Programming a President

Which pair is least compatible?

1) Oil and water

2) Egypt and Israel

3) William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal

4) Richard Nixon and TV

In 1960, the answer would have been laughably obvious. By 1968, however, things had changed. A "new Nixon" appeared on television with the kind of polish that could sell a used car to an Amish elder. The inevitable question arose from cynics and supporters alike: How come?

According to a book published this week, The Selling of the President 1968 (Trident Press; $5.95), it was simply a case of good advertising. Author Joe McGinniss, 26, a former Philadelphia newspaperman, followed Nixon's electronic campaign for about six months. He makes the point that the candidate of 1968 was not all that different from the candidate of 1960. The difference was that in 1968 the man the public saw was the man the Nixon men wanted people to see: a television Nixon who was casual, relaxed, warm, concerned, and--above all--sincere.

Book Bag Kid. "It's not what's there that counts," says Raymond Price, a former editorial writer for the New York Herald Tribune and one of Nixon's speechwriters. "The response is to the image, not to the man." This, to McGinniss, became the credo of the Nixon TV campaign. "It was as if they were building not a President but an Astrodome, where the wind would never blow, the temperature never rise or fall, and the ball never bounce erratically on the artificial grass."

One of the most important members of the Nixon TV team was Roger Ailes, a 29-year-old master of TV who met Nixon in the fall of 1967, when Ailes was executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show and Nixon was a guest. Ailes' campaign assignment was to produce Nixon's television appearances. Ailes developed the "man in the arena" format, in which Nixon confronted a panel of questioners and a studio audience. "Let's face it," Ailes told a studio director in Philadelphia. "A lot of people think Nixon is dull. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a book bag, who was 42 years old the day he was born. They figure other kids got footballs for Christmas, Nixon got a briefcase and he loved it. That's why these shows are important: to make them forget all that."

According to McGinniss, the studio panel was carefully preselected. "First, this meant a Negro," he writes. "One Negro. Not two. Two would be offensive to whites. Two would be trying too hard." The audience was "recruited from the local Republican organiza tions," and cued for applause. Ailes also stage-managed Nixon's appearance:

a suntan instead of slapdash makeup jobs; no lectern to hide behind. Ailes kept the set simple, the colors manly. Once Chicago set designers tried to use oh-so-chic turquoise curtains as a back drop. "Those stupid bastards," railed Ailes. "Nixon wouldn't have looked right unless he was carrying a pocketbook."

Folksy Manner. Nixon was also mar keted through commercials supervised by Harry Treleaven, formerly of J. Walter Thompson. Treleaven was drinking a can of beer on the beach at Amagansett, L.I., one September day in 1967 when he was approached by a neigh bor, Len Garment, a partner in Nixon's law firm. Garment invited Treleaven to handle Nixon's TV ad campaign.

"We went to Treleaven," said Garment later, "because of his experience with the great institutional products of America. He handled Pan Am, Ford, RCA --the established American institutions.'

Nixon's staff even heeded the guidelines of a report pointing out that "the simple folksy manner of John Wayne can be effective with the target group" of voters they were after. Kevin Phillips, a vote analyst, added that "Wayne might sound bad to people in New York, but he sounds great to the shmucks we're trying to reach. The people down there along the Yahoo belt."

The crass language of TV huckstering rings authentically throughout The Selling of a President, particularly since nearly one-third of the book is devoted to reprinting notes and memos from Nixon's TV advisers. The book is fast-paced, fascinating--and a bit frightening. The men who wrote the memos probably meant no disrespect; they were merely transferring the cynicism of the ad world to the business of politics. The fact that they cannot differentiate between a candidate for President and a container of Ban tells a great deal more about advertising and television than it does about Nixon.

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