Privately, King told Rustin that Nixon was a mixture of enthusiasm with pragmatism, whose general stance was that he would help the cause of civil rights if he could do so without getting hurt politically. King’s major reservation about the Vice President was that his relish and conviction seemed so evenly applied to all subjects as to mask his interior substance. Nixon was “magnetic,” King wrote a year later, in a public letter that darted between flattery and suspicion. “I would say that Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. When you are close to Nixon he almost disarms
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