REPUBLICANS: Surprise in Dixie

Sensing a political wind shift in the South, Richard Nixon last week made a hastily arranged five-hour test run into North Carolina. The reception he got astonished him and everybody else.

At the Greensboro-High Point airport, 500 Carolinians rushed up to Nixon’s plane to greet him. He was well prepared: besieged for autographs, he reached into his pocket for cards he had machine signed earlier. At Greensboro’s War Memorial Auditorium, which can be used for either summer ice skating or speech making, the G.O.P. had decided on “An Evening of Skating and Coffee with Dick and Pat,” on the ground that with the rink open, fewer seats would have to be filled. But a crowd of 9,000 jammed the hall and spilled into the aisles. Another 2,500 found seats in an adjoining auditorium, where speeches were piped in. Still another 1,500 milled outside. Police turned back 1,000 cars because the coliseum parking lot was filled bumper to bumper.

Forthright Answer. Nixon reminded North Carolinians that he had lived in the South, indeed had spent three years at the Duke University Law School in Durham. N.C., and knew that civil rights are “a difficult and complex problem.” He had a forthright answer to a question about the Southwide Negro sit-in movement begun in Greensboro last February: “Any American is entitled to go into a store to buy products, and should have the same right as any other American to use all the facilities of that store without discrimination.” And without saying anything to lose any Negro votes, he got over the idea that the Republican civil rights plank was less drastic than the Democratic.

Flying back to Washington that night, Nixon was obviously awed by the enthusiasm he had met. “That is the kind of crowd you get in the last weeks of a campaign,” he said. “There is something happening down there. We are going to have to look at these Southern states again.”

Good Listener. Greensboro was the week’s lone occasion when Nixon went to the people. For the rest of the time, people came to him. Among them: Cinemactor George Murphy and Actress Helen Hayes, to report formation of a “Celebrities for Nixon Committee” (“Anyone who considers himself a celebrity,” said a Nixon aide, “is eligible to join”). The heads of the Big Three farm organizations, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Grange and the National Farmers Union, came by to talk farm policy. Said Farmers Union President James Patton afterwards: “He had some very worthwhile ideas … I also found him to be a good listener.”

Nixon also met with the 16 business men, professors and scientists of his brain trust, including Harvard Law Professor Lon Fuller, Nixon’s onetime law teacher at Duke. Drawing on their ideas, Nixon plans to issue a series of study papers on campaign issues, started the flow last week with a 30-page report on “The Meaning of Communism to Americans.”