David Gergen, Master of THE GAME

On Nov. 9, 1960, the day after John F. Kennedy defeated Richard M. Nixon to become the 35th President of the United States, a reporter for The Washington Daily News and a reporter for The Associated Press dropped by Nixon's house in Washington, looking for a interview with the loser. The Vice President answered the door himself, and standing on the front stoop, the three men settled into a polite routine of questions and answers. Suddenly, Pat Nixon appeared. She was angry and, it was clear, not in control of her emotions. She damned the reporters and their colleagues for favoritism toward Kennedy that she said cost her husband the election. Nixon calmed her and led her away. When he returned, he said nothing about his wife's outburst, and the reporters resumed their inquiry as if nothing unusual had occurred. Neither reporter ever wrote about Mrs. Nixon's behavior; it wasn't news.

This small, oddly dignified scene, remembered by one of the reporters, belongs to a world that has vanished utterly. A journalist interviewing the losing candidate on the day after the 1992 election would have done so as a member of a large pack, covering a set piece of political theater -- a media event, as it is called. The event would have been scripted down to the level of minor jokes, in an effort to insure that the candidate committed no gaffes before the cameras. The reporters, hoping to shake things off-script, and aware of their own video presence, would have shouted self-consciously aggressive questions. Had the defeated candidate's wife interrupted to scold the press, this would have been regarded by his handlers as a calamity (unless they had secretly arranged it) and by the reporters as the news of the day.

The story of this vast change is the story of how the idea of image became the faith of Washington, and how the President became the central figure of that faith, the architect and ultimately the victim of the world's most elaborate personality cult.

In this new faith, it has come to be held that what sort of person a politician actually is and what he actually does are not really important. What is important is the perceived image of what he is and what he does. Politics is not about objective reality, but virtual reality. What happens in the political world is divorced from the real world. It exists for only the fleeting historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama. Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not true -- yet also maintain that it is the only truth that really matters.

Continue reading the main story

By the time Bill Clinton was elected the 42d President of the United States, the culture of Washington (and therefore of governance and politics) had become dominated by people professionally involved in creating the public images of elected officials. They hold various jobs -- they are pollsters, news-media consultants, campaign strategists, advertising producers, political scientists, reporters, columnists, commentators -- but the making of the movie is their shared concern. They are parts of a product-based cultural whole, just like the citizens of Beverly Hills. Some are actors, some are directors, some are scriptwriters and some are critics, but they are all in the same line of work and life. They go to the same parties, send their children to the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods. They interview each other, argue with each other, sleep with each other, marry each other, live and die by each other's judgment. They joust and josh on television together, and get rich together explaining Washington to conventions of doctors and lawyers and corporate executives.

Not surprisingly, they tend to believe the same things at the same time. They believe in polls. They believe in television; they believe in talk; they believe, most profoundly, in talk television. They believe in irony. They believe that nothing a politician does in public can be taken at face value, but that everything he does is a metaphor for something he is hiding. They believe in the extraordinary! disastrous! magnificent! scandalous! truth of whatever it is they believe in at the moment. Above all, they believe in the power of what they have created, in the subjectivity of reality and the reality of perceptions, in image.

Unlock more free articles.
Create an account or log in
The growth of the faith of image has had a gradual but cumulatively momentous effect. It has made the old distinctions of profession and ideology that had defined the culture of Washington seem outdated and naive, like the blushingly remembered fervors of adolescence. If the reality of an action is defined by the public presentation of the action, then what is a television reporter but an actor? What is a newspaper writer but a theater critic? If the truth of an idea is defined by its advertising campaign, who but a mug can seriously believe in one set of ideas or another? If perception is reality, what is the point of any differences at all -- between Republicans and Democrats, between journalists and Government officials, between ideologues and copywriters, between the chatterers of television and the thinkers of the academy, between Washington and Hollywood?

Indeed, the differences have become harder and harder to see. Yesterday's reporter is today's White House spokesman is tomorrow's pundit. On the Sunday talk shows, the celebrity host and the celebrity reporter and the celebrity political strategist sit side by side, and the distinctions between them are not apparent to the naked eye. In effect, they are one, members of the faith, the stars of a culture they themselves have created. Indeed, they have acknowledged their oneness. They have given themselves a name, the Insiders, and a language.

The language reveals, as all languages do, a great deal about how its speakers see themselves and the world. It is self-referential, self-important, self-mocking and very nearly (if subconsciously) self-loathing. It is deeply cynical. It portrays a society where to be knowing is to admit the fraud of one's functions in the act of performing them.

Editors’ Picks

The Brilliant, Bitter, Unlikable Scion of an American Political Dynasty

Snapshots of Daily Life in a Remote Region of Portugal

The 10 Best Books Through Time
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

This is how the Insiders describe the passage of a day:

The day is composed, not of hours or minutes, but of news cycles. In each cycle, senior White House officials speaking on background define the line of the day. The line is echoed and amplified outside the Beltway to real people, who live out there, by the President's surrogates, whose appearances create actualities (on radio) and talking heads (on television). During the rollout of a new policy, the President, coached by his handlers and working from talking points and briefing books churned out by war room aides, may permit his own head to talk. There are various ways in which he might do this, ranging from the simplest photo op to a one on one with a media big-foot, to the more elaborately orchestrated media hit (perhaps an impromptu with real people) to the full-fledged spectacle of a town hall.

The line, a subunit of the Administration's thematic message, is reinforced by leaks and plants and massaged through the care and feeding of the press. It is adjusted by spin patrol and corrected through damage control when mistakes are made or gaffes are committed that take attention off-message and can create a dreaded feeding frenzy. Reaction to the line is an important part of the cycle, and it comes primarily from Congressional leaders of both parties, the strange-sounding biparts, whose staff-written utterances are often delivered directly to media outlets via fax attacks. The result of all this activity passes through the media filter, where it is cut into tiny, easily digestible sound bites and fed to already overstuffed pundits, who deliver the ultimate product of the entire process, a new piece of conventional wisdom.

Every species produces its perfect flower and every culture its perfect moment. In the late spring of 1993, the perfect flower of the insider species and the perfect moment of the image culture met in the Presidential appointment of David R. Gergen, Washington's circular man.

The career of David Gergen represents the triumph of image. The character of David Gergen represents the apotheosis of the insider. The two are rolled up in him together, in a shining, seamless roundness whose mirrored surface reveals nothing but the political scene rolling by. In himself, Gergen has conflated all the old distinctions. Over the course of 22 years, he has traveled from White House to White House, from Government to journalism to punditry and now back to Government (and soon enough, you may bet on it, back to journalism again), from the Democratic camp to the Republican to the Independent to the Democratic again. So perfectly is he of his time and place and class that he is himself part of the tribal language. To be Gergenized is to be spun by the velveteen hum of this soothing man's smoothing voice into a state of such vertigo that the sense of what is real disappears into a blur. Nothing is more Gergenized than Gergen himself. The blur is the man. He is his own magic movie, forever revising the reality of himself.

On May 29, David Gergen was appointed counselor to the new President, a Democrat. The move surprised many who had known Gergen as a servant of three Republican Presidents, including one -- Ronald Reagan -- whom the new President had charged with ruining America. Actually, Gergen hastened to say with bland audacity: "I'm not a Republican. I've always been a registered Independent."

On June 7, standing at the podium in the White House press room where he had often spoken on behalf of Republican Presidents, Gergen was asked to define his politics more fully. His answer was marvelous for its accidental revelation of the heart of the man. When he first went to work for Richard Nixon in 1971, he had been a registered Democrat. Later, under Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, he had voted Republican, worked in Republican political campaigns and served as the public defender of Republican policies. But he characterized this as a matter more sartorial than ideological: "wearing Republican cloth." Leaving the Reagan White House in 1984 to begin a career at the more rarefied levels of journalism (a fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, a stint as editor and later as columnist for U.S. News & World Report, and a regular spot as a commentator on "The MacNeil/ Lehrer Newshour"), he had "thought it was important" that he "not be seen as a, quote, 'Republican.' " And so he had "evolved" into "an independent voice" that was "moderately right of center."

In most places, this sort of performance could win one a reputation for opportunism. It does that in Washington too, but here the tag is meant as a compliment. Possessing a large degree of what the Washington columnist and talk-television star Michael Kinsley has called "intellectual, uh, flexibility" is no sin here. Wrong lies in the opposite direction, in the gaucherie of displaying passionately held convictions. (Stage passion is fine, but it is crucial to know the difference. The real anger displayed by the Republican strategist Mary Matalin during the 1992 Presidential campaign was considered such a breach of manners that her boss, the deep-insider George Bush, forced her to apologize. Meanwhile, the faux tantrums of Matalin's boyfriend, the Democratic strategist James Carville, won him admiring fame.) A man like Gergen, unafraid to admit that his loyalties and convictions are no more than outerwear, is always welcome at the table.

Continue reading the main story

The moment that proved this true -- the perfect flower's perfect moment -- occurred on the evening of June 4, and of course on television. The scene was the set of "The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour," the insider's evening news, where reasonable men and women meet to mostly agree and occasionally agree to disagree (in the mildest possible manner). Until his latest Presidential appointment, Gergen had been a weekly guest on the show, playing (barely) conservative to the columnist Mark Shields's (barely) liberal, a relationship whose evident amiability was never once threatened by even a hint of strong disagreement.

This evening's program focused on two related Presidential events of the past week: the public relations disaster of Lani Guinier's abandoned appointment to head of the Justice Department's civil rights division and the hiring of the public relations impresario David Gergen.

Who did MacNeil/Lehrer invite to assess the impact of Guinier and Gergen? Who but, as host Robert MacNeil put it, a man who was until recently "a weekly analyst here on the Newshour . . . here tonight in his new role . . . David Gergen, news maker."

After interviewing Gergen on Guinier and Gergen on Gergen (he was modest and judicious on both subjects), MacNeil bade the news maker goodbye and introduced the show's political panel, which appeared minus the regular guest . . . David Gergen.

Once the panel host, Roger Mudd, had finished a bland discussion of the Guinier mess, he then turned to a subject of more intimate concern, the White House appointment of . . . David Gergen.

"Well, I wish David Gergen hadn't done it," said the conservative commentator Linda Chavez. "Because he's a friend of mine. Who would wish this job on anybody?"

The liberal commentator Eddie Williams chimed in: "I dropped him a note saying I congratulated him on what I felt was a fantastic match, my words, the match between Gergen and Clinton."

Continue reading the main story

Added Shields: "Let me tell you what David Gergen brings, I think, to Bill Clinton. . . . He has that ability to come in and speak the truth."

At which point, Mudd turned to face the table to Shields's right, and reintroduced . . . David Gergen.

"Did you realize he's been sitting, listening to us the whole time?" Mudd asked, as the director switched cameras to show Gergen there at the table, laughing, grinning slyly, from under his long, pale blond eyelashes, as if to say: Aren't we naughty? And everyone else, Williams and Chavez and Shields and Mudd, was smiling and laughing, too. The joke was, really, delightful. The whole time they had been discussing Gergen, acting as if they were trying to give an honest appraisal of the man -- why, he had been right there sitting among his pals. How delicious (how perfect) to admit that it was all just a great big shucks, that it didn't matter where Gergen sat or whom he worked for at the moment, that he and they were in on it together and that only those saps out there, outside the beltway, were dumb enough to think it was for real.

Oddly enough, no one knows better what is wrong with all this than David Gergen. It is a dislocating experience to hear him -- this former Nixon speech writer, this former Reagan director of communications, this man who has spent the larger part of his adult life building the images of Presidents and of himself, this insider so dedicated to the insider's art of leaking that old colleagues call him the Sieve -- as he disdains and regrets his life's work.

"So often now, Presidents are being judged, politicians are being judged by the quality of their performances: how well do they play the game?" Gergen says. "Did they give a good speech? Or did they do something interesting today? It's all the same. The horse-race nature of the campaign, which gets covered ad nauseam, now also dominates the Presidency. And I think in some ways that the people who are in the business of government and the people in the punditry business are almost co-conspirators. They are feeding off each other. The people in the press are judging you on that basis and the people inside are responding to that. Instead of saying, 'How do we change things in people's lives?' it has become: 'How do we put the packaging together? How do we put the bright ribbons on it that will make people think it is important, or interesting or different? How do we make the pundits say, "Gee, that was impressive"?' And this has no bearing on what happens underneath, and it creates a deepening cynicism."

What he's criticizing, it is suggested:

"Is stuff I've done. I admit that. I've done a lot of it. But you realize. . . . " Here he pauses for a long moment. "Look, I plead guilty to having played the game and inventing some forms of the game that I thought eventually went beyond what was intended. . . . It gave way over time to -- and this is what I regret -- a selling for the sake of selling. It had nothing to do with ideas. It had nothing to do with anything that was real. Eventually, it became selling the sizzle without the steak. There was nothing connected to it. It was all cellophane. It was all packaging. And I feel I contributed to that. There's no question about that. I'd been aggressive in my early years trying to get some of that set up. I did that in part because I thought that was the only way you could govern. I think now, as I get older, that the steak is very important, too. Yes, the selling has to continue, but it's not sufficient in and of itself. That becomes, over time, just an empty exercise."

What happened to the Presidency and to Washington was, Gergen argues, inevitable. "We have an inherently weak institution in the Presidency," he says. "It was intentionally set up that way by the founders. There is a reason why the Presidency is Article II of the Constitution, not Article I. The Congress was always intended to be the leading body, with the Presidency set up as a somewhat weaker body. And it was the weaker body for most of our history."

Continue reading the main story

But modern Presidents and the news media both tend to exaggerate the powers of the office, says Gergen, voicing a theory most prominently advanced by the historian Richard Neustadt. This exaggeration, the theory goes, has magnified the gulf between what the President can accomplish and what the public expects of him.

"Given this, and given the increasing power of the press, and the inability of contemporary Presidents to master the press enough to master the message, there has been a lot more effort on the part of the White Houses to manage the message, to orchestrate," Gergen says. "And that, in turn, increases the cynicism on the other side."

There is obvious truth in this vicious-circle theory, but the cloak of inevitability obscures the more complicated, larger story -- and the role of David Gergen in it. The empty exercise Gergen now deplores is not simply the product of historical forces nor merely the result of the irresistible rise of news-media power. It is also the conscious design of a small group of smart, purposeful men -- advertising executives and scriptwriters and pollsters and strategists -- who worked over a period of two decades to invent a new type of Presidency, one that would be primarily defined by the television screen. Gergen occupies a curious position in the group. He invented none of the big ideas or foundation techniques of the image-age Presidency. But he had the good fortune to find himself on the inside more or less at the beginning of the change (he has a great knack for being in the right place at the right time), and he had the skills to prosper.

He was intelligent and hard-working and he had a complex charm. A big man who underplayed his presence, he was solicitous of the opinions of others and expressed his own unthreatening thoughts in a soft, friendly voice that gave way easily to laughter. He was not a brilliant student of history or politics, but he was a dedicated one. He tended naturally to the accepted view and to the middle ground. And he had one more important talent. He was gifted at manipulating the appearances of all sorts of realities, including the reality of David Gergen.

From Nixon to Ford to Reagan to Clinton, Gergen carried the faith of image and the image of himself, polishing and adapting and expanding both. As the years passed, his predecessors and peers fell by the wayside, the victims of changing tastes and times. But Gergen changed apace, and quietly, almost inconspicuously grew toward the great role to which he now aspires -- wise man of the age of image.

On the day Pat Nixon told off the reporters on her doorstep, the age and Gergen were both bright and young. Kennedy's 1960 campaign had redefined politics. While other politicians had dipped into the waters of the new age -- Eisenhower had starred in both the first televised Presidential news conference and the first prime-time visit to the White House -- Kennedy was of the age. He had a generational grasp of what screen presence was about, and he ran for President essentially on qualifications of image: beauty, grace, youth, courage, wit, charm. The public J.F.K., shaped with a lapidary precision by the patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, was a World War II hero, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, the pride of an ideal family and a devoted husband to a loving wife. That these achievements were in considerable part the creation of professional myth-makers was overlooked by a press corps that was (as Mrs. Nixon pointed out) largely pro-Kennedy and also ignorant of the extent to which it was being conned. In office, Kennedy was similarly attentive to image, and similarly successful. His Administration shone with a gloss that maximized such minor accomplishments as inviting Pablo Casals to dinner and minimized such major disasters as the invasion of Cuba.

Kennedy's achievement made a powerful impression on Nixon and his advisers, who had to overcome one of the worst images in political history. On Nov. 28, 1967, the speech writer Ray Price, who would later become Gergen's boss and mentor in the Nixon White House, wrote a memorandum to his campaign colleagues explaining how the lessons of Kennedy could be applied to the problems of Nixon, who was planning a second campaign for President the following year.

Continue reading the main story

Nixon's woes, Price wrote, stemmed from "the fact that for years Nixon was one of those men it was fashionable to hate," a reaction to Nixon's style -- what Price called his "cutting edge." To change this political reality, Price said, it was not necessary to change the objective reality of Nixon. Voter approval for a Presidential candidate, Price argued, is not about reality but is "a product of the particular chemistry between the voter and the image of the candidate." He continued: "We have to be very clear on this point: that the response is to the image, not to the man, since 99 percent of the voters have no contact with the man. It's not what's there that counts, it's what's projected -- and . . . it's not what he projects but rather what the voter receives. It's not the man we have to change, but rather the received impression."

Price's insight, translated into a campaign plan of action by the advertising executive Frank Shakespeare and the television producer Roger Ailes, was revolutionary. The Democrats had never really advanced past the press-agentry techniques of inflating accomplishments and hiding flaws -- maintaining a tenuous connection to reality. Price postulated that a new political reality need not correspond at all to objective reality, that a new image could override both the known facts and the previous image of a candidate to become the only reality that mattered.

By Election Day 1968, Nixon had been so thoroughly repackaged that he became, in a sense, the first President to win the office by suicide. The man sworn in on Jan. 20, 1969, was someone the press called the New Nixon.

There was, of course, nothing really new at all. "You see in history a number of references to 'the New Nixon,' " recalls Herb Klein, Nixon's director of communications. "What that really meant was that he came on with a slightly different television technique. But he was the same man, had the same hostility to the press, the same values."

In 1971, two years after the New Nixon took office, the 29-year-old Dave Gergen -- a Navy veteran, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School -- went to work for the President. The Nixon White House was Gergen's true university, and it was an extraordinary school. Here, a public-relations-obsessed President and his staff would create the prototype of the image-age Presidency. This model, which remains in use today, assumes that the powerful, chronically hostile news media work steadfastly against a President's interests, and that this must be countered by a systematic program of propaganda. What a President (or Presidential candidate) says or does must always be calculated for its effect on his image, plotted as points along the arc of his ideal persona, a construct largely determined by what the pollsters say the people regard as ideal at the moment. Since the news media will trumpet the slightest deviation from the ideal as evidence of a flawed Presidency, the marketing of the President and his policies must be the primary concern of a White House, and campaigning must be a permanent feature of governance.

THE MORNING: Make sense of the day’s news and ideas. David Leonhardt and Times journalists guide you through what’s happening — and why it matters.
Sign Up
Gergen remembers the selling of the Nixon image as a central fact of life in his first White House. "The great cynicism had already begun when Nixon took office," he says. "It came with Vietnam when a generation of reporters concluded that their Government was lying to them. Nixon arrived on the back end of that, and he came carrying this great personal animosity, a lack of trust in the press.

"And Nixon understood that unless you mastered television, your Presidency would be ripped apart. And so he developed, the Nixon White House developed, a whole series of ideas about how one talks to the press and communicates through the press. A sort of rules for the road for how a White House acts."

Continue reading the main story

The Nixonian rules, Gergen says, "have been handed down from one Presidency to the next and have had enormous influence. "In many ways," he says, "I think almost everything we do now has come from those years."

Gergen's contention is borne out by the archival records of the Nixon White House. In their first several years in office, the new President's men, guided by an unending flow of orders from Nixon and supervised by a former advertising executive, the chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, invented virtually all the practices of public relations and press handling that would become standard in later White Houses.

Among the innovations were the coordination of an Administration-wide "line of the day" that was in turn part of an overall thematic "message"; the orchestrated use of surrogates and White House-connected "grass roots" organizations to build support, plant stories and attack enemies; a continuing effort to nullify the Washington press corps through an ongoing "outreach" program to the generally more friendly and malleable regional press; the carrot-and-stick technique of rewarding reporters and news organizations whose coverage is positive and attacking those who are critical.

The ideas behind these techniques were not new. What Nixon's men did was to systematize the tricks of puffery and calumny that had long been used in campaigns and incorporate them into the routine operation of the White House. A critical advancement in the corruption of the Washington culture, this not only created new and expanded forms of such tactics, but also legitimized them. Future White Houses would embrace them as essential elements of "how the game is played," as Gergen puts it.

"It was much more than just 'line of the day,' " Gergen remembers. "This was total orchestration. It was much more sophisticated than anything that had come before. There was a desire to control the entire environment, and a feeling that if you didn't control it, they would control it -- they, the great outside they."

In their everlasting search for control, Nixon and Haldeman set up four separate press and propaganda operations. The traditional office of the press secretary remained, but with its power diminished by the exclusion of the person who held that position, Ron Ziegler, from a great deal of information, thus increasing White House control and providing the Administration with a mechanism for denying statements that later proved inconvenient. In addition to the press office, there were two inventions that would also shape the way future White Houses worked: the Office of Communications, directed by Herb Klein, and the Office of Public Liaison, directed by Charles W. Colson.

Klein created two devices of lasting import, the pan-Governmental coordination of the White House line and the establishment of a press operation to feed local, regional and specialty news organizations outside the Washington press corps.

Continue reading the main story

"My concept was that the problem with Government was that everybody went off on their own way and there was no coordination," Klein recalls. "We set up weekly meetings with the people assigned to public affairs in each department of the Government, so the same song was singing through each department. At the same time, we built up coverage from the regional press -- a Cabinet officer speaking in Los Angeles or Minneapolis is going to make a lot more news than that same person speaking in Washington."

The fourth division of the Nixon operation was Dave Gergen's home, the speech-writing office headed by Ray Price. Charged with producing not only Presidential speeches and talking points but also most of the endless stream of speeches needed for Klein and Colson's surrogate operations, the shop employed as many as 50 people during the peak period of the 1972 campaign. Price hired Gergen in 1971 as a staff assistant, and in 1972 made him his deputy, which entailed keeping track of writers' assignments and helping Price edit copy. By the beginning of Nixon's second term in 1973, the continuing crisis of Watergate had forced some officials senior to Gergen out of the White House and left those who remained exhausted and distracted. Price quit the speech-writing department to deal with Watergate full time, and Gergen took over the shop until Nixon's resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.

Until Watergate, the overarching task of the entire press and public relations operation was the perpetuation of the New Nixon image. The obsession with this is illuminated in an unsigned "background memorandum" of December 1970. Kennedy, the memo noted caustically but accurately, had compiled a record in foreign policy of "utter disaster," but "his 'charm' saved the day for him." Eisenhower had been "distant and all business" with his staff, but had succeeded in projecting a "mythology" that he was really a "warm, kindly, fair man."

The memo prescribed a series of steps to "build" a public President Nixon who would embody "those fundamental decencies and virtues which the great majority of Americans like -- hard work, warmth, kindness, consideration for others, willingness to take the heat and not pass the buck."

By the time Gergen came to work in 1971, the make over effort had been organized into something that vaguely resembled a giant earth-moving job. Convinced that, in the awesome task of rebuilding Nixon, God lay somewhere in the details, White House "anecdotalists" dug and dug for "warm items" and "human-type incidents" about the President. The effort reached its sublimely silly peak in the RN Human Interest Story Program, ordered up in a 1971 memo from Haldeman to Price.

A speech-department staff member culled dozens of anecdotes about Nixon from intimates and aides in a lengthy report, with each anecdote indexed according to the character trait it was meant to advertise: Repartee, Courage, Kindness, Strength in Adversity. What is most painfully obvious about these undertakings is how little the anecdotalists had to work with. Exemplifying the President's talent for Repartee was an account of Nixon silencing a New York businessman who had upbraided him over the Vietnam War by telling the man not to "give me any crap." Illustrating the President's Strength in Adversity was a bald little story of how the young Congressman Nixon, falling on an icy sidewalk, still managed to keep his 2-year-old daughter, Tricia, safe in his arms.

In this perfectionist and paranoid atmosphere, Gergen learned the bones of his craft.

He learned the importance of saying the same thing, over and over and over: "Nixon taught us about the art of repetition. He used to tell me, 'About the time you are writing a line that you have written it so often that you want to throw up, that is the first time the American people will hear it.' "