page_title: Bring Us Together
section_title: Political usage and aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Bring Us Together / Political usage and aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: Deshler Fire Department, Main Street, Deshler, Ohio
context_page_description: "Bring Us Together" was a political slogan popularized after the election of Republican candidate Richard Nixon as United States President in 1968. The text was derived from a sign which 13-year-old Vicki Lynne Cole stated that she carried at Nixon's rally in her home town of Deshler, Ohio during the campaign.
  Richard Moore, a friend of Nixon, told the candidate's speechwriters he had seen a child carrying a sign reading "Bring Us Together" at the Deshler rally. The speechwriters, including William Safire, began inserting the phrase into the candidate's speeches. Nixon mentioned the Deshler rally and the sign in his victory speech on November 6, 1968, adopting the phrase as representing his administration's initial goal—to reunify the bitterly divided country. Cole came forward as the person who carried the sign, and was the subject of intense media attention.
  Nixon invited Cole and her family to the inauguration, and she appeared on a float in the inaugural parade. The phrase "Bring Us Together" was used ironically by Democrats when Nixon proposed policies they disagreed with or refused to support.
context_section_description: The Inaugural Committee wanted to adopt "Bring Us Together" as the inaugural theme, appalling Safire, who said, "That wasn't the theme of the campaign." Safire and other aides felt the administration should seek to advance its agenda, rather than seeking consensus on policy, and White House Chief of Staff-designate H. R. Haldeman was able to change the theme to "Forward Together." Nevertheless, the phrase "Bring Us Together" was thrown in the face of the Nixon administration by Democrats each time something divisive was proposed, and was used as the title of a tell-all expose by Leon Panetta after he was fired from the Nixon administration for dissenting from the White House's "Southern strategy" on civil rights policy. According to Safire, the use of the phrase against Nixon shows a slogan which evokes emotion can cut both ways.
  Nixon's advisors denied he had abandoned a desire to bring the American people together. However, they were divided between those who sought national unity, and those, such as campaign manager and Attorney General John N. Mitchell, who felt Nixon should concentrate on keeping the voters who had cast their ballots for him, and should seek to win over the voters who had favored third-party candidate Alabama Governor George Wallace, as the key to reelection in 1972. According to Safire, after taking office, Nixon and his advisors decided he need not bring the country together, but need only work to secure his reelection by appealing to voters who were not hostile to Nixon and his policies—they became known as the Silent Majority. Historian Stanley Kutler suggested in his book on the Nixon administration that Nixon's policies widened divisions in America, but that the nation finally came together late in his presidency—to reject Nixon and demand his removal.
  In late 1970, Vicki Cole indicated in an interview Nixon was doing the best he could. During the 1972 campaign, Cole served as Ohio chair of a future voters organization for the Nixon campaign. She then left politics, devoting her spare time to training and showing horses. In 1974, Cole declined to comment on the resignation of President Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal, but stated in 1977 that she felt sympathy for him, though she believed his resignation was necessary.
  Safire, in his political dictionary published in 2008, recollected that when he asked Moore, some years after the inauguration, whether he had really seen the girl holding the sign, or whether he had imagined it, "his eyes took on a faraway look". In columns written in the final years before his 2009 death, Safire commented that the sign was "almost too good to be true", and said of Moore, "[h]e may have made that up".
caption: Deshler, Ohio fire department, where the "Nixonettes" assembled
exif: {"Image Make": "Panasonic", "Image Model": "DMC-FZ28", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.0", "Image DateTime": "2009:06:24 10:50:31", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "2308", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 14, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, ... ]", "Image Tag 0xC6D2": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ]", "Image Tag 0xC6D3": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ]", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "1/96", "Thumbnail YResolution": "1/96", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "14522", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3880", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/640", "EXIF FNumber": "8", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Landscape Mode", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "160", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2009:06:24 10:50:31", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2009:06:24 10:50:31", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "33/5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2048", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1536", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "13990", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "66", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "Low gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF Padding": "[]", "EXIF OffsetSchema": "3756"}