Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968

Trapped in our homes by the coronavirus, now more than ever is a time for reading. It has actually been slower than I anticipated because I've been too tempted to keep up with the constantly changing news. But we need something else to occupy us. As The Police said, "When the world is running down/You make the best of what's still around."

At the last UNC Charlotte library sale, I picked up Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968. I went through a serious Nixon period in the early 1990s as the anniversary of his resignation neared, and read a ton on him and Watergate, and that interest never went away. This book is a breezily written and entertaining account of how consultants used TV to transform an often unlikable candidate into a winning image, devoid of substance but full of nostalgia. It's also depressing, because you can see how vacuity became a political goal.

As one of the filmmakers hired to do some commercials said, "Nixon has not only developed the use of the platitude, he's raised it to an art form. It's mashed potatoes. It appeals to the lowest common denominator of American taste. It's a farce, a delicious farce, self-deception carried to the nth degree" (115).

Hostility toward the common person was evident. You wanted enough "Negroes" in ads or staged events, but definitely not more than one because you would offend the "Yahoo belt" of the South. And they wondered why they were unwelcome in Harlem. They didn't even want to advertise with college students--it might offend people. Roger Ailes (only 28 at the time) plays a big role and is as offensive as you would expect, with references to "broads" and the like.

Hostility toward the press undergirded the entire effort, precisely as Twitter does now for Donald Trump. The leftist press would never give Nixon a fair shake, so TV gave him the opportunity to do things his way without their filter. More precisely, he could appeal to people's worst instincts without interference.

Overall there was, as one consultant put it, "the basic problem of Nixon's personality" (161). The whole point was to avoid showing the real him. McGinniss closes with the funny irony that Nixon believed that image didn't matter at all.