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Hedging His Bets

Why Nixon Killed HUD's Desegregation Efforts

Abstract

Drawing on primary sources from the Nixon Presidential Materials and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), this article examines HUD's attempts during the Nixon era to implement "pro-integrative" policies and the White House response to these efforts. Specifically, this article provides an explanation for why President Richard Nixon elected to dismantle residential integration initiatives while allowing similar policies in employment and education to proceed with some force. In contrast to existing work arguing that Nixon's civil rights positions were designed to maximize political payoffs, I contend that Nixon's strategies are more accurately characterized as blame avoidance. Whenever possible, Nixon attempted to shift the onus of political responsibility for controversial civil rights decisions onto other political actors. This argument is clarified by a second primary theoretical point, which argues that institutional vulnerability increases the likelihood of presidential attacks. In the case examined here, HUD's distinctive institutional weakness—shaped by its conflicting missions and unwieldy structure, and laid bare by scandals in the Federal Housing Administration—gave the president a relatively low-risk political opportunity to dismantle civil rights efforts, a chance he did not have in the areas of education and employment.

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