captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008 what i'm here to do today is to review this historyography of the nixon presidency because there's a strong body of historical literature with where you can see the old dialectic of thesis and get toward the synthesis of what nixon did and i'll look at four or five major schools of interpretation and do so quick ly. i think it would be called the orthodox presidency and it argued nixon retreated from civil rights enforcement and pursuit of conservative white corn votes an the you are. veighors of this argument cite as their examples the delays of

deadlines for school desegregation in mississippi 1969, the. the's appeals to white soerns, best attempts to place two conservative white southerners on the u.s. supreme court, haynesworth jr. and carswell. nixon's need to win the south in 1972 under the so-called southern strategy and the muffling of nixon's rhetoric on civil rights. southern strategy retreat interpretation of nixon's civil rights policies was advanced by journalists as roberts and novak and others who left the administration like leanne panetta, who wrote a memoir. problems with the retreat thesis include it is simplistic, it is to a serb extent unfist indicated and one-dimensional. it is true that it captured nixon's political motivation which was undeniable but it also

tends to wrap isolated events into a tidy, all policy is politics argument. the second school of thought might be described as the nixonian reversion of nixon's civil rights policies and that revision in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s to some ex-tent, and we even see memoirs emerging in the 1990s. this is the first effort to revise the record. it can be find by nixon and some of his closest adviser, william sapphire, george schultz, and john you are liurlicman j as we. we can include his peaceful desegregation of southern schools in 1970 in the wake of the supreme court's ruling in holmes versus alexander which said the south was to desegregate at once and

hereafter prit only unityary school. differences among the nixon memo memoirs, mixon painted his actions as being statesman like, sapphire, price, garr man and schultz portrayed nixon as pragmatic in his approach to the south and school desegregation. earlier the critical of the memoirs depicts him as wily and effective. the president rode white southern backlash to re-election in 1972 while at the same time doing more to desegregate southern schools than any previous president. one thing the nixonian accounts had in common, none of the memoirists with the exception of garmet made civil rights the dominant or lead subject in their books. third school of thought the scholarly revision of the civil rights policies of nixon had its orins in the 1980s and 1990s and

first decade of the 21st century. why did it happen? well documents opened. tempers and passions cooled at least somewhat. there was a wistful longing for liberal policies after the conservative administrations of ronald reagan and george bush the first and the moderate administrations that racqueted them by democrats jimmy carter and bill clinton and domestic policy in particular here was an opportunity to say something fresh about the nixon presidency. major works in this school of thought include hugh davis graham's massive and extremely important the civil rights era in 1993 which documented the nixon administration's role in developing affirmative action. graham did a lot of work looking in the nixon papers but looked at the records of the labor department. joan hoff's book "nixon

reconsidered" in 1994 delves into this train of thought. her book was especially strong on white house decision making. melvin small's "the presidency of richard nixon 1999" again took an integrative approach blending nixon with his advisers to study motivations and actions and policy break-throughs and s setbacks. my own book "nixon's civil rights" published in 2001 i put in the revisionist camp tried to account for nixon's sporadic boldness and frequent vacillation as well as successes and failings on civil rights. it tried to do all of that by emphasizing the political,

practical and philosophical underpinnings of what nixon did in the area of civil rights. my noting that nixon had principle was one of the more bolder claims of the book, i think. the balance sheet showed, i argued that, he did more to achieve int dprags in the workplace with affirmative action than in schools or in housing although obviously the school desegregation record in the south was strong. he supported separateism in a number of ways sufficient as minority-owned banks and businesses, historically black colleges, and native-american indian tribes and i should add here he was baffled by women's rights but it achieved some progress there address the concerns of a group that comprised the majority of the electorate. i think for the reality check for those of you that are interested in the scholarly revisionist, something to keep in mind and here i do something i don't usually do, i'm going to

speak for more than just myself here. we were not claiming in our writings that this liberal nixon in terms of domestic policy was the dominant aspect of nixon's presidency. we were not, in other words, using this new nixon to supplant other nixons or other new nixons. we were all different people with different takes on nixon's liberalism, and again i won't go into all of the details. we can talk about this in the question and answer. scholarship since the revisionists i think again briefly here two schools of thought. we have what we might call the anti-revisionists who would include ken neth o'riley and elizabeth drew, they talk about his divisiveness and ramping up bussing and the accomplishments in the area of civil rights and domestic policy stemmed from his pragmatism rather than his

liberalism. others have used the works of the revisionists to deepen our understanding of specific mixon era policies and i'm thinking of kevin yule and john david skretey who showed urban unrest in the 1960s prompted nixon to adopt an economic development strategy regarding myjority groups that you can see in affirmative action. garrett davis' study of federal education policy showed how nixon's school desegregation efforts were strongly influenced by southern politics in 1969, but then came to be influenced by what he called presidential responsibility in 1970, as the president set out to implement the supreme court's decision in holmes versus alexander. other books have a respect to minority businesses, fair housing and native american indian policy. so my conclusion here is trite but i think true, much has been

done in the area of civil rights and much needs to still be done. thank you. [ applause ] >> well it's my pleasure to be here today at this wonderful conference to talk about my contribution to the nixon volume which is on the environment, and environmental policy, and in doing so i was able to draw upon the literature of environmental history which is both fascinating and a burgeoning field which is good news for me, not such good news for mel, because i kept submitting revised and expanded bibliographies, but i think he forgave me and it's particularly good the literature of late in dealing with environmental policy history. in the most nixon specific of this literature has to be jay brooks flippins' book called

"nixon and the environment" by far the most comprehensive of the president and the policy. the essay was called "nixon and the environment" so in the effort to be utterly derivative i needed to figure out something to do with it so my take was to take the spotlight off of nixon and to a certain extent off of the period of his administration, the late '60s and the early '70s, not to deny their importance certainly, but more to provide some context and some perspective along with the specificity about what the administration accomplished, and when you look at the literature an environmental policy, whether it's environmental law, whether it's on congress, whether it's on environmentalism, what it all reveals is the rather deep and ex-tensive roots of environmental concern,

environmental consciousness and government policy stretching back certainly to the post 1945 era but even further back if you care to go there. so environmentalism was not quite the fad or the fringe element that nixon thought it was. he referred to environmentalism as "crap for clowns." i desperated wanted to entitle my essay "crap for clowns." i was overruled. [ laughter ] but you can't quite blame nixon for being caught off guard by the suddenness and the urgency with which the issue cropped up during his administration eight days after the inauguration, you have the oil spill and you're offit to races. if you look at the 1968 election there was no hint the environment would be a big deal. his response was defensive. he was worried his political enemy, muskee, senator from

maine and jackson, presidential rivals would take advantage so in many ways he was defensive, didn't want to lose ground on this issue. last explicable, his unwillingness after his presidency to incorporate his environmental achievements or administration's environmental achievements into his legacy, never mentioned it, odd for a guy so concerned with framing his legacy which is why i think flippant's book is so important because it beings on the hisoriography of wilson and the policy and part of that and there is indeed a lot to talk about and i can't possibly get into all, air pollution, water pollution, natural resources, parks, wilderness, pesticides, the epa, the national environment, the policy act, take your pick. and so my effort to deemphasize nixon in talking about this

really what i want to avoid doing is peering into nixon's soul. no good comes of peering into nixon's soul, although we're very tempted to do it, because so much was accomplished on his watch and we want to know, did he really mean it, because then of course, after 1971, he turns around and pulls the rug out from under and kind of turns against the environment, so what's going on, and i guess the point i want to make is that nixon's true feelings about the matter really don't matter very much and indeed in many ways distract us from the bigger picture. one of the bigger pieces you want to look at what the accomplishments are of the administration you need to look at the accomplishments of the staff and the activities of a very active staff including john urlichmann head of the domestic council, john whitaker, his assistant and the point man on the environment, russell trayne,

first in the department and head on quality and william ruckleshouse, first of the epa and i could add two others who were active in environmental policy and really it was nixon's disinterest in domestic policy and environment in particular which created the space for these guys to operate. he just wanted them to keep them out of interest you believe in the environment politically, they did that but ended up doing a lot more, creating the fullest slates of environmental legislation that you're going to find under an administration, and so in many ways, nixon's political opportunism was a catalyst for environmental policymaking during his first administration, particularly in the 1969 and '70 era. we also learned from karen that one of the things nixon had was to centralize control over the bureaucracy within the white house. he did this restructuring of the

bureaucracy because he wanted to circumvent career bureaucrats in congress because he didn't think he'd get much done and didn't like those guys. in the case of the environment this worked pretty well for the issue. when you look at the domestic affairs council, the task force of the environment under whitaker comes out, you get a detailed slate of recommendations coming out in 1969 as a consequence of this and the epa, an independent agency, answering directly to the president on environmental issues created in december of 1970 under executive order the centralizing function was seen as a way to get control of things sort of this crazy quilt of environmental agencies spread all over the government but it actually acords with the broader consensus that was sort of out there among politicians and policy experts about how the environment should be managed, a emphasis on wholistic efforts to manage the environment which goes along with ecological

thinking, ecology, as you probably know is very big in this time, and ecology again sort of seeing the whole greater than the sum of its parts, an offshoot of a broader what i call systems thinking, a systems management, the innate faith that policymakers had during this time that you could use the tools of systems analysis to manage complex systems, whether they were the environment itself or environmental bureaucracies and policymakers and congress and the administration could incorporate elites who populated the nixon administration, kind of bought this wholeheartedly as a tool kit for managing complex systems, like daniel patrick moynih moynihan, who was influential in the nixon administration was always trying to sell nixon on comprehensive policies for the cities, for the environment, something of a hierarchyian but the ethos was central to the national environmental policy

act, senator henry jackson's bill but also the epa interested in managing the total environment and the epa as well a vehicle that would prevent sort of the capture of any particular, by any particular industry, right, of the administration or the regulatory agency because it oversaw the whole thing. and in a strange way, it appealed to nixon, and here's a president who really didn't have as much of an ideological core as others and kind of found this systems thinking very appealing and in many ways fueled his grandiose and dare i say kennedy-esque rhetoric on environmental matters. when you hear about him talk about the environment the soaring rhetoric, all the more confusing when soon thereafter, even before the 1970 midterm elections the republicans take a bath, nixon sours on the environment, not getting off political bang for the buck, not getting enough credit for it and this is the time where you get more influential sort of

business oriented administrators maury stance for example or the office of management and budget under george schultz and performing quality of life reviews on regulation and sort of begin to see a turning here, but again i would argue that sort of looking at sort of nixon's souring on the environment misses the bigger picture, you kind of feel like deep throat, forget tom singretti, you're missing the overall, and what is really going on, this is the larger picture i refer to is the rise of the new social regulation in the late '60s and early '70s, a radically expanded scope and capacity of the government to regulate not just sort of in a are row economic concerns like the trucking industry, or the telecommunications industry, but large swathes of american life that affect the lives of millions of people, right, users of environmental amenities, racial minorities, women, right,

sort of large categories of people, and the new social regulation arises out of a radical pluralism, right, sort of the organization of sort of different groups of people, right, in the political arena, but also the proliferation and the politicization of expertise they use to push their agenda. this is open politics, relies on government more than ever and distrusts government more than ever, it's content. when you have experts clash, that's what happens. the institutional component of this when you deal with the environment and the environment is a precise example of this, environmental values achieved institutional permanence when the mass mobilization and protests typical of earth day in april of 1970 gave way to more obscure venues, congressional subcommittees, regulatory

agencies, and the federal courts. nixon could barely control his own epa, no way he was going to wrap his hands around congress, of the courts or public interest groups. and so in many ways the. thecy becomes less imperial by the minute, as during this time, and one example i could give, nixon tried to rein in regulations and deadlines on the clean air act but never did he come close to reining in as much as the courts or congress did after he left office because the regulations and deadlines proved controversial or undoable and they were contested and changed and later on of course, watergate prevented nixon from mounting a sort of full frontal assault on the environmental regulatory state. so in conclusion, nixon certainly recognized some of the excesses of the environmental movement. he sort of recognized that as happening within politics, he

never took his eyes off of the economic situation. he articulated for more openly what most presidents understood, it's the economy, stupid it's not that the environmental movement happened during low unemployment. the thing nixon did miss was the permanent change in political culture that happened on his watch. his political opportunism did more to establish the institutional foothold of environmentalism. thanks. >> that was wonderful. thank you all for that. i would like to right away turn to the audience. are there any questions? please. of course the first question is from the furthest back. oh. >> one can't talk about nixon

domestic policy without talking about john urlichmann so why john urlichmann, not exactly a policy wonk, a seattle attorney, not that well connected. why john urlichmann? >> from a mental perspective he was a lawyer in seattle, he was a land use attorney so he had sort of a visceral interest in grounding in environmental issues that nixon just didn't have so he bought a certain expertise he was able to apply, cared about the stuff far more than nixon did. >> i think the other part of that is a version of he was there at the time and nixon trusted him. at the beginning of the nixon administration there were the two ideologically contentious advisers of arthur burns who was about to go off to another

appointment and daniel patrick moynihan to handle the urban affairs council. and the continual disputes among those two people, that wasn't the way he wanted to have a prowse run and also didn't care that much personally about domestic policy. one thing john ulichmann was a good negotiator and facilitator. he was willing to take over the job of assembling task forces in order to try to address a range of environment issues. that then turns into the creation of a domestic council and the domestic council staff, and it's the task forces, including the other members of that domestic council staff like john whitaker that really begins to make the difference. john urlichmann was close to the

president which means these initiatives got paid attention to else where in the administration. >> i agree with a lot of what has been said. in 1969 the administration was formulating domestic programs and debates about welfare reform and revenue sharing, they submitted them in something like august, 1969. i sort of think that moynihan was too exciting and too liberal and burns too boring and too conservative and urlichmann to a certain extent benefitted from that. if he had any id yol, he was a moderate, a tack tigs, and i think that appeal to a very important part of mixon's character. >> moynihan was brought in to get a hold of what nixon saw bass a terrible wal fare program. the family assistance plan fails which is what both richard nixon and daniel patrick moynihan

really wanted to get put through in some form in congress. when that fails, arthur burns goes off to the fed, is that where he was -- >> um-hum. >> goes off to the federal reserve opinion he was in the white house as a placeholder. daniel patrick moynihan goes back to his tenured position at harvard so there was a vacuum then in the white house and the tack tigs that the president was very comfortable with, john urlichmann was there to fill that vacuum in part. >> i think is the first the president trusted urlichmann implicitly. the second is that urlichmann had a refined organizational intelligence, and that was a quality which wasn't -- that was a quality which was valuable to

nixon. nixon used it. >> in the back? >> i have two questions. first one, was nixon a racist? and if so, why or why not, and the second question to the whole panel is, in nixon's economic policy, was he economics 101 or did he have a post doc? where and how much did he really know about what he was doing as an administrative president or as far as economic policy goes? >> i think the answer i would give is yes, some people might feel more comfortable with the wo word, there are comments that emerged about jews and mexicans

that we would use that word, it gets into a little bit of a semantic point with respect to him and prejudice and racism i think that he also believed in a conversation of opportunity. he said we're not all equal but we must ensure that anyone might go to the top. >> on policy, i think i can't give a simple answer because i think the truth is quite complex but some things can be said. the first is i think the president regarded economic policy as intrinsically dull and is worthy of his attention only insofar as it promoted the interests of those of his core

and marginal constituents and those are two considerable constraints on the first point. he had, second point, no intrinsic intellectual interest in the subject matter, none that i can see. i have seen no reference in anything that i've read whether from the diaries of other participants or indeed from urlichman n's notes or halderman's papers no, indication the president had any interest in the subject matter, but whilst that point is used against the president one could make the same charge about president kennedy and lyndon johnson. it seems to me the president is there to use political judgment, not to bring disinterested intellectually validated expertise to the subject.

i think if there's a charge, the charge is his determination to maximize employment and minimize the inflation rate by november 1972, a strategy that worked with extraordinarier in success had medium consequences shall the inflation rate which bottomed out in november of '72 rose in every single month between december 1972 and august 1974. he bequeathed inflation rates to his successor of three times that which he inherited from his predecessor. so the intertemporal of policy making was something he was inadequately tutored on. i'm not sure he was entirely appropriately supported on at least not by arthur burns and something of which he