Nation: NOW THE REPUBLIC

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He had worked for two weeks on the speech, writing it out himself on yellow legal pads. It contained major elements of the basic speech that he had delivered again and again during the primaries, and reporters who had followed him during those campaigns could finish many of the sentences as soon as they heard the first word or two. But the nation as a whole had not yet heard it. It was a mixture of carefully balanced political calculations and genuine personal warmth. It was, by any reasonable standard, corny, but it also was one of Nixon's most effective speeches in years. Gone was the excessive partisanship and professional anti-Communism of his early days. The nation wants a high-roader after Lyndon Johnson. The republic has survived subversion. The cold war is passé. Viet Nam is something to be settled, not won. So Nixon told them what they wanted to hear. "Tonight I do not promise the millennium in the morning. I don't promise that we can eradicate poverty and end discrimination in the space of four or even eight years. But I do promise action. And a new policy for peace abroad, a new policy for peace and progress and justice at home."

To the Communist world, he declared an end to the "era of confrontations," now that the "time has come for an era of negotiations." But the new Administration must "restore the strength of America so that we shall always negotiate from strength and never from weakness." He did not touch on arms control, a major point to be negotiated.

Greatest Engine. In parts, the speech followed the Nixon pattern of giving and taking away, of praising and then attacking. He paid his respects to the courts, but they have "gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces." And his Attorney General would be a real gangbuster. The black and the poor need rescue, but they "don't want to be a colony." Federal antipoverty efforts have not helped at all: "We have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustrations, violence and failure." Therefore, urged Nixon, the Government must use its powers to "enlist in this battle the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man: American private enterprise."

He was curiously touching in describing the son of the slums who "dreams the dreams of a child. And yet when he awakens, he awakens to a living nightmare." He was rather embarrassing in the sketch of another child, himself, who hears a train go by and dreams of faraway places. "It seems like an impossible dream." But a self-sacrificing father, a "gentle Quaker mother," a dedicated teacher, a minister, a courageous wife, loyal offspring, devoted followers—plus a cast of millions of voters—combine to put that boy on the train that stopped last week in Miami Beach, possibly on the way to the White House.