It still stunned many that Nixon was attempting another run. Less than six years earlier, he had been left for dead, after an embarrassing failed run for governor of California, his home state. For this injustice Nixon blamed the national press. “For sixteen years, ever since the [Alger] Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of fun,” the former vice president said in his self-pitying concession speech at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in November 1962. He concluded his remarks with a challenge to the assembled journalists: “If they’re against a candidate, give him the shaft,” he said, “but also recognize if they give him the shaft, put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then.” Five days after the election, ABC broadcast a thirty-minute documentary titled The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon.
But Nixon—who joined Mudge, Rose as a consultant in February 1963, soon became a partner, and toyed with the notion of becoming commissioner of baseball—wasn’t quite dead. The man who revived him was Len Garment. A Brooklyn-born trial lawyer, Democrat, and jazz saxophonist, Garment became Nixon’s all-purpose adviser and fixer, and helped smooth Nixon’s entry into the cloistered halls of Manhattan society. His main task was to assemble a crop of fresh faces for Nixon’s new political team. “This game is all about youth,” Dwight Chapin said. In addition to Ray Price, there was a fast-talking New York publicist named Bill Safire, and a young Fortune writer named Dick Whalen. Garment brought experienced hands on-deck, too, convincing municipal bond lawyer John Mitchell to sign on as campaign manager.
Nixon himself grasped how to channel his bitterness at his treatment by the media and the wider culture into the wellspring of his political strength. In the mid-1960s, many Americans believed that the culture was out of control, that it had lost touch with traditional values, that it had stopped listening to the wisest among them—men like Nixon himself. To counteract the excesses of the youth movement, the culture needed a dose of adulthood. Nixon called his sober prescription “law and order”—a triangulation between Lyndon Johnson’s coddling liberalism and Barry Goldwater’s reactionary conservatism. Nixon wagered that, having put ideological purity ahead of reason, the Republican Party would return to its senses and see value in his familiar visage. After he campaigned for eighty-six Republican candidates in thirty-five states during the 1966 election, nearly two thirds of them won.
Though Len Garment eagerly talked up a Nixon resurrection—“The man and the times have finally come together,” he said—few believed him. In the wider public imagination, Dick Nixon was still a sad joke. A paradox struck Garment: in person, Nixon came across as confident and jocular. On television, Americans saw a diffident, humorless pol. Garment realized that all the talk about the “New Nixon” and the “Old Nixon” missed the point entirely. There was only one Nixon. But a hostile press establishment and the unforgiving lens of the television camera had prevented the voters from seeing the real man. His mission in 1968 was to highlight the positive aspects of Nixon’s personality that had been obscured. Television, therefore, was not just a tactical consideration. It was a matter of strategic importance.
The hardest part of the job may have been convincing Nixon himself of this truth. Television was at the top of Nixon’s list of resentments. To him, the Big Three networks were another tool the liberals on the East Coast had at their disposal to punish deserving men like himself. Nevertheless, he was determined to master the medium as he had mastered every other challenge in his life: with sedulous work and brute force. Harry Robbins Haldeman, the former J. Walter Thompson ad man with a famous buzz cut and athletic good looks, articulated the way forward. Bob, as he was known to friends, reasoned that one report on the nightly news would reach more people in an instant than the campaign could reach in ten months of stump speeches. “The time has come for political campaigning, its techniques and strategies, to move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye,” he wrote.
In the summer of 1967, Nixon sought out television advice from all over. Ed McMahon went to his office at 810 Fifth Avenue to help him prepare for his appearance on the Johnny Carson show, where the question of his presidential intentions was bound to be asked. In July, Nixon also took a meeting with Frank Shakespeare, the president of CBS Television. During a ninety-minute meeting at Nixon’s office, Shakespeare evangelized for the new religion of television. An ardent conservative, Shakespeare first considered working for Ronald Reagan until deciding that Reagan was too inexperienced. After the meeting, Nixon told Garment to hire him.
Several weeks later, Garment ran into his summer neighbor Harry Treleaven, who would also become an important Ailes teacher, on the beach near his cottage in Amagansett, on Long Island. Treleaven had spent eighteen years at J. Walter Thompson and was the creative mind behind the campaigns for such mid-century icons as Ford, Pan Am, and Singer. In 1966, Treleaven took a leave from J. Walter Thompson to go to Texas, where he produced advertising for the long-shot campaign of George H. W. Bush, a forty-two-year-old Republican running for Congress in a Houston district that had only elected Democrats. Treleaven theorized that persuading voters depended more on a candidate’s image than articulating positions on particular issues. “Political candidates are celebrities … and today with television taking them into everybody’s home right along with Johnny Carson and Batman, they’re more of a public attraction than ever,” he wrote in a report. Interviewing Texas voters, Treleaven discovered that they liked Bush personally, even if they were vague on where he stood politically. So he created a character for Bush to inhabit: the hardworking underdog. In his TV spots, Treleaven presented Bush—the pedigreed product of Greenwich, Andover, and Yale—as a homespun Texan amiably strolling dusty streets with his blazer slung casually over his shoulder and his shirtsleeves rolled up. It worked. Bush won comfortably, and Treleaven came aboard the Nixon campaign.
Price acted as Garment’s media theoretician, deepening and enriching his concepts. In late November 1967, Price circulated a strategy memo drawing on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In his chapter “Television: The Timid Giant,” McLuhan commented on Nixon’s 1963 appearance on The Jack Paar Show, in which he performed a work he had composed for the piano. “Instead of the slick, glib, legal Nixon, we saw the doggedly creative and modest performer,” McLuhan wrote. “A few timely touches like this would have quite altered the result of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign.” Price’s assumption was that in the age of television, humans inhabited multiple realities—the two most salient being the reality that actually existed and the reality burned onto a cathode ray tube. Since 99 percent of voters would never meet the candidate in person, Price was convinced that the only reality they would ever know was the one on their television screens. “It’s not what’s there that counts,” Price wrote. “It’s what’s projected—and, carrying it one step further, it’s not what he projects but rather what the voter receives.” Television was the only reality that mattered to swaying the minds of millions of voters. “It’s not the man we have to change, but rather the received impression.”