MM#487--Voters Decide Who Gets Counted Out

They told Richard Nixon his career was over. Then they told him again. He proved them wrong twice and, for a moment, he looked unstoppable. 

I walk through Nixon’s political exile after 1960 and 1962, then his return to win the presidency in 1968 and dominate in 1972. The point isn’t nostalgia or hero worship. It’s a hard look at how comebacks really happen when political elites rush to declare a leader finished, but the “lunch bucket” voters still show up, still work, and still vote. Along the way, I draw a modern parallel to Donald Trump’s 2024 comeback after years of investigations, prosecutions, civil suits, and impeachment fights, and why many Americans see that era through the lens of “lawfare” and institutional trust. 

To understand the country that produced Nixon’s return, we go straight to a defining source: Theodore H. White’s Pulitzer-winning The Making of a President 1960. White helped invent modern campaign journalism, writing scenes that capture Kennedy’s discipline, Nixon’s exhaustion, and the first truly television-driven presidential race where looking presidential mattered as much as sounding presidential. We also lay out the pivotal election sequence of 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972, including how Barry Goldwater’s loss plants seeds that later power Nixon and Reagan. 

Finally, we face the hinge point: Watergate. I explain why White’s series couldn’t survive Nixon’s resignation, why he turns to Breach of Faith, and where we go next with a deeper Watergate dive through Geoff Shepard’s trilogy and the argument that scandals can become tools used against future presidents. 

Key Points from the Episode:

  
• Nixon’s two political “deaths” and the mechanics of a real comeback  
• why the Trump 2024 return fuels comparisons about elites, voters and “lawfare”  
• Theodore White’s The Making of a President 1960 and what it changed in political journalism  
• the first TV-era presidential campaign and why “looking presidential” becomes decisive  
• how 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972 map the conservative movement’s rise from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan  
• “order” as a winning message for an exhausted country  
• Watergate as the turning point that breaks White’s series and reshapes trust in institutions  
• preview of the upcoming Geoff Shepard's Watergate trilogy coverage and the claim that scandal becomes a political weapon  

Other goodness

America's pivotal election series:  

https://www.teammojoacademy.com/mm342-pivotal-tuesdays-series-the-election-of-1968-part-1/

https://www.teammojoacademy.com/mm343-pivotal-tuesdays-series-the-election-of-1968-part-2/

We are building and have built out a whole library of book briefs, just one pager's five-minute read over at the Mojo Book Academy on Substack, mojoacademy.substack.com.  

Keep fighting the good fight!

Transcript

Welcome And The Mojo Minute

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. Richard Nixon was written off not once, but twice. They said his career was over, it was finished in 1960. They turned around again and said it was over in 1962. And twice Richard Nixon proved every last one of them wrong. That's the story we're going to tell today on this mojo minute. And we're prefacing all of that by saying this fall, in just about a month, the great Victor Davis Hansen is going to release a new book.

Nixon’s Comeback And The Trump Parallel

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Major title, The Counter-Revolution. And before that book lands, we're going to spend the next several weeks setting the table. We're going to walk through 1960 to 1972, one of the most consequential stretches in modern American political history: the Cold War, civil rights, Vietnam, and a country coming apart at the seams, and a president who came back from the political dead twice to hold it all together. Now, here's what matters today. This isn't just going to be a history lesson because Donald Trump's 2024 comeback wasn't just extraordinary. It was, in some ways, even more extraordinary than Nixon's comeback because of the investigations, the prosecutions, the civil suits, the first-term impeachments, years of what a whole lot of Americans rightly called lawfare. And Trump came back in 2024 and won. Anyway. Now, certainly Nixon and Trump were different men, different parties, different GOP parties, that is, and vastly different countries. We certainly have different crises. But the parallel still holds. Political elites can write a leader off too soon, and voters, the hard hat lunch bucket crowd who show up day in and day out, do their jobs, they get a choice in casting a ballot. They get the final word, not the pundits. That is, as long as we have free and fair elections, which we just covered Seth Keschel's incredible book, The American War on the Election Corruption. Be sure to check out that Mojo book brief for that excellent title. But to understand the country that produced Nixon's comeback, we have to understand the man who chronicled it. And that's going to bring us to our book of the day, and frankly, our series of this week.

Theodore White And Campaign Journalism

SPEAKER_01 4:16

And our source is going to be The Making of a President, 1960, by Theodore White. Now, White won the Pulitzer Prize back when that prize actually meant something. It's the first in a series that would define political journalism for a generation. Never before had a journalist covered in American election like White did in 1960. He was frankly a war correspondent in China, is how he he cut his teeth. He wrote a book called The Thunder Out of China. It was a hard look at the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist movement, and it cost him his job at Time Magazine when he refused to soften his criticism. You see, White had already watched governments fail before before he ever set foot on the campaign plane. So he knew what collapse would look like. And that's what brought him to American politics, the eye of a man who had seen nations crack apart, and now he was turning it on his own country. And publishers thought White's idea was a bad one initially. Book about a campaign written after the election was already over. Back in the day, they figured it was going to be stale news by inauguration day just some three months later. But boy were they wrong. Dead wrong. The making of a president in 1960 did not read like a textbook. White wrote scenes. He put you in the room. You felt Kennedy's discipline. You felt Nixon's exhaustion in 1960. The first TV campaign for president, essentially. And for the first time, you understood that the candidate now had to look presidential, especially on the television screen. You just didn't need to sound presidential on the radio. And let's give White his due, and certainly give him his correction too. Because this is where intellectual courage comes in. White was an establishment liberal. No two ways about that. He was cold war-minded. He was an institutionalist, though, comfortable with Kennedy and Johnson, uneasy with the newly formed conservative insurgency run by Barry Goldwater. But he the good thing is he was hostile to that new left. And the conservative reading this today has every right to raise the eyebrow. But here's the thing: White still told the truth when the truth was inconvenient. He showed that Goldwater's 1964 defeat wasn't the end of a movement, it was the seedbed. Four years later, that same conservative energy helped deliver Nixon's presidency. And then 16 years after that, it delivered Reagan's presidency. White saw all that coming, even though it wasn't for his side. That's the however pivot. The liberal writer, the honest, honest enough to hand conservatism its rightful due. Now let's put all four

Four Elections And The Promise Of Order

SPEAKER_01 7:26

elections on the table plainly, because the dates and the numbers tell the story better than any commentary could. In 1960, Kennedy edges Nixon in one of the closest elections in American history. Both men still operated inside a shared, confident post-war consensus in the United States. Certainly people can dispute the 1960 election. Was it thrown for Kennedy with mafia, you know, apparachics in Chicago and in Illinois swaying that vote? We're not gonna we're not gonna adjudicate that one here. But by 1964, Johnson buries Goldwater in a landslide. But the key point is Goldwater's insurgency plants the seed of a real conservative revival to come. Looking back on it, many historians now are believing that Johnson simply got a Ken a Kennedy sympathy vote. Certainly the is the first assassination in TV with with the TV medium as the number one medium. So that was that was that assassination was thrust into uh the face of a very innocent American republi uh American public. So again, Johnson buries Goldwater and a landslide. But by 1968, country very uneasy. And we covered this in our four-part series on pivotal elections. We'll put that link in the description. But by 1968, Nixon returns from two dead and buried defeats to win the presidency on a single word. He was going to restore order. That if there was one word that encapsulated the 1960 election, it was order. Most folks just saw the country being torn apart at the seams, and Nixon, with valiant effort, campaigned everywhere and anywhere and kept a disciplined message of we're going to restore order. By 1972, Nixon wins over 60% of the popular vote, carries 49 states, one of the largest landslides in American history. So seven years, two comebacks, one landslide. And you see, Nixon's message in 1968 wasn't utopia, and it certainly wasn't revolution. It was order. It was a country exhausted, like I said, by those riots, assassinations, a party convention that collapsed into chaos in the streets of Chicago. And most of the country just wanted one thing order. And Nixon gave it to him. Not a program, not a slogan, just a promise that the center and the center right would hold. And that's our nugget for today. Political elites can write a man off, but they cannot write the voters off who still believe in him. Nixon proved it in 1968 and again in 1972. Trump proved it again in 2024. And I want you to let that sink in. Because White's series didn't survive Watergate, and it shouldn't have. He couldn't write a normal campaign book after Nixon resigned in disgrace. So instead he wrote a breach of faith. And let me back up. So Theodore White wrote, he wrote in 1960, he wrote The Making of the Presidency or The Making of the President. And then that continued on. So in 1964, he wrote about the landslide victory by LBJ. In 1968, he writes about Nixon's comeback. In 1972, he writes about Nixon's landslide. So that four-part series over those 12 years really became a central landmark case study of political journalism.

Watergate Fallout And What’s Next

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But by Nixon resigning in 74, that that break has happened. And White did not want to write the 1976 The Making of a President. He thought everything was disrupted heavily in 1974 with Nixon's resigning in disgrace. So he wrote a breach of faith. Frankly, that title says it all, the breach of faith between the president and the constitution he swore to defend. But that's where we're headed next after this episode. Starting next week, we're going to dig into, and we've already done this, but we're going to dig into, we're going to cover again the Jeff Shepard Watergate trilogy. Because the case that Nixon never got to make and how Watergate stopped being a scandal and became a weapon used against every president, Republican president since. And so we're going to we're going to talk about that because there's a lot of parallels between Nixon and Trump. And boy, is there not a lot of parallels between Nixon being shoved out and what is starting to look a lot like what they have tried to do to Trump, and Trump just simply fought back. Certainly the Nixon, we'll we'll cover this, but the the Nixon break-in, that was legitimate. People should have gone to jail for that. But everything after that, Jeff Shepard, boy, did he document among those three, those three or books how just absolutely horrific the president was treated. So we're going to cover that next week. But in the meantime, this week's Mojo Academy Substack page, we're going to carry even deeper into this. We're going to do a two-part deep dive on Theodora White and the political transformation he chronicled. So head over there and dig in before we pick this back up next week. And certainly if you want to leave a review, click here. And if we've earned five stars, we appreciate it. High five knuckle bumps for that. We appreciate that greatly. Thank you. And until next time, as always, keep getting your mojo on and keep fighting the good fight.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well with other great

Substack, Reviews, And Closing

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reasons.