I reasoned, “If the religious issue is as grave as it now seems, the Republicans have a good chance to win. They have an awful lot in their favor. There’s peace of a kind. There’s prosperity within limits. They’re the incumbents, and that helps a lot. They have almost all the newspapers and magazines on their side, and they have a commanding military hero as their leader. If President Eisenhower decides to campaign with full vigor, he’ll carry a lot of states, and he seems to be ready for the fight.” Things didn’t look too good, for in addition to all the above assets, the Republicans had put together an appealing ticket whose second man, Ambassador Lodge, was being heralded by all the newspapers as much stronger than our Lyndon Johnson. Sitting alone with the cold facts I reasoned further, “It looks to me as if they’ll be able to hold the Negro votes that went for Eisenhower. The Jews certainly don’t like Kennedy. And even Jimmy Hoffa’s union is out to beat us, although that might prove to be an asset. What’s worse, Nixon got off to a rousing start by hot-footing it out to Hawaii. That was a real smart move, and our side hasn’t even started yet.”
Summing everything up, I told myself brutally, “The Republicans ought to win. Every major indicator says so, and if Eisenhower and Rockefeller pitch in, their victory is in the bag. Because I know that Nixon will put on a terrific campaign.” I sat back with the facts before me and came to this conclusion: “Nixon’ll win about 53 percent of the popular vote and about 380 electoral votes.” As I now look back at the election, I still think he should have done both.
On the other hand, I was emotionally committed to a Kennedy victory, and at the pit of my stomach—not my brain—I had intimations that some kind of irrational, last-minute miracle would enable us to win. What it might be I could not even guess; but if I was a firm devotee of Murphy’s Law I was also a partisan of Mr. Micawber’s completely contradictory theory that something good usually turns up. I felt this was particularly true in politics, and on this theory I based my irrational hopes. In the meantime I would work as never before.
The night after I formulated these rather gloomy assessments of the situation, I attended a dinner party, the last purely social affair I would participate in for a long time, and after we had dined, the guests were handed sheets of paper bearing the names of ten states whose votes would be critical in the election. We were required to predict how each state would go, and also what electoral vote the winning candidate would get. Of the ten people present, eight were sure that Nixon would win 300 to 350 electoral votes, and all were sure that he would carry most of the critical states.
My wife judged that Kennedy would win with 300 electoral votes, and she guessed right on almost all the states. I, facing my first public test in the campaign, thought: “This parlor game is not related to fact. This is an act of propaganda. Tonight I commit myself to John Kennedy.” Boldly I predicted that he would carry nine of the ten focal states—I gave him California, Ohio, Indiana … everything but Florida—and for my electoral total I splashed down the figures, “410.”
“You don’t mean you think the Democrats will win 410 electoral votes?” asked my host in astonishment.
“I do!” I snapped. “You don’t seem to realize it, but John Kennedy is going to win this election. The popular vote will be close but the electoral vote will be a landslide.”
I made these remarks so forcefully that in time I came to believe them. During the campaign, I repeated them a hundred times, in Connecticut, in New York, in Idaho, in Utah and in Indiana. I insisted that Kennedy was going to win handsomely in the electoral college, and the very force of my belief rallied people to my cause. I found assistance where before it did not exist, and to no one during the long campaign did I betray doubt regarding my announced position, to no one, that is, except one night as I was speeding across Pennsylvania accompanied by one of the most incisive young men I had ever encountered. With me rode Robert Kennedy, campaign manager for the senator, and he asked, “All fooling aside, how’s it going?”
“Terribly close,” I said.
“Will you carry Pennsylvania?” he pressed.
“If we do, it’ll be by a whisker,” I replied.
“But there is a chance?”
“Yes, there’s an honest chance.”
“Will you carry your county?” the quiet voice probed.
“No. The religious issue will hurt us badly. We’ll lose by about eight thousand. But that’s twelve thousand better than last time.”
“Good,” he said. “Maybe that’ll be enough to enable Philadelphia to carry the state.”
“How do you see it nationally?” I countered.
“Very close.”
“But we will win?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, and we drove through the long night.
The first thing I had done politically upon returning from the boat trip across the Pacific and the car trip across America was to report to my Bucks County chairman, there to volunteer my services in the forthcoming campaign. Renewing acquaintances was a pleasant job, because for nearly fifty years the chairman had been a personal friend. We had grown up together, had seen many storms, and had reached middle age with some illusions intact.
Johnny Welsh, when I saw him again in the fall of 1959, was a wiry, well-preserved, gray-haired, sharp-tongued politician whose iron will and personal integrity had kept the local Democratic party functioning for more than a quarter of a century. When others of us were working abroad, he and his six sons were at home doing the dirty work of running a complex party organization. When the Democrats were in such low esteem locally that not even candidates could be found, Johnny Welsh ran for office. He made his living selling real estate and insurance, but his real occupation was politics, and he knew more about the workings of my county than any other man alive.
Pennsylvania has the commendable system of placing each county’s affairs in the hands of three elected commissioners who in former days were paid $6,500 a year (now $8,500) and of whom one must by law be of the minority party. Thus no matter how strong the Republicans became, and they used to reap about 80 percent of the votes, there was always one paying job for a Democrat, and starting in 1951 Johnny Welsh filled that job. As such he became titular head of the party, and by the exercise of great will power and leadership in 1955 won the county away from the Republicans. This meant there would be two Democratic commissioners, and Johnny Welsh became the boss of one of America’s most challenging counties.
He was helped conspicuously, I must confess, by the fact that shortly before the county-wide elections in 1955 the Republican coroner was charged with twenty-five counts of misconduct in office. For this misbehavior the unfortunate coroner went to jail, taking his party with him in defeat. But I do not mean to explain away this stunning Democratic victory solely in terms of an imprisoned coroner. Most of the credit was due to Johnny Welsh, who, as minority commissioner, had so valiantly struggled to build a party.
By 1959 Johnny had run into trouble in the form of a revolt in the southern end of the county, where otherwise loyal Democrats had axed him, so that he not only lost control of the county, but his minority seat on the commission as well. He did not, however, relinquish his leadership of the party, although someone else now stepped forth as titular head. Like everyone else in Bucks County, when I wanted to talk to the head of the Democrats, I went to see Johnny Welsh, who sat like a gray eagle surveying everything with cold caution.
I said, “Johnny, if Senator Kennedy wins the nomination I want to work for his election.”
Welsh said, “I thought you were a Republican.”
I said, “For many years I was registered that way.”
Welsh said, “What’s a Republican doing working for Kennedy? You’re not a Catholic.”
I said, “I think the country needs him.”
Welsh said, “Well, if anything turns up later on, I’ll let you know.”
I said, “All right.”
Welsh said, “By the way, did you mean that if Kennedy is not n
ominated you don’t want to help?”
I said, “Kennedy or Johnson, either one.”
Welsh said, “Well, who do you think it’s going to be?”
I said, “Maybe Johnson and Kennedy, in that order.”
Welsh said, “That would be a good ticket, but I hope it’s the other way around.”
I said, “So do I.”
I did not hear from my old friend for many weeks, and I suspected that as a professional he did not entirely relish the participation of an amateur in an important election, but his tardiness in responding gave me an opportunity to study my county better, and all that I saw I loved.
Bucks was one of William Penn’s original counties rimming the environs of Philadelphia, and throughout Pennsylvania’s history there had always been antagonism between the crowded city and the lush, spacious counties of Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware and Chester. From time to time the central city voted Democratic, but the suburban counties could be depended upon to turn in large Republican majorities. In my youth, in central Bucks County, I grew up without knowing any Democrats. My mother thought there might be some on the edge of town, but she preferred not to speak of them. When I brought my wife home from Chicago, she met my aunts, who had occasion to observe, “We have really never known any Democrats,” and when my wife volunteered, “Well, you know one now,” there was a painful silence.
As a boy I used to sneak into sex trials that took place in the old courthouse just across the street from our school, for one of the major advantages of living in Doylestown was that it was the county seat with a courthouse where lurid trials were always available. Most exciting of all were the murder cases, and rather early in the game I noticed that one of the real tests of wit between contending lawyers came when our local district attorney tried by one subtle means or another to inform the jury that both the accused murderer and his lawyer were not from clean, God-fearing Bucks County but from corrupt, Devil-worshipping Philadelphia, and from the struggle which the defending lawyers put up trying to prevent this knowledge from becoming public, I could only guess that they acknowledged how prejudicial the comparison was. Well, sooner or later the truth leaked out, and there were very few Philadelphia murderers who got off free in our county.
BUCKS COUNTY, showing the communities mentioned in the report
Bucks County is a rather large county about forty-three miles long by seventeen wide, lying roughly north and south and extending from the edge of Philadelphia at the south to the large industrial city of Easton at the north. Since it lies wholly along the right bank of the Delaware, it commands the loveliest stretches of that river’s valley, and all of us who grew up in Bucks County have always felt that the Delaware was our special river, for not only does it run along our eastern boundary, but when it has finished its north-south run, it turns abruptly westward to form our southern boundary, too, as if it were determined to tuck us comfortably into place.
This valley is a land of extraordinary beauty. Maple trees and oaks combine with evergreens to lend the forests real majesty. A hundred little streams wind through the meadows, and for a hundred thousand years it has been a resting place for birds in their hurried pursuit of the seasons. In the old days before the gasoline tractor it was a breadbasket for the city, its spacious farms yielding substantial crops of corn and wheat, but now its historic fields are manicured by gentlemen farmers from the surrounding cities.
Bucks County is replete with historic sites. From our hospitable shores General Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night to attack the British encamped in New Jersey. Back and forth across our county he marched, so that we have many houses still standing of which one can truthfully say, “George Washington slept here.” Our old towns are filled with colonial remnants, and along our country roads are many farms that date back to the time of William Penn, our founding father. It seems only proper that we own one of the world’s principal historical museums, and experts come from many parts of the world to study here, for a sense of the past is very strong in Bucks County. Only this morning I was talking with Arthur Eastburn, crafty senior tactician for the Republicans and a man with an astonishing record of maintaining political control of his county, and he told me that he and his father between them had served as lawyers for ninety years, working out of the same office all that time. We are a historic county.
Yet we also have a nouveau riche aspect, and the natives despise it. In the 1920’s distinguished men and women from New York theatrical and publishing life discovered our magnificent farms, and for the next forty years one after another of the old places fell into alien hands. I was a boy at the time this invasion began and I can remember the bitterness with which we watched the outlanders arrive with their inflated bankrolls and their station wagons: George S. Kaufman, the playwright; S. J. Perelman, who thought he was funny; Pearl Buck, who wrote all those books about China; Oscar Hammerstein, who was mixed up with musical comedies; Moss Hart, who wrote and directed plays … we watched them all come and of each we suspected the worst.
But we were powerless to keep them out, for our farms were no longer productive, and in time Bucks County became world famous as a center for intellectual bohemianism, not that Kaufman, Perelman, Buck and Hammerstein ever engaged in any of it. They rather disappointed us by staying properly at home on their farms just as if they had been stuffy Bucks Countians all their lives. It was the hangers-on that made Bucks County, and especially the lovely old town of New Hope, notorious. The area was flooded with artists and writers and revolutionaries and people who never took baths. A disproportionate number of homosexuals arrived and people who read poetry aloud and who listened to high-fidelity music at all hours of the night. Our courthouse in Doylestown began to entertain some rather extraordinary cases, and we natives listened agog as things we had never heard of before unrolled before our judges, as such things sometimes will. A few years ago an outsider wrote a novel about us entitled The Devil in Bucks County, and all local patriots branded it scandalous, but there was some truth in it if you restricted its more lurid passages only to the New Hope area.
For one thing we were grateful. The strangers who flooded our county generally kept out of politics, so that although there was a natural animosity between the poor honest residents of the county and the rich debauched strangers who swept in—except that after a while it was the residents who were rich and the strangers who were broke—this animosity never expressed itself in political terms. The county remained Republican, and no man could remember when it had ever voted for a Democratic President.
When I was a boy we took politics seriously. My first memory of a political campaign concerned the 1916 contest between Hughes and Wilson, which occurred when I was nine years old. I remember the joy with which my mother took me into the center of town that Tuesday night while the victorious Republicans paraded with torchlights and a long, horn-honking file of expensive automobiles. We trudged home content that Charles Evans Hughes would be a great President, and my mother explained how good life was going to be, now that the Democrat Wilson had been thrown out.
I also remember that awful Friday night of the same week when my mother, biting her lip to control her tears, hauled me back to the Intelligencer Building, where we stood in the shadows and watched the Democrats celebrate their belated victory. What a grubby lot of people they were, strangers for the most part who had come into town to jeer at the Republicans, who had held their parade prematurely. I remember my mother saying, “Never forget this night, James. Look at them. There isn’t a Buick in the lot.” Years later, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for the second time she went to bed sick for four days and told me she didn’t care if she ever got up.
It was about 1916 that Bucks County fell into the hands of one of the greatest party politicians of our time. Joseph R. Grundy was then a powerful textile-mill owner who lived in Bristol, the industrial center at the southern end of the county, and as a boy I always considered him a man of better than national stature, for
I once worked on one of his newspapers and I can remember how we stood at attention when Mr. Grundy stalked in to lay down the editorial line for the next month.
He was a powerfully built man, silent, shrewd, and brilliant in command. I can see him now marching from our newspaper offices over to the courthouse, where every man who worked did so solely because Mr. Grundy had assigned him to the job. I suspect that even the judges were judges because Mr. Grundy had selected them. His word was absolute law, and the two things he hated were Democrats and disloyalty.
He controlled our county with an iron hand until he was in his nineties, and even as I write he is ninety-six and still a major force. During his long reign he gave us as good a government as a benevolent dictatorship can, and it was one remarkably free from open corruption. For example, when the overambitious coroner got into trouble it was widely held that if Mr. Grundy had been younger he never would have allowed this to happen, but whenever a Republican makes such a comment to Johnny Welsh, the Democratic boss observes acidly, “From the time I was a boy, every five years by the clock some leading Republican went to jail for stealing the people blind. If Grundy was so powerful, why didn’t he stop that?”
I wouldn’t say that Joe Grundy had ever been a hero of mine—I was far too scared of him for that—but I must admit that I felt a glow of local pride when he branched out from Bucks County to become the dictator of Pennsylvania and finally a United States senator. He was also president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association and was held by many to be the most typical president that that organization ever had. When he spoke on economic or political matters there was no uncertainty as to what he meant. So far as I knew, he was against every major bill that even the Republicans had ever brought out since the days of Abraham Lincoln, which is as far back as one can go in that direction. As for Democrats, his stand was forever exemplified by the front page of his Intelligencer for November 3, 1948, which remains a museum piece in political reporting.