EVEN as they pulled voting levers in massive numbers for him, Americans had no way of knowing just where Richard Nixon intended to lead them. After 26 years in politics, including four in the merciless glare of national attention that always focuses on the White House, he remained one of the most unpredictable and ineluctable men in public life. The politician who had always been off and running toward the next race had won the ultimate victory. He could stop now. But what would he do with his triumph?
The past was not illuminating. Nixon had reversed himself too often as circumstances dictated or opportunities beckoned. His shrewdly protective campaign had concentrated far more upon what he would not do than on what he expected to do. Yet there he was, the small-town boy from Whittier, so often in the past seeming insecure and introspective, so often tormented by self-proclaimed crises and ridiculed by scoffing critics, now vindicated by the only standard a democratic leader and professional politician appreciates: an overwhelming victory at the polls. He held unchallengeable control of the Executive Branch and had been handed a rare chance to shape the nation's future in his own fashion.
The fact that Richard Nixon need no longer worry about appealing to masses of voters was either scary or hopeful, depending upon the angle of view. Radicals and some liberals professed to have nightmares of an "unleashed" Nixon, finally free to throw dissenters into jails and to nuke Hanoi if it did not knuckle under. Conservatives held visions of a sturdy figure checking the tide of permissiveness, defending the work ethic against welfare loafers. Some moderates saw in Nixon's record the hope that he would now turn to the nation's neglected social ills; they cited his dramatic initiatives in traveling to Moscow and Peking, and his application of wage and price controls as evidence of his capacity for change.
Actually, all of those prophecies may well miss the mark. After studying the past period, calculating fiscal limitations and sounding out their sources in all of the Government's major departments and the White House, TIME Washington correspondents discovered little evidence that, having initiated historic breakthroughs in foreign relations, Nixon would now carve out a program of domestic achievement that was equally impressive. Officials, of course, would not necessarily talk with freedom about future programs just before the election, even if they knew of any. The evidence is not conclusive for another reason: a lame duck President's concern about how history will rate him may yet produce surprises.