Friendship Park at Border Field was one of the initial products of RN’s Legacy of Parks program, the history — and lasting impact — of which is explained in full by Frank Gannon. When Mrs. Nixon dedicated the park on August 18, 1971 she ordered the barbed-wire fence at the border removed and her impromptu stroll into Tijuana — shaking hands, signing autographs and greeting children along the way — embodied the purpose of Friendship Park.

Right now Border Encuentro is touching on a hot-button issue and potential subject of campaign 2012, that is whether or not to continue building a fence along the border. Regardless, the message of bringing people together is likely something Mrs. Nixon would have supported.

Jimmy Byron is a Marketing and Communications Assistant at the Nixon Foundation and a freshman at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Click here to listen to the whole broadcast.

Jonathan Movroydis is the Director of Communications at the Richard Nixon Foundation.

Ben tells his story in his usual relaxed manner, acknowledging that sometimes his memories are a bit misty.  He starts by recounting the day he went to the library and borrowed a book about RN, being much impressed by what was written about the President’s determination both as a student and in wooing his future wife.  (In this article, Ben places this event in 1952 and thinks the book might have been written by Earl Mazo. But his earlier columns and articles, more accurately, give the year as 1956, and the book as Nixon by Ralph De Toledano, which came out that year and was indeed the first biography of RN; Mazo’s book was published at the end of the ’50s.)

As is always the case, Ben tells it all when it comes to RN.  He writes that when he told his new bride in 1968 that he had voted for Nixon, she was so upset she got out of their car in midtown Manhattan traffic and stormed off.  (This was one of several stormy separations, though ultimately the former Alex Denman reconciled with Ben and they are happily married today.)

After Ben underwent a radical period of his own at Yale Law School, he moved back to Washington and, working as a trial lawyer, happened to catch a brief report about a break-in at the Watergate complex in the middle of a local newscast.  Then, after another somewhat countercultural interlude in Santa Cruz, he came back to DC, and, in the summer of the Senate hearings, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times defending RN.  This came to the attention of Assistant to the President Peter Flanigan, and Ben was invited to join the White House speechwriting staff.  (Since his father Herbert Stein was chair of the Administration’s Council of Economic Advisors, Ben had some prior familiarity with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.)

With his customary clean and direct prose, Ben describes his surroundings and colleagues, then explains what he was involved with:

I also worked soon thereafter on RN’s proposal for universal national healthcare. That, also, was a nightmare of complexity. My recollection — which could easily be wrong, after 40 years or so — is that our basic idea was to find out who had health insurance and if those people could not afford insurance, we would send them checks to buy it.

We would also have rural healthcare centers and health improvement centers that would have people doing calisthenics or eating whole wheat or flaxseed oil. That whole idea was not even close to as controversial as it now is.

It is amazing to think about it, but that was a Nixon plan supported by a Republican minority in Congress. It was killed dead by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who later wrote that he regretted doing so.

We also had plans and ideas about how to improve education. Even then, we were well aware that education for black children was a disgrace and RN had plans to fix it. Obviously, again, those came to naught.

The most moving part of the article describes Ben’s final weeks at the Nixon White House:

How does one grow broke? “Slowly and then, all at once,” as the saying goes. That was how my time at the White House with RN ended.

General Al Haig, who was chief of staff, called us together in an auditorium, told us staffers how brave we had been ( “. . . as brave as any men I have ever led in battle . . .” he claimed, which was certainly not true of me), then told us he was, “. . . a harbinger of horror . . .” and that we could not survive much longer.

Then RN resigned and the next day he spoke an incredibly moving farewell to the White House staff and spouses. I was there with Pat, both of us crying. I was chewing gum and crying. My father and mother were sitting nearby. I have never seen my mother so distressed and sad, sobbing, despairing, in anguish. My father looked as if his father had just died.

The RN speech was the most candid speech I have ever heard from a public figure, straight from the heart about his pain. His family stood behind him. I cannot imagine the agony of that day for them. Then RN left out onto the South Lawn into a Marine helicopter and then he was gone — but not forgotten.

Julie stayed behind to pack more mementoes. RN was to have a small staff in San Clemente. I wanted to go but was not allowed to. I recall walking out of the White House to the EOB, still sobbing.

Fred Dent, the kind South Carolinian who was Secretary of Commerce, patted me on my shoulders. “It will be all right,” he said, but his voice was hoarse.

But  the most unexpected part of Ben’s article is in rather a lighter vein.  Quite casually, he mentions that during a visit to the White House to see his father, at a time before he started working there himself, he met Elvis.

Yes.  The King and the man who gave us “anyone?….anyone?”  actually crossed paths.  Among the events of December 21, 1970, it is hard to picture anything quite approaching the iconic impact of the handshake of Nixon and Elvis immortalized in the National Archives’s most requested photograph, but this might have been a contender.

Unfortunately, none of the White House photographers seems to have had a camera ready when the man from Silver Spring (or North Woodside Park, as us South Woodside Parkers would say) met the man from Memphis, because the meeting took place in the White House cafeteria.  Back in 1997, Ben described the encounter in an article in the Deseret News:

Because of the elder Stein’s status, father and son could dine together in the White House mess.

“So he and I were sitting there, having lunch,” Stein said. “For $2.50, you could get a very good steak and ice-cream sundae.

“And my father said, `Isn’t that Elvis Presley sitting behind you with Bob Haldeman?’ And I turned around and I could not believe my eyes. It was Elvis Presley, looking a bit – shall we say – sleepy.”

Ben Stein told Presley that he was a big fan, and got the trademark “Thank you very much” in return.

“It was just unbelievable,” Stein said. “It was like seeing a spaceship land. If Elvis can turn up in Nixon’s White House, then there can be UFOs.”

The brevity of the conversation described may be disappointing, but it has to be kept in mind that in late 1970, Ben sported not the close-cropped look he has nowadays but a gigantic white boy’s Afro that, if he had a ripped T-shirt and jeans handy, would probably by itself have qualified him to work as a Grateful Dead roadie.   “El” may have been even more surprised to see someone with that tonsure in the White House than Ben was to see him.

In recent months, Ben has mentioned once or twice in his columns that he has thought about writing a whole book about his experiences working for, and talking with, RN.  Here’s hoping that the NewsMax piece leads to just that.

Robert Nedelkoff is a writer for the Richard Nixon Foundation.

It was just a matter of time before a production of the drama was mounted in the heart of “Nixon country,” and late last month this came to pass when the Maverick Theater in Fullerton, California, a few miles from the Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, premiered Frost/Nixon.  The Orange County Register gives this staging a thumbs-up, with the paper’s Eric Marchese writing:

Thankfully, both [Joe] Parrish and [David] Herbelin avoid the almost comical stereotypes of the 2008 film version. Parrish’s gruff, socially awkward Nixon is utterly compelling – a deceptively humble figure banal in look and manner and with a penchant for spouting clichéd anecdotes and maudlin sentiments whenever the cameras are rolling. Yet like any battle-hardened trial lawyer, his Nixon isn’t rattled by anything Frost throws at him.  

 Herbelin’s Frost is a poignant figure throughout: touchingly vulnerable and optimistic, constantly embattled yet engagingly resourceful. Even in the play’s early scenes, where Herbelin captures Frost’s cheesy grin and greasy glad-handing, he keeps low-key, and avoids overdramatizing, his portrayal of Frost.

Frost/Nixon runs at the Maverick through May 27; it may be just the thing to tide over OC’s Nixon buffs until Eric McCormack of Will & Grace fame can obtain the wherewithal for his planned production, with himself as Sir David, and John Larroquette – yes, John Larroquette from Night Court - as the President.

Robert Nedelkoff is a writer for the Richard Nixon Foundation.

The audience heard Ed Nixon talk about various topics concerning RN’s presidency, with particular emphasis given to the world-changing re-establishment of relations with the People’s Republic of China and the historic 1972 visit to that country.   It would be another decade before the younger Nixon had the chance to visit China himself, but starting in 1983, Ed went there on the first of about 40 trips.

An article about the lecture in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal describes a remarkable event during Ed’s most recent journey:

He visited the country in February to retrace his brother’s steps, taking him to six cities now modernized and where capitalists outnumber communists, he said.

A banquet was held in his honor where Nixon sat beside Mao Tse-tung’s daughter, Li Min, who toasted him and said it was the first time in 40 years that a member of the Mao family had met with a member of the Nixon family.

“Let’s drink to families,” he recalled her saying.

In an interview before his speech, Nixon said he responded, “It’s taken a long time to come ‘round this circle, but we realize now that we are leaving our children a legacy of many problems. We still have our central theme of getting together, agreeing on common goals.”

He said coming together will be a slow and gradual process and one in which radical ideas from both sides will have to be neutralized.

“Let’s drink to the children. It’s now their problem. That was my answer,” he said in response to the toast.

Ed’s career has been in the field of geology and mineral resources, and he told the audience in Spartanburg:

“Policy is extremely important in every country. We need friends everywhere. We certainly don’t need any enemies in countries where they have resources that we will all depend globally for the future of energy.”

Robert Nedelkoff is a writer for the Richard Nixon Foundation.

Perhaps necessarily—since there aren’t any moderate Republicans left in Congress—the discussion was grounded in the past. Huebner evoked the glorious old days of the mid-20th century, when young Republicans rose up in defiant opposition to radical student leftists. These self-styled “fiery moderates” were driven by important and honorable goals that often put them in conflict with the conservatives in their party: advancing civil rights and foreign-policy internationalism, protecting elements of the New Deal, and providing what Huebner characterized as “a temperamental moderation of conservatism.”

During this golden time, moderates were the alpha Republicans and sometimes sneeringly dismissed their conservative brethren. “Their number is negligible and they are stupid,” Dwight Eisenhower once said of conservatives, according to another panelist, Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. Alas, moderates have all but disappeared. “They might even be forced into breeding programs to keep them alive,” Kabaservice said, citing a recent Onion article. (Worth a click for the picture alone.)

With so few contemporary Republican moderates to discuss, the debate centered on the old ones and where they had gone wrong. The panel agreed that Richard M. Nixon was the culprit. “I think the plight of the moderate Republicans was caused by Watergate,” Huebner said. “[President] Obama cannot cite Nixon as an example [of the tradition of Republican moderation], so there’s a whole tradition that’s off limits because of Watergate.”

Might Nixon have prolonged the Age of Republican Moderation had he not gotten caught up in that other stuff? Huebner and others argued that he could have. Nixon did, after all, initiate arms-reduction treaties and environmental legislation, and he dramatically advanced school desegregation. His health insurance plan, one of the panelists said (I didn’t catch who), “went beyond Obama’s. It included, bragged about, and centered on the individual mandate.” There must have been a lot of dropped jaws in the room, because Huebner felt compelled to pause and remind the audience: “This is historical.”

Jonathan Movroydis is the Director of Communications at the Richard Nixon Foundation.

For nearly 40 years, the Post, its two intrepid young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and its crusty executive editor, Ben Bradlee, have been mythologized as the singularly pure-minded, courageous figures who were bold and brave enough to take on the Nixon White House and uncover its perfidious threats to Constitutional government, thus saving the Republic from total ruin.

Detailed in the book, All the President’s Men, and later enshrined in the movie of the same name, Woodstein’s story has assumed mythic proportions over the course of the past four decades. Recently, fundamental elements of this myth have come under scrutiny, undermining its power and potentially damaging the credibility of its authors.

Max Holland’s recent book, Leak, has convincingly demolished the myth surrounding the mysterious and heroic figure of “Deep Throat.” Long lauded as a patriotic, idealistic civil servant, Holland has exposed Mark Felt for what he was: little more than an FBI careerist who successfully drew the Washington Post into his own Machiavellian scheme to make himself J. Edgar Hoover’s successor as head of the FBI (Max Holland will be at the Nixon Library on May 15 for a lecture and book signing).

More recently, Jeff Himmelman, a former assistant to Bob Woodward, has revealed that Ben Bradlee harbored “residual fear” that the elements of the myth that grew out of the Post’s Watergate coverage didn’t hold up. Himmelman also reports that Bernstein talked with a member of the Watergate Grand Jury, an act that could have landed him in jail had it become known at the time.

As a result of Holland and Himmelman’s work, a long-overdue discussion of the methods, practices, and veracity of the Woodstein Watergate myth is underway. This is not, however, the first time such questions have been raised.

In 1990, Stanley Kutler, in his book, The Wars of Watergate, wrote this about All the President’s Men:

Some prominent reviewers criticized the authors’ tendency to favor the style of a detective story rather than seeking the introspective level of historical analysis, and critics questioned as well Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.

Woodward and Bernstein have consistently declined to substantively address any of the questions critics raised at the time their book was published and that Kutler raised again in his book in 1990. With the publication of both Holland’s and Kimmelman’s books, Woodstein’s 40 years of successful stonewalling about the facts behind the myth may finally be coming to an end.

It is a disservice to history that the paucity of critical examination of the myth that has long helped to define Watergate as a modern morality play has allowed a one-dimensional view of Watergate to prevail.

A full understanding of the meaning of Watergate also requires an understanding that it was, in no small part, a struggle for power conducted at the highest levels for the highest stakes. Dismantling the mythology around Watergate will allow for the construction of a more complete analysis of all the forces that were at play during that tumultuous period.

Napoleon once observed that, “History is a myth that men agree to believe.” For 40 years, that has certainly been true when it comes to how Watergate is generally presented and understood in the media and academe. As objective historians and reporters now declare that cannot continue to agree to believe in the myth because the facts don’t support it, the myth begins to crumble.

Holland’s and Himmelman’s work is revealing. But what may be even more revealing is Bob Woodward’s efforts to discourage Himmelman from publishing what he discovered and his fast and furious reaction (some might even say overreaction) once it was published. Rather than rebut the argument, he attacks those making it. To many observers, Woodward seems overly defensive to any suggestion that the narrative he helped morph into myth might be at all inaccurate in any respect.

Perhaps Woodward is merely following the MythBusters mantra, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” To me, however, it looks as if the gentleman doth protest too much. Woodward’s response suggests that he knows there’s more at stake than the accuracy of just a few scattered facts. He knows that if the myth on which he built his career is exploded, so too is his standing in journalism’s pantheon of heroes.

Bob Bostock served as an editorial assistant on two of President Nixon’s best-selling books and wrote much of the exhibit text for the Nixon Library.

Ben’s Watergate files weren’t the most organized part of his archive, but as a window into the guts of the reporting, they were mesmerizing. One of the more tantalizing items, from the start, was a dense seven-page memo with a set of initials at the top. It was hard to read, a faint copy of a typewritten document, and contained more than 100 data points, seemingly taken down in rapid-fire style by Carl soon after an interview. It was dated December 4, with no year.

By November of 1972, after President Nixon had been reelected, the Watergate story had run cold. Desperate for any kind of lead, Carl and Bob—with permission from Ben—decided to approach the grand jurors in the criminal case. In a long passage in All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein report that they made contact with several grand jurors but didn’t get anywhere with them. This was a dubious enterprise, no matter how you slice it. The Post’s lawyers had tried to advise Ben against it; though approaching a grand juror might not have been legal, it was certainly illegal for a grand juror to violate the confidentiality of the proceedings. “I wouldn’t be too literal-minded about that,” Bob told me later. “I mean, it was a dicey, high-wire thing to do. But that’s what we did. That’s what the whole enterprise was.”

In early December, Judge John Sirica was told by prosecutors that a grand juror had been approached by the Post reporters but had revealed nothing. Incensed, Sirica called Woodward and Bernstein into court two weeks later and warned against any further meddling. “Had they actually obtained information from that grand juror,” he wrote later, “they would have gone to jail.” According to the Post’s lawyers, who negotiated on their behalf, Sirica almost locked them up anyway.

Before the scolding from Sirica, Bernstein visited the apartment of a woman he identified, in the book, as “Z.” She wouldn’t talk to him in person, but she slipped her number under the door. “Your articles have been excellent,” she told him, advising him to read their own reporting carefully. “There is more truth in there than you must have realized,” she said. “Your perseverance has been admirable.” She sounded, Carl thought, “like some kind of mystic.”

A few paragraphs in to that old seven-page memo lay a description of a familiar-sounding source: “CB arrived at her home about 7:45 p.m. identified myself through a closed door and she immediately responded, ‘Your articles have been excellent.’ ” Later, by phone, she told him: “Your persistence has been admirable.”

I scanned the rest of the memo: All of the quotes attributed to Z in the book matched this interview. And there was no doubt, in the memo, how Z knew what she knew: “Of course, I was on the grand jury,” she said plainly.

It was late at night. I was sitting in a remote farmhouse in Rapidan, Virginia, and I could hardly believe what I was reading. For four decades, Carl and Bob have insisted that the grand jurors they contacted had given them no information. For four decades, that story endured, as it was replayed in interviews and reread in library copies of All The President’s Men, and as Woodward and Bernstein and ­Bradlee became a holy trinity of newspaper journalism. But, according to the memo, it didn’t appear to be true: Z was no mystic; she was a grand juror in disguise, and had apparently broken the law by talking. Woodward and Bernstein had always denied it—in 1974, and as recently as 2011.

Read more.

Jonathan Movroydis is the Director of Communications at the Richard Nixon Foundation.

In April 1972, the Chinese team accordingly traveled to these shores, and a match between American and Chinese players was arranged before an enthusiatic crowd a few miles northeast of Washington.  The Baltimore Sun, in an article published earlier this month, takes up the story:

Forty years ago this month, Maryland began its engagement with China by becoming the site of an iconic exchange in sports diplomacy, a groundbreaking ping-pong match between China and the U.S. The event was held at theUniversity of Maryland, College Parkon April 17, 1972, less than two months after President Nixon’s return from China.

Sitting in the stands in Cole Field House to watch the visiting Chinese delegation play a team of University of Maryland students was the president’s daughter, Tricia Nixon; Richard Solomon, a China scholar and future assistant secretary of state for East Asia Pacific affairs; and Robert Hormats, a Baltimore native and current under secretary of state who was then an economic advisor to national security advisor Henry Kissinger.

The University of Maryland’s role in the celebrated milestone of “ping pong diplomacy” signaled the state’s early emergence as a pioneer in the promotion of burgeoning U.S.-China ties. Then-Gov. Harry Hughes, who assumed office less than three weeks after the official normalization of relations in 1979, adroitly focused on building ties with China as one of his first initiatives.

Working with University of Maryland president John Toll, Mr. Hughes became in 1980 the first U.S. governor to visit China. Together with Chinese Vice-Premier Wan Li, he forged the first U.S.-China sister-state agreement, linking Maryland andChina’sAnhui province.

This was the start of a highly successful tour of the United States by the Chinese table-tennis team which, like the American team’s exploits in 1971, gave the sport a considerable although somewhat short-lived upswing in popularity here, and, more importantly, was no small factor in creating a spirit of friendliness and goodwill between the two superpowers.  It is worth keeping in mind in these times.

Robert Nedelkoff is a writer with the Richard Nixon Foundation.

As the Democratic primaries progressed, several things became evident to Buchanan.  One was that the kind of “Kennedyesque charisma” that so thrilled liberal-leaning journalists of the time now had extremely limited appeal to the American electorate; the candidate who most self-consciously evoked the Kennedy mystique, John Lindsay, was knocked out of contention early. The other was that the Democratic Party, despite the best efforts of its old guard to prevent it, was, on a national level, positioning itself as an acolyte of the New Left, as exemplified by George McGovern’s skillfully choreographed rise from also-ran to contender to nominee.

This led Buchanan to formulate a proposal as to how President Nixon should position himself as the GOP candidate: as the spokesman for “square America” versus the “radical America” embodied in the McGovern insurgency.  This was a good idea in many ways: by that point in the bell-bottom decade, a lot of Americans had longer hair and more flamboyant clothes than had been the case four years earlier. But this did not mean that bearing a passing resemblance to Hippius americanus, circa 1967, meant thinking like that specimen.

Indeed, many Americans were already looking back with longing to the days before the tumult of the 1960s.  In February 1972, a pilot filmed the previous year, set in the late Eisenhower era, aired on the ABC series Love, American Style.  The same month, the 1950s-set musical Grease proved a surprise hit on Broadway. That in turn led to George Lucas nailing down the backing to film American Graffiti and to the pilot getting the greenlight to become the series Happy Days.

These developments were in the near future, but Buchanan could sense that America, after years of tension, was looking for stability.  And what evoked a sense of stability better than the America of the 1950s?  This, in turn, provided the basis for structuring the themes of the 1972 Nixon campaign.  Over three years, the Nixon White House had been involved in its share of controversy, but the President had also put into place important and far-reaching initiatives in sectors of public policy from the environment to public health to the empowerment of women and minorities.  There was also the fact that, after the radical economic moves of 1971, the nation had headed out of recession and was enjoying its most prosperous period since the mid-1960s.  Finally, there was the epochal opening to China and detente with the USSR – foreign-policy triumphs that could only be undertaken by an assured and experienced Chief Executive.

It was plain to Buchanan that emphasizing the stability that had been won over RN’s first term, and contrasting it with the unpredictable and potentially chaotic nature of a McGovern presidency, offered the best way to persuade voters to pull the lever for Nixon that November.  Therefore the TV and radio commercials that were aired after Nixon’s renomination, and the overall tone of the campaign, emphasized this, with the result that the President won forty-nine states and an overwhelming percentage of the popular vote,  Nixon’s formal public demeanor served to emphasize that he was the President of all Americans, and reinforced his image as the man who could be relied on to get the country through four more challenging years.  This had great appeal who were alienated by the radicalism that overtook the Democratic convention that summer.

Forty years later, former Massachusetts governor, and now presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney faces a somewhat different situation. He is the challenger; a liberal with ideological roots in the 1960s is the incumbent President.  But Romney has a quality that may help him this fall, as discussed by David Paul Kuhn in the Real Clear Politics site this week: he evokes the America of a halcyon era to a greater degree than President Obama does.

In 2008, the Democratic nominee’s preference for dark suits and white shirts was sometimes the subject of comment; journalists would occasionally remark that, with his ready grin and cheerful personality, he invoked the sitcom dad as personified by Robert Young or Hugh Beaumont – that is to say, that persona which Ronald Reagan also embodied as the host of General Electric Theater in the airwaves of Ike’s time. This helped win him election.

But today, after three years of alternating the rhetoric of consensus with policies that have increasingly divided American voters, the President has alienated a substantial part of the electorate.  This is what gives Governor Romney his chance.

Kuhn begins with an account of Pat Buchanan’s square-vs-radical formulation, then continues:

Pundits tend to describe Mitt Romney’s vanilla disposition as a liability. The Washington Post recently asked, “Why does Mitt Romney seem so stiff?” But there’s a more practical question: How much does it matter?

Romney exudes 1950s man. Ronald Reagan did too. Even Reagan’s pompadour recalled the “good old days.” Romney’s perpetually coiffed hair may as well. In 1996, a Knight-Ridder poll found that Americans — including a plurality of men, women, liberals and conservatives — saw the 1950s as the best decade to live and raise children in. Romney’s disposition could evoke this rose-colored memory. He’s more Ward Cleaver than Don Draper.

In the America of 1980, of course, Happy Days was just starting to slip in the ratings after years as America’s most popular show, and two years earlier Grease had become the highest-grossing movie musical of all time.  The country was in the mood for a measure of serenity after the 1970s had served, in too many ways, to continue the tumult of the middle and late 1960s, and it saw in the cheerful ex-governor of California a chance to recapture, in at least some way, the virtues of the 1950s.

This mood was still strong, as the 1996 poll shows, even in the Clinton years – indeed, that President’s greatest advantage in office was that the economic prosperity of his time reminded Americans of the prosperity of an age past.  And it may be gaining ground again, as the recent flurry of TV series set in the early 1960s (a time closer in temper to the years before than those after) may serve to show.

In this respect, Romney’s cultural coordinates, which were recognizably formed in a United States that chuckled at Gomer Pyle, sang along with the Beach Boys in their “Surfin’ USA” days, and enjoyed a steak-and-baked potato dinner - and voted for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan - may resonate with Americans to a more substantial degree than our President’s partiality to the 1970s, which he sometimes expresses in song, as in his recent rendition of a few bars of “Let’s Stay Together.”

Kuhn observes:

Romney cannot compensate by simply mimicking Nixon’s 1972 strategy. There is no contemporary cultural frame that resonates like “acid, abortion and amnesty.” Instead, he can run on competence vs. incompetence. It de-personalizes the attack. Independents do not share conservatives’ disdain for Obama. Thus, Romney must bear-hug. His best tactic is to portray Obama as a good man but not the best man for the job, or up to the job. And Romney seems to understand that. “I think he’s a nice person, I just don’t think we can afford him any longer,” Romney said in a recent speech.

In a lot of ways, Romney’s “square” demeanor works for him.  Even his Mormon faith, viewed by some as a liability, can work to his advantage: one reason for the expansion in Latter-Day-Saints membership is that its houses of worship often seem aesthetically rooted in the comforting images of the Eisenhower era.  The more that he can present himself as a figure of continuity with the past, while offering stability with the future, the more he can evoke the kind of appeal Reagan had – and even his so-called “square” demeanor, as RN demonstrated in 1972, can be an advantage.

Robert Nedelkoff is a writer with the Richard Nixon Foundation.