Even though All in the Family has gone down in history as one of the greatest sitcoms ever made, it didn’t win everybody over when it first hit the airwaves back in 1971. Lucille Ball, for example, thought the series was “awful” and blamed it for making bigoted language popular again. “People do think that way, but why glorify it?” Ball said a couple of years after its debut. The legendary comedienne wasn’t alone in thinking that the show was glorifying things.
On February 9, 1971, CBS ran the groundbreaking All in the Family episode “Judging Books by Covers,” in which Archie learns that one of his friends is gay. Sometime later, President Richard Nixon was recorded on one of his infamous White House tapes complaining about the show to chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and advisor John Ehrlichman.
“I was trying to tune into the d—n baseball game—and then the game went off, and CBS came on with a movie,” Nixon began to tell the others, before Haldeman corrected him and clarified that he’d actually been watching a TV show.
Richard Nixon Once Blamed ‘All in the Family’ for Glorifying Homosexuality
Right out of the gate, Nixon made it clear that he wasn’t happy with the episode he was subjected to that day—the aforementioned “Judging Books by Covers.” The president didn’t take issue with the show’s inclusion of derogatory words like Ball, however; he was more concerned with it glorifying homosexuality. Haldeman went on to explain that each episode’s purpose was to downgrade Archie (who’s referred to as a “square hardhat”) to make his hippie son-in-law look good.
“The point that I make is that godd—nit, I do not think that you glorify, on public television, homosexuality!” Nixon interjected. “You see, homosexuality, immorality in general…these are the enemies of strong societies,” he continued. “That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They’re trying to destroy us!”
You can listen to the full recording, courtesy of CNN’s 2013 documentary Our Nixon, below.
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