AMERICA

The King's Man

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

TT is a painful thought to all who cherish one or 'the other: but the current Vice-President Humphrey is unexpectedly like the old Richard Nixon.

That is in part a risk of office; the Vice- Presidency of the United States long ago ceased to have any larger purpose than to prove that at least one American is a hero to his valet.

Their natures are different, of course. Hum- phrey's is altogether the sunnier and the more open: the wicked fairy who stands at all our cradles spared him that black distrust of other people which was Nixon's abiding misfortune. But they have one bond stronger than their common office. They are both children of the depression. We are a fluid society; more men born at the ragged edge now have positions of at least ceremonial prestige in the America of the 'sixties than in any non-revolutionary society on earth. Economic privation is not that hard to conquer here; but its spiritual damage can be permanent.

Humphrey and Nixon are both sons of store- keepers who struggled through the depression. Each was waiting on customers almost as soon as he could walk and under circumstances where every customer was an object of desperation. And so Humphrey and Nixon will always wait on people: they will always stoop too far. The first great childhood crisis of each must have been that excess inventory of soap that had to be moved or the business would perish; the style was formed in that emergency and it has endured ever since. Its most conspicuous manifestation is a terrible anxiety to soothe the mistrustful. Vice- President Humphrey is distrusted because he began as a member of the Democratic left; his excesses of language and his abjection of his better self are therefore apt to reach their most depressing when he addresses groups of business men.

A visitor happened upon him a few days ago talking to the American Newspaper Publishers Association at its annual convention. The Vice- President is too likeable a man to be followed about as Nixon used to be by reporters feverish to write down every word induced by the habit of desperation, and his sins generally go un- recorded. He is fortunate. When the Republicans were in power, there was a whole industry of night-club satire built round expressions like these:

To those who criticise at home and abroad, I say 'What have you to offer, what have you done?'

People say we cannot win [in Vietnam] be- cause the French could not win. Well, we're not the French.

I remember my visit with Mr Khrushchev in 1958. . . . He said, 'Let's compete' and I said, 'Yes, let's, and, when we do. we're gonna run you right out of Gorki Park.'

How long has it been since you heard the old phrases about labour bosses and economic royalists out of the White House?

So we have travelled all this distance from the Eisenhower years and behold we have discovered that the world is round. There is the same piety about dissent and the same vulgarity about the dissenter, the same taste in the imagination of ripostes•to Nikita Khrushchev, the same habit of boasting about our morals as Khrushchev used to boast about his rockets. And, most of all, there is the same dreadful wheedling and flatter- ing of any customer:

There was a time when people believed profit was an evil word. I'm going to come out for it strongly.

And the Vice-President who came to our atten- tion first as a populist radical Midwestern Senator went on to remind the property owners of all that the 'new economics' had done for them: 'Depre- ciation tax schedules have been altered . . • greater reliance has been placed on the private market.'

Vice-President Nixon was thought of through- out his tenure as the representative of the Repub- lican right; Humphrey's anointment was noticed at the time as a victory for the Democratic left. The condition that they sound so much alike is in part a reflection of a certain communality of

nature; but, more than that it describes a society in which those quarrels about Roosevelt- which dominated a generation of our politics are less and less relevant. We live, in fact, in a time where business has accepted the New Deal and the News Dealers have accepted business. It is a time very like the Eisenhower Age; for just that reason, it has only now become possible to wonder whether Mr. Johnson is as permanent as we had thought him.

General Eisenhower represented the national consensus of his time; it was very like the one Mr Johnson represents today, although a certain fever and impatience with leaving bad enough alone is bound to make the presnt less tranquil and cool-headed than that past. But both these Presidents share a satisfaction with what exists which is bound to dampen and alienate creative spirits whether radical or conservative. They leave very little of themselves behind them; General Eisenhower was unable, for all his authority, to name his successor; and Nixon has been wandering like an uneasy ghost ever since.

It is by no means certain that, when he departs, Mr Johnson will be able to leave any greater imprint: all the juices may, in this case too, have been driven into the opposition. It is odd: we are a people easy to move into the official style for a while, but terrible in our punishment of its spokesmen when its object has run his term.