I remember something about a Welfare recipients' union being derided in the bourgeois press. It was not my impression that the established order took it very seriously. Derision is only the second stage of their immune response to radical ideas (pretend it isn't there, deride it, fight it, co-opt it). Do you think Nixon and company were shaking in their boots on account of these people, when they ignored the vast demonstrations against the war? I don't.
They, or rather their predecessors, were probably afraid of Martin Luther King because he was beginning to link together racism, poverty, class war, imperialism, and the other usual suspects -- in other words, he was becoming an out-and-out leftist. But MLK was taken care of before Nixon's regime began. As long as Welfare and its recipients were kept separate, they could easily be neutralized and even exploited by arousing the resentment and envy of middle- and working- class people against them and their supporters.
Therfore, I continue to believe that Nixon's interest in Welfare and other social-democratic policies had other sources than street demonstrations, to wit, Bismarckian intentions -- a Welfare state entirely consistent with imperialism, nationalism, and police-state repression. If it's an evil Nixon you want, this one seems to beat the simple right-wing anti-Communist by a mile.
As another note not yet sounded in this discussion, Gary Wills (in _Nixon_Agonistes_, I believe) made him out to be some kind of liberal.