Investors, executives, blue-collar workers and just about everybody else agree that the U.S. economy has been suffering through a recession. But most of President Nixon's aides have avoided that word, preferring to describe their engineered economic slowdown as an "adjustment" or a "recedence." The semantic tug of war might seem to be only an academic matter, but it could have important political consequences in the 1972 election. Nixon figures that the last recession cost him the presidency in 1960.
The official referee in such matters is the private, nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, which judges by scrutinizing real...
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