Right All Along

Into the crowd of well-wishers and party workers gathered in Wing B of Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel strode the other half of the Eisenhower-Nixon team. His shoulders thrown back, his face glowing, the Vice President cried: "We're in! We're in!" Hours before, when Rich ard Milhous Nixon had been asked how he felt about the first intimations of a G.O.P. landslide, his reply had been guarded: "At a time like this, you just don't feel good--you feel numb." Now. with Pat Nixon at his side, as she had been throughout the campaign, all numbness had disappeared. The election Scoreboard had seen to that. Reaching for a drink. Nixon seemed to relax for the first time since he launched his bone-wearying campaign on Sept. 18.

The crowds that had come to hear him had been among the biggest of the campaign. Partisanship, in part, had impelled some of his audiences into the hired halls.

But many others came to get a look at the man who had been unmercifully clubbed by the opposition. Democratic Chairman Paul Butler had called him "the most despicable character in all the political history of the United States."

The very vehemence of the attack contributed to the success of Nixon's cam paign : the hard-working young man who represented Ike to the bulk of the American people seemed not at all like a devil with horns. And neither did he turn out to be the liability that Harold Stassen had predicted. Stassen had said that polls showed that Nixon would lose the G.O.P. 6% of the votes--and thus the election, since Ike got 55% of the vote in 1952. But in 1956. with Nixon at his side, Ike got 57-8%.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.