"Something More Substantial"

THE VICE-PRESIDENCY

"Something More Substantial"

Just two hours before his second inauguration, Vice President Richard Nixon met with a handful of newsmen in the sitting room of his white brick home in Washington's Spring Valley. He began with relaxed small talk: he had been able to sleep until 8 a.m. because his daughters did not have to go to school (Inauguration Day is a holiday in Washington); the girls, Patricia, 10, and Julie, 8, were now old enough to look in briefly on that night's inaugural ball; the Nixons' baby sitter had complained that she had never seen a President, so he had arranged for her to have a seat in his section at the inauguration ceremonies. Then, prodded by questions, Dick Nixon began to talk of the business of being Vice President:

"Four years ago I was really as green as I could be regarding the responsibilities of the vice-presidency. I didn't have the slightest idea of anything other than the ceremonial responsibilities. Now, through these four years have evolved rather definite lines of responsibility."

His first term, continued Nixon, gave him "a chance for a more liberal education in what goes on in the world than perhaps any other man in recent American history. I think I can fairly say that this increases my ability to make a worth-while contribution in the high councils of state." Therefore, said Vice President Nixon, for the next four years he "will be doing something more substantial than acting as a figurehead in presiding over the Senate."

The reporters left the Nixon home impressed with what he had said--and with what he had not said. Speculating on the whole performance, New York Times Pundit Arthur Krock noted: "At this distant point from 1960, across a time span in which coming events are necessarily obscure, the current fact seems to be not only that Nixon is foremost among Republican presidential aspirants but that he is unlikely to make the errors which would displace him from that position." Five days after the inauguration, Dick Nixon announced that the future held something else in store for him: a new home. He had signed a contract to buy (for $75,000 on a property appraised at $67,500) the 21-room (six bedrooms), old stone house owned by the late Homer Cummings, onetime (1933-39) Democratic Attorney General. The approximate moving date to fashionable Wesley Heights in northwest Washington: mid-March.

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