NIXON CALLING THE SIGNALS

...To insure room in his busy schedule for these TV press conference, he has had to give up something: The expendable was old-fashioned private interviews with the press, where in the past reporters were known to ask follow-up questions...

...Whatever may be wrong with him as a Chief Executitive, though, you must admit that in his television news conferences he radiates sincerity...

...The main element of the President's "truth hallmark" has from the start been his fairly regular appearances on television...

...They lack the distance necessary for sound judgment...

...He may even have some shortcomings as a home economizer...

...He has not explained who promoted Otto Otepka...

...Carried to its ultimate absurdity, a young fellow running for Congress could not imply that his opponent was a Left-leaning Communist...

...we would no longer have secret campaign funds or conflicts of interest...

...The value of thrift as a way of life has not had a proper spokesman since Poor Richard's Almanac...

...Actually, I wasn't the only major figure to neglect television during that period...

...While I don't like to criticize a competing medium, radio simply could not make the economic picture clear...

...As Joe McGinniss reports in The Selling of the President 1968, after a lengthy huddle early in the campaign, the Nixon team decided to go with the closeup...

...He seems to be saying that a picture on television is not always believable...

...The leading authority on the subject has to be the great psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, despite his having died in 1949...

...The viewers would see Nixon as a very small figure in a very large stadium, like the Rose Bowl...

...Nixon has a good position now?although it offers little in the way of security, since he could be impeached...

...In effect, he said that every time she went to Bloomingdale's she was destroying the economy...

...In terms of television art, this method had as much stature as the old Statute of Liberty trick in football...

...Then have each member of the group note where he felt the President altered his voice or flexed his jawbone...

...Sullivan was working on the high ad hom'nem level...

...Government Printing Office pamphlet on how to budget at home, mortgage or rent payments should equal no more than one-fourth of a working man's income...

...when his theories are applied to facts and issues, the hard stuff of politics, one may run into difficulties...

...The technicans made the most of what they had, however, and it worked...

...and politicians would stop making promises they couldn't keep...

...For as Sullivan further wrote: "A visual study to determine what there is about people's faces that gives away falsehoods and so on, immediately demonstrates the gross absurdity of thinking that their eyes provide us with any clues...

...Whenever the star went to the bench for a brief vacation, the number two quarterback, Spiro (Double-Threat) Agnew, would eat the ball for a big loss...

...The only advantage to radio as a medium for explaining that spending is bad for the economy, as far as I could determine, was that it eliminated the necessity for looking the American people in the eye...

...Indeed, the story of how Richard Nixon-an average Wall Street lawyer who gave up a lucrative practice to answer his country's call-Is planning to keep the wolf from his door during the next few years, would have guaranteed quite an edifying television show...

...Writing in The Psychiatric Interview, Sullivan observed: "Tonal variations in the voice are frequently wonderfully dependable clues to shifts in the communcative situation...

...My wife argued that his words obviously applied only to the poor...

...Herb Klein, Director of Communications for the Executive Branch, said before Inauguration Day, "Truth will be the hallmark of the new Administration...

...In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if by 1972 he stepped down as President for the higher post of dean of the An-nenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania...

...he may have had his private reasons for preferring to switch...

...He has not made it perfectly clear yet whether he is planning to end the draft before everyone has served time in the Army...

...The President knew his Sullivan, possibly by intuition, when he suggested in his Inaugural Address that we lower our voices in dealing with our problems...

...As my sacrifice, I didn't watch television the last two weeks of the month, so i guess you would call me a peace-movement extremist...

...A few weeks earlier, Time magazine reported that the President paid $1.4 million for his second vacation home at San Clemente, California...

...He is apparently also aware that there is no significance to the failure of his eyes to wander restlessly around the East Room when he speaks earnestly to the people...

...Even in the lower part of the face, which is distinctly more expressive and closely related to the mental state of the person concerned, the tensions are not so labile that they keep up with the changing mixture of truth, best appearances, untruth and frank falsehood that makes up a great deal of human communication...

...will undoubtedly reveal more than those interpretive articles you have been reading all week, and could even prove an antidote to Presidential radiation...

...For example, if somebody is attempting to describe his work as a journeyman electrician, things may go quite well until he is on the verge of saying something about the job which pertains to a field in which he has been guilty of gross disloyalty to his union, at which time his voice will sound altered...

...But the reviews of Dick Nixon's performances at the White House have been raves...

...Without the moonlighting opportunities open to the rest of us debt-ridden wretches, his wife may even have to take a job...

...After all television did for Richard Nixon, on October 19 he chose to deliver his major policy statement about the ills of the economy over radio...

...He has not ended the war in Vietnam yet, as he promised he would in his television appeals for our votes...

...Sooner or later, men in his line of work realize that the tactic of being open on camera can be carried too far...

...The terms were reasonable: $400,000 down and $100,000 a year, plus 7.5 per cent interest on the initial debt of $1 million...

...It severely limited the government's options in explaining away such mysteries as Spiro Agnew, Clement Haynsworth and the recent Green Beret fiasco...

...According to my private sources, a U.S...

...Too much had to be left to the imagination, including the condition of the President's beard...

...A policy of candidness is one of those visionary egghead schemes that will never work in a democracy...

...Still, if I were the President's television adviser, I would recommend that he have the cameras cover him the same way the networks televise professional football...

...Yet to meet his financial commitments he would have to work like a Stakhanovite, and his salary is limited by law: He cannot earn bonuses for doing a good job...

...It is clear that more work must be done in this field...

...The mortgage payments for the little place he bought at Key Biscayne, Florida, of course, are extra...

...These are what amateur economists call outstanding debts...

...he was always photographed bigger than life...

...He would be the quarterback, directing his team of superstars-william (Swivelhips) Rogers, John (Strong-arm) Mitchell, George (Brains) Romney, Walter (Oily) Hickel, et al.-to victory after victory, achieving the national goals against incredible odds...

...And you might help get it under way by gathering several friends to examine the President's most recent major television appearance on November 3. A private screening of the tape can be arranged by calling your local television station and explaining that you have set up a nonprofit foundation to study the President's election-eve address...

...The consensus (remember that...

...Since his election, the President has continued to show the American people more of himself than we may care to see...

...He may still give the facts about what a journeyman electrician should be and do...

...That Nixon passed up a golden opportunity to make things crystal clear on television is no credit to the profession of President, but it is perhaps understandable...

...Before going any further, I should point out that I am not in the President's confidence...

...But he will sound different in the telling...

...Nobody has ever seen the bags under Joe Namath's eyes during a Sunday football game on tv...

...That the President has taken the other route in his coverage only shows how little the experts understand...

...He is so natural on the tube, it's hard to keep him off, and the old pro has courageously refused to worry about the dangers of overexposure...

...I don't know whether he really followed my lead and dropped tv as his sacrifice for M-Day...

...No President had scorned the visual medium in such highhanded fashion since President Eisenhower in the '50s...

...Frankly, I think this was the Administration's first serious blunder...

...Make no mistake about it, Richard Nixon knows television...

...Naturally, you can t learn too much about Presidential behavior on television by reading the standard political analysts...

...Instead of trying to hide the candidate, the television strategists decided to give him to us full-face...

...Nevertheless, expecting an inspiring tale, I made my wife listen to the President's broadcast...

...Everybody-from Walter Cronkite to Pat Nixon-will most certainly affirm that the man seems sincere...