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Let Them Decide. When Nixon had finished with his accounting he noted, by a swift glance at the clock, that he had used only a scant half of his allotted half-hour. So smoothly that his audience could detect no change of pace, he went into one of his back-platform attacks on the Administration. He got up from his chair and walked out in front of the desk. Then he gave the whole speech a heightened meaning when he announced that he was submitting his case to the Republican National Committee. "Let them decide whether my position on the ticket will help or hurt . . . whatever their decision is I will abide by it ... But . . . regardless of what happens, I'm going to continue this fight. I'm going to campaign up & down America until we drive the crooks and the Communists . . . out of Washington. And remember, folks, Eisenhower is a great man, believe me. He's a great man ..." There in mid-sentence Nixon's time expired and the technicians cut him short. It was one more unintentional point of high drama in a dramatic half-hour, for the rest of Nixon's sentence was not half so important as the effect of his dissolving from the nation's TV screens in the midst of an appeal for Ike Eisenhower.
"I Couldn't Do It." When the red camera light blinked off, Nixon mumbled an apology for going over his time. Then he turned his face away and broke into sobs. "I couldn't do it," he said. "It wasn't any good." Studio technicians bore down on him to assure him that he was wrong; some of the TV camera crew were weeping too. Mumbled Nixon, who rarely drinks: "Let's get out of here and get a fast one. I need it."
Next morning, dog-tired, he knew he had made one of the most dramatically successful speeches in the history of U.S. politics. Toward the end of his speech he had asked his listeners to send their opinions on his case to the Republican National Committee, and people were responding as they had never responded before to a political speech. By week's end the national committee estimated that it had heard from some 2,000,000 people by telegram, letter or telephone. Some editorialists and a handful of columnists (including Walter Lippmann, Max Lerner and Westbrook Pegler) scoffed at Nixon's performance. And some professional television critics tried unconvincingly to measure him off in all the cliches of the cliche-ridden Manhattan television and advertising world. (Wrote the New York World-Telegram and Sun's Harriet Van Home: "Senator Nixon was using what admen call the 'sincere' approach.") But most newspaper editorial opinion flip-flopped thunderously to Nixon's defense.