Nixon and Social Immobilism

Not only has President Nixon failed to tackle any major problem, he has not even defined one. As Max Frankel has written:

By this stage in their administrations John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were forging new designs for European organization or urban transportation and tax reform and slum removal to boot. They were combing the budget and eyeing new revenues to pay for what they wanted done, with freedom and justice and ballyhoo for all. Mr. Nixon, by contrast, begins skeptically with questions about what can be done…. At home … [he] intends to wait to see how much spare cash his budget will yield before he begins to “move in the direction of our very difficult problems.” … [He has] betrayed a certain eagerness to hold the middle of the road.

—New York Times, March 19, 1969

Kennedy and Johnson, too, were finally compelled to hold to “the middle of the road,” but they were a bit...