Nation: THE CANDIDATES UP CLOSE

Two-thirds of his way through the presidential campaign, TIME Correspondents Hays Gorey, who had been covering Hubert Humphrey’s campaign, and Simmons Fentress, who had been following Nixon, exchanged assignments. They then met in Manhattan to compare their impressions of the two candidates and their campaigns. Excerpts from their dialogue:

Gorey: After watching the wild, rushing quality of Humphrey’s campaign, Nixon’s seems like clockwork. Humphrey is about as susceptible to programming as the Marx Brothers.

Fentress: You do get the feeling that Nixon’s campaign is as carefully planned as the Normandy invasion, and often the price is a feeling of contrivance. When he was in Buffalo, his schedule read: “8:47 p.m. EDT—R.N. goes to podium. 8:49 p.m. EDT—applause subsides.” It did, too.

Gorey: Humphrey seems psychologically incapable of being on time. The reason is talk—whether to a group, a person, even a dog. He can’t leave until he has indulged in verbal overkill.

Fentress: Nixon’s speeches are perfectly timed—30 to 35 min. With his lead in the polls, Nixon is conserving his energy and avoiding the fatigue that caused him to make mistakes in 1960. He usually gets to bed by midnight and takes weekends on the beach to preserve his suntan for the TV camera. That is an advantage for the press, too, of course.

Gorey: Humphrey started out a bit panicky, but in his closing drive he is a different man from the one who started reeling around the country after Chicago. He is in much better command of himself. He is full of fight and a surprising amount of self-confidence.

Fentress: Yes. He is 12 million miles behind, but I think he has got started, and this election isn’t over yet.

Gorey: Humphrey’s audiences are responding differently now. Even his disorganization is helping him project more warmth. Humphrey is a “people man. He gets his ideas by and while talking. His campaign has an engaging “what the hell, let’s see what happens” atmosphere about it.

Fentress: There is undoubtedly something in the Humphrey campaign that you don’t see in Nixon’s. I think his campaign style—a combination of “Give ’em hell” and “Pour on the bread and butter”—is just catching on. Winning is another thing.

Gorey: Nixon, by contrast, is almost excessively organized, even in his mannerisms. If he is asked a question he has answered 100 times before, he gives an agonized expression, as if anguished about how to answer.

Fentress: Even so, Nixon has mellowed a great deal. I think the defeats of 1960 and 1962 contributed to that. He is a bigger man than he was in 1960. The old Nixon was a political alley fighter who would throw the word treason around rather freely. He doesn’t do that now, but he might be capable of it again if it seemed necessary.

Gorey: Humphrey, of course, is Nixon’s antithesis m many ways. You can see an obvious difference between the candidates in their relationships with their wives on the campaign. Pat Nixon sits behind a curtain on the plane. When the plane lands, she steps out, and Nixon uses her as a sort of prop If he’s talking to farmers, for example, he never fails to tell them that Pat once raised a prizewinmng pig for a 4-H contest. The Humphreys are much less formal together. They chat and exchange gibes. “Oh, Humphrey,” Muriel will tease “You’re always talking!”

Fentress: Nixon is hard, extremely intelligent, amazingly well informed and capable of great concentration. Most of the reporters who trail Nixon respect him, but none can call him friend. This is the way he wants it. “The most important thing about a public man is not whether he’s loved or disliked,” he said in a television interview last week, “but whether he’s respected.”

Gorey: Humphrey is an intelligent man with a quick mind, but he sometimes comes across as a buffoon. What sticks in people’s minds now is his subservience to Lyndon Johnson. One of Humphrey’s main problems is trying to remind people that it takes courage to be as outspoken on civil rights as he has been during his career.

Fentress: Nixon’s audiences are almost entirely white middle class, and he tells them what they want to hear-about the war, about law and order. At no point has he told any group what it really didn’t want to hear. Not since Miami has he discussed in detail the predicament of the ghetto Negro. The Negroes avoid his rallies in droves; you can see more in a day with Humphrey than in a month with Nixon.

Gorey: Humphrey is certainly more solid on the race question. He swings hard at Wallace North, South, East and West—something Nixon doesn’t do.

Fentress: Still, Nixon is cool, relaxed.

A lot of people have been waiting for him to blow it, to make a big mistake as he did in the debates in 1960. But Nixon is not likely to make any major mistake when he is well ahead.

Gorey: Incidentally, one of the ironies of the campaign is that Johnson withdrew because he could not run on his war policy. Humphrey has had rough going trying to run on it. He has now said what he has wanted and needed to say about Viet Nam. He is at peace with himself. And yet Nixon may well win by running on a war policy that substantially agrees with Johnson’s.

Fentress: I think that Humphrey would be far better equipped to heal the domestic wounds of the country. This is my greatest single worry about Nixon. In going after the law-and-order vote, he may be talking too muc about troublemakers and not enough about the root causes’of disorder.

Gorey: Still, I must say that when Nixon does get to the issues, he does very well. Humphrey, frankly, does not read enough or study deeply emo

Fentress: Yes, Nixon has done his homework, almost with a vengeance.

Gorey: He has greater expertise on foreign affairs than Humphrey has. One problem with decade or so, when it became a possibility that he could become President, he did some things that ran counter to his basic ideas. For example, he publicly supported a resumption of the bombing in early 1966, but privately he was against it. But I have a feeling that the old Humphrey is still there and we may see it. Sometimes, though, you get the impression from him that God is in heaven and all’s right with the world. Nixon projects an image of more toughness, more fiber.

Fentress: I believe you would see that tough professionalism of Nixon’s reflected in his Cabinet choices as President. I think he would go after merit. I think Nixon would seek out indepedents and Democrats to make his a bipartisan Government.

Gorey: Humphrey has a deserved reputation of being very soft, and one of the willingness ways it shows up is in his unwillingness and inability to get rid of people who have been near him for many years.

Fentress: That is one of the things that worry me about Humphrey— that he might rely too heavily on old friend ships and loyalties.

Gorey: Which of the two do you think could lead the nation better?

Fentress: Given the nation’s problems and what I know of them, I would say that Richard Nixon probably could.

Gorey: I don’t agree with that. It seems to me that Nixon could easily fall into the same traps that Lyndon Johnson fell into, even more readily than Hubert Humphrey. One reason is Nixon’s insulation.

Fentress: Can Humphrey win?

Gorey: It isn’t beyond the realm of dramatic possibility. But rather development —and the prospects of that are remote now— Humphrey will have to do it through a steady erosion of Nixon and Wallace strength, through the image of decency he is projecting, through a return to the fold of millions of disgruntled Democrats, and through the fact that he might very well win some key states with a very small proportion of the white vote.

Fentress: Nixon has the brains for the job, and probably the discipline and understanding America’s Government and place in the world. The question is: Can he lead? Can he gain the trust of the Negroes, whom he has nearly ignored? And the youth who have marched out of the hall? Can he avoid the excessive cleverness that can in the end wreck public confidence?

Gorey: Humphrey has a leadership problem too. He knows that if he wins, he will be a minority President. And that might make it difficult for him to lead the country, to get the alienated into right as the well as the disaffected left back into the mainstream. The men are different, their responses are different. Humphrey might burst into tears at hearing Russia was moving, into, say Rumania. But he’d recover, and quickly confront a cold political situation. Nixon would tackle it as a cold political situation from the beginning. There is a legitimate argument as to which reaction is more appropriate in today’s world, and that may be what the 1968 election is all about.