Nixon's Secret (83 page)

Polls showing RN substantially ahead can be of considerable use, particularly with those of Group (2). But there’s a caveat here: poll strength is bound to fluctuate, and to the extent that our defenses against “can’t-win” are built on polls, they’re insecure. A slight downturn then could have a snowball effect. But if we can erase the feeling of “can’t-win,” then we can survive a substantial buffeting by the polls.

The hard core of the problem lies with those who themselves feel there’s “loser” somehow written on him—i.e., with Group (1). If we can get these, we’ll automatically get Group (2).

Again, we might divide the factors entering into the “can’t-win” feeling into two broad categories: (a) historical, and (b) personal. The historical factors would, of course, include the fact of the two losses, but they run deeper. In a sense, they’re all wrapped up in the fact that for years Nixon was one of those men it was fashionable to hate. It might take people a moment to remember why they were supposed to hate him, but they do remember that they were. Even in communities where he was locally popular, it was well known that he was hated elsewhere—and particularly in many of the best circles.

Generally, the sources of this hate centered around the way he practiced, or was alleged to practice, his political craft. Whatever the strange complex of passions that went into the hysterical anti-anti-communism of the postwar and McCarthy years; whatever the emotional responses of those who disliked his style, the essence of the objections lay in Nixon’s cutting edge. He was viewed as a partisan figure first, a national figure second; as devious and unfair in his debating tactics—a master of unsupported innuendo, etc.

Let’s leave realities aside—because what we have to deal with now is not the facts of history, but an image of history. The history we have to be concerned with is not what happened, but what’s remembered, which may be quite different. Or, to put it another way, the historical untruth may be a political reality. We can’t do anything about what did happen, and there’s not much we can directly do about people’s impressions of what happened; for better or for worse, these are part of the political folklore. Thus what we have to do is to persuade people that they’re irrelevant to 1968. How? This has three prongs:

1    The passage of time; this has clearly worked in our favor. The sharp edge of memory has dulled, the image has mellowed; people don’t maintain their passions forever. Also, Stewart Alsop makes an interesting point in his 1960 book,
Nixon and Rockefeller
: that with a couple of minor exceptions, “after 1954 the anti-Nixon dossier dwindles away into almost nothing at all . . . The fact is that, since 1954, Nixon has very rarely gone too far, although the provocation has often been great” (pp. 152–53).

2    A dawning recognition on the part of some voters that they (or the chroniclers) might have been wrong, and that maybe the horror stories weren’t all true after all; and

3    The natural phenomenon of growth. This is where I think there’s the most gold to be mined. People understand growth, readily and instinctively; they expect people to mellow as they mature, and to learn from experience. Particularly in the case of a person with RN’s recognized ability and intelligence, they’d be surprised if he didn’t grow and change with the years. This doesn’t mean a “new Nixon”; it simply means the natural maturation of the same Nixon, and in this context it makes the leaving behind of the old stereotypes perfectly acceptable and understandable. The great advantage of the growth idea is that it doesn’t require a former Nixon-hater to admit that he was wrong in order to become a Nixon supporter now; he can still cherish his prejudices of the past, he can still maintain his own sense of infallibility, even while he shifts his position on a Nixon candidacy.

But what of the personal factors, as opposed to the historical?

These tend to be more a gut reaction, unarticulated, non-analytical, a product of the particular chemistry between the voter and the image of the candidate. We have to be very clear on this point: that the response is to the image, not to the man, since 99 percent of the voters have no contact with the man. It’s not what’s there that counts, it’s what’s projected—and, carrying it one step further, it’s not what he projects but rather what the voter receives. It’s not the man we have to change, but rather the received impression. And this impression often depends more on the medium and its use than it does on the candidate himself.

Politics is much more emotional than it is rational, and this is particularly true of Presidential politics. People identify with a President in a way they do with no other public figure. Potential presidents are measured against an ideal that’s a combination of leading man, God, father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of the avenging Furies thrown in. They want him to be larger than life, a living legend, and yet quintessentially human; someone to be held up to their children as a model; someone to be cherished by themselves as a revered member of the family, in somewhat the same way in which peasant families pray to the icon in the corner. Reverence goes where power is; it’s no coincidence that there’s such persistent confusion between love and fear in the whole history of man’s relationship to his gods. Awe enters into it.

And we shouldn’t credit the press with a substantially greater leaven of reason than the general public brings. The press may be better at rationalizing their prejudices, but the basic response remains an emotional one.

Selection of a President has to be an act of faith. It becomes increasingly so as the business of government becomes ever more incomprehensible to the average voter. This faith isn’t achieved by reason; it’s achieved by charisma, by a feeling of trust that can’t be argued or reasoned, but that comes across in those silences that surround the words. The words are important—but less for what they actually say than for the sense they convey, for the impression they give of the man himself, his hopes, his standards, his competence; his intelligence, his essential humanness, and the directions of history he represents.

Most countries divide the functions of head of government (prime minister) and chief of state (king or president). We don’t. The traditional “issues” type debates center on the role of the head of government, but I’m convinced that people vote more for a chief of state—and this is primarily an emotional identification, embracing both a man himself and a particular vision of the nation’s ideals and its destiny.

All this is a roundabout way of getting at the point that we 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.

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. I think it was Luce and Hadden, in their original prospectus for
Time
, who laid down the rule that it’s not what the editors put into a magazine that counts, but what the readers get out of it—and that rule is just as applicable to us.

The TV medium itself introduces an element of distortion; in terms both of its effect on the candidate and of the often subliminal ways in which the image is received. And it inevitably is going to convey a partial image—thus ours is the task of finding how to control its use so the part that gets across is the part we want to have gotten across.

Our concentrated viewing of clips from the CBS library left a clear impression that RN comes across decidedly unevenly—sometimes rather badly, sometimes exceedingly well, and that the greater the element of informality and spontaneity the better he comes across. This spontaneity is difficult to get in the formal setting of a standard press conference or a set speech, when he’s concentrating on the arrangement of words to convey a particular thought in a particular way. Apart from all the technical gimmicks, the key difference in LBJ’s TV manner at his last press conference—and what really brought it off so stunningly—was that he was no longer trying to formulate sentences, in a precise and guarded manner; he gave the impression of being no longer self-conscious about his manner of expression, but rather seemed to have his mind fixed on the thing he was talking about. It was this apparent unselfconsciousness that unleashed the power of the man; and this unselfconsciousness is the essence of spontaneity. Suddenly, LBJ was transformed from a man with a can’t-win television image to a man with a can-win image, and the lesson ought not to be lost on us.

We have to capture and capsule this spontaneity—and this means shooting RN in situations in which it’s likely to emerge, then having a chance to edit the film so that the parts shown are the parts we want shown. We need to build a library of such shots, which then will be available for a variety of uses—and so that, in minimum time, we can put together a variety of one- or five-minute or longer films of the man in motion, with the idea of conveying a sense of his personality—the personality that most voters have simply not had a chance to see, or, if they have, have lost in the montage of other images that form their total perceptions of the man.

The Paul Niven show came across brilliantly, and it was a fine example of an appearance in which the circumstances were right: a relaxed, informal setting: a “conversation” rather than a
Meet the Press
–type adversary proceeding; sufficient time and scope to expand on the ideas presented; a chance to bring out the qualities of the man. The people who say Nixon “can’t win” tend to have a two-dimensional, black-and-white image of him; this kind of show makes it possible to bring out a third dimension, and it’s in this third dimension that the keys to victory lie.

In this third dimension, style and substance are inseparable. And the substantive essence is not whatever facts may be adduced (though facts are valuable), but the sense of attitudes and approaches which have been thought through, not only in depth, but also in terms of their relationship to those other processes of government and aspects of society that they may affect.

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. It would be helped by an occasional groping for an answer. Just letting the girls be seen can be a big plus. It came through at times on the Niven show, and strongly on the Carson show. One of the great plusses of the Carson show was that it hit a lot of people with the jolt of the unexpected—it showed people a side of RN that they didn’t know existed, and this jarred loose a lot of the old prejudices and preconceptions.

Getting across this sense of warmth does not require being a backslapper or a “buddy-buddy boy” or a hail-fellow-well-met. To attempt to be such would be not only transparently phony, but inappropriate; we’re in a Presidential race, not at a Shriners’ convention. It can and should be done subtly, naturally—and this is one of the great advantages of the TV medium (which is a close-up medium) in a relaxed setting, and also of film. Here the warmth does come across—in facial expressions, in the inflections of voice, in the thoughtful exposition of a problem in human terms and in a low-key manner.

Right now we should be concentrating as much as possible on “cool” uses of TV, and on “cool” impressions—both to establish likeability (it’s in the cool use that the warmth comes through) and to fit the rhythms of a campaign that’s going to hot up later. That is, we want to leave room on the upper end of the intensity scale, so that as we move toward November, we’ve got reaches of intensity—of “hotness”—to expand into.

So: we should use TV, but we should be selective in our uses of it. We don’t need exposure for exposure’s sake. We don’t have to establish recognition. But we do want to close the gap between old myths and present realities: we want to remind supporters of the candidate’s strengths, and demonstrate to non-supporters that the Herblock images are fiction. The way to do this is to let more people see the candidate as we see him, remembering that the important thing is not to win debates, but to win the audience; not to persuade them to RN’s point of view, but to win their faith in his leadership.
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