 When the plane reached Los Angeles , Nixon secluded himself in a suite in The Ambassador Hotel , letting no one except his wife , Chotiner , and attorney and adviser William P. Rogers have any hint what he was planning . He called two professors he knew at his alma mater , Whittier College , seeking appropriate Abraham Lincoln quotes . They called back with two suggestions , one of which he used . Unwilling to have his message filtered , the candidate adamantly refused to provide the media with any advance text of his speech , convinced that it would reduce the size of his audience . Without any hard information on what would be said during the speech , rumors flew through the media . UPI reported that Nixon would resign from the ticket well before the scheduled time for the speech . On the evening of the 22nd , the media broke the story that Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson had a similar fund , as Chotiner had predicted . The Stevenson information had been leaked by Bob Humphreys at the RNC , but as he later ruefully noted , " Nobody paid much attention to it . " 
