University of Virginia Library

Nixon: President Or Politician?

Reprinted with permission from
The New York Times.

By James Reston

ROANOKE, Va. The state of
Virginia has never seemed more
beautiful or more troubled
politically than it does now in the
midst of the autumn election
campaign. Nothing is quite the
same even in this most stable of
American states.

For one thing, Virginia has, of
all things, a Republican Governor,
Lin wood Holton, and a very good
one. It has as usual a Senator, Harry
Byrd, but he is running as an
Independent. It also has a powerful
Democratic political base in
the courthouses, but most of the
courthouse elders are not working
for George C. Rawlings Jr., the
Democratic candidate for Senate,
but for Senator Byrd.

So everything is a little different
in this part of the country. Even
the Blue Ridge is not blue; it is
muted red and brown and yellow,
an immense, spectacular and
masculine mountain range in the
afternoon sun, but gentle and vague
in the morning mist.

In a way, Virginia is a symbol of
our national politics again for the
first time since the beginnings of
the Republic. It is caught in the
struggle between the old politics
and the new politics, between the
days of Harry Byrd Sr. and Harry
Byrd Jr., between the white
courthouse elders and the new
organized black voters, and the
political forces in the Republican
party are just as confused as the
political forces in the Democratic
party.

The Republicans, and
particularly Mr. Nixon, have been
arguing for years that the South
was essentially conservative and
should make a place for their party.
With this in mind, President Nixon
campaigned for Linwood Holton
and helped him win the
governorship of Virginia. But in this
election, the President's attitude
toward the Governor of Virginia
has changed.

Mr. Nixon has not been arguing
in this election for a two-party
South. He is going around the
country stumping for Republican
senatorial candidates regardless of
their qualities, but he is not backing
the Republican senatorial candidate
in Virginia. He is for the
"principle" of Republican power
here, but he is really for Harry Byrd
Jr., on the theory that the White
House can count on Senator Byrd's
vote.

No doubt this strategy will win.
With the President and courthouse
elders for him, Senator Byrd is
almost sure to be re-elected, but the
consequences of this kind of
old-fashioned power politics may
be very serious for President Nixon.

His problem is to govern the
country, to put together a coalition
in the Congress that will vote for
his programs, to restore confidence
in the integrity of the institutions
of the nation and to go through the
next two years with some kind of
effective consensus in Washington.
But by playing power politics in
Virginia, Mississippi and New York,
even against the Republican party's
interests, he stands to lose, even if
he establishes a
Republican-conservative control of
the Senate.

What the President is doing in
this election is precisely the
opposite of what he started out to
do when he was elected. His aim at
the beginning was to unify the
country, to cut back overseas
commitments, to avoid
confrontations, to encourage
negotiations, to reduce partisan and
ideological arguments, to talk softly
and compromise at home and
abroad.

But lately he has been going in
the opposite direction. He has been
going with Vice President Agnew,
with the politics of confrontation,
with conservatives like Byrd in
Virginia and Buckley in New York,
even against the nominees of his
own party.

And the result of this is fairly
obvious. Even if he wins in the
November elections, he will have to
deal with a hostile opposition. This
has been a mean and venomous
campaign, which has aroused
partisan and ideological feelings and
is almost certain to leave the
President with a bitter and hostile
opposition, even if he gets a
Republican majority in the Senate.

Virginia merely symbolizes this
problem. Governor Holton took the
President seriously about
establishing a two-party system in
the South, and found that Mr.
Nixon put his own interests ahead
of the party's interests or the
principle of a two-party South.

Accordingly, it may be a little
early to say, who will win the
November elections, but the way
things are now going, the country is
almost sure to be the loser. For the
President has gone back to his old
partisan tactics, and while they may
prevail, his main problem is not to
win elections but to govern the
country, and even if he wins in
November, he may discover, like
President Johnson, that he has
missed the main point.