National Affairs: Old Nixon, New Magic

Dick Nixon flew out of Washington on his first prop-stop tour of the 1958 campaign last week, and before his chartered flying-command post had made three landings, Republicans across the land had a feeling they were back in business again.

At each stop he was well briefed on local grievances, had a special potion for local ailments. In Indianapolis he reminded internecine Indiana conservatives of their common enemy: “The radical A.D.A., which dominates the Democratic National Committee.” In Los Angeles he pitched a more moderate appeal to California’s golden harvest of independent votes: “Forget for the moment whether you are Republicans or Democrats.” In

San Francisco he labored out front and backstage to try to bring harmony between U.S. Senator Bill Knowland, the would-be Governor, and Governor Goodwin J. Knight, the reluctant would-be U.S. Senator, while steering clear of Knowland’s lonely stand for a right-to-work law.

But in Indiana, California and Oregon Nixon helped all the local causes by laying down a hard and quotable Republican line on national issues. Items:

Quemoy and Matsu. “What is at stake is not just Quemoy and Matsu, and not just Formosa, but the whole free world position in Asia. A policy of firmness when dealing with the Communists is a peace policy. A policy of weakness is a war policy.” When Democrat Adlai Stevenson suggested a Formosa plebiscite to see whether Chiang Kai-shek should stay, Nixon shot back a suggestion for a plebiscite in Communist China to see whether the Reds should stay.

Sherman Adams. “If our opponents want to fight this campaign out on the comparative standards of honesty in the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, we’ll give them the shellacking of their lives. The only way we could get the crooks out of the Truman Administration was to put them in jail.”

Defense. “Democrats imply that we are so scientifically poverty stricken and that our industrial machinery is so ramshackle that everything we are going to do in the next few years will be wrong and everything the Communists do will be right. This is rotgut thinking.”

Congress. “If you vote for a Democrat, you are voting to raise your taxes, cheapen your money, and stifle the new investment and enterprise, which mean more jobs and more progress for the American people.”

By week’s end Nixon had worked such magic among Republicans that the Democrats were taking back all the nice words they had said about the “new Nixon.” “The new Nixon,” growled the Fair-Dealing New York Post, “bears a striking resemblance to the old.”

By any other name the Republicans were still delighted.