Nixon's Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy.

Davies, Gareth

By Dean J. Kotlowki. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 404 pp.

Many scholars have written about Richard Nixon's civil rights policies in the course of wider projects--biographies of Nixon, surveys of federal policy toward African Americans--but surprisingly few have done so in any real depth. The two obvious exceptions to that generalization are Hugh Davis Graham's masterly account of The Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 1990) and John David Skrentny's book The Ironies of Affirmative Action (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Like Graham and Skrentny (and in common with many other scholars of the Nixon presidency), Dean Kotlowski is interested to understand why an ostensibly conservative president who had campaigned against the Great Society became associated with some surprisingly liberal social policies. But whereas Graham and Skrentny combine attentiveness to Nixon's complex political maneuverings with detailed analysis of the role played by judges, bureaucrats, and legislators in shaping the "Nixon" record, Kotlowski's analysis centers almost exclusively on the man in the White House and his immediate circle. In Kotlowski's view, domestic policy making, at times chaotic and confused, reflected Nixon's assumptions, intentions, and periodic vacillation. Credit or blame for his programs cannot be assigned exclusively, or even mostly, to staffers, as if the White House were headless and the nation governed by unseen "iron triangles." (P. 271)

With that bold finding, and in the book more generally, Nixon's Civil Rights takes issue not just with Graham and Skrentny but also with an extensive political science literature that associates the 1970s with the advent of a "new American political system" in which elected political actors had less power than before (one thinks here of scholars such as R. Shep Melnick and Sidney M. Milkis). However, Kotlowski is cautious about directly engaging those who take a different line, something that could lead the casual reader to underestimate the freshness and originality of the author's argument: Graham is criticized only obliquely, and Skrentny's highly influential book is, unaccountably, almost entirely ignored.

What, then, was Nixon's legacy? For all the chaos and confusion, and for all the evidence of visceral skepticism, occasional racism, and outrageous sexism that Kotlowski uncovers, the author finds, time and again, that the thirty-seventh president's record went considerably beyond that of his liberal predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Among other achievements, Nixon desegregated Southern schools, supported affirmative action, launched a "black capitalism" initiative, renewed the Voting Rights Act, sued communities accused of racist housing policies, established numerical hiring goals for women in the civil service, and pursued "almost revolutionary" reforms in behalf of Native Americans. As this list suggests, Kotlowski's differs not just from the scholars cited above but also from those--such as Dan T. Carter, William H. Chafe, and Kenneth O'Reilly--who see the shadowy specter of a "Southern strategy" lurking behind every racial initiative by Nixon. With the possible exception of Tom Wicker's masterly biography, One of Us (Random House, 1991), Kotlowski has provided us with perhaps the most vigorous and convincing rebuttal to the traditional view of Nixon since Joan Hoff's influential revisionist book Nixon Reconsidered (Basic Books, 1994). Not coincidentally, it was Hoff who supervised his doctoral dissertation, and unsurprisingly, it is Hoff who provides a glowing endorsement for the dust jacket.

Kotlowski's explanation for Nixon's comparatively liberal civil rights legacy is nuanced and dispassionate. It helps that he belongs to the post-Watergate generation of historians and is able to transcend the angry passions that still cast a substantial shadow over some Nixon historiography. On the other hand, neither does he fall into the opposite trap of making exaggerated claims in behalf of Nixon. Rather, he has wrestled tenaciously with his subject's formidable complexity and produced an explanation that is compatible both with the public man's progressive policy legacy and the private man's periodic bigotry. He finds that this was a time when conservatism was comparatively weak at an intellectual level for all the antiliberal passions stirred by the dramatic events of the Great Society era. In that environment, someone like Nixon, who took ideas seriously and--moreover--liked the notion of discomfiting his political opponents, found his more conservative advisers (Patrick Buchanan, John Dent, Vice President Spiro Agnew) less helpful than the more liberal ones (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Raymond Price, Leonard Garment). Additionally, some aspects of the Nixon credo (and, unlike Graham, Kotlowski believes that Nixon did have a credo) with superficially conservative policy implications ended up having liberal consequences. For example, Nixon's belief in the promise of American capitalism translated into support for affirmative action programs and minority business initiatives that--he believed--could catapult at least some poor blacks into the great American middle class. And by way of further example, the president's suspicion of forced integration left him well disposed to policies for Native Americans that de-emphasized assimilation and were congruent with a burgeoning rights consciousness.

This is a book that will be enormously valuable to historians of the Nixon years. Even ones whose central interests lie mainly outside of the civil rights area should be instructed by Kotlowski's nuanced understanding of Nixon's complicated but (as he shows) not impenetrable political personality. Particularly valuable, perhaps, are the many gems that he has mined from such comparatively little-used archival collections as the Elliot Richardson and Robert Finch papers. The author's account would have been still richer in interpretive terms had he paid somewhat greater attention to the role played by bureaucrats and judges in shaping Nixon's policy legacy (simply asserting that the president was in charge does not make it so). And Kotlowski might have done a little bit more to engage the existing historiography (not just of civil rights but of the Nixon years more broadly conceived) to highlight the distinctiveness of his contribution. But, that notwithstanding, Nixon's Civil Rights is a very fine book and an invaluable addition to the literature. Gareth Davies St. Anne's College, Oxford University