Lessons Learned and Applied
By Tom Lamia
My introduction to politics came while I was a student at USC in Los Angeles in 1960. I was as a sideline observer to student politics and a cab driver on the graveyard shift during the Democratic National Convention. Oddly, those exposures both taught the need to massage the message for maximum appeal, rounding sharp edges while smoothing or removing obstacles. This often requires recruiting experienced deceivers, generally people comfortable with the ends justifying the means. Many qualified nasty people will answer the call.
In 1960 there were two student political parties aggressively competing to win campus elections: TRG (Trojans for Representative Government), an open group, and TNE (Theta Nu Epsilon), an underground organization. Dog-eat-dog politics were going on at the college campus level among players who within a few years would emerge as key figures in national and presidential politics.
The links are through Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin and Ron Ziegler at USC; H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at UCLA, and the methods developed at college and later deployed at higher levels. Bare knuckle campaign tactics worked. Richard Nixon used them before 1960 but, as Ike’s running mate, pulled his punches in the 1960 presidential campaign and lost.
Dirty tricks became a hallmark of that success. It was not enough to call your opponent a communist, you could write a public letter falsely claiming evidence of racial bias against a major component of the electorate as Donald Segretti did in 1972.
The others in that time and place perhaps wish that the same was true for them. Several went to jail for Richard Nixon during the Watergate era. Nixon learned the mechanics of bending opinion to his advantage by launching a Southern Strategy soon after his 1962 defeat by Governor Pat Brown in California. His impressive start in politics was fueled by anti-communism, a ticket he punched time and again as he rose from Congress to the Senate. In each race he labeled his opponents with pejoratives and fuzzy allegations of communist associations. Eisenhower wanted an attack dog and accepted Nixon in that role once he had the nomination. The Nixon portfolio was trimmed back to better fit the profile of the war hero candidate. It did not reappear in his 1960 presidential race or in the gubernatorial contest in California but he lost those and set out to right his political ship.
The South has been a political and cultural unit since before the Civil War for racial and economic reasons which militated towards the Democratic Party. The “Solid South” was a political unit until the Republican Party offered a new promise directed to Southern concerns about racial equality. This reorientation took place in the 1950s. I was a student at the University of Mississippi in 1957-58 as Jim Crow laws came under attack following Brown v. Board of Education. It was still the Solid South for Democrats as the New Deal programs of FDR had cemented loyalties to the Democrats (think TVA, Social Security, Rural Electrification), but the Republicans were seeing the light. Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948, later became a Republican. Voting rights became a scare topic as Jim Crow was gradually diluted and Southern politicians saw the Republicans as a refuge. That perception still prevails in the formerly confederate states. Today’s MAGA movement is riding this wave now and gaining allies in largely rural northern states.
My appreciation of the Republican message in 1960 that led to my vote for Nixon was, in part, the result of reading Ayn Rand and hearing the rugged individualism message of Young Americans for Freedom. Once I cast that vote, my mind was changed by somber reflection and the views of others. Sources of mind-changing input included my Shakespeare professor who noted that the Democrats seemed always to be in charge when good things happened. I now believe deeply in the wisdom of this advice.
USC student politics and skullduggery played a part as well. Nixon was a student of these negative tactics. His Southern Strategy (to lock in an uncontested bloc of electoral votes) was designed and used as a screen against all issues other than race. His campaign tactics (disparaging political opponents with dirty tricks and false allegations) were the staple of USC student politics. Several USC or UCLA contemporaries assumed serious roles in Nixon’s White House. Nixon was a surly and insecure person whose personality and ambition did not mix well with honorable electoral politics. Zeigler, Segretti, Chapin and others from USC, abetted by UCLA’s Haldeman and Ehrlichman, were masters first at manipulating student politics and messaging the tricks of the terrible trade that Nixon practiced in the White House.
These practices have continued to the present, only magnified by their success. Now Trump is taking Nixon’s portfolio several iterations further into darkness. Trump has further capitalized on the Southern Strategy of Nixon, Goldwater and Reagan. By dint of his quirky and self-aggrandizing personality, Trump has made lies and insults central to his message and acceptable to a large number of people who not long ago would have seen them as shameful. The steps taken along the way to our present dilemma did not always include criminal behavior and punishment, but they did in the case of Nixon and several of his White House staff. None of that ever reached the point to which Trump has taken it. Maybe the most disturbing fact is that Trump does not recognize any wrongdoing in his actions and neither do his supporters.
