carswell. nixon's need to win the south in 1972 under the so-called southern strategy. and the general muffling of nixons a rhetoric on sift rights. southern strategy was advanced by such journalists of he was and novak and liberals of nixon's administration who left the administration like leon panetta who wrote a memoir. problems with the southern strategy retreat thesis including that it is i think simplistic. it is to a certain extent unsophisticated and one dimensional. it's true it captures 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 revision of his civil rights policies. this revision we can see

starting in the 1970s and continuing to the 1980s to some extent and we seen see some memoirs emerging in the 1990s. this is the first effort to revise the record. it could be found in memoirs by nixon and some of his closest and most loyal advisers such as ray price, leonard garmet and john ehrlichman as well. these writers stressed his policies and accomplishments, such as his peaceful desegregation of southern schools in 1970 in the wake of the supreme court's ruling in holmes versus alexander, which said that the south was to desegregate at once and to hereafter only operate unitary schools. also in his support for affirmative action and minority businesses, you can see this being stressed. differences among the nixon memoirs, mixon painted his actions as being statesman-like.

others portrayed him as being pragmatic in his approach to the south. ehrlichman probably the most critical depicts nixon as wiley 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 these memoirists made several rights policy the dominant theme or the lead subject in their books. third school of thought would be the scholarly revision of nixon's civil rights policies. has its origins in the 1980s, continues through the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. why did it happen? well, documents opened. tempers and passions cooled, at least somewhat. there was a wis.ftful longing f

conservative policies. and in domestic policy in general and in civil rights policy in particular, here was an opportunity to say something fresh about the nixon presidency. major works in this school of thought include hue davis graham's massive and extremely important "the civil rights era, 1990" which documented the nixon administration's role in developing affirmative action. graham did a lot of good work in looking in the nixon papers, but he's notable for looking at the records of the labor department. john hoff's book "nixon reconsidered" also falls into this train of thought. hoff dubbed nixon the unanticipated hero. melvin smalls "the president of richard nixon, 1999" took an

integrated approach blending nixon with his advisers to study motivations and actions as well as policy breakthroughs and setbacks. smalls' tone was fair and balanced. apologies to fox news. and praiseworthy of nixon's liberalism in domestic affairs which if we continue with the cable news references would probably gratify msnbc. my own book "nixon's civil rights" published in 2001 which i put in the revisionist karch tried to account for nixon's multiple motivations, 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. my noting that nixon had principle in this area was one of the more bolder claims of the book i think. after totally up nixon's record,

the balance sheet showed, i argued, that he did more to achieve integration 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 separate tism ism number of ways such as historically black colleges and native american indian tribes. i should add he was baffled by women's right but achieved some progress there addressing 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 kind of keep in mind, 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 are not, in other words, using this new nixon to supplant other sixons 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, briefly here, two schools of thought. we have what we might call the anti-revisionists who would include kenneth o'reilly and elizabeth drew, and they stress nixon's racism, anti-semitism, political ex ppediencyexpedienc. his divisiveness in ramping up the issue of busing and they argue his accomplishments in this 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 nixon era policies and i'm thinking of kevin uhl and john david skratney who showed how urban

unrest in the 1960s was one of the things that prompted nixon to develop an economic development strategy regarding minority groups. 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 enhanced our knowledge of nixon's policies with 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 treatment of the policy. the essay was called "nixon and the environment" so in the

effort to be something other than 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 'six and easter60s and 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 on environmental policy, whether it's environmental law, whether it's congress, whether it's on environmentalism, what it all reveals is the rather deep and extensive 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 desperately 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 santa barbara oil spill and you're off to the races. if you look at the 1968 election there was no hint the environment would be a big deal. it just didn't come up. his response was defensive. he was worried his political enemies, 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 his administration's environmental achievements into his legacy, he just never mentioned it, and it was odd for a guy who was so concerned with framing his legacy. which is why i think flippen's book is so important because it is on the historiography 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, and national environmental, the

policy act, take your pick. and so my effort to de-emphasize 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 ehrlichman, 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 director 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 the environment in particular which created the space for these guys to operate. he just wanted them to keep him out of trouble in the environment policicallpolicical. 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 on the environment under whitaker comes out of that task force. you get a detailed slate of recommendations coming out in 1969 as a consequence of this, and the ep a, an independent agency answering directly to the president on environmental issues created in december of 1970 under executive order, the den tralizing function was seen as a way to get control of things, this crazy quilt of environmental agencies spread over the government but it accords 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 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 nightmare of planning but it had this ecological ethos to it which was really central to things like the national environmental policy act, senator henry jackson's bill, but also the epa both 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 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 he kind of found this systems thinking very appealing, and in many ways to 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 where the republicans take a bath, nickon sours on the environment. he's not getting enough 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 stands, for example or the us a of management and budget under george schultz performing quality of life reviews, so you 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 and here i kind of feel like deep throat. you're missing the overall. and what is really going on here, sort of the larger picture i refer to, is the rise of the new social regulation in the late '60s and the early '70s. what i mean by that is a radically expanded scope and capacity of the government to regulate not just sort of economic concerns like the trucking industry or telecommunications industry, but large swaths 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 at the same time and it's very contentious 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 presidency becomes less imperial by the minute, 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 change 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 whach most presidents just knew implicitly, it's that the economy, stupid. it's not a coincidence that the environmental movement happened during an era of low unemployment.

the thing nixon did miss was the permanent change in political culture that happened on his watch. i would say that his political opportunism did more to establish the institutional foothold of environmentalism than really to dislodge it. thanks. [ applause ] >> that was wonderful. thank you all for that. i had like to turn right away 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 ehrlichman, so why john ehrlichman? a friend of bob halderman, ucla, not exactly a policy wonk, a

seattle attorney, not that well connected. why john ehrlichman? he's not that well connected. >> 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 nixon after a time got quite ex hawesed, if you will, by the continual disputes among those two people. that wasn't the way he wanted to have a white house run.

he also didn't care that much personally about domestic policy. one thing john ehrlichman was very good at in addition to the kind of background that was just mentioned was he was a good negotiator and facilitator. and he was willing then to take over the job of assembling task force s in order to try to address a range of environmental issues. that then turns into the creation of the domestic council and the domestic council staff, and it's the task force's including the other members of that domestic council steph like john whitaker that really begins to make the difference and john ehrlichman then gets a lot of attention because he was very good at what he did and he was close to the president, which meant then that these domestic policy initiatives got paid attention to elsewhere in the administration. >> i agree with a lot of what has been said. in 1969 the administration was formulating domestic programs you had debates about welfare reform and revenue sharing and

they were coming to head. i think they submitted them in august of 1969. i sort of think that moynihan was too exciting and too liberal and burns too boring and too conservative and to a certain extent ehrlichman benefitted from that, but if ehrlichman had any kind of ideology, he would have been identified as being a moderate. he was a kind of tactician and i think that appealed to a very important part of nixon's character. >> and the thing to remember, of course, about that period is that moynihan was brought into the white house to not only look at cities but also to get a different kind of a welfare -- get ahold of what nixon saw was a terrible welfare program. the family assistance plan fails which is what nixon and moynihan really wanted to get put through in some form through congress. when that fails, arthur burns goes off to the fed, is that where -- goes off to the federal reserve. he was in the white house as a placeholder.

daniel patrick moynihan goes back to his tenured position at harvard, and so there was a vacuum then in the white house and this tactician that the president was very comfortable with, john ehrlichman, was there to fill that vacuum in part. >> the think the first point is the president trusted ehrlichman implicitly. and implicit staff in senior staff is a prerequisite. and ehrlichman had that. the second is ehrlichman had refined organizational intelligence. and that was a quality which wasn't -- that was a quality which was valuable to nixon. and nixon used it. >> in the back? >> i have two questions. first one, easy one for you, 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 to that question is yes. seem might feel more comfortable with the word prejudice. you can see him -- we see this in the halderman diaries making some comments about african-americans. there are also some comments that have emerged about jews and about mexicans that we would use that word. it gets into a little bit of a sem man tick point with respect to him and prejudice and racism. i think he also believed in the

idea of opportunity though. as he put it in a conversation with halderman, you know, he said, we're not all equal, but we must ensure that anyone might go to the top. >> on economic 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 constituents and those of his morning nmarginal constituents. and those are two very 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 ehrlichman'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 john kennedy, precisely the same charge about 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 to be made, the charge is that his determination to maximize employment and minimize the inflation rate by november 1972, a strategy that worked in conjunction with extraordinary

success, had very considerable medium run consequences. the inflation rate which bottomed out in november '72 rose in every single month between december 1972 and august 1974, and he bequeathed an inflation rate to his successor of three times that which he inherited from his predecessor. so there are -- the temporal nature of policy making was something which i think he was inadequately tutored on. i'm not sure he was entirely appropriately supported on at least by arthur burns and it was something of which he himself i think had rather slight understanding. so the answer is nuanced in he had his political interest was very clear, his preferences were very clear. those seem to me to be strengths, but i think in terms of his understanding of the long-run consequences of his

determination to achieve those twin objectives by november 1972, i think that's the weightier charge. >> would anyone else like to comment? we have time for one last quick question. >> i'll make it quick then. actually giving grace to my students, if each of you would mind giving a grade to nixon in each of your policies in terms of the economy, the environment, civil rights, and as an administrator. >> hmm. >> give a grade on environmental policy and nixon. >> would anyone like to take a stab at that? no. all right. >> i will quickly. >> okay. >> i will quickly, just because this might spark some discussion.