Capp and Nixon
From Professor Alfred March Sir: No doubt your correspondent Al Capp is known to your readers as a gifted and cryptically lewd cartoonist. Mr Capp uses his graphic skills to draw a very distorted cartoon of the American press, Goyaesque in design if not in moral weight. His main point is that Mr Nixon, once a brilliant Senator, utterly correct Vice-President, distinguished lawyer, etc, eventually broke down during the Watergate period as a result of prolonged torture by the press.
Whoever examines the 'record will find that thesis to be utter nonsense. Mr Nixon earned the epithet 'Tricky Dicky' very early in his career for activities not different in substance, but on a smaller scale, than those revealed recently. He and his cohorts, which then already included Haldeman and Kalmbach, were found guilty of election fraud in a San Francisco Court after the 1962 California gubernatorial contest; however, that conviction had little impact, since Mr Nixon had lost the election. Throughout the years, the press, with very few exceptions, supported Nixon, Nearly 90 per cent of all US newspapers endorsed his re-election in 1972and they made hardly any efforts to expose the 'dirty tricks' operation that went on during the campaign. A few weeks before the election, a Gallup Poll revealed that nearly half of the public had not even heard about the Watergate burglary, which had occured several months earlier.
The picture changed in 1973, when the media gave a lot of adverse publicity to Mr Nixon by widely disseminating the findings of a few reporters from. the Washington Post, the New York Times and the CBS network. But it is doubtful that this was a 'liberal' effort on the part of most of the , press; more likely, it was a retaliatory one. At the time of Mr Nixon's inauguration in January of 1973, his administration started to harass the media severely: several reporters were jailed, among them the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, which had supported Nixon for many years, and some radio and TV stations were threatened with the loss of their licence. When the media realised that the man they had helped to re-elect would not permit any criticism of his administration, they apparently began to co-operate in exposing him. If only Mr Capp were right and the media had started earlier to expose Mr Nixon! We not only would not have had him to kick around for so long, but we would all have been spared a lot of grief. If the press deserves criticism, it is not for the reason given by Mr CaPP Alfred March
1621 Grove Street, Berkeley, California.
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