Jack Beatty

"You're asking to crawl inside the mind of the Nixon supporter. I'm unable to. The man, to me, incarnated the figure of the American jerk: the guy who's always clumsy, who sweats inappropriately, who knocks over his saucer when he goes to pick up the coffee, who has no redeeming virtue save a kind of stamina, an ability to last. In the Navy they called him 'hard bottom' because he'd play cards after everybody had left. And that seemed to be his one virtue. He persisted like a bad cold. And the jerk is a numerous species. Anybody in high school remembers him. All of us at some time were him. And I think Nixon spoke to the jerk, and he said: "That's all right, that's all right. You can be awkward and ungainly and uncouth and unscrupulous, just like me. And you can be full of hatred and unarticulated bitterness, just like me. And you don't have to feel guilty about anything, because I don't feel guilty about anything." And he sent a message to jerks all over the country that their hour had arrived. "Enough of this idealism. Enough of this Kennedy uplift. We're gonna have our day; the day of the jerk, of the 'silent majority'"—which is the apotheosis of jerkhood. Madison and Jefferson would've turned over in their graves to think that silence would be dignified as a democratic virtue. But that's the jerk's virtue, and in Nixon the jerk found his president."