Nixon—Humphrey—Wallace! How One Was Chosen

MR. JOLLIFFE:

In the long history of this Club we have been addressed by many of Canada's best editors--to mention only a few, Sir John Willison of the Globe, John W. Dafoe of the Free Press, Andre Laurendeau of Le Devoir, Blair Fraser of Maclean's, Grattan O'Leary of the Journal. These are men who have played a large part in Canadian life, but they are modest men, they don't like to be called pundits or even journalists. They always preferred to be known as newspapermen.

Let's not be misled by their modesty. We in Canada have had some of the best in the business. Among these is the Editor of the Ottawa Citizen, Mr. Christopher Young.

From his vantage-point in the capital of this nation he has watched the making--and sometimes the breaking--of our leaders. More recently he has seen how the Americans make and break their Presidents.

Before becoming Editor he was in the Press Gallery at Ottawa representing the Southam Newspapers and he also travelled in Europe and Japan. He has been a close witness of the wisdom and the follies--of all our favourite politicians, and also perhaps of the Universities, because he gained an education at the University of Manitoba and at Balliol College, Oxford. In his 20 years as a newsman he has worked for the Hamilton Spectator and the Winnipeg Tribune as well as in Ottawa.

He knows this country and he knows the United States. We have therefore invited him to report on the United States election as he saw it and the Candidates--as seen by a Canadian.--Mr. Young.

MR. YOUNG:

When Mr. Jollifle asked me to address this famous club, I inquired with some trepidation how long the speech should run. "Oh," he said, "our speakers go anywhere from 15 minutes to 45." I thought then of the story about Calvin Coolidge, who was certainly the most silent of American presidents, if not the most distinguished in any other way. So remarkable was Coolidge for terseness of speech that one of his staff members once bet another that he couldn't make the President say more than two words. The man who took the bet decided on the direct approach. The next time he entered the oval office, he said: "Mr. President, my colleague has bet me ten dollars that I can't make you say more than two words." To which Coolidge replied: "You lose."

I didn't say to Mr. Jolliffe, "You lose"--that will be for this audience to decide--but I did tell him that no one need worry about getting back to the office late.

Coolidge was often in my mind a month ago when I was in the United States writing about the final stages of the election campaign. You will recall that he was one of those vice-presidents who attained the White House because his president died in office. President Harding was possibly even less well equipped for the position than Vice-President Coolidge. His administration is mainly remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal and for the fact that the president's mistress was delivered of his bastard child in a White House closet. Even so, mention of Coolidge inevitably evokes what Americans call "the heartbeat issue".

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian, played on this issue rather cleverly at a pro-Humphrey rally which I attended last month. He recalled that Spiro Agnew had recently made the pronouncement that "Overcrowding is the cause of slums." This, said Schlesinger, was "the most profound remark since Calvin Coolidge ventured the thought that unemployment was caused by having too many people out of work."

I suspect that it was Nixon's choice of Agnew as his running mate, as much as anything else, that caused his spectacular decline from a position that should have given him a landslide victory in September to the hair's breadth decision of November. There were two things about the choice of Agnew that were worrying. First, it showed that Nixon was concerned primarily about the threat from George Wallace and his gang of bigots, rednecks and frustrated bullyboys. He was determined to outflank Wallace on the right by making an appeal to all those voters who were fearful or angry about the thrusting aspirations of the Negro. He decided to make the so-called "law and order" issue his own.

And the second thing that was significant about the Agnew choice, to me at least, was that it revealed the basic cynicism of Nixon's political approach. He was willing to risk the possibility that the United States might be left in dangerous times with a man like Agnew at the helm because he wanted so badly to win the southern votes that he thought Agnew and Strom Thurmond could collect for him.

The Americans, in my opinion, are not in general a cynical people and a great many of them did not like this blatant manoeuvre. As the vice-presidential candidate uttered a series of gaucheries that came to be known as "Agnewisms", the theory developed that his appointment was really a clever kind of life insurance for Nixon. With Agnew as vice-president, no one would dare to harm the president. Agnew weakened the ticket dramatically, as Edmund Muskie strengthened Humphrey. Agnew could not even persuade his own state of Maryland into the Nixon column. Many uncommitted voters who were inclined to vote against the Democrats because of the Vietnam war, trouble in the streets, inflation, or other frustrations, swung to Humphrey in the final stages of the campaign. One reason was that Humphrey was dealing with these big issues whereas Nixon was only trying to manipulate them.

The most alarming thing about the Nixon campaign, as I saw it, was this: He deliberately set out to win the presidency without the help of those angry and alienated elements of the American society whose resentment has created so much trouble during President Johnson's term. Above all, he wrote off the most important of American minorities--the Negroes. The choice of Agnew was the tip that this would be the strategy, and the nature of the Republican campaign confirmed it. Nixon hardly ever toured a Negro ghetto or an urban slum. At his big city rallies, you could hardly find a black face. The focus of his campaign was in the suburbs and the small towns. He calculated that if he could be sure of winning the white, the well-to-do, the middle-aged and middle-browed--who after all make up the great majority of Americans--he could afford to lose the coloured, the poor, the students and the intellectuals--all of whom together make a minority.

Nixon's campaign speeches--or speech, because he usually gave the same one--were slick and hollow generalizations designed to appeal to majority prejudice, to rub the majority sore spots, and to avoid all specific proposals. For example, he tried to present himself both as the peace candidate and as the man who would keep America strong in the face of military challenge. I noted down this sentence from a Nixon speech in Pittsburgh: "I am proud to have served in an administration in which we ended one war and kept the nation out of other wars for eight years." The Johnson administration, he continued, had "the most miserable record" in American history. It was responsible for the longest war the country had ever fought, the worst crime rate, the highest tax rate and the lowest level of foreign respect for America.

Changing gears smoothly, Nixon then said it was time for new leadership "when a fourth-rate naval power like North Korea" could get away with seizing an American ship. This seemed to imply something other than a peace platform, since even fourth-rate powers are unlikely to accept, unless force is applied, the presence of unfriendly warships inside their territorial waters. The inconsistency did not bother Nixon, who went on to promise both that "the American flag will not be a doormat for anyone, at home or abroad," and that he planned "to move away from the draft and have a volunteer armed service."

Well, now that Nixon is going to be president, Art Buchwald has announced that we can no longer call him "Tricky Dick". But you can understand why Buchwald proposes as an alternative, "Crafty Richard".

"Crafty", on the other hand, is one of the last adjectives that would be appropriate for Hubert Humphrey. He seems totally lacking in guile, and so genuine in his liberalism that one almost suspects him, as somebody said long ago of the British Labour party, of allowing his bleeding heart to go to his bloody head. Perhaps it's my own prejudice in favour of politicians who have a heart and show it, but I thought he waged an admirable campaign. The disaster of the Chicago convention might have crushed him, and nearly did. But he fought back with enormous courage and stamina and he very nearly pulled off a comeback on the scale of Harry Truman's upset in 1948.

Humphrey took almost the entire Negro vote by default, because of Nixon's tactics, but he failed to get through to discontented youth. The Vietnam war hung about his neck like an albatross, which was no more fair to him than it was to the Ancient Mariner. "Dump the Hump," cried the Yippies, who nominated a pig for president.

I was deeply struck by the irony of the leftward position one night in New York City. I spent part of that evening in the gleaming new Madison Square Garden, where the Republicans put on a slick and super-colossal rally, and paid ABC television $200,000 to get an hour of it on the network. They had Jackie Gleason delivering a Nixon commercial on a giant overhead screen. They had the disembodied voice of Mamie Eisenhower testifying for Nixon from her husband's sickbed in Walter Reed Army Hospital. They had Lionel Hampton and the Serendipity Singers and six state governors from Spiro Agnew to Nelson Rockefeller.

I ducked out of this extravaganza and walked two blocks to a rather small and shabby hall called the Manhattan Centre. There the Americans for Democratic Action--the radical wing of the Democratic party--were trying to rally the disenchanted left to the cause of Hubert Humphrey. Harvard professors spoke, and Negro leaders, and theatrical people like Shelley Winters. The main speaker of the evening was John Kenneth Galbraith, who is president of A.D.A. among his many other activities.

There had been no heckling at all at the Nixon rally so far as I could see, but when Galbraith unlimbered his giant frame to address the A.D.A. rally, a strange thing happened. A claque of Yippies, previously unnoticed in the hall, suddenly disrupted the meeting with shouts of "Fascist," "Pig," and "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh." There was a great deal of scuffling and rushing down the aisles, and suddenly one long-haired young man appeared on the stage in front of the row of distinguished speakers totally naked. A policeman wearing a riot helmet and waving his truncheon chased the naked Yippie off the stage in a scene straight from the theatre of the absurd. It looked exactly as though the D'Oyly Carte chorus had got itself mixed up with the cast of Hair.

This may well have been the only time in his life when the voluble Galbraith was struck dumb. He stood frozen to the microphone, as I'm sure most of us would do in similar circumstances, but Shelley Winters' stage experience came to the rescue. She rushed to the microphone and screamed at the Yippies: "Why didn't you demonstrate at the Wallace or Nixon rallies?"

It was a fair question, and the broadsheet distributed by the Yippies left an unsatisfactory answer. "You are all pigs," it said. Radical youth, it seems, made no distinction among the established political leaders. They were all to be swept into the dustbin of history.

Among more mature people, I think there was a very deep feeling of disillusion flowing not only from the war but from the terrible events at home. The men of hope were dead, murdered by the haters. John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Hubert Humphrey was running for president by a process of deadly elimination, and that was not an inspiring thought. A Negro told me he was for Humphrey, but then he added quietly: "I don't really care. They killed my man." He thought Ted Kennedy would be crazy to run next time, because they would certainly kill him too.

A Canadian expatriate in Washington described Humphrey's trouble as "Paul Martin disease". The American people simply could not get excited about him. He had been around too long. His face was too familiar. He had talked too much about too many things that had ceased to be of central interest to the electorate. Nevertheless, it seems an irony that the Democratic party, which perhaps deserved defeat for the troubles of the last four years and for the spectacle it made of itself in Chicago, should have been triumphantly returned to control of the Congress; while its presidential candidate, who talked a great deal of sense about the major issues, should have lost.

That kind of result, of course, could not happen under our system. If we want to vote the party, we get the leader the party has chosen. If we want to vote for a leader, we can do it only by voting for his party's candidate. If we split very nearly down the middle, as we did in 1962, '63 and '65, we get a minority government, something that doesn't exist in the American system. Richard Nixon, despite a victory that was so close in the popular vote that it was almost a tie, will be a president with powers as ample as those that Lyndon Johnson enjoyed after the record landslide of 1964. On the other hand, our system cannot produce a deadlock, which was the nightmare of the 1968 presidential campaign.

George Wallace, the man who conjured up this nightmare, is a symptom of the real sickness in certain cells of the American body politic. He is the negation of the American dream. He is dedicated to the proposition that men are created unequal and that some of them must on no account be allowed the pursuit of liberty and happiness. More subtly than the Ku Klux Klan, he tells his followers how to keep the Negro down: by encouraging segregated housing and restoring segregated schools; by jailing dissident students and critical professors; by carrying arms against those whom he would condemn to dwell forever in the ghettoes. I heard him urge these solutions at a rally in Philadelphia--the city of brotherly love. To hear him speak is to sense the worst that could happen to the American Republic.

But the American people have no intention of letting it happen. Their vote for Wallace was significant, but it was much smaller than had been widely predicted, and his strength was restricted to sections of what used to be known, in what now seems a distant past, as the Democratic Solid South.

The turnout for Wallace in Philadelphia was very disappointing to the organizers. Those who came to cheer yelled with delight as he attacked the "pointy heads", the New York Times, and a tiny band of hecklers. But the crowd filled only a small fraction of the seats in the huge hockey and basketball arena where the rally was held. Enroute to the arena, the Negro taxi driver made very good time through light traffic. This obviously gave him satisfaction.

"If Wilt Chamberlain was in town," he said, "you couldn't get through no-how."

When the rally began, a clergyman whose peculiar interpretation of Christianity had led him into this devilish company, was asked to give an invocation. He addressed his God with the following beautifully ungrammatical solecism: "We pray that if elected you will use Governor Wallace as an instrument. . ." and so on.

Well, God was not elected, and neither was Governor Wallace. The more realistic possibility that Wallace might have been able to use the Electoral College for driving some kind of bargain with a Faustian Nixon also vanished like a bad dream on the morning after election day, and for that it would perhaps be appropriate to thank God.

That was the nightmare that kept sensible men awake a month ago--not a Wallace victory, but sufficient Wallace strength to create a deadlock in the Electoral College. Perhaps that scare will be enough to inspire a successful movement to abolish the Electoral College. It is an eighteenth-century anachronism that has no relevance to the modern American democracy.

By good fortune, a deadlock in the Electoral College has not occurred since the nineteenth century. No one knows exactly what would have happened if it had occurred this time, or how the resulting paralysis would have affected the United States and the western alliance. Canadians, whose fate rides with American judgment, may well share in the general gratitude that it did not happen.

We have something else to be thankful for--a passing thing I hope, for I wish only success and constructive achievement to the United States. The fact is that we had a better choice than our neighbours did in this important political year, 1968. There have been times in the past when that was not so, and there will be such times in the future. But this year our political parties were more cohesive than theirs, and spoke more clearly about the directions in which they wanted to take the country. They even made a better fist of suggesting to the world at large the kind of problems that needed to be attacked first, and how.

On the individual level of leadership, we elected a young prime minister as politicians go--a brilliant scholar whose stylish intelligence could win the enthusiastic respect of our majority, could comprehend the aspirations of our most important minority, and would not forget the needs of those long neglected splinters of society whose numbers have never compelled political priority. As a realistic alternative, we could have followed the leader of the opposition--a man of sterling integrity, of granite common sense, of modest and genuine humanity. If we felt dissatisfied with the two leaders who could hope to win the election and if we wanted to express that feeling in a third-party vote, we were not required to turn to an ignorant demagogue preaching hate and communal war. The leader of the NDP we knew to be a dedicated reformer of long practical experience.

If any one of these three Canadian political leaders had been able to present himself to the American electorate in 1968, I venture to think he would have done very well indeed. Which is not to be smug--we have no right to be that-but only to remark on the good fortune that has promoted honest and able men to the leadership of contemporary Canada.

Adlai Stevenson said of Eleanor Roosevelt that she would rather light a candle than curse the darkness. If we can keep a guttering candle aflame here in the northern winter, it may be more useful to the common future of this continent than any curses we may invent for Richard Daley or George Wallace. The America of Jefferson and Lincoln, of Stevenson and Kennedy, will outlast the haters and destroyers. The news of its death, to steal from Mark Twain, has been grossly exaggerated.

Thanks of the meeting were expressed by Mr. A. J. Langley.