Report of the County Chairman Page 15

  “Like what?” Booz asked.

  “Like the coroner getting arrested,” Mulligan explained. “It broke just before the election and won the county for us.”

  “Coroners like that don’t come along too often,” Sam Thompson lamented.

  “I have faith that something’ll turn up,” Mulligan insisted. “As county chairman I have to have faith.”

  Incredible as it seems, at that moment the phone rang. Mulligan took the call, gasped, and went into a private room. In a moment he came out, his normally florid face drained of blood, to ask for Oscar Booz. The two consulted in secret for some time, then appeared together. Mulligan’s face was still white and I assumed some tragedy had occurred.

  “Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “I want you to take pencils and paper, because this is too fantastic to digest all at once. Ed Boyer, the Republican chairman of the county commissioners, has just been arrested by the Pennsylvania State Police and charged with extorting $4,000 from a merchant and using part of it to bribe a federal marshal from performing his duties.”

  We weighed the improbability of such a story’s breaking at that particular moment, and when we had digested the enormity of the commissioner’s act, as charged, and its woeful timing so far as the election was concerned, nobody spoke for some moments. Finally Sam Thompson observed, “Today I have the feeling that God is a Democrat.”

  In the weeks that followed, the Boyer case exploded all over the papers, and if two Democratic script writers had set out to compose the perfect case to injure the Republicans, they could not have created a better one than the one that now unfolded. For the two Republican commissioners fell at each other’s throats, with outlandish charges and countercharges. No Democrat was required to say a word beyond John Mulligan’s frequently expressed pious hope that the county would promptly clear up the mess, since all decent citizens were outraged by what the two Republican commissioners were disclosing. Boyer charged his fellow Republican commissioner with having personally engineered the plot at the covert direction of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association, and after that bombshell I was unable to follow the intricacies of the case, except that whenever local Democrats found themselves cornered during the election they invoked coroners and commissioners, always to loud applause.

  There were two aspects of the Boyer case, however, that disturbed me deeply, and had I been asked during the campaign I would have stated so, even though to do so might have worked against my party. Ed Boyer was a strong, able younger man from Levittown, and when he elbowed his way into high Republican ranks there were many disgruntled persons in the northern end of the county who predicted, “Hell, this man Boyer isn’t even a native. He grew up in Philadelphia and moved in during the Levittown boom. Mark my words, he’s not an old-time Republican of the kind you can trust. We’ll rue the day we elected that one.” Therefore, when he was apprehended in a suspicious negotiation I am sorry to say that just as many Republicans were glad to see him get caught as Democrats. One good Republican told me, “Well, in one way, it’s a blessing. It settles forever the question of electing any more Levittowners to office in this county.” And many Democrats felt the same way. Thus both parties lost in the Boyer case, and lost grievously, because it drove yet another wedge between the urban south and rural north, between the newcomers and the old-timers.

  The second reason why the Boyer case distressed me, and why I never mentioned it, not even when it might have helped my cause to do so, was that he was apprehended on a matter which should never have constituted a crime. Pennsylvania, like many other disturbed areas, had recently started enforcing a long-outmoded Blue Law which curtailed the right of stores to stay open on Sunday. In large measure it was directed against Jewish merchants and gentile supermarket operators who worked in suburban areas, and was another in the long chain of exasperations between the newcomers who wanted to shop in one convenient suburban operation on Sundays and the old-timers who said, “Let ’em come into the town on weekdays, like everybody else.” The law was unfair, unwise, and unenforceable. It cried out for politicians to make deals with the enforcing agencies so that this store or that could remain open without fear of harassment. The crime that Boyer was charged with was arranging such protection. He claimed he turned the collected funds over to his party. The party insisted that he had not done so but had operated on his own. Regardless of the truth, the law that was involved was a bad one, and I for one was sorry to see Ed Boyer charged with crime because of it. Put more bluntly, I sympathized with him and refused to use his embarrassment to my advantage.

  One of the prime values I derived from the campaign was the frequent opportunity I had to share speaking platforms with Pennsylvania’s senior senator, Joseph Clark. In the long talks that preceded and followed these affairs I discovered what an admirable man Clark was. Originally a wealthy Republican, he had like Averill Harriman and others discovered that his strong interest in good government and the proper solution of social problems threw him more and more toward the Democratic persuasion, so finally he made the leap. First as mayor of Philadelphia and then as senator he brought distinction to our state, and during the campaign when people spoke, as they often did, with contempt of politics I always cited Pennsylvania’s senior senator, and wondered how many men of comparable stature and integrity my questioner associated with in his profession.

  I do not mean to stress the senior senator from my state at the expense of his Republican junior, Hugh Scott. I had first met this tall, floridly handsome hatchet man under extraordinary circumstances. I was in the cellar of a Honolulu warehouse looking at some old Japanese prints when the custodian said, “There’s a man over in the other corner you might like to meet.” I was led through cobwebs to where a man of obvious discernment was bending over a tray full of Chinese ceramics. My guide said, “I want you to meet one of America’s foremost experts on Chinese pottery, Senator Hugh Scott, of Pennsylvania.”

  The senator looked up, smiled ingratiatingly and said, “You’re sworn to secrecy. Don’t ever tell my constituents.”

  We had an amiable talk about politics, during which he confided, “The reason I’m down here is that I’m hiding out.”

  “From what?” I asked with some surprise.

  “From the outraged leaders of the Republican party in Pennsylvania,” he laughed.

  “But I thought the Republican party elected you to the Senate only a week ago.”

  “Well,” he admitted reflectively, “I did win, and on the morning after the election the party issued a statement claiming that my victory proved that the Republican party in Pennsylvania was as vital as ever. In the next edition of the papers I announced that my victory proved no such thing, because the party had fought me in the primaries, had worked against me in the general, had grudgingly contributed only $5,000 to my fund, and noised it around that they didn’t want me to win. After the interview I hopped on a plane and here I am, hiding out in Hawaii.”

  I found the senator a delightful conversationalist, so that when, during this 1960 election, I was invited to debate against him I accepted with pleasure. I knew him to be a very tough campaigner and a man most tricky in debate, but I thought I might be able to hold my own simply because in defending Kennedy I had much more to work on than he had in defending Nixon. I was to be surprised.

  When we met at the studio Senator Scott was all smiles and recalled with reminiscent relish our meeting in the Honolulu cellar. Station representatives handed us copies of the innocuous introductions they intended using to get the debate started and asked if we had any changes. I looked at mine. It said nothing and was in no way offensive. Scott looked at his and asked, “Could I make one small change?” A moment later we were on the air and the announcer read my trivial introduction. Then he changed over to the one Scott had rewritten for himself, and out came a slashing attack on the Democrats, a bell-ringing defense of the Republicans. That was only the first blow.

  Throughout the debate, whenever I presented carefull
y chosen and checked figures, Senator Scott amiably destroyed them by smiling at me blandly and saying, “Unfortunately, you are using the wrong figures. The correct ones, which I have here, show exactly the opposite.” When I cited accurate accounts of votes in the Senate he, with childlike sincerity, pointed out that he had been there and I was all mixed up again. When I wanted to talk seriously, he trotted out a very funny story, and all in all he paraded every debater’s device that would discredit and disarm me. He won by a mile. Nevertheless, I enjoyed fighting with Hugh Scott because he had one clear and apparent aim: to annihilate Democrats, and in a campaign year I can respect such motivation.

  But what I particularly enjoyed during the campaign was meeting with others who were working directly on the election, whether they were for Kennedy or Nixon, and I should now like to identify those moments when in the company of such workers I became assured that Kennedy would win. They were three in number, and I remember each with special clarity, although curiously enough I cannot remember who provided the first and perhaps the most substantial of the moments.

  I had gone to New York to meet Senator Kennedy in relation to a committee of artists and scientists who wanted the privilege of endorsing his candidacy, and while we were sitting about waiting, a newspaperman whose name I didn’t catch, was regaling us with an account of how Lyndon Johnson was conducting his campaign in the South. I had long been an admirer of Johnson and it irritated me considerably when at most of my meetings people pointed out that Ambassador Lodge was so much finer a choice than Johnson for the Vice Presidency and that Lodge was helping his ticket while Johnson was hurting his. This I never believed, and in the later stages of the campaign when the rumors became virulent I had the pleasure of telling Senator Johnson that I was one northern liberal who was convinced that he was adding enormous strength to our ticket. I need not explain, therefore, how thoroughly I enjoyed the following monologue:

  “I’ve been campaigning down South with Senator Johnson, and, man, he does things his own way. He blows into a state capital and first thing he does is convene the two senators and the governor. They all pour big drinks and Johnson says, ‘Now, Senator Buford, I understand exactly why you can’t find it in your heart to come out for the Democratic ticket in this election, and believe me, I sympathize with you. There are many things about that Los Angeles platform that I can’t abide, either, and I appreciate the fact that you have to come back to your people in 19 and 62 for reelection, and you can’t do it if you stand on that platform in this year of 19 and 60. So you certainly aren’t going to hear any rebuke from me, because I understand fully the political pressures you’re under.’

  “Then Good Ol’ Lyndon pours everybody another drink and he turns to the other senator and says, ‘Baxby, old fellow, I would have been amazed if you had been able to support our national ticket, what with Mr. Kennedy being a Catholic and all that. I appreciate the difficult situation this fact puts you in down here with the churches barking at your heels and the preachers lambasting you on Sunday, and I tell my friends it would be a miracle if the South was reacting any way different from the way they are reacting, and, Baxby, I’ve frequently cited your case as a case in point. I simply don’t see how a God-fearing man can be called upon, not even by his party, to vote against his own conscience nor to advise his neighbors to do so. If a man can’t respect the dictates of his own conscience, he’s not much of a man, I say.’

  “Next the senator from Texas looks directly at the governor of this sovereign state and says, ‘Governor Beauregard, I would be the last man in the Democratic party to come to you and ask you to change your beholden opinion about this election. Because I have got to acknowledge that our party has made it very difficult for you men on the local scene, and I will so acknowledge publicly if I’m called upon to do so. I refuse to see how a group of party experts in Washington or New York can expect to interpret for us in the South what we’ve got to do in the South. How can they be expected to understand our separate and special problems? That’s why, Governor Beauregard, you find me so sympathetic, because every problem you are now facing I’ve had to face in the past, and I know better than most men what is involved. So if you thought that I came to put pressure on you to modify your public statements about the present election, put such thoughts from your mind. I’m a practical politician and I appreciate what you’re up against here at home.’

  “With this reassurance, repeated several times and in different ways, the first two hours pass. But in the third hour Good Ol’ Lyndon pours hisself a third round and he says expansively, ‘Now, gentlemen, I most particularly don’t want you to feel sorry for me nor for Mr. Kennedy. If we lose the election in November we surely aren’t going to be out of work. I’ll be reëlected senator and presumably will go back to Washington as majority leader of the Senate with enhanced powers because of the national race. And Mr. Kennedy won’t be out of a job either, because he just stays on in the Senate as titular head of the party and as one of the most powerful voices in the nation, and, Senator Buford and Senator Baxby, I just don’t see how, if your defection is the cause of our defeat, you’re ever going to get one little old bill through that Senate. Governor Beauregard, you say you have to have that new airport and you want to keep the Army base down here. How do you think you’re going to get such bills through the Senate if Mr. Kennedy and I are sitting there solely because you didn’t produce the vote that would have elected us?’

  “There’s a long silence, and then Good Ol’ Lyndon says expansively, ‘Gentlemen, there’s a lot of work to be done in this state before November 8 and I feel increasingly that you are the men to see that it gets done.’ ” The newspaperman stopped, looked at us and said, “If I had to bet right now I’d bet that the only major southern Democrat that fails to speak out publicly for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket will be Harry Byrd. The Democrats are going to carry the Deep South, South Carolina and all of them except Florida, and the man they have to thank for the victory is Lyndon Johnson.”

  We questioned him on many aspects of the story, but he stood firm: “Johnson is going to carry the South. He’s the silent hero of this election and it looks as if he might carry Texas, too.” From that exciting moment on I never wavered in my belief that our side would win a majority of the votes in the South. With them, it seemed a good bet that we would win the nation, as well. My view was not popular with northern experts, especially those who felt that Lodge had helped the Republican ticket whereas Johnson had hurt the Democrats, but the more I heard from the South and Texas and the more I watched Ambassador Lodge’s amiable fumbling, the more convinced I became that Jack Kennedy’s selection of Lyndon Johnson as his running mate had been one of the master strokes of the campaign.

  That we were going to win the big industrial states of the North I first became aware under dramatic circumstances. On Saturday, October 22, I was driving my wife to an important rally in northern Connecticut, where I was to speak to the egghead population, and we stopped in a small town to get breakfast. Eagerly we looked for a copy of the New York Times so that we could catch up on what had been happening in the big states, but all copies had been sold and we were forced to buy a day-old copy of a paper which we do not normally see in rural Pennsylvania, the tabloid New York Daily News, and as we rode toward Connecticut, my wife read me the political dispatches, and after the usual material she said, “Here’s something interesting, the first returns in the Daily News straw vote for New York. It’s been pretty good in the past.”

  “Don’t be worried about the first figures,” I assured her. “It’s a strongly Republican paper and I think they doctor their figures.”

  “These are nothing to worry about,” she assured me. “It says here that on the basis of the first returns Kennedy leads 51.1 to 48.9.”

  “What?” I shouted.

  “Keep your voice down,” she cautioned. “That cop’ll think you’re nuts. It says here Kennedy 51.1 to Nixon 48.9.”

  Then it all came to me. “What’s
happened,” I explained carefully, “is that the editors have published only the New York City figures so that tomorrow when the upstate figures come in heavily Republican they’ll be able to headline a big swing to Nixon. It’s an old trick they pull every year.”

  “Very interesting,” my wife replied, “but these are mostly upstate figures.”

  “They’re what?” I bellowed. I slowed down and then pulled off to the side of the road, and there I saw for myself that the first upstate figures, from traditionally Republican strongholds, showed that Kennedy not only had hacked President Eisenhower’s lead of 1952 and 1956, but was actually ahead. I sat still for a moment, then asked, “Do you know what this means?”

  “Explain it to me,” my wife said, and we drove on.

  All that long day in Connecticut, at all of my speeches, I thought of those tantalizing figures, and the more I thought the more convinced I became that this was an editorial trick. It had to be, so in my speeches I made no reference to what was rather striking political news. When the next day’s figures were released they showed, under the headline, “Kennedy Leads in Our Straw Poll by 5 Percent—And That Ain’t Hay,” that the score had now grown to 52.7 to 47.3 in our favor.

  Still I could not believe the evidence of my own eyes, for by all accounts New York was not going to be as easy as that. After all, Nixon, Rockefeller and Eisenhower had all made strong pitches in New York, for it was the great prize, and I knew the fighting for votes was brazen. It was in this mood that I returned to Connecticut for another round of speeches, this time to stay with the state’s remarkable Democratic boss, John Bailey of Hartford. After a long evening during which Chester Bowles gave one of the finest expositions of a desirable foreign policy that I have ever heard, we retired to the Bailey study to talk politics and wait for a phone call from New York.