If confession is indeed good for the soul, even if that soul grew up in a Protestant family that didn’t have a structured confessional environment, then it might be a good time for me to finally admit publicly, for the first time, that I did a bad bad thing: Back in the election season of 1968, I told a lie.
Growing up in a conservative Republican family, watching events unfold during that summer, with Nixon making it clear why he was smiling as he issued his appeal to the silent majority, I felt that Dick simply had to win in November. I was certain that if Hubert Humphrey took the oath of office in January of 1969, the United States would go Communist before the end of that year. I believed this so strongly that I even thought of writing a book about the looming Communist threat, and how HH and other prominent Dems didn’t take it seriously enough, although now I can’t imagine what kind of factual data I would have presented to support such an assertion and fill out an entire book, let alone how I would have gotten a book published in that long-ago era which predated the wonderful self-publishing tools currently available.
That era also predated our modern partisan polarization, and a significant percentage of voters who identified with one party still felt the need to vote for moderate candidates of the opposing party, at least in part to assure themselves, and their personal circle, of their own political moderation. I saw an opportunity when my friend Brian’s mother said, during a political discussion, that she would be open to voting for a Republican that year if the party put up somebody reasonable (as opposed to Goldwater, from the previous presidential contest). I knew Brian’s family was Catholic, and they usually voted for Democrats, which back then seemed connected in my mind, but I figured I could get his mother to vote for Nixon if I presented the case properly.
What case did I make? I told her that Nixon would end the Viet Nam war quickly, and peacefully. Lyndon Johnson’s VP had little credibility at that point in terms of how he might settle the conflict, whereas Dick claimed to have a plan to accomplish this seemingly-impossible goal. While RMN hadn’t revealed quite how he intended to pull off this feat, the Republicans did have some plausibility in this regard, since Tricky Dick served as the VP for the man who ran in 1952 on a promise to end the Korean War and who kept that promise. Eisenhower also spoke openly about his personal hatred of war, the financial toll it takes on taxpayers, and the danger of the growing military industrial complex.
This Nixon peace case seemed to have worked, since Brian’s mother did vote for Nixon, and perhaps his father may have done so as well, but at the moment when I forcefully presented the argument, did I really think Dick would genuinely conclude peace negotiations over the Viet Nam war? Not for a second. I felt quite sure that he would soon mount a more aggressive military engagement that, I believed, would somehow resolve the situation. I worried about the dominoes falling, and I knew RMN would keep that from happening. I obviously read his intentions correctly, though I couldn’t have had any concept of the living hell he would unleash, or the lingering human and environmental toll it would take in southeast Asia.
I remember meeting Brian in a school hallway on the sunny November morning after election day, and how we smiled and celebrated Nixon’s victory. Little could we have guessed at that instant how much we would both be cursing the man’s image in less than 2 years, and the negativity that his win would set in motion. The racist War on Drugs that I wrote about last week is but one facet of an enduring legacy of malfeasance that will take many more years to unwind, and much greater effort to undo. We have Nixon to thank, or actually to curse, for helping to launch the D.C. careers of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, along with many other monsters he let loose.
Fellow progressives, bless me for I have sinned. My last confession was never. 48 years ago I told a political lie that changed someone’s vote for the worse, and that helped Nixon win a close election. Oh, my God, am I sorry with all my heart! Even 46 years ago I had realized that I had sinned against people and causes that I held dear, and I long since pledged to never commit such a sin again. Amen.