I had a wildly entertaining professor a couple years back who made seemingly outlandish historical claims in class without bothering to back them up. I think he did this to make us go look for info to prove him wrong (brilliant strategy actually).
He once remarked that Nixon decided to vigorously enforce federal civil rights in the South to cause salty white democrats to realign with republicans because they didn't want to be in the same political party as blacks (Southern Strategy).
I found an audio clip long ago of Nixon saying this same thing in as many words, but cannot relocated it. Does anyone know of a specific Nixon tape where he (and maybe Kissinger?) discuss this in detail?
He wouldn't have discussed it with Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was Nixon's foreign policy majordomo, not his political strategist. Apart from the omnipotent reminders from Nixon on how winning elections was important-which everybody got-Nixon didn't tend to discuss domestic policy or campaign strategy questions with Kissinger. Granted, Kissinger (partially) came from the "Eastern Elite" demographic which Nixon saw it as his domestic mission to disempower and spent years working for Nixon's top rival in the GOP, Nelson Rockefeller, so I doubt Nixon would have been all that inclined anyway to talk to him about his plans to win elections.
I think what he might be referring to is a Kevin Phillips memo from the mid-60s, before the Nixon Presidency, when Phillips mentioned that the Republicans would be short sighted if they tried to fight the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the midst of the SS. This applied to Northern working class Catholics as well as Southern Protestants. He mentioned it in a 1970 NYT interview, shown here:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf
Phillips was a pretty interesting guy who wanted the Republican Party to take a more populist bent, not only socioculturally, but socioeconomically as well. (He tellingly always insisted on labeling himself as a "Nixon Republican", not a "Reagan Republican".) He strongly disliked the turn of the Republican Party to free-market orthodoxy in the 80s and 90s and ended up publicly splitting from the party during the Bush I years, in spite of him being the original architect of bringing vast amounts of ex-Democrats into a Republican coalition.