Nixon 'stage setting for TV’

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33051, 19 October 1972, Page 17

Nixon ' stage setting for TV’

(By

JAMES RESTON,

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

ATLANTA, October 18. President Nixon did not visit Atlanta last week; he captured it and turned it into a stage setting for national television. His rally was a masterpiece of political organisation and propaganda. The advance men had done their work well. School was out. Peachtree Street was jammed with the lunch-time crowd. There were hgh school bands by the dozen and Dixieland jazz by hairy young men in straw boaters and red and white candy stripe jackets, and the cops and politicians said that there were 750,000 people along the President’s route, which was quite a mob even if you make allowances for the weaknesses of political arithmetic.

But the President didn’t address the people. That is oldfashioned stuff. He spoke to a meeting of Republican Party leaders from the South and piped his remarks down to the reporters in the basement.

For this was a modem political spectacular aimed not primarily at the people of

Atlanta, who were bit actors in the production but at the party workers and the evening television shows, and it was wonderfully effective. Are the American people apathetic about this campaign? Well they can be made to look enthusiastic. The pictures on television screens told the story, or did they? Tons of coloured paper floated down on the President and the vast crowd in glorious sunshine, but this didn’t come from adoring Republicans tearing up the “Atlanta Journal” and tossing it out of the skyscraper windows. It came mainly from giant machines with spouts like sewer pipes that blew literally tons of shredded paper off the tops of the buildings in Peachtree Street and almost drowned the candidate and his lady when they stopped at the prearranged spot between the Lane Bryant building and the Regency Hyatt House. So what? Anything wrong with this? Nothing at all. The contrivances of politics are ageless and endless. The only point is that political deception is now being increasingly mechanised by the computer and the television camera, to which lately have been added the shredder and the mechanical blower and it won’t hurt you if you don’t believe everything you see, and don’t inhale.

The trouble is that these modem political techniques are being used in more devilish ways, not to spread

the truth but to suppress it, not to strengthen the Democratic process but to distort it, not to inform the people on the basic questions of the election, but to use the people as actors in a play. It is not only that the arts of publicity and advertising are being used in politics—they always have been—but that the blacker arts of espionage and sabotage are now being employed to confuse the people and harass and vilify the opposition.

This used to be common in the gutter politics of the

Democratic big city machines; the new thing now is that it is being organised and mechanised by men in the service of the President of the United States, and turned into a form of political and psychological warfare. To see how the level of political morals is declining, all you have to do is go back to Richard Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech about his so-called “secret fund.” “I have a theory,” he said then, “that the best and only answer to a smear or to an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth. ... I am sure that you have read the charge that I, Senator Nixon, took $lB,OOO from a group of my supporters. Now was that wrong?” He emphasised that this was a moral and not a legal question. “Because,” he said, “it isn’t a question of whether it was legal or illegal. That isn’t enough. The question is, was it morally wrong?” But now, there are not only charges but evidence of hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret funds being passed through Mexico to the Republican national committee, agents of the committee burgling and bugging the Democratic headquarters, fake letters being written on Ed Muskie’s stationery to make him look like a bigot, strange telephone calls in the middle of the night to white voters asking them to vote Democratic because the Democrats have been good to the black people.

This is not just gutter politics but guerrilla war, and it is not only wrong, but illegal. But President Nixon does not follow the principle

of Senator Nixon in the checkers speech. And even when the Air Force bombs Hanoi and blows up the French mission in Hanoi during what the President calls a very delicate and critical stage in the peace negotiations in Paris, the people not only get no explanation but a suggestion from the Secretary of Defence that maybe the North Vietnamese did it. And what’s worse, these destructive tactics are regarded by many people as being “very clever” and not a single member of the old “respectable Republican establishment” has asked the President publicly to speak out for the honour of the party, and the Republic.