At dusk, with signs and slogans and Captain Keith's sliding crowd estimates reverberating in their heads, several hundred newsmen finally stumbled out of their buses and into the Tarrytown Hilton. The Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President had contracted with the Hilton to provide reporters with a newsroom, free telephones, and free food and drink. The few journalists who were so elite that they did not have to file a story on the day's events by early-evening deadline time headed for the bar. Most of the rest headed for the Grand Ballroom to write their stories. As deadline time approached, the newsmen were feverishly reconstructing what they had seen that afternoon--50 miles of Westchester County; boisterous crowds; touching incidents; boring speeches given by various Republicans; even an assassination attempt that had been foiled by the New Rochelle Police--trying to figure out how they were going to make these raw events lie flat on paper in ordered paragraphs.
An hour later, the events of the day had been boxed into news stories and the stories had been read loudly over the telephone to the newsrooms back home. The reporters headed in various directions: some to get drunk; some to hear the President tell an evening rally of suburban Republicans in Nassau County how he was planning to subvert the Constitution in the coming week.
I HAD MISSED the last press bus to Nassau County, so I never made it to the rally. But I was able to describe it in my news story the next morning as if I had been sitting in the front row. Reporting the news is big business and one service provided by the newsmakers for their media retailers is the pre-packing of news events in advance. I had been given a copy of Nixon's evening speech shortly after he first arrived at Westchester airport that afternoon. I knew what he was going to say, so I put excerpts from his speech in my story. I didn't know that several hundred demonstrators had infiltrated the Nassau County Coliseum, that they would disrupt Nixon's speech and that they would be forcibly ejected from the auditorium. So that important event didn't make the morning paper. Too bad, but that's the way it goes in the news business.
Nixon told his Nassau County audience what he had told the press earlier in the day: that he had some "bad news" for the "big spenders" in Congress who had not only ignored his demand last month for executive veto power over the Federal budget, but had also "jammed through" social welfare legislation which put the budget well over the $250 billion ceiling Nixon had demanded.
The "bad news" was a Nixon pledge to use "my full legal powers" to keep the budget under $250 billion. For once, Nixon acted quickly on a campaign promise. Four days after his Nassau speech, Nixon vetoed nine bills, including the entire Department of Health Education and Welfare and Department of Labor appropriations. Also vetoed on the Nixon "budget-breaker" list were appropriations for: flood control projects; improved burial and cemetary benefits for veterans; expanded health care facilities at Veterans Administration Hospitals; vocational rehabilitation programs for people so handicapped that they cannot work; and public works projects to bring jobs to low income areas and areas with severe unemployment.
Nixon defended his budget vetoes as anti-inflationary, but it must be remembered that several days before Nixon decided to pinch pennies on the sick and poor, he signed into law a $76.7 billion appropriations and military construction package for the Defense Department.
Although Nixon's vetoes were appalling, they were legal. But in announcing the vetoes, White House Aide John Erlichman had still more bad news--this time for the Constitution. In a further effort to enforce the President's $250 billion ceiling over the already-stated will of Congress, Erlichman said that Nixon would simply refuse to spend some of the money which Congress had appropriated. Congress is the branch of government delegated to make final decisions on the budget, and Sen. Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina, a constitutional scholar, promised that he would bring suit if Nixon tried to impound money which Congress had decided to spend.
HAD the Nassau County audience realized that Nixon was announcing his intention to use dictatorial powers? When Nixon told the middle class suburban voters that "there is no higher priority with me than protecting our people against higher prices and higher taxes" had the audience understood that what Nixon meant was that their pocketbooks and his re-election chances had a higher priority than wounded Vietnam veterans, flood victims, and paraplegics?
After seeing it in operation, it is impossible to be sure whether the Campaign to Re-Elect the President is putting the country to sleep, or whether it is creating a constituency as calculating and self-interested as the President himself.