REPUBLICANS: Candidate in Crisis

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Plenty of Advice. The grim effects of this change of fortune became more apparent to Nixon as he moved into New York City for three days of conferences and huddles in his Waldorf-Astoria suite prior to his TV debate. Not only was Kennedy surging in the big-vote eastern states and winning adulation in the streets, but the Nixon camp itself was showing its first signs of gloom and discouragement. Gone was the confident prediction that Nixon would win or lose in one big sweep—the win to be based, hopefully, on his clear superiority in leadership of the cold war battle. Instead, the Nixon forces were regrouping for a dogged stateby-state battle for votes, prepared to stick to Nixon's experience theme for all it was worth but equally ready (along with the Democrats) to work such local issues as farm support in the Midwest. oil depletion in Texas, aid for depressed areas in states of rising unemployment.

In huddles with such Republican leaders as New York's Governor Rockefeller. Tom Dewey, Herbert Hoover and Publisher Roy Howard, Nixon aired his problems. One sign of Republican worry was the barrage of advice, some of it flatly contradictory, that poured in on him. Among other things, advice givers urged him to:

¶ Hit harder, in direct, personal attacks on Kennedy.

¶ Halt direct, personal attacks on Kennedy and stick to a high-toned foreign-policy-is-the-issue approach.

¶ Take a firm G.O.P. line and stop trying to sound both liberal and conservative.

¶ Bring Ike more directly into the campaign, perhaps by staging joint Ike-Dick parades in New York and Chicago.

¶ Break away from Ike—to create an independent image of strength instead of hanging onto Ike's coattails.

Plunge into Bathos. Nixon is something of a fatalist and no stranger to tight spots. No spot could be tighter than the tense moment in the 1952 campaign when he was caught in the uproar over a Nixon trust fund and found not only Democrats but Dwight Eisenhower's lieutenants ready to throw him off the ticket. Completely on his own, he delivered his well-remembered nationwide TV speech in which he laid bare his personal finances and mentioned, in a plunge into bathos, that the only gift he ever had accepted was the little dog Checkers. The Checkers speech became a monument to political torn, but the oft-forgotten fact was that it brought Dick Nixon such a landslide of popular support that Ike promptly welcomed him back to the team as "my boy."