After 1960, though, I no longer took him seriously. Two years later he blew his bid for the governorship of California and made it overwhelmingly clear that he no longer took himself seriously -- at least not as a politician. He made a national ass of himself by blaming his defeats on the “biased press.” He called a press conference and snarled into the microphone: “You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my final press conference.”

There is no avoiding the fact that Richard Nixon would not be running for President in 1968 if John Kennedy hadn't been assassinated five years earlier. . . and if the GOP hadn't nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. . . which guaranteed the election of Lyndon Johnson, who has since done nearly everything wrong and botched the job so that now even Nixon looks good beside him.

The situation is so obvious that Nixon, “the political man,” can't resist it. And who can blame him for taking his luck where he finds it? He's back on the “fast track” that he likes to talk about, with the Presidency to gain and nothing at all to lose. He's obviously enjoying this campaign. It's a bonus, a free shot, his last chance to stand eyeball to eyeball again with the high rollers.

Richard Nixon has been in politics all his life; for 21 years he has rolled about as high as a politician can in this country, and his luck has been pretty good. His instincts are those of a professional gambler who wins more often than he loses; his “skill” is nine parts experience to one part natural talent, and his concept of politics is entirely mechanical.

Nixon is a political technician, and he has hired technicians to help him win this time. As a campaign team, they are formidable. They have old pros, young turks, crippled opponents, and a candidate who once came within an eyelash of beating the late John F. Kennedy.

The “new Nixon” is above anger, and he rarely has time for casual conversation. His staffers explain to the grumbling press that “Mr. Nixon is busy writing tonight's speech.” He is grappling in private, as it were, with the subtle contradictions of the Asian mind. (He slipped once in public during a late February trip to Wisconsin. “This country cannot tolerate a long war,” he said. “The Asians have no respect for human lives. They don't care about body counts.” The implied racial slur was a departure from his carefully conceived campaign oratory.)

At one point I asked Ray Price, one of Nixon's chief braintrusters, why the candidate was having such difficulty finding words to echo Dean Rusk's views on Vietnam. Nixon's speeches for the past four nights had been straight out of the Johnson-Rusk handbook on the “domino theory.”