Watching Nixon's speech in hazy color on the Owl Farm tube with New York Mayor John Lindsay, Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin and former Bobby Kennedy speechwriter Adam Wolinsky, I half expected to hear that fine old Calvin Coolidge quote: “The business of America is business.”

And it only occurred to me later that Nixon wouldn't have dared to use that one, because no president since Hubert Hoover has been forced to explain away the kind of root-structural damage to the national economy that Nixon is trying to explain today. And Hoover at least had the excuse that he “inherited his problems” from somebody else -- which Nixon can't claim, because he is now in his fifth year as president, and when he goes on TV to explain himself he is facing an audience of 50 to 60 million who can't afford steaks or even hamburger in the supermarkets, who can't buy gasoline for their cars, who are paying 15 and 20% interest rates for bank loans, and who are being told now that there may not be enough fuel oil to heat their homes through the coming winter.

This is not the ideal audience for a second-term president, fresh from a landslide victory, to confront with 29 minutes of lame gibberish about mean nit-pickers in Congress, the good ole American way, and Let's Get on with Business.

Indeed. That's the first thing Richard Nixon and I have ever agreed on, politically -- and what we are dealing with now is no longer hard ideology, but a matter of simple competence. What we are looking at on all our TV sets is a man who finally, after 24 years of frenzied effort, became the President of the United States with a personal salary of $200,000 a year and an unlimited expense account including a fleet of private helicopters, jetliners, armored cars, personal mansions and estates on both coasts and control over a budget beyond the wildest dreams of King Midas. . . and all the dumb bastard can show us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national economy, disastrous defeat in a war he could have ended four years ago on far better terms than he finally came around to, and a hand-picked personal staff put together through five years of screening, whose collective criminal record will blow the minds of high-school American History students for the next 100 years. Nixon's hand-picked Vice President is about to be indicted for Extortion and Bribery; his former campaign manager and his former Secretary of Commerce & personal fund-raiser have already been indicted for Perjury, two of his ranking campaign managers have already pleaded guilty to Obstruction of Justice, the White House counsel is headed for prison on more felony counts than I have room to list here, and before the trials are finished. . .