to the reality. the huge number of u.s. combat deaths in a war that was not going to end the way president johnson said it was going to end. when richard nixon ran for president the second time in 1968, mcginnis ripped the scab off that campaign almost as brutally. he showed how nixon and his people used television to repackage their candidate, to confect a new nixon for public consumption. he showed the take, the retakes, the whole inside of how nixon created the notion that he was out there meeting the people, debating the issues in what was really an extremely produced campaign performance. nixon was avoiding the kind of real debate that killed him in the '60 campaign against john f. kennedy, by pretending to be performing before a real live audience that was there to judge him. it worked. only when we read mcginnis' superb "selling of the president" did he see how it worked. i remember getting a copy of that book when i was in swaziland teaching business in the peace corps. the book made its round among the volunteers. this inside look at state of the art media politics was something new back then.