Page 109 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

RICHARD M.
NIXON,
98
be sent to Indochina. It was a trial balloon by the Eisenhower administration,
and few trial balloons have drawn so much flak.
When he ran for president in 1960, he complained that the reporters were
biased against him. Yet, he had more than three times as many editorial en-
dorsements as his opponent, John F. Kennedy.
Then, in 1962 he ran for governor of California. It was an election that was
seen as having great bearing on who would be the Republican candidate for
president in 1964. Nixon was expected to win but lost to Democrat Pat Browne.
On the same day, James Rhodes in Ohio and George Romney in Michigan upset
incumbent Democratic governors, and Nelson Rockefeller, expected to have a
close race for governor of New York, won easily. Two days later Nixon held a
press conference announcing that he was retiring from politics and saying to the
assembled journalists, "You won't have old Dick Nixon to kick around any-
more." What he succeeded in doing was stealing the media play from the three
Republicans who had won and thus kept his political career alive.
Nixon was elected president in 1968, and his administration was critical of
the media, although the criticism came more from Vice President Spiro Agnew
than from Nixon. He left office in 1974 bitter about the Watergate expose by
the Washington Post that led to his resignation. (See also Spiro Agnew; Ken-
nedy-Nixon Debates.)
SOURCE: Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America, sixth edition,
1988.
Guido H. Stempel HI