Report of the County Chairman Read online

  Two aspects of Levittown impressed me unfavorably. I found the forced segregation of the city into economic areas distasteful, for this causes serious complications, the psychological effects on children being the gravest. Also, in all Levittowns the mature population tends to be of the same age, and this is stifling. How often I wished, during my meetings, that there were occasional old men in the audience who had been through elections much earlier than ones I could remember, or newly married couples with their own special problems. A wide range of interests is a fine base for a democracy such as the one we try to operate.

  Politically, everything I had been told about Levittown was wrong. The “lace-curtain Irish” were not certain to vote Republican again. There was a real chance they might return to the Democratic party. The Jewish intellectuals who in 1956 had flirted with Republicanism were willing to discuss this election on its own merits. Voters in suburbia were not going to adhere slavishly to any economic lines of demarcation. Everybody’s vote was up for grabs. I spent many hours speculating on what the vote would show in Levittown, and depending upon what my most recent experience had been, I fluctuated between a fear that the area would repeat the unexpected 51-to-49 advantage it had given Eisenhower and a hope that it might move into the Democratic column by about 58 percent. At no time during the campaign did I feel confident of the outcome in this critical area.

  But one thing I was sure of. Any party which wants to win suburbia in the future will have to make major concessions. Once-rural counties like Bucks can no longer consign their Levittowns to the outer darkness. Local men who have grown up in the party by slow stages will have to find room for newcomers who are in a hurry, distasteful though that accommodation might be. For the essential nature of suburbia is that its men and women tend to be of the same age, the same interests, and the same determinations. If they ever decide that the Democratic party has no home for them, they will swing sharply Republican. Conversely, if the Republicans fail to make the proper adjustments to absorb them, they will move in droves to the Democrats.

  One of the things that reassured me most in this election was the skill with which Senator Kennedy wooed the suburbias, for he accurately sensed that victory could be decided by their swing vote. On the other hand, I was surprised that Nixon and Eisenhower did not stress these areas more, for I believe that at the beginning suburbias were strongly inclined toward the Republicans. With these conflicting speculations shifting back and forth across my mind, I waited anxiously for November 8.

  On the first day that I reported to Johnny Welsh’s Doylestown headquarters, from which the official Democratic party was directed, I saw lounging in an armchair a man who made me actually stop and stare. I remember thinking: “If a person were writing a political novel he’d have to use that character as the typical hanger-on.” The man was apparently in his late fifties, wore a loose-fitting suit, brown shoes that needed polishing, a snap-brim hat which he carried on the back of his head, a waxed mustache and a cigar. He had a big, amiable face, eyes which darted about sizing up all visitors, and a most ingratiating smile.

  Johnny Welsh was not in the office at the moment, and this gentleman said, “You’re Jim Michener. I want to introduce myself. I’m the only man you’ll ever meet who has a bottle of whiskey named after him.” With that he dragged out of his right rear pocket a fifth bearing a bright new label reading: “Sam Thompson. Selected from our finest reserves of Superior Quality.”

  “The name’s Sam Thompson,” he said, extending a friendly hand.

  “What do you do here?” I asked.

  “Just hang around and make myself useful,” he replied.

  Sam was useful in so many ways that I came in time to rely upon him for everything from Scotch tape to advice on electioneering. It was he who decorated the office, working on the principle that “if there’s six square inches of empty space anywhere, paste up a picture of Kennedy.” It was Sam who arranged for motorcades. He knew where he could find a sound truck. It was he who assured me, “That electrician owes me a favor. He’d better lend us some lights for the campaign or else.”

  It was also Sam, bland as honey in a bear’s mouth, who solved our first big problem for us. In setting up our headquarters we had, as I pointed out earlier, usurped the town’s best practical location, and we were congratulating ourselves on having outsmarted the Republicans, when one morning I found to my dismay that right up the street from us they had rented an entire abandoned hotel, had plastered it with Nixon-Lodge signs, and had opened a headquarters which frankly swamped ours. I called Sam and showed him the bad news.

  “Something’s got to be done about this!” Sam growled. “Look at them! They completely blanket us!”

  He stomped off, his old raincoat flapping in the wind, and I wondered what Sam Thompson could do that would in any way frighten the Republican party, but three hours later I noticed to my surprise that the big enemy headquarters had shut down. Later that day they reopened in a small vacant store half a mile from the center of town, where practically nobody could see them. When the forced move had been completed, Sam Thompson came shuffling back to our headquarters and fell into a chair. He was grinning.

  “What’d you do, Sam?” I asked.

  “Matter of a fire inspection,” he replied laconically.

  “Are you a fire inspector?” I asked.

  “I got real tears in my eyes,” Sam replied, ignoring my question. “I told ’em that more than anything else in this campaign we wanted them to have the best headquarters available. But I said it was also necessary to protect them, and if that old hotel caught fire, and if any lives were lost, I’d be the sorriest person in town. I told ’em we certainly didn’t want to win any election by burning up good Republicans.”

  “Didn’t they argue back?” I asked, staring at the empty hotel.

  “They wanted to,” Sam replied, looking up at the ceiling and laughing.

  “How did you manage it, Sam?” I asked. But he would never tell.

  I did find, however, that it makes a great deal of difference in a national campaign if one’s state is controlled by one’s own party and if the major cities are also in the right hands. The odds against the Democrats’ carrying Pennsylvania were tremendous, and few outside observers gave us much chance, but repeatedly I noticed that whenever we faced a real crisis, there was always some professional politician in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh who could help, or there was some state official in Harrisburg who, had he been a Republican, could have intensified our difficulty. I came to the conclusion that Democratic control of the state offices, of Philadelphia and of Pittsburgh were worth at least 200,000 votes, and had these various political offices been in Republican hands I doubt that Kennedy could have won the state.

  I also found that in Governor David Lawrence we Democrats had an ally who was firm, intelligent, and dedicated. I found him also to be a very appealing man, even though the opposition had long enjoyed painting him as a “typical ward-heeling politician.” I wish he were typical. We understood that Lawrence, a Catholic who had just barely squeaked through in his 1958 race for the governorship, was, of all the professionals who dominated the scene at Los Angeles, the one most afraid of the anti-Catholic vote, because he had seen how powerful it could be in a state like Pennsylvania, which the party felt it must win if the national ticket were to win. We were told that Lawrence had held out to the last, insisting that his fellow Democrats acknowledge the grave risk they were taking, but that when the convention decided to go ahead, it was Lawrence who stood forth as one of the most forceful of Kennedy’s supporters.

  I shared the speakers’ stand several times with Governor Lawrence, and he was a valiant campaigner. I also went to many places where he had preceded me, and the reports were always favorable. For many years he had been the vigorous mayor of Pittsburgh and the unofficial boss of the western part of the state, so I suppose the newspapers were right in labeling him “a typical ward-heeling politician,” but whenever I heard the phras
e in connection with Dave Lawrence, I thought, “I wish my ward were in such hands.” For the thing that impressed me most about Governor Lawrence was that he talked sense. In his speeches that I heard he hammered away at specific legislation, at specific problems. He seemed to have a delicate radar set tuned in to the minds of the people to whom he was talking, and with each group he discussed the things that they were interested in. Not once did I hear him degenerate to either stupidity or prejudice, and I never heard him speak without feeling that he had established a higher standard for me to follow. I don’t see how anyone could utter more profound praise for a practicing politician, except that Lawrence, while doing these things, also delivered the vote. Sometimes I suspected that he was able to deliver the vote because he had always done the things of which I have spoken.

  What Sam Thompson’s connection was with Governor Lawrence I never found out, and perhaps it was better that I didn’t, because a few days after the closing of the fire trap in which the Republicans had set up office—to the danger of their life and limb—smiling Sam said, “You know, Jim, every morning when I come down here to work …”

  “What work do you do, Sam?” I inquired.

  “Every morning I see this enormous empty store, right in the heart of Quakertown, at the main crossroads where everybody has to go past.”

  “Sam, put it out of your mind,” I snapped in a rather surly rebuff, for I had found that Sam Thompson could spend unlimited funds on unlimited projects. Some time back he had been propositioning me about a sound truck that could be bought cheap, and I had asked, “Would you buy a whole sound truck to use for six weeks?”

  “If it would win an election,” he had replied. “And we could keep on using it for the next ten years.”

  “Forget the sound truck,” I had said with ruthless finality. Now I repeated, “The store’s out, Sam.”

  “For you, yes. I know your budget is exhausted …”

  I remember at the time thinking, “That’s an odd use of words. ‘The budget is exhausted.’ I wonder where Sam heard that?”

  “… but would you have serious objection if I used your name and tried to get the store?”

  “Yes I would,” I said firmly, “because once you got the store you’d want money to get the decorations, and there … is … no … money.”

  Sam bit his lip, looked out into the street and whispered, “The decorations we got.” He led me to an old car, the back of which was truly crammed with expensive bunting, photographs of Senator Kennedy, full-sized cut-outs of Lyndon Johnson, and a mouth-watering collection of buttons, posters and stick-ups.

  I exploded. For two weeks I’d been searching vainly for just a little helping of the paraphernalia of electioneering. Telegrams to Washington and phoned pleas to Philadelphia had availed me nothing. But here Sam Thompson was with a carload. “I have another station wagon full down the road,” he added.

  “Where in hell did you get this stuff?” I stormed.

  “Remember last week when I was gone for two days?” he asked.

  “Where were you?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Philadelphia,” he replied evenly, “and Washington. I marched into headquarters and told them I was your personal assistant and that you would be damned if you could run a campaign with no posters.”

  “You mean you conned them into giving you …”

  “They didn’t exactly give it to me,” Sam explained. “They were impressed that you felt the lack of material so urgently …”

  Again I was struck by this wild-eyed politician’s use of words, but he continued, “… and in each case they wrote out an order for me to take to the warehouse. They were willing to let us have a few things.”

  “What did you do, forge the figures after you left the main offices?”

  “Every warehouse in the world,” Sam explained, “has a watchman who is underpaid. With your permission, I gave each of the watchmen five bucks, and if you could later on see your way clear …”

  In the car and the station wagon Sam must have had four hundred dollars’ worth of electioneering devices. I stood looking at them for some time, and while I was standing there he was whispering, “So if you would let me use your name in some creative way in the northern end of the county, we might do miracles with that empty Quakertown store.”

  “I want to see it first,” I replied cautiously. So we rode together through some of the most glorious parts of Bucks County, through the German lands where autumn was rich on the farms and deer were to be seen sifting across the brown fields. How often during that long and perfect autumn was I to think, “This is one of the great counties.” How extraordinarily lovely it was in the fall of 1960.

  Sam, driving the car, was saying, “In that farm over there, all good Democrats, and I’ll bet everyone votes for Nixon.” He spotted the various places he knew and it seemed to me that nine tenths of them were Democrats who were determined to vote for the other side. “What are we opening an office up here for?” I asked.

  “To give the troops encouragement,” Sam explained. “Wait till you see what I have in mind.”

  When we got to the site, I found that Sam had understated the case. It must have been the biggest single building available in Quakertown, and Minnesota could have held football practice in it. It had, as I recall, some dozen enormous windows, any one of which would have been invaluable as a billboard. It stood at the main corner of the new shopping center, had never yet been occupied, and probably commanded a rent that my committee could not possibly meet.

  “Sam,” I said, “this is magnificent. This is the kind of headquarters a chairman dreams about. We’d have thousands of people passing here every day, and you can see it from four major highways.”

  “Wait till you see what I have outlined for the roof!” Sam cried, sensing that he had me on the hook. He took me to an area where he had blocked out two stupendous signs, each of which ran almost half a block. They said simply:

  JAMES A. MICHENER

  PRESENTS

  JOHN F. KENNEDY AND LYNDON B. JOHNSON

  I looked at the staggering signs and their inappropriate wording and said sadly, “Sam, it won’t do.”

  “Why not?” he pleaded. “For God’s sake, why not?”

  “It looks like a theatrical sign. What’s this presents?”

  Sam took me by the arm and said firmly, “Jim, for years guys like me have worked in this northern end of the county with nothing. We’ve had no money, no candidates, no help. Now you come along, a Bucks County boy, and everybody knows you, and everybody’s wondering what you’re doing backing Kennedy. This is our big chance, Jim, and I’m determined to make a dent this year. Of a thousand people who pass that store, nine hundred and ninety will be Republicans, and I’m going to convert some of them.”

  “It won’t do,” I said with finality, but I was to find that speaking to Sam Thompson with finality and making it final were two far different things.

  Still holding onto my arm he whispered, “If we took out the presents, could you possibly go for it then?”

  “Sam,” I explained wearily, “we don’t have money for this store.”

  “I was coming to that,” he said easily. “Now if I could arrange to get this store … at absolutely no cost to you … and if I could arrange to have those signs painted, again at no cost …”

  “How would you arrange all these things, Sam?” I asked.

  “You might prefer not to know,” Sam said. “Please, this is our one big chance to make a splash.”

  On one of my subsequent trips, when Quakertown had the single most dazzling political headquarters in eastern Pennsylvania, with signs that stretched for blocks, dozens of windows flashily displayed, and a bevy of eager people spreading the gospel, I did overhear a man who apparently had something to do with the place asking Sam Thompson if Sam thought the last legal permission that was needed before the premises could open as a store was going to come through on time.

  “I have a feeling it’ll b
e here,” Sam assured him, and that’s all I know about the fifth headquarters we opened. It did the best business of all.

  Just as we got things organized in Bucks County, trouble began. It was Friday night, October 7, and my wife had invited a group of neighbors in to hear the second debate. We were preparing to gloat over a second victory when I heard Senator Kennedy state, almost unnecessarily it seemed to me, that he would be willing to surrender Quemoy and Matsu to the Chinese communists. “Oh, I wish he hadn’t said that!” I gasped, and I do believe that in the first moment of hearing the statement I recognized how important it was going to become. Certainly Mr. Nixon must have felt the same way, because he jumped in with his disclaimer, and went far beyond the acknowledged administration position, stating that he would engage in war to prevent the loss of Quemoy and Matsu. In the ensuing days we Democrats were pressed very diligently by Republican hecklers, and I lived in constant fear that President Eisenhower would make some simple statement to the effect that Senator Kennedy had imperiled the American position. The President’s statement never came, and we were able slowly to repair the damage that had apparently been done.

  Because of a trick of history, I was called upon to speak widely on the Quemoy and Matsu incident and did so in many different states, for I happened to be one of a handful of private American citizens who had visited both Quemoy and Matsu. Many had seen Quemoy, but few indeed had ever been to Matsu, and even fewer to both groups. My visit to the Matsus had occurred under unusual and privileged conditions during the height of military tension over the islands, and I had spent a wintry day traversing the tiny and insignificant heap of rocks where the Chinese troops were stationed.

  Matsu, as I knew it, was about as indefensible militarily as a pile of rocks could be. It lay under the shadow of land-based batteries and could be neutralized at will. All the natives occupying it could have been evacuated in a couple of old liberty ships. It had no airfield, no substantial batteries of its own, no usable harbor, no worthy installations. Its only use, in time of military crisis, might be as a radar station providing help for American planes bombing the mainland, and it was even doubtful if it could be held for that purpose. The only conceivable way in which it could be held, if the Red Chinese wanted it badly enough, would be for the United States to use atomic bombs delivered from either the Seventh Fleet or from our great bases in Okinawa and Guam, and to do that implied the start of World War III. No one that I knew was ready to launch a nuclear war to save Matsu, which was patently not worth saving … so far as military considerations alone were concerned.