ABSTRACT
James Reston wrote of Richard Nixon's career until 1962: "He mastered the techniques of politics before he mastered the principles, and ironically it was this preoccupation with techniques that both brought him forward and cast him down". Nixon came back from defeat in 1962 just as earlier, in 1952, through the "Checkers Speech", he overcame rejection by most of the powers of the Republican party. Even the Constitution came to be discussed among Nixon's men in the language of power. Nixon has proved that a person with a difficult temperament can, by hard work, master the art of television. Nixon's efforts, by contrast, were to revise present perceptions of reality. Nixon believed that the national media were his political opponents. Nixon created a category of "official facts", which from time to time had to be revised. In the Nixon world, the attempt to contrive a self-contained reality went to unprecedented lengths.
