Bring Us Together

Bring Us Together

Vicki Lynne Cole with a recreation of her sign at the 1969 inaugural parade
Date	October 1968 – January 1969
Location	Deshler, Ohio – Washington D.C.
Participants	Vicki Lynne Cole, Richard Nixon
Outcome	Slogan briefly adopted by Nixon administration, but later turned against it by Democrats

This article is part of a series about Richard Nixon
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"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 which 13-year-old Vicki Lynne Cole stated that she had carried at Nixon's rally in her hometown of Deshler, Ohio, during the campaign.

Richard Moore, a friend of Nixon, told the candidate's speechwriters he had seen a child carrying a sign reading "Bring Us Together" at the Deshler rally. The speechwriters, including William Safire, began inserting the phrase into the candidate's speeches. Nixon mentioned the Deshler rally and the sign in his victory speech on November 6, 1968, adopting the phrase as representing his administration's initial goal—to reunify the bitterly divided country. Cole came forward as the person who carried the sign and was the subject of intense media attention.

Nixon invited Cole and her family to the presidential inauguration, and she appeared on a float in the inaugural parade. The phrase "Bring Us Together" was used ironically by Democrats when Nixon proposed policies with which they disagreed or refused to support. Cole declined to comment on Nixon's 1974 resignation, but subsequently expressed sympathy for him. In newspaper columns written in his final years before his 2009 death, Safire expressed doubt that Cole's sign ever existed.