He has said it himself: “All this talk about 'the new Nixon.' Maybe it's there, but perhaps many people didn't know the old one.” He understandably dislikes the implications of the term: The necessity for a “new Nixon” means there must have been something wrong with the old one, and he strongly disputes that notion.

There is probably some truth in what he says, if only to the extent that he will now talk candidly with individual reporters -- especially those from influential papers and magazines. Some of them have discovered to their amazement, that the “private Nixon” is not the monster they'd always assumed him to be. In private he can be friendly and surprisingly frank, even about himself. This was never the case with the “old Nixon.”

So there is no way of knowing if the “private Nixon” was always so different from the public version. We have only his word, and -- well, he is, after all, a politician running for office, and a very shrewd man. After several days of watching his performance in New Hampshire I suspected that he'd taken a hint from Ronald Reagan and hired a public relations firm to give him a new image. Henry Hyde denied this emphatically, “That's not his style,” he said. “Mr. Nixon runs his own campaigns. You'd find that out pretty quick if you worked for him.”

“That's a good idea,” I said. “How about it?”

“What?” he asked humorlessly.

“A job. I could write him a speech that would change his image in twenty-four hours.”

Henry didn't think much of the idea. Humor is scarce in the Nixon camp. The staffers tell jokes now and then, but they're not very funny. Only Charley McWhorter, the resident political expert, seems to have a sense of the absurd.

Oddly enough, Nixon himself shows traces of humor. Not often in public, despite his awkward attempts to joke about how bad he looks on television and that sort of thing. (“I understand the skiing is great here,” he told one audience. “I've never skied, but” -- he touched his nose -- “I have a personal feeling about it.”) Every now and then he will smile spontaneously at something, and it's not the same smile that he beams at photographers.

At one point I had a long conversation with him about pro football. I'd heard he was a fan, and earlier that night in a speech at a Chamber of Commerce banquet he'd said that he'd bet on Oakland in the Super Bowl. I was curious, and since Ray Price had arranged for me to ride back to Manchester in Nixon's car, I took the opportunity to ask him about it. Actually, I suspected that he didn't know football from pig-hustling and that he mentioned it from time to time only because his wizards had told him it would make him seem like a regular guy.