ABSTRACT
George Meany and Richard Nixon were diametrically allied. That is, they respected and admired each other and did not like or trust each other. Their vision of America in the world was the same: hard-line, hang tough, be number one. Their vision of government in American society was opposite: Meany for central government performing more social services, Nixon for the diffusion of power and the arrest of governmental growth. On the gut issues, the social issues, they identified with working people in much the same way: traditional, conservative, worried about the effects of permissiveness, quick to sense the barbs of real or imagined snobbery. Nixon was an ideological partisan, Meany a party partisan, and every time their paths crossed, the clearing looked later as battered and churned up as an elephants’ mating ground.
