Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Young David Broder Chronicles Edition)
From Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, describing Richard Nixon's 1966 barnstorming political tour:
Nixon still pleaded cloth-coated poverty when he wrote old associates:
Dear (Insert Name Here): I am planning to spend five weeks in September and October campaigning in some of the key congressional and Senate races across the country. As usual, I am undertaking this ambitious schedule with only a very part time staff at my disposal. If you could find the time to do some volunteer advance work during that period I would greatly appreciate it.... As usual, we have no funds available for salaries for our advance men.
He hit up the Republican National Committee for a free airplane because, he said, he would be working for the party’s sake, not his own. Fortunately for the other 1968 contenders, RNC chair Ray Bliss, who had a keen ear for bullshit, made him rent one, out of the half million dollars raised by [Maurice] Stans. The crusade began in January with a speech to the white-gloved ladies of the Women’s National Republican Club at the Waldorf-Astoria (how he hated speaking to women’s groups: “I will not go and talk to those shitty ass old ladies!” he once said). The next day, he appeared on the ABC Sunday show Issues and Answers, and the New York Times nicely obliged him by featuring his most important talking point: “I do not expect to be a candidate. I am motivated solely by a desire to strengthen the party so that whomever we nominate in 1968 can win.”
His usual round of Lincoln’s-birthday Republican fund-raising dinners followed, run this year like a miniature presidential campaign: blocks of hotel rooms reserved for the press; mimeographed bullet points slipped under their doors; then on to the next city by Jetstar—the same plane “in which James Bond was transported by the fabulous Pussy Galore in the movie version of Goldfinger,” wrote an agog David Broder of the New York Times...
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
