THE NIXON YEARS: DOWN FROM THE HIGHEST MOUNTAINTOP

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woefully unprepared. The country faced a truly alarming inflation rate, higher than anything the U.S. had known in peacetime; while much of it had to do with international factors beyond U.S. control, it represented, aside from Watergate itself, the Nixon Administration's worst failure. By midsummer 1974, the Administration's only policy was to suggest that slower growth and budgetary restraint, even at the cost of some rise in unemployment, would eventually reduce inflation. To be sure, not many businessmen or economists, liberal or conservative, had much else to suggest.

On the crucial issue of race, Nixon's record was unpleasant. The best that can be said for him in the social area is that he lowered the unrealistically high expectations that had been stirred up by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. This was an act of realism that was needed in the U.S. Nixon probably expressed an overwhelming majority feeling in his firm opposition to busing: eventually his Supreme Court, presided over by Warren Burger, dealt busing a severe blow by ruling Detroit's cross-district busing unconstitutional.

But Nixon consistently failed to appeal to the better natures of American citizens; he gave undue aid and comfort to the narrow and meanspirited. Acutely conscious that middle-and low-income whites alike were resentful of the special efforts that were being made to ease the plight of America's 20 million blacks, Nixon adopted a hands-off approach. His textual justification, wrenched out of its context, was Moynihan's statement that "the time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect." Moynihan was saying not only that the issue had been "too much talked about" but also that other minorities (Indians, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans) were not getting enough attention. In any neglect" case, to seemed many distinctly blacks, malign. "benign

Ideological Flexibility

By the time of the 1972 election the radical "threat" to American society, always exaggerated, had largely spent itself. But Nixon chose to run against the 1960s — against radicalism, excess, permissiveness — a strategy in which he was greatly aided by McGovern's ill-considered and irresponsible economic schemes, and by the vaguely "revolutionary" slogans put about by some of his wilder and woollier supporters.

To the very end, Nixon defied analysis. The reason columnists, like auto manufacturers, almost annually proclaimed the emergence of "a new Nixon" lay partly in his remarkable opportunism. Few politicians have ever preached the verities of work ethic, law and order, anti-Communism and the rest with such fervor while so thoroughly readjusting their private dogmas to deal with events. Like an Elmer Gantry intransigent in the pulpit, Nixon knew all about sin and situational ethics in the political streets. The ideological flexibility that allowed him to embrace China and Russia, a guaranteed annual income, and wage and price controls, always troubled conservatives.

Until Watergate, on the other hand, liberals half believed that Nixon's new incarnations meant a pattern of growth. They disliked him, but they also tried to perceive over the years a man successively shucking off his earlier gut-fighting instinct, his narrow antiCommunism, becoming more