Watergate was not why Nixon was reviled. He was in Democratic cross hairs from the moment he went after liberal darling Alger Hiss as a communist, which Soviet documents reveal he was. Nixon's HUAC cross-examination of Hiss was brilliant, and he was far less reckless, far more circumspect, and consequently far more effective than McCarthy, the name Democrats scream every time anyone mentions the now undeniable Communist penetration of our government in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

Since you apparently did not read the article, I'll repeat a relevant section of it:

In 1956, as vice president, Nixon went to Harlem to declare, “America can’t afford the cost of segregation.” The following year, Nixon got a personal letter from Dr. King thanking him for helping to persuade the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Nixon supported the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968.In the 1966 campaign, as related in my new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority,” out July 8, Nixon blasted Dixiecrats “seeking to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.”

Nixon called out segregationist candidates in ’66 and called on LBJ, Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy to join him in repudiating them. None did. Hubert, an arm around Lester Maddox, called him a “good Democrat.” And so were they all — good Democrats.

While Adlai chose Sparkman, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew, the first governor south of the Mason Dixon Line to enact an open-housing law.

In Nixon’s presidency, the civil rights enforcement budget rose 800 percent. Record numbers of blacks were appointed to federal office. An Office of Minority Business Enterprise was created. SBA loans to minorities soared 1,000 percent. Aid to black colleges doubled.

Nixon won the South not because he agreed with them on civil rights — he never did — but because he shared the patriotic values of the South and its antipathy to liberal hypocrisy.

When Johnson left office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated. When Nixon left, the figure was 70 percent.

Richard Nixon desegregated the Southern schools, something you won’t learn in today’s public schools.

For history is a pack of lies agreed upon.

Please tell me exactly how Nixon's actions in the 50s, 60s and 70s, anathema to the southern racists that dominated the Democratic party in the south, somehow were transmuted into an appeal to racists that allowed him to put the South in the Republican column. I think Buchanan's analysis is much closer to the truth than the popular NY Times canard you cite.

So the New Left isn't racist which means the Right must be? Strange logic. The shift was a clear political strategy to get votes and not a shift in their beliefs.

The differences between the New and Old Left are as substantial as the differences between the "New" and "Old" Nixons. The "New Left" was clever rebranding, but there was not a dime's worth of difference between it and its predecessor. They were, and are, both statist to the core. The Old Left was overtly racist. The New Left's welfare state may not have been, but it locked millions of blacks into a never ending cycle of poverty and social pathologies.

The New Left formed because the Old Left wasn't moving fast enough for them. Both had similar goals. Compare FDR's record with Obama's. Other than WW2, they aren't that much different. Where they are different, it is because Obama is more willing to go beyond the constitutional limits of the presidency. The major way that FDR went beyond his constitutional authority was in trying to increase the number of Supreme Court justices. Obama has no limits.