Or perhaps that's beside the point. Senator McCarthy's success in New Hampshire can hardly be attributed to the hard-nosed professionalism of his staff. . . and in his broader context the Nixon campaign seems flawed. There is a cynicism at the core of it, the confident assumption that success in politics depends more on shrewd technique than on the quality of the product. The “old Nixon” didn't make it. Neither did earlier models of the “new Nixon.” So now we have “Nixon Mark IV,” and as a journalist I suppose it's only fair to say that this latest model might be different and maybe even better in some ways. But as a customer, I wouldn't touch it -- except with a long cattle prod.

Granted, the “new Nixon” is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow. But I recognize the man who told a student audience at the University of New Hampshire that one of his biggest problems in politics has always been “that I'm not a good actor, I can't be phony about it, I still refuse to wear makeup. . .” Three weeks later this same man, after winning the New Hampshire primary, laughingly attributed his victory to the new makeup he'd been wearing. He thought he was being funny -- at least on one level -- but on another level he was telling the absolute truth.

Pageant, July 1968

Author's Note

Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 A.M. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn. . . out here at the far end of Geary Street: this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of “Seal Rock” looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light. About two hundred seals have been barking out there most of the night. Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound. Last night we had a huge paranoid poodle up here in the room, and the dumb bastard went totally out of control when the seals started barking -- racing around the room like a chicken hearing a pack of wolves outside the window, howling & whining, leaping up on the bed & scattering my book-galley pages all over the floor, knocking the phone off the hook, upsetting the gin bottles, trashing my carefully organized stacks of campaign photographs. . . off to the right of this typewriter, on the floor between the beds. I can see an 8x10 print of Frank Mankiewicz yelling into a telephone at the Democratic Convention in Miami; but that one will never be used, because the goddamn hound put five big claw-holes in the middle of Frank's chest.