Abstract
In December 1972, Richard Nixon gave a rare interview with the Associated Press.¹ Coming just six weeks after his landslide victory in an election that saw the Democratic Party in complete disarray, a reader might have expected to learn about Nixon’s goals and agenda for his second term in office. The interview, however, had been granted on the condition that the president not be asked “substantive questions about public issues but would seek only to elicit his personality and mood.” As such, the resulting profile was an explicit effort on the part of the administration to recast Nixon’s public image,