Westward Ho!

Richard Nixon was already off and running. Having vowed to campaign in all of the 50 states, he started with the farthest first. After a strategy meeting in Newport, R.I. with vacationing President Eisenhower and Running Mate Henry Cabot Lodge early in the week, Nixon and Wife Pat headed west. At a Reno airport welcome, Nixon drew cheers from the crowd by pointing out that Pat, born in nearby Ely, Nev., was wearing a pin that boasted. "I'm from Nevada" (someone had slipped it to her two minutes before). Campaigning smoothly herself, Pat got photographed kissing an Indian papoose.

Leis & Poi. Next came Nixon's own home territory, Los Angeles. Welcomed at the airport by 5,000 cheering people and one baby elephant, Nixon led a motorcade to his alma mater, Quaker-run Whittier College, found the football field jammed with 15,000 greeters. Next morning, on a chartered prop plane (to save the G.O.P. National Committee $11,000 more than a jet charter would have cost), Dick and Pat hurried on to Hawaii, spent two days there island hopping. Nixon campaigned as if he expected Hawaii's three electoral votes to decide the outcome in November. He was also testing his style and some of his "impact lines" for future use. Inevitably, he was draped with leis, let himself be kissed by Hawaiian maidens, showed up at a luau wearing a just-purchased electric-yellow sports shirt, ate gluey poi with his fingers in the native manner.

As always, his staff had primed Nixon with bits of local knowledge to toss off at opportune moments. Landing on the island of Kauai in a rain squall, he smilingly observed that Kauai legend holds rain to be a good omen. At Hilo, on the island of Hawaii, he mentioned not only the tidal wave that devastated Hilo last May but also the big wave that hit the city back in 1946. On Maui, he tried his tongue on some flattering words in Hawaiian: "Maui no ka oi"--roughly, "Maui is the best of all the islands.'' It all went over very well.

Republicrat or Democan? Reporters who made the long plane trip with him cabled home informed stories about what kind of campaign strategy Nixon intended to follow. The basic decision was to try to erase the public's old image of a highly partisan Richard Nixon and substitute a new statesmanlike image to appeal to independents. On the trip, Nixon repeated again and again that he intended to "avoid personalities" during the campaign and "leave the low road to him"--meaning Jack Kennedy, though sometimes, when he accused Kennedy of buying the labor vote, it took a sensitive altimeter to know when the road was low or high. He quickly resumed a high. "The thing I hope you will do," he told a crowd in Hawaii, "is not vote for a party but study the issues and what I say about them and what my opponent says about them, and then make up your mind on the basis of what is best for the country."

So far did Nixon lean into nonpartisanship that the Republican New York Herald Tribune headlined: NIXON: REPUBLICRAT OR DEMOCAN? Such a style may not sit well with G.O.P. regulars, Nixon conceded, but he is convinced that since the G.O.P. is the minority party, according to party registration, he must gather in a heavy majority of the independent vote if he is to win in November.

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