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Bon Ami. The President's faux pas came in the middle of another attack on his frequent foe, the press. Nixon had just come from a ten-day working holiday in San Clemente, where he found himself angered by the coverage given the Manson case in the local media. Many of the young, Nixon said in Denver, "tend to glorify and to make heroes out of those who engage in criminal activities." Was it the fault of the press? Yes and no, said Nixon. Yes: "It is done perhaps because people want to read or see that kind of story." No: "This is not done intentionally by the press." In fact, the Los Angeles papers have played the story at length, but they have done so dispassionately.
In Los Angeles, the effect of Nixon's remarks on the Manson trial was instant and dramatic. While the Los Angeles Times came out the same afternoon with a four-inch headline reading MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES, Judge Charles Older went to great lengths to ensure that the jury, which has been sequestered since the trial began, would not learn of Nixon's remarks. The windows of the jury bus were whited over with Bon Ami so that no juror could glimpse the headline on street newsstands. If the jury discovered Nixon's verdict, the defense might have grounds for a mistrial. His efforts were to no avail. Next day Manson himself displayed a copy of the Times to the jury for some ten seconds before a bailiff grabbed the newspaper from his hands. Judge Older called a recess, then questioned the jurors one by one to satisfy himself that their judgment would not be affected. An alternate juror convulsed the courtroom when he announced his disclaimer: "I didn't vote for Nixon in the first place." The judge denied a motion for a mistrial, and the defense lawyers proceeded with cross-examination of the state's star witness, Linda Kasabian, a former member of the Manson "family."
The ghastly gunplay in San Rafael in a curious way pointed up the hazards of the President as film critic. In praising the new John Wayne film Chisum, he seems to have overlooked the fact that in it the good guys prevail over the bad guys only by taking the law into their own hands. That, of course, is what the "revolutionaries" of Marin County were attempting with such bloody results. Vigilantism appeals not only to conservatives; it is no accident that S.D.S. members, too, loved the John Wayne of True Grit, last year's western in which Marshal Cogburn observes that "ya can't serve papers on a rat." Perhaps the President's interpretation of Chisum ought to be balanced by the message of an earlier western. No film has understood itself or its kind better than Sam Peckinpah's classic, Ride the High Country (1962), where youth meets frontier man rendered obsolete by the encroaching century. Says one character: "My father says there's only right and wrong, good and evil, nothing in between. It isn't that simple, is it?—No, it isn't; it should be, but it isn't."