In the chapter on President Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack in his 1962 book, Six Crises,
Richard Nixon lambastes some of the press for its treatment of
Eisenhower after Eisenhower had a stroke. Eisenhower after his stroke
had difficulty expressing his thoughts, as he mixed up words and had
problems coming up with the word that he wanted. Ordinarily, even
before the stroke, Eisenhower's mind tended to outrun his speech (and
Nixon told Eisenhower that, in the case of many politicians, the exact
opposite is the case!), which was why Eisenhower's thoughts sometimes
appeared garbled. But Eisenhower's stroke exasperated his struggle with
words.
Regarding the press, Nixon says on page 175: "I thought
that some of the press coverage of the President's difficulties in this
period was unnecessarily savage and sadistic. Some reporters insisted
on counting up and duly reporting the exact number of 'fluffs'----actual
or imagined----the President might make in a speech or press
conference. Knowing what agony he was going through, I would become so
infuriated on reading such reports that on more than one occasion I
slammed the paper or magazine into the fireplace."
Stephen Ambrose speculated in Nixon: The Education of a Politician
that, had Nixon become President in 1960, he wouldn't have felt as
under assault as he did in 1969, and his relations with the press would
have probably been better. I have my doubts about this, for I think
that Nixon's ill-feelings towards the press were long building up, until
they culminated in Nixon's 1962 statement to reporters that "You won't
have Nixon to kick around anymore". In Six Crises, Nixon notes
that a lot of the press was against him on the Alger Hiss case in the
1940's, that the press tended to highlight the sensational charges
against Nixon in his 1952 race for Vice-President while not highlighting
when those charges were disproved, and that there were people in the
press who mocked Eisenhower after his stroke. There are times when
Nixon in Six Crises manifests a nuanced view of the press: when
Nixon says that the press highlighted the charges against Nixon rather
than the refutation of those charges because it was pursuing
sensationalism in order to sell papers, when Nixon refers to reporters
who treated him with respect when Eisenhower had a heart attack, and
when Nixon acknowledges that there were newspapers that favored
Republicans (Nixon's point being that he wasn't surprised when the
liberal Washington Post was attacking him in 1952 for having a
fund from the donations of private interests, but he realized that the
situation was serious when Republican papers started attacking him,
too). But, in a number of cases in Six Crises, Nixon appears quite jaded when it comes to the press.
Perhaps
the reporters who mocked Eisenhower after his stroke were themselves jaded.
The world of politics can easily harden people and make them cynical,
sucking out of them (to a certain extent) important pieces of their
humanity, such as compassion.