Crowds of people from Wall Street cheered them on. But they decided that the kids had taken down the flag, and started beating the protesters. The reason in fact was that it was a drizzly day and the flag is not allowed to be flown in the rain. They complained to the cops that flags were not flying at Federal Hall. Then 200 construction workers from the area marched in on their lunch break, wearing hard hats and carrying the American flags that topped off building sites. On May 8, 1970, anti-war students rallied at the statue of George Washington in Lower Manhattan to protest the war and the Kent State Killings. We can identify that moment precisely: the riots on Wall Street following the Kent State killings in 1970. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960, his platform wasn’t all that different from Kennedy’s.Ī key turning point in the history of Nixonland is the invention of the 'hardhat' as a political figure, which coincided with the rise of the flag as a partisan political symbol. In 1960, there was a strange creature called the Liberal Republican. You are suggesting there was a time when the Republican Party did not win power by mobilizing resentment and anger. On right wing radio today, they keep talking about how snobby and elitist the liberals are - just like Richard Nixon did. But the way Richard Nixon used the sixties to define the ideological contours of American politics is still with us. I don’t mean that the political anxieties and passions today are as great as they were in the late sixties. He was overwhelmingly reelected because he was an excellent president, not because of dirty tricks and the ineptitude and hypocrisy of his feckless opponent, George McGovern.Yes we do. from Vietnam without losing the war, opened relations with China, warmed up relations with the U.S.S.R., negotiated and signed the greatest arms control agreement in history, started a Middle East peace process, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, vastly expanded the national parks system, pioneered welfare reform and fiscal decentralization, reduced the crime rate, eliminated the draft, and ended school segregation without recourse to the court-ordered nostrum of transporting millions of schoolchildren all around the cities of America by bus to effect racial balance. Four years later, he was reelected by 49 states and a plurality of 18 million votes, because he stopped the assassinations, race riots, anti-war riots, skyjackings, inflation, extracted the U.S.

Roosevelt took office in more daunting circumstances than Nixon.

It is not mentioned that only Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Countering Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, RN biographer Conrad Black argues that RN won in 1972 not because he was a good polarizer but because he was a good President: