I don’t believe I have ever spoken in such silence. No one moved, and from the front row Chuck Roche nodded grimly. I said in conclusion, “If there are in this audience any who feel that they positively cannot vote for a Catholic, we understand your position and we listen with sympathy to your fears. If you believe that the election of Jack Kennedy to the Presidency dooms the United States to go the way of Spain or Colombia, then you ought surely to vote against us next week. For I have no hesitancy in saying that if America were threatened with the loss of religious freedom that has overtaken Spain I would resist to the point of death. But I am telling you as a Quaker who has no special love for Catholics that that is not going to happen in America. Under President Kennedy we shall be like Canada, and none of you will be aware that a Catholic is our President. So if you cannot vote for us now, we’ll understand. Four years from now we’ll come back and ask for your vote again. But don’t believe the poison they’ve been distributing in this community. You’re far too sensible for that.”
I have rarely received an ovation, but I got one that night, and after the meeting hundreds of people, most of them determined to vote for Nixon, gathered around me and one minister said, “Michener, you have courage.” I said, “It was Roche, whom you haven’t met, who had the courage.” The minister said, “Thank him for me.” After the election I checked the vote in this city and Kennedy lost by two to one. Next time he may do better.
The feminine counterpart of Chuck Roche was a perplexing girl. Jane Wheeler was a southern beauty with driving energy and the most unruffled calm I had seen in a long time. She had organized the tour and had been in touch with leading politicians in each of the states we visited; if anything went wrong she took immediate responsibility for correcting it, and she could be a cooing slave driver. Her natural good looks were enhanced by a permanent smile, a chuckling manner of speech, and an alertness that was infectious.
What puzzled me about Jane was that she seemed like a Republican committee woman, and not a Democrat at all. I had been awakened to this problem by a recent research article in which the author pointed out that in the American political system it is Republican women, and not Democrats, who do the most productive campaigning, because they tend to come from homes where it is traditional for women to take an active part in community life, whereas Democratic women tend to come from social groups which expect their women to stay home. The author also claimed that Republican women tend to spend more on their appearance and are thus unembarrassed about appearing in public. And finally, Republican men have learned in business to trust women with important jobs, whereas men who tend to be Democrats have not enjoyed this experience and are inclined not to share responsibility.
At any rate, I had often reflected upon the advantage the Republicans enjoyed in this respect. In Hawaii, for example, there was simply no contest between the two parties insofar as utilizing women was concerned. The Republican women, trained in local society, did a magnificent job of getting out the vote and were one of the strongest political factors in the islands; the Democratic women had not yet mastered the tricks. It was like that across the nation.
But here was Jane Wheeler, a delightful girl who could adjust to any confusion and who was at home in any society, and she was a Democrat. I began to take hope, thinking: “We’re getting our own type of clever girl, and pretty soon we’ll match the Republicans in this field.” But then I vaguely remembered having seen Jane at the Washington airport with her husband kissing her good-bye just before we took off, and I thought: “Mr. Wheeler looked exactly like a Republican.”
We were flying over Idaho when this picture of Republican husband kissing Democratic wife good-bye flashed across my mind and I went aft to where Jane was cracking jokes with Stan Musial. “Are you a Republican?” I asked bluntly.
“Yes,” Jane replied.
“How come you’re on this trip?”
“I saw the light,” she said. “This country needs Kennedy.”
“When it’s all over, will you be a Republican again?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “I wouldn’t promise, but like the girl said, I saw the light.”
I thought: “We could use a lot more like you. I wish I knew where they were coming from.”
After we had been on the trip for some time it occurred to me that I had no idea as to why I had been invited. I asked about this and one of the people who accompanied us to check schedules explained, “We were in the office one day when this character blew in from Bucks County begging us for some materials. He talked very persuasively.”
“Was his name Sam Thompson?” I asked.
“That was it! We gave him about ten dollars’ worth of stickers and posters.”
I thought: “You thought you gave him ten bucks’ worth, but he waltzed off with four hundred dollars’ worth.” Aloud I asked, “But what does Sam Thompson have to do with my being on the trip?”
“Well, after he got the slip permitting him to pick up ten dollars’ worth of material he asked to see Bobby Kennedy on a matter of vital importance.”
“What was it?” I asked, for I was never able to predict what Sam might consider vital.
“Mr. Thompson told Mr. Kennedy that up in Bucks County he had an assistant who could speak better than Demosthenes. He said that if the party didn’t utilize his friend the party damned well deserved to lose. So we checked into the matter, and some of what Mr. Thompson said turned out to be true. He made a good impression.”
“You’d be surprised at some of the impressions Sam makes,” I said.
On our trip we encountered two shocking situations which served to underline our conception of what we were trying to accomplish in this election. In Boise, Idaho, our plane blew a tire and we were necessarily thrown off schedule. Our local hosts, in a burst of ill-advised generosity, cried, “You can eat here on the ground while they fix the tire. We’ll take you to the country club.”
They led our motorcade to a lovely spot on the outskirts of town where, as the evil genius who supervises elections had arranged it, the Republican women’s club of Boise was having a bridge luncheon. When I saw what we were heading into, I suggested, “Maybe it would be wiser if we ate somewhere else.” But the local hosts overrode me and said, “You’ll be entirely welcome.”
We filed into the club to find that word of our Democratic affiliation had preceded us, for we were met by two rows of attractive women in Nixon hats, jeering at us. I took this to be a standard kind of American horseplay and fell into line by going up to an elderly lady waving a Republican flag and saying, “That Nixon hat looks real cute on you, ma’am.” As I started to speak she withdrew as if I were contaminated and cried in a hoarse whisper, “Don’t come near me, you Democrat!”
I interpreted this as further horseplay and said, “After the election you come to my club and we’ll split a beer,” but again she drew back among her friends and cried, “Look at them! Democrats in a decent club.” I then realized to my astonishment that this kindly lady meant what she was saying, and that our group was contaminating hers.
We sat down in ugly silence while the women at the bridge tables stared at us. Our meal was served and I said to Stan Musial and Jeff Chandler, two men who are certainly not repugnant in appearance, “I don’t believe this. Let’s apologize to these women for having broken up their party.”
From table to table we moved, and I shall never forget the look of honest hatred that greeted us at some of the groups. Three times women drew back from us and called out to their associates, “They’re the ones who are going to take it away from us.”
I was so appalled at this interpretation of American politics that I asked Chandler, “Did you hear what they said?”
“They said, ‘They’re the ones who are going to take it away from us.’ ”
We retreated from the tables and ate our meal in embarrassed silence. My back was to the door, so I didn’t see the next incident when it began, but I heard a loud cry from the bridge p
layers and looked over my shoulder to see a waitress coming into the room bearing across her chest the biggest Kennedy banner I had seen that day.
She had on a Kennedy hat, a Kennedy button, and carried a Kennedy pennant.
“Oh, no, Edna!” the women cried. “You’re not a Democrat, are you?”
She paraded in silence through the crowd, then came to me and said, “I apologize for the way you were treated.”
I said, “If you get fired, let us know. We’ll get you a job training Marines. They need characters with guts.” She completed her parade and left the room. When it came time for us to leave, Jane Wheeler and I walked through the tables to quieten the fears of the bridge players, but again they drew back from us and muttered, “They’re the ones who are going to take it away from us.”
I cannot be mistaken in what was said, for it was said directly to me four distinct times, and when we got back on the plane we were a very subdued group. Among us were some people of wealth, and some of distinction in various fields, and many with conservative economic principles. It shocked us to think that we were being held up as the contaminators of America, the subversives, the revolutionaries, the idiot fringe. I think that for our party as a whole, the experience in the Boise, Idaho, country club, where we met an unusually attractive group of women who would not speak with us, was the most lasting. It convinced us that John Kennedy simply had to win this election, and it made me, at least, a confirmed liberal until the day I die. I would be appalled at my own degeneration if I should ever come to look upon the representatives of a major American political party as we were looked upon that day. With such attitudes there can be no traffic.
Our second psychological jolt came in the city of Bloomington, Indiana, where for the first time during this campaign I had a chance to see how conservative, if not reactionary, many college students are becoming. By ill chance our motorcade was driven slowly along fraternity row at the University of Indiana, and in the some two or three dozen fraternity and sorority houses—those standard Georgian repositories of respectability and family status—we found not one decorated on behalf of Kennedy and Johnson. All were blatantly for Nixon and Lodge, except for several that were for Barry Goldwater.
This was in good fun, and was accepted as such, for fraternity men tend to come from upper-middle-class families where it is almost obligatory to be Republican if one wants to participate in social life, but we were not prepared for the catcalls and ill-tempered jeers that accompanied our progress through fraternity row. Then, when we reached the center of town where the meeting was to be held, we found that more than half the crowd consisted of these same fraternity and sorority people armed with banners and bugles and a determination to break up the rally.
Several events stand out rather clearly in my mind when I recall that exciting afternoon. The Republican newspaper reporting the event went to classic lengths in partisanship. It said, in effect, that some strangers—no names given—had come in to Bloomington to conduct a Democratic meeting, but that they were ably heckled by “Martin Flynn of Lafayette, former student body president; Tom Huston of Logansport, a member of Governor Harold W. Handley’s youth council; Robert Gray of Indianapolis, a varsity debater, and Steve Moberly of Logansport, a student government leader.”
The able hecklers, and I grant them that distinction, almost succeeded in breaking up our meeting, but the second memory of the day came when Jeff Chandler got sore and very unwisely invited the whole football team to come up on the stand one at a time or in groups and take us on. At this point I started looking for an escape route, but after an initial movement toward the stand, the hecklers subsided.
By the time I was called upon to try to say something I had my courage back and was angry. Under pressure I delivered my only good line in the campaign: “You seem surprised that one small group like this would include two authors. Everybody who can write is for Kennedy and ninety percent of those who can read.” This crack almost launched its own riot, but in the end we got out of town without real trouble.
I was both surprised and distressed during subsequent discussions to discover that on many campuses the abler students are turning quite reactionary and that Barry Goldwater and the National Review have substantial followings. There are many reasons for this: the temper of the times; the allure of the Eisenhower administration; the natural dissatisfaction of students with their teachers; the fun of being different; the outspokenness of Senator Goldwater; and the subtle fact that there is no longer any cachet in being a liberal, whereas there is great campus distinction in being an arch conservative. It seems to me that the Democrats ought to address themselves most studiously to this matter, for if they lose the allegiance of collegiate intellectuals they have lost one of the great props that have made and kept them strong. I do not believe that the peculiar coalition of talents which the Democratic party must be can prosper or even exist without a constant replenishment of men like Senators Proxmire, Fulbright, Clark, Douglas and Kennedy, and we had better see to it that their successors are enlisted quickly.
I am quite prepared to write off the well-bred, frightened, bridge-playing women of Boise, Idaho, but I am not willing to surrender to either Nixon or Goldwater the potential young leaders at schools like the University of Indiana.
As for the tour itself and the eight exciting states we visited, it was for me a privilege to meet the local political leaders and to exchange ideas with the various senators, governors and congressmen who sought our help. I was also repeatedly aroused by sights of a part of the world in which I had grown to intellectual maturity: the towering ramparts of the Rockies; the bleak yet alluring flatlands of Wyoming; the rolling hills of Idaho; the vast lake of Utah and the lively mountains surrounding its cities; and the historic evocations of central Illinois, southern Indiana, and Kentucky. It was very good to see these places during a time when our nation was choosing its new administration, and it was sobering to think that every one of these cherished locales was strongly Republican. I wondered if there was indeed an irreparable cleavage between the rural grandeur of our nation and our crowded cities; but no matter how strong the suspicion came that we were a nation somewhat divided, I knew that I was totally committed to the liberalism of the cities rather than to the conservatism of the rural areas I had once known so intimately and loved so well. It was a pity that lands as lovely as Colorado, Wyoming and Utah had to be defeated in 1960, but I was satisfied that it was for the good of the country.
I think all of us on the tour appreciated these matters better because of what we came to call “the day of anguish.” We were about to depart from Denver for our longest flight, to Bloomington, Indiana, when just before we climbed into the plane we heard the early-morning radio announcement that Nikita Khrushchev had been arrested, deposed, thrown into jail and replaced by Gyorgy Malenkov. We delayed departure of the plane while Chuck Roche frantically called the Denver papers, and they confirmed the story: “Austrian sources released the details, which had been leaked to them by the Russian embassy.”
We climbed aboard the plane as gloomy a crew of people as I was to see during the campaign. For six or seven hours we were out of radio communication and were forced to stew in our own mental juices, which were acid indeed and which ate right to the heart. Chuck convened Schlesinger, White and me and asked what we thought. I led off by saying, “Murphy’s Law has swung into operation. I feel sick. I can hear Eisenhower tonight telling the American people, ‘See! What Nixon has said all along is true. The pressure we have applied through Ambassador Lodge has worked, and Khrushchev is finished. Our international reputation was never higher, and you can see that Russia’s was never lower.’ ”
“Do you think this could lose the election for us?” Roche asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But there is still a chance that we can fight back. How can we give this affair an interpretation that will aid our side?”
Schlesinger suggested that Malenkov was known to be more anti-American than Khrushchev, s
o that we could honestly claim that instead of proving that the Eisenhower administration had contained Russia and forced Khrushchev to resign, as I believed the Republicans would argue, the fact was that Eisenhower had so messed things up that our relative friend Khrushchev was out and our actual enemy Malenkov was in. I thought this was going to be difficult to sell, but I kept my mouth shut.
Whizzer White thoughtfully pointed out that we had to have our story straight by the time we landed, for reporters would surely be at the airport to heckle us on the dramatic developments. “We’ve got to tell one story,” he insisted, “and it’s got to be logical. And the hell of it is that we can’t consult anybody before we speak. Now what shall we say?”
It was Chuck Roche who determined our tactical behavior. He said, “When we get off the plane, we play it completely dumb. We don’t know what they’re talking about and will make no comment until I call Associated Press for an official verification.”
Then we repaired to our separate seats to brood about the dismal events of the day. Schlesinger and I discussed Russia for a while, and I felt increasingly sick at my stomach. The thing I feared had happened. The Korea that had won for the Republicans in 1952 and the Suez that had won again in 1956 were about to be reënacted, and a party whose fumbling, bumbling policies had brought us to the edge of catastrophe was once more to be rewarded for its failure with a victory at the polls.