The Press: Watch on the Potomac

In a collection of his New Republic columns titled The Nixon Watch, John Osborne last year wrote that “the study of Richard Nixon requires a steadfast clinging to the fact that he is human. That is not easy.” Last week The Second Year of the Nixon Watch was published (Liveright; $5.95) and the Osborne view had changed as little as the book title. He writes: “Mr. Nixon, with his shifts from the stately style and sound content of his formal messages to his reckless rhetoric on the campaign stump, seems to me to make anything approaching a sustained belief in his wisdom, his compassion, his courage, his good faith impossible.”

It is a tribute to Osborne’s professionalism that despite such searing sentences, he has held the respect, if hardly the love, of the White House’s current occupants. He has a passion for fairness and a willingness to admit error; last month, after Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger complained about a reference to his “sometimes cruel ways” with aides, Osborne straightforwardly apologized in print the following week: “He is right; the word was poorly chosen.” White House Press Spokesman Ron Ziegler has been known to cut off reporters’ questions, and then give in deferentially to an Osborne rumble from the rear of the room: “I’ll take one more from you, John.”

Uncompromising Language. The Osborne approach to Nixon’s programs and policies is often more analytical than critical, and he clearly means it when he writes, as he did in one column dealing with school desegregation, that “it is a pleasure to report that Mr. Nixon has come up with something good.” A recent column called the President’s revenue-sharing plan “a valid and defensible concept,” but observed “there is a basically false quality in Nixon revenue sharing” because the President cannot “come up with enough shared money to make it adequately helpful.”

It is Nixon’s personal qualities that bring from Osborne uncompromising language: “The viewed Nixon—the sullen mouth twitching on order into that spurious smile, the quality of cold and unceasing calculation to be seen in his little eyes—aroused in me a sense of ingrained and ineradicable cheapness.”

Osborne works as hard at reporting as he does at writing—he sometimes locks himself up for hours sharpening the language of his columns—and he has good pipelines into the high echelons of the Administration. Last week’s column revealed the existence of a memo from Nixon to Kissinger as far back as Feb. 1, 1969, instructing him to explore all available avenues for better relations with China. It is this kind of special detail that Osborne regularly digs out for his readers, adding depth and dimension to his commentaries.

Moving Left. Osborne pursues sources privately, preferring the telephone or the quiet office chat to the more public techniques of lunching at well-known Washington restaurants or badgering at press briefings. If he receives a fair amount of White House cooperation, even though he represents a liberal, anti-Nixon publication, it is partly because of the Osborne manner. His thin gray hair and elongated face convey senatorial dignity. His deep bass voice is thick with the accent of Corinth, Miss., where he was born 64 years ago. Osborne attended Southwestern University and the University of Colorado, got his first job at the Memphis Commercial Appeal at 20.

He moved from there to the Associated Press, the Knoxville Journal, the old Washington Herald and, in 1936, to Newsweek. In 1938 he switched to TIME, serving as writer, foreign editor, then foreign correspondent. “At TIME,” he says, “I was known as a pretty conservative type. I suppose I’ve moved somewhat left.” Osborne served LIFE in several capacities, including foreign editor and chief editorial writer, before he left in 1961. After a freelance period, he joined the New Republic in 1968.

Wife’s Tribute. Through it all, Osborne says, he has had a compulsion to find out and write about what makes Presidents the sort of men they are. “You get some feel of the temperature of the place, what they’re anxious about, a thermometer reading,” he says. “I try to make the President and his actions understandable, not necessarily likable or supportable.”

Osborne admits that Nixon remains an enigma. He says: “The Nixonologists of the press are reduced, most of the time, to applying to their study of the President the processes of deductive guessing that Kremlinologists and students of the Hanoi and Peking hierarchies have to rely upon.” To Osborne, Nixon “appears to have imposed upon everybody who works for him a rule of reticence.” As a tribute to the President’s success, Mrs. Osborne has presented her husband with a handsomely bound volume stamped “All I Know About Nixon—by John Osborne.” Every page is blank.