The crowd had been enthusiastic without real hurly-burly or hint of pandemonium. More in a state of respectful enthusiasm, and the hot patriotic cupidity to get near the man who is probably going to be the next American President. The office, not the man, is moving them. And Nixon passes through them with the odd stick-like motions which are so much a characteristic of his presence. He is like an actor with good voice and hordes of potential, but the despair of his dramatic coach (again it is High School). “Dick, you just got to learn how to move.” There is something almost touching in the way he does it, as if sensitive flesh winces at the way he must expose his lack of heart for being warm and really winning in crowds, and yet he is all heart to perform his task, as if the total unstinting exercise of the will must finally deliver every last grace, yes, he is like a missionary handing out Bibles among the Urdu. Christ, they are filthy fellows, but deserving of the touch. No, it is not so much that he is a bad actor (for Nixon in a street crowd is radiant with emotion to reach across the prison pen of his own artificial moves and deadly reputation and show that he is sincere) it is rather that he grew up in the worst set of schools for actors in the world— white gloves and church usher, debating team, Young Republicanism, captive of Ike’s forensic style—as an actor, Nixon thinks his work is to signify. So if he wants to show someone that he likes them, he must smile; if he wishes to show disapproval of Communism, he frowns; America must be strong, out goes his chest. Prisoner of old habit or unwitting of a new kind of move, he has not come remotely near any modern moves, he would not be ready to see that the young love McCarthy because he plays forever against his line. “If I’m nominated, I can’t see how I’d possibly fail to win,” says McCarthy in a gloomy modest mild little voice, then his eyes twinkle at the myriad of consequences to follow: raps in the newspaper about his arrogance, the sheer delicious zaniness of any man making any claim about his candidacy—yes, many people love McCarthy because his wan wit is telling them, “We straddle ultimates: spitballs and eternals.”
Nixon has never learned this. He is in for the straight sell. No wonder he foundered on “America can’t stand pat.”
But the reporter is obsessed with him. He has never written anything nice about Nixon. Over the years he has saved some of his sharpest comments for him, he has disliked him intimately ever since his Checkers speech in 1952 —the kind of man who was ready to plough sentimentality in such a bog was the kind of man who would press any button to manipulate the masses—and there was large fear in those days of buttons which might ignite atomic wars. Nixon’s presence on television had inspired emotions close to nausea. There had been a gap between the man who spoke and the man who lived behind the speaker which offered every clue of schizophrenia in the American public if they failed to recognize the void within the presentation. Worse. There was unity only in the way the complacency of the voice matched the complacency of the ideas. It was as if Richard Nixon were proving that a man who had never spent an instant inquiring whether family, state, church, and flag were ever wrong could go on in secure steps, denuded of risk, from office to office until he was President.
In 1962 the reporter had given a small celebration for the collapse of Nixon after his defeat in the election for Governor of California. To the Press: “Well, gentlemen,” the defeated man had said, “You won’t have Nixon to kick any more.” It had seemed the absolute end of a career. Self-pity in public was as irreversible as suicide. In 1964, Nixon had stood about in the wings while Barry was nominated. Now, in 1968, he was on the edge of becoming the nominee. It was obvious something was wrong with the reporter’s picture. In his previous conception of Richard Nixon’s character there had been no room for a comeback. Either the man had changed or one had failed to recognize some part of his character from the beginning. So there was interest, even impatience to hear him speak.
He was not having a press conference, however, on the day of his arrival. That would wait until the next morning at 8:15. Then, he would face the Press.
10
The room filled slowly. By the time Nixon began, it was apparent that 500 seats had been an excessive estimate.
Perhaps half of them were filled, certainly no more than two-thirds. It was nonetheless a large press conference. Nixon came in wearing a quiet blue-gray suit, white shirt, black and blue close-figured tie, black shoes, and no hand-kerchief for the breast pocket. He stepped up on the dais diffidently, not certain whether applause would be coming or not. There was none. He stood there, looked quietly and warily at the audience, and then said that he was ready for questions.
This would be his sole press conference before the nomination. He was of course famous for his lack of sparkling good relation with the Press, he had in fact kept his publicity to a functional minimum these past few months. The work of collecting delegates had been done over the last four years, particularly over the last two. Their allegiance had been confirmed the last six months in his primary victories. He had no longer anything much to gain from good interviews, not at least until his nomination was secured; he had everything to lose from a bad interview. A delegate who was slipping could slide further because of an ill-chosen remark.
To the extent that the Press was not Republican, and certainly more than half, privately, were not, he would have few friends and more than a few determined enemies. Even among the Republicans he could expect a better share of the Press to go to Rockefeller. Even worse, for the mood of this conference, he did not, in comparison with other political candidates, have many reporters who were his personal friends. He was not reputed to smoke or drink so he did not have drinking buddies as Johnson once had, and Goldwater, and Bill Miller, and Humphrey; no brothel legends attached to him, and no outsize admiration to accompany them; no, the Press was a necessary tool to him, a tool he had been obliged to employ for more than twenty years but he could not pretend to be comfortable in his use of the tool, and the tool (since it was composed of men) resented its employment.
Probably Nixon had agreed to this conference only to avoid the excess of bad feeling which no meeting with the Press would be likely to cause. Still, this was an operation where his best hope was to minimize the loss. So he had taken the wise step of scheduling the conference at 8:15 in the morning, a time when his worst enemies, presumably the heavy drinkers, free lovers, and free spenders on the Reagan Right and Far Left of the press corps, would probably be asleep in bed or here asleep on their feet.
Nonetheless his posture on the stage, hands to his side or clasped before him, gave him the attentive guarded look of an old ball player—like Rabbit Maranville, let us say, or even an old con up before Parole Board. There was something in his carefully shaven face—the dark jowls already showing the first overtones of thin gloomy blue at this early hour—some worry which gave promise of never leaving him, some hint of inner debate about his value before eternity which spoke of precisely the sort of improvement that comes upon a man when he shifts in appearance from looking like an undertaker’s assistant to looking like an old con seriously determined to go respectable. The Old Nixon, which is to say the young Nixon, used to look, on clasping his hands in front of him, like a church usher (of the variety who would twist a boy’s ear after removing him from church). The older Nixon before the Press now—the new Nixon—had finally acquired some of the dignity of the old athlete and the old con—he had taken punishment, that was on his face now, he knew the detailed schedule of pain in a real loss, there was an attentiveness in his eyes which gave offer of some knowledge of the abyss, even the kind of gentleness which ex-drunkards attain after years in AA. As he answered questions, fielding them with the sure modest moves of an old shortstop who hits few homers but supports the team on his fielding (what sorrow in the faces of such middle-aged shortstops!) so now his modesty was not without real dignity. Where in Eisenhower days his attempts at modesty had been as offensive as a rich boy’s arrogance, for he had been so transparently contemptuous of the ability of his audience to witness him, now the modes
ty was the product of a man who, at worst, had grown from a bad actor to a surprisingly good actor, or from an unpleasant self-made man—outrageously rewarded with luck—to a man who had risen and fallen and been able to rise again, and so conceivably had learned something about patience and the compassion of others.
When the reporter was younger, he might have said, “Nixon did not rise again; they raised him; if a new Nixon did not exist, they would have had to invent him.” But the reporter was older now—presumably he knew more about the limits of the ruling class for inventing what they needed; he had learned how little talent or patience they had. Yes, at a certain point they might have decided, some of them at any rate, to dress Richard Nixon for the part again, but no one but Nixon had been able to get himself up from the political deathbed to which his failure in California had consigned him. He was here, then, answering questions in a voice which was probably closer to his own than it had ever been.
And some of the answers were not so bad. Much was Old Nixon, extraordinarily adroit at working both sides of a question so that both halves of his audience might be afterward convinced he was one of them. (“While homosexuality is a perversion punishable by law, and an intolerable offense to a law-abiding community, it is life-giving to many of those who are in need of it,” he might have said if ever he had addressed a combined meeting of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association and the Mattachine Society.) So he worked into the problem of Vietnam by starting at A and also by starting at Z which he called a “two-pronged approach.” He was for a negotiated settlement, he was for maintaining military strength because that would be the only way to “reach negotiated settlement of the war on an honorable basis.” Later he was to talk of negotiations with “the next superpower, Communist China.” He spoke patiently, with clarity, gently, not badly but for an unfortunate half-smile pasted to his face. The question would come, and he would back-hand it with his glove or trap it; like all politicians he had a considered answer for every question, but he gave structure to his answers, even a certain relish for their dialectical complexity. Where once he had pretended to think in sentimentalities and slogans, now he held the question up, worked over it, deployed it, amplified it, corrected its tendency, offered an aside (usually an attempt to be humorous) revealed its contradiction, and then declared a statement. With it all, a sensitivity almost palpable to the reservations of the Press about his character, his motive, and his good intention. He still had no natural touch with them, his half-smile while he listened was unhappy, for it had nowhere to go but into a full smile and his full smile was as false as false teeth, a pure exercise of will. You could all but see the signal pass from his brain to his jaw. “SMILE,” said the signal, and so he flashed teeth in a painful kind of joyous grimace which spoke of some shrinkage in the liver, or the gut, which he would have to repair afterward by other medicine than good-fellowship. (By winning the Presidency, perhaps.) He had always had the ability to violate his own nature absolutely if that happened to be necessary to his will—there had never been anyone in American life so resolutely phony as Richard Nixon, nor anyone so transcendentally successful by such means—small wonder half the electorate had regarded him for years as equal to a disease. But he was less phony now, that was the miracle, he had moved from a position of total ambition and total alienation from his own person (at the time of Checkers, the dog speech) to a place now where he was halfway conciliated with his own self. As he spoke, he kept going in and out of focus, true one instant, phony the next, then quietly correcting the false step.
Question from the Press: You emphasized the change in the country and abroad. Has this led you to change your thinking in any shape or form specifically?
Answer: It certainly has. (But he was too eager. Old Nixon was always ready to please with good straight American boyhood enthusiasm. So he tacked back, his voice throttled down.) As the facts change, any intelligent man (firm but self-deprecatory, he is including the Press with himself) does change his approaches to the problems. (Now sharp awareness of the next Press attitude.) It does not mean that he is an opportunist. (Now modestly, reasonably.) It means only that he is a pragmatist, a realist, applying principles to the new situations. (Now he will deploy some of the resources of his answer.) For example ... in preparing the acceptance speech I hope to give next Thursday, I was reading over my acceptance speech in 1960, and I thought then it was, frankly, quite a good speech. But I realize how irrelevant much of what I said in 1960 in foreign affairs was to the problems of today. (The admission was startling. The Old Nixon was never wrong. Now, he exploited the shift in a move to his political left, pure New Nixon.) Then the Communist world was a monolithic world. Today it is a split world, schizophrenic, with ... great diversity ... in Eastern Europe (a wholesome admission for anyone who had labored in John Foster Dulles’ world.) ... after an era of confrontation ... we now enter an era of negotiations with the Soviet Union.
While he was never in trouble with the questions, growing surer and surer of himself as he went on, the tension still persisted between his actual presence as a man not altogether alien to the abyss of a real problem, and the political practitioner of his youth, that snake-oil salesman who was never back of any idea he sold, but always off to the side where he might observe its effect on the sucker. The New Nixon groped and searched for the common touch he had once been able to slip into the old folks with the ease of an incubus on a spinster. Now he tried to use slang, put quotes around it with a touching, almost pathetic, reminder of Nice-Nellyism, the inhibition of the good clean church upbringing of his youth insisting on exhibiting itself, as if he were saying with a YMCA slick snicker, “After we break into slang, there’s always the danger of the party getting rough.” It was that fatal prissiness which must have driven him years ago into all the militaristic muscle-bending witch-hunting foam-rubber virilities of the young Senator and the young Vice President. So, now he talked self-consciously of how the members of his staff, counting delegates, were “playing what we call ‘the strong game.’ ” SMILE said his brain. FLASH went the teeth. But his voice seemed to give away that, whatever they called it, they probably didn’t call it “the strong game,” or if they did, he didn’t. So he framed little phrases. Like “a leg-up.” Or “my intuition, my ‘gut feelings,’ so to speak.” Deferential air followed by SMILE—FLASH. Was it possible that one of the secrets of Old Nixon was that his psyche had been trapped in rock-formations, nay, geological strata of Sunday school inhibitions? Was it even possible that he was a good man, not a bad man, a good man who had been trapped by an early milieu whose habits had left him with such innocence about three-quarters of the world’s experience that he had become an absolute monster of opportunism about the quarter he comprehended all too well? Listening to Nixon now, studying his new modesty, it was impossible to tell whether he was a serious man on the path of returning to his own true seriousness, out to unite the nation again as he promised with every remark: “Reconciliation of the races is a primary objective of the United States,” or whether the young devil had reconstituted himself into a more consummate devil, Old Scratch as a modern Abe Lincoln of modesty.
Question from the Press: A little less than six years ago, after your defeat for the Governorship of California, you announced at the ensuing press conference that that was going to be your last news conference. Could you recall for us this morning two or three of the most important points in your own thinking which made you reverse that statement and now reach for political office on the highest level?
Answer: Had there not been the division of the Republican Party in 1964 and had there not been the vacuum of leadership that was created by that division and by that defeat, I would not be here today.... I believe that my travels around the country and the world in this period of contemplation and this period of withdrawal from the political scene (some dark light of happiness now in his eye, as if withdrawal and contemplation had given him the first deep pleasures, or perhaps the first real religious pleasures of his lif
e) in which I have had a chance to observe not only the United States but the world, has led me to the conclusion that returning to the arena was something that I should do (said almost as if he had heard a voice in some visitation of the night)—not that I consider myself to be an indispensable man. (Said agreeably in a relaxed tone as if he had thought indeed to the bottom of this and had found the relaxation of knowing he was not indispensable, an absurd vanity if one stares at Nixon from without, but he had been Vice President before he was forty, and so had had to see himself early, perhaps much too early, as a man of destiny. Now, reservation underlined, he could continue.) But something that I should do (go for the Presidency) because this is the time I think when the man and the moment in history come together. (An extraordinary admission for a Republican, with their Protestant detestation of philosophical deeps or any personification of history. With one remark, Nixon had walked into the oceans of Marx, Spengler, Heidegger, and Tolstoy; and Dostoevski and Kierkegaard were in the wings. Yes, Richard Nixon’s mind had entered the torture chambers of the modern consciousness!)
I have always felt that a man cannot seek the Presidency and get it simply because he wants it. I think that he can seek the Presidency and obtain it only when the Presidency requires what he may have to offer (the Presidency was then a mystical seat, mystical as the choice of a woman’s womb) and I have had the feeling (comfortably pleasant and modest again—no phony Nixon here) and it may be a presumptuous feeling, that because of the vacuum of leadership in the Republican Party, because of the need for leadership particularly qualified in foreign affairs, because I have known not only the country, but the world as a result of my travels, that now time (historical-time—the very beast of the mystic!) requires that I re-enter the arena. (Then he brought out some humor. It was not great humor, but for Nixon it was curious and not indelicate.) And incidentally, I have been very willing to do so. (Re-enter the arena.) I am not being drafted. I want to make that very clear. I am very willing to do so. There has never been a draft in Miami in August anyway. (Nice laughter from the Press—he has won them by a degree. Now he is on to finish the point.) ... I believe that if my judgment—and my intuition, my “gut feelings” so to speak, about America and American political tradition—is right, this is the year that I will win.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago Page 5
