Nixon's Secret (41 page)

Recognizing his liabilities and his reputation as a “loser,” Nixon later said he entered the Republican primaries intent to win them resolutely to dispel the stink clinging to him since his back-to-back defeats for president and governor of California. To recast himself, he worked with some of the most talented public relations experts in history.

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Nixon’s famous animosity towards reporters is perplexing: the press made Richard Nixon. Favorable newspaper coverage of his role nailing Alger Hiss as a Communist spy made him a national figure. He generally enjoyed favorable newspaper coverage in his eight years as vice president, where he used his adept knowledge of the workings of the Eisenhower administration to leak stories selectively and curry favor with the big newspapers.

Nixon remembered well how quickly the press had turned on him in the 1952 secret fund scandal. There, he salvaged his vice presidential candidacy by going on national TV in the celebrated Checkers speech—contrary to the orders of Eisenhower’s advisors that he quit the ticket. Nixon distrusted the press from that day forward. It got worse in 1960, when reporters heaped praise on the handsome and cultured John F. Kennedy and painted him as a frumpy relic of the 1950s.

The press corps bought heavily into the myth of Camelot, even before Jackie Kennedy gave it that name. They regarded Nixon as hopelessly square, solidly middle-class as well as devious, deceptive, and ambitious. Still, more national newspapers would endorse Nixon than Kennedy in the 1960 contest.

According to biographer Stephen Ambrose, “The way the press had fawned on Kennedy had made Nixon furious and jealous; all that money and the things Kennedy had gotten away with had made Nixon resentful.” From then on, Nixon would blame the media for many of his professional difficulties and his eventual resignation.

Nixon also blamed the press for his 1962 loss to Pat Brown in the California gubernatorial race. “Most of the media are out of step politically with the rest of the country,”
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Nixon would later write. “[The] media consider themselves outside of and above the society at large, looking down haughtily as they fire thunderbolts at us.”
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Some reporters, like Richard Bergholz of the
Los Angeles Times
, were just outright hostile. Still, Nixon earned more than his share of newspaper endorsements in his race against Brown too.
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“Why did the media hate him so much? I have always thought it was because he was vulnerable and showed it when attacked,” assessed Nixon speech writer Ben Stein. “He did not have the tough hide of a Reagan or an Obama. Like the schoolyard bullies they are, the media went after him for his vulnerability” (Ben Stein, “The Truth about Nixon,”
CNN.com
, June 4, 2014).

Nixon’s response to the broad perception that he was tricky, devious, duplicitous, and manipulative with the press was to launch “Operation Candor.” Biographer Anthony Summers would incorrectly report that “Operation Candor” was launched in the days of Watergate. In fact, it was the title of an earlier Nixon strategy to soften press suspicion and belligerence. He made himself accessible to the working press on the record and was willing to answer any question on any subject. He used these opportunities to demonstrate a more relaxed and easy-going demeanor; he used self-deprecating humor to soften his image.

Although Nixon attempted to renegotiate his relationship with the press, there were certain drawbacks in “Operation Candor.” For some reason, Nixon could not resist the impulse to point out to reporters exactly where he was being political. In 1967, Stephen Hess and David Broder, the essentially cautious and sympathetic (to Nixon) coauthors of
The Republican Establishment
, noted that the man always “compounded his own problem,” by letting reporters see “Nixon the Manipulator,” “the man of technique, not of substance . . . Nixon is not content to be admired. Rather than let the reporters discover for themselves how he adapts his basic speech to the situation, he goes on to say, ‘Now, this is a pretty conservative district, so you’ll notice I don’t bear down as heavily on . . .’ or ‘The Democratic incumbent here has been a very good Congressman, so I’m going to have to stay away from personalities and concentrate on . . .”

For some odd reason, he insisted on pointing out to reporters the artifice of his performance as if he was proud of the stagecraft. He explained, in detail, some of his various political devices and his motives for using them. For example, he told reporter Jules Witcover that the occasional favorable comment about the opposition was “a device, of course, to show I’m fair-minded.”
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It was on the stump, even more than to reporters, that Nixon worked Operation Candor. Of course, he made sure people knew how candid he was being, by constantly drawing their attention to it. Some of his oft-used phrases preceding a statement included: “to be perfectly candid,” “speaking quite frankly,” “putting it bluntly,” “let me be quite precise,” and “let me make it perfectly clear.”
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If Nixon was being accused of being tricky and secretive he went to great lengths to appear frank and candid. While the media heard Nixon brag about his techniques, the voters only saw the new “candid” Nixon.

In fact, “Operation Candor” served its purposes through 1967 and the string of Republican primary victories through early 1968 and would still be operational going into the Republican National Convention in Miami.

After Nixon’s convention coronation, he entered a whole new world of television in the general election. His team had already tested the medium on a regional and state basis in Nixon’s $10 million nomination drive. During the primaries, Nixon spoke to voters through earned media coverage of his campaign and cutting-edge television commercials. The ads reintroduced Nixon to voters under tightly controlled conditions that were artfully made to look spontaneous.

In the 1960 general election, Nixon’s disastrous performance in the first debate with John F. Kennedy nearly ended his career. The contest gave the American public the visual of a sweaty, pasty, uncomfortable, shuffling Nixon. In contrast, Kennedy was tanned, calm, and presidential. It revived the picture of Nixon as untrustworthy, as “Tricky Dick.” Media theorist Marshall Mcluhan said Nixon resembled “the railway lawyer who signs leases that are not in the best interests of the folks in the little town.” The much-ballyhooed “last press conference” set Nixon back even further.

Nixon’s relationship with television scalded him in 1960. It was a far cry from his September 1952 Checkers speech, when he used the medium skillfully to save himself. And experts were poised to use television to land him in the White House.

In November 1967, White House speechwriter Ray Price wrote one of the best campaign strategy memos in history; it rates a full read by anyone with an interest in politics. In his early-stage strategy discussion, the aide framed Nixon as a tentative frontrunner with uncertain support and a robust challenger in Romney. He called Reagan the charismatic candidate, and Rockefeller the not-Nixon.

According to Price, Nixon’s greatest challenge was overcoming the conventional wisdom that he couldn’t win—and it had to be accomplished by early April. Price described a soiled candidate who just “feels” like a loser. And his advice: understand the depth of the sour sentiment and simply start over with Nixon.

“. . .[W]e should be concentrating on building a received image of RN as the kind of man proud parents would ideally want their sons to grow up to be: a man who embodies the national ideal, its aspirations, its dreams, a man whose image the people want in their homes as a source of inspiration, and whose voice they want as the representative of their nation in the councils of the world, and of their generation in the pages of history.
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“That’s what being a ‘winner’ means, in Presidential terms.

“What, then, does this mean in terms of our uses of time and of media between now and April 2?

“For one thing, it means investing whatever time RN needs in order to work out firmly in his own mind that vision of the nation’s future that he wants to be identified with. This is crucial. It goes beyond the choice of a slogan, beyond the choice of a few key ‘issues’; it’s essential to the projection of RN as the man for the ‘70s.

“Secondly, it suggests that we take the time and the money to experiment, in a controlled manner, with film and television techniques, with particular emphasis on pinpointing those controlled uses of the television medium that can best convey the image we want to get across.

“I know the whole business of contrived image-mongering is repugnant to RN, with its implication of slick gimmicks and phony merchandising. But it’s simply not true that honesty is its own salesman; for example, it takes makeup to make a man look natural on TV. Similarly, it takes art to convey the truth from us to the viewer. And we have to bear constantly in mind that it’s not what we say that counts, but what the listener hears; not what we project, but how the viewer receives the impression . . . One of our great assets for 1968 is the sense that RN comes to the fray freshened by an experience rare among men in public life, and unique among those of his generation: after a meteoric rise, followed by eight years at the center of power and the grinding experience of a Presidential campaign, time as a private citizen to reflect on the lessons of public service, on the uses of power, on the directions of change—and in so doing to develop a perspective on the Presidency that no serious candidate in this century has had the chance to achieve. It’s a perspective that an incumbent cannot have, because one has to get away from the office to see it whole; and that an outsider cannot have, because one has to have been there to know its nature.

“Another thing we’ve got to get across is a sense of human warmth. This is vital to the Presidential mystique, and has largely been the ‘hidden side’ of RN, as far as the public is concerned. And it can be gotten across without loss of either dignity or privacy. It shines through in a lot of those spontaneous moments that have been caught on film.”

Price’s strategy memo describes the power of television in ways that stand true a half-century later. In his view, Nixon needed to be cut loose on television in safe but inspiring circumstances, in “cool” uses of TV leaving “cool” impressions. “In this third dimension,” he wrote, “style and substance are inseparable.” He proposed first dispatching the stink of two failed campaigns, then selling the new, improved Nixon as a unique specimen.

Veteran advertising man H. R. “Bob” Haldeman also understood how television would revolutionize the daily campaign. Instead of running Nixon ragged through grueling days of campaigning with multiple events, Nixon would pace himself by seeking one major media event timed for maximum evening television coverage per day. The Nixon shown to voters through the television news was tanned and relaxed, and he played to maximum-capacity rallies put together by his able advance man “Rally John” Nidecker. One- on-one interviews with the candidate were rare, and Nixon ducked the big weekend talk shows like
Meet the Press
and
Face the Nation
, relenting to do them only in the closing weeks, when the race with Humphrey appeared close. Nixon would talk to voters on the evening news and through the relentless shower of thirty- and 60-second TV ads.

Seeking to make Ray Price’s memo a reality, Leonard Garment put together and led a media team comprised of himself, former CBS executive Frank Shakespeare, and J. Walter Thompson ad man Harry Treleaven. Together they would make Nixon more accessible to voters by making the candidate less accessible to the press. While Shakespeare and Treleaven certainly understood the medium, it was twenty-eight-year-old Roger Ailes who transformed Nixon’s public image through remarkable use of television.

Prior to working for Nixon, Ailes was the boy wonder executive producer of
The Mike Douglas Show
. Ailes, who had worked himself up from prop boy three years prior, was responsible for turning Douglas’s career around and transforming his show into a ratings bonanza.

Ailes knew television. On January 9, 1968, he met Nixon backstage, who was scheduled for an interview on set with Douglas.

“It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” Nixon said, flippantly.

“Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes said.
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“Mr. Nixon, you need a media advisor.”

“What’s a media advisor?” Nixon asked.

“I am,” the twenty-seven-year-old responded.
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Len Garment hired Ailes soon after as a part-time media consultant. The Nixon of 1968, instead of regarding television again with hangdog indifference, hired staffers who could quote media theorists like McLuhan like scripture, men in touch with the new age of electronic media. These men knew what was said on the box was not nearly as important as what was seen on it.

As media critic Neil Postman noted: “[T]hink of Richard Nixon, or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein’s case, of photograph of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.”

To Marshall McLuhan, it didn’t matter that Nixon was intellectually superior or more able to explain policy; his style was not suited to the medium of TV. Kennedy, more poised, quippier, and cool, came across to television viewers as the more agreeable candidate. Style was the substance of television. As McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.”

Or as Joe McGinniss, who penned the advertisement-angled 1968 campaign book
The Selling of the President
, wrote, “The medium is the massage and the masseur gets the votes.”
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Ailes was less poetic when describing communication in the new age of media. “I wasn’t worried about the message; I was worried about the backlighting,” he said.
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