Nixon's Secret (42 page)

Jules Witcover summed up the revolutionary multitrack media strategy of the new Nixon after the Nixon traveling entourage in New Hampshire went to a secret TV taping the morning after a party the Nixon staff had for the press. No presidential campaign would ever be the same. It set the template for how presidential campaigns would be run. Ailes would recrest the magic for George Bush in “Ask George Bush,” and Mitt Romney would utilize the staged “exposure” to real voters:

For many of the political reported at the party, there had been too many New Nixons for them to accept easily this latest version of a friendly and candid one. Yet Nixon at the press party had made a specific point of assuring his assembled guests that this time around he would be making himself available frequently for briefings and interviews, and that reporters would not be kept in the dark about anything he was going as a campaigner.

Early the very next morning, however, as the press corps slept, Nixon, Buchanan and a few other aides slipped out of the hotel. They drove over deserted roads to the near town of Hillsborough, where a small group of townspeople, farmers and college students handpicked by the local Nixon committee had gathered for an “entirely unrehearsed” discussion with the candidate at the Hillsborough Community Hall. A paid television crew recorded the scene for use in later television commercials. When word leaked out, Buchanan defended the slippery caper on grounds that the presence of reporters might “inhibit those people.”

The goodwill generated by the press party didn’t last very long in light of that episode. Nor was it restored the next day when the traveling press corps was taken by bus to another “entirely unrehearsed” meeting of preselected locals—but obliged to remain outside the hall as uniformed guards admitted the citizen props for another taping session.

What the press corps was seeing—or, rather, not seeing—was the second segment of a basic two-tracked campaign for the presidency that had been carefully thought out by Nixon and aides during the long night of his private citizenship after 1962.

The first track was the obvious and unavoidable public campaigning in the primaries—the speeches, the rallies, the handshaking walks through small towns—that was traditional in the presidential politics of the era . . .

It could, however, be carefully controlled in what the candidate said and did and when he said and did it. Nixon in 1960 had campaigned nonstop, with events from morning to night daily that wore him into the ground in the process. In 1968 he would severely limit his appearances on the first, public, track. With television becoming increasingly dominant in presidential politics, Nixon would hold relatively few public appearance each day, almost always well scripted, and timed early enough in the day and located conveniently enough to major airports for television crews to ship their film of the events by air to the network shows in New York.

Meanwhile, on the second track, Nixon would be presented to the voters in the most positive light, in television commercials prepared by Madison Avenue wizards, fashioned sometimes from the closed-door meetings with preselected voters and sometimes carefully created in television studios. This second track, unlike the first, could be pursued out of easy scrutiny by the press, and in time it began to crowd out the first track as the view of the candidate actually seen by the voters. It was expensive, to be sure, but at the time there was no federal limitation on how much money could be contributed to or spent on a presidential campaign. And Nixon had a powerful fund-raising operation going that generated all the funds needed for the second track.
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Roger Ailes recognized that instead of changing Nixon, it would be easier to control the medium. He knew if the campaign was putting out the product, every detail was under their direction. “Those stupid bastards on the set designing crew put turquoise curtains in the background,” Ailes said as they designed a set in Chicago prior to the fall campaign. “Nixon wouldn’t look right unless he was carrying a pocketbook.”
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Ailes worked to erase Nixon’s image as a partisan slasher by making him look calmer, more mature, more balanced, and more measured. He made Nixon look like a statesman who was knowledgeable, firm, and experienced. Just as important, Ailes schooled Nixon on how to work with the camera to avoid looking shifty and, above all, to seem like he had the gravitas to be president. Ailes also struggled with Nixon’s propensity to sweat under the klieg lights, a quality when combined with his shifty eyes, made Nixon look nervous and even duplicitous.

More importantly, Ailes created a format that made it appear Nixon was being spontaneously questioned and was risking all. In fact, the atmospherics of the television exchange were tightly controlled and Nixon was risking absolutely nothing. In the post-convention phase of the campaign, where the national and local press had no access, the patented answers Nixon delivered in Ailes tightly controlled format were how most voters received Nixon’s position on the issues. “He [Nixon] felt that if the public heard his own words directly, the chances of effective distortion by newsmen diminished,” wrote Herb Klein.
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The “man in the arena” concept, developed by Ailes, was so effective that it would later be used by two other presidential candidates uncomfortable in their own skin: George H. W. Bush and Mitt Romney. The in-studio audience was handpicked. The questions were written beforehand. The answers were scripted, Nixon was center stage, and the furious media was locked outside the studio looking in.

In a meticulous outline of the format, Ailes detailed everything from the tanning of the candidate and Nixon’s posture, to the desired gender and race demographic of the audience.

Ailes used the “man in the arena” tapings to humanize Nixon, who, standing without a podium and surrounded by people, appeared spontaneous, warm, slightly humorous, self-deprecating, more mature and seasoned, and, above all less tricky. The partisan slasher of the 1950s was gone. Here was a man of vast experience, who had used his time out of office to reflect on the great challenges of our times and was ready to provide a war-divided America with “new ideas and new leadership.”

Ailes’ deft camera work as Nixon responded to questions from “typical Americans” sold people the new Nixon. In fact, the canny media consultant had extenders fitted to all TV camera zoom lenses, and had Nixon’s eyes specially lit so as not to appear dark or shifty. The close camera work created an intimacy that, for the first time ever, made people comfortable with Richard Nixon.

Aware hot television lights made Nixon sweat, Ailes mandated the studio air conditioner be turned up at least a full four hours prior to the broadcast and limited camera rehearsal as much as possible to keep the lights off and the heat down. All studio doors were ordered sealed. Ailes had Nixon dab himself with a chemically treated towel between takes to avoid the beads of sweat that would form on his upper lip.

Ailes also controlled Nixon’s major speeches and an effective, but staged telethon in the closing days of the campaign. Nixon drafted most of his own major speeches on yellow legal pads, longhand. He strained through several arduous drafts, only stringing together 2,500 to 3,000 words a week.
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. Nixon “didn’t recite the speech, but ‘saw’ the text unreeling before his mind’s eye,” he would tell speechwriter Richard Whalen.
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Ailes displayed the new Nixon in the former vice president’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican Convention in Miami Beach. These were the days of gavel-to-gavel network coverage, with all three networks broadcasting the speech to millions.

Many years later, Nixon told me over dinner in his Saddle River, New Jersey, home that it was Ailes who taught him how to drop his voice for emphasis as opposed to picking up the volume. Nixon used the technique with great effect in his “I see a small boy who hears far off train whistles in the night” speech where he described how he lived the American dream.

The speech was so effective at displaying the new Nixon—and burying the old one—that Ailes cut it into thirty- and sixty-second TV spots, which ran through September. Ailes took his final shot at the electorate in a two hour election eve telethon broadcast live nationwide.

Ailes’ freewheeling style did not mesh well with Nixon’s Teutonic high command. The media advisor had a blunt and direct style; he would tell you exactly what he thought. Although Ailes thought Nixon had the capability to be president, he wasn’t a sycophant, like most of the men Nixon gathered around himself. The television genius ran afoul of Haldeman when he was quoted as saying:

Let’s face it, a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a bookbag. Who was forty-two years old the day he was born. They figure other kids got footballs for Christmas, Nixon got a briefcase and he loved it. He’d always have his homework done and he’d never let you copy. Now you put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away. He’s a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody just hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, “I want to be President.” I mean this is how he strikes some people. That’s why these shows are important. To make them forget all that.
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Nixon would find more innovative ways to utilize the medium of television and soften his public image. In the midst of the 1968 campaign, Nixon agreed to help out a friend, NBC writer Paul Keyes, in providing a cameo for the show Paul worked as head writer on
Roland and Martin’s Laugh-In
. The cameo was brief, only five seconds and four words long, but its influence was out of proportion to its size.
Laugh-In
producer George Schlatter would later apologize for what he believed was his role in helping to elect President Nixon.
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While most readers today will be unfamiliar with
Laugh-In
, during its five-year run from 1968 to 1973 it sought to represent the alternative culture of the late sixties for a mass audience. That is, it appealed to young members of the hippie movement for its appearance and somewhat manic style, while still being able to be enjoyed by the individuals who made up what Nixon would popularize as “the silent majority,”
Laugh-In
felt new enough to woo America’s youth, while being old enough in content to protect the sensibilities of an older generation of viewers as well.
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As a result of this duality it was tailor made for Nixon’s campaign in 1960, in which the old anti-Communist who cut his bones in exposing Alger Hiss, mellowed his image to avoid turning off voters.

In the years after his 1962 electoral defeat in the California governors race, Paul Keyes had become a fixture in Nixonland. He was placed on the payroll intermittently between then in the campaign, largely used to write jokes for Nixon’s speeches, and generally make Dick Nixon appear more likeable.
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Laugh-In
cohost Dan Rowan recalled that during the 1968 campaign, Keyes would receive calls from Nixon “four or five times a week,” and it was this closeness that enabled him to talk Nixon into appearing on the show.
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However, Nixon’s decision to participate in the show met with concern among many of his senior staff, to whom the idea of a potential president taking part in a cheap and somewhat vulgar gag (earlier in the bit one of the show’s female characters suffered a number of unfortunate accidents, including having her dress ripped off and her underwear soaked in water) appeared inappropriate. After some negotiation regarding what exactly Nixon would say on the show between Keyes, Schlatter, and the Nixon team the participation in the “sock-it-to-me” gag was decided upon. Schlatter recalls that Nixon required around “six takes” because in his early shots Nixon appeared angry or irritated.
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Ultimately, the end result of the
Laugh-In
gag was worth it for the Nixon camp. The candidate comes off even today as, if not a natural comedian, an earnest and enthusiastic participant. Some have pointed out that the genius of Nixon’s performance lies not in the quality of Nixon’s acting, but rather in the unique manner in which he addressed the performance.
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If you watch the clips available online today of the entire gag, one is struck by the way in which the other actors speak the line not as a question (that is, they do not appear to be asking, “[are you going to] sock it to me?”), but rather as a statement, or declaration (i.e., “here we go again”). Nixon stood that on its head, and presented the line as a surprised question, exactly as one would expect any normal individual to do so when confronted with the potential to endure one of the show’s torments for those being “socked.”

It is strange to consider and perhaps objectively a little silly; however, this simple distinction is enough to help make Nixon appear more normal. After the appearance, and in realizing the potential effect the show had, apparently unintentionally, had on a close race, they reached out to the campaign of Vice President Humphrey and offered to let him make a similar cameo. Humphrey’s camp passed on the opportunity, fearing that the show creators would manufacture a way of making the candidate look silly; in point of fact, Schlatter has claimed that all they wanted Humphrey to say was, “I’ll sock it to you, Dick!”
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In the end,
Laugh-In
was but one part of the effort to “reinvent” Nixon during the 1968 campaign, but it must be viewed as one of the most successful parts in which Nixon managed to find some common cause with the countercultural movement sweeping across Americas youth.

Many amusing anecdotes came from the ‘68 campaign. Nixon often golfed with show business legend Jackie Gleason. Gleason’s appetite for alcohol, food, and beautiful women was legendary. Gleason was a good golfer, and he and Nixon would hit the links in Miami Beach when Nixon was president. Nixon needed only two drinks to be as inebriated as Gleason. They would have many rounds in the clubhouse after playing a Miami Beach course. A particular drunken night of revelry between the chief executive and “The Great One” would become Internet legend. Gleason’s last wife, Beverly, had revealed that the president and the actor became engaged in a vigorous drunken conversation about UFO’s and that Nixon had taken Gleason to a secret military installation when he showed the comedian proof of alien beings. “He [Jackie] and Nixon were in contact quite a bit and I’m not sure how that was arranged, but it seems that their meetings were set up by an associate of Nixon’s,” said Mrs. Gleason. “After he got back, he was very pleased he had an opportunity to see the dead little men in cases, he explained to me what they looked like and was still talking about it the next day.”
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The last Mrs. Gleason offered no documentation, but her story is widely believed in the new media. Gleason would tape an effective television appeal for Nixon in the former vice president’s 1968 comeback bid. Wearing a $1,500 three-piece suit, natty tie, and red carnation, Gleason stared into the camera and said, “I don’t usually get involved in politics, but we need Dick Nixon,” in a devastatingly effective television spot engineered by television genius Roger Ailes.
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