Editorial II
Nathan, George
Editorial II: Why I Voted for Richard M. Nixon The choicest qualities which recommended Richard Nixon for another term were: his utter prosaism, his lack of any imaginable kind of glamour, and his...
...But then so is the chief executive of almost any large corporation, and the gloomy fact is that our Republic has become the largest corporation of all...
...Nixon is yuk...
...But reasonable and knowledgeable persons do not expect corporation executives to answer questions gracefully or to make women swoon...
...It is more important that executives ask questions, the right questions, and pound tables if these questions are not answered...
...The President has expeditiously moved to assure peace on a wider range than was ever anticipated...
...His press conferences have all the easy atmosphere of a public execution...
...James Roach, the recently retired chief executive of General Motors, always made excrutiatingly painful performances on television...
...Editorial II: Why I Voted for Richard M. Nixon The choicest qualities which recommended Richard Nixon for another term were: his utter prosaism, his lack of any imaginable kind of glamour, and his inability to excite the faintest quiver of enthusiasm...
...In performing before the cameras, he is awkward and unconvincing...
...But most importantly he has proved his competence by directing the corporation through one of the most perilous periods in its history...
...He is capable of moralizing under the most unusual circumstances, and he has convinced me that he worries about my spiritual well-being...
...Stylistically Mr...
...I take it as a sign of divine intervention that Richard Nixon is such a deeply uninspiring leader...
...Nixon's policies...
...He is indistinguishable from the soapbox orators who used to unbosom themselves in Chicago's Bug House Square...
...McGovern as steward of a democratic republic is quite unthinkable...
...His politics drift off towards the crackpot and the bizarre, leaving me to contemplate Mr...
...He did it without whooping it up and disturbing the cows...
...But Americans must swear off the meretricious charms of glamour and religious quackery...
...He seems willing to leave us to our humors...
...An odd confection of ingredients you might say, but for me they rendered President Nixon irresistible...
...George Nathane Nathan...
...But Mr...
...It needs a competent executive...
...his wooden humor makes dogs howl, and even small children wince...
...Even moderate doses of the stuff bring on totalitarian hangovers...
...He is the most competent executive available...
...I have become acquainted with his homilies, and they, in their quaintness, do not make me feel threatened...
...His concern for human travail seems genuine and only rarely is his realism about human possibilities vitiated by the kind of megalomania that drives governments to undertake the impossible...
...If he flunks his screen tests, so what...
...He is vulnerable to almost any one of those cunningly triggered questions the newsmen lay for him...
...They are all too dizzying and dangerous to democratic polity...
...Through all these years, no one has ever been able to put Mr...
...Nixon is competent at asking questions and pounding tables...
...Now if America were a religion, Mr...
...If in the next four years he can trim down the corporation's overhead, fire the handful of petty fixers beneath him, and close down some of the inappropriate and unprofitable divisions, he may be judged one of the great executives of the century...
...McGovern would have had my vote...
...Nixon over on the press, the intellectuals, or the priggish hordes of suburban and university intellectualoids whose yearnings seem to be for the benign despotisms of the past...
Vol. 6 • January 1973 • No. 4
