The poetry of Mr Nixon

AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON

New York—Talking to Mr Nixon is like talking to his manager. But then, since he has so long had to make do without either great property or conspicuous talent, he has had to become his own manager.

Mr Nixon has always been difficult to translate because the best analogy for his career is with baseball, a sport which has never really travelled beyond the western hemisphere and which is so uniquely American that its super- vising tacticians are called 'managers,' while their equivalents in other games are designated as 'coaches' just as they are in most other places on earth.

The enduring managers in baseball were seldom conspicuous as players; one is inclined to think, observing their careers, that a period of disaster and neglect was necessary to make the game an obsession for them. Baseball can be rather a bore to the player who never failed at it; Joe DiMaggio, a god undimmed seventeen years after his retirement, seldom watches a baseball game unless invited. But men who failed in mid-career scuffle and struggle to keep some link with it; they may not make the best managers, but they are the most obsessive ones; they will talk to anyone so long as it is about baseball. They disappear but they always return.

Mr Nixon has had the same vicissitudes in career: a long stewardship, a great chance coming his way and missed by a matter of inches, the discarding and the forgetting, the brooding alone over the techniques of better players, the learning of the game by watching it, and now the returning, more manager than player. The experience makes Mr Nixon, within the limits of the playing field, the most obses- sively intellectual of the candidates. A morning with him is naturally all about the game.

He assumes that he won the Republican nomination in the Oregon primary, when every eye was focused on Governors Rockefeller and Reagan and there was little to be seen there. He talks about vice-presidential candidates in terms that are the ultimate mark of assurance; Mr Nixon can choose the man who will do him the most good in November, while his rivals still have to use the vice-presidential nomina- tion to bargain with aspirants who might give them delegates in August.

Ronald Reagan's name suddenly intrudes into his discussion. That would be an odd notion for him to entertain. The enduring base- ball managers are tactically orthodox above all else; and a Nixon-Reagan ticket would seem a dangerous rightward tip in what ought to be a very delicate balance. 'But let me be devil's advocate for a mOment,' Mr Nixon says. 'They're worried about George Wallace. They think Reagan would help with that. And then

there is television. I almost never look at it; I'm a reader. But they say he is magic on that box.'

They are the delegates, the owners. One use of failure is that its victim never forgets how dependent he is on the goodwill of proprietors; Mr Nixon has learned to sit and look respectful when a delegate talks about the game, because his views expressed, however inexpert, are the property of a man who can always hire a new manager and who is talking to a manager who is expendable as a player. The way to survive is to listen intently to the owner and to take just enough of his advice not to lose too many games.

Listening to the owner brought Mr Nixon where he is, of course; if there is a danger that he will go no farther, it is that he may have been persuaded by what he listened to largely out of courtesy and necessity. He stays out of trouble remarkably well, but, when he slips, it is from talking too much like the average delegate to a Republican convention. He owes his present security as a candidate for the nomination to their votes. But there is real danger to him as a candidate for election if he does not rise above their opinions.

A few weeks ago, quite suddenly and surprisingly, he took a hard line on the Soviet seizure of an American plane—and then dis- covered that the soft line of our State Depart- ment had proved swiftly efficacious. A few weeks ago he went before the American Bar Association with a routine assault on the Supreme Court for coddling criminals and was surprised to find so much hostility to these views in an audience until now dependable in their acceptance.

There has been an infusion of radicalism, however transient, into a host of American institutions until now safely conservative. We cannot say for sure how deep it goes; Mr Nixon himself is plain confused. His passion, after all, is for the game itself; one charm of the game is that, for most of his career, it has been fairly predictable; if a manager did A, he used to be able reasonably to expect B to follow. But C has been following A much too often this season. Mr Nixon does not know— none of us do—that, if he goes to the right, he may not find that the country had wanted a slightly leftward candidate or that if he goes to the left, he may not find that the electorate wanted him to go right.

It is not a situation where authorities can do him much good; he has one expert who thinks that Governor Wallace will get 25 per cent of the vote unless Mr Nixon provides a satisfactory alternative; and he has another, quite as heavy with documents, who is sure that Governor Wallace cannot survive the summer as a serious menace and that Mr Nixon should disregard him and makes his peace instead with Demo- crats of the left.

. Mr Nixon is being as dependent as the rest of us on his instincts in these matters. In the end, one thinks, his instincts will lead him to attempt to appease those persons who distrust him the most; it always has. His vice- presidential choice would then be someone with a fashionable interest in liberal solutions to the problems of the cities. He will talk about Governor Reagan until he is absolutely sure of the delegates and then he will settle for someone more modern, like Senator Percy of Illinois.

It is not very easy to say what sort of President he will be. The game which so obsesses him is different from all others because victory does bring with it special responsibilities. No one asks the coach of a team contesting the World Cup what it will do after it wins. So Mr Nixon's view of the office tends to turn a little vague; the eyes, until now so alively focused on computation, drift towards the middle distance and look at something unknown and beyond the game and its ordered simplici- ties.

'Think,' he rouses himself, 'of the wonderful things that will happen in the next eight years. A new Europe, perhaps a third force there and the talks with the Russians and in Asia, the emergence of Japan and the strengthening of a ring of buffer states around the South-east Asian ring and then the talks with China.'

So there is a Grand, if imprecise, Design left in him after all. There is no thought here of the lesson of failure, because failure was never accepted. He can begin to think that, even now, he could become part of the mystery which hangs about the great players. 'It was said of Lincoln.' he remembers, 'that he saw not just the horizon but things that lay beyond the horizon.'

And the eyes searched earnestly for whatever it was the great players saw.

'I told my staff one night,' Mr Nixon said, 'that politics is poetry and not prose. I know that sounds funny from me.' It does not sound funny at all. When a game becomes an obses- sion, it is poetry to the one obsessed, however prosaic he may seem to us.