THE VICE PRESIDENCY: The Realized Asset

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Many a wise old political head was wagged in pity last September when Vice President Richard Nixon put Texas on his campaign itinerary. All the signs of local politics indicated that Texas would be a Republican wasteland—and Republican campaigning for Texas’ 24 electoral votes a waste of precious time. At first the old heads seemed right; Nixon spoke m Houston’s Music Hall to a crowd that filled fewer than two-thirds of the 4,000 seats. But the Vice President listened as he talked, looked as he was looked at, and recommended that the G.O.P. make a real Texas try. During the campaign he flew 800 miles across the state, speaking to ever more enthusiastic crowds at Fort Worth, San Antonio and El Paso. On his recommendation, Dwight Eisenhower added Dallas to the presidential schedule. This week, as Nixon had hoped and expected, Texas was a real political battleground, and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket had a chance to win the battle.

What happened in Texas is only one detail of the unsung political phenomenon of 1956: the widespread realization that Richard Milhous Nixon is a prime national asset to the Republican Party, not only because of his political skill but also because of his genuine appeal to the U.S. electorate. By Nov. 6 the young (43) Vice President will have traveled 42,000 miles by airplane, train and car, will have made more than 150 campaign speeches in 36 states.* He has been a field strategist as well as a campaigner, firing back his analysis of what other G.O.P. campaigners can do, where and when they should do it. As his travels have progressed, his crowds have grown in size and warmth, and he has given the G.O.P. cause a vital lift all over the U.S. Says Victor Johnston, director of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee: “He’s the best campaigner we’ve got, bar none.”

The verdict has been echoed in state after state. California Republicans, troubled by Democratic organization strength, count Nixon’s speech at Whittier (his home town) as the send-off of a campaign that seems headed toward victory; Michigan’s G.O.P. leaders consider Nixon’s appearance at Grand Rapids the turning point of their campaign; Pennsylvania’s bickering, despondent Republican chiefs, still in deep trouble, were astonished and encouraged by the reception that Democratic Philadelphia gave the Republican Vice President. When Nixon finished a speech at a Republican rally at the Maryland State Fair Grounds, G.O.P. State Chairman Eldred Rinehart rushed up to a Nixon aide, grabbed him by the sleeve and pleaded: “We’ve got to get him back here to work the Eastern Shore.”

Man Without Horns. In view of the talent and tenacity that Dick Nixon has shown in ten years of dramatically successful political life, it was not surprising that he should be an effective campaigner in 1956. What surprised many political observers was his ability to become a shining asset—and not a liability—to the Republican cause. The victim of a concentrated assault unparalleled in recent U.S. political history, he first had to erase the black and distorted picture his foes had painted unceasingly for nearly eight years. One of his aides summed up the task: “We had to show the country that he didn’t have horns.”

Had Nixon been the weak, unprincipled character that his more choleric enemies make him out to be, he might well have given up and accepted the advice of some of his friends to lie low. But, while he is a politician to his fingertips, Nixon is a man of consistent principle, whose values are as sound and fundamental as any in U.S. politics today. The son of a devout Quaker mother and a spirited Scots-Irish father who was a streetcar conductor and then a grocery-store operator, he grew up in the Depression and learned to take his problems head on. Always intense, serious and studious, he turned to government and politics as a boy, worked his way through law school, served as a Navy operations officer in the Pacific in World War II and got into politics full time when he ran for Congress in California’s old Twelfth District (suburban Los Angeles) in 1946.

As a Congressman, Nixon went at his job with the same intensity, industry and ambition that he had shown before and has shown since. He pushed the congressional investigation of Alger Hiss to the conclusion that eventually sent Hiss to prison; then, knowing the perils of subversion as did few others, he made pointed and effective use of the subversion issue in his campaigns. His intensity in the use of that issue inspired many of the bitter attacks that have been made on him. Stumping the country in 1952 and 1954, he intensified the bitterness by hitting hard, by trading blow for blow with Harry Truman. (Among his most consistent, most effective antagonists: the Washington Post and Times Herald Pulitzer Prize Cartoonist Herbert Block—Herblock.”) There has been little criticism of the job he has done as the most active and influential Vice President in U.S. history. Says an aide: “His whole life is now dedicated to being Vice President and a candidate for Vice President. There just isn’t anything else.”

The Positive Side. When the 1956 campaign became the job to do, Richard Nixon went about it characteristically. Within 48 hours after the Republican National Convention adjourned in San Francisco, he met in Los Angeles with a group of friends, e.g., California’s Republican Congressmen Bob Wilson and Patrick Hillings, to work out policy, strategy and details. While some Republicans urged him to repeat his searing attacks of 1952, Nixon decided that, as a spokesman for the Administration in power, he would pitch his campaign largely on the positive side, outlining gains the U.S. has made under Dwight Eisenhower (buried at Nixon’s instigation early in the campaign: the potential issue of Adlai Stevenson’s character-witness testimony for Alger Hiss in 1949).

Nixon himself wanted to show his hornless head to the people of all 48 states, but G.O.P. National Chairman Leonard Hall finally convinced him that this would be a senseless waste of energies. Instead, Nixon & Co. mapped three tours, one to touch as many states as possible, a second to concentrate on the weak spots, a third to work intensively in important and crucial areas. Convinced that the Democrats had started their campaign too early, Nixon decided to wait until mid-September, aim his campaign to reach its peak in the latter half of October, then sustain the high pitch right up to election day. With the geography and the basic strategy settled, he gathered a staff of aides—most of them tested in the “Nixon Fund” days of the 1952 campaign—and directed them by his personal example of efficiency, industry and energy.

Rash & Hustle. The first tour, which covered 15,000 miles and touched down at 32 states (including the exploration in Texas) was as much a pushing and probing operation as it was a personal campaign tour. Nixon talked long and late with local political leaders, reporting almost daily to the White House and the G.O.P. National Committee on what he heard. Fearful that complacency was overtaking an Ike-happy G.O.P., he emphasized the weak spots in his reports to Washington and in his conferences. The result: a rash of newspaper stories and columns late in September that the G.O.P. was up against a tough fight—perhaps a losing fight—followed by a widespread feeling in the party that Republicans had better get out and hustle. It was exactly that state of mind that Nixon wanted to create at exactly that time.

It was near the end of the first tour that Nixon made his own personal breakthrough. He headed for Hartford, despite warnings from some jittery Connecticut Republicans who thought that the anti-Nixon propaganda had created a serious antipathy toward him in the state. They told him not to expect much of a reception, to be prepared for small turnouts and open hostility. When he rode into Hartford’s Bushnell Park at noon one October day a crowd of some 8,000 was there to greet and cheer him. Connecticut G.O.P. leaders were amazed; Nixon was reassured.

By the time he began his second tour on Oct. 9, Republican candidates all over the U.S.—from New York’s Senatorial Candidate Jacob Javits to Idaho’s Senator Herman Welker—were begging for more Nixon time and effort. Ohio’s U.S. Senator George Bender happily grabbed Nixon’s coattails, crying, “Ohio loves Dick Nixon.” It seemed to. At Defiance a crowd equal to a third of the town’s population (12,500) turned out to hear him; in Warren more than 30,000 people lined the streets to cheer. The crowds and the confidence were growing.

No Cadillacs, Please. Also growing was the press corps’ respect, if not its liking, for Candidate Nixon. Dogging his every step were more than a score of curious, probing, and sometimes suspicious reporters, more than had ever before consistently covered a vice-presidential candidate. Day after day he held press conferences (he has held more than 50 during the campaign) and answered in great detail questions on everything from the Eisenhower Administration’s policy in the Suez crisis to statements he had made on the Fifth Amendment a decade ago. He also showed some deft footwork. In Toledo, one correspondent tried to trap him into an indorsement of George Bender’s opponent, Ohio’s Democratic Governor Frank Lausche, who has been favorably inclined toward the Eisenhower Administration. Was Lausche Nixon’s kind of Democrat? Nixon made clear that he was all out for George Bender, but he added: “I have great regard for many of our Democratic friends in the Senate and the House.”

At a televised college press conference at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., some of the traveling reporters stood on the sidelines and slipped the college students headline-making questions. Prompted by a traveling reporter, a persistent student editor taxed Nixon about his failure to mention Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson in his speeches. Would Nixon favor the retention of Benson in the Eisenhower Administration, and why had he avoided mentioning Benson? Replied Nixon: “When I go into the state where a Cabinet Secretary lives, I then give him his commercial … I mentioned Mr. Benson in Utah . . . The first part of the question I cannot properly answer. The new Cabinet will be chosen by the President of the United States.”

By the time Nixon’s second tour ended, some of the reporters who had started out openly hostile had a new impression. Riding in his United Air Lines DC-6B, the “Dick Nixon Special,” they were astonished by the thoroughness and efficiency of the operation.* At the back of the aircraft there was a private cabin serving as the candidate’s office; there was also a work area, with typewriters and a duplicating machine, for his staff. At times the staff numbered 13, including two secretaries, two press aides, a tour manager and a doctor. A corps of advance men ranged ahead to see that proper arrangements, e.g., transportation, press facilities, had been made at the next stop. Mindful of the Democrats’ “big business” charge, they had one standard instruction: no Cadillacs, please.

Chart & Report. In the candidate’s cabin, not a moment was wasted. Wearing a plaid smoking jacket (to keep his coat unwrinkled for the day’s appearances), Nixon received the daily “tip” by his staff on the situation at the next stop: population of the town (broken down by ethnic groups), its prides and its problems, its political complexion, the situation in the congressional races, the people who should be mentioned in his speech. Said one staff report as the plane droned over Texas: “San Antonio is a popular winter resort and a haven for many elderly people who have retired there. This, perhaps, explains the Republican vote in presidential years.”

Always up to date was a chart that showed the whereabouts and activities of other key campaigners—President Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson and former President Truman (Nixon largely ignored the travels, of Estes Kefauver). From the chart, Nixon could be sure that he was not upstaging Ike in the next day’s headlines, and also could know when and what he should be saying in countering Stevenson and Truman. Every day he received from Washington a report prepared by ten staff members of the White House and the Republican National Committee, summarizing the national political situation. Excerpt: “In his statement yesterday on the Bulganin-Eisenhower exchange, Stevenson sought to establish that Eisenhower is the Kremlin’s choice in the elections. If so, why did Bulganin come to Stevenson’s side on the H-bomb issue?”

For the most part, Nixon cut his own pattern of what he would say and do, but he kept in close touch with the White House and Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington. Only twice did Washington’s Republican strategists prompt him on major matters: once to suggest that he get a little rougher with Adlai Stevenson, once to urge him to drop his valid point that free-enterprise technological advances will one day lead to a four-day work week in the U.S. It was a tough point to get across, and some Administration and G.O.P. brasshats thought it sounded like a commitment by the Eisenhower Administration to come up with a compulsory four-day week.

“The Old Shoe.” Before he set out on his campaigning, Candidate Nixon had laid out a firm base for what he would say. He holed up for five days to finish eight speeches that would serve as his basic campaign documents. They ranged over the Eisenhower Administration’s whole record, discussing in detail and in statistic the fields of foreign policy, defense, economics, labor and agriculture.

Once written, however, the speeches were used always as the bible but seldom as texts. Generally Nixon spoke without a text and without notes. More of a talker than a speechmaker, he aimed directly at his audiences, used simple, plain, stark language, made his points specifically and clearly, never shouting. Where it was possible he would pick out three or four people at various points in the crowd and speak directly to them. At Evansville, Ind. he spotted a man in blue overalls standing near the center of the audience, talked directly to him, watched for reaction. There was none until the end of the speech, when the man held up his right hand, put the tips of his forefinger and thumb together to form a circle, and grinned. Said Nixon later: “Well, I guess we made one vote today.”

Speaking without manuscript, Nixon could draw on all of his texts to fit the occasion and the crowd’s reaction, and could work in whatever local references were appropriate. But the technique also brought out, at almost every stop, some old, familiar phrases in what reporters came to call “The speech.” The correspondents coined their own titles for the standard phrases, e.g., “the old shoe” for his statement that the U.S. “has prosperity and peace to boot,” “the weight-lifting act” for his line that “every man can hold up Dwight Eisenhower to his children as a man who has faith in God, faith in America and who has restored dignity and respect to the highest office in the land,” and “the bush-leaguer” for his assertion that “Adlai Stevenson just isn’t in the same league with President Eisenhower.”

Schedules ran with easy precision. When Nixon took to train travel, reporters soon learned that they should dash back to their cars when he introduced his wife Pat, because that meant the train would pull out in exactly 60 seconds. Pat was introduced without fail at every meeting, usually as ”the best campaigner in the Nixon family.” While that was a pardonable overstatement, efficient, proper Pat Nixon is indeed a good campaigner. She did all of the packing for trips, and astonished local women’s-page editors by traveling with one suitcase.* Despite the campaign’s pace she always managed to appear on the platform looking chic, fresh, interested and pleased, even when a meeting lasted three hours. Says she: “The important thing is not to look tired.”

Most of the Nixon campaign days are 18 hours long; the toughest of them begin at 7 a.m. and end at 3 a.m. the next day, only to begin again at 7. When Nixon was hit by the flu in September (TIME, Oct. 8), he refused to slow down, ordered his doctor to stoke him with antibiotics and vitamin pills and spray his throat with cortisone. Although he eats little on campaign tours (a light breakfast, a sandwich on the road, a snack before his evening speech, an attempt at dinner afterward), he actually gained two pounds on his first tour, has maintained an even weight of about 175 throughout the campaign.

New Stature. By last week Campaigner Nixon had good reason to know that all of his effort had paid off. On his third and final swing, he rolled through Michigan on a special train drawing bigger crowds than Adlai Stevenson had drawn along the same route a week earlier. They were warm crowds; newsmen could find no trace of “that anti-Nixon feeling.” There were 2,200 at the railroad station in Lansing, 5,000 at Battle Creek, 2,500 at Kalamazoo (about twice the crowd Stevenson drew) and 2,000 at Niles. Across Lake Michigan, in Chicago’s Loop, more than 200,000—the biggest crowd to greet a visitor there since General Douglas MacArthur came home in 1951—thronged State Street to hail the Vice President.

As he moved into the final stage of his 1956 campaign, Nixon clearly saw the makings of a big Eisenhower sweep, and he was hopeful that it would be big enough to pull a Republican majority into the House of Representatives. (On the Senate he wasn’t guessing.) Quick to sense the weakness of Adlai Stevenson’s H-bomb proposal (it attempts to hit Eisenhower where he is strongest), Nixon set out to tie it to Democratic candidates for Congress. His challenge: “In view of the terrible danger this program presents, it is time for all candidates for national office to stand up and be counted on this issue. [ believe that every candidate for the House and Senate, Republican and Democrat, should state before Election Day whether he favors the Eisenhower proposal for disarmament, which insists on inspection, or the Stevenson proposals, which provide for stopping tests on a simple agreement without inspection.” Few Democrats cared to answer back.

Long after the campaign of 1956 has ended, Republican candidates for the Senate and House—and their state and county chairmen—will remember the efforts of Richard Nixon. In his decade of service as an unashamed Republican working for the principles that have become the basic philosophy of the Eisenhower Administration, he has built close, personal friendships deep in the party organization all over the U.S. On a much broader scope, he has this year shown that there is a clear, direct line of communication between him and the American people. These achievements, coupled with the unprecedented importance he has given the vice-presidency, promise Richard Nixon a new and impressive stature in his party and in his country.

*Missing only Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico JNorth Carolina, South Carolina, Vermont Virginia and Wyoming.

* Wrote Columnist T.R.B. (the Christian Science Monitor’s Richard L. Strout) in the rabidly anti-Nixon New Republic: “On the Nixon caravan everything goes right, on the Kefauver Special everything goes wrong . . . With genuine perplexity Republican columnists ask, ‘Why is it people dislike Richard Nixon?’ Honestly we don’t know. We puzzle about it. Maybe it is because he flashes his smile off and on so like an electric light. (Kefauver rarely smiles or laughs or anything; occasionally there is a wide, quarter-moon grin).”

* An inquisitive male reporter discovered that she accomplished this by a standard wifely tactic: she packed some of her gear in her husband’s two bags.