Nation: The Computerized Army

First, there is a neat, pink, numbered card that allows visitors to enter. Then there are receptionists to make sure that strangers do not stray into just any of the 250 rooms in Washington’s financially troubled Willard Hotel, which has been taken over by United Citizens for Nixon-Agnew. Finally, there is a typical Nixon executive—cool, nononsense, briskly with it.

Anyone who still had doubts about the legendary efficiency of Richard Nixon’s campaign organization, reports TIME Correspondent Lansing Lamont, would lose them after glimpsing the operation at the Willard. Compared with the one-floor warren that passes for the Democratic National Committee and Hubert Humphrey’s campaign headquarters across town, the Nixon show is a lesson in the power and effectiveness of supreme organization.

Reserve Army. At the Willard, 600 full-time workers toil, helped by 1,300 part-time volunteers. No one scurries down the carpeted corridors; no voices are raised (“Miss Gaylord, tell the visitor precisely what you do here. About three minutes will do, thank you”). The Nixonites have put on magnetic tape more than 1,100,000 names and addresses of a reserve army of workers. National Director John Warner says his goal is 5,000,000 names by Nov. 5. Within 72 hours, Warner boasts, leased computers across the nation can crank out 5,000,000 letters.

In another sector of Nixon’s politico-cybernetic system, still more machines type automatically “personalized” letters composed by dialing a selection from some 70 paragraphs by Nixon. Robot typewriters transform coded commands from a tape into letters that answer questions raised by concerned citizens. To a voter worried about the cities, for example, the robots write: “Of the many challenges facing America today, none seem more critical than solving the crisis that faces our cities and urban areas.” The letters are mailed to voters who have given the candidate a tape-recorded three-minute piece of their mind at one of Nixon’s 700 “listening posts.” Aides listen to each tape, so far have heard more than 40 miles of gripes and queries.

These are tabulated on a “key issues” chart of most-discussed topics. Last week the law-and-order issue on Nixon’s charts slipped from September’s 20% to only 11.9%, while Viet Nam spurted to 24.5%. Nixon workers even keep track of the shifting odds on the U.S. elections offered by London’s bookmakers, who last week favored the G.O.P. ticket by 10 to 1.

The War Room. The operation is run with virtuosity by National Chairman Charles Sylvanus Rhyne, 56, a North Carolina-born onetime Democrat who was Nixon’s classmate at Duke University Law School and who switched to the G.O.P. this year. Rhyne, a former president of the American Bar Association and an expert in international law, is fascinated by computers. Before joining Nixon, he was busy feeding laws from around the world into electronic memory banks; he also publishes a monthly magazine called Law and Computer Technology. Rhyne expects to spend $2,000,000 coordinating more than 1,500 functioning Nixon-Agnew clubs and helping to organize between 150 and 175 new clubs that are established every day.

The heart of his operation is a small, windowless office known as “the war room.” Its walls are plastered with charts and maps that trace every move by the candidates. One chart focuses on ethnic groups and their numerical strength in 17 pivotal states. One map goes so far as to try to show the location of troubles that have yet to occur. When violence flared briefly at Columbia University last month, Nixon headquarters quickly received intelligence reports that similar disturbances were planned at colleges across the nation. The reports, naturally, went right onto the futures map.