Leadership Quote by Richard M. Nixon

Nixon’s line is a tidy piece of moral judo: it grabs a culture-war obsession by the lapels and flips it into a claim of adult seriousness. In an era when hair length signaled everything from Vietnam dissent to generational revolt, he positions himself as the reasonable father of the nation, refusing to be baited by surface-level panic. The phrasing is deliberately narrow and disciplined. “Today” suggests a corrective to a noisy moment; “not with the length” turns a tabloid grievance into something petty; “but with his conduct” elevates the conversation to law, order, and patriotism without having to name any of those loaded words.

The subtext is not actually permissive. By insisting he’s above judging appearances, Nixon gets to sound tolerant while keeping the real target in view: the behavior he and his coalition associated with the counterculture - protest, refusal, disruption, a public challenge to authority. It’s a classic Nixon move: reassure the “silent majority” that he won’t be distracted by aesthetics, then quietly encode aesthetics as a warning sign of deeper social disorder. Hair becomes the decoy, conduct the hook.

Context matters because the late 1960s and early 1970s were saturated with symbolic battles that stood in for policy fights: who belongs, who obeys, who gets to define “American.” Nixon’s genius here is rhetorical: he offers a civility pose that doubles as a mandate. He’s not policing style; he’s policing legitimacy.