Republicans: Stately Pace v. Aggressive Courtship

“After the 1960 campaign,” Richard Nixon recalled last week, “Jack Kennedy and I got together for a post mortem. We agreed that while people usually judge a candidate by the number of miles he covers and the number of hands he shakes, that kindof campaign is madness. With modern communications, it is also a waste of time.”

Nixon learned other lessons from his joust with John Kennedy, and he is cannily applying them to his primary battles against Michigan’s George Romney. The former Vice President’s campaign to date in New Hampshire and Wisconsin has been relaxed and understated, designed to encourage the image of Nixon as statesman. Ironically, Nixon believes that in the popular memory he has somehow acquired a Kennedyesque patina simply because they opposed each other in 1960. He is right about some of the patina, of course: he has a new TV makeup man.

Like John Kennedy, Nixon refuses to kiss babies or wear funny hats on the campaign circuit. In contrast to Governor Romney’s hyperactive hand-pumpings at street corner and factory gate, Nixon is deliberately restricting himself to broad policy speeches, delivered with a new urbanity and self-effacing if slightly forced humor, before sizable crowds. For unlike Romney, Nixon is almost too well known. After eight years with Eisenhower, his loss to Kennedy, and his disastrous defeat by Pat Brown in California, he knows he must avoid seeming stale—and a loser—in the voters’ minds.

Racial Gaffe. Last week, as the candidates passed the midway point in the New Hampshire primary campaign ending on March 12, Nixon continued campaigning at a stately pace. He delivered two speeches in Wisconsin, scene of the nation’s second primary, then returned to the Granite State for several weekend appearances with his wife Pat, Daughters Julie, 19, and Tricia, 21, and Julie’s 19-year-old fiancé, David Eisenhower.

Only once did Nixon lose his footing. In Rhinelander, Wis., a TV interviewer asked him about Viet Nam. “This country cannot tolerate a long war,” Nixon blurted. “TheAsians have no respect for human lives. They don’t care about body counts.” The implicit racial slur invited attack, particularly against a candidate advocating vigorous prosecution of the war.

Still, a Gallup poll last week showed Nixon the choice of 51% of G.O.P. voters, followed by New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller (25%) and California’s Governor Ronald Reagan (8%). Romney was in fourth place with 7%. Another Gallup rated Nixon even, 42 to 42, with President Johnson among all the nation’s voters.

Global Dog. For all the confident serenity of his campaign, Nixon’s aloof campaign style is a calculated gamble. Despite the odds against him in the opinion polls, Romney’s aggressive courtship is obviously beginning to win some supporters. Where Nixon treats Viet Nam in gingerly generalities, Romney has lately hammered out at least a comprehensible if debatable formula calling for “neutralization” of the two Viet Nams, Laos and Cambodia. In fact, the Michigander’s war views are beginning to intersect more and more with those of Democratic Peace Candidate Eugene McCarthy. “The pattern of public deception over Viet Nam has not receded in the last 5½ months,” Romney said in New Hampshire last week, defending his “brainwashing” charge against the Administration. “If anything, it has been escalated.”

“We’re losing the war,” he insists, adding with a flourish of Romneyesque euphuism: “The Viet Nam tail is wagging our global dog.” And, in the midst of his political rhetoric, Mormon Romney invariably ticks off a litany of the nation’s six “declines”: “Decline of religious conviction, moral character, the quality of family life, the principle of individual responsibility, patriotism, and respect for law.”

“If One Came.” Romney’s chief political booster, Nelson Rockefeller, continued to disavow presidential designs of his own, but for the first time in nearly three years he began to break his silence—just a little bit—on Viet Nam. Having endured a brutal public relations defeat in the New York City garbage dispute when he refused to call out the National Guard to break the sanitation strike, Rockefeller obliquely compared that battle to the war.

“Increasingly the reaction, when one is frustrated, is to pull a gun or call out the troops or drop the bomb,” he told a news conference. “I don’t honestly think that this is going to be the answer to our problems at home or to problems internationally.” In Detroit, where he spoke at week’s end at a Romney fund-raising luncheon, Rocky emerged just long enough from his noncandidate’s shell to tell reporters flatly that he would accept a draft at the convention—”if one came about.”