ABSTRACT
The Nixon win of 1968 turned out to be a truce, a temporary tactical pause between the gut-fighting Nixon of the past and future. The way he brought that off, by the most adroit and systematic manipulation of the mass media yet seen, is an object lesson in the perils of modern democracy. Nixon had come into politics as a fighter, a modern-day political Jack the Ripper, from his first contest in 1946 through his hatchet work for Eisenhower down to his failing fight for the governorship of California in 1962. Nixon came out of 1960 believing that "television has increasingly become the medium through which the great majority of the voters get their news and develop their impressions of the candidates". The Nixon commercials were designed with the aid of unpublicized "semantic differential" polls, asking people to check where they would put Nixon on scales running from "shifty" to "direct", from "insincere" to "sincere" from "politician" to "statesman".
