My request to sit in on the tape session was flatly denied. “This is a commercial taping,” said Henry Hyde. “Would Procter & Gamble let you into their studios? Or Ford?” Hyde was a gear and sprocket salesman in Chicago before he became Nixon's press aide, so I wasn't surprised at his weird analogy. I merely shrugged and took a cab that afternoon down to the TV station -- half expecting to be thrown out the moment I showed up. This didn't happen, perhaps because a CBS camera crew was already there and muttering darkly about Nixon's refusal to see them. They left shortly after I arrived, but I hung around to see what would happen.

The atmosphere was very sinister. Nixon was off in another room, as usual, rehearsing with his cast. They spent an hour getting all the questions right. Meanwhile Hyde and other staffers took turns watching me. None of them knew who the “citizens” who were to appear on the program were, or who had chosen them. “They're just people who want to ask him questions,” said Hyde.

Whoever they were, they were shrouded in great secrecy -- despite the fact that their faces would soon be appearing on local TV screens with monotonous regularity. At one point I was making notes near the studio door when it suddenly flew open and two of Nixon's staffers came at me in a very menacing way. “What are you writing?” snapped one.

“Notes,” I said.

“Well, write them on the other side of the room,” said the other. “Don't stand around this door.”

So I went to the other side of the room and made some more notes about the strange, paranoid behavior that had puzzled me for the past few days. And then I went back to the Holiday Inn and waited for the next “drill.”

Nixon's speeches that week are hardly worth mentioning -- except as indisputable proof that the “old Nixon” is still with us. On Vietnam he echoes Johnson: on domestic issues he talks like Ronald Regan. He is a champion of “free enterprise” at home and “peace with honor” abroad. People with short memories say he sounds in speeches like a “milder version of Goldwater,” or a “Johnson without a drawl.” But those who recall the 1960 campaign know exactly whom he sounds like: Richard Milhous Nixon.

And why shouldn't he? Nixon's political philosophy was formed and tested by the time he became Vice-President of the United States at age 40. It served him well enough for the next eight years, and in 1960 nearly half the voters in the country wanted him to be the next President. This is not the background of a man who would find any serious reason, at age 55, to change his political philosophy.