Report of the County Chairman (6 page)

Lieutenant Meisenheimer replied, “Smart politicians take each year as it comes. If Kennedy wins in November, by 1964 the Republicans may be very happy to have Rockefeller on hand, no matter what they thought of him in 1960.”

My fourth prediction was one of the few bits of real insight I had during the campaign, and once I stated it, I never reconsidered: “I don’t know who is going to be the Democratic nominee. Obviously, when Kennedy wins tomorrow in West Virginia he’ll be in front position. But you fellows claim the old professionals in the Democratic party won’t have him. If you’re right, they won’t have Stevenson either, and they know they can’t win with Symington. So I suppose it’ll have to be Johnson and Kennedy. And I think they’ll win.”

Captain Heimark asked, “You think that Jack Kennedy will accept second spot on the ticket?”

“Any one of the four leading contenders will accept either first spot or second.”

Lieutenant Meisenheimer probed, “You think Johnson would accept second spot to Kennedy?”

“Sure,” I said, “and I hope that’s the way it works out. Because that ticket might prove to be the very best.”

Captain Heimark was not entirely satisfied. “You think that Adlai Stevenson would run in second place with Kennedy?”

“If asked,” I said. “Or Kennedy will run in second spot to Stevenson. The difference between my Democrats and your Republicans is that your two top men can’t get together to win an election, whereas our four top men will submit themselves to any possible combination in order for the party to win.”

Somebody asked slowly, “Let me get this straight. You are saying that in your opinion Lyndon Johnson would accept the Vice Presidency in second place to Jack Kennedy?”

“Certainly,” I replied.

Then Lieutenant Meisenheimer asked bluntly, “But tonight, what do you think the ticket will be?”

I thought for some time and said, “I suspect it’s going to be Johnson in first spot and Kennedy in second, but I sure hope it works out the other way.”

Guatemala illuminated two other aspects of the campaign. Adlai Stevenson had recently passed through Mexico and Latin America, and I was surprised at the manner in which Republicans who might have been disposed to scorn him said, “Stevenson accomplished wonders for the United States down here. No American in recent years has done as much. It’s one thing to see Adlai at home, where the press is always hammering him. But it’s quite
different to see him overseas, where he’s about the only American the foreign nations really respect.” Listening to many such comments, I began to suspect that Stevenson might have a better chance for the Presidency than I had originally thought, but if he did not win, I hoped that the victorious Democrat, whoever he might be, would find a major place for him in his official family. My wife, of course, exulted, “See! I told you, Adlai’s the only candidate of any stature.” I replied, somewhat churlishly I’m afraid, “If he could win, I’d be for him.”

The second discovery was in some ways more amusing, in others, more ominous. An American wife, normally a loyal Democrat, chuckled, “I hope Rockefeller wins, and I’ll tell you why. I want to see the startled look on America’s face when he decorates the White House with his personal art collection. Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Feininger and Jack Levine! It’s about time we had some art in our life, after the dreadful drabness of the last eight years.”

I asked, “Would you, a good Democrat, vote for Rocky against Lyndon Johnson or Jack Kennedy?”

“I sure would,” she snapped. “Rocky knows his way around. He’s modern. He talks my language, and we’ve got to get some vitality in the White House. Can’t you just imagine Rocky’s first musicale? Not Guy Lombardo, not Meyer Davis, not Lawrence Welk, but the Schola Cantorum singing Carl Orff. That I want to see.”

I returned to Pennsylvania to find the U-2 incident splashed across the papers, and from the first I took a much more grave attitude toward this than did some of my friends, who found considerable consolation in
Time
magazine, which pointed out that after all the incident merely demonstrated our ability to penetrate Russia.

I had known something of the problems of espionage, and a fundamental understanding of all who occupied themselves with it was that if they were caught by the enemy, their own government would piously wash its hands of the whole affair. When the Eisenhower administration elected to pursue a course counter to historical precedent, I suspected that real trouble would follow, for one of the basic arrangements whereby nations are able to continue talking with one another had been breached. Along these same lines, I was appalled at the reported behavior of the aviator, Francis Powers, and it seemed to me as if a segment of our whole national posture had been willfully jeopardized. Both the government and the man behaved badly, and when Power’s trial eventuated, he proved the sickliness of the situation. As one general observed wryly, “He certainly was no Nathan Hale.”

I was on the point of writing to the
New York Times
, advocating that the Paris summit meeting be canceled by us before something worse took place, but my friends dissuaded me from such a course, and I sat back waiting for the time bomb to explode. I remember taking consolation in the fact that at least one of the Republicans’ major campaign issues was about to be blown sky-high. They could not, in October, claim that they had brought peace in our time, for now what many of us who worked abroad knew, would become apparent to all: that America was far from true peace and that her international posture had deteriorated badly in the last eight years.

The debacle came, not in the form I had imagined,
but worse. With shame I read President Eisenhower’s response to Khrushchev’s breaking up the summit and found it one of the most tedious and ineffective statements ever made by an American President. Where were the bold challenges that Teddy Roosevelt would have thrown down, the clear logic of right that Woodrow Wilson would have expounded, the ringing call to international decency that Franklin Roosevelt would have uttered, or the pedestrian, honest reaction of Harry Truman? Our nation looked most inadequate that day, and when, a few days later, our President retreated from Paris to Portugal to garner the meaningless plaudits of a commandeered crowd I wondered what our values were.

I took consolation from the fact that although as a nation we had suffered a body blow, the citizens had witnessed what had happened and were in a position to assess the blame.

At this point the Democrats received help from another quarter. Months before, I had been apprehensive about President Eisenhower’s intervention in the British elections. London newspapers had cynically termed him “Prime Minister Macmillan’s campaign manager,” and much of the Labour Party’s subsequent hostility to the United States stemmed from this unwarranted intrusion by our President. The only reason why there were no riots in the streets of London was that Englishmen tend to be gentlemen.

But when President Eisenhower tried the same gambit in Japan, seeking again to shore up a conservative party, which sought revision of the Japanese constitution, the roof fell in. Japanese leftists, in their weird snake dances
and virulent chants of hatred, proved that they were not bound by the restraints that govern British gentlemen. I am sure that the Japanese did not resent President Eisenhower’s intervention any more deeply than had the British; they merely expressed that resentment in more violent ways. At the time I was widely questioned about the Japanese riots and replied consistently, “In the long run they mean very little. Merely that the Japanese won’t tolerate outside meddling in their internal political life.” When my interrogators expressed amazement at my lack of panic I added, “Watch. At the next election Japan will vote conservative, just as before.” And it did.

On the other hand, from the short-range view, the Japanese rioters had struck another lethal blow at Republican campaign claims, for it would now be difficult for that party to argue that it had organized the world into groups that supported us. All too visibly, the world was falling apart if an American President was unable to visit the capital of our nation’s principal bastion in the Far East. I remember thinking at the time, “Right now the general public doesn’t seem to realize the setbacks we’ve suffered. But later the pictures they’ve seen on television will return to their minds, and when the Democrats refer to these matters, the voters will understand.” I was convinced that the Republicans had suffered substantially from the events in Paris and Tokyo.

At the same time I had to admit that the Democrats had also absorbed two frightening body blows. When I heard the newscast that John Kennedy, while on tour somewhere in the West, had said something like, “President Eisenhower might have apologized to Khrushchev,”
I was shocked. The news report was fairly garbled and I remember praying that I had not heard it correctly. This was the kind of unhappy phrase that could plague a candidate right down to the wire. Later, when the clarification came through, I felt that whereas Kennedy had offered an explanation, it did not constitute a justification, and I dreaded the repetitions of that phrase that I was bound to hear through the autumn months.

Even more damaging, I felt, was the French newspaperman’s report of his interview with Adlai Stevenson. I recall reading a very brief news story about this on an inside page in the Philadephia
Inquirer
, and I stopped cold when I saw it, for if what the Frenchman reported had truly been said by Stevenson, it did indeed constitute giving aid and comfort to the enemy on the eve of an important international convention. Specifically, it undercut our nation’s bargaining position. I refused to believe that Stevenson had made the remarks attributed to him, but I knew that the fat was in the fire. For the next several days I looked in vain for any follow-up on the story and felt considerable relief when it appeared to have been overlooked. But in politics I am a great believer in Murphy’s Law, “If something bad can happen, it will.” And before long the Republicans caught up with the damaging article and interrogated the French reporter, who defended the accuracy of the interview as printed; thus they had a vibrant fresh charge that Stevenson was soft on communism. At the time I felt reasonably sure that Mr. Stevenson did not say the things he was quoted as saying, but I also felt certain that he had further disqualified himself as the Democratic candidate. Republican
orators would hound him to his political grave, chanting those words from Paris and conjuring up visions and images that would be as deadly as they were unfair.

Casting up the harm done both sides, Paris and Tokyo versus “the apology” and the French “interview,” I felt that in superficial damage the four events were just about a stand-off. But when one considered the fundamental nature of the wounds, one found that half the Democratic losses involved only Stevenson, who was not going to be the candidate anyway, while the wound that Kennedy had suffered involved only vague words which could later be explained away. But the damage that the Republicans had suffered was visual. Most of the American electorate had seen on television the appalling events in Paris and the wild-eyed snake-dancers in Tokyo, and these wounds were not peripheral; they struck at the vital posture of the party. On the whole, I faced the nominating conventions with equanimity.

But on May 23 my complacency received a sharp shock. That evening I spoke in New York on the same program with Governor Nelson Rockefeller at a meeting to honor Shigeru Yoshida, the former prime minister of Japan, and it fell to me to speak first. I made a few undistinguished remarks and was followed immediately by the governor, who went out of his way seven times to comment on the brilliance and aptness of what I had said. I thought: “This man’s really running for the Presidency. He doesn’t know where I stand and he wants to be as congenial as possible.” As he spoke, I smiled wanly back at him and fought down the sick feeling that had taken control of my stomach.
I thought: “I was absolutely right in Guatemala. This man’s going to get the Republican nomination and he’s going to win. Look at that audience!”

As Governor Rockefeller spoke, the large crowd poured out its adulation. When he ended, people surged about the table crying, “We want you for President.” I followed him as he moved through the crowd and saw how hundreds of strangers rushed up merely to touch him and to cry, “You’re our man, Rocky.” There was something terribly electric in the air, the unknown substance from which votes are compounded. I heard him say over and over, “Thank you, fellow. Thank you, fellow.” If I ever saw a man running for office, it was Nelson Rockefeller. Finally he gripped my hand and said, “Thank you, fellow. That was a great speech.” I thought: “Damn him. He can defeat Kennedy and he knows it.”

Later on I rejoined my wife, to find that while I was at the dais, she had been sitting with Emmett Hughes, one of my favorite politicians, the gray eminence of the Rockefeller team. I had first known him as an editor at
Life
, and he was one of the best. He had often worked on my material and I could always tell where he had added something because he had a penchant for alliteration and an uncontrollable fondness for the letter p. Often during the time that he wrote Eisenhower’s speeches I would listen to the President read off something like “our powerful posture of preparedness,” and I would say to myself, “That’s my boy, Emmett.” He was a tall, prematurely gray, extremely brilliant young man whose book
America, the Vincible
must have outraged the Republican administration,
for it was a frontal attack on the Eisenhower foreign and defense policies. Now Hughes was supporting Rockefeller, and they made a formidable team.

That evening I asked Emmett some desultory questions and he replied in kind, and so well did he mask his feelings that I got the impression that he had given up on Rockefeller’s chances for the Republican nomination. The very next afternoon the governor released his famous statement concerning the direction in which his party ought to move. It constituted a direct attack on current Republican policies and an oblique attack on Nixon. It was a persuasive document, and it tore the Republican party apart. We were told that when Eisenhower saw it he growled, “Emmett Hughes wrote this.” When I read the strong alliterative passages I said the same thing, and we were both right. Then I read the vituperation from Republican headquarters and slowly realized that even though defeat seemed certain if the Republicans nominated Nixon, the professionals were determined to do so and to crush Rockefeller. I could not believe what I was witnessing.