Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most part, Nixon cut his own pattern of what he would say and do, but he kept in close touch with the White House and Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington. Only twice did Washington's Republican strategists prompt him on major matters: once to suggest that he get a little rougher with Adlai Stevenson, once to urge him to drop his valid point that free-enterprise technological advances will one day lead to a four-day work week in the U.S. It was a tough point to get across, and some Administration and G.O.P. brasshats thought it sounded...
...Shoe." Before he set out on his campaigning, Candidate Nixon had laid out a firm base for what he would say. He holed up for five days to finish eight speeches that would serve as his basic campaign documents. They ranged over the Eisenhower Administration's whole record, discussing in detail and in statistic the fields of foreign policy, defense, economics, labor and agriculture...
Once written, however, the speeches were used always as the bible but seldom as texts. Generally Nixon spoke without a text and without notes. More of a talker than a speechmaker, he aimed directly at his audiences, used simple, plain, stark language, made his points specifically and clearly, never shouting. Where it was possible he would pick out three or four people at various points in the crowd and speak directly to them. At Evansville, Ind. he spotted a man in blue overalls standing near the center of the audience, talked directly to him, watched for reaction. There was none...
Speaking without manuscript, Nixon could draw on all of his texts to fit the occasion and the crowd's reaction, and could work in whatever local references were appropriate. But the technique also brought out, at almost every stop, some old, familiar phrases in what reporters came to call "The speech." The correspondents coined their own titles for the standard phrases, e.g., "the old shoe" for his statement that the U.S. "has prosperity and peace to boot," "the weight-lifting act" for his line that "every man can hold up Dwight Eisenhower to his children...
Schedules ran with easy precision. When Nixon took to train travel, reporters soon learned that they should dash back to their cars when he introduced his wife Pat, because that meant the train would pull out in exactly 60 seconds. Pat was introduced without fail at every meeting, usually as ''the best campaigner in the Nixon family." While that was a pardonable overstatement, efficient, proper Pat Nixon is indeed a good campaigner. She did all of the packing for trips, and astonished local women's-page editors by traveling with one suitcase.* Despite the campaign...