Pushing the Human Side

"By March," Presidential Adviser John Ehrlichman predicted in mid-January, "all the press carping will be forgotten. The President will have announced this year's program. He'll have the initiative. He'll have a forward-looking, dynamic aspect."

Ehrlichman's optimism was at least premature. In March the President's "new American revolution" is sputtering on Capitol Hill. The Gallup poll found that, thanks to Laos, 69% of the American people think the Administration "is not telling the public all they should know" about Viet Nam. Nor is there any dramatic improvement yet in either inflation or unemployment. Issues aside, one of Richard Nixon's most insistent problems remains the old devilment of his personal image.

White House aides sometimes despair that his more human qualities and his executive strengths simply do not get across to the people. Says Attorney General John Mitchell: "People do not see the President for what he really is or see what he is really doing. He is the most misunderstood and underestimated President." As Nixon knows, that "misunderstanding" is liable to become more and more politically dangerous to him as 1972 approaches.

Equal Time. Thus, despite his deep suspicions of the news media, Nixon has embarked on what is for him an extraordinary campaign of public relations. "It's a feeling on the President's part," says one White House staff member, "that the time has come to make it more personal. This is the first sustained effort to show the President's personal side."

At times recently, Nixon has been in the uncharacteristic position of actually pursuing the press himself--a minor symptom of his tendency to veer from one extreme to another. Two weeks ago, NBC's Barbara Walters was about to embark on a vacation when she received a call from the White House inviting her to bring down a camera crew for what became a two-hour interview for the Today show. Broadcast last week, the program had Nixon chatting about his wife Pat, American family life and other values. When the interviewer prodded him gently about his "stuffy" image, the President protested, a bit too much, that he never gave the matter a thought. "I don't worry about images," he said. "I am just going to do a good job for this country."

This week Nixon scheduled an hour's interview with ABC-TV's Howard K. Smith. Earlier, Nixon consented to a long on-the-record talk with conservative British Journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, which resulted in some eye-opening optimism about the ultimate outcome in Indochina. Nixon even sent Worsthorne some afterthoughts about his childhood: "I developed in these formative years a strong commitment toward individual responsibility and individual dignity."

The President remains careful about the newsmen he will see. The New York Times's James Reston, Max Frankel and Robert Semple have had standing requests with the White House for Nixon interviews, but the President instead summoned an old journalistic friend, the Times's somewhat more conservative columnist Cyrus L. Sulzberger, when he wanted to talk. The first that the paper's Washington bureau knew of the session was when Sulzberger walked in and reported that he had just spent an hour with the President. Nixon made the somewhat startling prediction that Viet Nam would be the nation's last war, but generally provided a thoughtful and tempered tour d'horizon of world affairs.

At least part of the President's new expansiveness springs from current family happenings--Tricia's engagement, for example. Just before Pat Nixon turned 59, the President invited nine women reporters to the Oval Office for a 75-minute talk about his wife and daughters, about his catsup-on-cottage-cheese dietary lunches and his selfdiscipline. Yet as often happens when Richard Nixon attempts jovial bonhomie, the encounter had a certain wooden quality. He may mean to reveal "the human side," but it remains curiously elusive. As one White House aide observes: "You have to recognize that Richard Nixon is a very private man."

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