In 1948, we had the courage to stare down the Dixiecrats and throw them out of the party (eventually into the loving and waiting arms of Richard Nixon and the Republicans), knowing it would lose us the South for at least a generation if not three, but we did it because it was right and Johnson finished the job with great civil rights victories.
Years later, in the mid-1980s, with the U.S. once again strong and confident, Malcolm Forbes, my late father, wrote an editorial in these pages suggesting that President Reagan give Richard Nixon a diplomatic assignment dealing with arms control and Russia.