Campaigning

Notes worth saving from a New Hampshire diary:

. . . Great guilt clings to reporters. They know they help keep America slightly insane. Norman Mailer

Concord

Fourteen days before the vote, George Romney bowed out. It was a decisive act in an otherwise indecisive campaign. Romney’s polls were so bad that even the Nixon people did not believe them. The margins were incredible, six and seven to one against him, so in the end he decided to withdraw. At a cheerful press conference, he warned the moderate Republican governors to hang together lest they hang separately. But to his managers and to others, he still wondered: why did it go so wrong?

Richard Nixon thought he knew. “Perhaps we have seen for the last time the hand-shaking, person-toperson type of campaign,” he said at a press conference the next day. “Governor Romney gambled on a hand-shaking campaign. I deliberately wrcnt on an issues-type campaign. I think that will be the campaign of the future.” What is important, Nixon told the reporters, “is not just winning, but how it’s won.”

New London

The argument was whether she was pretty or merely sexy or both. The Baltimore Sun declared it was mostly sex; I demurred. Anyone that sexy had to be pretty. She was a Romney Girl, one of a revolving band of half a dozen caped, miniskirted, tights-wearing college girls who preceded the candidate to meetings at coffee hours and rallies. She had a marvelous look about her —well built with long hair that spilled carelessly into her eyes. She was the prettiest of the six. The Romney Girls were singing the Romney Song, something about Romney making the world go ‘round,

The winds atop Mount Washington
Whispering Romney’s Right,

when a cameraman for CBS began to tinker with his camera, focusing the long black lens and inspecting the lighting. This was at Colby Junior College, in the auditorium there, and the cameras were set in the middle of the long rows of scats that filed back from the stage and its podium.

The candidate had not yet appeared. George Romney, threeterm governor of Michigan, corporation executive, family man, churchman, had just the week before returned from twenty-seven days around the world (fourteen countries; three days in South Vietnam), and was relaxing in the anteroom. He had come to the Colby campus from the slopes of the King Ridge Ski Area, where in the company of the director he had snowplowed three runs down the beginner’s slope, and fell as he swept into a stem Christie. It was a production for what are now called the media, with all three networks recording the descent and a girl working for the New York Times taking down quotes. The pictures received very good play the next day. In all, a useful exercise.

So the candidate was still offstage as the girls were singing, warming up the crowd. The television cameras were working and the Baltimore Sun and I were smiling. The girl we were watching had moved to the front of the jiggling line of six Romney Girls. Her head was held slightly forward of her body, and she smiled widely and frequently. One hand held a tambourine, and that tambourine always seemed to be covering, or at least distracting, the face of the girl to her left. Even in the back row, thirty scats away, we could hear her voice above the others, tinkling the Romney Song, and her body swinging in a modest shake. Now she was looking straight into the CBS camera and smiling. She had been bitten. She was looking straight into a nonlinear future. Farewell Brett Ashley, Natasha, Hester Prynne. Enter Betty Furness. The girl wanted to be on television.

As the rest of us. You can watch their faces working as the cameras pan over the audience. It is best seen at close quarters, when George Romney is speaking earnestly of the decline of American morals. He talks about this in living rooms all over New Hampshire, and the national press is squeezed into living rooms along with the voters. The hostess is sitting near the front, and her shy, nervous eyes are darting about between Romney and her neighbors.

He was late arriving, and the hostess was certain that he would not come; she would be embarrassed in front of her neighbors, whom she had asked to her living room to listen to a candidate for President of the United States. But he arrives and makes his way among the women, nodding and smiling, ruddy and hearty, joking about the cold, looking like a President ought to look, looking in Excellent Health. The women wait for the speech. Some of them have brought their husbands.

The national press has heard it all before. They call it BOMFOG — brotherhood of man, fatherhood of God. “I am not here as a politician, but as a concerned American . . .” It is a stock talk, ten minutes, rarely more, and questions. Pencils come out during the question period because Romney has had trouble with language in the past. Once he said he was brainwashed in South Vietnam, and the remark almost put him out of the running for keeps, almost made his candidacy a joke, which is the worst thing that can happen to a candidate for office in American politics. When there are indications he will say something different, the pencils come out and the television lights go on. Abruptly he mentions, apropos of nothing, the Supreme Court. Blink! The lights go on. It is an excruciating white light, necessary for the sixteenmillimeter-film cameras. The lights do not illuminate the entire room, just that part of it to which they are directed. Romney pauses for an instant, and the only sound is the gentle grinding of the camera wheels, a whir like a dentist’s drill before it is placed on a molar. It is the only sound in the room. The strobe light plays over the faces of the people standing and seated before Romney. The camera follows the light, and the people know this. It is serious business, so they cannot smile or wave as the camera passes by them. They must behave as if the camera were not there. To do otherwise would be to mock the ceremony, to transform George Romney into Johnny Carson, to turn a campaign for the presidency into the Tonight Show. They try to watch the television man as well as the governor, and in the process their eyes and minds go blank. Romney is blotted out as thoroughly as if he were speaking to a parlor full of the deaf and the blind. He notices none of this, of course, being experienced in front of cameras; and the light is in his eyes also, and he cannot see the audience. The camera records, then moves on. The light extinguished, people blink their eyes as when they have come into a dark room from the sunshine. Romney ends on a note of exhortation: the imperative to halt the decline in religious conviction, family life, moral character, personal responsibility. Then he nods and it is over, and shaking hands, he leaves. A woman awkwardly picks her way through the folding chairs and to the side of one of the television correspondents. “When will it be on?” she asks.

Portsmonth

Nixon moved as effortlessly as a tango dancer, gliding to rhythms dimly reminiscent of some other, faraway ballroom. “Interest rates,” he’d said, “are the highest in 100 years.” He spoke of a new coalition of voters in America, high-minded citizens who would forget partisan politics and vote for “what’s good for America.”

How could Romney counter that? The search for a theme became desperate but essential. His managers knew this, particularly the astute and enormously likable William R. Johnson, the young Hanover lawyer who was running the Romney show in New Hampshire. Johnson spoke one night oi a groping Romney, “struggling to find the words . . . the theme to the campaign.” It wasn’t working then, and Johnson knew it, but he felt that somehow it might be made to work. Somehow Romney would make a relevant connection between the theme of “excessive concentration of power” — in Romney’s obscure formulation a matter which appeared to be more a reference to stalemates in collective bargaining than an analysis of America’s industrial situation — and the feeling that the nation was in moral decline.

Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knew the latter, and knew that the electorate’ knew it, too, but how could it be expressed in the language of 1968? It was not enough to say that there was a decline in family life, religious conviction, and the rest. Not nearly enough. What could a President do to somehow give the nation a sense of itself, and where it ought to go? Romney, a Mormon St. Paul in twentiethcentury Babylon, was not approaching it right. Even the elderly Republicans who came to sit on the parlor sofas in the presence of the television cameras to hear him, and largely agree with him, knew that. The trouble, as a Manchester lady put it, was that Romney did not, ah, convey brains. “Do you think he’s smaht?” she asked.

To a degree, whether Romney found his theme depended on the response of the people of New Hampshire. The national press, newspapers, magazines, and television had a certain influence, but no one knew how much. In any case, the people were guarded in their response.¹ Themes are not found in vacuums. What was the mood of New Hampshire?

Exeter

The problem, as a perceptive colleague put it, was that George Romney had only one speed, of about the velocity and excitement of a Mack truck: solid, durable, dependable, slow. It handles the same for a suburban matron or an electronics technician as it does for a pensioner. Or for the boys at Exeter Academy.

It passed understanding why he was booked into the hall in the first place. Bill Johnson, campaign manager, admitted it was a mistake, but had an idea that the campaign might pick up some weekend recruits. Schoolboys work very hard for campaigns once they are enthusiastic. But it seemed no one had asked if the preppies would find George Romney, churchman and moralist, congenial. Of course, they did not, and it was more than a matter of that school’s “negoism,” an Exonian phrase dating from the early fifties which combines in about equal parts snobbery, nihilism, and coolth. Someone should have known about negoism.

It was not only that he used the phrase “when I was your age,” a concept which stirs approximately the same hostilities in adolescents as its reverse does in adults, but he used the occasion to speak at length on national fiscal and monetary affairs, particularly inflation. The disaster was preceded by a short warm-up talk from the governor’s wife, Lenore; the snickering began then, during a long anecdote about the certain failure of Communism in Southeast Asia.

There is something about the younger generation which fails to respond when a politician describes his public policy as one of “call a spade a spade, and let the chips fall where they may.” The youngsters tend to view this as something more than a slightly mixed metaphor. They view it as cheating, so they tend to laugh behind their hands. The snickers become titters when the politician says that “this nation will not be destroyed from without, it will be destroyed from within.” Of course the titters become snorts of laughter when a man earnestly declares: “I have seen young women of seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen become expert plasterers . . .” Or, devastatingly, “50 percent of the crime in this country is committed by youngsters sixteen years old or younger.” This is on the threshold of black humor, and the Exeter boys understand that. There were boys in that room who had read Regis Debray, and George Romney had not. Let alone Frank Harris, or all those memoirs of Victorian gentlemen.

But let the public man dwell on President Johnson and his war policy, and the young audience, many of whom hold draft cards or are about to hold draft cards, come alive. “We can help the Vietnamese, but we cannot win the war for them" — rapture. “But we are not going to walk out”—clapping, with faintly audible groans.

Dwell on the war, or on the perfidy of the Johnson Administration, and the Exeter boys are in your pocket. But talk about the economy — “a financial mess . . . has been building for nineteen years” — and the faces become blank. Talk about morality, and the smiles come. Can anyone who has a girlfriend who has taken LSD, who bops to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, who thrills to the slaughter scene in Bonnie and Clyde be moved by the historical imperative that “it was just a matter of time before the country [America] and the principles of freedom would sweep the earth?” Or that the decline in American family life was a harmful menace?

Doubtless not. But they are still decently polite at the better New England prep schools, so when George Romney finished, the boys gave him a big hand.

Antrim

There is a surreal, only-American scene here, with the candidate standing before a lectern in the middle of a basketball court. The students are arrayed in front of him, seated on risers. There are four hundred of them, perhaps a few more. He makes the speech, asks for questions. Loudly applauded before he spoke, he was given an ovation when he finished. But during the speech, the students did not seem interested. There are no banners protesting the war. A student, asked about it, said that at Nathaniel Hawthorne, everybody talked about the war but no one did anything about it. He was very polite. The candidate is pleased with the reception. So are his managers. Could it be — is it possible — that all the talk about protest, about sex revolutions, about drugs and the rest happens only at Berkeley or Harvard or CCNY or Duke? Who at Nathaniel Hawthorne was reading Regis Debray? Is there a revolution in the revolution?

Manchester

We billeted at inns. This particular inn, the nicest of all of them, served giant martinis and huge steaks and slabs of beef. A guitarist sang folk songs in a self-consciously Early American atmosphere in the bar. This would come at the end of a long day watching New Hampshire through a green-tinted window of a Continental Trailways bus, debarking when the candidate did, and trooping into the house to assess the crowd and ask one or two stupid questions. New Hampshire is beautiful in winter, ten-foot icicles hanging from eaves, the houses white and beautifully clean against the snow. The impression then, in early 1968, was of order and tranquillity. The state was at peace, and never mind Saigon or the Negro revolution.

One assessed what one had seen. The towns blurred, one into another, and what was said in Hampton was no different from what was said in Raymond. Both towns the same, the candidate the same, the ideas the same, the news dispatches the same.

Green-tinted New Hampshire slipped by, and with it the assessment. There was no assessment. The objective was to keep everyone slightly crazy. I thought of the ideal dinner party, certain to plunge to the heart of the matter, Bonnie and Clyde. Ho Chi Minh. George and Lenore Romney, left to right. That was decided shortly after midnight. Then we paid the score, and went to bed, first calling our offices to find out if anything had happened in the world that day.

Goffstown

Eugene McCarthy moves with the slow step of a priest, a smiling ironic man whose wit dances with Irish twists. What is he doing here? No one knows what he is doing here, least of all the candidate himself. He says he is here giving expression to his opposition to the war. Here in Goffstown, amid the black-robed Benedictine friars of St. Anselm’s College, he begins an excursion into mainstream politics. He talks about what the Administration has been doing in South Vietnam.

It is a pleasure to watch a politician in full possession of an audience, a delight to listen to an intelligent man ad lib his way through political rhetoric. The audience is with him, and he with them, in a kind of natural rhythm and harmony. As Eugene McCarthy leaves center stage, his eyes are glistening. A dozen rounds of applause, six of laughter, and a standing ovation at the end.

“Dean Rusk . . . Dean Rusk,” he’d said, “has denounced dissension — in one of his more original phrases — because it causes joy . . . in . . . Hanoi.”

The journalists, of course, did not forget to count the house, and duly noted the next morning that most of the audience were “kids”; nonvoters. That became an explanation of sorts, at the very least, confirmation that the McCarthy crusade would not get out of hand and actually influence anything. He was, and is, a much criticized man, not at all the white knight his fervid supporters suggest. His record on the Finance Committee of the U.S. Senate is not unblemished.

But he is civilized and natural, with the kind of style that appeals to people who loved Adlai Stevenson. He had conviction. McCarthy knew the Administration had been playing false with the country, and now he was saying so; he was the only Democrat who was, in a way that somehow made emotional sense. But mostly he was civilized and natural. In these days, in these times, what more can one ask?

But his press was bad. The press likes professionals,

Dover

By late March there had come to the campaign a peculiarly cloying sense of irrelevance, of a ritual exercise played on a side court. In the mornings as the journalists assembled over coffee and the Manchester Union-Leader, the talk was of General Giap and the struggle at Khesanh, not of McCarthy, Romney, or Nixon. There were endless discussions of the effects of the Tet offensive.

Was it not somehow tasteless, in the safety of New Hampshire, for the politicians to be declaiming on the war? The Marine perimeter grew tighter, and Colonel Lounds jauntily told newsmen: “I’ve got a lot of Marines.” And Lounds’s unspoken correlative: “And they are ready to die.”

It was time for tonight’s Nixon meeting. The Dover High school gymnasium, smelling of sweat and rubber shoes, was packed literally to the rafters with supporters who threw balloons and lofted signs saying: “Nixon’s the One.” He was introduced without embarrassment as “the next President of the United States” — a phrase no master of ceremonies for a Romney or a McCarthy performance had been able to bring himself to utter—and the overflow crowd of 1000 beat its palms and cheered. Nixon rose, a trim six-footer, scarcely any gray in the jet-black curly hair, his deep blue suit of a carefully neutral cut. He is indisputably a professional.

Girls and well-groomed young men pass out Nixon literature. He has spent twenty years in public life, one throwaway says, “eight of them at the very center of power,” a period which was “followed” by a “rare opportunity to reflect and restudy.” There is only one man in American public life who would so describe his loss of the presidency by less than a percentage point. The man with that “rare opportunity” to rethink and restudy, the pamphlet goes on, is “the thinking man’s Republican.”

But he seems to speak of another time and place. “If you take the United States out of the world,” he says, “the rest of the non-Communist world would be living ... in . . . sheer . . . terror.” It has been some time since we looked at it like that, what with the coming to power of Fidel Castro, and the death of John Foster Dulles, and the irruption of a land war in Asia. Kosygin, Nixon concedes, is a different man than Khrushchev: “When Kosygin comes to the UN, he does not bang his shoe on the table.” So the Communists have changed, he says, “but only insofar as the tactics —”

All the old gestures and phrases are there: “Let me simply say this,” as the long pianist’s fingers play with an imaginary spool of thread. Well, he is different. A new man. He speaks more easily, more confidently; watch him now, as he edges his position on the Vietnam War a trice to the left. A liberal columnist walks away from a private meeting convinced of Nixon’s intelligence and of his viability as a candidate who can win against Lyndon Johnson. He is alright . . . he has changed . . . there is a New Nixon. Perhaps the columnist is right. In the sixty-minute speech at Dover, Richard Nixon mentioned the Eisenhower Administration only once. — Ward S. Just

REPORT CONTRIBUTORS

Elizabeth B. Drew writes regularly from Washington for (he ATLANTIC. Ward S. Just, a Washington POST correspondent recently returned from Vietnam, is covering the 1968 campaign. In future issues, as in this one, some reports will be unsigned at the request of their authors. The ATLANTIC,of course, assumes responsibility for them.