[More from fifty years of politics for my kids and grandchildren].
Since this was the campaign that drastically changed my life…for the better, although I didn’t understand it that way then…I’ve had forty-four years to ponder and research how it happened. Slowly, methodically I’ve talked to people high and low who were involved…most of whom are now dead. The lower level ones supplied lots of the detail. The higher-up ones confirmed or corrected. One survivor obviously: the key stuff.
In January, 1962, John Kennedy was riding pretty high and Elmer Andersen was riding along in the mid-40s in the polls on approval—but compared to Karl Rolvaag he looked fairly good. Andersen hadn’t accomplished much in the 1961 session, had submitted a populist budget that turned the DFL into the guardians of the money establishment…then withdrew it, feinted and accepted the withholding tax system which gave a one-time influx of money that balanced the budget. No great victories there. He was portrayed as a decent, fairly liberal (I would say in the genre of the time an extremely liberal) Republican governor. Now he and Rolvaag were vying for the state’s first four-year term: the four years interested Humphrey greatly.
Andersen’s one big non-negotiable item was the Taconite Amendment to the state constitution which would guarantee that the manufacturing process of extracting ore from slag would be taxed as what it was—a manufacturing process and not at the high rate that the occupation tax on mining was. For those who were sophisticated about issues, his Taconite Amendment was a winner—which would allow more investment in the process and more jobs on the Range. But for those who were not, the taxation of taconite was a big boring blur. But when Andersen explained it with small words and commonsense terms, it was beginning to get through. Rolvaag was very inarticulate and came off as a labor union hack, opposed to any concession for jobs.
But to make matters more complicated for Andersen, the mining companies themselves were leery of the Taconite Amendment. They were frightened that if the Amendment was submitted to the voters and was turned down, the legislature would be more unfriendly to the industry than before. So their lobbyists tried to eat their cake and have it, too. They proposed that instead of an Amendment, the legislature pass a simple statute ruling that taconite be taxed as manufacturing. I was one of those who finally succeeded in convincing Andersen of something: to turn down the offer. Initially he wanted to accept it. The mining companies wanted a statute but we didn’t because we wanted to keep a wedge issue on jobs. So I argued that a statute could be passed in one session and repealed in another. Thus while the mining companies would settle for a statute we would not. That’s pretty much the way it stood with us Republicans in Minnesota in January, 1962.
Humphrey felt it was essential to reclaim the governorship for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party so as to rehabilitate himself with national Democrats. They had pointed to how the Republicans of the state snookered him in the Minnesota presidential primary by sneaking GOP voters into it and causing Estes Kefauver to win, with Humphrey denied for a time even a delegate’s slot. Adlai Stevenson was all set to name Humphrey as his veep but after Stevenson was derailed in Minnesota, opened the convention to pick his running-mate. The convention thumbed its nose at Humphrey and picked Kefauver…some leaders telling Humphrey: Hell, Hubert, you couldn’t even win for Stevenson in your own state’s presidential primary! No one really understood how that burned Humphrey. The image grew that Humphrey didn’t run the party in this state when, in fact, he did. So he had to prove himself in order to be in line for the next choosing of a presidential candidate in 1968.
Now, Humphrey had an alcoholic DFL candidate for governor…the lieutenant governor, Karl Rolvaag…with an alcoholic wife—both items fairly secret from the electorate. Rolvaag was leading Andersen 49 to 47. Too close to call. Humphrey decided to act. He called Rolvaag and told him he would like to meet both Rolvaag and his wife for breakfast unannounced in his suite at the Leamington hotel, Minneapolis—his visit not to be announced to the press…setting an early time—7 a.m.. He had by his side a physician from a world-famed institute on addiction.
He told them they had a choice: submit to a regimen to be further described or he, Humphrey, would have to pull the plug—using some pretext or other but which would inevitably be recognized for what it was: his belief that Rolvaag was not ready. And Mondale would be ready. The polls would jerk upward suddenly in Mondale’s favor: like 60 to 30. He told the Rolvaags this, plainly. He said he, Humphrey, would not play a role in the campaign if Rolvaag would not change his ways starting now. That, as they all knew, would be a disaster. But, said Humphrey, if both of them submitted to treatment—which meant going a way for a short time, then coming back…everything could work out. They agreed to begin a lifetime treatment starting with total seclusion for a limited time—10 days…which would be explained as the need to take a long delayed vacation. When they came back, the campaign would be initiated. A staffer skilled in alcoholic counseling would be added to the campaign management, who would travel with the candidate—another aide would minister to her, visit with her, take her calls etc. The physician would call the turn at all times. If it failed, Rolvaag would have to bail out because of any number of reasons--“illness,” “the need to spend time with the family.” Et al.
These were his conditions. They enthusiastically accepted them—but he wasn’t overjoyed when they did because (a) he knew as alcoholics they would promise anything initially and (b) he preferred Mondale, wanted Rolvaag to bow out. When they left, Humphrey told the physician he was doubtful that the enthusiasm meant anything but things seemed to be settled on them in any event. The physician whose interests in Humphrey and the DFL were great, told him he did well and promised on his honor to keep them on track and stay in touch with Humphrey. He had the Senator’s private number at work and home.
They left his suite at about 9:30 a.m. Humphrey got on the phone with Roger Blough of U. S. Steel and said that Blough should get mining lawyers to him that very day and work with him to write a Taconite statute which Rolvaag would officially endorse in place of an amendment. A group of lawyers from a Twin Cities law firm came to his suite at 1:45 p.m. in time for late lunch. They had a draft of a statute. Humphrey made a few phone calls including one to Robert Olson, head of the Minnesota AFL-CIO while the industry lawyers were present. He served as intermediary between Olson on the phone and the industry lawyers, scribbled in some language himself, and formally but privately committed the DFL and Rolvaag to the statute—in order to fuzz things up and let allow Andersen to own the jobs issue. When they left, he called Blough again, got him out of a meeting and said the statute endorsement was a done deal—and that he, Humphrey, fully expected industry would take note of that and also contribute to Rolvaag. Blough said he understood.
He called Rolvaag and told him he now had a statute, pleasantly noting to himself that the candidate sounded okay. By 3 p.m. he was in a quickly-called session with the state chairman of the DFL party who was surprised to note that Humphrey was in town. He came over to Humphrey’s suite. They had coffee. He told him that it was important that Rolvaag have a bright, new face for Lieutenant Governor. The state chairman recited a few candidates. Humphrey snapped that there wasn’t a bright new face in that crowd. The chairman said he couldn’t think of a particularly bright new face. Humphrey blew up. That’s exactly the problem, he said. Well, I have. And he nominated then and there a bright, young liberal state senator from the southeastern sector who was planning to run against Rep. Al Quie in the future, A. M. (Sandy) Keith. Humphrey told the state chairman that he must go gentle with the other also-rans but this fellow would be the one. That meeting ended at 4:30 p.m. with Rolvaag to be notified as to who his running mate would be.
Now Humphrey met with a DFL staff operative working on the Fraser campaign for the House vs. Walter Judd. The official gave a depressing view of the campaign to unseat Walter Judd. The Kennedy State Department was actively cooperating with Judd’s reelection because it felt that the Minnesota Republican was an important link to conservatives in the House to get them to back foreign aid and military appropriations. Judd had received active aid and comfort including a letter from Secretary of State Dean Rusk that praised him for his bipartisan cooperation and gave heavy hint that the Kennedy administration preferred that he win the election of 1962. The operative thought the Minneapolis “Star” and “Tribune”—both owned by the Cowles family—would normally endorse Don Fraser because the papers were moving left…but if the JFK administration showed it needed Judd, the endorsement could go with qualification to Judd, which might very well mean Judd’s victory. The rumor was that Judd had a glowing Dean Rusk letter in his file—all ready to go to the press.
The JFK people backing Judd privately: Humphrey saw it as a duplication in duplicity. One instance didn’t really bother him. The Kennedy brothers were betraying Rep. Syd Yates who was running against Sen. Everett Dirksen in Illinois, were almost visibly consorting with Dirksen on plum federal projects for Illinois to get him reelected. They were unimpressed with Yates who they saw as rather seedy and nothing more than a hack. Humphrey knew about the Dirksen ploy and, frankly, as a Senator himself believed that Dirksen was more important in the Senate to the Kennedy-Johnson foreign policy program (although not so important as the Kennedy brothers felt) than a first-term Democrat from the lakefront the same general area Paul Douglas was from: and Humphrey thought Douglas was a man of conscience but one who couldn’t deliver many votes.
So he had winked at it, viewing Dirksen as a wheezing elderly bag of helium who told funny stories and who was undependable sometimes but as one who could deliver the conservative Democratic South, extraordinarily helpful. But that wouldn’t hold for Walter Judd. The deliverer of the 1960 keynote damn near got Nixon elected with that one speech. Humphrey got on the phone in the staffer’s presence, got hold of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and asked if Rusk had written a private, supposedly confidential letter to Judd expressing the hope that Judd would be reelected. He stood up and walked back and forth the length of the phone cord, winking at the staffer as he listened to Rusk’s explanation.
Rusk denied it. Then he fudged. He said yes he had written a kind of bread-and-butter letter. He hadn’t expressed that view about hoping Judd would be reelected. Still, his personal correspondence was, er, ah personal. Then Humphrey feigned a tantum. He bluffed, said he had Rusk’s letter right there in his hand. He got Rusk to admit he did say Judd’s cooperation was valuable—er, maybe he said it was invaluable. Listen, Dean, said Humphrey raising his voice, don’t give me that personal letter crap! It just may be as Majority Whip I have a few personal objections to your program including some aspects of your appropriation and your president’s program. If we’re in the business of letting our personal views dominate, you’ll get mine as soon as I get back to Washington.
Again: If you want this to occur I can tell you it will as soon as I get back to Washington. I would greatly appreciate a statement from some underling somewhere who has looked at Fraser’s foreign policy statements that support the president and sees fit to praise Don Fraser who will be there for the administration on many things more than Judd will. I’d like to see that in the newspaper out here —or by God after this is all over all of us may have enough time to romanticize with Walter Judd when we’re sitting on our [derogatory reference to human posterior] with nothing to do but write our memoirs in the Metropolitan Club [snooty men’s club in Washington]. Rusk mumbled agreement.
Slam went Humphrey’s receiver. The staffer was relieved and left with a message to tell Fraser.
Then he picked it up again, called Vice President Lyndon Johnson and the both of them laughed at his description of his earlier put-on tantrum. He got Johnson on his side immediately. It was too late to fly back to Washington but the next day was Saturday anyhow. His work for the day was finished. He had (a) shaped up the Rolvaags—husband and wife—he hoped, for the campaign, (b) had given Rolvaag a wedge-busting issue of a Taconite statute that had been okayed not just by organized labor but by Roger Blough of U. S. Steel; (c) got Blough to understand Rolvaag should have some big financial support from the steel industry; (d) had given Rolvaag a bright young lieutenant governor candidate; and (e) ended any idea in the Kennedy administration of doing a backhanded endorsement of Walter Judd, thus cutting the ground from under Judd. Pretty good day.
He called Mrs. Humphrey in Washington, telling her he was going to be back early the next day, Saturday and that he would stay at the Leamington rather than his Waverly, Minnesota home because he didn’t want to advertise to the press that he was in the state. Following which he had a lingering pre-dinner snack with a friend…coffee, butter cookies…a fan—a bright young woman, Norwegian immigrant boutique entrepreneur who had done weather…Wanda the Weather Bunny stuff (no meteorologist) …on KSTP-TV, then divorcing and marrying a rich investor (who gave plenty of dough to the DFL). Tall, 30ish, fecund, flowing blonde hair, limpid blue eyes. Did news reading for WCCO radio but the hint of a Norwegian accent bothered the station manager who didn’t want it to sound like an ethnic station. When she quit, news director Arv Johnson felt like crying, he said, because he wouldn’t have the scenery to look at in the studio anymore. She went to the first all-news station in the Twin Cities, then quit for a lifetime as a wealthy DFL, minor philanthropist and civic matron.
She handled media relations as a volunteer for the DFL including Rolvaag; had free-market orientation strange for a DFLer (Humphrey supposed from her husband). One of the real lookers in the DFL. Hell, almost the only looker, Humphrey would say privately. Most of the others looked like what they were: college professors in dumpy sweaters no makeup and sensible shoes, junkies with bitten-off, broken fingernails, no nail-polish, somewhat in need of grooming; fat women labor economists, skinny ex-U of M depression baby radicals. Not this one. After Humphrey’s death in 1978 and yet another divorce (making it three), she moved rightward. Humphrey was the last good Democrat, she said.
They were having a platonic love affair—one of shared intellectual pursuits, quiet jokes, she hugely enjoying his hilarity at recounting achievements of the day—including this very day. Platonic. They were both married, she on her second. She was open to an affair: not he, not Humphrey, uh-uh. But Humphrey the raconteur derived a great sense of ego fulfillment—that was all--from their infrequent, discreet meetings. She understood completely, before he needed to elucidate. Her suggestions were very few; but, listening, asked good questions. Humphrey told her he needed a scandal on Andersen: the Taconite amendment, Taconite statute was arcane. So Rolvaag wanted a statute, Andersen an amendment. Who the hell cared? She agreed. Humphrey pondered: But what kind of scandal? Minnesota didn’t grow scandals either with DFL or Republican. They drank coffee and nibbled butter cookies. He came to no conclusion, deciding to ask Orv Freeman to sound out holdovers in state government. But enough about me. What’d you got?
She had gossip about journalists, the business community, pols. They gabbed until very late. Obligatory kiss on the cheek. Warm parting tender looks at the door. That was it. And she was gone. Never anything more than that with Humphrey. No affairs for him. Kennedy and Johnson could get away with it…but sometimes even they were caught up and less effective trying to ditch clinging women. Not many others were so lucky. George Smathers, presidentially qualified: rumors dogged him, ruined his chance at the presidency. That wouldn’t happen to Hubert. Nothing wrong with a cheek kiss, butter cookies, coffee. Good advice, too. Once in a while they’d talk on the phone. Meet once every six months or so. Harmless friendship.
As he flew back to Washington the next morning, he knew the job wasn’t done. There would have to be a scandal within the Andersen administration on which to capitalize. Which was difficult because Andersen was squeaky clean and his administration was filled with new hires, largely people who had not been in government. But to repeat: there must be some fuse of scandal to be lighted. Or the contrast between slow-witted Rolvaag and Andersen, bright, articulate, idealist—yeah, somewhat feminine (they had already checked that angle: no dice)—would work against Rolvaag. Humphrey would sit down with Orville Freeman, the last governor, now Kennedy’s secretary of agriculture, and see if Freeman could run through his old state government contacts to see if they couldn’t pick up some gossip that could lead some negative researchers to gin up a scandal. Humphrey was confident he could strike flint on stone and blow on the spark to cause it to flicker into what could seem to be a four-alarm fire.
Lots of Democratic holdovers remained—in mental health (Minnesotans were pro-mental health: that’d be a good one if he could find something in that department), conservation, corrections (crooked guards smuggling reefers into Stillwater?) Show him any state government even in pure Minnesota that couldn’t produce a scandal—even a very modest one that could look bad. It would be up to Freeman and his people to dig one up from holdovers in state government. Yep, he knew his old aide Orv and his assistants could find one. One of the best was still deputy commissioner of highways—Frank Marzitelli. With luck, they could dump Andersen. Which would bring in a DFL governor for four years—carrying over to 1966. One term for Rolvaag and out: then Mondale coming in in `66, carrying beyond the presidential year of 1968. 1968: Humphrey’s year. That’s what you’d call being in good political shape. Fasten the seatbelt: coming in to Washington National.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Personal Asides: The Best Papal Defense…Carol Marin Scores…Poor Mark Brown…Bernie Stone’s Courage …Bernard Lewis on Iraq.
Best Papal Defense.
After reading the text of Benedict’s lecture that infuriated the Muslims, I find the best writing anywhere in defense of the Pope been not in the Catholic press…and in no secular paper better than in “The Wall Street Journal.” Start with the column “Global View” on September 19 by Bret Stephens, a staffer, entitled “Pope Provocateur”—a sophisticated and theologically brilliant discourse that tops anything Papal apologists have disseminated either here or overseas. Excerpt: “Let’s play that again, since the rest of the media failed to notice—Pope Benedict suggests that the God of Mohammad is, or may seem to humans to be, `not even bound to truth and goodness.’ Who knows whether that really reflects a consensus view down the ages among Muslim theologians—Benedict makes his case about Islam by citing one scholar who cites another scholar who cites another…
“In fact, Benedict saves his sharpest barbs for non-Muslim targets: Protestantism which seems a `primordial’ form of faith; liberal theology which reduces Jesus to `the father of a humanitarian moral message’; scientific rationalism, the ethics of which are `simply inadequate’ to answer the `specifically human questions about our origin and destiny’; and what might be called Catholic pluralism, a culturally adaptive notion of the faith that Benedict denounces as `false’ and coarse.’” Then there’s Daniel Henninger’s (deputy editorial page editor) in Friday and seemingly additional comments every day. One has to really hunker down to remember graduate theology to savor all these: remarkable for a secular economic newspaper. How different from the crass (you’re just as guilty as they are) Martin Marty in the “Tribune” not to mention the Sun-Times’ all-purpose know-nothing, nominal Catholic, Richard Roeper, the aging marketing niche-directed “youth” columnist.
Carol Marin.
Aha, you thought I was going to crack her again, didn’t you? No, Carol Marin’s column questioning the consistency of Mike Quigley, the Cook county commissioner supposedly the “reformer’s reformer” who sanctioned his top aide going to work for Todd Stroger although Quigley won’t vote for Stroger, is superb. Quigley has been dining out on his reform credentials but uses the old liberal dodge of not voting for Peraica because Peraica is pro-life, just like the other purist liberal Forrest Claypool, who, though a good man, can’t afford to offend the pro-abort sacred cows in his lefty party. Frankly, Peraica isn’t even that much a pro-lifer…refusing to do what George Dunne did and rescind the public abortion policy at County Hospital. Nevertheless Quigley-Claypool use that dodge to ingratiate themselves with their fellow lefties as the pretext for not voting for Todd Stroger.
If pro-abortion and gay rights meant as much to them as they say, they’d vote for Todd Stroger who supports both. Com’on Quigley and Claypool: don’t melt away into the woodwork. You can’t have it both ways. Aren’t abortion and gay rights of such importance that you can’t vote for Stroger when he’s running against a pro-lifer and non-gay rights supporter? Where is Terry Cosgrove of Personal PAC, the whip-cracking disciplinarian of the pro-abort movement? Is Cosgrove going to let Quigley and Claypool get away with this wimpy evasion—not voting for Stroger? Kudos to Marin for pointing out Quigley’s phony-baloney stratagem…refusing to vote for Stroger but sending his top aide over to support him.
Poor Mark Brown.
Poor Mark Brown of the “Sun-Times.” He has decided to vote for Peraica but he has to make amends to the liberal constituency of the city’s Democratic newspaper of record. Honest, he’s a liberal Democrat. Honest, he’s for abortion rights. Honest to God he’s for gay rights. But he’s going to vote for Peraica anyhow because, well, er, Peraica can’t get his terrible social conservatism through the County Board. Honest. He can’t. Of course he can’t. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still a liberal Democrat; honest to God I am. Let me count the ways! Oh shut up, Mark. You won’t lose your lefty credentials; stop worrying. Gawd. What a slavish ideological sycophant.Bernie Stone’s Courage.
Understand, I don’t know whether or not the late Fred Roti was a crook or not—but that’s immaterial: I have a tremendous respect for Alderman Bernie Stone who defended him last night on my radio show…saying that the FBI waited until Roti was dead before they listed him as a crime figure. Stone is one of those rare, rare politicians who has the courage to stand by his friends…and he said he loved Roti…no matter what the prevailing winds of political correctness ordain. Anyone else would sink the dagger into the corpse and say the FBI may be right etc. Not Stone. He knew Roti for a long time and denounced any thought that he was involved except for association with the name. I like that. How different that is from the twisting and turning of Stone’s colleague in the 49th –picking up the juicy phony populist campaign for his own self-aggrandizement. Although I will say that Joe Moore is welcome on my show not because I agree with him but because he is a good guest.
Bernard Lewis.
What you want to do is to subscribe to “Imprimis” the free…absolutely free…newsletter from Hillsdale College. Costs you nothing. The latest issue describes a lecture given by profound and unexcelled Middle East expert, 90-year-old Bernard Lewis. Since you can get it free, I won’t bother summarizing it. If you want me to, just say the word and I will. As for now, it’s late and I have to go to bed. Goodnight all.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Personal Aside: Bernie Stone and Cindy Canary Score at Roosevelt.
The contrast was like day and night: a tough-minded alderman who served for 32 years, basically defending the system he understands so well…and a bright young woman who wants to bring more equity to it. Bernie Stone proved why he has been so often returned to office with his frank, un-cynical but realistic appraisal of how things work in the Chicago City Council. At the same time, Cynthia Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform showed the Roosevelt class how idealism is an indispensable commodity for young people and older ones to work with the system. Since the words of the speakers are entirely off-the-record this writer can only list impressions. They are three. First, given Bernie Stone’s wise, witty and thoroughly expert knowledge as alderman, not just his 50th ward but the entire city is fortunate to have him. Second, Canary’s work has provided an invaluable assist by listing on the Internet an award-winning website and campaign finance database at www.ilcampaign.org . Third, there is grounds for some hope that the two forces of seasoned aldermanic service and expert pressure for reform can accomplish much for a city that works and which can work even more effectively in the future.
Both Stone and Canary will be on my WLS-AM “Political Shootout” Sunday at 8 p.m.
Next up at my Roosevelt class: Former Illinois governor Jim Edgar who will appear at 6 p.m. There is little doubt that Jim Edgar retired at the peak of his popularity, that he still ranks high as one of the most respected chief executives of the state…and that had he wished to, he could have won the 2006 gubernatorial nomination without half trying and probably gone on to become the next governor of Illinois without breaking a sweat.
And at 7 the triple-threat man (a) business expert (b) media expert and (c) former regulator Dan Miller…financial editor of the “Sun-Times”…a knowledgeable commentator on the city and state’s economy…and proven authority on city and state media: Dan Miller.
At 90, Robert D. Stuart, Jr. is a Leading Progressive Entrepreneur. But at 24, With JFK and Others He Built a Dynamic Grassroots Movement that Saved Lives and Made U. S. Stronger.
How He Led “America First” Before He Joined World War II as Aide to General Eisenhower. Restraint Seen as Model for Foreign Policy of Today.
The first in a series of three articles on the birth of the historic “America First Committee” that sought to keep the U. S. out of World War II. and a blueprint for those today who seek to restrain future needless international involvements. Reprinted from The Wanderer, the oldest national Catholic weekly in America.
By Thomas F. Roeser
LAKE FOREST, IL.--We celebrated the 90th birthday earlier this summer of the greatest entrepreneur and most public-spirited leader the legendary Quaker Oats Company of Chicago ever had, Robert D. Stuart, Jr. He is a key architect of this city’s social contract with generations of mayors, governors and presidents…a lifelong conservative Republican, charming family man, role model for employees and CEO colleagues. And also the founder, national director and last surviving leader of the original “America First Committee” which was formed to keep this country out of the 2nd World War.
Never was a peace movement so valiant and so successful in terms of delaying a war and saving human lives. Far from being disproved by Pearl Harbor, its fear of unprecedented presidential power to maneuver to war was thereby justified. Those who joined with Bob Stuart to keep America out of war went on to fame in other fields. They included a young John F. Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, Charles A. Lindbergh, Chester Bowles, William Benton, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, Bill Scranton, novelist Kathleen Norris, actress Lillian Gish, the LaFollette brothers of Wisconsin (former governor Philip and U. S. Senator Robert), Kingman Brewster, Gore Vidal, Jay Hormel, General Robert Wood (of Sears-Roebuck), John T. Flynn. While not a member, a close ally was Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque, Iowa.
Because he was my boss for 27 years and valued mentor, I was glad to stand with my colleagues and raise a slender goblet of champagne to Robert D. Stuart, Jr. But at evening’s end, he told us our work was not over, ordering us to return to the same spot—his homey, tasteful but not ornate mansion—for his 100th. Born in 1916 of Scottish Presbyterian heritage, he had planned to be a lawyer and run for public office—setting his eyes on a U. S. Senate seat. But later it was clear that nobody else was ready to run Quaker after his uncle and father—and so it fell to him. And there he remained, a businessman when all the time—unbeknownst to us—he wanted a career in public life.
But it was his company’s inestimable good fortune to get him as CEO. It didn’t hurt that his name was Stuart to head a company partially founded by his grandfather—but his selection was not inevitable (his family actually owned only a micro-fraction of stock). Much had to be done. When he took over the company Quaker was regarded as principally a breakfast food company. His uncle and father moved it out of the general store classification to mid-20th century stature. When he left it, it was not only the choicest marketing marvel of the breakfast food industry but superbly diversified, owner as well of Fisher-Price, the Cadillac of toy companies, a men’s clothing chain, a marquis restaurant chain and a leader in providing quality television entertainment and with a prestigious reputation for social responsibility the conscience of grocery manufacturers. Bob Stuart made it so prominent a company that it was generally listed as outstanding in many categories: marketing and public responsibility foremost.
When he left to serve as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Norway, his company fell upon evil days, into the hands of transitional professional managers who viewed commerce only as funnel for their own enrichment. And who saw their goal as piling up lavish salaries, accoutrements and private jets (which he would not have tolerated).
The stock first spurted but then greed got too much: as it is said of the Jacobins of the French Revolution, they knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Rather than hunker down and repair their mistakes, these pragmatic managers “sold out”—the proper phrase for it—and consigned the Company as an appendage to a conglomerate, making big bucks for themselves in the process. But a final bright note: As a retiring vice-president, I was the last of my contemporaries who walked out under his own power. Everybody who plotted the debacle was either booted out the door or was forced to scoot like a river of frightened, squealing mice ahead of the tidal wave. What happened to them didn’t bring a good company back but showed there is such a thing as remunerative justice.
But it’s not of commercial enterprise that I write but of the “America First Committee” which Bob Stuart founded. After 65 years, he has written a book of memoirs, Making a Difference which he subtitles: Memoirs of a Lucky Man. It is privately circulated but which, if put on the market, would greatly alter some current misconceptions about the effort to keep this country from plunging into World War II very early—which was what Franklin Roosevelt sorely wished. The battle waged was valiant and by postponing our entry into the conflict enabled the U. S. to emerge from World War II with fewer casualties than any other nation participant. Pearl Harbor did not invalidate America First: on the contrary, when historians look at the machinations of the FDR administration to goad Japan to war, what happened on December 7, 1941 supported the fears of “America First.” Now as this nation is engaged in an agonizing reappraisal of the Iraq War, the words Bob Stuart writes and his insights are instructive indeed.
In 1938, Roosevelt’s New Deal began to fade into “a Roosevelt recession.” Before that happened, the president had been judged a conservative in foreign policy. Now, as the stock market sagged and unemployment rose, he began to warn of foreign aggression. He became especially became concerned with Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler who spoke of the German people’s wish for more living space (“Lebensraum”) and initiated a private correspondence with a “retired naval person” aka Winston Churchill, out of power. The yen to stride across the world stage was entrancing.
. But FDR was frustrated; the Congress, propelled by overwhelming opinion, passed five different Neutrality Acts that forbade U. S. involvement in foreign conflicts. Most Italian-Americans and many German-Americans were Catholics and moved by anti-Communist considerations. Irish-Catholics abhorred the idea of helping British policies anywhere. Which meant that Roosevelt must gingerly, duplicitously, edge toward war while vowing to avoid it. All the same, he wanted to give heart to his international fellows and saw the perfect opportunity to make a pronouncement. In Chicago: where else?
In Chicago on October 5, 1937, he came to dedicate a portion of the Outer Drive bridge. The press had been tipped off that his speech would deal with the need to “quarantine” foreign aggressors. Covertly, Col. Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher of the Tribune rented a huge billboard behind the speakers’ stand. A tarp covered it but underneath, painters were at work. When at noon the president approached the rostrum (with great difficulty due to his paralysis) and the cameras were focused, the tarp was pulled away and the crowd gasped. Some applauded. The billboard showed majestic white letters on a deep blue background that read: “The Chicago Tribune: Completely Undominated!”
Roosevelt turned and viewed the sign, saw that it would be in the background of every photo taken that day and smoldered. Later in Washington he held a news conference in the Oval Office and asked, “is Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune here? Would he stand, please?”
Trohan, deputy bureau chief, stood up. Roosevelt said, “Thank you, Walter. Now you may sit down. I just wanted to get a view of a completely undominated newspaper reporter!” Trohan told me the story personally a year before he died in Washington at age 102. The press group roared with laughter but understood that from that moment on, the struggle to keep the nation out of war was centered in one big city—Chicago.
But not for long. One McCormick cousin, Joe Patterson, owned the New York Daily News and another, Eleanor (“Sissy”) Patterson the Washington Times-Herald. McCormick and the two Pattersons started to throw the book at Roosevelt, charging he was seeking war, warning that the so-called “Neutrality Act of 1939” was legislation that sailed under false colors. It enabled warring Britain and France to buy armaments and munitions in the United States and extended cash-and-carry provisions that had expired six months earlier. Roosevelt used the mis-named Neutrality Act to extend “aid short of war.” As increased national defense spending began to revive the economy, there came the subtle Roosevelt strategy to repeal or further drastically revise the Neutrality Act. Grass-roots committees sprung up like mushrooms including one headed by small town editor William Allen White called, coyly, “The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.”
The New York Times and the Henry Luce press—Time, Fortune, Life—were beating the drums for intervention and Hollywood was getting into the act. Still, the polls showed 81 percent of Americans did not want war. The most fashionable foreign policy columnist of the time, Dorothy Thompson, was actively crusading for our entry into the war while her husband, Sinclair Lewis, had signed up for America First. A few organizations formed to oppose the war were pacifist. One was headed by socialist Norman Thomas. Non-pacifist American nationalists needed a grassroots movement to oppose the war.
It was at that psychologically right moment that a student movement to keep us out of war got a leader from Chicago—a young law student of 24 at Yale, Bob Stuart, whose father was a vice president of Quaker Oats and whose grandfather had been a company founder. The difference between his generation which opposed involvement in war and the much later grungy generation of unshaven, unshorn and un-bathed Hippies of the 1960s and `70s was like day and night. Then, bright, cogent and immaculately researched students vowed to defend America if it were attacked; in the `60s the grunge generation skipped to Canada. Today so-called “peace movements” are ineffective, camp out with Cindy Sheehan near Crawford, Texas, tool around with Al Sharpton and invite the president of Iran to berate President Bush and America in Harlem.
The grunge protests hit the nadir in the `60s when a disheveled, bearded effeminate youth held aloft a sign “Make Love Not War!” in front of California Governor Ronald Reagan as he addressed the crowd. With brilliant timing, Reagan read the sign aloud to the crowd: “Make love not war! I’m not sure this chap can do either!” to resounding cheers. Since that time, no grassroots movement protesting usurpation of executive power has been seen as clean, orderly, meticulous and reasoned.
As FDR moved toward war, Bob Stuart fashioned a committee unequaled in prestige. Earlier, in March, 1939 Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia and stepped up pressure on Poland for Danzig and the Polish Corridor that separated the two parts of Germany. Then on September 1, 1939 he moved on Poland. In April, 1940, he launched his blitzkrieg against Denmark and Norway. Stuart believed that if America kept up its defenses it could avoid war. He did not believe nor does he now that the forces of Hitler’s aggression could possibly overtake the United States. He believed then as he does now that the up-building of a strong military is the best preventive of war. At no time in public polling did Americans prefer war. Rather sizable skepticism felt that war was viewed by policy makers as a stimulant to bolster the economy where the old New Deal had failed.
“My primary reason for believing that America should stay out of the war was simple,” Stuart writes in his memoir. “I had learned at Princeton that the United States had gained nothing from its intervention in the `Great War’ of 1914-1918. On the contrary, our country had lost a great deal. We had wasted lives, squandered treasure and betrayed some of our most sacred founding principles. More than 112,000 `doughboys’ fresh from the prairies and Main streets of Ohio and Kansas and Georgia had died horrible deaths in the killing fields of Europe. The war cost us countless millions of dollars (and broke the economies of Britain, France and Germany). At home, our government had curtailed civil rights and expanded federal power with abandon—actions that smoothed the way for the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, the calamitous social experiment known as Prohibition.”
So, “afire with antiwar convictions” he called together a handful of like-minded students at Yale and formed in spring, 1941 what would come to be known as “The America First Committee.” Four of them circulated a letter to collegians nationwide requesting their support in “forming a definite program to counter the forces that are leading the United States toward intervention in the European war.” Stuart’s wife, the late Barbara, then a 25-year-old mother, did the mailing and mimeographing. Stuart recalls, “The vortex of America First might have pulled other couples apart but it strengthened our marriage. In later years, Barbara had a few emotionally shaky periods but she was always at her best when she had a project—and overseeing a truly grass-roots movement to keep America out of war was one helluva project.”
Its first public announcement made these points:
1. The United States must build an impregnable defense for America.
2. No foreign power, nor group powers, can successfully attack a
prepared America. American democracy can be preserved
only by keeping out of a European war.
3. “Aid short of war” weakens national defense at home and
threatens to involve America in war abroad.
Stuart led the group on its first step—to obtain signatures on hundreds of thousands—potentially millions—of petitions. “Our general purpose,” the group declared, “is to give expression to the large but unorganized mass of American people who believe in defending America in the Americas, instead of forfeiting democracy by fighting abroad.”
All the while he ran the petition drive, Stuart, from an unused Quaker office at the Board of Trade building, met with Sears’ General Robert Wood, himself a brilliant quartermaster general of World War I and phoned and corresponded with a great number of leaders—elected and non-elected. Earlier he had gone to the Philadelphia GOP convention to try to nominate Sen. Robert A. Taft. His list of acquaintances was bulky: from Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a foe of intervention, to Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, to then nationalist Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, to Jack Kennedy who was handling the grassroots in Massachusetts, to Lillian Gish in Hollywood who was beginning to feel the sting of a blacklist, to Jerry Ford, the assistant football coach at Yale.
And to the leading Roman Catholic prelate in the United States who was unalterably opposed to our entering the war—Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque. Fr. Charles E. Coughlin struck Stuart then—and now—as too extreme although through his newspaper Social Justice he carried a strong message.
The money was coming in. General Wood was raising money by the bucket-full. But “The America First Committee” was composed of clean-cut college kids and new grads plus a phalanx of grey-haired businessmen: not an ounce of charisma in a carload.
Then there came into the organization, America’s Number One Hero, a man Bob Stuart today calls “a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in our country’s history”—the Lone Eagle, Charles A. Lindbergh. How Stuart and Lindbergh worked—and flew together across the country—and how Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque made a speech that electrified the country and got the fury of the Roosevelt Justice Department on his neck meting out retaliation that ruined his career—will be told in the next two installments.
The first in a series of three articles on the birth of the historic “America First Committee” that sought to keep the U. S. out of World War II. and a blueprint for those today who seek to restrain future needless international involvements. Reprinted from The Wanderer, the oldest national Catholic weekly in America.
By Thomas F. Roeser
LAKE FOREST, IL.--We celebrated the 90th birthday earlier this summer of the greatest entrepreneur and most public-spirited leader the legendary Quaker Oats Company of Chicago ever had, Robert D. Stuart, Jr. He is a key architect of this city’s social contract with generations of mayors, governors and presidents…a lifelong conservative Republican, charming family man, role model for employees and CEO colleagues. And also the founder, national director and last surviving leader of the original “America First Committee” which was formed to keep this country out of the 2nd World War.
Never was a peace movement so valiant and so successful in terms of delaying a war and saving human lives. Far from being disproved by Pearl Harbor, its fear of unprecedented presidential power to maneuver to war was thereby justified. Those who joined with Bob Stuart to keep America out of war went on to fame in other fields. They included a young John F. Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, Charles A. Lindbergh, Chester Bowles, William Benton, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, Bill Scranton, novelist Kathleen Norris, actress Lillian Gish, the LaFollette brothers of Wisconsin (former governor Philip and U. S. Senator Robert), Kingman Brewster, Gore Vidal, Jay Hormel, General Robert Wood (of Sears-Roebuck), John T. Flynn. While not a member, a close ally was Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque, Iowa.
Because he was my boss for 27 years and valued mentor, I was glad to stand with my colleagues and raise a slender goblet of champagne to Robert D. Stuart, Jr. But at evening’s end, he told us our work was not over, ordering us to return to the same spot—his homey, tasteful but not ornate mansion—for his 100th. Born in 1916 of Scottish Presbyterian heritage, he had planned to be a lawyer and run for public office—setting his eyes on a U. S. Senate seat. But later it was clear that nobody else was ready to run Quaker after his uncle and father—and so it fell to him. And there he remained, a businessman when all the time—unbeknownst to us—he wanted a career in public life.
But it was his company’s inestimable good fortune to get him as CEO. It didn’t hurt that his name was Stuart to head a company partially founded by his grandfather—but his selection was not inevitable (his family actually owned only a micro-fraction of stock). Much had to be done. When he took over the company Quaker was regarded as principally a breakfast food company. His uncle and father moved it out of the general store classification to mid-20th century stature. When he left it, it was not only the choicest marketing marvel of the breakfast food industry but superbly diversified, owner as well of Fisher-Price, the Cadillac of toy companies, a men’s clothing chain, a marquis restaurant chain and a leader in providing quality television entertainment and with a prestigious reputation for social responsibility the conscience of grocery manufacturers. Bob Stuart made it so prominent a company that it was generally listed as outstanding in many categories: marketing and public responsibility foremost.
When he left to serve as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Norway, his company fell upon evil days, into the hands of transitional professional managers who viewed commerce only as funnel for their own enrichment. And who saw their goal as piling up lavish salaries, accoutrements and private jets (which he would not have tolerated).
The stock first spurted but then greed got too much: as it is said of the Jacobins of the French Revolution, they knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Rather than hunker down and repair their mistakes, these pragmatic managers “sold out”—the proper phrase for it—and consigned the Company as an appendage to a conglomerate, making big bucks for themselves in the process. But a final bright note: As a retiring vice-president, I was the last of my contemporaries who walked out under his own power. Everybody who plotted the debacle was either booted out the door or was forced to scoot like a river of frightened, squealing mice ahead of the tidal wave. What happened to them didn’t bring a good company back but showed there is such a thing as remunerative justice.
But it’s not of commercial enterprise that I write but of the “America First Committee” which Bob Stuart founded. After 65 years, he has written a book of memoirs, Making a Difference which he subtitles: Memoirs of a Lucky Man. It is privately circulated but which, if put on the market, would greatly alter some current misconceptions about the effort to keep this country from plunging into World War II very early—which was what Franklin Roosevelt sorely wished. The battle waged was valiant and by postponing our entry into the conflict enabled the U. S. to emerge from World War II with fewer casualties than any other nation participant. Pearl Harbor did not invalidate America First: on the contrary, when historians look at the machinations of the FDR administration to goad Japan to war, what happened on December 7, 1941 supported the fears of “America First.” Now as this nation is engaged in an agonizing reappraisal of the Iraq War, the words Bob Stuart writes and his insights are instructive indeed.
In 1938, Roosevelt’s New Deal began to fade into “a Roosevelt recession.” Before that happened, the president had been judged a conservative in foreign policy. Now, as the stock market sagged and unemployment rose, he began to warn of foreign aggression. He became especially became concerned with Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler who spoke of the German people’s wish for more living space (“Lebensraum”) and initiated a private correspondence with a “retired naval person” aka Winston Churchill, out of power. The yen to stride across the world stage was entrancing.
. But FDR was frustrated; the Congress, propelled by overwhelming opinion, passed five different Neutrality Acts that forbade U. S. involvement in foreign conflicts. Most Italian-Americans and many German-Americans were Catholics and moved by anti-Communist considerations. Irish-Catholics abhorred the idea of helping British policies anywhere. Which meant that Roosevelt must gingerly, duplicitously, edge toward war while vowing to avoid it. All the same, he wanted to give heart to his international fellows and saw the perfect opportunity to make a pronouncement. In Chicago: where else?
In Chicago on October 5, 1937, he came to dedicate a portion of the Outer Drive bridge. The press had been tipped off that his speech would deal with the need to “quarantine” foreign aggressors. Covertly, Col. Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher of the Tribune rented a huge billboard behind the speakers’ stand. A tarp covered it but underneath, painters were at work. When at noon the president approached the rostrum (with great difficulty due to his paralysis) and the cameras were focused, the tarp was pulled away and the crowd gasped. Some applauded. The billboard showed majestic white letters on a deep blue background that read: “The Chicago Tribune: Completely Undominated!”
Roosevelt turned and viewed the sign, saw that it would be in the background of every photo taken that day and smoldered. Later in Washington he held a news conference in the Oval Office and asked, “is Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune here? Would he stand, please?”
Trohan, deputy bureau chief, stood up. Roosevelt said, “Thank you, Walter. Now you may sit down. I just wanted to get a view of a completely undominated newspaper reporter!” Trohan told me the story personally a year before he died in Washington at age 102. The press group roared with laughter but understood that from that moment on, the struggle to keep the nation out of war was centered in one big city—Chicago.
But not for long. One McCormick cousin, Joe Patterson, owned the New York Daily News and another, Eleanor (“Sissy”) Patterson the Washington Times-Herald. McCormick and the two Pattersons started to throw the book at Roosevelt, charging he was seeking war, warning that the so-called “Neutrality Act of 1939” was legislation that sailed under false colors. It enabled warring Britain and France to buy armaments and munitions in the United States and extended cash-and-carry provisions that had expired six months earlier. Roosevelt used the mis-named Neutrality Act to extend “aid short of war.” As increased national defense spending began to revive the economy, there came the subtle Roosevelt strategy to repeal or further drastically revise the Neutrality Act. Grass-roots committees sprung up like mushrooms including one headed by small town editor William Allen White called, coyly, “The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.”
The New York Times and the Henry Luce press—Time, Fortune, Life—were beating the drums for intervention and Hollywood was getting into the act. Still, the polls showed 81 percent of Americans did not want war. The most fashionable foreign policy columnist of the time, Dorothy Thompson, was actively crusading for our entry into the war while her husband, Sinclair Lewis, had signed up for America First. A few organizations formed to oppose the war were pacifist. One was headed by socialist Norman Thomas. Non-pacifist American nationalists needed a grassroots movement to oppose the war.
It was at that psychologically right moment that a student movement to keep us out of war got a leader from Chicago—a young law student of 24 at Yale, Bob Stuart, whose father was a vice president of Quaker Oats and whose grandfather had been a company founder. The difference between his generation which opposed involvement in war and the much later grungy generation of unshaven, unshorn and un-bathed Hippies of the 1960s and `70s was like day and night. Then, bright, cogent and immaculately researched students vowed to defend America if it were attacked; in the `60s the grunge generation skipped to Canada. Today so-called “peace movements” are ineffective, camp out with Cindy Sheehan near Crawford, Texas, tool around with Al Sharpton and invite the president of Iran to berate President Bush and America in Harlem.
The grunge protests hit the nadir in the `60s when a disheveled, bearded effeminate youth held aloft a sign “Make Love Not War!” in front of California Governor Ronald Reagan as he addressed the crowd. With brilliant timing, Reagan read the sign aloud to the crowd: “Make love not war! I’m not sure this chap can do either!” to resounding cheers. Since that time, no grassroots movement protesting usurpation of executive power has been seen as clean, orderly, meticulous and reasoned.
As FDR moved toward war, Bob Stuart fashioned a committee unequaled in prestige. Earlier, in March, 1939 Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia and stepped up pressure on Poland for Danzig and the Polish Corridor that separated the two parts of Germany. Then on September 1, 1939 he moved on Poland. In April, 1940, he launched his blitzkrieg against Denmark and Norway. Stuart believed that if America kept up its defenses it could avoid war. He did not believe nor does he now that the forces of Hitler’s aggression could possibly overtake the United States. He believed then as he does now that the up-building of a strong military is the best preventive of war. At no time in public polling did Americans prefer war. Rather sizable skepticism felt that war was viewed by policy makers as a stimulant to bolster the economy where the old New Deal had failed.
“My primary reason for believing that America should stay out of the war was simple,” Stuart writes in his memoir. “I had learned at Princeton that the United States had gained nothing from its intervention in the `Great War’ of 1914-1918. On the contrary, our country had lost a great deal. We had wasted lives, squandered treasure and betrayed some of our most sacred founding principles. More than 112,000 `doughboys’ fresh from the prairies and Main streets of Ohio and Kansas and Georgia had died horrible deaths in the killing fields of Europe. The war cost us countless millions of dollars (and broke the economies of Britain, France and Germany). At home, our government had curtailed civil rights and expanded federal power with abandon—actions that smoothed the way for the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, the calamitous social experiment known as Prohibition.”
So, “afire with antiwar convictions” he called together a handful of like-minded students at Yale and formed in spring, 1941 what would come to be known as “The America First Committee.” Four of them circulated a letter to collegians nationwide requesting their support in “forming a definite program to counter the forces that are leading the United States toward intervention in the European war.” Stuart’s wife, the late Barbara, then a 25-year-old mother, did the mailing and mimeographing. Stuart recalls, “The vortex of America First might have pulled other couples apart but it strengthened our marriage. In later years, Barbara had a few emotionally shaky periods but she was always at her best when she had a project—and overseeing a truly grass-roots movement to keep America out of war was one helluva project.”
Its first public announcement made these points:
1. The United States must build an impregnable defense for America.
2. No foreign power, nor group powers, can successfully attack a
prepared America. American democracy can be preserved
only by keeping out of a European war.
3. “Aid short of war” weakens national defense at home and
threatens to involve America in war abroad.
Stuart led the group on its first step—to obtain signatures on hundreds of thousands—potentially millions—of petitions. “Our general purpose,” the group declared, “is to give expression to the large but unorganized mass of American people who believe in defending America in the Americas, instead of forfeiting democracy by fighting abroad.”
All the while he ran the petition drive, Stuart, from an unused Quaker office at the Board of Trade building, met with Sears’ General Robert Wood, himself a brilliant quartermaster general of World War I and phoned and corresponded with a great number of leaders—elected and non-elected. Earlier he had gone to the Philadelphia GOP convention to try to nominate Sen. Robert A. Taft. His list of acquaintances was bulky: from Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a foe of intervention, to Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, to then nationalist Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, to Jack Kennedy who was handling the grassroots in Massachusetts, to Lillian Gish in Hollywood who was beginning to feel the sting of a blacklist, to Jerry Ford, the assistant football coach at Yale.
And to the leading Roman Catholic prelate in the United States who was unalterably opposed to our entering the war—Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque. Fr. Charles E. Coughlin struck Stuart then—and now—as too extreme although through his newspaper Social Justice he carried a strong message.
The money was coming in. General Wood was raising money by the bucket-full. But “The America First Committee” was composed of clean-cut college kids and new grads plus a phalanx of grey-haired businessmen: not an ounce of charisma in a carload.
Then there came into the organization, America’s Number One Hero, a man Bob Stuart today calls “a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in our country’s history”—the Lone Eagle, Charles A. Lindbergh. How Stuart and Lindbergh worked—and flew together across the country—and how Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque made a speech that electrified the country and got the fury of the Roosevelt Justice Department on his neck meting out retaliation that ruined his career—will be told in the next two installments.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Personal Asides: Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke Joins Roosevelt U List…Along with Multi-Millionaire Inventor Jack Roeser…At Roosevelt and Later on WLS: Stone and Canary.
Anne Marie Burke.
Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Marie Burke will discuss the legal system and the courts with my Roosevelt University class. Justice Burke is the third woman to serve on the state’s high court. A bartender’s daughter, she began her working career as a Park District employee and noted that the playgrounds were not hospitable to retarded children. She conceived the idea of a Special Olympics and joined with Eunice Kennedy Shriver to make the idea a national event. At the age of 40, as the mother of four, she enrolled in law school. Once she was admitted to the bar, she opened a neighborhood law center dealing with family law on the southwest side. Always interested in juvenile law, she became a special assistant to Governor Jim Edgar, dealing with problems attendant to the state’s program for children and family services.
She was named an Appellate Court Justice and in that capacity filled an unusual position—interim chairman of the National Review Board for the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, an independent board that probed the priestly pedophilia scandal in the Catholic church. Showing independence as head of the Board, she and attorney Robert Bennett flew to Rome to share their findings with then Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, later to become Benedict XVI. The findings and recommendations of the Board laid out a thorough program for the bishops to rectify past scandals and chart a new course. Whether the programs have been implemented is another question. Needless to say, after having interviewed Justice Burke extensively for a series of newspaper articles, I’m delighted she has agreed to guest lecture. She will speak on October 12 at 6 p.m.
Jack Roeser (No Relation).
Republicans are divided on Jack Roeser—some love him and are prepared to follow him anywhere, others call him an obstructionist and ethics martinet…but no one has ever said that Roeser, a reformer (and not related to me) hasn’t put his money where his mouth is on the issue of supporting clear-cut candidates and programs which he hopes will rebuild the Illinois Republican party. Few know that the self-made multi-millionaire 82-year-old Carpentersville manufacturer and philanthropist…athletic and trim who pilots his own sailing craft and who on a few years ago won the grueling Mackinac sailing race from Chicago to Mackinac Island…is an engineering genius whose inventions have made jet plane flying safer and built thousands of jobs over the years for those who serve in his modern manufacturing plants and in the surrounding area. With personal wealth estimated conservatively at more than $100 million, he has poured rehabilitative funds into Carpentersville, restoring historic buildings and has ventured into Chicago’s inner city to supply financial and human resources to St. Elizabeth’s elementary school which was in dire need of such help.
A doughty social conservative, Roeser has headed a program to push vouchers in education. Dismayed by the venal “Combine” that links Democrats and Republicans in common cause to lobby and make money from politics in Illinois, he ran for governor in a challenge to incumbent Jim Edgar. He was a vigorous critic of George Ryan since long before the notoriety from scandals that convicted the ex-governor. As head of the grassroots movement Family Taxpayers, Roeser backs the removal of the GOP’s national committeeman (and national party treasurer) Bob Kjellander. Roeser’s topics will involve business’ social responsibility to improve the tone and efficiency of government as well as his initiative in launching a grassroots movement for political reform. He will speak on November 30 at 7 p.m.
At Roosevelt this Thursday: Stone and Canary.
On WLS this Sunday: Stone and Canary.
Guests at Roosevelt tonight in separate lectures and on “Political Shootout” this Sunday in joint appearances will be the Odd Couple. They are: Alderman Bernie Stone (50th), a good friend, chairman of the city council Building Committee and a man who years ago called Luis Gutierrez a “pipsqueak” which said it better than anyone elese…and Cynthia (Cindy) Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a statewide non-partisan education and advocacy project. I don’t regard Bernie Stone as a reformer but basically a hard-working, practical politician who doesn’t stint on his own time spent helping the city and his constituents. He also has a priceless ingredient for his business: a good sense of humor and a workaday command of language that is true Chicago-ese. I have never met Ms. Canary but will when the two speak, at different hours, at my Roosevelt.
As you know, any ex-leader of the LWV is automatically a friend of mine! And I’m told by Dr. Paul Green, her admirer, that the lady can take good care of herself. I only wish he had said that about me.
Ms. Canary was executive director of the League of Women Voters which tells you that she is indubitably a liberal. She is much interested in campaign finance reform and has interesting recommendations on that issue. She helped lead the League’s National Voter Registration Act in this state. She has also worked in the public education section of the American Bar Association (another liberal outfit) but comes highly recommended as an true reformer by many sources. The “Chicago Tribune” referred to her as “the state’s most vocal adsvocafte for good government.” She received her B.A. in political science from Hampton college and did graduate work at Georgetown University. She and her artist husband, Adam Brooks, have a 16-year-old son, Tyler. Her organization’s website www.ilcampaign.org has a lot of valuable information about the financing of all Illinois campaigns. I am just assuming Bernie, a realist, will not be as enthusiastic about campaign reform as she—but we’ll find out.
Flashback: Battles I Lost While Working for an Exceedingly Honorable Albeit Liberal Republican Governor—but Joys As Well.
[More from fifty years of politics for my kids and grandchildren].
Working for an exceedingly honorable, some would say lofty others would say crafty, governor…either a John Gardner-style reformer or a trimmer who forsook conservatism in order to build a kind of Third Way of governance, ignoring his party in the process…was fun, invigorating, filled with great memories and many, many lost battles. The most praise I can give my old boss, Elmer L. Andersen, is this: there was never a time…never a single time…when crass, quid-pro-quo politics intervened in his running state government: never once. None of his appointees was ever suspected of being on the take. No jobs were promised, no deals with contracts were cut. The office of contract compliance was in place and had served dispassionately from the day we walked in. While I was there, I shared workloads with the same Democratic and Republican professionals who had worked at the highest levels of state government for Republican Luther Youngdahl, Democrat Orville Freeman and us. The same budget specialists that advised Freeman advised us and advised our successors. They served us on the state capitol third floor and our soon-to-be-announced opponent, Karl Rolvaag on the 2nd floor. Whenever I consider the rabid partisanship that engulfed the George Ryan administration, I marvel at the almost pristine innocence of those years.
The contrast between that Minnesota and this Illinois stunned me when I returned to my home state in 1964 and to see the grunting, inexpressibly ultra-partisan skirmishing carried on by Dick Ogilvie and his group to scale the heights of the governorship. Patronage and contracts were the only things that seemingly mattered. One thing I have concluded: Minnesota’s state government then had no scandals because it had a firmly entrenched, clean civil service system with only a handful of jobs available to elected officials—jobs they were rather careful to fill with well-qualified individuals who could serve well…precisely because there were so few political jobs available. Illinois, a prime patronage state, has a civil service system that is evidently a laughingstock where qualifications are winked at too often which make mockery of those who are highly qualified. With Minnesota’s, if you ever tried to hire a relative or friend who was unqualified…or who was asked to perform a distinctly political service…you were sure to be found out, indicted and go to jail. Likewise, I can clearly state that there was no scandal in Orville Freeman’s administration either, or major scandals whatsoever in Minnesota government going back to the early days of the 20th century.
But I promised to tell about the battles I lost, didn’t I?
The non-partisan, anti-party belief of my boss, who shirked his party responsibilities, drove me nuts. All executives, presidents and governors, should, intentionally…as is their right…name jurists who share a general philosophy with the governor’s party. Andersen was the first and only Republican of any stature who was determined to keep a “bipartisan balance” on the state courts and regulatory agencies instead of naming qualified people to uphold a party’s philosophy: it was stunning to me and still is. Walter Judd had a particularly vehement opponent in past years, a highbinder personal injury lawyer Joe Robbie. Robbie, a Lebanese, was an itinerant political junkie and hustler but also a kind of entrepreneur who often couldn’t pay his bills. For a long time, politics was his undoing. He ran for South Dakota governor twice unsuccessfully. He moved to Minnesota without a dime, ran twice for Congress against Judd unsuccessfully. After the second loss to Judd the old charlatan who was also a brilliant attorney when he concentrated on it, needed a job. He applied to Andersen for the job of head of the Minnesota Municipal Commission, a regulatory agency to succeed an old DFLer who retired. Nobody questioned that Joe had the ability to do the job—probably better than it had been done before. But his views were not in keeping with Andersen’s party and Robbie was clearly seeking the job as a tide-me-by until he could either run against Judd again or do something else in DFL politics. Therefore the naming or Robbie was an insult to the Republicans.
There was no question that Andersen wanted to name Robbie. Robbie was indeed a good municipal attorney but I asked him: isn’t there a Republican municipal attorney just as good as Joe around? Believe it or not, Andersen wanted to keep what he saw as a “balance” in government, a liberal to replace a liberal. I said, “has it occurred to you that Joe wants to run against Judd a third time and this job will keep him in the public light?” Andersen said so what: he was a good lawyer and he would keep the “balance.” .
I said: “Balance? Don’t you understand that the nature of our two party system is to replenish governmental agencies from time to time with those who have different approaches? That’s the so-called `balance’ Governor. Have I missed something in poly sci class? Gee whiz!” I lost; he made the Robbie appointment. Judd told me: “Elmer’s trying to woo the liberals but I’ll tell him this—that never works.” He was right. Robbie later quit, used a Chicago banking connection, a friend of Humphrey’s, to move to Florida and round up some financing in Miami where there was no sports competition. It was all paper clips and scotch tape with Robbie who often once again couldn’t pay his bills. He raised $7.5 million himself, overcame a pro-football embargo and bought the Dolphins in 1965 and hired Joe Shula. Their phenomenal Superbowl record caused them to name the stadium after him. To the end his was fighting off creditors and competitors, one of whom was entertainer Danny Thomas, a fellow Lebanese, who sought to displace Robbie with a group of investors. Robbie narrowly survived. He died in 1990. The stadium’s name has been changed.
A second battle between Andersen and me involved an appointment to the state Supreme Court. Frank Gallagher, an old DFLer, was slipping physically and mentally. The chief justice wanted Andersen to have coffee with him and suggest he consider retirement. Andersen did but the old man wouldn’t have anything to do with the idea. Then Andersen suggested that if Gallagher retired he’d appoint another DFLer, Bob Sheran, a prominent lawyer and former state Senator—a DFLer—to the post. Gallagher loved the idea and made plans to clean our his desk. I blew up—this happening right after Robbie. I told the governor: If I wanted to help the DFL, I would have accepted Hubert’s original offer to work for him years ago. This appointment of Sheran means that a young DFLer will be on the Court for years to come. “Yes,” said Andersen, “but you have to admit that Sheran is a top lawyer.” Sure he’s a top lawyer, I said. Don’t we have any young top lawyers? I think, I added, you’re really a DFLer at heart, Governor. “No,” he said, “I want to preserve the balance on the Court.” I asked: Is this what Republicans thought they were getting when they voted for you?
That was scathingly rude and I shouldn’t have said it. No answer. He wasn’t a DFLer but thinking of himself: Andersen. He was really thinking that it would help him with the DFLers in Mankato. It didn’t. He taught me a prime political lesson: if you don’t remember your base, when you run again they won’t remember you. They didn’t.
These were the battles I lost—all over the governor’s failure to understand he should build up his party. The fun things involved the decision of the old Washington Senators to move to Minnesota and become the Minnesota Twins. The governor was supposed to officially welcome Twins owner Cal Griffith to the state with a meeting in his office. I enlarged it to a huge public reception after talking to Griffith. He concurred that he would give free tickets to the opening game to all pairs of twins who showed up at the Capitol for the reception. I announced it to the media and the rotunda was jammed with twins, ranging from 2 years old to 96. It got national media attention. “That’s what you good at,” the governor said, “rather than giving me hell over my appointments.” Wrong. Somebody should have given him hell about those appointments and nobody wanted to but me.
Another fun thing involved our program to help Minnesota Indians on the reservations with good state programs in nutrition, anti-alcoholism, child welfare and sanitation, all which were sadly lacking. The governor and I made several trips to the reservations. Hubert Humphrey, jealously watching our progress, blasted us from Washington with a press release that accused us of capitalizing on Indian misery for political gain. When I got the acting head of the Chippewa tribe to respond in a story that was run banner-line under the head “Indian Leader Rips Humphrey for Cynicism” there was silence from the Senator. Then a letter arrived at my desk a week later in an envelope from Humphrey’s Senate office. It contained the clipping circling the Indian leader’s statement and bearing the notation in his handwriting: “God, Roeser, if only white people could write like that!” It showed that he was aware of where the rejoinder had originated—but it was in good humor and showed that in this battle we won round one.
When I made a routine trip to Washington, D. C. as the 1962 political season started…to visit the GOP delegation as liaison man for the governor…I was informed by my secret DFL moles that Hubert had taken over practical management of the Rolvaag gubernatorial campaign. He was determined to do all he could to elect a governor as prelude to a future attempt to run for president. His plan: Of course he would support the Kennedy-Johnson ticket for reelection in 1964 but he believed, correctly, that Johnson’s heart problems might well detour his running for president in 1968 and Humphrey wanted to become the nominee that year when he would be 57 years old. To gain credibility as a Democratic leader he needed to win back the governorship for a DFLer, Karl Rolvaag, in 1962 to be followed by Walter Mondale by the time Humphrey would make his third pass at the presidency in 1968. An insider in the DFL in Washington told me: “Roeser, you guys have Humphrey’s undivided attention. He feels he must retake the governorship in 1962. Watch it. He’s attempting to figure out how he can devise a so-called scandal.”
There were no scandals and would be none with our clean-as-a-whistle administration. But how Humphrey invented a scandal that never existed shows the raw machinations of this at once lovable but formidable…even grimly opportunistic…political figure.
Working for an exceedingly honorable, some would say lofty others would say crafty, governor…either a John Gardner-style reformer or a trimmer who forsook conservatism in order to build a kind of Third Way of governance, ignoring his party in the process…was fun, invigorating, filled with great memories and many, many lost battles. The most praise I can give my old boss, Elmer L. Andersen, is this: there was never a time…never a single time…when crass, quid-pro-quo politics intervened in his running state government: never once. None of his appointees was ever suspected of being on the take. No jobs were promised, no deals with contracts were cut. The office of contract compliance was in place and had served dispassionately from the day we walked in. While I was there, I shared workloads with the same Democratic and Republican professionals who had worked at the highest levels of state government for Republican Luther Youngdahl, Democrat Orville Freeman and us. The same budget specialists that advised Freeman advised us and advised our successors. They served us on the state capitol third floor and our soon-to-be-announced opponent, Karl Rolvaag on the 2nd floor. Whenever I consider the rabid partisanship that engulfed the George Ryan administration, I marvel at the almost pristine innocence of those years.
The contrast between that Minnesota and this Illinois stunned me when I returned to my home state in 1964 and to see the grunting, inexpressibly ultra-partisan skirmishing carried on by Dick Ogilvie and his group to scale the heights of the governorship. Patronage and contracts were the only things that seemingly mattered. One thing I have concluded: Minnesota’s state government then had no scandals because it had a firmly entrenched, clean civil service system with only a handful of jobs available to elected officials—jobs they were rather careful to fill with well-qualified individuals who could serve well…precisely because there were so few political jobs available. Illinois, a prime patronage state, has a civil service system that is evidently a laughingstock where qualifications are winked at too often which make mockery of those who are highly qualified. With Minnesota’s, if you ever tried to hire a relative or friend who was unqualified…or who was asked to perform a distinctly political service…you were sure to be found out, indicted and go to jail. Likewise, I can clearly state that there was no scandal in Orville Freeman’s administration either, or major scandals whatsoever in Minnesota government going back to the early days of the 20th century.
But I promised to tell about the battles I lost, didn’t I?
The non-partisan, anti-party belief of my boss, who shirked his party responsibilities, drove me nuts. All executives, presidents and governors, should, intentionally…as is their right…name jurists who share a general philosophy with the governor’s party. Andersen was the first and only Republican of any stature who was determined to keep a “bipartisan balance” on the state courts and regulatory agencies instead of naming qualified people to uphold a party’s philosophy: it was stunning to me and still is. Walter Judd had a particularly vehement opponent in past years, a highbinder personal injury lawyer Joe Robbie. Robbie, a Lebanese, was an itinerant political junkie and hustler but also a kind of entrepreneur who often couldn’t pay his bills. For a long time, politics was his undoing. He ran for South Dakota governor twice unsuccessfully. He moved to Minnesota without a dime, ran twice for Congress against Judd unsuccessfully. After the second loss to Judd the old charlatan who was also a brilliant attorney when he concentrated on it, needed a job. He applied to Andersen for the job of head of the Minnesota Municipal Commission, a regulatory agency to succeed an old DFLer who retired. Nobody questioned that Joe had the ability to do the job—probably better than it had been done before. But his views were not in keeping with Andersen’s party and Robbie was clearly seeking the job as a tide-me-by until he could either run against Judd again or do something else in DFL politics. Therefore the naming or Robbie was an insult to the Republicans.
There was no question that Andersen wanted to name Robbie. Robbie was indeed a good municipal attorney but I asked him: isn’t there a Republican municipal attorney just as good as Joe around? Believe it or not, Andersen wanted to keep what he saw as a “balance” in government, a liberal to replace a liberal. I said, “has it occurred to you that Joe wants to run against Judd a third time and this job will keep him in the public light?” Andersen said so what: he was a good lawyer and he would keep the “balance.” .
I said: “Balance? Don’t you understand that the nature of our two party system is to replenish governmental agencies from time to time with those who have different approaches? That’s the so-called `balance’ Governor. Have I missed something in poly sci class? Gee whiz!” I lost; he made the Robbie appointment. Judd told me: “Elmer’s trying to woo the liberals but I’ll tell him this—that never works.” He was right. Robbie later quit, used a Chicago banking connection, a friend of Humphrey’s, to move to Florida and round up some financing in Miami where there was no sports competition. It was all paper clips and scotch tape with Robbie who often once again couldn’t pay his bills. He raised $7.5 million himself, overcame a pro-football embargo and bought the Dolphins in 1965 and hired Joe Shula. Their phenomenal Superbowl record caused them to name the stadium after him. To the end his was fighting off creditors and competitors, one of whom was entertainer Danny Thomas, a fellow Lebanese, who sought to displace Robbie with a group of investors. Robbie narrowly survived. He died in 1990. The stadium’s name has been changed.
A second battle between Andersen and me involved an appointment to the state Supreme Court. Frank Gallagher, an old DFLer, was slipping physically and mentally. The chief justice wanted Andersen to have coffee with him and suggest he consider retirement. Andersen did but the old man wouldn’t have anything to do with the idea. Then Andersen suggested that if Gallagher retired he’d appoint another DFLer, Bob Sheran, a prominent lawyer and former state Senator—a DFLer—to the post. Gallagher loved the idea and made plans to clean our his desk. I blew up—this happening right after Robbie. I told the governor: If I wanted to help the DFL, I would have accepted Hubert’s original offer to work for him years ago. This appointment of Sheran means that a young DFLer will be on the Court for years to come. “Yes,” said Andersen, “but you have to admit that Sheran is a top lawyer.” Sure he’s a top lawyer, I said. Don’t we have any young top lawyers? I think, I added, you’re really a DFLer at heart, Governor. “No,” he said, “I want to preserve the balance on the Court.” I asked: Is this what Republicans thought they were getting when they voted for you?
That was scathingly rude and I shouldn’t have said it. No answer. He wasn’t a DFLer but thinking of himself: Andersen. He was really thinking that it would help him with the DFLers in Mankato. It didn’t. He taught me a prime political lesson: if you don’t remember your base, when you run again they won’t remember you. They didn’t.
These were the battles I lost—all over the governor’s failure to understand he should build up his party. The fun things involved the decision of the old Washington Senators to move to Minnesota and become the Minnesota Twins. The governor was supposed to officially welcome Twins owner Cal Griffith to the state with a meeting in his office. I enlarged it to a huge public reception after talking to Griffith. He concurred that he would give free tickets to the opening game to all pairs of twins who showed up at the Capitol for the reception. I announced it to the media and the rotunda was jammed with twins, ranging from 2 years old to 96. It got national media attention. “That’s what you good at,” the governor said, “rather than giving me hell over my appointments.” Wrong. Somebody should have given him hell about those appointments and nobody wanted to but me.
Another fun thing involved our program to help Minnesota Indians on the reservations with good state programs in nutrition, anti-alcoholism, child welfare and sanitation, all which were sadly lacking. The governor and I made several trips to the reservations. Hubert Humphrey, jealously watching our progress, blasted us from Washington with a press release that accused us of capitalizing on Indian misery for political gain. When I got the acting head of the Chippewa tribe to respond in a story that was run banner-line under the head “Indian Leader Rips Humphrey for Cynicism” there was silence from the Senator. Then a letter arrived at my desk a week later in an envelope from Humphrey’s Senate office. It contained the clipping circling the Indian leader’s statement and bearing the notation in his handwriting: “God, Roeser, if only white people could write like that!” It showed that he was aware of where the rejoinder had originated—but it was in good humor and showed that in this battle we won round one.
When I made a routine trip to Washington, D. C. as the 1962 political season started…to visit the GOP delegation as liaison man for the governor…I was informed by my secret DFL moles that Hubert had taken over practical management of the Rolvaag gubernatorial campaign. He was determined to do all he could to elect a governor as prelude to a future attempt to run for president. His plan: Of course he would support the Kennedy-Johnson ticket for reelection in 1964 but he believed, correctly, that Johnson’s heart problems might well detour his running for president in 1968 and Humphrey wanted to become the nominee that year when he would be 57 years old. To gain credibility as a Democratic leader he needed to win back the governorship for a DFLer, Karl Rolvaag, in 1962 to be followed by Walter Mondale by the time Humphrey would make his third pass at the presidency in 1968. An insider in the DFL in Washington told me: “Roeser, you guys have Humphrey’s undivided attention. He feels he must retake the governorship in 1962. Watch it. He’s attempting to figure out how he can devise a so-called scandal.”
There were no scandals and would be none with our clean-as-a-whistle administration. But how Humphrey invented a scandal that never existed shows the raw machinations of this at once lovable but formidable…even grimly opportunistic…political figure.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Personal Asides: Tom Dart to Guest Lecture at Roosevelt U…Becky Carroll Rescheduled…Marty Marty and the Crusades.
Dart.
Democrat Tom Dart who is just about as certain to be elected Cook county sheriff next November as anyone can reasonably expect, will guest lecture at my Roosevelt University class. Smart and personable, Tom was an assistant states attorney and a superb state legislator. He got the Democratic nomination for state treasurer but Judy-Judy-Judy cut a deal with Rep. Bobby Rush among others and Rod Blagojevich, supposedly close to Tom, pulled a disappearing act on the race with the result that Tom lost to Topinka. Tom should have been made state commissioner of corrections but was not by his one-time friend Blagojevich, unaccountably. However, he went on to become chief of staff to Sheriff Mike Sheahan. There he has supplied great acumen and ability to the point where the sheriff endorsed him as his successor when he determined not to run for reelection. Tom will speak on November 9 at 7 p.m.
Carroll.
Becky Carroll, spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget who is one of the most adept and adroit expositors of state government in the Blagojevich administration, has been re-scheduled for a lecture at my Roosevelt class on October 12 at 7 p.m.
Marty Marty.
Reverend Martin Marty, a professor emeritus of religion at the University of Chicago, is one of those guys who was born to sit on a dais. He has received 64 honorary doctorates and has written well over forty books which have been well-reviewed in contemporary liberal journals. A Lutheran former senior editor of the “Christian Century,” one of the nation’s oldest trendy left Christian publications, he and his magazine especially under the Rev. Jim Wall, Marty Marty’s friend, have taken a decidedly Arabist point of view concerning the Middle East. Wall and Marty Marty who look somewhat alike are always dissatisfied that Israel has not made more commitments, Marty is not known particularly for the religious ideas he espouses but for his political stance.
Marty Marty’s son, John, has followed him in this and has been even more activist—moving to the Roseville suburb of St. Paul and becoming the most liberal State Senator in the state. Following his father in theatrics, John when he was a DFL candidate for governor, voted in defense of flag-burning and was rather tempered when a group of VFW veterans in uniform demanded to see him on the issue. They really didn’t get far in trying to see John as he is not known in Minnesota as being interested in confrontation with angry war veterans. John is a thinker not a fighter. He lost the election, of course.
Nor is the man known as Marty Marty known to be a particularly heavy fighter or thinker—just a pop campus religious figure not unlike the late William Sloane Coffin. Like Coffin, Marty Marty has always been in the forefront of opposition to any military campaign in America’s interest: from the earliest days of the Cold War to today. It would be instructive to imagine where we would be if the nation had listened to Marty Marty down through the years, from Truman to Reagan. We would not have won it; although Marty Marty still does not recognize that we won it.
Yesterday, appropriately, the newspaper that has not yet figured out what it believes so on most matters it splits the difference, the “Chicago Tribune” published Marty Marty’s Op Ed on the controversy between Pope Benedict XVI and the Muslims. You would expect that Marty Marty would take the side of the Muslims in this controversy, would you not? No, he eschews beheadings but he said they have a point concerning the terrible atrocities the Christians—then Catholics—committed in the Crusades. Appropriately, Marty Marty picked a book, different from many others, which is tough on the Crusades and Crusaders—but that is not surprising, is it? A good number of books have justified the Crusades but Marty Marty is banking that most Op Ed readers wouldn’t know them. Like “The Sword of the Prophet” and “Hatred” Kingdom.”
Recognizing that carnage and killing happens in all wars, the same question can be asked about Marty’s position anent the Crusades as Marty’s position regarding the Cold War—and that is, what kind of world would we be living in if the Crusades had never happened? The Crusades bought Europe time i.e. if Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard the Lionhearted and others hadn’t waged their fight, the jihadists would certainly have swept across Europe easier and sooner. Crusader armies occupied them fighting for Antioch and Ascalon rather than Vienna. None other than Edward Gibbons saw the possibility of the Koran being “taught in the schools of Oxford.”
While the Crusades didn’t accomplish what they set out to do but supplied the steel for the West to overcome the jihadist advance. The Muslims were turned away from Malta in the 16th century and failed in their siege of Vienna in 1529; they won against the Poles in 1672 but lost what they gained ten years later. They tried to rape Vienna again but were turned back by Poland’s King Jan III Sobieski on a fateful day that marked the crest of Muslim expansion in Europe—September 11, 1683.
Not that all this means a thing to Marty Marty who lives with equivalence in foreign policy even if, in this Op Ed, he denies it. The wars meant something to Gibbon just as they mean nothing to Marty Marty. When I say the Crusades made the full flowering of European civilization possible, Marty Marty…always looking for a good sound byte…would say: “full flowering of European civilization but wasn’t there too much suffering and carnage at a time when so many underprivileged were not treated as equals?” You see what I mean? You can never make a point with Marty Marty because his view…turned as it is against all history…is nihilistic. He should be designed for a statue in Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Not the big one in London; the little one in Vegas will do. His figure in dramatic pose with hand upraised to make a point will illustrate the truism that it’s possible to be educated beyond one’s intelligence.
Flashback: The Birth of Our Mary Catherine…The Mondale-Rolvaag Adventure Gives Humphrey More Concern.
[More from fifty years in politics for my kids and grandchildren].
Right after Christmas and just before the new year of 1962…on December 29, 1961…Lillian gave birth to our second child—a daughter, Mary Catherine. Like her brother before her, she was, thank God, a healthy baby. When her brother Tommy heard that someone new was joining the family he joyously shouted, “a puppy?” He was not overwhelmed when we brought our newest home since he had been the only baby. Little children, babies themselves, are funny when they confront a sibling. Tommy’s first reaction was to seem rather aloof, then quite curious and finally when he was allowed to kiss his sister, quite adult about it.
That month of December saw the Minnesota legislature in special session ratify the plan of redistricting that cut nine districts down to eight and which prompted Walter Judd to announce his decision not to run for a 12th term in 1962. Originally, Judd’s idea expressed to the governor was reasonable—to carve two districts in Hennepin county, one for the city of Minneapolis and one for the suburbs including the hard-pressed, blue-collar towns and let candidates have at it. Instead the two districts were jiggered so that Judd’s district received many labor areas outside the city and MacGregor’s received the plums: the upper-crust heavily Republican areas which made his election a cinch. Why Andersen didn’t try to interfere has never been explained satisfactorily to me, least of all by him: but he maintained that Judd’s national prominence would be enough to carry him through a tough district and the lush exurban one would elect MacGregor for a net gain of one.
I must say I don’t believe that for a moment. If the governor thought he was wooing DFLers by signing such a bill, it was only the latest in a string of ill-considered actions that expected a Democratic return for services rendered which didn’t pan out. I do know that John Mooty who was in charge of the Republican side of the negotiating was a heavy supporter of Clark MacGregor and that late at night when the negotiations were concluded and the map drawn, he was asked in my presence if he was satisfied with the plan. He said, although he was dismayed to notice that I overheard: “Yes. It went pretty well. But [here an exaggerated groan] we may well have lost Walter Judd.” He then glanced at me and bustled away.
I have never been able to figure out what the attraction of Clark MacGregor was…a thoroughly mediocre lawyer who ended up succeeding John Mitchell as head of Nixon’s CREEP…over an international statesman but I have noticed the preference for young exurbanites for one of their number before then and since. The young affluent types thought themselves as more progressive than Judd—and a Dartmouth grad—who as a badly pock-marked oldster was not seen as smooth. But that has been a characteristic of many weak-minded suburban Republicans in Illinois as well. There’s a human quotient to Andersen’s decision as well: he always wanted to be well-regarded by these types (he never was because they thought they saw in him a peculiar kind of weakness). In fact, in losing his sharply Democrat-accentuated district in 1962, Judd still ran ahead of Andersen by 22,000 votes. Andersen lost reelection by 91 votes out of a total of 1,250,000 cast.
But I’m getting ahead of the story. Hubert Humphrey sat down with his protégé Fritz Mondale and in one session gave him the facts of life which benefited Mondale enormously. One who was not in the room with them but who was filled-in by Humphrey on the dutch-uncle talk later, told me that Humphrey began with this: “Fritz, what the hell is this stuff about your not liking being called Fritz and wanting to be called General?” When Mondale tried to explain it, Humphrey waved him down. “Don’t interrupt, Fritz. Let me tell you as the first order of business—and you make a damned good note of it, you hear? If people get the idea that they can’t call you Fritz, ultimately they aren’t calling to call you General either. You’re going to be dead. Conversely, if people at the Minnesota State Fair feel they can’t call me Hubert, they aren’t ultimately going to call me Senator either, because I will have lost. Now, I don’t want to hear any more of this General stuff. You’re Fritz to me and to everybody else and if you resent it, you better find another profession.”
That talk worked wonders on Fritz Mondale. I met him a lot after that and his nonchalance and refusal to take himself too seriously became an attractive part of him. It was just the kind of correction that he needed…and maybe all of us may have needed at one time or other in our lives. The best speech I ever heard Fritz give was over Humphrey’s casket where in lay in the Capitol rotunda. Humphrey had a long, slow painful death from bladder cancer and appeared day in and day out a shadow of himself as the illness took root. Mondale said, “He taught us how to live. And he taught us how to die.” I must say my eyes teared up on hearing him. He was a gallant warrior. And he did me a good service although I didn’t realize it at the time. He singlehandedly beat Andersen with the result that all of us went to the private sector where I made out pretty well. Not rich but comfortable in a job I very much enjoyed. Thus I say: thanks Hubert.
All of these things were blissfully unknown to us and far ahead. Mondale still entertained somewhat the idea of running for Governor against Rolvaag in the primary and Humphrey didn’t try to stop him, but decided not to get involved. The idea came to a screeching halt—or let us say it was overturned—one mid-Spring day when the DFL leadership scheduled a retreat at a posh resort in Alexandria, heart of the park region tourist country. Everybody was there but Hubert but he was to be completely informed. And they were on their best behavior. In deference to the Lieutenant Governor no drinks were served but he seemed perfectly at ease and convivial nonetheless.
Mondale showed up in a full suit with trousers pressed to a knife-edge, starched shirt, tie, tie-clip, shined shoes, out of kilter for the relaxed nature of the session—but he had had a speech earlier. Legislative leaders, the state House Speaker, majority leader, leaders of the state Senate were all there as were some loyal liberal members of the state Capitol press room. While attendants got ready for lunch, Lt. Governor Rolvaag decided to take a spin in somebody’s new speedboat and invited Fritz to go with him. Fritz sat in the prow as Rolvaag turned on the ignition and primed the engine expertly. Then with a wave to the crowd, Rolvaag gripped the wheel and gunned for the opposite shore. Except that he had forgotten to unhook the chain from the pier.
Those who saw it said that Mondale made a high, spectacular arc in the air and went head first into the water which, thank heavens, was fittingly deep or else he might have struck his neck and have been paralyzed. As for Rolvaag, he was thrown over the steering wheel, did a kind of crazy pirouette with a surprised look on his face before he disappeared into the lake. Thankfully, the engine cut off. Mondale came up immediately and they wondered about Rolvaag but he showed up beside the boat and climbed into it. Mondale paddled ashore. “It was a stunning thing,” he told an onlooker, “to be sitting in the prow one second and be on the bottom of an ice-cold lake the next.” It was a rather sobering experience for Rolvaag as well—and, of course, the rumor circulated that he had been secretly drinking Vodka which he denied. But the episode got around and somehow, inexplicably, damped Mondale’s ambition to run for governor. So by the time the retreat ended and he and his suit was dried out, he had decided to let Rolvaag have the honor.
The episode gave Humphrey more concern about Rolvaag but there was nothing he could do. He resolved to get involved in the gubernatorial campaign thoroughly himself and try to propel Rolvaag to victory. But it would take great imagination. But no one ever criticized Hubert Humphrey for lack of imagination.
Right after Christmas and just before the new year of 1962…on December 29, 1961…Lillian gave birth to our second child—a daughter, Mary Catherine. Like her brother before her, she was, thank God, a healthy baby. When her brother Tommy heard that someone new was joining the family he joyously shouted, “a puppy?” He was not overwhelmed when we brought our newest home since he had been the only baby. Little children, babies themselves, are funny when they confront a sibling. Tommy’s first reaction was to seem rather aloof, then quite curious and finally when he was allowed to kiss his sister, quite adult about it.
That month of December saw the Minnesota legislature in special session ratify the plan of redistricting that cut nine districts down to eight and which prompted Walter Judd to announce his decision not to run for a 12th term in 1962. Originally, Judd’s idea expressed to the governor was reasonable—to carve two districts in Hennepin county, one for the city of Minneapolis and one for the suburbs including the hard-pressed, blue-collar towns and let candidates have at it. Instead the two districts were jiggered so that Judd’s district received many labor areas outside the city and MacGregor’s received the plums: the upper-crust heavily Republican areas which made his election a cinch. Why Andersen didn’t try to interfere has never been explained satisfactorily to me, least of all by him: but he maintained that Judd’s national prominence would be enough to carry him through a tough district and the lush exurban one would elect MacGregor for a net gain of one.
I must say I don’t believe that for a moment. If the governor thought he was wooing DFLers by signing such a bill, it was only the latest in a string of ill-considered actions that expected a Democratic return for services rendered which didn’t pan out. I do know that John Mooty who was in charge of the Republican side of the negotiating was a heavy supporter of Clark MacGregor and that late at night when the negotiations were concluded and the map drawn, he was asked in my presence if he was satisfied with the plan. He said, although he was dismayed to notice that I overheard: “Yes. It went pretty well. But [here an exaggerated groan] we may well have lost Walter Judd.” He then glanced at me and bustled away.
I have never been able to figure out what the attraction of Clark MacGregor was…a thoroughly mediocre lawyer who ended up succeeding John Mitchell as head of Nixon’s CREEP…over an international statesman but I have noticed the preference for young exurbanites for one of their number before then and since. The young affluent types thought themselves as more progressive than Judd—and a Dartmouth grad—who as a badly pock-marked oldster was not seen as smooth. But that has been a characteristic of many weak-minded suburban Republicans in Illinois as well. There’s a human quotient to Andersen’s decision as well: he always wanted to be well-regarded by these types (he never was because they thought they saw in him a peculiar kind of weakness). In fact, in losing his sharply Democrat-accentuated district in 1962, Judd still ran ahead of Andersen by 22,000 votes. Andersen lost reelection by 91 votes out of a total of 1,250,000 cast.
But I’m getting ahead of the story. Hubert Humphrey sat down with his protégé Fritz Mondale and in one session gave him the facts of life which benefited Mondale enormously. One who was not in the room with them but who was filled-in by Humphrey on the dutch-uncle talk later, told me that Humphrey began with this: “Fritz, what the hell is this stuff about your not liking being called Fritz and wanting to be called General?” When Mondale tried to explain it, Humphrey waved him down. “Don’t interrupt, Fritz. Let me tell you as the first order of business—and you make a damned good note of it, you hear? If people get the idea that they can’t call you Fritz, ultimately they aren’t calling to call you General either. You’re going to be dead. Conversely, if people at the Minnesota State Fair feel they can’t call me Hubert, they aren’t ultimately going to call me Senator either, because I will have lost. Now, I don’t want to hear any more of this General stuff. You’re Fritz to me and to everybody else and if you resent it, you better find another profession.”
That talk worked wonders on Fritz Mondale. I met him a lot after that and his nonchalance and refusal to take himself too seriously became an attractive part of him. It was just the kind of correction that he needed…and maybe all of us may have needed at one time or other in our lives. The best speech I ever heard Fritz give was over Humphrey’s casket where in lay in the Capitol rotunda. Humphrey had a long, slow painful death from bladder cancer and appeared day in and day out a shadow of himself as the illness took root. Mondale said, “He taught us how to live. And he taught us how to die.” I must say my eyes teared up on hearing him. He was a gallant warrior. And he did me a good service although I didn’t realize it at the time. He singlehandedly beat Andersen with the result that all of us went to the private sector where I made out pretty well. Not rich but comfortable in a job I very much enjoyed. Thus I say: thanks Hubert.
All of these things were blissfully unknown to us and far ahead. Mondale still entertained somewhat the idea of running for Governor against Rolvaag in the primary and Humphrey didn’t try to stop him, but decided not to get involved. The idea came to a screeching halt—or let us say it was overturned—one mid-Spring day when the DFL leadership scheduled a retreat at a posh resort in Alexandria, heart of the park region tourist country. Everybody was there but Hubert but he was to be completely informed. And they were on their best behavior. In deference to the Lieutenant Governor no drinks were served but he seemed perfectly at ease and convivial nonetheless.
Mondale showed up in a full suit with trousers pressed to a knife-edge, starched shirt, tie, tie-clip, shined shoes, out of kilter for the relaxed nature of the session—but he had had a speech earlier. Legislative leaders, the state House Speaker, majority leader, leaders of the state Senate were all there as were some loyal liberal members of the state Capitol press room. While attendants got ready for lunch, Lt. Governor Rolvaag decided to take a spin in somebody’s new speedboat and invited Fritz to go with him. Fritz sat in the prow as Rolvaag turned on the ignition and primed the engine expertly. Then with a wave to the crowd, Rolvaag gripped the wheel and gunned for the opposite shore. Except that he had forgotten to unhook the chain from the pier.
Those who saw it said that Mondale made a high, spectacular arc in the air and went head first into the water which, thank heavens, was fittingly deep or else he might have struck his neck and have been paralyzed. As for Rolvaag, he was thrown over the steering wheel, did a kind of crazy pirouette with a surprised look on his face before he disappeared into the lake. Thankfully, the engine cut off. Mondale came up immediately and they wondered about Rolvaag but he showed up beside the boat and climbed into it. Mondale paddled ashore. “It was a stunning thing,” he told an onlooker, “to be sitting in the prow one second and be on the bottom of an ice-cold lake the next.” It was a rather sobering experience for Rolvaag as well—and, of course, the rumor circulated that he had been secretly drinking Vodka which he denied. But the episode got around and somehow, inexplicably, damped Mondale’s ambition to run for governor. So by the time the retreat ended and he and his suit was dried out, he had decided to let Rolvaag have the honor.
The episode gave Humphrey more concern about Rolvaag but there was nothing he could do. He resolved to get involved in the gubernatorial campaign thoroughly himself and try to propel Rolvaag to victory. But it would take great imagination. But no one ever criticized Hubert Humphrey for lack of imagination.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Personal Asides
Rich Miller of Capitol Fax Joins Roosevelt Class to Lecture About Illinois Politics…Dan Proft, Leading Republican Political Consultant Signs Up for Lecture As Well…Also the Only Man to Get Me to Register Democrat: Phil Rock, former Senate President, Joins the “Faculty”…The “Sun-Times” Blagojevich Landslide Poll.
Miller.
In Illinois politics, if you’re talking inside baseball and astute analysis, you automatically go to Rich Miller’s Capitol Fax newsletter whose subscription fee is absolutely worth everything you pay for it—and more. In addition there is his superb blog, www.thecapitolfaxblog.com which every serious student of Illinois politics and government…as well as those who just love the thrill of the game…reads as the first order of business each morning. It’s a given that no other reporter covering state politics…from Springfield to Chicago and all points in between…works as hard or as indefatigably as does Rich Miller. He is almost always consulted by nationally-known journalists when assessing the tempo of political contests in Illinois. That we don’t always agree makes life interesting for both of us but his prowess at interpreting Illinois government, and especially the legislalture, sets him on a pinnacle as an invaluable member of the Roosevelt U group of lecturers. That’s why it’s a pleasure to announce that Rich Miller will lecture at my Roosevelt University course on December 7 at 6 p.m.
Proft.
The young man who moved from Northwestern University student days as an editor of a conservative, alternative independent newspaper on campus which, having been persecuted by the liberal establishment, won the support of NW alum Academy Award winner Charlton Heston…Dan Proft…who has become a leading Republican political consultant in today’s state politics…will lecture on the nature of political consultancy at my Roosevelt U class. Proft is a key strategist for Tony Peraica, the hard-charging Republican candidate for president of the Cook county Board and superintended the win of a Republican mayor of Cicero in a dramatic tilt with the forces of Eddie Vrdolyak as well as Beth Coulson, the progressive Republican lawmaker from Glenview. His career strategizing has included Alan Keyes’ conservative run for U. S. Senator and State Senator Steve Rauschenberger for governor. He was founder and first editor of the innovative Internet political newsletter, “The Illinois Leader.” Proft is a frequent guest on “Beyond the Beltway with Bruce DuMont” and has also appeared on my own WLS-AM program. He will speak on October . 12 at 6 p.m.
Rock.
The only man who made me become a Democrat …technically, and for a short time…has signed up as a guest lecturer at my Roosevelt University class: Former state Senate president Phil Rock. Democratic state chairman and widely regarded as the statesman of the Senate, Rock dealt even-handedly with Democrats and Republicans and introduced legislation on occasion that was unpopular but nevertheless needed introducing. An Oak Parker, Phil Rock ran also as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U. S. Senate in 1984. Because he was…and is…a pro-lifer and would oppose pro-choice Sen. Charles Percy, I decided to vote for Rock in the Democratic primary in that year in an effort to help him win (though he was …and still is…too liberal for me on some economic issues but for me pro-life is always uber alles). Thus by taking the Democratic ballot, I became, technically, a Democrat. I never thought of staying a Democrat—but if I ever had, lefty Paul Simon, who defeated Rock for the Senatorial nomination, would have scared me away permanently. Former president Rock is going to talk about the nature of the state Senate and discuss how legislative leaders of one party can work with those of another party…and a governor of another party…to get things done. He will speak on November 2 at 6 p.m.
Poll.
There is little doubt that the “Sun-Times”-NBC5 poll showing Gov. Blagojevich leading Judy Baar Topinka 56 to 26 percent is skewed due to an abnormally small sample and probable imprecise weighting of Democrats, Republicans and independents…but no one seriously believes anymore that Topinka has more than a sliver of a chance. What is the reason for the imbalance? Democratic liberals who passionately want Topinka to beat Blagojevich, serve one term, raise the income tax and get out to allow Lisa Madigan to coast trouble-free, see that the governor’s fund-raising has done the magic. Possibly—but they should understand that a Republican who is at serious odds with her party on major social issues…to the extent that she will not even support a marriage amendment…and to the point of refusing to endorse even abstinence funding…in addition to pro-choice and gay rights…cannot possibly be supported by much of the GOP base.
Any normal Republican candidate…Jim Oberweis…Bill Brady…Ron Gidwitz…having won the primary would have marched into the fray with a reasonably united party base. A unified base would have been strengthened by the scandals and probe headlines that have ravaged the governor’s campaign. In addition to being unable to muster more than a shattered base, Topinka has herself been unprepared for a major contest and entered the primary debates without a program. Why I don’t know. She has had years and a formidable office with which to muster possible state programs but everything she says sounds like she’s winging it.
In addition the tone of her campaign is low-rent. Please: for those who have misunderstood my use of this term earlier: “Low rent” is not an economic term but a social one. Paris Hilton is low-rent. Brittany Spears is low-rent. Rosie O’Donnell is low-rent. All multi-millionaires and all are low-rent. Brad Pitt and his pregnant girl friend who will not marry until “everyone is allowed to marry” are low-rent. Low-rent is what we have in the Republican gubernatorial contest and barring a sudden cataclysmic debacle in the Democratic race, the results on election day will so testify.
Flashback: Working for a Liberal Governor, Even Though I Liked Him, Had Its Down Moments. The Nature of the Liberal Beast. The Defeat of Walter Judd. The Rolvaag Literary Tradition.
[More on fifty years of politics for my kids and grandchildren].
When critics say that because I am so conservative I don’t have any conception of the breadth and depth of modern liberalism, they fail to recognize that I comprised a virtual lifetime in the subject matter by working with a host of national minorities in the U. S. Commerce Department…as number three in the Peace Corps…teaching politics and dining with colleagues at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard plus knowing—and admiring some singular aspects of—Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and others. But it was working with liberal Republican Elmer Andersen as Minnesota governor, one of the most intellectually capable chief executives in the nation (who died last year at age 96 proudly touting to me that his last vote was for John Kerry) that I think I absorbed the entire grist of the mind-set…with which I steadfastly disagree.
The trademarks were evident in Andersen from the start. First, he was a determined relativist…a Lutheran for political and social reasons but who really doubted that God exists and expected in old age that after death he would go, not to “the Great Perhaps” which even some speculative saints hope for…but to “the Great Void” which he felt had caused the world to be created in happenstance. This was really liberal nihilism. Second, while he had built his company and his own personal fortune on adaptation to exigencies with shrewd application to what he saw as practicality, he knew the knack of getting out with magnificent timing—a timing he felt should be applied to practical politics. Third, he had the liberal relativist’s fondness for public solutions to problems and a devotion to the adulation that comes from support of the under-classes and equality of result. (After we left office he continued on to support abortion rights. There is not the slightest doubt that were he around today he’d support rapid pull-out from Iraq, the Big Box ordinance and gay rights, as well.)
When last I saw him a few years ago, he was in his motorized wheel-chair, blind, palsied at 96, but as clear-headed as ever and still wedded to liberal solutions. He had an absolute vengeance for philosophical conservatives witness his coldness for and refusal to attend the funeral of the man who built the Minnesota GOP’s organization as a conduit to his election: Ed Viehman. (If left to his own devices, he would have regarded me the same way except that my mentor, Mrs. Heffelfinger, a fellow liberal, convinced him duplicitously that I was a liberal at heart when she knew I wasn’t, for which I owed her much).
So he came to the governorship a brilliantly successful multi-millionaire entrepreneur and he applied adaptation and flexible pragmatism to all tasks. He absolutely rejected cutting the state budget in order to balance it…but realized a tax hike would be politically disastrous…so he attempted to tax utilities with a populist approach. When this was rejected by the legislature, he tried to let the body stew in its own juices or come up with another solution. It waited him out and he broke quickly. I told him to wait out the impasse and the legislature would crack—but with no intransigence, he was the one who cracked and caved. The legislature bluffed him into submitting another variant which it wanted in the first place: a withholding tax which hiked revenues for a one-time shot. That balanced the budget. It gave him a year which didn’t bother him at all.
He was right about crusading for a Taconite Amendment to stimulate the mining industry which to his credit he stuck with—but Democratic liberals would not allow one to pass because they did not want him to benefit politically from it. So in the interim he fiddled around with liberal toys—such as passage of the Fair Housing bill which prohibited discrimination in housing: an okay bill but identical to what was being considered by the Congress. On this I helped him, because (a) it was my job and (b) I was not unalterably opposed to the legislation but believed real progress in housing should come from private initiatives and voluntary agreements: legislation was a show-boat way of performance that satisfied political needs.
He was ambitious to get on the national stage and saw the way as a conduit to Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York and then (1961) widely held to be the frontrunner against Kennedy in the 1964 election. With social issues not on the agenda, I myself thought Rocky was the best man we had. From the start I was unimpressed with Barry Goldwater: a kind of simplistic third-rate (and hardly even that) Walter Judd. We went to the National Governors’ Conference in Hawaii, flying on a Minnesota National Guard prop plane where he intrigued Rockefeller, ensconced at a family mansion in Honolulu, with ideas that he and Rocky should try to get the governors to pass a civil rights resolution.
The Conference…intimidated by the southern Democratic segregationist governors…never tried to pass a civil rights measure—and why should it? A resolution would mean absolutely nothing, had no binding power.. Andersen was determined to try for public relations value. . I regarded it as a pure self-serving device as did, I believe, Nelson Rockefeller who listened to Andersen somewhat apathetically as he drank Polynesian lemonade on the veranda on his munificent and garish estate on Maui. Looking at Rocky that day…a handsome, much younger-appearing man than he really was at 53 (rivaling in sandy-haired rugged appeal John Kennedy who was nine years younger)…I did get the feeling that he was Destiny’s Tot. He gave you a Franklin Roosevelt sense of inevitability. Besides, he was wondrously firm on defense policy and the Cold War, even to the extent of being appealing enough for Walter Judd to quote him.
As it turned out there was no political inevitability to Rocky at all, due to his liaison with Happy Murphy, the wife of a former employee. God knows she was no looker (she was around as a staff aide in Hawaii; of her real romantic purpose there we had not an inkling). But his forceful breaking up of two marriages, his convincing Happy to abandon her own children, doomed his 1964 presidential effort as it should have. But we knew nothing of this then.
Andersen thought it would be great fun and terrific press for Rocky and him to bait the segregationist governors—Ross Barnett of Mississippi and Orval Faubus of Arkansas. I watched Rocky nod, wink and smile absent-mindedly as he sprawled on his veranda and got the idea that he was less interested because he was calculating the animosity the device would generate in the South for a future presidential election. For one thing, his brother Winthrop…an Arkansan who was plotting a future governorship run…was also sipping on the veranda with us (only he was slushing a Vodka concoction not lemonade like the rest of us). Winthrop was decidedly not for the enterprise, saying rightly that such a resolution had no binding power and was pure persiflage—which it was.
But Andersen would hatch his plans for Rocky and himself with long tedious conferences with fellow opportunist Mark Hatfield, then the governor of Oregon, while Rocky was out on his catamaran, Hatfield wanting a national career himself. They were conferences at which I was in bored attendance, looking wistfully out the window as the beautiful days were consumed with this foolish plotting, I ruefully concluding how right Winthrop was about the whole thing. In these talks, Nelson Rockefeller was the least interested—probably wishing, like me, that Andersen would let go of it and allow all of us to slink off into the warm sunshine. But not my workaholic.
So I used Andersen’s venture to get a lot of good press for him back in Minnesota…and to link Andersen and Rocky together as brothers which was nonsense hype…comforting but which added no hike to Andersen’s middling Minnesota poll numbers created by his failure to tame his legislature. He came back to Minnesota ecstatic, not at all concerned with the fact that 1962 was to be a redistricting year where the state was to lose one Congressman—go from nine to eight. I was because it was clear that much of the rearrangement of districts would take place in the metropolitan areas and that a very real loser could be Walter Judd. A vigorous young lawyer, Clark MacGregor, had finally won narrowly in the Minneapolis suburbs and his fan club, composed of all the wealthy, wanted to bolster his district with Republican cut-offs from Minneapolis. These people included Brad Heffelfinger, regrettably.
After we came back from Hawaii, the governor and I went to Washington to visit with the Republican members of the House delegation preparatory to Andersen’s coming later to meet with them. Meeting with Andersen before the meeting, I found him ecstatic about helping MacGregor and not enthused about bolstering Judd. In Washington, I took the time to slip away from the others and brief Judd, my old boss, urging that he get his financial backers in Minneapolis to agitate in his behalf and insist that no sacrifice be made of fertile Republican territory to MacGregor. The idea was to encourage the Republican delegation to agree on a new map—get their Democratic colleagues to agree, certify it, and serve it up to the legislature which was going to hold a yet another Sergeant Robert Eickstadt-ordained special session as a fait accompli for ratification. I told Judd, This is where you could really get screwed, Doctor, if you don’t mind my usage of that word—if you don’t pay close attention to what’s happening in Minnesota while you get so absorbed in foreign policy in Washington. The MacGregor forces are eager to carve up your territory.
He said to me, “That’s one hell of a note. If I may say so, now that the Kennedy people are running the country, I am the leading Republican spokesmen on foreign policy in the nation. You can’t imagine how dumb Goldwater is in all this. And now you tell me I have to rally all my people in order to save myself from extinction by Minnesota Republicans who want the freshman Clark MacGregor to survive?”
I said that’s the way politics at home always is, Doctor. Do you know that Sam Rayburn, number two in line to the presidency, has to watch his back because in Sherman, Texas some farmer in his district is pissed at his lack of service from Agricultural Extension of USDA and blames Rayburn for it and has joined with others to try to bump him off?
“Yes,” he said, wearily. “And that’s what I hate about this dreadful business.”
I saw a sense of futility in him about this and worried all the more. Here was a man who by his own lack of confidence didn’t work at convincing Richard Nixon that he should be his running-mate in 1960…and who could very well have given the ticket enough steam to get them both elected…a man who passed up a chance to possibly beat Humphrey for the Senate when the man who took the assignment came close to beating him…who now appeared too tired to try to defend himself in the rough-and-tumble redistricting process. Whatever it was, I couldn’t do more because I was supposed to be working for the governor and not for any individual Congressman’s interest. I talked one last time to Miriam Judd who said her husband was indeed tired of all this political business. Bad news.
When we got down to the negotiating (in the last special session prompted by State Highway Patrol Sergeant Robert Eickstadt), Judd had not rallied his troops and the MacGregor people, helped by the mobilization of the indefatigable Sally Pillsbury (who could whistle through her teeth to hail a cab just like a man) and her brother a blond-haired “tennis anyone?” multi-millionaire who inherited his dough from a St. Cloud land and granite quarry baron, rich dilettante Wheelock Whitney who bore the affable nickname “Whee!”, creamed the Judd people. The man who was in charge of the Republican negotiations, John Mooty, a big money lawyer (now in advanced old age the owner, among other things, of Dairy Queen nationally) allowed the map to be drawn which took much Republican territory from Judd. They gave him lots of hostile northern Minneapolis labor union areas and bolstered MacGregor with lush conservative suburbs.
Andersen told me, “Oh, well, Walter is a national figure. He shouldn’t have all that much trouble getting reelected. Maybe it’ll be good for him so that he pays more attention to Minnesota now.” Meaning: rather than the well-being of the nation then locked in a Cold War with the USSR, an issue in which Andersen had little interest except that of dovish parochialism. Judd, angered (but really having himself to blame) issued a statement that said that he was retiring. That was what Brad Heffelfinger kept telling me until she discovered first-hand there was hell to pay. Former President Dwight Eisenhower called her and gave her hot-tempered five-star general unvarnished, un-shirted hell for allowing this to happen to Walter Judd, whom he called a “national treasure.”
“Brad,” he thundered from Gettysburg, “are you telling me that you people out there don’t realize after all this time that Walter is the body and soul of the anti-Communist movement? Who the hell is the governor out there anyhow who let this crap come to pass?”
Chastened and scared out of her wits, she mounted a terrific public relations campaign to convince Judd to change his mind, promising that they would bring all the riches of Croesus to his aid. She called me and ordered me to cajole him to come back. I said, no, Brad. He’s made the decision. You and Sally Pillsbury decided Clark MacGregor is more valuable to the nation. To which she shouted: “You little ingrate! How dare you turn your back on me!” She assailed me so hard on the phone as a brat and ungrateful whelp that I couldn’t take it so I went out there on a mission for her to see what he said.
When I walked in to his office in Washington, he said he had indeed changed his mind. I did tell him that he would have a tough fight since one of the young favorites of Hubert Humphrey, Don Fraser, a liberal State Senator was going to run and apparently had the blessing of the powerful Cowles Minneapolis “Tribune.” I left Judd’s office and called her saying he had changed his mind. “Darling boy!” she gushed. I told her I had nothing whatever to do with his change of heart. “I don’t believe it!” she trilled.
But I feared that there was one thing worse than his not running—his running and losing. Then to cheer myself up, I went across the Capitol to the Senate side to see some aides of Sen. Eugene McCarthy—longtime friends—who might tell me what was on Hubert’s little mind these days. Why did I expect to be cheered up? Humphrey’s problems were at least as bad as our own.
Hubert Humphrey was in a sober, un-celebratory mood about Minnesota politics. He had missed his first big chance at the national limelight when through his own carelessness and arrogance he tried to jam Adlai Stevenson down his party’s throat in the Minnesota presidential primary of 1956, allowing us Republicans to cross over and vote for Estes Kefauver, delivering a stunning rebuke to him. He had hoped to use the primary vote for Stevenson to get the vice presidential nomination with Stevenson and thereby, after the team of Stevenson-Humphrey lost to Eisenhower-Nixon, would find himself in top position for the 1960 presidential nomination—ahead of JFK and everybody else.
Not so. His ambition was derailed. He lost badly to JFK in the presidential primaries of 1960 and didn’t do particularly well in running for reelection that year against a lackluster Republican candidate: winning but with no landslide. That year he lost his best aide-de-camp, Orville Freeman as governor to Republican Elmer Andersen. He foresaw a buildup of church voters who were voting Republican—an indication of his prescience of the future when this really did happen. He could sniff a rise of evangelical fervor hitched to politics—years before it happened. He feared his party was going overboard on too many things. Even civil rights. He believed it was essential to win back the governorship so as to help him in future runs for president and he believed Andersen could easily be beaten. But there was an impasse.
Andersen, he believed, could be defeated easily by attorney general Walter Mondale, another close friend and a rising DFL star. All the polls agreed. But the DFL Lieutenant Governor, Karl Rolvaag, stood in the way and demanded a shot at the title. What bothered Humphrey was that Rolvaag was privately a near unredeemable alcoholic (who had tried all kinds of remedies and washed out), seeking to hide his addiction rather than dealing with it. Moreover, the rumor was out that Rolvaag’s wife had now turned to alcohol. But Rolvaag was beloved by the DFL rank and file which didn’t adequately perceive the extent of the alcoholism. Still, Rolvaag was not a sure-thing winner over Andersen—and even if he were to win, the specter of a governor with this great weakness gave Humphrey pause. He would love to back Mondale but having been burned by fighting against his party’s rank-and-file once, in 1956, Humphrey didn’t want to take on the Rolvaag forces and plump for Mondale in 1962. Nor was Mondale particularly desirous of a bruising primary. Also Rolvaag’s name was legend in Minnesota by people who had worshiped his father.
He was the son of a legendary novelist and professor at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Ole Rolvaag. Ole penned the greatest book ever written about Minnesota dealing with its heritage of Norwegian immigrants which has become a national literary classic, “Giants in the Earth”—and Ole’s wife, Karl’s venerable mother the Earth Mother of All Norwegians in Minnesota was still alive at 90, hoping to see her son run for governor. Humphrey was almost sure that Rolvaag couldn’t beat Andersen, that the extent of his alcoholism…and that of his wife…would be found out in a gubernatorial campaign and Andersen would win. So what cheered me up was to learn that our nemesis Hubert had problems aplenty too. And something was to happen shortly that worsened the situation for Humphrey and brightened our perception of that problem.
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