empowers the administration to more easily construct enemies of our other critical institutions—like the judiciary—and of vulnerable groups—such as Mexican immigrants and Muslims.

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Elon Green | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,019 words)

Roger Morris was standing on the South Lawn of the White House. It was early 1969, and Richard Nixon had only been in office for three or four weeks. Morris was a holdover on the National Security Council from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, staying on at the behest of Henry Kissinger. Morris and his colleagues had been invited to fill empty spots on the lawn during a ceremony involving a visiting head of state. “I was suddenly aware of this figure, very close to me on my right,” Morris said. “I looked over and it was Pat Nixon.” Morris decided that, though he’d never met the first lady, as a courtesy he ought to say hello.

When the event concluded, Morris turned to Nixon. “I just want you to know how much I am enjoying my work. It’s a pleasure to work for a president who is so well-informed in foreign affairs,” he said. Morris wasn’t just blowing smoke. He found Nixon quite knowledgeable about his own portfolio — Africa, South Asia, and the United Nations. As Morris told me, “[Nixon] knew a lot of heads of state in Black Africa, personally and well, for years.” And it wasn’t uncommon, he said, for Nixon to point out mistakes made by Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during briefings.

Nixon looked at Morris rather quizzically. “Oh dear,” she said. “You haven’t seen through him yet.” Morris, stunned, could only nod.

Pat Nixon was formidable. That year, during a visit to Vietnam, she became the first first lady to enter an active combat zone since World War II. But her relationship with the president could be a challenge. “No question it was a tough marriage,” Bob Woodward would tell Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie in 1980. “Even the people we talked to, who were very defensive about him, just felt that he didn’t treat her very well.”

Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the president’s secret taping apparatus, told Woodward not long ago that the first lady was “borderline abused.” Nixon would ignore her when they were together. “I wanted to shake him. ‘Answer her, goddamn it; she’s your wife!’”

There have also been darker reports, many of which were rounded up in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2000 Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power. For instance: Allegations that Nixon “kicked the hell” out of Pat in 1962. That, after telling America that the country would not have him to “kick around anymore,” the former vice president “beat the hell” out of her. That, in fact, she had been so injured “she could not go out the next day.” That, on an unspecified occasion, one aide or perhaps more “had to run in and pull [Nixon] off Pat,” who sustained bruises on her face.

That Nixon struck his wife while he was president.

‘Oh dear,’ Pat said. ‘You haven’t seen through him yet.’

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. (The Nixons’ daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, unequivocally denied the allegations made in The Arrogance of Power in 2000.) But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity. The scrutiny is not commensurate with the accusations.

For years, journalists and historians have mostly danced around the reports, gently poking and prodding. Nixon chroniclers tend either to acknowledge that the reports exist without assessing their reliability, or they ignore them altogether. A conspicuous absence of specifics in the public record — dates, locations, and documentation — may be to blame for this, and, especially when writing about allegations of abuse, one must write with care and caution.

What can be said with confidence is the truth of the matter has not been been satisfactorily resolved. With the benefit of distance and perspective, it’s worth giving the alleged incidents a second look and considering their sources more closely, because allegations of abuse are taken more seriously today than they were a half-century ago — or even more recently, when this history was being written.

***

In 1962, Nixon was running for governor of California against Edmund “Pat” Brown. He’d spent the previous eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. Nixon was suited to the position. “Eisenhower radically altered the role of his running mate by presenting him with critical assignments in both foreign and domestic affairs once he assumed his office,” wrote Irwin Gellman, one of the great Nixon chroniclers. “Because of the collaboration between these two leaders, Nixon deserves the title, ‘the first modern vice president.’”

The gubernatorial campaign was contentious. “Nixon had charged that Brown was soft on communism and crime, while the governor claimed that the former vice president was interested in the governorship only as a stepping stone to the White House,” the Los Angeles Times recalled years later.

Brown told Fawn Brodie, in her Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, that during the campaign he heard that Nixon “kicked the hell out of her, hit her.” The book was published in 1981, which makes this, I suspect, the earliest on-record accusation of its kind.

In a recording of the interview from July 1980, which is held with Brodie’s files at the University of Utah, Brodie and the loose-talking former governor wonder if the alleged abuse — they had both heard the rumors — was physical or purely emotional; they’re uncertain. This is what follows:

BRODIE: Were you aware of Pat as a campaigner, in the campaign, at all? Was she —

BROWN: I don’t think she campaigned. She may have gone to a few women’s parties. But we got word, at one stage of the campaign, that he kicked the hell out of her. He hit her or some damn thing. Did you ever hear that?

BRODIE: That story keeps surfacing.

BROWN: Some of the guys that were on the plane with the campaign came to me confidentially and said, “Nixon really slugged his wife. He treated her terribly. He hauled her out in the presence of people.”

BRODIE: He slugged his wife in front of people?

BROWN: Well, in front of one of the press that was supposed to be friendly to him. He got so angry.

BRODIE: He hit her.

BROWN: But I can’t prove that. I never used it.

Brodie disliked Nixon. As Newell Bringhurst recounted in Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, Brodie called her subject a “shabby, pathetic felon,” “a rattlesnake,” and a “plain damn liar.” When, in November 1977, Brodie’s husband, Bernard, was diagnosed with cancer, she paused her research, quoting her husband saying: “That son of a bitch can wait.” (Brodie herself would die of lung cancer in January 1981, never entirely finishing the manuscript.)

In a recent conversation, Bringhurst called Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character Brodie’s weakest book. “It’s not a balanced biography at all,” he said. “She went into that — into the research and the writing — with a biased perspective.” It’s true, and understandably so: After Nixon was elected president in 1968, after promising to end the war in Vietnam, Brodie’s son was nearly drafted. When Nixon, several years later, attempted to smear the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation colleague of Bernard Brodie’s, it was salt in the wounds.

Brodie had for many years taught college classes on how to write a biography. And yet, said Bringhurst, “she violated, in many ways, the very canons that she tried to teach her students: You have to have some empathy and perspective for the person you’re writing the biography on.”

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity.

Brown wasn’t the only source for accusations leveled against Nixon during that period. There’s a quote from Frank Cullen in The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, who, to their great credit, explore the allegations in greater detail than any biographers before or since. Cullen, a Brown senior aide, said he had heard that Nixon “beat the hell [out of]” Pat in the wake of the gubernatorial loss.

By the 1962 campaign, Cullen was an old hand at politics. He’d volunteered on John F. Kennedy’s congressional campaigns in 1948, and stayed on for the Senate run in 1952. In 1960, during Kennedy’s campaign for president, Robert Kennedy introduced Cullen to Brown, who would appoint Cullen assistant legislative secretary. (In 1972, Cullen helped coordinate the visit to the United States by China’s table tennis team that was later famously called “ping-pong diplomacy.”)

***

Other people have made accusations about Nixon. In March 1998, in a talk he believed to be off-the-record, Seymour Hersh told an audience of Harvard’s Nieman fellows about “a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.” Hersh would reprise the charge three months later during appearances on CNBC and NBC.

More recently, Hersh wrote about it in his memoir, Reporter. A couple hundred pages in, he writes that a few weeks after the resignation:

I was called by someone connected to a nearby hospital … and told that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had been treated in the emergency room there a few days after she and Nixon had returned from Washington. She told her doctors that her husband had hit her. I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency room physician who treated her.

After receiving the tip, Hersh called John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s White House counsel. Ehrlichman not only declined to wave Hersh away from the story, but said he knew of two other instances of abuse: one from 1962 — presumably the instance referenced by Cullen — but also one that occurred during Nixon’s presidency. (Hersh, in an interview with me for the Columbia Journalism Review, said his hospital source was a doctor.)

The biographers Summers and Swan, who interviewed Hersh, also talked to John Sears, who worked for Nixon in 1968. With Sears, who was suspected of being Deep Throat, it’s essentially a high-level game of telephone: Sears heard from Waller Taylor, a senior partner at Nixon’s law firm, that in 1962 Pat Nixon was hit so hard “he blackened her eye” and “she threatened to leave him over it.”

Sears, now 78, told me he was surprised by Taylor’s story because he himself had neither seen nor, until that point, heard of such abuse. Still, he said, “I saw no reason [Taylor] would make up such a thing. He was a friend of theirs.” This seems to be true. Summers and Swan note that Taylor’s father had been an early supporter of Nixon’s, and Taylor himself introduced Nixon to trickster Donald Segretti. Segretti, however, disputes the latter point. “I’ve had a lot of things over the years made up about me that are just complete fantasy. This sounds like one of those stories,” Segretti said. “I do not know who this Waller Taylor was, [and] I never met President Nixon.” (For good measure, without prompting, Segretti also denied authorship of the “Canuck letter.”)

Sears recalled telling the story to Patrick Hillings, who succeeded Nixon in Congress: “He said it was quite possible; the whole business of the loss in California had made them both upset, and that Nixon had finally agreed to move to New York and get out of politics. But there was a lot of problems in and around that.” Hillings, said Sears, didn’t attest to the truth of the allegations, “but he thought it believable.” (I asked John Dean, who succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel, if he knew about the abuse allegations. Dean’s name doesn’t come up in any of these stories, but historically he’s been quite critical of his old boss — he cooperated with the Senate Watergate investigators — so I assumed he would be candid. “I have zero knowledge of RN striking his wife,” he emailed.)

Seymour Hersh told an audience about ‘a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.’

The game of telephone continues with a quote from William Van Petten, a reporter who covered the ’62 campaign. Van Petten told a writer named Jon Ewing that he found Nixon to be “a terrible, belligerent drunk” who “beat Pat badly … so badly that she could not go out the next day.” Van Petten, Summers and Swan write, was informed this had happened before, and that Nixon aides, including Ehrlichman, “would on occasion have to go in and intervene.”

What to make of it all? For his part, John Farrell, author of last year’s Pulitzer finalist, Richard Nixon: The Life, dismisses much of this, asserting that the sources are not to be trusted. “Richard Nixon fired John Ehrlichman. Nixon fired John Sears, too,” he said. (Sears said he left under a “mutual understanding.”) However, he allows, “Pat Hillings would have known. Pat Hillings was incredibly close to the Nixons. But he’s not with us anymore.”

Summers, who conducted the interviews with Ehrlichman for The Arrogance of Power, doesn’t believe that Nixon having fired Ehrlichman tainted the source. “In the sense that one assesses the credibility and character of someone who’s talking to you, I found Ehrlichman a credible interviewee, and not a vindictive interviewee.”

***

On August 8, 1974, 61-year-old Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. He was in poor health, exhibiting persistent phlebitis and shortness of breath. In September, he would be admitted to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, where he was given a blood thinner. Scans revealed evidence of a blood clot that had moved from his left thigh to his right lung.

Then, in October, after what one of his doctors later described as “groin pain and the persistent enlargement of the left leg,” Nixon went back to the hospital. He would remain there for three weeks and lose 15 pounds.

Sometime during this period, again according to Hersh, Pat Nixon was taken to a local emergency room. Evidently, her husband had attacked her at their home in San Clemente, California.

I called Hersh to see if he could shed more light on this. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “I’m not interested. Bye bye.” Mentioning that he had a guest in his office, he hung up.

So I asked Anthony Summers for more information, anything really, about that hospital visit. Did he and Swan attempt to verify Hersh’s source? “I have a very vague memory that we looked for a doctor at the San Clemente hospital.” Did he find the doctor? “I don’t recall.” He suspects the answer is buried in his notes, which aren’t retrievable.

***

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others. According to Farrell’s biography, during Nixon’s 1960 campaign for president, on a swing through Iowa, the strained candidate

vented by violently kicking the car seat in front of him. Its enraged inhabitant, the loyal [Don] Hughes, left the broken seat, and the car, and stalked off down the road. At an otherwise successful telethon in Detroit on election eve, Nixon once again lost his temper, and struck aide Everett Hart. Furious, Hart quit the campaign. “I was really mad,” Hart recalled. “I had had a rib removed where I had had open heart surgery, and that is where he hit me.”

Hart, said Farrell, spoke to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, over the phone about the incident, and said he could not forgive the man. Woods summarized the phone conversation in a memo currently in Nixon’s archives.

More than a decade later, in the summer of 1973, Nixon, mired in the Watergate scandal, visited New Orleans to give a speech to a veterans group. It was expected to be a friendly audience. As Nixon walked toward the convention hall, reported the Washington Post’s magazine, “he wanted nothing in his way, in front or in back, before he got at the crowd inside.” However, “breathing on him from behind was [Ronald] Ziegler and the clump of TV cameras, mics, and newsmen that inevitably followed.”

An angered Nixon, as Michael Rosenwald wrote last year, “stuck his finger in Ziegler’s chest, turned him around, and then shoved him in the back hard with both hands, saying ‘I don’t want any press with me and you take care of it.’” It was even caught on tape, which was fortuitous because a Nixon aide later denied the incident had occurred at all.

***

The earliest chronological firsthand accusation is also the most shocking. In 1946, Nixon ran against Jerry Voorhis, a five-termer in California’s old 12th congressional district. Despite his incumbency, or perhaps because of it, Voorhis ran a terrible campaign. To boot, there were reportedly phone calls to prospective voters from an anonymous caller inquiring, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?”

Nixon destroyed him. In his account of the defeat, Farrell includes a quote from Zita Remley, a Democratic campaign worker of whom a Long Beach paper enthused in 1960 that, were she to ever faint, “it’s certain that she could be immediately revived by fanning her with a political brochure.” Remley found Voorhis “very white and sort of quiet. … He just sort of put his head in his hands.”

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others.

Farrell mentions Remley once more in the book, in the endnotes, where he accurately describes her as a “Democratic partisan” who claimed to have “firsthand knowledge of the anonymous phone calls.” However, he writes:

Remley, at least, is a troublesome source: a Nixon hater who fed at least one demonstrably false story about Nixon’s taxes to the press and claimed (more than 20 years later) that Nixon slapped her outside a public function — an assault that, if verified, would have ended his career but that she didn’t report to the police at the time.

Remley talked about the slap in question with Fawn Brodie, who wrote about the knotty tax business:

[Remley] had become a deputy assessor of Los Angeles County with the job of checking veterans’ exemptions. In 1952, just after the election, Nixon sent a notarized letter to her Los Angeles office requesting a veteran’s tax exemption, which was granted only to veterans who, if single, had less than $5,000 worth of property in California or elsewhere, and if married, $10,000.

As Brodie (who misspelled Remley’s first name as Vita) tells it, Remley knew that Nixon bought a pricey home in Washington, D.C., and denied the request. The powerful political columnist Drew Pearson found out and published a damning story.

Nixon was upset about it. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he wrote that Pearson’s column was “teeming with innuendo and loose facts” and claimed that Pearson retracted the column three weeks after the 1952 election.

That sets the scene for what followed later that year. Brodie writes:

When Nixon was speaking in the Long Beach auditorium, Mrs. Remley went to hear him. Arriving late, she listened from near the open door. As he emerged he recognized her. In a sudden fit of rage, he walked over and slapped her. His friends, horrified, hustled him away in the dark. There were no cameras or newsmen to catch the happening, and Mrs. Remley, fearful of losing her job, told only a few friends.

Farrell doesn’t buy it. “She really detests Nixon,” he said. “She could have ended his political career right there by filing a complaint. And yet she never did. There’s no hospital report. There’s no police report from that incident. It’s just her talking, years later, to Fawn Brodie.”

Those doubts are among the reasons Farrell chose to exclude the Remley incident from the book’s text, “to signal to the reader that I didn’t believe it.”

Of the allegations more generally, Farrell continued: “In the period after Watergate, Nixon was accused of everything — some of it quite fanciful — and it’s significant, I think, that you had three of the greatest investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein and Hersh, and not one of them put it in print in their long investigations on Nixon.” Neither Woodward nor Bernstein responded to repeated interview requests.

***

Farrell is right that, given the opportunity to thwack Nixon about this, the otherwise fearless trio declined. Maybe that means something. After all, if “Woodstein” and Hersh couldn’t nail him, who could? But maybe it just says something about the nature of investigative journalism; chasing dozens of consequential stories at any given time, and they don’t all pan out. Which doesn’t, of course, make them false. It just means the threshold for publication — a hospital report or a doctor’s testimony, perhaps — wasn’t met by deadline.

Decades later, we’re left having to deal with a handful of hazy stories, and wondering about the motives of the men and women telling them.

Of all the allegations, it’s Zita Remley’s that really gnaws at me. I am willing to concede, as Farrell contends, that Remley lied about Nixon’s taxes, even if there’s evidence she just made a dumb mistake. What I keep returning to is this: What did this obscure campaign worker stand to gain from accusing the still-living Nixon of slapping her? It certainly wasn’t fame. From what I can tell, Remley’s death in 1985 didn’t even merit an obituary in the local papers.

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls. Their lives do not seem measurably improved by sticking their necks out. (Quite the contrary. Stormy Daniels, for instance, was recently arrested for touching undercover detectives in a strip club — charges that were later dismissed.)

Now, imagine doing this 40 years ago — which is to say, 20 years before Monica Lewinsky was dragged through the mud and Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating of 66 percent.

What’s the upside?

***

“This is an agonizing subject for me, because I heard some of the same stories, from a much earlier period,” said Roger Morris. A source suggested I talk to Morris, who resigned from the National Security Council in 1970 when Nixon ordered the bloody Cambodian “incursion.”

Morris wrote 1991’s Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, which charts Nixon’s life and career through the election of 1952. He heard stories in Whittier, California, where Nixon moved at the age of 9, and Washington. The tales, always off-the-record, were passed along by friends and acquaintances, often elderly Quakers. (I asked if there was anyone I could talk to; Morris said they were all dead.)

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls.

“I had heard stories about the physical abuse of Pat Nixon as early as the Congressional years, which would have been ’47, ’48, ’49, and much of 1950,” Morris continued. “They had these terrible, raging fights, at high decibel.” Per the descriptions he heard of altercations at the Spring Valley home, Nixon had “manhandled” his wife, “not necessarily beaten. It was a violent relationship, in that respect.”

Morris didn’t hear the stories when he was in government, but only much later, starting in around 1983, when he began work on the book. He could never nail down the details, so, while his book includes accounts of the marriage becoming increasingly strained, there’s no reference to physical abuse. “I didn’t have any real, solid verification. I did not have any eyewitnesses.” Which is not to say his sources were bad, or distant; among them, Morris said, were in-laws of the Nixons. “They were plausible people, serious people.” He believed the stories, but lacked what he felt would be necessary for inclusion — eyewitnesses, testimony from doctors, or hospital records. (That’s to be expected, and it’s one of the inherent difficulties in writing about abuse.)

“If you ask me if this is probable — could it have happened? Absolutely. It is consistent with too much testimony of what we know about their relationship. It was stormy. It was given to outbursts of anger, profanity. It was not based on abiding, mutual respect,” Morris said. There had once been a great deal of love between them, “but as in many marriages, it was depleted and exhausted.”

Just before we hung up, Morris added: “We’re living in a very different era now, and I do think historical figures ought to be judged whole, as it were, against the setting of their times, but also against the setting of posterity.”

Elon Green is a writer in Port Washington, New York.

***

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

There’s no going out on the 4th of July at my house. The evening is allocated to the soothing of an anxious dog. The shift runs from dusk (around 8:30 in my Northwest corner of the U.S.) until the bad noises stop. It’s a good night for movies. Thanks to a recommendation from Salon, I landed on 1776, the 1972 movie version of the 1969 musical.

“1776” brings to life the vibrant personalities that helped bring America to life. You have Daniels as the acerbic, indignant and unshakably honorable Adams, Da Silva as the sly and charming but deeply idealistic Franklin and Howard as the quiet and cerebral Jefferson. Like all of the best works about history, it forces audiences to see important figures from the past as flesh-and-blood human beings rather than stodgy icons.

Spoiler alert: the vote goes to independence and the rest is (sorry) history.  I did not read the entire Salon piece up front; I didn’t want to know anything more than “Yep, this movie is a great choice (for those of you stuck under 15 pounds of quaking dog) for July 4th.”

Because I didn’t read the entire write up, I didn’t know that none other than President Richard Nixon had feelings about the movie. It’s thanks to him the song “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men” was cut; it’s since been restored.

In the musical “1776,” the song “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men” depicts Revolutionary War era conservatives as power-hungry wheedlers focused on maintaining wealth. So it’s not surprising that then-President Richard Nixon, who saw the show at a special White House performance in 1970, wasn’t a big fan of the number.

What is surprising is that according to Jack L. Warner, the film’s producer and a friend of the president, Nixon pressured him to cut the song from the 1972 film version of the show–which Warner did. Warner also wanted the original negative of the song shredded, but the film’s editor secretly kept it intact.

Small wonder — it’s a scathing number. “Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor,” scowls John Dickinson. (Dickinson refused to sign the Declaration of Independence.) The cast breaks into a second verse about the joys of conservatism.

We’re the cool, cool considerate men
Whose like may never, ever bee seen again
With our land, cash in hand
Self command, future planned

And we’ll hold to our gold
Tradition that is old
Reluctant to be bold

We say this game’s not of our choosing
Why should we risk losing?

No wonder Nixon hated it. It was the Broadway version of the 1776 version of “We’ve got ours, we’re good, thanks.”

The movie holds up well enough for 1972, though I’m fairly certain Martha Jefferson would not have sung to John Adams and Ben Franklin about her husband Thomas’ prowess at… violin, sure, that song is about his musical skills, sure. I found Franklin too cartoonish, though I liked William Daniels’ Adams a lot (he played Benjamin’s dad in The Graduate). I was riveted by “Molasses to Rum,” the number praising, among other things, the slave trade.

Once the credits rolled, I had to research any number of things — where Edward Rutledge stood on slavery, what happened to John Dickinson after he declined to sign the Declaration, and what about that Abigail Adams anyway?

I don’t know how I got through the 70s without seeing 1776. When I posted to Facebook that I was watching it, my feed lit up with commentary — including one friend admitting he would like to play Andrew McNair, the long suffering custodian/bell-ringer who keeps trying to open the windows to let some air into what’s now known as Independence Hall.

All those men in brocade, arguing in the heat of a Philadelphia summer. It must have stunk to high heaven in the room where it happened.

Stories mentioned:

• “Fourth of July viewing: Before there was “Hamilton,” there was “1776”, Salon, July 4, 2017
• “Heated Debate About ‘Cool’ Cut,” LA Times, September 7, 2001
• “The Patriot Who Refused to Sign the Declaration of Independence,” History Net, June 3, 2010
• 1776 (on Vimeo), Columbia Pictures, 1972

Andrea Pitzer | Longreads | April 2017 | 11 minutes (2,800 words)

During his heady first days in office, Donald Trump developed his now-familiar ritual for signing executive orders. He began by swapping a large sheet of paper for a hinged portfolio, then he started revealing the signed documents to onlookers a little awkwardly, crossing his forearms to hold the folio up, or bending it backward to show the press his signature. Finally, he perfected the motion by turning the open folder completely around to face the audience, displaying it from three angles, as if delivering tablets of law from Mount Sinai. By the end of the week, he seemed pleased with this bit of theater in which he could star as the president. The ritual, of course, became a meme.

Shortly after he perfected this performance, Trump signed three executive orders promoted by the White House under the heading “Law and Order.” The first required the Attorney General to look at crimes against law enforcement; the second directed the AG to create a task force on crime reduction and public safety, with specific mention of illegal immigration; the third delegated cabinet members to review strategies for finding and prosecuting international drug cartels. All three called for studying crime rather than implementing new programs—they also heightened anxiety over purported crime by blacks and immigrants while making it seem like only Trump was willing do something about it.

“Law and order” has been a popular catchphrase for Trump—he used it repeatedly on the campaign trail going back to 2015. In doing so, Trump followed in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, who gets much of the credit for perfecting this disingenuous approach to crime in American politics. In a diary entry from 1969, White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman paraphrased Nixon’s thinking: “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” During the campaign Nixon’s team tackled this challenge by adopting a strategy of “law and order”—by playing to racist fears, they could cloak divisive rhetoric in an unobjectionable demand for security during a chaotic era.

The crime wave seized on by Nixon was not imaginary. Beginning in the 1960s, the United States faced a surge in criminal violence: Across the decade, the murder rate rose by 44 percent, and per capita rates of forcible rape and robbery more than doubled. The reasons for the surge in offenses—as well as the cause of its decrease in the early 1990s—are still not fully understood, though historians believe that the high rate of male baby-boomers coming of age likely played a critical role.

Nixon was responding to “soft on crime” rhetoric by President Lyndon Johnson, who in a 1966 statement to Congress on crime and law enforcement had described “social justice and personal dignity for all Americans” as a path to preventing violence. Johnson’s greater attention to rehabilitation and bail reform provided fodder for conservatives who argued the country was coddling criminals. Ambitious politicians found it easy to pair anxiety over the end of Jim Crow and the beginning of the women’s liberation movement with this fear of all-too-real violence.

A candidate who declared himself tough on crime was understood to also oppose radical shifts in the social order. That same year, 1966, Gerald Ford, then the House Minority Leader, asked: “How long are we going to abdicate law and order—the backbone of any civilization—in favor of a soft social theory that a man who heaves a brick through your window is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?” Months before Nixon’s victory in 1968, Governor of California Ronald Reagan blamed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the civil rights leader’s own policies of civil disobedience. On the day of King’s funeral, Reagan pointed to the “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

The success of this language at the ballot box meant that later presidential adopters followed the same law-and-order trail. In 1988, George H.W. Bush launched a racial smear campaign with a television ad that associated opponent Michael Dukakis with convicted murderer Willie Horton and “revolving door” prisons. Bush would continue the theme on the campaign trail once again four years later: “We need to show them what law and order is all about.” Democrats also played the law-and-order card. In 1994, Bill Clinton invoked the phrase as he tried to shore up his own tough-on-crime credentials by supporting the largest crime bill in U.S. history. In the summer of 2016, Donald Trump launched his own law-and-order candidacy during a time when violence could be perceived as rampant—eight police officers had been gunned down over two weeks that July—but crime statistics remained near historic lows.

Law and order is as much a perception as it is a policy, and the roots of law and order as a political platform run far deeper than Nixon’s “Southern strategy.” For centuries, the rhetoric of law and order has been used to intimidate black Americans, limit voting rights, and hobble the influence of minority religions. But law and order for Trump is also nostalgic throwback to the politics of his youth and the youth of many of his supporters, offering a simple good-versus-evil binary through which he can view the entire world.

***

Americans have long been an unruly population. In the colonial era, British attempts to impose law and order were met with occasional mob actions and armed resistance, encouraging the King to leave his subjects in a quasi-anarchic state for long periods of time. At the close of the French and Indian War in 1763, Parliament began passing a series of acts prohibiting settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, suspending disobedient colonial legislatures, and heavily taxing American subjects with the intention of cracking down on “obstinate, undutiful, and ungovernable” colonists. The acts sparked open rebellion and eventual independence.

As the nineteenth century began, the idea of imposing law and order retained some of its imperial stain, at least until influential figures across several states found they now had their own interests to preserve. By mid-century, law and order parties sprang up across the United States to fight social change and maintain the status quo for those in power.

In the 1840s, a Law and Order Party formed in Rhode Island out of a coalition of rural Democrats and Whigs. The party aimed to keep a colonial-era charter signed by King Charles II which limited suffrage to white men with assets totaling at least $134. After a renegade election bypassed the existing legislature and installed a body of representatives elected by white men of all incomes, the Law and Order Rhode Islanders insisted on retaining power on the terms laid out in the 1663 royal charter. With two separate legislatures and governors in place—one the result of expanded voting, and one standing against it—the Law and Order government barricaded the state house to block armed supporters of the People’s Party. After plotting a military raid on an arsenal, the shadow governor who fought for expanded white suffrage was captured, tried, and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor and solitary confinement. (He was eventually freed.)

[pullquote align=”center”]For centuries, the rhetoric of “law and order” has been used to intimidate black Americans, limit voting rights, and hobble the influence of minority religions.[/pullquote]

A decade later, during the maelstrom known as “Bleeding Kansas,” which would determine whether the territory would become a “free” or “slave” state, a new Law and Order Party was formed in response to the establishment of a Free-State Party. Law and Order organizers drew military officers from as far away as Florida to intimidate armed abolitionists arriving from the North. As in Rhode Island, competing state governments arose through disputed elections, and after a few skirmishes between their militias, the Free-State government was crushed by Law and Order forces.

Intercession on the part of President Franklin Pierce on the pro-slavery side was followed by cross-border massacres. John Calhoun, the surveyor-general of Kansas and Nebraska, had called the Free-Staters “outlaws and traitors,” condemning “the idea of appeasing the insatiable gluttony of abolition rage and fanaticism by harassing and plastering with indictments the law and order men, under the pretense of ‘impartial justice.’”

After the Civil War, political Law and Order Leagues were formed for the prohibition of liquor, a largely Protestant movement bound up with an attempt to control Irish-Catholics, from the factories where they worked, to their schools, convents, and saloons. The leagues were affiliated with the Know-Nothing Party, a movement that drew on prejudice and fear of diluting American culture.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, “law and order” as a concept became less attached to any specific political belief, but rather a stand-in for a perceived status quo. After the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in 1954 and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the liberal Warren Court effectively ended broad legal accommodation of racial animus. Denied a policy agenda, “law and order” persisted as a social construct: Goldwater nodded to increasing street crime in 1964, and many politicians—including Nixon—began to shift to a more subtle wink-and-nod approach to conflating racial issues with crime. In return, not only did Americans elect Richard Nixon to the presidency twice, but American culture also winked back.

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Donald Trump turned twenty-five in 1971. That year, a bloody law-and-order aesthetic bloomed in Hollywood. In Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood’s cop is frustrated with a lax criminal justice system, taking matters into his own hands in order to execute justice. In A Clockwork Orange, an ultraviolent gang of droogs assaults an elderly tramp who laments that “there’s not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more.” The novel Death Wish appeared the next year, followed in 1974 by the Charles Bronson film, in which a former bleeding-heart liberal avenges his wife’s murder by becoming a murderous vigilante on the streets of New York.

Political scientist Timothy Lenz, writing about the wave of law-and-order movies in the early 1970s, notes that when it comes to this strain of conservatism, a tension exists between the opposite poles of “law” and “order.” This tension has existed for millennia, Lenz writes, pointing out that even Aristotle and Plato disagreed on whether the rule of law is the best vehicle for justice. From one perspective, law can be seen as simply a means to an end—the establishment of order. If order can be achieved by other means, the law can be dispensed with. Looking at the law-and-order scaffolding that framed Dirty Harry and similar crime films of the era, Lenz explains that in any narrative contest between law and order, order triumphs, and the audience walks away satisfied with what critic Pauline Kael calls a manipulative “righteous conclusion.”

This idea has dominated criminal policy and the cultural portrayal of crime in the United States for nearly half a century. It worked in Nixon’s favor, but Nixon wasn’t alone. Lenz describes Eastwood’s cop as projecting “an air of confidence, certainty, and simplicity, the character attributes that contributed so much to the political success of another actor turned Republican politician, Ronald Reagan.” Three decades after Reagan, with the actor’s same confidence, certainty, and simplicity, Trump further blurred the lines between entertainment and reality, drawing his supporters toward the binary world in which he resides.

If conservatives were inclined to tip the scale towards “order” to deliver a Hollywood ending, others have tried in vain to co-opt the phrase and tilt it back toward the “law” side of the equation. During and after World War I, progressives formed Law and Order Leagues with the support of the NAACP to oppose lynching and denounce vigilante justice—only to compete against the Ku Klux Klan, which had embraced the phrase first, and was portrayed by supporters as “conservators of law and order” as early as 1871.

By the second half of the 1960s, “law and order” had a single meaning: A restoration of the traditional social order. George Wallace ran in 1968 on the Supreme Court’s responsibility for nationwide lawlessness, and proclaimed from the campaign trail that he found it “a sad day in the country when you can’t talk about law and order unless they want to call you a racist.”

Over time, law-and-order movements are often steamrolled by the social change they try to suppress. In the case of Prohibition, decades of anti-Catholic sentiment persisted alongside liquor restrictions until the passage and then repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and the grudging acceptance of a once-alien Irish population. Rhode Island’s Law and Order Party conceded on the issue of suffrage only months after locking the state house, quickly moving to enfranchise blacks as well as middle-class and poor whites. In Kansas, the Law and Order party lost its pro-slavery momentum despite early victories, and the territory entered the Union in 1861 as a free state. Radical law and order movements sometimes win the battle, but generally lose the war.

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Donald Trump first used the phrase “law and order” in a 1990 Playboy interview. He had recently taken out a full-page ad in four New York City newspapers to demand the death penalty for muggers and murderers. It was widely understood the target of the ads were the five black and Latino youths recently charged with the assault and rape of a white woman in Central Park. Asked about the ad by Playboy, he replied, “In order to bring law and order back into our cities, we need the death penalty and authority given back to the police.”

The Central Park Five were exonerated by DNA evidence and their convictions vacated in 2002, but Trump never accepted their innocence. With little in the way of proof, he claimed as late as October 2016 that the men were guilty. “When we hear he is going to be a ‘law and order president,’” wrote one of the defendants, “a collective chill goes down the spines of those of us who have been the victims of this ‘law and order.’”

Trump’s advisors learned law and order as political strategy from the Nixonian inheritors of anti-suffrage and pro-slavery movements, but Trump’s supporters embraced law and order as a remedy for their own suffering. If suffering can’t be cured—if jobs don’t come back, or a higher social status isn’t restored—law and order implies that at least somebody will be punished.

Yet Trump himself embraces law and order as someone who understands the world through television and film. His tough-on-crime stance may be the only philosophy on which he campaigned that was not purely political posturing. Law and order for Trump has as much in common with Dirty Harry as Tricky Dick. Like everything he says, it’s political theater—but in this case, one that has been part of his personal worldview for decades.

This latest law-and-order mania marks a strange congruence, one of the few in which Trump, his advisors, and his base all understand exactly what each of them means, though they arrive there by different routes. For once, Trump doesn’t have to flip positions or embrace something he doesn’t comprehend or believe. He’s always believed in law and order—even when it’s not real.

This time, there is no crime wave to serve as a fig leaf justifying a crackdown, but this was never at the heart of what law and order was about. The fear of blacks, immigrants, and voter fraud dovetails with Trump’s carnival-barker feel for his crowd’s resentments. His supporters’ pop-culture fantasy of using violence to keep the upper hand is his desire, too.

On the stump in Tennessee in October of 2015, a full year before his election, Trump played to the crowd by borrowing another page from Nixon’s playbook, calling his supporters the “silent majority.” In a video of the event, he declares, “We need law and order” then repeats the line again. After reading the Second Amendment aloud from a sheet of paper, he pretends to do a fast draw from a holster. “I have a license to carry in New York,” he announces from the podium, quickly inventing a fantasy vigilante scene. He imagines his attacker saying, “Oh, there’s Trump. He’s easy pickings.” Trump tilts his head and play-acts drawing a gun a second time. Thumb up and index finger pointed at the audience, he asks his invisible villain, “What’d you say?” From there, he reenacts a scene from Death Wish, making his favorite bing! sound effect as he pretends to be Charles Bronson shooting a bad guy. “One of the great movies,” he says. “Today, you can’t make that movie.” But that won’t keep Trump from trying.

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Andrea Pitzer is the author of the forthcoming book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov.

Editor: Michelle Legro
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Illustration: Kjell Reigstad

Nixon had refused the teleprompter from the start. He kept all the figures—crime rising nine times as fast … 300 cities … 200 dead … 7,000 injured … 43 percent of the American people afraid … He kept them all in his head, like the date of the Battle of Hastings.

Now he was starting again: “As we enter the last few days of the nineteen sixty-eight campaign, there is one issue on which there is a critical difference of opinion between the two candidates and that’s on the issue of law and order in the United States. Mr. Humphrey pledges that he will continue the policies of the last—”

He stopped.

“I don’t like that, either,” he said. “Let’s—We’ll do another one here.”

Again, three beeps from the machine. Richard Nixon sat at the edge of the desk, looking at the floor. He rested his chin on his fist.

-Journalist Joe McGinniss, from The Selling of the President 1968, hailed as one of the classic books about the modern marketing of a presidential candidate. McGinniss, who also wrote books including Fatal Vision, died Monday at age 71 from complications related to prostate cancer.

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