Richard Nixon’s legacy will be forever tarnished by the Watergate scandal that led him to become the first and only U.S. president to resign from office. But Nixon was also a political mastermind whose impact continues to resound in both domestic and world politics.

John R. Price served on the domestic policy side of the first Nixon administration, eventually becoming Special Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs. He has written about his experience in a compelling new memoir and history, The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider’s Perspective on Nixon’s Surprising Social Policy. In this interview, Price talks about his background as one of the founding memoirs of the Ripon Society (a moderate Republican activist group in the 1960s), his efforts on behalf of progressive Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits, and his work in the Nixon administration for the eminent Harvard sociologist (and later U.S. Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Price describes his efforts with Moynihan and Nixon to create the Family Assistance Plan, a far-reaching welfare proposal that would have implemented a negative income tax for households with working parents. He makes the case that Nixon was in many ways a liberal — indeed the last liberal Republican president — and that his social welfare program, if it had passed Congress, would have put the country on a different and better trajectory.

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