REPUBLICANS: Candidate in Crisis

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Cold Rejection. Ike's endorsement was all Nixon needed to assure him the Republican nomination: GOPoliticians had made up their minds for Nixon long before. He won their unshakable loyalty by campaigning hard for G.O.P. congressional and gubernatorial candidates in the off-year elections of 1954 and 1958. Over the years, Republican professionals had come to look upon Richard Nixon, rather than Dwight Eisenhower, as the leader of the Republican Party—and much of the talk of a "new Nixon" evolved from the fact that Nixon grew in stature as he came to accept this responsibility. When Nelson Rockefeller, with his impressive against-the-tide victory in New York State in 1958 and his magic way with crowds, set out with hopes of winning the G.O.P. presidential nomination, he met with cold and swift rejection by Republican politicos—not because they doubted his vote-getting abilities, but because they were loyal to Nixon and respected him.

Once he got the nomination at Chicago, Nixon faced a tough problem in political arithmetic: in the U.S. in 1960, Democrats outnumber Republicans by many millions. Despite Ike's vast personal popularity, a Democratic tide has brought about 2-to-1 Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, a Democratic edge of 33 to 17 in governorships. Public-opinion polls and voter-registration tallies indicate a basic Democratic majority of roughly 7 to 5. "To win," said Richard Nixon at the start of his campaign, "we have to get most of the Republicans, more than half of the independents, and 20% or more of the Democrats." Nixon was confident that he could do that. He based his hopes on the fundamental assumption that, with uneasiness about the Communist menace and the threat of nuclear war widespread across the land, he could win over enough of the swing voters—the independents and wavering Democrats—by convincing them that he was better equipped, in maturity and experience, to deal with the dangerous times ahead. The need to whip up Republican enthusiasm while appearing to be above party sometimes gets him into embarrassing contradictions—as in two conflicting statements in Arizona last week, when he pledged his backing of all Republican candidates everywhere and an hour later urged voters to eschew party labels.

The Activist. All the whirl of campaigning—the speechmaking. the debaters' points on TV, the mimeographing of position papers—comes down to one question for the independent-minded U.S. voter when he goes to the polls Nov. 8: How will the candidate look in the White House? One of Kennedy's disadvantages (or advantages) is that the voter, trying to judge future performance, knows only about Kennedy what he has seen on television and what he has read about the coolly, capably run political campaign. The Nixon vision is summoned up far more easily. Already, Nixon has made it clear that he will rely on a high-level kind of staff: Vice President Lodge as coordinator of peacetime cold war, presumably Nelson Rockefeller as an occasional foreign policy adviser, a new council for economic affairs equal in stature to the National Security Council, and the active cooperation of Ike himself.