See How Dick Ran

...A Humphrey stalwart gave us $1,700 to rent a hall...

...Who was forty-two years old the day he was born...

...McGinniss describes how the men who created Nixon's commercials did exactly that...

...The pictures made the point, not the speaker...

...While that may sound strange, no professional would associate himself with a show that could not at least afford the right kind of lighting...

...Jones told McGinniss that after the election he planned to move his family to a little island called Montserrat...

...Roger Ailes, who had been producer of the Mike Douglas tv show, was hired to set up the panels around the country...

...One bright spot," responds the creative director of advertising, Harry Treleaven, "you see Agnew and it makes you realize how good Nixon is...

...He'd always have his homework done and he'd never let you copy...

...They figure other I'-ids got footballs for Christmas, Nixon got a briefcase and he loved it...

...He obviously kept careful notes in preparation for this book...

...The problem we've had, in most cases, is Nixon himself...

...his top assistant in selling Nixon to the voters was a McCarthy Democrat, Jim Sage...

...Later in the campaign Roger Ailes, the source of most of the cynical gems in the book, says: "We're doing all right, if we could only get someone to play Hide the Greek...

...Harrington, Badillo, Farmer...

...Once again the contrast between the two campaigns was glaring, but by this late date it was intentional on the Democratic side...

...They had picked up tickets at Republican headquarters for that night's Nixon rally, and they were going to "invade" the massive auditorium and stoutly wave their hand-lettered Humphrey signs...

...The first commissioned interview with Spiro Agnew, for example, was a disaster...

...He believes that policy and ideas may be obsolescent in the age of impact...

...Eugene S. Jones, the designer of Nixon's commercials, had previously made a powerful film about the horror of Vietnam called A Face of War...

...Having had this preparation, I could not find anything Joe McGinniss writes about surprising...

...He's a funny-looking guy...

...Hundreds of seats around the speaker's stand had been removed to keep the audience well away...

...The woman was pulled back by someone in the front row, but the young man, much pleased with himself, strode directly to Ambassador Galbraith and presented him with the head of a pig on a platter...

...Sage criticizes the commercials and Nixon at considerable length, complaining particularly about political interference in the film editing, such as the excision of any implied criticism of Mayor Daley and the elimination of any picture of hippies who seemed to be enjoying themselves...

...McGinniss confirms that the intent of the gop camp was to shun the discussion of issues, to stay as nebulous and amorphous as possible...

...They developed a technique they considered startling and revolutionary...

...the nearest people were a large corps of smiling, well-rehearsed Nixon girls who ringed the platform...

...Toward the conclusion of the campaign, though, as Nixon begins to slip dangerously in the polls, the author concludes that the candidate who refuses to show himself runs the risk of appearing too slick...

...But the sponsoring groups (the New Coalition for Humphrey-Muskie and the New York Americans for Democratic Action) did not have enough money to obtain even the volunteer services of an experienced impresario...

...That's why these shows are important...

...Humphrey hoped to project the image of a sensitive, warm, imperfect man vs...

...Think he's a bore, a pain in the ass...

...And once the rally was in progress, we learned that the Secret Service was checking the place out for an unannounced visit by Ed Muskie...

...He was dropped, Ailes says, because "Nixon hates psychiatrists...

...Were you happy?' " 'The ability to be happy is directly proportional to the ability to suffer,' Agnew said...

...The kids were excited...

...To make them forget all that...

...A persistent problem for the stiff was to find the proper ethnic balance: There had to be one Negro, but never more than one...

...McGinniss plays with the idea that future elections will go to the best performer, or at least to the candidate with the best media manipulators...

...I don't think it's possible to merchandise a vegetable.' " My recurrent doubt about the political-power-of-television books, such as this one, is that the technicians and experts may be inordinately presumptuous...

...Maybe the hidden persuasion aspect of Nixon's campaign did win the election for him...

...His tone indicated he might doze before finishing the sentence, 'and as you grow older you feel everything less.' "He stopped...

...Though I did not see it, I am sure that when the cue came, those thousands of Nixon balloons rose to the Madison Square Garden ceiling at precisely the right moment and right velocity...

...As one might expect, the Nixon staff was shocked to see the Democratic tv finale: Humphrey and Muskie were taking telephone calls live and the sloppy mechanics in the studio were fully exposed to the home audience-cameras, cranes, folding chairs, and all...

...Nixon receives the same scathing treatment from him: "Let's face it, a lot of people think Nixon is dull...

...In Philadelphia he made the mistake of including a Jewish psychiatrist on the representative panel...

...So much for us...

...I don't think the man has had an original observation in his life...

...Said Ailes: "Well, what's going to happen, is all of the questions are going to come through the operators over there, and then runners will bring them down to the producer's table, which will be set up here, and from there they'll go to a screening room where the Nixon staff will tear them up and write their own...

...And I expect that most Democrats who read through the book will find themselves muttering, "I told you so...

...What I knew about Nixon's prospective audience was that 15 or so high school students had spent the afternoon at Humphrey headquarters preparing double signs-on the outside they read, "Nixon's the one," but when that piece of poster was pulled away, a Humphrey slogan was uncovered...

...is very, very basic...

...The words are given meaning by the impressions created by the stills...

...he must have set out to get a position at the vital center...

...Had Humphrey squeaked out another percentage point of votes here and there, his media experts would then have proclaimed the proof of their methods...

...contributor, "Urban Review" During the 1968 Presidential campaign, I was offered the dubious distinction of co-producing a New York rally of leading liberal intellectuals supporting Hubert Humphrey's candidacy...

...Nixon had tried to run a flawless, computerized campaign?avoiding reporters, press conferences and any possibility of unrehearsed contact with the public...

...I couldn't help wondering all through the book what McGinniss' job was in the Nixon campaign...

...a carefully screened, predigested, plastic candidacy...

...He's got this thing, apparently...

...The candidate turned himself over to the technicians and said, in effect, "Package me...

...Muskie never made it, though, for just as John Kenneth Galbraith stepped forward, two nude Yippies, male and female, leaped to the stage...

...Across the street, at that very moment, Richard Nixon was staging a perfect show...

...They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a bookbag...

...It consisted of preparing movies from a painstakingly arranged sequence of still photographs, accompanied by Nixon's voice...

...After three week's effort, we gathered all the right names: Galbraith, Schlesinger, Sorenson...

...The highlights of The Selling of the President 1968 are the revealing anecdotes of both Republican candidates...

...At another point, Ailes explains the format of Nixon's grand finale telethon, featuring citizens from across the nation calling in questions to 125 volunteers, who then relay them to the candidates...

...Then they'll go to Bud Wilkinson who will cleverly read them and Nixon will read the answers off a card...

...In the name of art or money, what services must he have offered to advance the election of a man he clearly considers a burn-out case...

...In fact, the radicalness of this approach is the fact of creating an image without actually saying anything...

...Yet it does raise a disturbing point of professional morality in its presentation of the creative professional as hardhearted whore or, to be kinder, mercenary...

...maybe it didn't...

...Another suggests that what Spiro needs is some dexedrine...

...Agnew was at his casual worst: " 'All life is essentially the contributions that come from compromise.'" His voice was sleepy, his face without expression...

...But they never got past the guards at the door, who had somehow been trained to spot the enemy...

...Then the voice of the interviewer: 'I see.' " Several of Nixon's top media advisers watch the film...

...The Selling of the President 1968 is a good book, if not an important one...

...He quotes an ad man at Doyle, Dane, Bernbach: '"In the end, communications skills alone can't do it...

...maybe their being undisguisedly under 21 was the tipoff...

...One says, Agnew comes across as "such an utter bore...

...The questions fit right in: " 'It must have really been a thrill to have been picked for Vice President...

...My question is whether a professional can, in good faith, hire himself out to perform a task for which he has nothing but contempt...

...They make him very nervous...

...I had never produced anything before...

...Meanwhile, about a dozen other Yippies marched through the aisles chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh...

...to the beating of a drum...

...There was silence on the film...

...As one of the filmmakers explained: "The script...

...He says such incredible pap...

...Now you put him on television, you've got a problem right away...

...He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, T want to be President.' I mean this is how he strikes some people...

...The best we could get for that price was the ancient Manhattan Center on West 34th Street, a grimy, proletarian barn filled with wooden folding chairs...

...The book also details the staging of the "live" interview shows, on which Nixon answered questions from a carefully selected panel of local people, supposedly a random cross-section from the areas where each program was to be broadcast...