Republican lame ducks
Henry Fairlie
Washington Perhap one should be writing this week about Gerald Ford, who has just announced that he will not campaign for the nomination of the Republican Party. It is not every day that a defeated president seems about to become a candidate again — it has not happened before in this century — and then, after a flurry of activity, puts himself back again on the sidelines. It ought to have been a great event, but the New York Times only found space for the news on page 28, and no newspaper has noticed it in an editorial. Nevertheless one ought not to be in this business if one cannot make bricks without straw now and then, a phrase which Harold Macmillan once gently used to me after reading my accounts of my interviews with him.
So I went to my files and drew out the folder on Gerald Ford. As I felt it, my heart sank. It was very slim. I opened it: only one cutting. Only one straw. (I started keeping Thy present files after the last election.) Perhaps. the one cutting would stir my imagination. Its date was 2 June 1978. It said that the former President was hiring a Political aide to coordinate his campaign activities, a move which his executive assistant announced with the words: 'It may not help, but it sure won't hurt'. Those are a straw all right. But, alas, how to improve on them? They summarise the presidential campaign which the ex-president has now brought decently to a close. Republican Presidents have always seemed to golf more than Democratic presidents, but of none more than Ford has it seemed so appropriate to say that he sinks a putt. One's eyes follow the ball across the green, they see it topple into the hole, one reaches down to collect it and, lo and behold, there is no ball there. The man has just done it again. So should one write about the rest of the Republican candidates? Will the moderates in the party now coalesce around one candidate? Howard Baker of Tennessee, the minority leader in the Senate, obviously thinks so. He greeted the news of Ford's 'withdrawal with glee, and this is understandable, since his only strategy for winning can be to have no opponents. You Could bet on him confidently in a 'field of one, He is the son-in-law of a former minority leader of the Senate, Everett Dirksen, who used to growl defiantly in public against the Democrats but then like Baker now, used to do whatever any DetTIOCTatie leader wanted him to do. He of course did not stand a chance against Lyndon Johnson, but Hubert Humphrey also had fine tales to tell of how he talked Ey' into thinking that some Democratic bill was `Ev's' bill, until he stood forth the complete patriot and pushed it through the Senate.
I wrote two weeks ago that the covey of Republican candidates had not yet taken wing. Since then one of them has tried. John Connally rose squawking from the sage brush. He would talk strongly, he would talk 'macho'. But he must be the first partridge which has ever carried up its own shotgun, and then fired it pointblank and with a tremendous noise into its own wing. He plummeted to earth. The New Republic this week has the damaging headline to its editorial: 'John Connally, Weakling'. He is simply the first American politician who has said that the United States should sell out Israel for oil, and this comes from the man who has been striding about the country proclaiming that Carter has been selling out America's friends. Where does Connally come from? Why. The oil state of Texas. Who are the clients of Connally's law firm? Why. The big oil men. But one should not blame Texas or the oil industry. The shoddiness of John Connally is in the man himself.
I lived in Texas for a time. Since I am now writing a book about Lyndon Johnson, the politics of Texas is my food and drink. (And very good food and very strong drink it is.) I have been heard to shock political experts here by saying that John Connally will not carry Texas. Neither in the nomination, I add to hammer home my point, nor in the election. This is clearly to fly in the face of all reason. Yet as an exaggeration it has a purpose. The distrust of Connally which he meets all over the country is no less strong in Texas. They are so used to the smell of money in Texas, they can sniff it even when the stuff has been laundered. That Connally was accused of taking money from the dairy industry and acquitted in a way which convinces very few only leaves the Texans murmuring, as one of them did to me: 'He would sour even the milk from a mother's breast'.
I was once at a dinner in Houston at which most of the guests were oil men. It was during the spring of 1973, when Nixon was still clinging to office. Host and guests had voted for him in 1972, host and guests had until then stood by him. But when we were ushered into the dining room and looked down at our place-mats, it was to see that each of them had been made, specially for the evening, out of Nixon's income tax returns. Not a word was said but, as each course was cleared, every eye went back to the mats. I knew then that Nixon was finished. But Connally of course had left the Democratic Party to join Nixon. How untimely was the betrayal. The attitude of Texans on this is forthright, as it is on most things that do not touch oil: if you are going to be a turncoat, you had better be sure you are a winner. Connally did not only lose the Democratic Party in Texas, he did not win the hearts and souls of Republicans in return. But even more serious than either, he lost his mentor with the death of Lyndon Johnson, When LBJ wanted to utter one of his many axioms of political wisdom, he usually put them into the mouth of his father or his schoolteacher. One of his favourite went like this. °Mah Daddy used to say that, if you go into a bull roast blindfold and can't smell if it is Republican or Democratic, you should get out of politics'. Everyone today is saying how weak the parties have become. But there are still strong attachments to them, and Connally of course cannot now smell the difference. But again this is also true of the Republicans in general. As their hopeful candidates stray around the country, looking for votes, no one has the slightest sense of the Republican Party as an animal.
One of the cadre of intelligent and sensitive observers whom the Spectator now seems to send to the party conferences in Britain said the other day that the Conservatives sometimes sigh for the kind of rumpuses which give the Labour party so much publicity. The truth of the remark loses nothing by its familiarity, and the Republicans here feel the same with more cause. The Democratic party is stealing every headline today, and not only with Jimmy Carter and Edward Kennedy. There, recognisably, is the heraldic beast that everyone knows.
This could not have been more vividly underlined than in last Saturday's ceremony to dedicate the new Kennedy Library at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Surrounded by Kennedys, Carter stole the show. The Kennedy people were quoted as saying, 'he really rose to the occasion , . I never knew he had it in him. . . he showed a lot of class'. But one of the most revealing remarks of all came from John Tunney, the former senator who is one of the Kennedys' cup bearers: 'It will be an exciting campaign'.
It will be an exciting campaign — and what more does any Democrat ask? If I were a Republican I would be very worried at the way in which everyone — the ordinary people one meets as one goes about the country — seems to think that the Democratic nomination campaign will in effect be the election, Perhaps a Republican will emerge who will turn it all upside down. But for the moment one cannot help thinking of the Democratic love-feast in Boston. The duel has still to be fought. The mud will be thrown hard and straight. But this is not a party that will destroy itself in the process. It will simply perform its old trick of getting to know itself again. But, on the other side of the fence, the withdrawal of Gerald Ford has only had the usual result of showing that, if you take the hole out of the middle of a doughnut, there is indeed no doughnut left — as the coffee-shop advertisement says.
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