Nixon bids for more popularity

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32568, 30 March 1971, Page 17

Nixon bids for more popularity

(By

JAMES RESTON.

r , of the "New York Times" through N.Z.P.A.)

WASHINGTON, March 29. President Nixon’s almost desperate efforts to increase his public support recently have only resulted in a decline in his standing in the popularity polls, and the reason is fairly obvious.

He has dealt with his problems as if they were primarily personal and could be removed or at least eased if he were more visible, amiable, and accessible to his critics.

He hag changed his manner, but retained his policies, as if being nice to Barbara Walters about Tricia’s wedding on the “Today” show or agile in fielding Howard K. Smith’s tough but fair and courteous questions over the A.B.C. network would somehow help win acceptance of his Indo-China policy. The result has been painful, and at times humiliating He has recently been on the television almost as much as Walter Cronkite, but in his conversation with Howard K. Smith he spent over half an hour trying to explain why people did not believe him, and even then most of the television audience tuned in on other programmes. Student answer

He invited a few students to tell him what questions were being asked on the campuses these days, and one of them replied, with pitiless candour. “What country are you invading today? And who can beat you in 1972?” He finally invited the black Congressmen to the White House after ignoring their requests to see him for months, and while they spoke pleasantly about his patience and courtesy, they presented him with 60 specific recommendations, and insisted that they were not asking for “equality of- rhetorical promise” but for "equality of results.” There is something very wrong and very sad when a

President has to ask to go on the “Today” show for two hours, and when he has to spend half an hour with Smith protesting that he is telling the truth. What have we come to when the President dominates the news unsuccessfully, while the VicePresident is roaring round the country like an unguided missile cutting up the networks his chief is trying to placate? The trouble, or so it seems in this comer, is that President Nixon has been persuaded, not that his policies are wrong, but that his public relations are wrong. His staff has been telling him that if only the people could see the industrious, peace-loving, compassionate Mr Nixon they see in the privacy of the White House things would be better. It is recognised in the

White House, and quite rightly too, that no President can wage an unpopular war effectively, let alone put over a reformist programme in a Congress dominated by the opposition party, .unless he has that affection and trust that make men follow him even when they don’t quite know where he is going. In this sense, there is something to be said for mounting a campaign to explain what he is doing, and to show the more human side of his personality. But it doesn’t really work, for his main problem is not with his personality, or with the press, formidable as these problems are, but with his policies on the war and the economy. He did not lose the vote in Congress on the supersonic transport, for example, be-

cause the American people have suddenly put ecology ahead of technology—though the environmentalists are now a powerful political force—but because the Congress thought that his priorities were wildly out of order, and his economic arguments for the plane fallacious. His support on the conduct of the war is not falling because people do not like him or because the press is hostile to him, or because he isn’t effective on television —he is remarkably agile before the cameras —but because he has not persuaded the people that the sacrifices in blood and money are going to achieve the “generation of peace” he talks so much about He is in trouble with his claims of substantial progress in Laos and with his assertion that the South Vietnam-

ese Army has come out of the aborted struggle with greater confidence and higher morale. In the short run it is undoubtedly true that the enemy has been badly hurt, the supply of arms from Hanoi interrupted, and time gained for the American withdrawal. But what about the long run? He has not convinced the American people that South Vietnam, with more than 1000 American airships over the battlefield, will be able to do better against the enemy when the United States Air Force is gone and the United States Army is no J >nger holding the flank. What then, the people ask, will justify all the killing when we get out? These questions are not removed by pleasant presidential performances on the air or unpleasant tirades by the Vice-President against C.B.S.

Bad products can be put over by good advertising, but the more you argue bad policies or contend that this is the wsfr to end all wars, a sad theme that has been heard many times before, the more resistance you are likely to get. Worst products

And that is what seems to be happening. In the case of Laos, as in the arguments for the S.S.T., and the nominations of Judges Carswell and Haynsworth, the Administration has advertised and dramatised its Worst products, but they don’t sell. President Nixon has urged Americans on the domestic front to keep what works and scrap what doesn’t, and to put everything to the test of “cost-effectiveness,” but the cost in Indo-China is too high and the effectiveness is too low, and the people are finally on to it. They are passing judgment not on personalities but on policy, and they obviously don’t like what they see.