Report of the County Chairman

by James A. Michener

  “What are you worried about, specifically?” someone asked.

  “These things,” I said. “First, some Catholic bishop somewhere is going to say something that will infuriate the nation. Second, the Chinese Reds will start shelling Matsu or Quemoy. Third, Castro will try to occupy Guantánamo Bay. Fourth, Nikita Khrushchev will announce that he favors the Democrats. Fifth, Jack Kennedy will say something he didn’t intend to say. Every night when I go to bed I listen to the midnight news to hear which of these things has happened somewhere in the world. And if all’s well, I say to my wife, ‘Thank God we got through another day.’ ”

  One of my Republican listeners asked, “Isn’t there anything that could happen which would defeat Nixon?”

  “Of course!” I said quickly. “Khrushchev could say that he wants to see the Republicans win. Or the Russians might put a man in space and remind us all that what Kennedy’s been saying is true. Or Nixon might say something grotesquely wrong. But my experience has been that in the last stages of an election the nation tends to get more and more conservative and looks about wildly for any good reason to vote Republican. So I live from day to day, hoping that we’ll get through this twenty-four hours.”

  “You think it’s that close?” a neighbor asked.

  “We’re involved in an election that could be decided by any chance event that occurs anywhere,” I replied. “That’s why Kennedy’s comments on international affairs make so much sense to me. Because that’s the ticklish kind of world we live in.”

  There were many critics of the campaign who felt that Senator Kennedy was ill advised in letting up as he did during the last week of the election. Such critics are correct in their assumption that the Democratic campaign did in a sense let up, for no new subjects were discussed. But I and many professionals with whom I worked were more than content to have it so. We knew that we were ahead across the nation—at least in the big states like New York and Ohio—and we felt that the only thing that could lick us would be one of the catastrophes that I so desperately feared. If we could only keep from making an error of commission, we could win. So I was well satisfied to see Senator Kennedy let up a little and thus avoid some calamitous error. And each night when I went to bed I whispered again, “Thank God we got through another day.”

  One morning after such a prayer, I was waiting in my Doylestown headquarters for Sam Thompson, who was to show me some new development in the northern end of the county, when Lester Trauch, the drama expert on our local newspaper, dropped by to see what was going on. I told him I was waiting for that rare old clown, Sam Thompson, and he stepped back. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve to call Sam Thompson an old clown,” he snapped.

  “I was speaking of his …”

  “Don’t you know who he is?” Trauch interrupted.

  “A man with a whiskey named after him,” I replied.

  “Well, he was one of the dedicated men in the early experimental theater in the United States,” Trauch explained. “Sam Thompson helped Eugene O’Neill put on his plays with the Provincetown Players. Sam was in the original cast of The Emperor Jones. He’s mentioned in books along with Harry Kemp and George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell and Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  “Sam Thompson?” I gaped.

  “Sam Thompson with the little mustache,” Trauch insisted. “In the revival of Emperor Jones that he brought to Broadway he gave a beginning actor his first role. Who do you suppose that actor was? Moss Hart. Jim, this man’s a walking monument to artistic integrity. Did you ever hear about the part he played in the Federal Theater Project?”

  It seemed so right, what Trauch was saying. It explained Sam’s preposterous sign: “James A. Michener presents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.” It explained his flamboyant fire and his plea to allow the men in the northern end of the county to have one good fling. For Election Night he had already arranged for a parade of one hundred horn-blowing cars.

  “How did a man like this ever wind up on a farm in upper Bucks County?” I asked.

  “A man has only so much fire,” Trauch replied. “Sam used his in helping Eugene O’Neill burn his way into the American theater. After that he retired to Bucks County and became a minor politician.”

  At this point Sam drove up, and as we headed north I said, “You never told me you were one of the Provincetown wild men,” I chided.

  He looked at me sideways with a certain pleasure and said, “The first play I was in was with Helen Hayes. We were both ten and we gave Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp. Later I was with her on Broadway.”

  “How’d you get into politics?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’ve always looked at politics as just another road show,” he said grandly. “You need a press agent, a production chief, a star and a master of legerdemain. I got here, actually, after the war. I was in the war, you know.”

  “World War I?” I asked thoughtlessly.

  “Hell no, World War II. I was too old for active service, of course, but I was sitting in my room one day and the thought came to me, ‘The stewards on those big troop transports must make a killing,’ so I hurried down to the U. S. Lines and filled out an application. I ended the war as chief steward for the lines.”

  “Did you make a killing?” I asked.

  “Soldiers shoot a lot of crap,” Sam said. Then he dropped one hand from the wheel and slapped his leg. “You asking me about how I got here. Some years ago at a political rally a Republican woman made a speech and said it was an outrage that a newcomer like Sam Thompson should be elected to office in a historic county like Bucks.”

  “What did you say?” I asked, realizing that I was supposed to play the straight man.

  “I’m glad you asked that question, Senator,” Sam laughed, “because I was able to tell that audience that one of my ancestors was the first sheriff of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and that he served as an officer in the French and Indian War, where he distinguished himself at Braddock’s defeat by hiding from the Indians behind a big tree and escaping the ambush. I told that dame that I refused my wife permission to join the Daughters of the American Revolution because my family held that all that crowd was newcomers to these parts.”

  I noticed that we were not driving along the normal road to Quakertown and I asked, “What’s the big deal, Sam?”

  He said, “I want to show you something I’ve been working on for fifteen years.”

  We drove along the wonderful back roads of Bucks County through rural areas where the larch was golden and the oak was red. We passed Dutch houses that had stood beside their streams for two hundred years, each with a barn bigger than itself, for that was the sign of frugality. How beautiful my county was that day, how especially lovely and rural it was, as if there had never been a Levittown nor a Catholic daring to run for the Presidency. It was a timeless land and from the towering oaks fell acorns that would be the trees of the next century.

  “This is a land worth fighting for, Sam,” I reflected.

  “I want you to see what I’ve been fighting for,” he replied, and he drove me to a small hill from whose winding dirt road I could see a considerable depression, down the center of which ran one of our most pleasant streams, the Tohickon. On the sides of the hills were the old farmhouses and in the meadows were cattle that had descended from the time of William Penn.

  “For the last fifteen years I’ve been coming to this hill,” Sam said, “dreaming of a lake that would be dammed up down there and of a state park that would preserve this area forever. There are so many people crowding into the valleys, Jim, and so few of the valleys are being kept clean and free for the next generation.”

  “Sam!” I cried. “Is this the new state park they were writing about in the Intelligencer the other day?”

  “Yep, we finally got it through,” Sam said. “I want you to look at the dam.” He drove me down a side road to a very old dam, holding back scarcely a pond, let alone the large lake that was now envisioned. “I think the whole project might h
ave fallen through,” he mused, “if we’d allowed this old dam to disappear. As long as it was here it remained a symbol of what could be done.”

  “It looks pretty new to me,” I said, kicking at some of the stones in the way a man does when he’s thinking of buying a used car.

  “Well, that part is,” Sam said. “Three or four years ago I talked our Tohickon Watershed Association into encouraging our Boy Scouts into spending their entire vacation rebuilding this dam. When we got it done, the Scouts scrounged everything, cement, time, money. Well, when we got the dam repaired everybody began to see what might be accomplished if we could get hold of the entire valley.” He stood beside the dam and looked upstream. “This’ll be the best public park in Pennsylvania,” he observed.

  I found also that during the years when Sam Thompson was fighting for his park he was also organizing the local township officials throughout the county so that each could be more efficient in his job. Today Bucks County has one of the finest such groups, headed by Sam. He was also energetic whenever schools or libraries needed help, and his round, smiling presence was available when old people went on relief.

  One day he told me, “I don’t dislike Republicans. It’s just that men who build parks are usually Democrats.” I replied that I was engaged in this election because I felt that there was a lot of building that needed doing. “I figured that’s why you got mixed up in it,” Sam said. “That’s the real reason for being a Democrat.”

  I would not like, however, to leave even the slightest touch of sentiment in my last comment about Sam Thompson. A reflection of this sort seems closer to the man: I never saw Sam engage in a single activity but what he first asked, “What angle can we use to get the bastard to see things our way? You know any pressure we can put on him?” The last time I worked with Sam was on the evening before election. He was making plans to get a hundred folding chairs for the victory party which he had arranged for the northern section. I said, “Why don’t we just call Otto? I know he’s got a lot of chairs.”

  “No,” Sam reflected. “We won’t call him direct. That would put us in the beggar’s position. Otto’s coming up for reëlection next year and he’s going to need our help. I’ll just drop by and sort of ask him how he sees things for next year, and he’ll get the point and the son-of-a-bitch’ll have to give us those chairs.”

  * Copyright, 1960. New York Herald Tribune, Inc.

  In the waning days of the campaign, when it was obvious that I could accomplish no more in Bucks County, I was invited by headquarters in Washington to participate in a barnstorming tour of areas where the Kennedy candidacy was in serious trouble. I replied that I didn’t see offhand what I could accomplish, but I agreed to go.

  Early one rainy morning a sleepy-eyed group gathered at the Washington airport and mumbled introductions to one another. Not even the most partial observer could have guessed that the dozen or so people who were perfunctorily shaking hands were shortly to be billed as an extraordinary galaxy of stars from the motion-picture, sport and intellectual worlds. They looked for the most part like a bunch of hungover bums.

  One of the group was alert. He was Jerold Hoffberger, a surprising gentleman from Maryland. Part owner of the Baltimore Colts football team and partner in the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, he was properly listed as a sportsman. Managing director of many industries, including some hundred bowling alleys, he could also correctly be billed as an industrialist. And in view of the fact that he was contributing the airplane, the food, and the staff, I suppose he could be classified as either a politician or a philanthropist. The one description we never, never used during our trip was the one that was most accurate. He owned one of the biggest breweries in the South, but we felt that it might be a little indelicate to introduce Jerry Hoffberger to political audiences in dry areas as “the genial beer baron.” He was invariably referred to as “a leading Maryland industrialist,” although I always suspected that the former might have gained us more votes.

  He was a joy, a salty young man, wise in the worlds of business and sport, and he made one of the best impressions of our entire group whenever he said simply, “I am a businessman who believes in high wages and high taxes, because I have seen what both have done for my company and my nation. I am a businessman for Senator Kennedy because I know that this country has got to get started on hundreds of different projects. On the morning that I flew out of Washington my assistant told me that Sparrows Point, the biggest steel producer in our area, had just gone on half time. Do you know what that means to an industrial area? Do you know what is really happening in many parts of our country? Do you know why so many businessmen are going to vote Democratic this year for the first time?” When stubborn Jerry Hoffberger punched away at this theme, people listened, and he provided our tour with much more than the airplane and the sandwiches.

  Our chairman was the distinguished Denver lawyer, Byron White, who had graduated from Colorado University when I was teaching in that state, and who was noteworthy in those years for being an all-American football player, a top honor student and a Rhodes scholar. Later, as a Detroit Lion backfield star, he had led the professionals in rushing the ball and had been one of the toughest operators in football. I had known of him in the South Pacific as a much-decorated aide to Admiral Halsey, and if you read the official history of the great naval battles fought off the Philippines, you will find that Lieutenant Whizzer White played a critical role far beyond what his immature years would have entitled him to. In civil life he had become a lawyer and while serving his apprenticeship in Washington had met up with Congressman Jack Kennedy, whose later nomination to the Presidency he had helped engineer. The first major campaign appointment Kennedy made was of Whizzer White to head the Citizens for Kennedy, which made him my boss.

  As a speaker he affected a hesitancy which deluded his listeners into thinking, “He’s a nice young man.” But when the chips were down he could line out facts faster than John Kennedy in a debate. He had a brilliant mind and a sharp wit. We were not surprised that often during the election he was mentioned for this or that cabinet post. He was a quiet operator, a very knowledgeable politician, and a most pleasant man to be with.

  The schedule that Whizzer had outlined for us was, I must say, in the grand tradition of the Democratic party. No time was designated for meals or washing up. There were speeches, short plane hops, more speeches, long plane hops, more speeches, and a distant hotel in which to flop. Each day saw four or five meetings, interviews with press and television, impromptu talks to clubs or boys’ homes or supermarkets, and an endless procession of local political aspirants who hoped that we would say something to further their candidacies. It was as grueling a tour as could have been devised, and when at last one staggered to the end, he could say with no fear of successful contradiction that he had campaigned for a President.

  Whizzer had an excellent and a typical plan. He said, “Why go into areas that are going to vote Democratic anyway? What help can we provide there? Let’s go into all the areas where the sledding is toughest for the local candidates and see what we can accomplish in such places.” Consequently, our tour took us to Republican strongholds in Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Indiana and Kentucky, and wherever we went, our forces were beleaguered like forlorn settlers fighting off the final charge of the surrounding redskins. It was exciting work and we grew to love it.

  It would be improper for me to designate any one person as the star of our show, but two people did stand out in the public’s mind and each happened to come from Hollywood. The first was Angie Dickinson, a strikingly beautiful young woman with golden blond hair, dark eyes and a truly gamin manner. She had just gained much acclaim for her role in a Frank Sinatra movie and was on her way to Spain for a starring role. She was in huge demand at all studios, having suddenly become what is called “a hot property.” Even while on tour with us she was bombarded by telegrams from Hollywood offering tempting new roles.

  Angie was a
delightful girl to have aboard an airplane. She had a low raucous laugh that quite demoralized serious discussion, which was a boon after the hard work we did. Her sole responsibility was to step off the plane at each stop looking positively delicious, but she had to accomplish this with no sleep, improper food, no dressing room, and not even a place where she could stretch out for a nap. She was the soul of patience and my permanent memory of her was of a sleepy-eyed young girl doing her hair laboriously before each stop, and getting it out of curlers just before the plane landed. Magically she would fluff out her curls, press her dress down with her hands, adjust her coat and step out onto the gangway with a ravishing smile.

  But Angie was deceptive. I liked to talk with her because I sensed that young as she was, here was a real old pro who had knocked around Hollywood without getting anywhere, and then suddenly everybody wanted her. She was a girl at that magnificent moment when a career dramatically opens up, and I had known many such girls later in their lives when it had somehow all gone wrong, and how desperately I hoped for Angie that she would meet the right agent, make the right deals, marry the right guy and get some good out of the burgeoning fame that was beginning to surround her.

  On our entire trip she was a model of good sportsmanship, a source of constant hilarity. I think she had a touch of Carole Lombard about her, a divine irreverence. And she provided us with much more than beauty. Night after night she surprised the crowds when instead of smiling like a movie star she explained, in her halting manner, “I have come here as a private citizen to tell you that I am working voluntarily for the election of Senator John Kennedy. He is a brilliant leader and a man who will serve this country well. I ask you individually for your vote. Because Senator Kennedy will help us all to build the strong America that we need in the years ahead.”