Document – Richard Nixon, “What Has Happened to America?” Reader’s Digest (October 1967)

Slipping Standards.

The symptoms are everywhere manifest: in the public attitude toward police, in the mounting traffic in illicit drugs, in the volume of teen-age arrests, in campus disorders and the growth of white-collar crime. The fact that whites looted happily along with Negroes in Detroit is ample proof that the affliction is not confined to one race.

The shocking crime and disorder in American life today flow in large measure from two fundamental changes that have occurred in the attitudes of many Americans.

First, there is the permissiveness toward violation of the law and public order by those who agree with the cause in question. Second, there is the indulgence of crime because of sympathy for the past grievances of those who have become criminals.

Our judges have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces.

Our opinion-makers have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal, is to blame.

Our teachers, preachers and politicians have gone too far in advocating the idea that each individual should determine what laws are good and what laws are bad, and that he then should obey the law he likes and disobey the law he dislikes.

Thus we find that many who oppose the war in Vietnam excuse or ignore or even applaud those who protest that war by disrupting parades, invading government offices, burning draft cards, blocking troop trains or desecrating the American flag.

The same permissiveness is applied to those who defy the law in pursuit of civil rights. This trend has gone so far in America that there is not only a growing tolerance of lawlessness but an increasing public acceptance of civil disobedience. Men of intellectual and moral eminence who encourage public disobedience of the law are responsible for the acts of those who inevitably follow their counsel: the poor, the ignorant and the impressionable. For example, to the professor objecting to de facto segregation, it may be crystal-clear where civil disobedience may begin and where it must end. But the boundaries have become fluid to his students and other listeners. Today in the urban slums the limits of responsible action are all but invisible.

If our society, which is founded on a wise balance of freedom and restraint, is to survive, then it must return to this dictum of Theodore Roosevelt: “No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it.”

Our judges and courts must take a large measure of responsibility for the current lawlessness. The fault cannot be traced to any single decision of any one court. It is rather the cumulative effect of many decisions, each one of which has weakened the law and encouraged the criminal. …

It is both right and humane that we should concern ourselves with the environment that has helped to produce criminals in this nation. But our sympathy for the plight of a criminal neither excuses his crime nor justifies turning him loose to prey on an innocent society.

There is little question that our judicial and legal system provides more safeguards against the conviction of an innocent man than any other legal system on earth. We should view this accomplishment with pride, and we must preserve it. But the first responsibility of government and a primary responsibility of the judicial system is to guarantee to each citizen his primary civil right—the right to be protected from domestic violence. In recent years our system has failed dismally in this responsibility—and it cannot redeem itself by pointing to the conscientious manner in which it treats suspected criminals.

One of the principal deterrents to crime is the presence of justice that is both swift and sure. Neither can be said of justice in the United States today. Today crime is increasing six times as rapidly as the population, and as the crime rate rises the rate of convictions continues to fall—a vicious circle of cause and effect.

Any system that fashions its safe-guards for the innocent so broadly and haphazardly that they also provide haven from punishment for uncounted thousands of the guilty is a failure—an indictment, not an adornment, of a free society. No need is more urgent today than the need to strengthen the peace forces as against the criminal forces that are at large in America. …

Many observers contend that the only answer to riots is to rebuild our cities and remove the basic causes of race conflict. This confuses long-range needs with short-range crises.

The problems of our great cities were decades in building; they will be decades in their solution. While attacking the problems with urgency we must await the results with patience. But we cannot have patience with urban violence. Immediate and decisive force must be the first response. For there can be no progress unless there is an end to violence and unless there is respect for the rule of law. To ensure the success of long-range programs, we must first deal with the immediate crisis—the riots.

An End to Violence. How are riots to be prevented?

The first step is better pay and better training and higher standards for police; we must attract the highest caliber of individual to the force.

We demand many things of the man on the beat. He must protect us effectively from crime and yet be circumspect in his handling of criminals. He must handle riots with speed and firmness. He must avoid verbal as well as physical brutality. He must risk his life to protect our property. In short, we ask more of them than we ask of ourselves—and if we are going to get the kind of police protection we want, we are going to have to pay police officers what they are worth.

Second, there must be a substantial upgrading in the number of police. The first purpose of the added man-power is to bring the physical presence of the law into those communities where the writ of authority has ceased to run.

The responsibility of the police in these areas is not only to maintain the peace but to protect life and property. It is the Negro citizens who suffer most from racial violence. When police and firemen retreat under sniper fire from riot-torn districts to let them “burn-out,” it is the Negro’s district that is burned out.

America’s primary effort to close its gaping racial wound should be an effort to gain the trust and the active help of the law-abiding majority of the Negro community. One thing is certain: the allegiance of Negroes to the goal of a biracial society will not be won by abandoning them and their property to scavengers and arsonists.

Some will argue that dispatching thousands of police into the slums will not solve the problems of jobs and housing and schools or alleviate the conditions that breed crime and violence. No, it will not; but the first requisite of progress is peace and the purpose of these police is to ensure that peace. …

The Negro Must Move Upward.

It would be a national tragedy if last summer’s orgies of looting and burning were used as an excuse to halt the Negro’s economic, political and social advance toward full and equal membership in American society.

The riot statistics show that the Negro has already paid an enormous price for the violence. It was the Negro’s home, often his shop, his future that were burned out by the rioters. It would be a compounded injustice now to penalize the law-abiding Negro majority for the criminal conduct of the lawless minority.

How is the country to pick up where it left off before the rioting? Some see the answer as simply more money—billions of dollars more.

Certainly money will be needed; but the extremists who threaten riots or “long hot summers in the streets” to get it are gravely mistaken to think that the threat of pillage is the way to sell Americans on social justice. Congress is responsive to the will of the people; and Congressional resistance to spending for the cities has mounted rapidly in the wake of the disorders.

Before rushing into massive new programs, Congress should find out why the programs of the past have failed. It is time to stop using the warmed-over programs of the ’30’s to solve the problems of the ’60’s.

When second- and third-generation families are living on welfare as semi-permanent wards of the state, something is drastically wrong with the program. Both the goals and the means of aiding the chronically impoverished must be restudied. …

The degree of despair in the Negro community today can be accurately gauged by the number of false hopes that have been raised, and dashed on the pavement of reality. Many political figures in this country have promised too much with the passage of each new piece of social and civil-rights legislation. It is both wrong and dangerous to make promises that cannot be fulfilled, or to raise hopes that come to nothing.

No issue in our history has been so suffused with demagogy, irresponsible partisanship, vote-buying and promises of Utopia as has the century-long struggle of the American Negro from the degradation of slavery to the mainstream of American life. Normally, those are but the venial sins of American politics. But when added to the race issue, they have become explosive ingredients, and that issue cannot carry a much heavier load.

Needed: A New Candor.

The time is now for a new candor —for straight, honest talk, and strong, effective action. Negroes have rightly and repeatedly been reminded that the divisions of centuries will not be months in passing away. But white America is dangerously deluding itself if it thinks that a handful of court decisions and civil-rights acts are going to make full competitors in our society out of children who arrive at life’s starting line fresh from broken families, slum conditions, inferior schools and crime- and vice-ridden neighborhoods.

The hour is late for America. Crime and urban violence have reached the high-water mark where they either crest and recede—or we shall have to pay for their suppression and containment in the coin of freedom.

After traveling to some 40 nations around the world this year, I came home with one vivid impression.

The peoples of the world look to America for leadership. Whether peace and freedom survive in the world depends on how America meets that challenge. Never has a nation had more advantages to qualify it for leadership. Our economic superiority is immense; our military superiority is whatever we choose to make it. But there is one question that is increasingly being asked all over the world: Does America have the national character and moral stamina to see us through this long and difficult struggle?

We must face up to an unpleasant truth: A nation weakened by racial conflict and lawlessness at home cannot meet the challenges of leadership abroad.

To heal the wounds that have torn the nation asunder, to re-establish respect for law and the principles that have been the source of America’s growth and greatness will require the example of leaders in every walk of American life. More important than that, it will require the wisdom, the patience and the personal commitment of every American.