Adlai Stevenson is a man of almost compulsive charitableness, and he may choose to find a way of restoring some of Truman’s political prestige, perhaps by turning up some agreeable chores to keep him from boredom in his advancing years. As of this moment, though, Truman has practically no standing in his own party. The Party will be spoken for by the two men he has fought the hardest, and his friends have been excluded from all roles of importance. If anything comes his way now, it will come as a gift from Adlai Stevenson, and it will come in recognition of his services in the remote past, not in appreciation of anything he has done lately. Moreover, it is fairly certain that Stevenson’s efforts to dissociate himself from the Truman record and the Truman approach will no longer be undertaken in private or spoken of sotto voce. In one way or another, he will have to make it clear that he cannot go along with Truman’s characterization of the Eisenhower administration as “this bunch of racketeers” and that he does not share Truman’s view of Truman as the greatest living expert on everything.
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Stevenson is now in a position to run whatever sort of campaign he wishes. The one serious question about his candidacy is whether he will get from his party the kind of support he needs. Most of the people who have been at the convention feel that it was an apathetic and uninspired gathering. They feel that Stevenson had more votes than enthusiasm behind him. Lack of excitement and inspiration is, of course, the general rule at political conventions, and more often than not any enthusiasm manifested is contrived and bogus. The only real enthusiasm at the convention that nominated General Eisenhower in 1952 was for the man the delegates rejected, Robert A. Taft, who was more beloved by the delegates than Eisenhower, and who was loved with a special fervor and sympathy because it was necessary to deny him the recognition he sought. It has frequently been said this week that while there was no Taft at the 1956 Democratic Convention, Stevenson was its Eisenhower. He was the man the delegates had to choose, because a strong case existed for not giving the prize to any of the other candidates. There is probably something to this, but the comparison with the Republicans in 1952 cannot be made without certain substantial qualifications. Stevenson has acquired four years of seniority since his first appearance, and in view of his lack of shock effect on the delegates it is perhaps surprising that his acceptance speech—which was not felt here to be one of his more felicitous addresses—got as good a response in the convention hall as it did. Moreover, this convention, unlike either convention that took place in 1952, was fully aware that its party’s chances for victory are generally thought to be slim. It requires a certain amount of confidence to promote enthusiasm, and the most that any reasonable Democrat believes is that victory is not impossible. The Party faithful can assume that with Adlai Stevenson a free agent the campaign will be an interesting and intellectually stimulating one, but to the people who show up at these affairs, there are a lot of things more important than intellectual stimulation, and the Democrats at the moment don’t seem to have many of them. It is conceivable that the spectacle of the Republicans luxuriating in harmony at San Francisco this coming week will gall them into more determination than they have displayed here.
Richard H. Rovere
SEPTEMBER 1, 1956 (ON THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION)
HE TWENTY-SECOND AMENDMENT to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1951 and provides that no President shall serve more than two full terms, took practical effect in this handsome city during the past week. Though Mr. Eisenhower enjoyed a great personal triumph here, he suffered, thanks to the new provision in what the classier orators like to call “the basic charter of our liberties,” a measurable diminution of power. Nominated for the last possible time, he cannot, from this historic moment on, use the threat of nonsupport or outright reprisal to bring recalcitrants in his party to heel. This is not to say that the moment doesn’t belong to him. The Centennial Convention of the Republican Party was nothing less than an ode to his leadership. Indeed, “leadership” is a poor word for the thing that was celebrated from Nob Hill to the Cow Palace by Republican Ciceros, by blaring trumpets and mighty Wurlitzers and Irving Berlin, by bathing beauties and calisthenics teams, and by 2,646 delegates and alternates. At times, the rhetoric was so lavish, the spotlighting was so dazzling, and the mass demonstrations were so massive that the recently imported phrase “personality cult” sprang to many minds—only to be rejected, of course, because the President’s true personality, as distinct from that of the near-divinity fabricated by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, does not lend itself to a cult, and because he himself would not tolerate one. (Besides, the Twenty-second Amendment, while open to criticism on many grounds, is fair insurance against this sort of disaster.) Still, there is more to politics than rhetoric and stage management, and the key political fact about the gathering now breaking up is that it has made Richard M. Nixon the symbol, if not the center, of authority in the Republican Party. It was Eisenhower’s past that was being honored and Nixon’s future that was being assured. In the campaign that is about to open, the President’s word will be the command of practically every Republican, but the campaign will be only a short interlude. When it is over, the Vice-President will be the Republican to watch—which would be the case even if the President had never been stricken by a heart attack and ileitis. Of all the men in the Party who can look to 1960 and beyond, Nixon will be the one most courted, most emulated, and most feared.
The President, it is felt here, would do well to take all the comfort he can from the tributes he has received in the past few days and will undoubtedly continue to receive in the next few weeks, for while he may win much praise and many additional honors in the years ahead, his ability to command the Republican organization has reached its peak and can do nothing hereafter but decline. He must be very well aware of this himself. He has learned from harsh experience that there are more orators who will praise him for his “moral and spiritual leadership” than there are politicians who will accept his political counsel. He has had a hard enough time maintaining any sort of party discipline in the years in which every poll and almost every election revealed that the success of the Republican Party was dependent largely on his personal prestige. According to an authorized history of his first administration, he came to recognize this difficulty early in his White House tenancy, and at one time was so nearly overcome by despair that he considered quitting the Republican Party and starting a new party of his own. Nothing is more certain than that he will be given even more cause for despair in the future, since his reappointment as head of the Party on Wednesday put him forever beyond the hope of keeping his associates in line by the most powerful of all his political weapons—the threat of disinheritance. In effect, he is himself disinherited by the Twenty-second Amendment. He has nothing to pass along except the blessing of a President headed for retirement. This may be worth somewhat more than the blessing Harry Truman gave Averell Harriman in Chicago, but that only makes it a little better than nothing. From now on, unless there are forces at work that are unseen by any of the sharp eyes casing the situation here, he will be as dependent on the favors of Republican senators and representatives as they in the past have been dependent on his favors.
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To say, as has been said time and again here, that the really important thing the convention did was to turn control of the Party machinery over to the Vice-President is a crude way of stating a matter of considerable complexity, and there are some people who believe that it puts the cart before the horse. Has Nixon become the head man, they ask, or has he merely served as the agent of a faction whose victory is signalized by his renomination? Will he control the machinery or be controlled by it? A number of Republicans have always looked upon the Vice-President chiefly as a spokesman for a particular tendency within the Party, and they have wished him well or ill according to their view of that tendency. Harold Stassen, for example, before his capitulation on Wednesday morning, insisted that his case was not against Nixon—whom he prof
essed to think a nice enough fellow, and possibly even a friend of Stassenism—but against such things as isolationism and reaction, which he deplores and which he said were riding on Nixon’s renomination. Neither Stassen nor the few people who were willing to identify themselves as his supporters argued that they had any serious objection to Nixon’s staying on as Vice-President or becoming President. They claimed to be principally concerned about Nixon’s friends in the Party, and especially about those friends’ influence in the next Congress. In discussing the latter question, they offered a double-barrelled line of reasoning. First, they maintained that Nixon’s presence on the ticket would be offensive to enough voters to cost the Republican ticket 6—or, in some estimates, 8—percent of the vote. The President and Nixon, they said, could survive such defections, but large numbers of Congressional candidates could not, and the sure consequence of renominating Nixon would be to deprive the President of a Republican majority. Whenever this analysis was challenged, they were ready with the other barrel. Things would be just as terrible if they were wrong as if they were right, they said, for if a Republican Congress should be elected despite the fact of Nixon’s renomination, it would be a Congress controlled by those who had made the greatest effort to keep Nixon in power—Styles Bridges, of New Hampshire; John Bricker, of Ohio; William Jenner, of Indiana, and others of that supposedly sinister breed. At any rate, it was nothing personal, these people went on, but all a matter of high principle, with nation being put above party and party above candidates. And there are good grounds for believing that this is how they really felt about it. Whether or not they were right in any of their political estimates is something else again. The mere fact that Senator Bridges was deeply gratified by Nixon’s renomination does not entitle him to a victor’s spoils. Nixon, after all, won by considerably more than a nose. It remains to be seen whether the Republicans can elect a Congress in November. If they fail, it will not be easy to pin the blame on Nixon; they have failed quite a few times when he was not on the ticket. A very strong case could be advanced for the proposition that the Republicans would have damaged their chances more by rejecting Nixon; if, that is, the leading figures in the Stassen demonology are as powerful and determined as Stassen made them out to be, then rebuffing them might have been every bit as destructive as jobbing Nixon.
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Stassen’s fight came to nothing except a comic end, but it was one of the two things that had any political interest in a convention that could have done all its business in half a day and that was far from engaging as a spectacle. The other was a small controversy over the civil-rights plank in the platform; this was speedily and effectively stilled when it became clear that the President, far from wishing to insist on language that would sharply distinguish his position from that of the Democrats, was willing to settle for a statement that, like the one adopted in Chicago, would scarcely go beyond acknowledging that the Founding Fathers saddled us with the United States Supreme Court and that we are obliged to honor its decisions—though not necessarily today or tomorrow. The wording that was finally written into the Republican platform came from the White House and was reported to be the last of three formulations suggested by Presidential advisers, each version being slightly less militant than the preceding one. It was plain that the President did not at any time feel himself deeply engaged in the platform controversy and—probably because he figured that he would be able to set the tone of the campaign in speeches prepared under his own direction—could have lived with any of several phrasings. A platform is a lifeless thing, important only until the candidate either identifies himself with it or repudiates it, and there is no reason to suppose that either the President or Adlai Stevenson suffered much anguish over any section of their parties’ statements this year; both platforms violate the known beliefs of the candidates at one point or another, but a long and—through usage—honorable tradition exists of overlooking these conflicts.
There is, however, reason to suppose that the President suffered a good deal of anguish over the affair of the Vice-President, and that the real, if perhaps never fully knowable, history of this episode is considerably more interesting than the recorded proceedings of the convention make it appear. Though the Stassen crusade came to an absurd dénouement in the rambling and pointless and generally embarrassing speech of its leader, the facts remain that Mr. Stassen has shown himself to be a fairly astute politician in the past, and that he is in any case not the sort of man to deliberately risk his career in an utterly quixotic cause. Nor is he a man without honor. Even if he were to become involved in a totally misguided adventure, he would not seek to excuse or extricate himself by lying about the encouragement he had received in high places. Stassen never claimed that the President had expressed any hope for the success of his cause, but he did insist that nothing the President said had led him to believe that Mr. Eisenhower would be displeased if Nixon was dropped from the ticket, and neither the President nor anyone else in the White House offered a different interpretation of what had passed between Mr. Eisenhower and his adviser on disarmament. It is also a matter of general knowledge that several people who customarily devote themselves to fulfilling the hopes and wishes of the President to the best of their ability and understanding lent themselves to the Stassen movement at one stage or another, among them General Lucius Clay, Sidney Weinberg, and Paul Hoffman. And if it was necessary to believe Stassen when he said he had found favor in the upper reaches of the administration, it was also necessary to believe his lieutenants here—who are honorable men, too—when they said that their missionary work among the delegates was about as successful as they had expected it to be when they arrived in San Francisco. The fact that they would not reveal to the reporters the names of delegates partial to their cause did not prove that there were no such delegates. In the sort of atmosphere that was developing during the weeks before the convention, it would have taken a bold Republican politician to come out openly against Nixon, and it was only to be expected that those who offered Stassen covert support should have demanded that their names be concealed until the rebellion was a success—at which time, naturally, they would have wished their names listed prominently in every newspaper in the country.
Yesterday afternoon, following Stassen’s abandonment of his own movement, there were only Terry Carpenter, of Nebraska, and Joe Smith, a phantasmal creature to everybody but Joe Martin, to give weight to the notion that anyone in the Republican Party thought there might be a case against putting Richard Nixon in line for the most august and powerful office on the face of the earth. Yet there was an obvious malaise surrounding the whole performance of putting him there. The very morning that Governor Christian Herter, of Massachusetts, nominated Nixon, he received with gratitude the assurance of some correspondents that they would have been far happier if Stassen’s plan had succeeded and Herter, rather than Nixon, were the candidate. “They had me boxed in,” the Governor said. He did not say who “they” were, and his tone of voice suggested that it was an impersonal “they”—the surging forces of history. An instrument of those forces was Leonard Hall, the National Chairman, who, immediately after Stassen’s original advocacy of Herter, got Herter to agree to nominate Nixon. But it obviously took more than Hall to convince Herter of the futility of the Stassen movement; the governor of a powerful state owes very little to a National Chairman. Indeed, if the Nixon steamroller had not gathered practically irresistible force by the time Stassen got under way, Stassen would almost certainly never have started; that is to say, Stassen is not the most foresighted of statesmen, or the boldest, and it must have taken a strong conviction of the desperateness of the moment to lead him to jeopardize his own career. Moreover, there has always been an almost visible unease in the President’s handling of the Nixon question. Right up to the last minute, he could not be persuaded to assert a preference for Nixon over any other candidate. At the start, this could have been put down to his desire not to give offense to other aspirants, but after a
while there were no other aspirants, and when the President persisted in refusing a forthright endorsement, he could hardly have failed to realize that his refusal must give offense to Nixon. Yet he did persist, and as late as yesterday morning, at the extraordinary news conference when he told of Stassen’s plan to leap back on the bandwagon by seconding Nixon’s nomination, he refused once more—in fact, several times more—to embrace Nixon. He was asked whether, if he found himself serving as a regular delegate from Pennsylvania, he would move the renomination of Nixon, and he hemmed and hawed and said he could give no flat answer, because there were a number of things a delegate would have to think about. At all odds, he could not, standing before the press in the Italian Room of the St. Francis Hotel a few hours before Nixon’s scheduled nomination, be led to say that Nixon was his man—or “That’s my boy!,” as he said on a famous occasion four years ago.
The conclusion drawn by most of the people in the Italian Room was the same as that drawn by most people in Washington during the spring and early summer. It was that the President was of at least two minds about the Vice-President—that he admired Nixon’s ability and energy and political cleverness but at the same time had misgivings about Nixon as a possible President of the United States, and was no longer willing, as he had been before the heart attack of last September, to praise him in terms so extravagant that they raised the question of how he could deny him anything. He had once called Nixon “the most valuable member of my team” and “one of the great leaders of men,” but that was at a time when his thoughts about the Vice-President probably did not include much speculation about the kind of President he would make. A good many powerful Republicans began thinking that question over last fall, and more than a few of them became jumpy at the prospect of Nixon’s renomination. The President seems to have become jumpy, too. It may be that only the spectre of controversy over Nixon raised doubts in his mind about having Nixon on the ticket again; the President is bothered by dissension of any sort and likes, whenever he can, to avert a controversy by removing its cause. At any rate, he seems to have had second thoughts about Nixon, and right up through the weeks before the convention he was careful not to foreclose the possibility of another Vice-Presidential candidate. But as the weeks went by, it became clearer and clearer that Nixon could be stopped only by the President himself. Harold Stassen saw this; his aim was never to secure enough anti-Nixon votes to win for another candidate but, rather, to create an atmosphere in which the President could with propriety ask Nixon to withdraw or could endorse another man in the interests of party unity. Toward the end, Stassen could see, as anyone with normal vision could, that this was hopeless. White House intervention, had it come, would not have averted controversy but would have promoted it.
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