Report of the County Chairman by James A. Michener
I’m afraid I never had much success with my Stevensonian hecklers, for although I was patient, and although I tried to do everything reasonable, I suspect I was never able to hide my contempt for people who thought that their tastes were so refined that in a time of national crisis neither Richard Nixon nor John Kennedy was worthy of their support. This pose of superiority seemed to me such a negation of democracy—such a refusal to look at the record where a very average Chester Arthur suddenly thrown into the Presidency gave a fine account of himself or where a Hugo Black, projected onto the Supreme Court after a Ku Klux membership, transformed himself into one of the finest justices of our day—that I had to hold it in contempt. One night, after I had been severely heckled by Stevenson supporters, I said somewhat angrily, “Look, Mr. Stevenson is going to be in Philadelphia on October 19. Go hear him, please, and you’ll hear him tell you himself that you ought to transfer your allegiance to Kennedy.”
One heckler argued, “Hell never say that in public. How can you, an intelligent man, support John Kennedy?”
Tired, I snapped, “How can you, if you supported Adlai Stevenson, now ignore the qualities of John Kennedy and still dare to call yourself intelligent?” I suspect I lost a vote, but I felt better.
My wife and I often discussed this phenomenon, and once I asked her, “Can you comprehend how anyone who voted for the idealism of Adlai Stevenson could now adopt the pose of not voting at all?” To my relief she said that such a posture was incomprehensible. But out of this searching for a way to handle the disgruntled Democrats, I did fashion a speech which went a long way to assuage hurt feelings. To such hecklers I confessed, “Good as John Kennedy is, he’s no superman. He’s not as brainy as Adlai Stevenson. He doesn’t know as much about military affairs as Stuart Symington. He certainly doesn’t know as much about running the Senate as Lyndon Johnson. And if any of you in the audience supported any one of those three at the convention, you know I’m telling the truth. But I’m also telling the truth when I say that all things considered, John Kennedy is the best man available. He’s going to be elected. And he’s going to be a great President.”
Almost every day during the campaign somebody would ask, either in perplexity or with intent to insult, “Why would a man like you get mixed up in politics?” I never got accustomed to this question, nor can I yet absorb it without anger. There were two disturbing parts to the query, each insulting to the nation. The first lay in the phrase “a man like you.” At the beginning I used to embarrass my questioners by retorting, “What kind of man do you think I am?” And they would usually reply, “Well, a writer. You could live anywhere you wish. You don’t owe anybody anything.” There were so many good answers to this part of the question that I never had the nerve to use any of them. They all sounded too much like something Ben Franklin might have written or that George Washington might have copied in his chapbook as a boy. I still wouldn’t know how to answer that basic question without sounding like part of the Declaration of Independence, so I let it ride.
The second part of the query, “get mixed up in politics,” seemed especially insulting. At first I responded, “If politics was good enough for Aristotle and Cicero and Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, it’s certainly good enough for me.” But such an answer was more dignified than the question merited, so in the later weeks I said simply, “I happen to be convinced that John Kennedy is going to make a great President.” Usually my questioners were satisfied with this reply, even though I wasn’t.
I must confess that in the early days of the campaign, with everything apparently going against us, with a cold in my chest, and with endless miles before me at the close of each meeting, I became momentarily depressed. The Stevenson supporters were openly implying that my candidate was inadequate, and the religious bigots were hammering us from all sides. Several dozen of my helpers reported that their ministers were haranguing them in church, and all the newspapers in our area were reporting fresh Republican triumphs. I had been working mainly in Republican areas, and what the papers claimed was borne out by my experience.
And then late one night as I was driving home alone from a labor-union meeting in Bristol, I stopped at an all-night coffee stand, where a group of ordinary workmen were hanging around waiting for whatever it is that comes along a lonely road at two in the morning. They saw the Kennedy-Johnson sticker on my car and started asking me questions. Why was I for Kennedy? Was I a Catholic? What did I think of the Forand Bill? Would he raise taxes? Would he get the $1.25 minimum wage bill through if he was President? What about Kennedy’s brother and Hoffa?
The night wore on and others drifted in and out of the conversation, and as our exchange of ideas progressed, I realized that not since the days in Guatemala had I had so fine a political discourse. These men knew. They understood what was happening in this election. They pinpointed one problem after another, and some of the best of the group were for Nixon, and they knew why. We talked for about two hours, and I left that coffee shack positively elated. That my countrymen knew as much as these men did about our political system was a tribute to our nation. No one asked, “Why is a guy like you in politics?” But four asked, “What can I do to help?” And three made cash contributions to what I was already doing.
As I drove home I took with me a heartening view of the election. I saw fairly clearly that if John Kennedy could speak sensibly to such people, if he could get across to them the things he believed in, there was a good chance that he could win. On this hope I existed during the dark days. And I must say, looking back on the election, that the best speakers I heard during the campaign, insofar as honest political reasoning was concerned, were the labor-union men. Invariably they cited specific legislation, specific courses of action, specific legislators. They made more sense than anyone else I heard. True, they were the best men from our best unions. They were shrewdly trained political experts, and whenever I found that one of the speakers on my program was a union man, I relaxed. I knew I could depend upon him to talk facts; I was left free to indulge in generalizations.
A corollary to this coffee-stand discovery came during our first big meeting in Bristol, when we were trying with no great success to kick off the campaign. The dais was rather high and this kept our table of speakers—and a rather distinguished group it was, too, with a governor and a senator—rather far above the crowd of some 800 diners. Before it came my turn to speak I saw that two attractive Negro girls had come to the meeting and either by someone else’s design or by their own timidity had taken a table totally apart from the white people. I waited for some minutes for someone in the audience to perceive what had happened, but nobody did, and I thought, “You’re in this campaign because you say you believe certain things. Prove it.” So I left the head table, climbed down into the audience and went over to the two girls. “Look,” I said, “I refuse to address a Democratic meeting when two pretty colored girls like you are sitting alone.” They looked up at me and laughed. “I mean it,” I said. “I’m not going to open my mouth till you join in with the crowd. Let’s go.”
What I was doing, as will be explained later, was a good deal more inflammatory than it may seem in words, for not long ago in this area Negroes, trying to move into Levittown, had evoked an international race-relations scandal and tempers had not yet fully subsided. I took the girls by the arm and led them to a table where a small collection of Levittowners sat. “Should we?” the girls whispered.
“You damned well should,” I said. “That’s one thing this election is all about.”
I seated the girls and introduced them. The Levittowners seemed pleased to have them, and during the remainder of the campaign the Negro girls from Bristol and their white confreres from Levittown were among the best workers the Democratic party had. I was therefore doubly appreciative, a few weeks later, when Robert Kennedy, speaking in the same hall, but to a much larger crowd, insisted upon exiting through the kitchen so that he could talk with the Negro waiters. “We
From such ground-level experiences I developed a concept which the leaders of the Democratic party had apparently adopted years before: that to succeed, the Democrats must win the allegiance of many diverse groups, and that doing this takes precedence over any other tactical consideration. Starting from a solid base of people who vote Democratic automatically—many Republicans do the same—the party must enlist the liberals, who are notoriously swing voters and must be lured with solid proof of performance, labor, the intellectuals, Negroes, Jews, and the Catholics of the big cities. My wife, who was a distinguished pioneer worker in the field of race relations, screams in protest whenever anyone refers to “the Negro vote,” and I am not here referring to such a vote or to “the Catholic vote,” or to any other kind of vote that one can rely on automatically. But at the same time I think it naïve to adopt the position that people of similar interests do not vote in similar patterns if they receive similar impulses. I would reject the idea that the Democratic party was the prescribed home of Negroes, Jews and Catholics, for that is patently not true, but I do believe, for example, that people who tend to have the experiences that Negroes today have can find their hopes best cared for in my party.
I was disturbed when, on a visit to one of America’s most distinguished Jews, I found that he had assembled a small group of men well known in America, ostensibly for a social gathering but principally to discuss some documents which had fallen into his hands. Most of the men present were Republicans, and some were extremely highly placed. The situation was a simple one: “By means which are of no concern to anyone here, we have acquired photostatic copies of letters written by the German ambassador in London to Herr von Ribbentrop in Berlin just prior to World War II. Presumably these papers were found by American researchers in the German archives after the death of Hitler.”
“What do they relate to?” someone asked.
“They report the German ambassador’s conversations with the American ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy.”
A hush fell over the group, and I remember muttering under my breath, “Oh hell! That’s all we need.”
The nature of the reports was made sickeningly specific. “If they are widely publicized,” the self-appointed chairman observed, “I doubt if any New York Jews would dare to vote Democratic, and if Kennedy doesn’t carry this state, Nixon is elected. What should we do?”
The discussion proceeded for several hours. One group felt that a late-October advertisement in one of the leading New York papers, simply setting forth the facts, would accomplish the defeat of John Kennedy. Others felt that under no circumstances should the documents be used. “They’d probably backfire and assure his election,” these men argued.
I was much impressed by the level-headed analysis offered by one of America’s leading public-relations men, and a man totally committed to the election of Richard Nixon. “Don’t touch these papers,” this gentleman argued. “If you did use them, and I were a Democrat, I’d charge you with having forged them. Next I’d charge you with trying to fasten the sins of the father, supposing they were sins, on the son, and this would gain sympathy for Kennedy. Finally I’d advise Kennedy to put Abe Ribicoff on television with a ringing denouncement of the whole damned trick, and you’d lose more votes than you’d get.”
“No,” reasoned a profound Jewish patriot. “You would lose some votes, but remember that the Jews have suffered terribly because of opinions like the ones represented in these documents, and if those opinions were circulated, no self-respecting Jew could vote for anyone even remotely related to them.”
The discussion grew vigorous, and always the public-relations man insisted that the plan was not practical because it simply would not yield the desired results. “It’s sure to backfire,” he argued.
My opinion was asked and I said, “Seems to me I read hints about this in Drew Pearson’s column. Looks as if the Democrats are building a backfire so as to control the blaze if anyone ignites the subject later in the campaign. But even more important, Joseph Kennedy has denied he ever said what the Germans attributed to him. Doesn’t this destroy the papers completely?”
Insofar as this particular afternoon was concerned, the matter was settled by a sage Jew, who gave new reasons: “When I first read those documents my blood boiled, and I wanted to publish them from the housetops, but prudence as an American citizen warned me that to do so would be folly. If it were generally believed that the Jews were strong enough, even in their minority, to defeat John Kennedy for the Presidency, we would not consequently reap any rewards from the Republicans. We would be hated additionally merely because we were so strong. And those who hated us would be right in doing so, for we would have abused in the political field what ought to be a power merely in the religious field. Therefore we should under no circumstances use these documents during this election, for to do so would be imprudent. But if what Michener says is true, and if the documents are false, then to use them would be corrupt.”
Someone snapped, “That’s a fine speech. But the brutal fact is that where the Catholic Church becomes powerful, liberal Jews have a hard time.”
It fell to me to answer this argument: “As has been pointed out, I’m openly working for Jack Kennedy. At the same time I’m one of the leaders of a population-control movement. And as a novelist I frequently find myself opposed to the more repressive measures of the Church. But I don’t find working for Kennedy and working for population-control mutually incompatible. I know from my textbook experience that the Church makes it difficult for Jewish liberals and for all other liberals, too. But one opposes this sort of thing step by step in his quarrel with the hierarchy, not in fighting with individual Catholics. I’m much impressed with the sign I saw in the Milan Cathedral which said, ‘Bicycle riding forbidden in this church.’ But the kids rode their bicycles up and down the aisles nevertheless.”
“What’s the point of that story?” someone asked.
“Simply that in America we take Catholicism too seriously. Here it’s a young religion shepherded by a bunch of overly eager Irishmen. In Italy kids ride bicycles up and down the aisles. I believe that in about fifty years we’ll have settled down, and American Catholicism will have settled down, to comfortable European patterns. The best way I know to speed the process is to elect John Kennedy President. He’s probably as anti-clerical as I am.”
A wise observer said, “You don’t elect a President in order to reform a church.”
I replied, “But if he’s the better man, and if you can help adjust a church to American life at the same time, then it’s a logical bargain.”
As good Republicans, they did not agree that Senator Kennedy was the better man, and during the rest of the campaign I sat on needles waiting for the New York Jews to publish their German documents. Had they done so, they might have made it impossible for Kennedy to carry New York City, and of course its loss would have cost him the state and the Presidency.
So all in all, the early weeks of the campaign were not pleasant, but I felt that even though the Republicans were off to the better start, something was bound to happen that would get us rolling. What it would be I could not guess. I think I relied principally on some eruption in the field of foreign relations which would disclose to the electorate our nation’s precarious position in contrast to the roseate picture being painted by the administration; but even the prospects of such a development gave me little real solace, and in this mood I approached the night of September 26, when the first of the televised debates was to occur. I had already explained to my wife that Nixon would probably trounce Kennedy in formal argument, and it was with no expectancy of triumph that we sat down early that Monday evening to watch the first debate. To me it was just another dangerous hurdle that could not be sidestepped.
When the cameras disclosed the austere concrete walls I gasped and thought, “It’s like a setting for a Franz Kafka play.” And when one of the lenses wande
The unreality of the night increased when the camera time and again picked up that fantastic row of heads belonging to the nameless and faceless reporters. This indeed was a Kafka movie I was watching, with the ponderous voices of the newsmen intoning their impersonal and generalized questions. The setting, the row of heads, and one of the actors formed the components of a burial, and I felt sure that it was my candidate who was going to be interred.
And then he started to speak. In short, sharp, incisive sentences he hacked away at his major themes. America must move ahead. We are not doing enough. We need much new legislation. At the end of his opening statement I sighed with at least momentary relief and whispered, “It’s good he went first. Public got a chance to see him before Nixon clobbers him.”
Then came the Vice President, and I was shocked at the emptiness, at the foolish oratory, at the lack of specifics. Where was the fire of the acceptance speech at Chicago? Where was the fighter, the dominator? I simply could not believe that I was looking at Richard Nixon.
Now came the questions to Kennedy, and in the manner that was to become famous he started punching out his answers. His right hand jabbed at the hearts of his listeners. He stood erect, his shoulders and chin leaning just a little forward. He kept referring to things in numbered series. He spoke with rapidity and force, and best of all, what he said made good sense. Along with seventy million other Americans, I sat up.
When the camera flashed back to Mr. Nixon, his face was drawn and streaked. Bubbles of perspiration rested on his chin and twice he tried vainly to wipe them away. His voice was silken where it should have been hard. He said, “I agree,” where he should have waged war. He fumbled, failed and frowned. It was a performance that I shall never forget, for I doubt if any other viewer in the nation was as astonished by the complete collapse of a public figure as I was on that first night.