Nixon's "last" press conference
Nixon's "last" press conference was held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on November 7, 1962 , the day after Richard Nixon's defeat in the election of California Governor . In an angry monologue, Nixon criticized the media coverage that never gave him a fair chance. He ended the press conference with the now famous sentence
"You won't be able to push Nixon around in the future because this, gentlemen, is my last press conference."
" You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference. "
background
In the 1962 California gubernatorial election , former Vice President Richard Nixon ran as a Republican candidate , but was considered an outsider from the start as the Democratic incumbent Pat Brown was extremely popular. Nixon, on the other hand, had not yet recovered politically or personally from his defeat by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election and was running a poor campaign. Although the polls initially showed slight advantages for Nixon, Brown, who started his election campaign relatively late, was able to catch up. Brown's victory by over 5% over his Republican opponent surprised the media public across the country in its clarity.
press conference
On the evening of election day (November 6th), Nixon's defeat was already becoming apparent, the candidate himself refused to speak to the media until after midnight on the advice of his campaign manager Harry Robbins Haldeman , because in Orange County , which was traditionally Republican, many votes had not yet been counted. When the electoral defeat became clear, Nixon telegram congratulated Gov. Brown . Nixon's team decided that the candidate should leave the hotel through a back door. At ten o'clock in the morning the next day, Nixon's press secretary Herb Klein was talking to reporters when Nixon himself suddenly entered the room and almost forcibly pushed Klein aside. Then he began his speech, which lasted about fifteen minutes. He said he knew that all reporters were delighted with his defeat, that for the past sixteen years, since his election to Congress and since the Alger Hiss case , they had "had a lot of fun" with him, and had never given him a fair chance given. But he hoped that the newspapers would now only once again print what he really had said. After incoherent references to the economic situation, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Brown's election campaign, he returned to the main topic of his speech, media criticism. He hoped, said Nixon, that his speech would mean that in the future every newspaper would have at least one reporter actually report what a candidate said in the election campaign and thus give him the opportunity to present his arguments. Then he ended his speech with the final sentence quoted above. Although the event was announced as a press conference and is referred to as such in the literature, Nixon refused to answer questions from reporters after his speech.
aftermath
The general public saw the press conference as the irrevocable end of Nixon's political career. His media-critical speech was taken as a sign that he was a bad loser who did not have his emotions under control. John Ehrlichman , a close confidante of the future president, stated that he was under the influence of alcohol and medication on election night; Haldeman suspected something similar. President Kennedy said in a private conversation that he had doubts about Nixon's sanity because no one who was completely mentally normal could ever make such a speech. Nixon himself did not regret his words in later years either, speaking of a warning that had led the media to treat him far more fairly in later election campaigns. Despite the immensely negative publicity, the “last” press conference did not damage Nixon's political career - contrary to all expectations - in the long term.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Der Spiegel 49/1962: My boy
- ↑ MSNBC: The 'last press conference'
- ↑ Summers (2000), pp. 231ff.
- ↑ Summers (2000), pp. 237f.
literature
- Anthony Summers: The Arrogance of Power. The secret world of Richard Nixon . Penguin, New York-London, 2000 ISBN 0-14-02-6078-1