REPUBLICANS: Candidate in Crisis

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But Nixon's staff knows another side of him. Although he gathers the advice of the best people he can find, Nixon makes up his own mind and far faster than Eisenhower. Frequently he takes a completely different tack from what his advisers suggest (he has been known to change the day's campaign plans and schedules in mid-air because his ear tells him that it is time to vary the routine). Nixon acts coolly in crisis, has a good feeling for the workings of vast government and knows how to short-circuit bureaucracy. He understands Congress, though he does not have a warm relationship with congressional leaders of either party. He has a strong sense of public mood, which might lead him to postpone some decisions until there is a sufficient public outcry to back him up (a favorite device of both Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower). He has, as yet, shown no strong sense of mission like Kennedy's that might energize his administration into a flurry of activity in the "first go days." But Nixon is by nature an activist.

Streak of Fatalism. As he headed into the final phase of the campaign last week, Nixon had apparently not yet succeeded in persuading a majority of U.S. voters that he, and not Jack Kennedy, should cope with the problems, the perils, and the opportunities of the 19603. Nixon is convinced that the decisive lap of the campaign still lies ahead. He argues that only in the final fortnight of a presidential campaign do the undecided voters-still numerous enough to swing the election either way—make up their minds, largely on the basis of a "last impression" of the candidates. This week, in pursuit of those still-undecided voters, Nixon will take to the rails for the first time in the campaign, make a six-day whistle-stop tour through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois aboard the "Dick Nixon 1960 Campaign Victory Train." Evidently taking the advice of those who said he had to be rougher and tougher to win, he was already talking tougher then in his final debate—calling Kennedy's ideas "sophomoric," constituting "a pattern of conduct that should convince many Americans that they could not rest well with a man with such a total lack of judgment as Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces." Next week, he will hit stops in New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, Washington and his native California, saving the last two days of the campaign for emergency expeditions to wherever the campaign needs him most.

During the final, climactic fortnight of the campaign, Richard M. Nixon, aware that if he loses this time he will probably never get another chance to run for President, can gather some serenity from his streak of fatalism. "Political positions have always come to me," he once said, "because I was there and it was the right time and the right place." On the night of Nov. 8, he will be able to tell whether November 1960 was the right time.