The Grand Old Party: An Intimate Autopsy of how Paranoia, Prejudice, and Criminal Conspiracy Corroded American Democracy, One Year at a Time

Part One: The Nixon Years: A Presidency Unravels, Thread by Poisoned Thread

Note: This is part one of five articles looking at the National Republican Party from Nixon to Trump and how lies, cheating, bulling and racism became the favorite tools of the GOP.

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1969: The Seeds of Destruction

The snow that January was particularly harsh, as if nature itself was offering commentary on what was about to unfold. Richard Nixon took the oath of office with his hand on two family Bibles, his Quaker mother Hannah’s spirit surely turning in her grave at what her son was about to do to the Republic. But there he stood, that fascinating gargoyle of American ambition, promising to bring us together while his henchmen were already drawing up the enemies lists in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building.

The transition period had already shown Nixon’s true colors. Before even taking office, he had sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks through Anna Chennault, his secret liaison to the South Vietnamese government, promising them a better deal if they refused to negotiate with Johnson. This treasonous act—yes, treasonous—prolonged a war that would kill 20,000 more Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. But winning mattered more than lives.

The tapes from this first year—oh, those glorious, damning tapes!—reveal a man drunk on the wine of finally, finally having made it. The recording system, ironically installed to preserve his legacy, would become the instrument of his destruction. Voice-activated, capturing everything, missing nothing—every slur, every criminal conspiracy, every paranoid rant preserved for posterity in magnetic clarity.