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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

Secret Service man in the back seat. It was a white Chevrolet sedan, and as he came in and the car stopped and he jumped out, he banged his knee very severely on the door. The accident was so severe that he almost fell to the ground because he'd banged his knee so hard. He was, I believe, eager to demonstrate to the -- and the members of the press were all around on the other side of the entranceway, inside the building. Nixon had been ailing and had had some bug or something and had lost a lot of weight, didn't look well at all and, I think, was trying to impress upon us as well as the press that he was not only nimble but he was energetic and so forth. And he jumped out and cracked his knee very severely. So severely that when the press wanted to take pictures of him, and called to him, he was disoriented. He didn't know where they were. I believe that -- in the first place, I don't believe that he was up to the debate physically. And I think this didn't help any.

We took him in. I took him into the studio and showed him where he would be seated. And of course, by that time all of his people were in the studio ready to take care of him and so forth. By taking care of him I don't mean about the knee, because by that time he had tried to forget that. We had him seated so that he could be sure of where the lectern was and so forth, where the cameras were going to be, where the journalists were going to be who were going to question him. We at that time used boom mikes, with a long fishpole, the mike hung down. And so there were voice levels taken on that. In those days, the control room for the studio was right in the studio. Today of course they're remote from the studio. But the control room was looking right out on the set. I went back to the control room to see how he looked on camera and so forth. His collar was so extra large that you could run his finger around his neck. He had --

Q:

His weight loss was severe.





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