from Smoke and Mirrors by Dan Baum
(pages 20-21)
Fear and anger, Gordon Brownell thought. That?s what got Richard Nixon elected and that?s what will keep him in office.
A smooth-faced, heavy-set politics junkie of twenty-four, Brownell had a dream job: administrative assistant to Nixon?s political manager, Harry S. Dent. Dent had masterminded the so-called ?southern strategy? that pried white southerners away from the Democratic Party during the last election by playing to their fear of black power and their anger at the civil rights movement. It had transformed the GOP?s image from country club golfer to defender of working whites fed up with expensive hand-wringing over Negroes and the cities. The strategy worked, but was poorly named. Nixon?s win was national, and its most visible new adherents were manifestly northern ? union-affiliated former Democrats known loosely as ?hardhats.?
The White House lived by the principles or the southern strategy, and Dent?s office had its own lingo. There were issues that mattered to ?our? people, and those that mattered to ?their? people. ?Their? people were what the White House called ?the young, the poor, and the black.? The phrase rolled off the tongue like one word: theyoungthepoorandtheblack. The young were the long-haired student antiwar types for whom the president had open and legendary contempt; the poor and the black were leftover concerns from the Great Society.
Brownell daily read a dozen newspapers from around the country and clipped stories that played on those themes. He looked for stories about badly managed social programs, watched for currents of localized resentment, combed the columns for colorful quotes and juicy anecdotes the presidential speechwriters might use. He particularly kept and eye out for drug stories. Drugs were one thing the young, the poor, and the black all seemed to have in common.
Despite Nixon?s assertion to the preelection Disneyland crowd that drugs were ?decimating a generation of Americans,? drugs were so tiny a public health problem that they were statistically insignificant: far more Americans choked to death on food or died falling down stairs as died from illegal drugs.
So Brownell was delighted that the media were inflating the story by melding the tiny ?hard drug? heroin threat with the widespread ?soft drug? marijuana craze. Marijuana, Brownell knew, was a perfect focus for the anger against the antiwar counterculture that Nixon shared with ?his people.? Brownell dug out a recent clip from Newsweek: ?Whether picketing on campus or parading barefoot in hippie regalia, the younger generation seems to be telling [the middle-class American] that his way of life is corrupt, his goals worthless and his treasured institutions doomed. Logically enough, a good many middle-class citizens tend to resent the message.? In an article Brownell might have penned himself, Newsweek identified the targets of that middle-class resentment this way: ?The incendiary black militant and the welfare mother, the hedonistic hippie and the campus revolutionary.? The young, the poor, and the black. Nixon couldn?t make it illegal to be young, poor, or black, but he could crack down hard on the illegal drug identified with the counterculture.
Brownell loved his job and ? until he went wildly apostate and joined the opposition ? he was good at it.
