On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
ON TELEVISION By Marvin Kitman on Candid Camera Richard Milhous Nixon went to the American people on television two weeks ago to tell the truth again about his past. He has raked over this...
...Even Bobby Kennedy's ruthless opportunism...
...He has raked over this material so often since 1952, it's hard to imagine anybody would still be interested in hearing him speak candidly...
...1, No...
...2"—that's how they slug the shows—Nixon said: "As far as that charisma stuff and public relations tricks that are supposed to make you look like a matinee idol, forget it...
...But he refused to put his foot into them...
...So I was cheered to read that the gop candidate had been invited to appear on Sixty Minutes for an interview advertised as "Nixon?Speaks Candidly...
...After building a tradition of hard-hitting journalism dating back to its first program, two weeks earlier, Sixty Minutes had reprinted what amounted to a poor selection from Nixon's campaign biography...
...He did throw away a line that was so candid, however, it deserves some study for what it says about both the Nixon campaign strategy and Sixty Minutes, a rather pretentious cbs news-variety show which calls itself a "television magazine...
...I have lost some hair, and I am a little more jowly...
...I am a hard critic of myself," Nixon said in his luxurious 810 Fifth Avenue apartment...
...There was the family seated around the titular leader on a small stage, all with hands clasped...
...I've been watching Nixon campaign hard on sincerity since several minutes after he won the nomination at Miami Beach...
...Nixon had been able to project his sincerity image because none of the other interviewers could get under his skin...
...In some future edition, the editors are planning to interview Hubert Humphrey...
...On "Vol...
...Republican, which I'm sure is true...
...At least every other detail had been carefully staged...
...My own theory is that Wallace must have whiffed too much of the nerve gas he reported on in the science section of the magazine...
...Everybody knows the old saying, "It is a dangerous man who believes everything he says...
...One looked for a little smile around the eyes, which would have started a Nixon boom in the ranks of intelligent independent voters...
...Even when he failed to discuss an issue, say Vietnam, the voters seemed to understand...
...The point Mazo and Hess make is that McCarthy didn't follow Nixon's advice...
...Even in Mazo and Hess we live again such thrilling moments as Nixon casting doubt on the patriotism of Adlai Stevenson (for giving a deposition to the court on Hiss), pledging that a Republican administration would fire Dean Ache-son if elected (the safest promise in American political history), and counselling McCarthy the Bad...
...Wallace handled Richard Nixon with the kind of awe one usually reserves for the next President of the United States...
...Frankly, he looked like he had just lost...
...A sharpshooter couldn't even load his rifle, so thoroughly disoriented did the gas make him...
...And so the interview went...
...Yet it has long been known that Nixon only has a certain number of good hours in him each day, then he flies off the handle...
...I read Nixon, by Earl Mazo and Stephen Hess, after the show ended to remind me of what he was really like...
...Nixon's eyes were as cold as a Communist's taking a loyalty oath...
...The American people are always ready to forgive a young man his transgressions...
...Have you no regrets...
...I couldn't take my eyes off Pat Nixon —the picture of what Bonnie might have looked like if she hadn't married Clyde...
...Nixon merely sat there explaining his sincerity...
...The Republican nominee sat far away from his interrogators, and while I can't prove this, I wouldn't be surprised if a sheet of glass separated his group from the reporters...
...And if anybody could bring out the worst in Nixon, it would be Mike Wallace...
...That is the only explanation I can think of for what happened to Sixty Minutes...
...It was possibly the most abject surrender by a resident of the building since Nixon himself capitulated to his neighbor Rockefeller on the gop platform in 1960...
...The test will be whether he is given the opportunity to speak candidly on the virtues of consistency...
...This press conference should have been held in the Orange Bowl to accommodate all the people who had been promised—or thought they had been promised—the Vice Presidency...
...As for its political articles, I'd like to read more before reaching a judgment...
...I have always run on the issues," Nixon explained sincerely...
...Traditionally, in the great moment of triumph, the candidate goes to his party workers and allows himself to be pummelled and cheered by those responsible for the victory...
...Now the important thing—when it comes to this field," Mazo and Hess quote Nixon advising a novice, "is always understate, never overstate your case...
...The scene was reminiscent of Nixon's famous address on financial ethics, the Checkers Speech of 1952...
...Something went wrong, though, with his handling of the Nixon "article...
...Wallace has a wonderfully insinuating, really rotten interviewing style...
...The piece it did on Graham Hill, the racing car driver, as seen through his wife's eyes, was more interesting than a sports car race...
...I'm sorry to keep you all in suspense," Nixon said, trying to quiet the low roar in the crowded ballroom...
...Nixon looked us straight in the eye and easily waved away that dreary stuff about calling Truman and Acheson "traitors," and Helen Gahagan Douglas and Jerry Voorhis "Communists...
...I have no apology for my career...
...But there is no new Nixon...
...Nevertheless, Wallace looked at Nixon sideways...
...He immediately called a press conference at the Fontainebleau to show tv fans the new Nixon...
...As far as your statement in Wheeling is concerned, I haven't read it, but you will be in an untenable position if you claim that there were umpteen, or however many, card carrying Communists in the State Department...
...Nobody doubted he was as clean as a hound's tooth during the 1952 Nixon campaign fund scandal, that the money didn't go into his pockets but was used to help defray the costs of his political fights against those in government whom he considered soft on Communism...
...It was the way he fought which bothered people...
...If Nixon stopped denying the past, perhaps he wouldn't have to go on explaining it again and again...
...He asked all the wrong questions, to be sure, opening the old wounds...
...Wherever he went on television after that, Nixon pressed the sincerity issue...
...asked Wallace in the same detached voice...
...He comes across in the biography as a devout half-Quaker, and an earnest, sober, relentless Mr...
...Perhaps he had already decided on his running mate...
...Then he went on at great length to explain the qualifications needed for this high office...
...Nixon answered each question from the floor earnestly and politely...
...If the National Association of Manufacturers could have fathered a child, it would have been Dick Nixon...
...There is only one way for a newspaperman to look at politicians," Frank H. Simonds once said, "and that is down...
...As for Sixty Minutes, it shows promise as light reading...
...Unfortunately, Nixon's political problem has never been his sincerity...
...The Nixon-Wallace collaboration wasn't nearly as revealing as the "official" campaign biography...
...He did an outstanding piece on the evils of chemical warfare in the front of the magazine...
...My face hasn't changed much...
...Of humble gas station-grocery store background, Nixon has worked hard since age 12 to make it to the top...
...The next demonstration of Nixon's new campaign style on television took place the following morning, when he told of his wishes regarding the Vice Presidency...
...He said he was always willing to submit his whole career to scrutiny...
...A critic of Wallace might say that he was smoothing the way for himself in the Nixon administration, perhaps as Attorney General...
...He is the Philip of Macedon of television reporting, in the sense that the Macedonians, in Plutarch's words, were famed for "being rude and clownish people who called a spade a spade...
...As Goldsmith said, "A silent address is the genuine eloquence of sincerity...
...This kind of praise is somehow more damming than anything Sixty Minutes told us about Nixon...
...These invisible nerve gas agents, Wallace noted, could incapacitate riflemen in an insidious way...
...What encouraged me to think this wasn't going to be another one of those political puff pieces, like all the frank interviews Nixon had been granting to non-television magazines since he started speaking out, was the man scheduled to interview him...
...He hammered away at it on the Johnny Carson Show, the Rowan & Martin Laugh-in...
...asked Wallace in a gentlemanly manner...
...Certainly I've made mistakes...
...If that's what the American people want in a President, I'm not their man...
...Did you have no excesses...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 20
