In the political sense, Barack Obama came out of nowhere — and both his Democratic primary opponents and John McCain in the general election tried to persuade voters of the risks of electing someone with so sparse a past, telling them that “we don’t know who he is!”

This raises a bigger question: how well do we really “know” any politician, no matter how long he’s been in the public eye? History holds a cautionary lesson.

Barack Obama is an unknown quantity. But so, after 20 years in the public eye, was Richard Nixon.
January 1969. The month came with gusts of freezing rain and murky ice fog hovering over the Potomac. Yet Washington’s welcome was warm with hope and the promise of change.

After a prodigal rise, searing defeats, and a stunning comeback, Richard Milhous Nixon became the 37th president of the United States. At 56, with more than two decades on the national stage, he was a familiar figure. Elected to Congress in 1946 and the Senate in 1950, he had been in politics scarcely six years before he became vice president under Dwight Eisenhower. He lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy in 1960 in one of the closest, most controversial races in the nation’s history. When he suffered humiliating defeat in a 1962 bid to be governor of California, his political life seemed over. Then, gradually, political havoc and his own dogged resolve gave him another chance. With Gov. George Wallace of Alabama draining Democratic votes as a third candidate, Nixon’s 1968 victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey was a bare 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent. He had won the presidency at last.

The America Nixon now led was deeply divided by rising opposition to the Vietnam War, along with a seething reaction to cultural and racial upheavals of the 1960s. Historians would ponder into the 21st century the complex character of that wider turmoil — both more and less transformative than clichés had it. The impact at the time was epic, cast in fire and blood. Urban riots, campus revolts, the withdrawal of President Lyndon Johnson from his re-election bid, the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the violent police suppression of antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention, Governor Wallace’s 46 electoral votes marking a historic realignment of party politics in the South — all that and more made 1968 the most tumultuous election year in modern American politics.

That furor was a staple of Nixon’s triumph. But no politician of his rank had been more partisan and divisive. He had fueled his early rise with crude chauvinism, impugning the patriotism of opponents. If he embodied much of the virtue and striving of the great postwar American middle class, he also played to its fears, resentments and prejudices.

Even in successive efforts at political makeover in the 1950s and ’60s, cultivating the imagery of a “New Nixon,” he harbored rancor and blame for a host of perceived enemies. As he bitterly told reporters in his supposed “last press conference” after losing the California gubernatorial race, they would “not have Nixon to kick around any more.” Yet in 1968 — silhouetted against fractured Democrats as well as his own campaign themes of restoring “law and order” and a vague but welcome plan to “end the war with honor” — he came to office as a symbol of longed-for stability and even conciliation for a strife-worn country.

There was haunting paradox in the anticipation — some constituencies, especially in the South, expecting the president to avenge or uphold their interests; others believing he was the leader to transcend old antagonisms, including his own. “A lot of people that year, even his opponents, saw in him what they wanted,” his aide John Ehrlichman later said, “even if what they wanted was very different.” Divider as unifier, attacker as peacemaker, it was a role the new president embraced. He would be guided, Nixon said after his victory, by a sign he saw in a campaign crowd — “Bring us together.” A later era, weary of its own red-blue divisions, might have called it all “post-partisan.”

His inaugural went on in a cold drizzle, with a relatively somber crowd of 250,000 compared to Johnson’s 1.2 million four years before. Between podium and audience the bulletproof partition was a grim token, wrote the Washington Post, “of the assassinations which so suddenly had altered the political fortunes of the leaders present.” But the new president’s speech, often forgotten in the tangled history that followed, was arguably the finest of his long career, confirming the disparate hopes riding that January.

In these difficult years America has suffered from a fever of words: from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices. For its part, government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways — to the voices of quiet anguish, the voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart — to the injured voices, the anxious voices, the voices that have despaired of being heard.

He went on to speak of “rebuilding our cities and improving our rural areas” and “protecting our environment and enhancing the quality of life,” including an eloquent if oblique reference to civil rights: “What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man.”

And, invoking the “better angels of our nature,” he spoke of own deep-seated sense of mission:

The greatest title history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America — the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil and onto that high ground of peace that man has dreamed of since the dawn of civilization … to the crisis of the spirit we need an answer of the spirit … we need only look within ourselves …

We have endured a long night of the American spirit. But as our eyes catch the dimness of the first rays of dawn, let us not curse the remaining dark. Let us gather the light.

Those last words moved some to tears, and would seem all the more impressive for being echoed in private notes Nixon jotted before and after the Inauguration on his ubiquitous yellow legal pads: “Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone … Need to be good to do good … The nation must be better in spirit at the end of term.”

The Nixon transition — headquartered at the elegant Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park in Manhattan and described in the press as “brilliantly managed” and “silken smooth” — was reported to give every sign of that “better” prospect, and from news media once thought hostile, praise for the new government was fulsome. For a “revitalization” of the White House staff, it was reported, the president had enlisted not only two “gifted” aides from the campaign, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and White House counsel John Ehrlichman, but also, to head a new Urban Affairs Council in a bipartisan spirit, former Kennedy-Johnson Democratic official Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And from the camp of Nixon’s Republican rival Nelson Rockefeller, a little known Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger, as national security advisor.

These new men, America was told, were “relaxed and almost mellow,” with what Life Magazine called “remarkable ease and sense of pleasure” and, according to the Washington Post, “none of the moralistic sense of good guys replacing bad guys.” Kissinger especially impressed journalists with his openness and modesty; he would be doing “quiet thinking” about foreign policy, he told them, and no “operating” or “self-aggrandizement” in diplomacy. The columnist Joseph Kraft, who would soon be a frequent Kissinger contact, thought it all made for “an era of better feeling.”

Background briefings assured the media that there would be no “bureaucratic wars,” with the White House overshadowing the cabinet, as in past presidencies. Introduced by Nixon in a specially staged ceremony broadcast live by television networks, each extolled in turn, the new cabinet secretaries would be nothing less than “deputy presidents who run their own departments,” and the Oval Office always open to them.

The same collaboration was pledged to Congress, where Nixon was the first president in more than a century without his party having a majority in at least one chamber. “Bipartisan cooperation,” Moynihan told a Congressional group as Kissinger looked on smiling broadly, “will be our watchword.” “He knows he needs us,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield would say confidently of the president. Not least, there was a solemn promise to an already admiring media. “Truth will be the hallmark of the Nixon administration,” announced Herb Klein, the White House communications director.

Altogether, concludes Rick Perlstein in “Nixonland,” his colorful and authoritative history of the era published last year, the weeks around the 1969 inauguration saw “a remarkably successful public relations campaign selling the new presidency as a magnanimous respite from a cacophonous era of division.” But as not even some of the “sellers” understood until later — to say nothing of the Congress, media, and public who did the buying — that image was very different from the inner reality of the Nixon presidency.

As we now know from memoirs, official archives, testimony and various other sources, what White House aides came to call the “dark side of the moon” was there from the start. The supposedly “smooth” and hard-working transition was a sham. “We did have a couple of meetings, but basically we were left on our own to compose the government,” remembered Ehrlichman, who was at the center of the process. “The personnel process … was a shambles.”

Not surprisingly, the disarray traced largely to Nixon himself. By several accounts, a president that the nation now assumed to be so experienced and ready to lead in fact had little purpose beyond his longtime ambition to be a global statesman and scant interest in much of governance. Domestic policy he thought a “bore,” or, as he once put it, “building outhouses in Peoria.”

“When Dick was finally elected president he attained eighty percent of all goals in his life,” Bryce Harlow, one of his longtime closest friends and advisors, confided to an associate before the inauguration. “He has no idea of what he will do after he is sworn in.”

Harlow was not quite right. The new president had definite ideas about keeping power in his own hands. The cabinet he publicly announced as “deputy presidents” with an open door to the Oval Office he privately derided as “clowns,” “idiots” or worse. “Keep them away from me!” he ordered Haldeman. When Kissinger soon after the inaugural told him how much he admired some of the cabinet (pointedly excluding his rivals, Secretary of State William Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird), but then said he felt obliged to mention the suspect foreign ties of one of the other department heads, Nixon brushed it aside. “Oh, Henry,” Nixon shot back, “they’re all dirty.”

Behind the “revitalization” of the White House staff was a deliberate, almost total and ultimately insidious concentration of power in the presidency that would exclude and demonize most of the rest of government. The new president’s “relaxed” and “mellow” men would be charged, as Haldeman put it in an early staff meeting, “to move over and through anyone who gets in our way.” The monopoly was most complete, most venomous, and eventually most famous in Kissinger’s dominance of foreign relations from his deceptively small office in the White House basement.

If little else had been accomplished in the suites of the Hotel Pierre, it at least had been the scene of a transition coup d’etat in the making of foreign policy. Not long after the inaugural, Secretary of State Rogers was presented with a new presidential directive vesting decisive power in the national security advisor. The Nixon-Kissinger duopoly could now begin the ultra-secret diplomacy and covert actions — secret from most of the rest of government as well as the public — that would make much of the dramatic, and tragic, history of the next five-and-a-half years.

Foreign policy was hardly the only secret. As for bi-partisanship and collaboration with a Democratic Congress: “None of them will help us and none of them are worth a damn,” Nixon told an early staff meeting. “Just ignore ’em.”

As for the elegant passage on civil rights in the inaugural address: “Nothing should happen in the South without checking with Dent,” Nixon said, giving veto power to his special counsel Harry Dent, a protégé of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and now the administration’s point man in resisting civil rights measures and enforcement that would offend the Southern voters Nixon planned to win over (even beyond the six states of Dixie he had taken in 1968). It was the beginning of the vaunted Republican Southern Strategy, and was accompanied from the start by Nixon’s casual use of racial epithets.

As for the media now being told the truth, Nixon referred to the press corps as that “bunch of crew cut boy scouts” in a conversation with writer Theodore White soon after the inauguration. After a White House press aide reported to him that coverage of the new administration over its first month had been “almost uniformly excellent,” the president answered impatiently: “You don’t understand, they are waiting to destroy us.” Nixon would hold no televised press conferences in his first eight months, and then only 31 over four years (by comparison, Johnson held four times as many in his five years in office).

And finally, most tragically, there was the war: “The Nixon constituency is behind the war effort,” Kissinger said that winter, revealing a base motive that belied the new government’s promise of an early peace: “If we were to pull out of Vietnam, there would be a disaster, politically, for us, here at home.” There would be, of course, other calculus, other mania, in the following four more years of war — with Nixon and Kissinger, the historian learns early, motives are rarely simple, or constant.

At almost the same moment The Times was reporting public pressure on the war had “disappeared,” Nixon was ordering the secret bombing of Cambodia. The new presidency would be less than 100 days old when a leak to The Times on the war policy set in motion the malignant process that would bring the wiretapping of officials and journalists, and ultimately onto the sequence that would lead to Watergate.

It was indeed a “historic” start for the new administration, if not in the sense of the benign, hopeful public image of January 1969. America had elected a familiar, reassuring figure to the presidency, only to find a stranger in the Oval Office.