Bring Us Together

Bring Us Together.
"Bring Us Together" was a political slogan popularized after the election of Republican candidate Richard Nixon as President of the United States in the 1968 election. The text was derived from a sign that 13-year-old Vicki Lynne Cole stated that she had carried at Nixon's rally in her home town of Deshler, Ohio, during the campaign. After being told of the sign, Nixon's speechwriters, including William Safire, began inserting the phrase into his speeches. Nixon mentioned the rally sign in his victory speech, adopting the phrase as representing his administration's initial goal—to reunify the bitterly divided country. Nixon invited Cole and her family to the presidential inauguration, and she appeared on a float in the inaugural parade (pictured). The phrase "Bring Us Together" was used ironically by Democrats when Nixon proposed policies with which they disagreed. In newspaper columns written in the final years before his 2009 death, Safire expressed doubt that Cole's sign had ever existed.