Nixon laughed. The audience laughed. Even Leibman was chuckling.
The game was fun for everyone except the panelists: set ’em up, knock ’em down. The cheers from the crowd revealed that the real prey was the panel, not Nixon. Every time the citizen questioners opened their mouths, they could surely feel the stares of six hundred Republican eyes on their backs.
Ailes had spent days perfecting it all. Treleaven, Shakespeare, and Price had come up with the controlled television concept but Ailes fine-tuned the camera placements and the staging. Filming Nixon below his eye level made him appear taller, a commanding leader.
Midway through the broadcast, Warner Saunders, the black community leader and former schoolteacher, sat at the microphone with his arms crossed, signaling confrontation. “I’d like to step out of the box of an educator and talk about communications. A communications gap that is basically a color gap,” Saunders began in a voice steady with resolve. “I would like to explain to you that the black community feels the term ‘law and order’ means violence, destruction inside of our community on the part of a recalcitrant police department, on the part of recalcitrant mayors and other officials inside of our community. What does ‘law and order’ mean to you?”
If anyone at home had grown bored by the proceedings, they surely snapped to attention now.
Nixon leaned back and took a deep breath. “Well, first, Mr. Saunders,” he said, “I’m quite aware of this fact that law and order, I think the term that I’ve heard used, is a code word, a code word for basically racism.” Then he pivoted to one of his prepared points: past injustices never justified lawbreaking. “I have often said you cannot have order unless you have justice. You cannot have order unless you have progress. Because order without progress, if you just stifle the dissent, if you just stifle the progress, you’re going to have an explosion, and you’re going to have disorder. On the other hand, you can’t have progress without order because when you have disorder—revolution—what you do is you destroy all the progress.”
The director caught a reaction shot from Ed Brooke, the black Massachusetts senator, who was seated in the front row next to Pat Nixon. Then it was back to the candidate: “The greatness of America, with few exceptions, over the period of our history, is that we have had the combination of having a system in which we could have peaceful change, peaceful progress, with order. Now that’s what I want for America.”
The virtually all-white audience responded with ecstatic applause. This well-run talk show was a microcosm of the civil society Nixon and his team were trying to sell.
Nixon sailed through the rest of the broadcast. He spoke of ending the war and building “bridges to human dignity” and getting “this country on a sound basis again.”
At the fifty-five-minute mark, Wilkinson spoke up. “I’m very sorry I have to interrupt this very interesting discussion, but our time is running short.”
Nixon asked Wilkinson if Mary Frances Squires, the housewife, could have one more question.
“I never like to cut off a lady, you know,” Nixon said. On cue: more laughs.
Squires wanted to know if Nixon favored releasing the names of POWs held in Vietnam. “If it doesn’t involve the security of the country, there’s no excuse whatever for that kind of retention of information,” he said. “I will certainly look into it.”
The final question of the night came from Wilkinson. “I wonder if definite plans have been set for Julie and David’s wedding?”
The camera held on Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower grinning and squirming in their seats.
“That is confidential information,” Nixon replied, with mock conspiracy.
The audience tittered. It was the payoff, just like one on The Mike Douglas Show.
The next morning, Ailes reviewed tape of Nixon’s performance. On the Douglas set, Ailes’s perfectionist streak would often cause him to feel down immediately after the taping. But watching the footage of Nixon in Chicago reassured him that Nixon had delivered. “Mr. Nixon is strong now on television and has good control of the situation,” Ailes wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “He looks good on his feet and shooting ‘in the round’ gives dimension to him.… The ‘arena effect’ is excellent and he plays well to all areas. The look has ‘guts.’ ”
Nixon would tape three more panels that month. The next stops were Cleveland and Los Angeles, where Nixon made a four-second taped appearance on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. (“Sock it to me?” he deadpanned.) Ailes had already developed more than two dozen ideas to improve the Man in the Arena shows, which he delivered to Garment and Shakespeare. To play to the home audience, Nixon had to speak more directly into the camera. Because he would sweat under the hot studio lights, the air-conditioning needed to be turned up to the max at least four hours before his arrival. His deep-set eyes benefited from slightly whiter makeup applied to his upper eyelids. Ailes had timed all twenty of Nixon’s answers: “Some … are still too long and over half tended to be the same length,” he explained. Nixon needed “memorable phrases to use in wrapping up certain points.” Ailes also recommended more applause and more music, perhaps a Connie Francis soundtrack. “It might give us a classy ‘standard’ opening to use,” he wrote.
On September 18, McGinniss and Ailes arrived in Philadelphia two days ahead of the candidate. Ailes loved to ham it up for McGinniss’s notebook. “He never forgot I was writing,” McGinniss later said. Ailes’s mordant one-liners about Nixon’s running mate, Spiro Agnew, were especially bold: “We’re doing all right,” he told McGinniss. “If we could only get someone to play Hide The Greek.”
Although his home in the suburbs was just ten miles from the studio, Ailes was staying at the Marriott Motor Hotel. Things were not going well with Marjorie. He had been on the road for six weeks working eighteen hours a day and the pace of the campaign was naturally pulling them apart. In Philadelphia, Ailes wanted to push the envelope. The previous taping in California had been flat—the panelists asked stale questions. Ailes wanted to scramble the cast. “Nixon gets bored by the same kind of people,” he said. “We’ve got to screw around with this one a little bit.” Dan Buser, an assistant from the local Republican Party, recommended the head of a black community group as a panelist.
“And he is black,” Buser added.
“What do you mean, he’s black?” Ailes asked.
“I mean he’s dark. It will be obvious on television that he’s not white.”
“You mean we won’t have to put a sign around him that says, ‘This is our Negro’?”
Ailes booked him. McGinniss suggested the name of a political reporter, who Ailes found out was also black.
“Oh, shit, we can’t have two. Even in Philadelphia.”
The panel was almost complete. He had secured an Italian lawyer from Pittsburgh, a suburban housewife, a Wharton student, a Camden newsman, and a raspy-voiced radio and TV commentator named Jack McKinney. That left one open slot. As Ailes sat with McGinniss eating room service, Ailes told his friend just what he wanted. “A good, mean, Wallaceite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, ‘Awright, mac, what about these niggers?’ ” Ailes went on: “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. They think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a bookbag. Who was forty-two years old the day he was born.… Now you put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away. He’s a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’ I mean this is how he strikes some people. That’s why these shows are important. To make them forget all that.”