ABSTRACT
Richard Nixon was masterful at exploiting white resentment. While his November 3 speech was fundamentally an address on US policy in Vietnam, we remember it today mostly for a clever coinage he employed as he was winding down. For many Americans, the civil rights victories represented a long overdue step toward the nation’s promise of universal freedom. But not all white Americans embraced the change. For them, the specter of blacks living in their formerly all-white neighborhoods, attending their children’s once all-white schools, and otherwise disrupting their racially homogenous social existence was unacceptable. Richard Nixon’s great contribution to the growth of the political right was his mastery of the politics of resentment. Ronald Reagan, a one-time “New Dealer to the core” who made a name for himself in Hollywood before moving right politically and serving two terms as California governor, did not occupy the White House during the Vietnam War.
