The Coronation of King Richard

THERE has always been something of the born loser about Richard Nixon. Save for his satellite days in the Eisenhower sun, he has never known the Roman triumphs of an easy campaign or an easeful election eve in all his long political life. Considered the favorite in 1960, he lost to John Kennedy and two years later was even rejected for Governor by California voters. Starting far ahead, he let Hubert Humphrey nearly overtake him in 1968, and suffered a setback in the 1970 congressional elections because of an unduly strident campaign. Not much more than a year ago it looked as if he might become the first incumbent President since Herbert Hoover to be turned out of office. But now, for the first time in his scar-studded career, he bestrides the American political arena like a colossus. By every sign, omen and pollster's tally sheet, Nixon and his running mate Spiro Agnew have it made. The President may be forgiven a touch of vertigo these days.

Inevitably, this week's Republican Convention in Miami Beach wears the joyful and slightly smug mien of a coronation. It is proudly programmed to praise the man who is going to give the Republicans four more years at the helm of the nation, and who will perhaps forge the first new alignment of political power in the U.S. since the New Deal. The campaign to follow looms almost as anticlimax, an exercise in the forms of democracy, though it will be the most lavishly financed and highly organized in Republican history. Yet it should also pose the sharpest choice on basic issues of any modern U.S. election. No matter; in the euphoria of the convention, the Republicans are acting as if the voting were already over. Four years ahead of time, conservatives are maneuvering to put their ideological favorite, Spiro Agnew, at the top of the ticket when Nixon steps down.

To judge from the convention scene, Richard Nixon, that most controversial of politicians, never had an enemy in the world. Old rivals were as eager as party job holders to pay tribute to the President. California Governor Ronald Reagan, his own presidential ambitions behind him, readily agreed to chair the convention until Tuesday afternoon. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, having moved far enough rightward to satisfy the President, was happy to put Nixon in nomination.

Unity and punctuality were to be the watchwords of this convention--in pointed contrast to the discordant Democrats. "The convention will be short, compact and precise," declared Republican National Committee Chairman Robert Dole. "We want a convention that will be watched--and not just by insomniacs." Everything is under control, observes the wry Dole, including a "spontaneous floor demonstration for Nixon and Agnew." Dissent is muted, polite, served up in small doses. There is no Bella Abzug storming around denouncing the nominee; instead Jill Ruckelshaus, wife of the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, makes a discreet, ladylike case for more lenient abortion laws.

Celluloid. The bulky party platform, composed at the White House and supporting the President on every imaginable issue, is accepted with scant protest. California Congressman Paul "Pete" McCloskey, who may have one elected delegate at the convention, wanted to be put in nomination for President to air his antiwar views, but television time is too valuable for that. The Rules Committee last week hastily approved a proposal that no one can be nominated unless he is supported by a majority of delegates in three states. "Open-door party!" snorts McCloskey. "It's like putting five padlocks on it and then cementing it shut."

The delegates are assembled not to deliberate--there is nothing to deliberate--but to pay homage to the President, and to have a good time. The convention delegates have that familiar Republican look: white, middle-aged male, a bit balding. There are more women this time, 30% of the convention as compared with 17% in 1968. Youth representation has jumped from 1% to 9% on the floor and even more in the galleries. To offset the youthful image of the Democratic Convention five weeks earlier, the Republicans have brought in 3,000 people 30 and under to do odd jobs and cheer themselves hoarse for Nixon. Explains Stephen Nostrand, a staff director for National Young Voters for Nixon: "If the President calls and says, 'I need 500 kids at a press conference,' we can get them there in 20 minutes." Outside the convention hall, the protesting youths (and their elders) that were gathering had a leaner, hungrier look than the more casual and less dedicated dissidents at the Democratic Convention.

The President is the convention star on celluloid as well as in person. Three films are shown on Nixon and family, all produced by David Wolper. The camera pans in on the President at work. Speaking into an Oval Office phone, he orders: "Get off a telephone call or message to Connally. What does he think? I suppose he went up the wall." Staffers enter--an act not to be undertaken lightly, the narrator warns. "The President must be jealous of his time. Whatever they bring him must be pertinent and precise." White House Aide John Ehrlichman chats with Nix on. Says the President: "What's the matter with these clowns? The whole purpose of this is to get property taxes down." Replies Ehrlichman: "That's what I thought you'd say."

Others pay tribute to the President, including his daughter Tricia. She reveals how her father, too shy to speak to her directly, slipped a note under her door spelling out his ideas on marriage. Speechwriter Pat Buchanan wonderingly recalls: "If you had said to me that in 1972 I'd be in the Great Hall of the People in Peking clinking glasses with Premier Chou Enlai, I'd have said you were out of your ever-loving mind."

Pat Nixon is the subject of a 15-minute film narrated by old Nixon Fan Jimmy Stewart who explains: "She shows the softer side while he negotiates the somber affairs of state." Her "32 years of political partnership" are briefly detailed. Under her guidance, says Stewart, the White House has become a "social mecca" where 13,000 guests were entertained for dinner in the first two years of the Administration --a record for First Ladies. Described as a "force in her own right," Mrs. Nixon is shown on her various tours around the world as "elegant, but never aloof --reachable."

The Republican extravaganza is a faithful mirror of the party's supreme confidence, a confidence as great as it was when Ike was running and Dick Nixon was considered at best a liability --someone was always trying to get him off the ticket. Now each succeeding poll shows the G.O.P. candidate pulling farther ahead of George McGovern (see story, page 15). The news is so good that the President's supporters scarcely dare believe it--or so they say. "We're really running scared," says a White House aide, "for about one inch. People are running around the White House telling themselves, 'Yeah, yeah, we're scared.' " Not so scared, apparently, as to fail to count their chickens in advance. "We aren't conceding anything," says Dole, "We aren't saying we'll win all 50 states, but we aren't conceding anything." Some Republicans talk about gaining control of the House in a Nixon landslide, but that is only an outside chance since the party would have to pick up 39 seats.

Prospects are brighter in the Senate, where a switch of only five seats would put the Republicans in command.

The role of the President in his own campaign is a curious one. It is almost as if he were not needed --or wanted. The less campaigning he does, think some Republicans, the better. "We blew it in 1960 and 1970, and we almost blew it in 1968," says a White House staffer. "If we can keep Nixon on the job and off the road, we'll be better off. But I'm not sure we can do it. Nixon loves to campaign, though he's a lousy campaigner." For the moment, however, the President plans to stay on the job. He will leave the rest of the work to what are called "presidential surrogates": a collection of Cabinet heads, Congressmen, and others who will carry the Nixon message. They will act as shields in the basic strategy: keep Richard Nixon the President from having to answer George McGovern the challenger. No debates on television, no debates in the press, stick to the issues and to what Republican strategists characterize--and intend to exploit--as the McGovern challenge to America's basic institutions.

The preliminary platform approved last week was laced with anti-McGovern vitriol. It asserted that the Democratic Party has been "seized by a radical clique which scorns our nation's past and would blight her future," and would turn "back toward a nightmarish time in which the torch of free America was virtually snuffed out in a storm of violence and protest." It piously protests that the U.S. should not perform an "act of betrayal" by overthrowing the Saigon government, nor should it "go begging to Hanoi." And: "We reject a whimpering 'come back America' retreat into isolationism."

To finance their massive campaign, the Republicans plan to raise some $35 million, and more than half of that amount is already in hand. Nixon's chief fund raiser, Maurice Stans, is a master of the hard sell. He tells contributors that they should give at least 1% of their gross income to the campaign. Says he: "That's a low price to pay every four years to ensure that the Executive Branch of the Government is in the right hands." Such was Stans' zeal that he raised more than $ 10 million before the new campaign law went into effect that requires the disclosure of the names of contributors of more than $ 10. Democrats are pressing the Republicans to make public these anonymous, under-the-wire contributors, but the G.O.P. has no intention of doing so, suggesting that the number of Democrats on the list would be highly embarrassing to McGovern. Unlike 1968, the bulk of the funds will go to the grass-roots operations, though the grass roots complain that they have not received much of anything yet. The amount spent on media advertising will be considerably less than the $13.8 million ceiling set by the new law; the Republicans do not think they need it.

Funds will be distributed by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, an organization that has been operating for more than a year. Staffed in part with castoffs from the White House and the relatives of key Administration people (Nixon's brother Edward is co-chairman of Lawyers for Nixon), C.R.P. is regarded as amateurish by the more seasoned professionals at the Republican National Committee, who have far less money and manpower at their disposal. C.R.P.'s most famous exploit to date is its connection with the bugging of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex (see story, page 20). So far, the C.R.P. promise outruns performance. The President himself has questioned a C.R.P. claim that 125,000 youths are ready to hit the pavement for Nixon, and at a recent breakfast of state chairmen, complaints about the committee flew thick and fast. New York State Republican Chairman Charles Lanigan told of being phoned by a C.R.P. aide who asked him whether the Governor of New York is elected or appointed.

Clark MacGregor took over as campaign manager when John Mitchell resigned, and has been bringing some order to chaos. Gradually, Republican moguls who would talk only to Mitchell are beginning to talk to MacGregor. Not that Mitchell has vanished. His law office is located in the same building as the C.R.P., and he often drops by or rings up. He takes a particular interest in New York, a state he thinks Nixon has an excellent chance of winning. Remaining as before a confidant of the President, he is a dour and formidable figure. At a recent meeting of the presidential surrogates, he praised the President in glowing terms and then asked if anybody had ideas for improvement. When nobody responded, Mitchell smiled and said, "Well, perhaps we've kept you here too long."

At the White House, the campaign is closely run by the President, MacGregor, Domestic Affairs Assistant Ehrlichman, Presidential Assistant H.R. Haldeman and Special Counsel to the President Charles Colson. The presidential aides and other senior staffers meet at 8:15 every morning and plot the day's strategy. White House watchers are intrigued by the prominence of Colson, 40, once the lightly regarded head of the "department of dirty tricks." While remaining the hatchet man who keeps errant staffers in line and dreams up projects to embarrass the opposition, Colson also now mixes in such delicate matters as the grain sale to the Soviet Union. He has a sign on his wall that reads: " 'I hope the Nixon people do to George McGovern what the Democrats did--underestimate him. If they do that, we'll kill them.'--Gary Hart, Washington Post, May 14, 1972."

Most White House staffers have been given extra chores for the campaign, though they are careful not to be seen doing them. To get too much publicity is tantamount to disloyalty. Speechwriter Raymond Price Jr. has enlarged his staff, while Pat Buchanan and William Safire have left Price's operation to write directly for the President. Herb Klein continues to move quietly among the media explaining the President's policies. Nixon seeks advice from a variety of ideological sources. On the one hand, he listens to Deep-Dyed Conservative Buchanan. On the other, he sends liberal-leaning Leonard Garment as an emissary to the intellectual community.

The campaign will stress the President's record. By all reports, Nixon has finally faced up to the fact that he will never be a well-loved President. So he has consoled himself with maintaining that he is at least a respected one who has proved that he can handle the job. The campaign will attempt, in the words of Ehrlichman, to build up a "mosaic of competence" around the President. Speakers, literature and commercials will emphasize these areas:

FOREIGN AFFAIRS. The President has wrought a historic change in relations with the two hostile superpowers, China and the Soviet Union, opening fresh chances for accommodation and peace throughout the world. His creative statesmanship was all the more remarkable for its turnabout from his own record of narrow anti-Communism and for being accomplished even while the Viet Nam War continued.

DISARMAMENT. While the Democrats talked about limiting nuclear weapons, Nixon got the SALT talks going and has begun a chain of agreements. He showed that he is willing to compromise but not give up an American advantage without a quid pro quo.

VIET NAM. Though the President has so far failed in his promise to end the war, he has at least ended the American ground combat role; 500,000 Americans have come home, casualties have been reduced to fewer than ten a week. But the heavy bombing of North Viet Nam and other areas of Indochina goes on, and so does the killing of Asians. There still seems to be no early return in sight for the American prisoners of war in Hanoi's hands.

THE ECONOMY. Belatedly, the President took command by imposing a wage-price freeze that has worked better than most critics said it would. Inflation has been slowed, and the G.N.P. is beginning to rise at a brisk rate. By devaluing the dollar, the President showed that he could be as flexible as he had to be in handling the economy.

For all the emphasis on issues, staying out of the political fray will not be easy for an old gut-fighter, however much reformed. When Nixon hears the bell, his first impulse is to come out punching. One skeptical liberal Republican expects the campaign to be "very presidential in the beginning, but pretty soon there will be lots of Democratic bait. Nixon will rise to it." But so far, so gentle. As an illustration of the style now in favor, neither the President nor his press secretary responded to Ramsey Clark's broadcast from Hanoi accusing the U.S. of bombing the dikes (see story, page 16). The counterattack was delegated to Secretary of State William Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. "We have to watch out that the kick-'em-in-the-nuts urge doesn't become so great that we give in to it," says a White House aide known for some expert kicking in his time.

Spiked Mace. Even Spiro Agnew is to be reined in. For much of Nixon's first term, the Vice President's principal duty seemed to be to go after the Administration's enemies and critics with a spiked mace. In alliterative swings he denounced Democrats, liberals, radicals, protesters, the press, the Eastern Establishment, even dissident members of his own party, with an assiduousness and acidity that would hardly have been becoming of the President. There were liberal Republicans who thought it unbecoming even in a Vice President, and who saw in Agnew few qualities that would make him a suitable President of the U.S., should the need arise. They urged Nixon to choose a new running mate for his second term. But the President, secure in the polls and mindful of Agnew's loyal and noisy constituency on the right, decided not "to break up a winning combination."

During the campaign, Agnew will continue to address those $1,000-a-plate dinners where Republican fat cats come to devour the Veep's red meat. But Agnew has been instructed not to become any more of a campaign issue himself than he already is thanks to past rhetoric. "Give the Democrats hell," the President advised him, but judicious hell, and lay off everybody else, particularly the press. Agnew will not, of course, take the high road. That is still reserved for the President. Agnew will have to find something in between, perhaps what McGovern sarcastically calls "low-road remote control."

There are signs, in fact, that Agnew is learning, though critics would say mainly from his own mistakes. "He didn't go to Harvard," says someone who knows him well. "Washington is full of educated people, and he has had to play catch-up ball." On his trips overseas, he may have stumbled less than the press has suggested; certainly they were publicity flops, in part because of his own hostility to the press, but they were not necessarily failures from the point of view of Nixon's foreign policy. A high ranking State Department official feels that in general Agnew has handled himself well. "He is courteous and articulate. He understands and reflects nuances. He has always been able to establish rapport with leaders of foreign governments." Though Agnew has gone out of his way to defend the colonels in Greece, the official feels that there, too, the Vice President carried out the orders he was given. But Agnew does not always perform so well. When he visited South Korea for the first time, he got into such a row with President Chung Hee Park that he was treated with cool disdain when he paid a second visit.

At home, Agnew has been busy building up his own constituencies. Often feeling unwanted at the White House, not even let in on key projects like the President's journey to Peking, he has sought out groups where he would be more popular. As head of the Office of Intergovernmental Relations, he has ingratiated himself with many Governors and mayors round the country, Democrats included, who credit him with fighting hard for revenue sharing. That does not mean they would like to see him become President, but at least they have learned that he does not bite --them, anyway. Higher roads are obviously available to the Vice President if he chooses to take them.

It may be easier for the Republicans to restrain their aggressive tendencies this time round because they feel that McGovern has made haymakers unnecessary. They can scarcely believe their luck in having an opponent who laid out his whole program in vulnerable detail before the main campaign was under way. For months, Republican strategists have been picking it apart and storing up ammunition. Nixon has told his campaign planners: "Our peopie don't have to go around talking about our budget deficit. Talk about how much McGovern's programs would cost." He also intends to throw the blame for the deficits on the Democratic Congress, pointedly using the veto between now and Election Day to underscore the point. He began last week by vetoing a $30.5 billion appropriations bill for social services because it was almost $1.8 billion more than he had asked for.

Nixon instructed his campaigners not "to let McGovern off the hook." If he has changed his mind about something, forget it and play up what he said originally. McGovern, for example, has backed away from his proposal to give every American $1,000 as part of a program to redistribute income, but Republicans intend to remind middle-class voters how heavily they would have been taxed under that abandoned scheme. In case any campaign workers are unaware of the McGovern record, they will be able to consult a handy reference guide covering the Democratic nominee's positions on everything from amnesty to women. Says a researcher for the Republican National Committee: "I can't imagine how he could survive all this stuff, if we use it right."

McGovern will be portrayed as a man too radical for even the Democratic Party, a prisoner of what the Republicans call the beads-and-sandals set, the pot smokers, the gays, the abortionists, the crazies. Republicans will hammer away at what they call the "incredibility factor." Says a White House man: "The Democrats made it absolutely beyond belief that Goldwater could possibly win in 1964. This year Republicans are going to do the same thing with McGovern. We ought to get just so confident that nobody even thinks of George McGovern in the context of the White House."

The Republicans are going to do their best to pick up the Democrats who break with McGovern, to separate Democrats from McGovernites. "We want to solidify opinions now held across an unbelievably broad spectrum of the electorate," says MacGregor. Although Lyndon Johnson endorsed McGovern last week, several L.B.J. intimates have come out for Nixon. In Washington, John Connally has set up shop for Democrats for Nixon; he has been joined by L.B.J.'s former press secretary George Christian as well as former U.S. Information Agency Director Leonard Marks and Commerce Secretaries John Connor and C.R. Smith. Other Democrats who have defected: Frank Fitzsimmons, president of the Teamsters Union; Judge Mario Procaccino; former California Congressman James Roosevelt; Frank Sinatra; Sammy Davis Jr.; Mickey Mantle. The Republicans like to point out that there are no organized "Republicans for McGovern," though McGovern has promised that such a group is forthcoming.

The very elements, in fact, that have made up the Democratic coalition for 40 years are now threatening to desert to the G.O.P., and the Republicans are doing everything possible to make them feel at home. The so-called white ethnics, largely Catholic voters, have been pleased by Nixon's opposition to abortion and his support of aid to parochial schools. The blue-collar voter has been treated to a variety of favors. The New York City construction unions have been placated by an easing of the demand that they hire more members of minority groups. Transportation workers are happy that the President has stopped pushing a bill that would submit crippling strikes to compulsory arbitration. The maritime unions are expected to go Republican because the President has increased federal subsidies to the shipbuilding industry. One welcome windfall was a Nixon endorsement by the National Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association, a small but financially potent union that gave COPE, labor's political arm, its single largest contribution in 1970.

Blacks have been put off by the President's stand on busing and his coolness toward integration, but they also have been courted with federal jobs and aid to small business. After receiving a pledge of $14 million for his Soul City housing project in North Carolina, onetime CORE Director Floyd McKissick announced for Nixon. He was labeled a "political prostitute" by Georgia Legislator Julian Bond, though he retorted that his decision had nothing to do with the grant.

Special attention has been paid to the Chicane vote. As far back as December 1969, Nixon set up a Cabinet Committee on Opportunity for the Spanish-Speaking, now headed by Henry Ramirez. Numerous federal jobs, many of them high ranking, have been given to Spanish-speaking citizens. Ramirez exhorts his fellow Chicanes to give up the "Chevy mentality," the kind of attitude that repeatedly accepts the same old car, or the same party's choice for President. Yes indeed, you can buy a used car from this man.

All these various ethnic enterprises are directed by what is marvelously named the Heritage Division at the Republican National Committee and the Ethnics Division of the C.R.P. Brochures are sent out in the appropriate language detailing all that the Nixon Administration has done or promises to do for a particular group. As far as Republicans can tell, no race, creed or color that makes its home in America has been overlooked. For that matter, age categories and occupations are also targeted. At the C.R.P., there is a Director-Jewish, a Director-Youth, a Director-Elderly, a Director-Doctors, a Director-Lawyers, a Director-Business and Industry, a Director-Airline Pilots. Somewhere, for all anyone knows, there may be a Director-Effete Snobs.

This hastily contrived, jerry-built structure may or may not suffice to win the election, but will it endure beyond that? Republicans as well as Democrats have their doubts. It rests on too flimsy a foundation--political gimmickry rather than enduring political principle, lack of an attractive alternative candidate rather than adherence to Republican precepts. It lacks so far the kind of sustained vision or creative programs able to turn a minority party into a majority one. The flesh may be willing but the spirit is weak. Today the President may be the favorite of the schoolteacher, the auto mechanic, the Catholic father, the Jewish rabbi or --more usefully--the Jewish businessman. But tomorrow?

Bonus Plan. The evidence as the convention got under way was not reassuring. While the President was preparing his acceptance speech at Camp David last week, efforts to broaden the party base met with defeat. The party did not stand completely still. After hearings chaired by former Florida Representative William Cramer, the Rules Committee voted some long-sought procedural changes. From now on, party caucuses to select delegates must be open to all qualified Republicans. Unless they are required by state law, assessments can no longer be charged to delegates, who sometimes have had to pay as much as $1,000 for the privilege of attending the convention. Party leaders and elected officials can no longer be automatically selected as delegates; they will have to submit to the nominating process. Finally, the delegates will not be permitted to name their own alternates, a practice that led in the past to many husband-wife and father-son teams appearing at conventions.

But on the more important issue of delegate allotment, the conservatives proceeded to turn back the clock. Last April a U.S. district court declared that the Republican practice of giving bonus delegates to states that had gone Republican in the previous election is unconstitutional. But that did not stop conservatives from approving a variation of the bonus plan initiated by Texas Senator John Tower and New York Representative Jack Kemp. The new formulation favors Southern and Western states because Nixon is more likely to win them. These states would be overrepresented in 1976. Complained Charles Lanigan: "This plan freezes the Republican Party into the same sectional politics that has torn us apart in the past. I fear the party has forgotten how to be a national party."

Considering the scope of the Goldwater disaster in 1964, it was surprising how many Republicans displayed overt hostility to the larger states, as if they had not learned the impossibility of maintaining a viable political party without them. Much of the conservatives' opposition was directed at any attempt to impose a quota system, or what New York Senator James Buckley called "the impulse to McGovernize the party." And, having seen how quotas divided the Democrats by favoring one group at the expense of another, liberals were as hostile to them as conservatives. The liberals simply argued that a greater variety of people must be drawn into the party, and this can best be accomplished by enlarging the big-state delegations.

Behind the battles over arithmetic were maneuvers aimed at controlling the convention in 1976. Some conservatives accused the liberals of trying to push Agnew out of contention for the presidency by reducing his power base in the South and West, where his photograph figures more prominently in Republican offices than the President's. It is true that two of the leaders fighting for larger delegations, Charles Percy and William Brock, are known to harbor presidential ambitions. But Oregon's Bob Packwood denied that it was a "dump-Agnew movement. It will become one only over my dead body." Liberals pointed out that Agnew has strength among the ethnics in the big cities who would benefit from a delegate shift. Said Percy: "If Agnew wants to win elections as well as nominations, he will have to go where the people are."

If the convention is any indication, the Republican Party could be heading for another fateful divide. It has been proved that only a consensus Republican candidate--an Eisenhower, a renovated Nixon--can appeal to enough groups to get elected. In a party that claims the allegiance of only 30% of the nation's voters, a divisive candidate inevitably goes down to defeat. Yet Agnew and the forces behind him are following the same well-trodden sectarian route that leads nowhere except to a certain ideological satisfaction. It would be an irony indeed if in the very year that Longtime Loser Richard Nixon finally joins the roster of the big winners, his party should start throwing away his hard-won gains.

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