THE PRESIDENCY THE CAMPAIGN THAT CARRIED RICHARD NIXON TO VICTORY

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31831, 8 November 1968, Page 10

THE PRESIDENCY THE CAMPAIGN THAT CARRIED RICHARD NIXON TO VICTORY

[Reprinted from "Newsweek” by arrangement.] The real Richard Nixon finally showed himself to the American people this year—and he turned out to be neither the blue-jawed gutter fighter of myth and memory nor the calm, deliberate statesman of his supporters’ romantic reveries. The real Nixon is a technician, probably the foremost political craftsman of the age. Hunched over his yellow legal pads, he diagrammed the 1968 electorate like a fussy old grammarian parsing a sentence. And if the campaign that resulted had all the authentic passion of a sonnet printed out by a computer, it still had a poetry of its own.

To a nation nervous and distracted by the obdurate problems of war, race and inflation, candidate Nixon vowed to “sock it to ’em.” In fact, the kinky slogan with its promise of infectious exhilaration masked the true nature of the Nixon operation: an intricately plotted out, resolutely unemotional drive to take America not by storm but by shrewd calculation. With that gift for self-detach-ment that marks the man far more profoundly than his skijump nose, Nixon split his political personality—and put the fragments to work, with the backup help of an expensive, efficient organisation. The Stumper The most visible of the Nixons, of course, is the sock-it-to-’em stumper—the glib partisan who has made his

jet-propelled national campaign a balloon-strewn triumphal progress. Avoiding a face-to-face debate with Hubert Humphrey—even after George Wallace essentially satisfied Nixon’s conditions by offering to drop out of the televised confrontation—the

more than 500,000 listeners have caught any one of the Nixon radio speeches. But the texts are quickly reprinted in handy booklets and distributed as proof positive of how substantive Nixon really is. The radio addresses and

stumper has carried the fight to the opposition with slogans. These have been carefully polished since the early days of the primaries until today they provide a foolproof catalogue of applause lines. “The first civil right,” he shouts from his rostrum, his arms pinwheeling like those of an amateurishly-handled marionette, “is the right to be free from civil violence." Or he exclaims; “What we need is not more people on welfare rolls but more people on payrolls." The stump speech is a pastiche of catch phrases lifted from Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, even Robert F. Kennedy. But it is all summed up in Nixon’s quintessential time - for - a - change exhortation: “When you're in trouble, you don’t turn to the men who got you in trouble to get you out of it I say we can’t be led into the '7os by men who stumbled into the ’60.” Controlled Situations The speech is always well received because it is almost always given to a carefully recruited rally of the faithful drummed up by a hard-eyed team of 75 .'dvance men, especially trained and armed with a 75-page manual of crowdsmanship. Even in these controlled situations, most of the noisy enthusiasm comes from teen-agers whose roles in the extravaganza are rehearsed in advance. Toward the rear of the packed auditorium, the adults are often unmoved. And when, as he did in Ohio, Nixon risks a whistle-stop tour before openair crowds, the response he generates from ordinary audiences can be decidedly indifferent. The whole stump campaign is designed to project the semblance of intensity and vitality when it is in fact a rather leisurely enterprise. Unlike the mad swirl of his exhausting 1960 campaign (which he later swore never to repeat), Nixon '6B is carefully booked so that he is neither over-exposed nor over-tired. By Election Day he will have covered only 31 of the 50 states and travelled some 50,000 miles, nearly all of them in the womb-like luxury of a fleet of Boeing 727 s that nearly always arrive and depart within minutes of the mimeographed daily timetable. Typically, as he entered the home-stretch, Nixon promised the most intensive closing ever staged by a Presidential contender. The Media Man

Actually, the difference was in pace not substance. Nixon did give his final flourish an extra zing by escalating the level of his rhetorical attacks on Humphrey, accusing him, among other things, of having “the fastest, loosest tongue in America."

The latest twist prompted the Humphrey camp last week to insist, more out of hope than hard evidence, that “the old Nixon” had finally reared his familiar head. The truth seemed to be that Nixon the technician was carefully building to his programmed climax.

Nixon’s stump candidacy is only one phase of bis larger campaign scheme. Backing up the herky-jerky character at the rostrum is the media Nixon, another creature entirely. The media Nixon is thoroughly modern Milhous — a disembodied but soothing voice on the radio earnestly discussing larger issues, such as youth’s questings or an “open” Presidency, a name on a slickly produced placard that, rather incongruously, insists “Nixon has soul,” a smiling face on expensive four-colour souvenir brochures, artistic television spots, even neo-psychedelic posters. Stumper Nixon uses the same basic techniques American politicians have made part of their repertoires for more than a century; the media man is as trendy as the next issue of Marshall McLuhan’s news-letters. Talking Paper Perhaps the most novel ingredient in Nixon’s mixedmedia bag is his use of radio. He has come up with a genuine political first—the talking position paper. All candidates are taxed with the obligation to state their policy on a raft of subjects generally unsuitable for discussion in the hurly-burly of a rally. The standard solution has been the publication of a position paper, which is invariably filed and forgotten almost before its ink has dried. Nixon’s break-through consists of a series of fifteen radio talks—ten in the last fortnight—covering the gamut from natural resources to the problems of senior citizens. At a generous estimate no

related statements give Nixonites ammunition to counter the common complaint that the Republican candidate's public campaign skirts the real issues in favour of ritualistic calls for law and order. And, in fact, there is an eyebrow-raising difference between Nixon on the radio and Nixon on the stump. The dignified audio Nixon is fond of pledging, as he did last week: “I will never promise what I can’t deliver. I will level with you and be direct with you.” The more viscera! ! platform Nixon talks in such catch phrases as he used on last week’s whistle-stop tour of Ohio: “Let me give you the promise of the future . . A new foreign policy in which we will end this war on an honourable basis . . .

To you young people: You will not be fighting another Vietnam any time in the future . . . Prosperity without war, progress without inflation.” To All Men . Thus, like any politician, Nixon is striving to be as much as possible to as many as possible. But no politician of tbe modem era has had his product promoted with quite the merchandising savvy of the Nixon organisation. This is the third basic element of the Nixon effort. For in addition to Nixon the orator and Nixon the media man, there is Nixon on the corporate executive, chief executive officer of a 350-man outfit that has the drive and dash of a hot advertising agency. Precision - tooled, young organisation men (some of them from the Los Angeles offices of J. Walter Thompson) I set the tone on tbe Nixon campaign. Most of the men around Nixon are mildly conservative and truly dedicated to the premise that the nation needs a change, but ideology plays a relatively minor role. Taking their cue from “The Boss,” their real commitment is to the technical mastery of American politics. One Flaw? Nixon and his apparat have performed flawlessly, in a technical sense at least. The only real question on this score is Nixon's selection of Maryland's Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate. Mostly because of his own, clumsiness, Agnew has suffered from a disastrous press and given tbe Humphrey camp an unanticipated target of opportunity. He seems to be lagging far behind Nixon in popular appeal, trailing Humphrey's running mate, Senator Edmund Muskie, by 41 to 24 per cent in the latest Harris poll. Still, Agnew's hard law-and-order campaign has won some adherents, and Election Day may prove Nixon’s calculation on this score correct after all. Indeed, the returns on November 5 seem likely to confirm all Nixon’s higher calculations —to build an electoral base in the West Midwest and border states, to hammer hardest on the law-and-order issue and mute his attacks on Wallace, to avoid specifics on Vietnam and inflation, to eschew debate and instead stage regional television question-and-answer sessions with local people rather than trained newsmen. (He finally went on Columbia Broadcasting Service’s “Face the Nation" and appeared on N.B.C.’s “Meet the Press” November 3.)

The Heart Immune Most basic of all, perhaps, was Nixon’s gut judgment that he could not win the heart of the country, only perhaps its confidence in his professionalism. “There's an entirely different reaction to Nixon than, say, to Ike,” says one insider. “People wanted Ike to throw his arms around them and be their daddy. Nixon appeals as the kind of fellow you would retain to solve your problems _ like a good lawyer. Welt, the country's like a ' client in trouble.” Like the good lawyer that he Is, Nixon has researched his case and polished his tactics. He even filed a brief—a handsome 194-page document that lists his position on no fewer than 227 issues. But all his preparation and proficiency have failed to project a clear picture of how lawyer Nixon would act in the White House as the chief magistrate for 200 million Americans. Nixon’s run for the Rose Garden amply displayed his ability to put a party and a Presidential campaign together. But it has not yet challenged him to reveal those inner sources of mind and spirit that separate the skilled technician from the memorable leader of men.

Under the heading “The Real Dick Nixon Stands Up,” this article describing the President-designate as it saw him during the campaign appeared in the last pre-election issue of “Newsweek.”