The American Scene

Lesser Nixon victory seen?

Henry Fairlie

Washington On July 26, 1945 — the day on which the votes in the British general election, which had been cast three weeks earlier, were to be counted — the New York Times carried the memorable headline, LESSER CHURCHILL VICTORY SEEN. On the following day, of course, it had to announce to its readers, CHURCHILL IS DEFEATED IN LABOR LANDSLIDE. I am not suggesting that a comparable reversal is to be expected in the American presidential election this year, but it is possible that by polling day we will be reading variants of the headline, LESSER NIXON VICTORY SEEN.

Day by day, memories stir at the back of my mind of the general election in Britain two and a half years ago. Did not everyone agree, when it was over, that one of Harold Wilson's mistakes had been that he had fought the campaign too much as Prime Minister and too little as candidate? The electors did not like the way in which he affected to stand above the battle, refusing to explain to them his policies for the next five years. This is exactly the way in which Richard Nixon has been acting, and there seems to me still to be time for a sizable number of electors to become more disgusted than they are with the Campaign for the Re-election of the President who himself disdains to campaign.

He has so far made no major address to any general body of the electors. Even when he entered Atlanta in triumph two weeks ago — the last memory of Lincoln's war, so it seemed, gone with the wind — he spoke not a word to the populace; he addressed only ,a small gathering of his campaign leaders in the ten Southern states he is expected to carry. When asked if the crowds in Atlanta would encourage him to campaign elsewhere in the country, he gave the answer: "I will do as much as I can, but I have to be President first." The words have at least this ring of truth in them, that he undoubtedly thinks of himself as being President in this manner. He has to be President first because there is nothing else that he has ever been second which tells of any worth in the man.

Above all, he has always been a poor candidate, and by now he does not underestimate his own capacity to lose an election simply by being heard to speak a single syllable. Thus, he suddenly decided to go to Philadelphia last Friday, after various reports had indicated that George McGovern was beginning to pull strongly there. But he did not go as a candidate; he went as the President to sign there the Revenue Sharing Bill which he has said is the beginning of a second American revolution. In other words, the electors had to pay for this rare appearance in the election campaign, for the contrivance of it;' and still he did not talk to them as voters.

He signed a Bill, and it seems that " being President first " means just that: signing things, exactly as Alice explained to Christopher Robin. The sixty-minute television advertisement for Richard Nixon, which is repeated in segments from evening to evening, of course shows him striding into Peking and then into Moscow, rather like a man who has just successfully hijacked a plane and got away with the ransom money. But, when it has to show what he did there, and in particular what he has done at home, there are always and only pictures of him signing things. It does not matter how questionable the treaties, how debatable the Bills, how controversial the policies, the substance of them is never discussed. The environment? "The President signed into law. ..." Arms limitations? " The President signed with the Soviet Union . . ." And there he is on the screen, making his mark. Someone has estimated that the arms agreement with Russia, which is an extremely hazy document as it is, has already been publicly signed by Richard Nixon, on its progress to ratification, at least twenty-five times before the television cameras, and this is only a slight poetic exaggeration.

This is, of , course, the point. We are witnessing the first ruthless television election: the first election in any country in which television has been used, not just as one weapon in the campaign, not merely as the primary weapon, but as the only weapon. Unless his strategy and his tactics change in the final days before the election. Richard Nixon's campaign will have consisted solely in: ay the television advertisement which I have mentioned, segments of it repeated at spaced intervals day after day; (2) a thirty-minute television advertisement, devoted entirely to an appeal by John Connally on behalf of his Democrats for Nixon committee; and (3) occasional public appearances by Richard Nixon and sufficient public appearances by his surrogates to fill the three or four minutes which the network television news programmes feel bound to allow each evening to the two candidates.

That is all, as an incumbent, that is required; and it will be seen at once that it is not necessary in these circumstances to have a policy, and that it is barely necessary to have, a candidate. All that is really needed is a Howdy Doody plastic bouncing clown, or a Yogi Bear beach ball; and that is .very much what the American people have got.

For let us be clear about the significance of the $45,000,000 election fund, and the accumulating scandals. They are evidence that Richard Nixon has largely abandoned his political role, and subjected it and himself and his party and the country to the corporate interests which he has so clearly accepted as his paymaster.

Even if one dismisses the corruption itself as just another caper, the kind of ripoff on which the "investigative reporting" of the Insight Team of the Sunday Times puts the stamp of contemporary morality, merely by the manner of its attentions, we are still confronted by the abdication of politics in favour of the economic interests which it has chosen to serve.

A kind of patriotic soldierly virtue at last awoke in Dwight Eisenhower towards the end of his years in office, as he realised the interests which he had been serving, and he gave his remarkable warning, in his farewell address, against the militaryindustrial-complex, which is too seldom quoted in full: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial-complex. The potential for the disastrous use of misplaced power exists and will persist." The potential is today being realised.

Anyone who read the Wall Street Journal with any care in 1967 realised that the corporations and the bankers — the really big bankers — wished to extricate the country from the war in Vietnam before the people began to question the consensus which has maintained the war economy of the United States during the past twenty-five years. It really costs them nothing to send the Richard Nixon plastic bouncing clown to Moscow and Peking; it simply makes it easier for them to say that weapons are needed to wage peace.

I am by no means, in this respect. ranging myself with the New Left critics of American foreign policy since 1946. They argue that economic interests have been the only factor in the determination of that policy, I am arguing only that they have been a factor; they are fundamentally opposed to the entire direction of that policy during the past quarter of a century, I have fundamentally approved of that direction. I am nevertheless willing to admit that, in the single extended defence of the .policies of Richard Nixon which the American people have been given in this campaign, the intentions of the economic interests were too plain to be ignored.

The defence was given by John Connally in his thirty-minute addresS on television. He had a single theme: the continuity and the bi-partisanship of American foreign policy under the past $ig Presidents, and their agreement that 8 large arms programme is necessary te support that foreign policy. As a Democrat for Nixon, grateful for the Oil Depletion Allowance which George McGovern threatens to cut, he placed Richard Nixon in the same line as Franklin Roosevelt, as Harry Truman, as John Kennedy, aS Lyndon Johnson,' and of course as Dwight Eisenhower.

Against them — all six of them — he placed George McGovern, quoting his opposition to the Truman Doctrine in 1941, and his support of Henry Wallace in 1948' This was the one great policy message from the camp of Richard Nixon; and, al" though it began with references to his visits to Peking and Moscow, every other minute of it was devoted to reinforcing the Cold War doctrines.

It seemed to me, as I listened and watched, that the cat was out of the bag. I have very little time for the revisionist historians of the Cold War, and I see no reason for revising my own support of American policy at the time. But that is altogether different from asking the American people now to act and to vote as If the situation had in no way changed, and particularly to support as large an arms programme as ever.

By far the most outspoken opponent of the Truman Doctrine was that most honourable of conservatives, Robert A. Taft, Very few people listened to him with anything but scorn at the time, as he Warned against the global messianism in Harry Truman's words, and I still believe he was essentially wrong, in the circumstances which then existed. But, if Robert Taft were alive and running for President today, it would be difficult not to vote for him — the time for his idea has come, so to speak — and, as I listened to John Connally reciting what he regarded as the damning quotations from George McGovern twenty-five years ago, I frankly admit that the consistency of the man on a Major issue began to impress me.

In short, I believe that the single policy Message delivered by John Connally at last Made the issue in the election clear: on the one hand, behind the appearance of a consistent attitude over the years, of detente with Peking and with Moscow, the arms programme of the Cold War will be sustained by Richard Nixon; on the other hand, that arms programme will be subjected to the inquisition, born of a consistent attitude over the years, of George McGovern; and what John Connally Made amply clear is that, given the determination of the military-industrialcomplex to maintain the arms programme even in the conditions of a detente, it needs something of George McGovern's consistency to oppose it.

The truth is that, so deeply is the arms _Programme locked into the economy of the united States, not even the most militantly Pacifist President could in four years endanger the country's security. The whole I,I1Ythology of the weapons systems is in Itself almost self-sustaining. It may need a rather small-minded preacher's son from South Dakota to be unimpressed by them. Anyhow, it is now clear to me, after f°11n Connally's address, why the election `und of $45,000,000 is there; why the te,Prruption is politically more significant 'an the corruption itself; why the sunbelievable attempts have been made to _abotage the Democratic Party in general awnd George McGovern in particular; and h.Y George McGovern has been pursued Nitvith far more venom than he deserves. I bln not taking back a single word that I

written about George McGovern in

e past; and I will have more words to '..aY about him next week, as it at last be roes clear what — and where — is the 4011lek, Ing point of the man. But the stench sere Republican campaign really made no se to me until John Connally spoke; and atpd then one saw exactly what the corpora 1°ns believe is at stake for them.

WhY — why — why — commentator `er commentator has been asking in

re cent weeks, when his victory seems virtually assured, •has Richard Nixon allowed his campaign to be conducted so disgracefully? Part of the explanation may lie in the man; as the Washington Post said the other day in one of its truly magnificent editorials denouncing the President, he is no stranger to his aides; they know him, and know what he will tolerate and sanction. But that is not explanation enough, and one must look for it in the economic interests of which he is the prisoner.

The scandals of the campaign, said the Washington Post again, "add up to the most arrogant assault ever mounted on the political process, the institutions of government and the credulity of the people." But that assault has been mounted, not by the politician in the White House so much as by the corporations of which he is the beach ball. For this is the dismal personal tr4tith of it all. Richard Nixon, in thinking that he is "being President first," is more deluded than he has ever been. Not even as he appears to be about to win a great victory, is he anything but someone else's creature.

The, to me, surprising but, on reflection, telling phrase which George Gale used about Edward Heath seems to me to apply at least as certainly to Richard Nixon. It is the angry will of the man that I fear, especially if it is released for four more years, to take revenge on all those who have opposed him in this campaign. There is something that he has still to prove about himself; and what the electiou. campaign has shown is that he has still to prove that he is in fact the President of the United States, or capable of being one.