NIXON AND AMERICAN POPULATION POLICY: ANNIVERSARY OF A MISSED OPPORTUNITY (NPG Footnote)

• David Simcox
• March 1, 1998
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
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NIXON AND AMERICAN POPULATION POLICY: ANNIVERSARY OF A MISSED OPPORTUNITY
An NPG Forum Paper
(An NPG Footnote)
by David Simcox
March 1998

The post-mortems marking the 25th anniversary of Watergate earlier in 1997 overshadowed another quarter-century milestone of the Richard Nixon era – one of even greater long-term consequences for the nation’s future.

In 1972 President Nixon rejected the report of John Rockefeller’s Commission on Population and the American Future – the nation’s sole consideration of an explicit population policy. While the idea of a national commission took form under Lyndon Johnson, President Nixon made population growth a major concern, calling it in 1969 “one of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century.” He backed legislation creating the commission and appointed most of its members. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Nixon White House advisor, was a driving force.

There was good reason then for Nixon’s sense of urgency. The post-war baby boom had added fifty million Americans in just two decades. If that high birth rate had persisted there would have been 400 million Americans by 2013.

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