Outside Looking In by Garry Wills

Author:Garry Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

8

Nixon

I first got involved in presidential politics by accident. In 1967, I had taken my wife and three children to my parents’ home in Michigan for the Christmas vacation. I got a phone call from Harold Hayes, the Esquire editor, who asked me if I could fly immediately to New Hampshire. Murray Kempton, whom he had asked to cover Nixon’s attempted comeback in that state’s primary, had canceled for family reasons. I flew out, missing Christmas with my family for the second time at Harold’s behest (the first time was when he sent me to Dallas to write about Jack Ruby). This time I fell into a political situation for which I had no experience. I was lucky enough to meet with some friendly journalists who knew more than I did, people like Jim Dickenson, Jack Germond, and Jules Witcover. Jim Dickenson and his wife, Mollie, also a journalist, became and remain especially close friends. One day when Nixon ghosted himself away for unannounced TV tapings, leaving the press crew with nothing to do, Jim and I tried to ski for the first time in our lives. Neither was deft, but I was the prime goof, going backward on the beginners’ slope.

To follow the New Hampshire primary, as my earliest exposure to presidential politics, was a blessing, especially in 1967, before twenty-four-hour cable exposure had made the event national, scrutinized by hundreds of commentators. There was still a local and intimate feel to the process. Candidates crisscrossed each other in that tiny cockpit, where teams of reporters mingled and compared notes daily. I saw George Romney’s flameout when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because he was “brainwashed” by government guides on his trip there.

When Nixon took a break from the New Hampshire primary to set up the race in Wisconsin, his entourage was still small enough to be fitted, staff and journalists, in a DC-3 with only twenty seats in the economy section. After short hops about Wisconsin, we boarded a plane for a night flight to Chicago, and Pat Buchanan, his press aide, led me up into the darkened first-class section for an interview with Nixon. Under the dim overhead light, it was my first close-up opportunity to observe the famous nose. I suppose these words in my Esquire article, more than anything else, earned a place for me on Nixon’s later enemies list:In pictures, its most striking aspect is the ski-jump silhouette (“Bob Hope and I would make a great ad for Sun Valley”) but the aspect that awes one when he meets Nixon is its distressing width, accentuated by the depth of the ravine running down its center, and by its general fuzziness. Nixon’s “five o’clock shadow” extends all the way up to his heavy eyebrows, though—like many hairy men—he is balding above the brows’ “timber line.” The nose swings far out; then, underneath, it does not rejoin his face in a straight line, but curves back up again, leaving a large but partially screened space between nose and lip.

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