Nation: FOULS IN THE FINAL ROUNDS

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Up to the final weeks of the cam paign, Hubert Humphrey and Rich ard Nixon had filled relatively rigid roles. Humphrey, who after the Dem ocratic Convention privately admitted, "I'm dead," sought resurrection by fron tal assault. He inveighed against "Rich ard the Silent," vowed "to put a blow torch to his political tail and run him out into the open." Nixon rarely ventured out of his protective thicket of statesmanlike aloofness, either to discuss the issues or trade invective. As one top Republican strategist said immediately after Miami Beach, "It would suit me if he sits on the front porch all fall while we play that acceptance speech on TV."

Whether because of Humphrey's blowtorch or out of a desire not to appear overconfident in the campaign's final days, Nixon last week abruptly changed tactics. Like Harry Truman in 1948, he whistle-stopped through Ohio and motored across eastern Pennsylvania, giving as much hell as he had earlier absorbed. Humphrey, he said, owns "the fastest, loosest tongue in the nation" and performs "the fastest switch of position ever seen in American politics." In nine Ohio communities, Nixon hit the crime issue harder than ever, talking about the murder, rape and mayhem being committed elsewhere in the land. "Hubert Humphrey," he cried at one stop, "defends the policies under which we have seen crime rising ten times as fast as the population. If you want your President to continue the do-nothing policy toward crime, vote for Humphrey. If you want to fight crime, vote for Nixon. Hubert Humphrey," he declared in Dayton, "sat on his hands and watched the U.S. become a nation where 50% of American women are frightened to walk their city streets at night."

Parity Concept. As campaign oratory goes, it was not an unusual sort of exaggeration. Nor was it exactly surprising that Nixon ignored the Johnson Administration's efforts to help the states fight crime, and the fact that Humphrey recommends additional programs toward that end. Nixon was not overly scrupulous either, when he implied that Supreme Court civil liberties decisions have given "thousands" of known murderers their freedom.

Even in his latest address on net work radio—a medium he had previously used for calm, almost scholarly talks, Nixon did some pre-Halloween scare work. "I charge the opposition with creating a security gap for America," he said. Much in the pattern of John Kennedy's missile-gap talk in 1960 and Barry Goldwater's assertions in 1964 that the U.S. was becoming weak militarily, Nixon accused the Democrats of endangering the nation's lead over the Russians in strategic missiles, nuclear submarines and tactical and long-range aircraft. "This parity concept," Nixon observed gravely, "means superiority for potential enemies. We cannot accept this concept and survive as a free people."