As Richard Nixon finally went on television last week to make his first report to the American people in three months, he faced perhaps the toughest audience of his career. A Gallup poll showed that he had become the least popular President in 20 years, with only 31% of the people approving of the way he was handling his job. The Oliver Quayle poll further announced that if the 1972 elections were to be repeated today, Senator George McGovern (who received only 38% of the popular vote) would win with 51%. The only comfort the polls held for the President was the curious paradox that, while 73% suspected him of complicity in the Watergate coverup, only 26% wanted him removed from office.
Clearly, a troubled nation was waiting for an explanation, a restoration of public trust. What it received instead was a plea by the President to put aside the "backward-looking obsession with Watergate [that] is causing this nation to neglect matters of far greater importance." He made no real effort to answer the damaging charges and questions that have emerged from three months of testimony before the Ervin committee; he merely reiterated that the charges against him were false. Perhaps understandably, he had nothing at all to say about the latest scandal to involve his Administration: the grand jury investigation in Baltimore of kickback and extortion charges that gravely threatens Vice President Spiro Agnew (see following story).
No Relief. In some respects, it was a brilliantly crafted speech, straightforward sounding and without the self-pity of last April's performance. It was carefully balanced between shouldering the blame and pushing it off on others, between condemning Watergate and excusing it, between criticizing the cover-up and justifying it on security grounds.
He "deplored" the Watergate acts but also suggested that they were only the work of a few officials acting out of misguided zeal and somehow infected by the excesses of the radicals in the '60s.
He accepted overall responsibility but also managed to imply that he was not to blame for being misinformed—and misinformed largely by one man, John Dean. He reaffirmed his desire to get at the truth and yet complained that the investigators of the scandal were mired in the past and determined to implicate the President even if it meant damaging the country. "If you want the mandate you gave this Administration to be carried out," the President declared, "then I ask for your help to ensure that those who would exploit Watergate in order to keep us from doing what we were elected to do will not succeed ..."
In short, the President was scrambling to break clear of Watergate, pleading other urgent business. For the present at least, that other business offered no relief, no encouragement for the country. Nixon defined his mandate thus: "to control inflation, to reduce the power and size of Government, to cut the cost of living ... to achieve peace with honor in Southeast Asia and bring home America's prisoners of war, to build a new prosperity without inflation and without war ..."