The Lift of a Driving Dream

What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost

Richard Nixon gave the first speech of his presidential campaign in February 1968 at the New Hampshire Highway Hotel in Concord. It was a volatile time in American life. One month prior, the Soviet Union had detonated a nuclear bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site, North Korea had seized the USS Pueblo, and the Viet Cong had launched the Tet Offensive, which would lead to widespread disillusionment among Americans and the eventual U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973.

Then as now, Americans lived with the looming threat of Russian aggression, North Korean hostility, and a distant war against barbaric forces that left American public opinion bitterly divided. We see the same disillusionment today over the war in Israel, as leftists again stage antiwar protests, so it wasn’t terribly surprising that I was reading the paper on Christmas Eve when what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a story in the New York Times suggesting a parallel between the Vietnam protests of the 1960s and the pro-Palestinian protests of today.

Decades later, in his 1987 book No More Vietnams, Nixon would darkly reflect on the war in terms that regrettably apply to Israel now, writing, “No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much.”

Reading the Times article, I was reminded of an argument the paper made in 2005 that drew parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. That piece was trounced by the late Christopher Hitchens, who took another swing when then-President George Bush made the same comparison. The Vietminh, Hitchens said, were U.S. and British allies during World War II, while the Iraqi Baath Party was on the other side—as were the Palestinians, I might add. Hitchens noted that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence by quoting Thomas Jefferson, a man whose thinking was wholly alien to the jihadist propaganda of Baathists—or Hamas. He added, Vietnam was content with its borders, whereas Iraq claimed the entire territory of its neighbor Kuwait—just as Palestinians claim Israel. Vietnam had no quarrel abroad, while Iraq sought to murder all Jews and infidels—ditto Hamas. The Americans in Vietnam had targeted civilians, Hitchens explained, but no more, whereas in Iraq, killing the innocent was a badge of honor—as in Gaza today.

Still, there are throughlines between Vietnam and Gaza. Then as now, we sat witness as terroristic psychopaths kidnapped and executed innocent civilians. The Viet Cong slaughtered up to 6,000 people in the Huế massacre. Then as now, such horrors gave leftists in the West little pause. Then as now, antiwar activists looked at war abroad through the simplistic lens of power, obtusely casting one side as occupiers and the other as anti-imperialist liberators. Then as now, Americans lived in a time when anti-American sentiment among themselves ran high.

This brings us back to Nixon’s speech in Concord. His return to politics was a surprise in the New Hampshire primaries, and he began his speech with a stirring line of patriotic pride:

The finest hours in our nation’s history have been triumphs of the American spirit. We now are engaged in a great test of that spirit.

Then as now, indeed they were. Nixon had served in the Navy, was a California representative, and became a senator in 1950. He won that race by accusing his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, of being a communist, thus also winning himself the nickname “Tricky Dick.” As senator, he focused on the threat of global communism, supported Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood, civil rights for minorities, and benefits for illegal immigrants. When Dwight D. Eisenhower named Nixon as his vice president, Nixon used the office to shepherd the Civil Rights Act through Congress. He ran for president in 1960 and famously lost to JFK, who didn’t argue as well, but was more photogenic.

The years from 1963 to 1968 are known as Nixon’s wilderness years. By the time he gave that speech in front of the Highway Hotel in 1968, people had come to the conclusion that Tricky Dick was a has-been. Later that year, American columnist William Safire published his book, Safire’s New Political Dictionary, in which he briefly analyzed the speech:

The use of a Churchill phrase—“finest hours”—and the use of the Loncolnian construction “We are now engaged”—reflected the candidate’s dual purposes: to rally and to heal. The centerpiece of the speech, written by Ray Price, was this line: “What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost: the lift of a driving dream.

Nixon’s campaign strategy rested on attracting what he called the “silent majority,” meaning all the level-headed Americans in the middle who were turned off by the extremist liberal agenda unfolding across the country as well as by the offensive and often racist rhetoric of the far-right populist George Wallace. Nixon saw a swath of politically homeless Americans and offered them a return to sanity. As Dana Wormald of the New Hampshire Bulletin has observed:

We know, through thousands of hours of Oval Office tapes released during Watergate, what Nixon sounded like off the stage in all its ugliness and depravity. But … Nixon was telling New Hampshire voters that the 1968 election wasn’t about vengeance or righting a past wrong, whatever motivations he held in his heart, but changing direction for the good of an entire nation. And then he made his big, vote-snagging pitch to Granite State Republicans:

“We need leadership that recognizes that the real crisis of America today is a crisis of the spirit. What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost: the lift of a driving dream.”

Nixon won the presidency and that majestic phrase, the lift of a driving dream, was one that he would often repeat. In 1971, correspondent Nancy Dickerson asked him about the first time he used the phrase, that day outside the Highway Hotel, to which Nixon replied, “Before we can really get this lift of a driving dream, we have to get rid of some of the nightmares we inherited.”

When Nixon later resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, his successor, Gerald Ford, famously evoked that line, saying, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

There is absolutely no meaningful comparison to be drawn between Vietnam and Gaza. As Hitchens often argued, the antiwar protesters of the 1960s were protesting a war of questionable moral origins and even more questionable prosecution. There is a colorable argument to be made, despite the depredations of the North Vietnamese, that the protesters then were on the right side of history. There is no such argument for the protesters today, who tear down images of kidnapped Israeli children, chant the genocidal slogan “from the river to the sea,” and yell that Hitler “should have finished the job.”

Our long national nightmare is far from over. Ours is a time of even greater urgency, in which we are even more confused and divided than we were then. Our own institutions of truth, our classrooms and newsrooms, have been turned into breeding grounds for moral depravity and radicalist idiocy.

Friends, I have bad news. It will all get worse before it gets better. But it will get better. If the woke revolution, cancel culture, the university scandals, and October 7 have done nothing else, they have stirred the silent majority. They have shown us that we face a crisis of the spirit. But they have also reminded us that what matters most is the American spirit, the values of liberal democracy, the principles we cherish, and the spine that is needed to stand for them.

What America needs most today, it is true, we have lost. But as Americans we all know, our strength is not in any legal document, however highly revered, nor in the might of our military, however formidable, but in our hearts, in the lift of a driving dream, and the American dream is one that may be lost at times, but never dies.