COVER STORY
I know some of you have been through defeats, as I have, and had your hearts broken. It has been said that a great philosophy is not won without defeat. But a great philosophy is always won without fear.
SO said Richard Nixon to his party workers during the campaign. So he said again when he appeared before his followers to accept and savor his victory. Now he could forget the defeats, both the hairbreadth miss of 1960 and the humiliating rebuff of 1962. Now he could put behind him the fear that maybe he was, after all, a born loser. Now he could relish the fruits of unremitting labor for his party, of countless fund-raising dinners and victory banquets and formula speeches in remote towns. Now he could demonstrate to the nation—and perhaps to himself— just what his "great philosophy" is. Now, at last, he had achieved a goal that, six and eight years ago, seemed to have eluded him forever.
But Richard Milhous Nixon became President-elect of the U.S. by the narrowest of margins—so narrow that it may even impede his conduct of the office. At the beginning of his campaign, Nixon held a seemingly unassailable lead. By the time Illinois' 26 electoral votes put him over the 270 mark, it was clear that his lead had been whittled almost to the vanishing point, and that he had come close to the most bitter defeat of his career.
What had kept him from the major, decisive victory that had been so widely (and perhaps too optimistically) expected by many of his followers? In addition to his choice of Maryland's inept Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate, it was probably his closed, negative campaign. That, and a personality that has simply never come close to captivating the U.S. voter. Nixon was so far in front that his overriding concern was to avoid a serious error—hardly the sort of strategy designed to fire imaginations. But it can also be argued that the Democrats—the majority party—were bound to recover from their low point, and that Nixon had to play it safe. His aides certainly take this view. They insisted even after Nixon's narrow electoral escape that if they had to do it again, they would change nothing—including the surely damaging decision not to debate Democratic Candidate Hubert Humphrey.
Once the campaign got under way, Nixon's standing in the polls froze at the mid-40% mark, despite the Democrats' Job-like troubles. All the while, Humphrey was gaining on him, chipping away at the Wallace vote among the blue-collar workers of the big industrial states, rallying the once indifferent blacks, bringing antiwar dissidents back into the fold after they had sulked for a suitable time. When the vote tallying began, it swiftly became apparent that the Vice President had scored enough of a comeback to make the election as breathtakingly close as the 1960 cliffhanger. With more than 92% of the total popular vote counted, in fact, Nixon's plurality was fewer than 250,000 votes out of 68 million (v. Kennedy's 119,000 out of 69 million).