U.S. CONTENDERS then and now
All the candidates seeking the U.S. presidency in 1960, Richard Nixon included, were infinitely more qualified than any of the Republican candidates of 2012.
“I will tell you,” Perry said. “It’s three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone: Commerce, Education and the – what’s the third one there? Let’s see. … OK. So Commerce, Education and the … The third agency of government I would … I would do away with the Education, the … Commerce and … let’s see … I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”
Oops, indeed. In fact, this year’s crop of Republican candidates has elevated “oops” to the level of a national campaign theme. Perry, now mercifully on the sideline, may have been (with Michele Bachmann, who has also dropped out of the race) the weakest of the lot – but even those still in the campaign lurch almost daily from the absurd to the ridiculous.
By coincidence, while this farce was playing out in the background, I was re-reading Theodore H. White’s classic of political journalism, The Making of the President 1960. It’s a wonderful book and must reading for anyone who wants to understand American politics.
The 1960 presidential campaign in the U.S. was, without argument from either side of the political spectrum, a watershed in American politics. It was the first time television played a significant role in a campaign. It was fought under the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust, with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev rattling missiles and making threats in the background.
It was a test of religious tolerance, with the Massachusetts Catholic John F. Kennedy making a serious run for the White House. And it was oh, so close: Kennedy won by 112,000 popular votes and a shift of 4,500 votes in Illinois and 28,000 in Texas would have given Richard M. Nixon the presidency.
What strikes you when you read White’s book, however, is that all the candidates seeking the presidency in 1960, Nixon included, were in
finitely more qualified for the office than any of the Republican candidates vying for the nomination this year.
As the exhausting run of Republican primaries heads into contests next Tuesday in Arizona and Michigan and then to the March 6 Super Tuesday run of primaries in Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Vermont, the Grand Old Party has yet to come up with a clear front-runner or even someone who is clearly presidential material.
The contrast to the candidates of 1960 could hardly be more stark. It’s possible there has never been an election anywhere in which more great or potentially great statesmen vied for the right to lead a nation. On the Republican side were Nixon, with eight years in the vicepresidency behind him, and New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. For the Democrats, there was Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Missouri senator Stuart Symington, the grand elder statesman Adlai Stevenson (loser of the contests against Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956) and Kennedy, the eventual winner.
Compare their biographies with 2012 candidates Romney, Perry, Bachmann, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum ,herman cain,jon huntsman (the former ambassador to China who may have been the most rational of the lot) and Ron Paul. There is, in truth, no comparison.
Three of the 1960 candidates (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon) would become president. Humphrey would come close. The visionary Rockefeller and the highly capable executive Symington (the least known of the candidates today) would have made outstanding presidents. Nixon, minus the paranoia and bitterness left from his losing effort in 1960 and his defeat when he sought the california governorship in 1962, might have made a strong president, despite his personal flaws.
In 1960, American voters could not go wrong.
As a group, the candidates of 1960 seemed more serious, significantly more versed in world affairs, more articulate, more eloquent, more mindful of what they called “America’s burden” as the world’s richest nation. They had been through the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War.
The candidates in 1960 were all remarkable for their grasp of the issues and the clarity with which they expressed their views. At the drop of a question, they could deliver cogent, pointed responses on almost any issue. Across the board, they possessed an eloquence since matched only by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
Nixon, whom history has not treated kindly, showed an international breadth of vision in his acceptance speak for the nomination that would be unthinkable among today’s narrow, blinkered candidates. “This will be a difficult task,” Nixon said. “Difficult because at times our next president must tell the people not what they want to hear but what they need to hear. Why, for example, it may be just as essential to the national interest to build a dam in India as it is in California.”
And here is Humphrey, speaking extemporaneously to a Jewish group before the Wisconsin primary, on a day when his voice had all but given out: “We believe liberalism is more than intellectual capacity – intellectual liberalism must be buttressed with an understanding of people and a love of them that goes far beyond texts or documents. For if you can’t cry a little bit in politics, the only other thing you’ll have is hate.”
Hate, so much a part of the politics of the right in 2012, was largely absent from the 1960 campaign. All the candidates in 1960, Republican and Democrat, possessed to some degree a sympathy for the poor and disenfranchised that is utterly missing in the current Republican field. Kennedy’s father was the millionaire Joseph P. Kennedy; Rockefeller was the descendant of what was, at the time, America’s richest family.
Yet their stance toward the unfortunate contrasts sharply with that of Mitt Romney, who sits atop a $200-million personal fortune and expresses nothing but contempt for those with less. Here’s Romney on the poor, for instance: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.” Romney also explained, while campaigning in Florida last year, that he understood unemployment because “I am also unemployed.” Well, there’s unemployed – and then there’s unemployed with $200 million. Not the same thing.
Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who is the current front-runner in the polls, is a true believer in the worst sense of the term, a narrowminded prig who thinks that everything can be interpreted in terms of his version of the Christian Bible. Nothing that has been said in this campaign is quite as terrifying as Santorum’s statement on the issue of abortion, when he said that if his daughter were raped, he would want her to have the child:
“I think the right ap- proach,” Santorum said, “is to accept this horribly created – in the sense of rape – but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.”
A man with his hands on the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal who sees God in the guise of a rapist? It’s enough to chill the soul.
In 1960, Kennedy twice had to meet the issue of his Catholic religion head-on: first in West Virginia during the primary, then again during the campaign for the presidency, when he flew to Houston to take questions from a hostile group of Protestant ministers in an attempt to clarify his stance. Kennedy understood that perhaps the single most enduring principle of the American form of government is the separation of church and state, a separation that Santorum seeks to erase in the most serious way.
“I believe in an America where the separation
of Church and State is absolute,” Kennedy said, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote. … That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of presidency in which I believe – a great office that must be neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any religious group, nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any religious group.”
One wonders if Santorum, should he become the Republican nominee, would agree to undergo such a grilling from his opponents and whether he would make such an unequivocal promise to keep his religion out of the affairs of the nation. The answer, unfortunately, is on the record – assuming you can comprehend what Santorum is struggling to say.
Why has the quality of Republican candidates declined so dramatically in the past 50 years? The easy answer is the poisonous alliance of big money, Fox News and the Tea Party. But there’s more to it than that. There’s the system itself.
In 1960, the first of the primaries, in New Hampshire, was held in early March. This year, the New Hampshire primary, on Jan. 10, followed the Iowa caucuses by a week. Most of the candidates have already been hard at it since last summer and the eventual Republican winner still has eight months to go. You can argue that no really capable individual would intentionally put himself through such an ordeal, so in this primary race, at least, we’re left with the dregs – the individuals who can offer ambition and ideology and little else.
The amounts of money that must be raised are also daunting: The most recent figures show that the four remaining Republican candidates (Santorum, Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul) have, counting the money provided by the controversial political action committees, raised between $8 million and $15 million each just since the beginning of the year – and for three of the four, it won’t be enough.
In 1960, there were only two really contested primaries for the Democrats, in Wisconsin and West Virginia. Johnson didn’t declare his candidacy until five days before the July convention and Stevenson remained a candidate without declaring at all. Now, even the most long-shot candidates figure on an 18-month marathon.
In 1960, Nixon and Kennedy began campaigning in earnest on Labor Day. By election day, Nov. 8, they were both completely exhausted – especially Nixon, who kept a campaign pledge to visit every one of the 50 states by flying to Alaska in the last 48 hours before the vote.
Still, although Nixon grew maudlin and self-pitying as exhaustion overtook him, none of the candidates made the sort of gaffe that has become routine for the Republican candidates of 2012. They were better people, they were better politicians. They knew the issues inside out, they expressed themselves brilliantly.
They even managed to retain some of their humanity. Within what was, even then, an absurdly gruelling way to choose a president, that in itself was an achievement.