One day Nixon raged to his press aides to sever all ties with the Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Next he added the Washington Post, after it jumped the gun in announcing his meeting with the president of South Vietnam on Midway Island June 8. (Nixon had decided he needed an excuse to be out of the country that day to get out of a scheduled address at Ohio State after the FBI told him it was one of the hottest antiwar campuses.) The reporter with the best contacts in the West Wing, the New Republic’s John Osborne, reported the president was enveloped in “a passing phase of extreme frustration.” Nixon spent hours each day alone, brooding, or bitching to Haldeman about the staff’s failure to get the press to write that he worked twenty-hour days. And that he cared nothing about public relations. Moody and angry White House.