Eminentoes

...This is a series of apostasies largely overlooked by his admirers...

...If the prep schools of Democratic patron saints are subject to the Index expurgatorius, the policies cannot be far behind...

...Surely a more motley, ill-educated, solemn, and intense crew of Claghorns and Throttlebottoms could not be found in all of Christendom...

...His conduct, moreover, had raised not a few Democratic eyebrows...

...He was rewarded after the election with the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, a figurehead and at that time thankless position, but a matchless opportunity for self-aggrandizement...

...The scene, in all its horror, is already beginning to take shape: a massive hotel ballroom, festooned with banners and slogans, a sea of delirious adolescents, deafening rock band, so-and-so of NBC News ("and now the President-elect is making his way slowly to the podium"), the great man with his double-knit suit firmly buttoned in the middle, surrounded by lackeys and future sub-Cabinet officers, Mrs...

...He proved that if the conditions are right the near-impossible can be achieved, or at least approximated...

...For that I submit my own modest theory, placing Fred Harris at some juncture in the political tradition...

...Into that he threw himself with abandon...

...So it is, I think, with that vague and indefinable moment when a man decidesthat the crossroads of destiny is, in fact, under his feet, and he must in spite of all privations, poverty, a happy home, and a middling reputation, become President of the United States...

...Something of quality, at long last, has gone out ofstatesmanship...

...For most of his single term he compiled what might be charitably called a "mixed" record...

...The impetus may not be anything nearly so worthy as starvation...

...What, then, can we look forward to...

...Harris was born in Dust Bowl Oklahoma and worked his way through its state university and law school...

...Between extramarital copulating and nationwide speechmaking Fred was unable to stir the public's imagination...

...What gives him vitality, alas, is something so incidental as his hairdo...

...It is believed, for example, that Dr...

...Indeed, after the rise and maturity of our national institutions, after 200 years of self-government, how could we have arrived face-to-face with the present collection of White House aspirants...

...Surely, he reasoned, this was an occasion when, in Richard Nixon's phrase, the man and the moment came together...

...It is glorious to see what delusions of grandeur can do to otherwise mediocre minds...

...Of course, I cannot help but wonder what Franklin Roosevelt (Groton, Harvard) would think of it, or John Kennedy (Choate, Harvard), or Adlai Stevenson (Choate, Princeton...

...Fred may be playing the fool in 1976, but he will assuredly be the prophet with honor, if not the recipient of Doctorates of Law, in 1996...

...Once the moral imperative is clear, it would seem, everything else falls neatly into place...

...the prospect glimmers like a rainbow in the distance, and with a ladder built of cash, staff, and the willing suspension of disbelief, the rainbow can be mounted...

...She was described years ago as part Comanche, but with time and the growing chic of Indianism her fraction has grown progressively larger to the point where I now nearly expect to see her emerge from her office (a half-block from mine) dressed in warpaint, with feathers in her hair...

...This always takes the form of certain signs and code phrases, "Vice Presidential timber," a pleasant word from party elders, admiring articles in news magazines, in those days an invitation to one of Robert Kennedy's marathon dinners at Hickory Hill—perhaps even Ethel shoving one into the pool...

...There are less exalted callings, to be sure, but it appears that the Presidency has come to embody all that we as a nation see in and hope for ourselves...

...What next happened to Fred is the stuff of political lore...

...Supposing, then, that our national future is inscribed in his pudgy features, what can we profit from it...

...At any rate, Fred took them seriously, and in 1968 he abandoned his new and ostensible friends and served as co-chairman of Hubert Humphrey's delegate-hunting campaign...

...In our own time I ascribe this baleful influence to Eugene McCarthy, a man I otherwise admire, and his astonishing victories in 1968...

...Fred is no exception...

...Herbert Hoover came close, but Harris' line is unequivocally down the center...

...It is a spectacle that is, ultimately, disheartening...

...He is fond of saying, for instance, that it is about time we got the Choate and Groton graduates out of the conduct of our foreign policy...

...Of course, I say this as one who has been privy to sober conversations on the Presidential prospects of the likes of Julian Bond, and it is easy to become cynical about the extent to which political activity can be based on thin air...

...Whatever else we look for in politicians it is not often that we are forced to feed on such meager scraps as Fred Harris offers...

...What is worse, our system is such that we are practically assured of their absence...

...Of course, I believe also that Gresham's Law, a much-overused dictum, rather like Lord Acton's, explains a certain part of the course of Presidential history...

...This has become a reliable crowd-pleaser and is often quoted with approval by many Democrats...

...The Democratic Party, prostrate and broke, was sufficiently supine that Fred could cast a measurable shadow over its affairs, and it cannot be denied that he tried...

...Fred Harris and the Crossroads of Destiny I have never been able to decide whether political crusades are based on the force of an idea, or whether they come to pass because the troops and machinery are massed, ready to move, waiting for an initial shove...

...Whether his unusual grooming is calculated or not, it gives his candidacy a historical, tradition-minded veneer it might not otherwise have had...

...There is nothing surprising in that—in a democratic system some semblance of ambition is necessary to get ahead...

...Casting aspersions on customs and dignity, deriding learning, poking fun at supposed pomposities is nothing new in the American political tradition, as the late Richard Hofstadter so admirably pointed out...

...And, indeed, they are not...

...The social and political system that advanced the Fathers to the fore cannot ever be duplicated, and it is a proscription largely written into law...

...Because of his youth and, perhaps, because he withstood the Republican resurgence in 1966 (he was elected to an unexpired term) he began to be mentioned as a future prospect...

...This puts Harris in somewhat more respectable company than he might expect, or desire...

...This contrary, almost suicidal characteristic in rarefied circles was bound to have wider repercussions, and then political repercussions, and indeed it has...

...We have not had a moustachioed candidate since Thomas E. Dewey, although Harris sported one a few years ago...

...He did not seem to live a wholly blameless private life, and he was apt to do things like provide staff and office space for the activities of his wife LaDonna in behalf of American Indians...

...But it could not be any other way...

...X beaming and waving, "My fellow Americans, tonight we rededicate ourselves...

...One of the more obvious signs of a ruling class on the run is its anxious identity with the elements most strongly opposed to it, witness the professors who could, and I imagine can, always be relied upon to make cause with their students most anxious to destroy the university...

...He is, in fact, the only candidate since Al Smith so to do...

...For Fred Harris, the call to greatness came at a time when he was in a unique position to act on it, and when his party needed a cachet upon which to hang itsideological hat...

...Surrounding himself with a regiment of former Humphrey advisors, he created committees, councils, commissions, churned out press releases, hosted dinners, threw into gear all the insufferable machinery of modern self-promotion...

...I haven't the gall to ask Averell Harriman (Groton, Yale) what he thinks, but am pleased to report in any case that none of the current cam14 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 paigners carry so polluted a record on their conscience...

...Ideas, however, are larger than men, and while Fred today seems nearly a caricature of a Presidential candidate, his bizarre ideas are treated with, if not respect, then at least straight-faced attention...

...After a suitably hard-scrabble and Rotarian apprenticeship he found himself in 1965, at the age of 34, in the United States Senate...

...It is for that reason, then, that I am persuaded Fred Harris, one-term Senator from Oklahoma, two-time candidate for the Presidency, is, far from being the maverick of the pack, in fact the logical consequence of our political tendencies and standards, the deadly precursor of things to come...

...Very imperial, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...Of such incidents, apparently, are great notions born...

...A friend of mine, in a much better position to observe and judge Harris than I, suggests that his whole career has been motivated by ambition...

...He even accepted the requisite illegal contribution from the Gulf Oil Corporation, an organization he now of course abominates—perhaps they didn't give him enough...

...He is certainly running against the past five Democratic Administrations, not to mention the greater part of his own career...

...He even voted with most of the Deep Southerners on various civil rights issues...

...As his camper makes its royal progress across the land, I trust political observers might agree...

...It is a gathering cyclone in which, I fear, we are presently caught in the middle...

...I, happily, was a witness to the event...

...It never seems to matter how hopeless or foolish the prospect of success may be...

...It is the character of his ambition that is so deplorable...

...One soon learns the signs at a glance: styrofoam coffee cups, ties askew, mimeograph machine merrily clacking, hushed invocations of "the Senator" or "the Governor" or whomever...

...Fred Harris is only sticking his wet finger in the wind...

...In the end, angry creditors proved more compelling than the American People and by December 1969 Fred was traded in for the subsequent choice of the more familiar and trustworthy Lawrence O'Brien...

...He traded his Senate seat for financial support of his six-week 1972 Presidential campaign, huffing and puffing around the country, continually inflating the New Populism balloon...

...he was the unwitting inspiration for the respectable notion that anyone, regardless of whatever, can and should run for President...

...Much attention has been paid in this bicentennial year to the unhappy contrast between the Founding Fathers and our present leaders, the present leaders not coming out so well...

...It is very easy to speak with bland disapproval of "privilege" these days, and Fred has helped pave the way...

...What can it mean but that we have come so far and fallen so low...

...What is ironic is that, by so doing, he should also be poking it in the face of his own party...

...Supported by the Oklahoma oil industry, he always voted in their interest, stopping along the way to compile a notably anti-labor roll call, and even voted against what must surely have been the essential Great Society measure, Medicare...

...Fred Harris is both the symptom and the disease...

...it can be, and has been for that matter, the single tax, lesbian liberation, a square deal for the working man, a square deal for the businessman, hot school lunches, rent control, moral rearmament, etc.—indeed, all the great issues and national controversies that have stirred and engaged some of the liveliest intellects and public philosophers of our time...

...If the intern had not known his alphabet Fred Harris might today be propounding something quite different...

...An eager young intern was dispatched from the Chairman's conference room to look up the word "populism" in the dictionary, and a few days later a program for the future was presented to the public—"The New Populism," a phrase now so well-worn and devoid of meaning it is instructive to recall its humble origins...

...I don't think I am particularly bold in saying he will not win this year, or ever win The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 13 at all, but he is cast in such an inexorable mold that as long as the center is collapsing, it is today's nascent Fred Harrises who will fill the breach...

...Campaigns, under these circumstances, have come and gone...

...For Fred, it was downhill ever after...

...Alas, it didn't take...

...When we find ourselves sagely discussing Fred on other terms—watch out, America...

...He has made the tactical error of wearing a ten-gallon hat and telling an estimable portion of the electorate to go to Hell, but I have no doubt that he represents the incipient dogmatism and self-hatred of the modern American Left...

...When he did, incidentally, he parted his hair on the side: two aberrations, it would seem, exceed the limit...

...LaDonna, incidentally, is a curious sidelight to Fred's career...

...Of course, for myself, this is the only basis upon which he can be judged...

...might say...

...I doubt, however, if they will...

...To be sure, it sets him apart from the pack, and I like to think it is the only thing about him that has set the public's imagination on fire...

...Townsend concocted his $30every-other-Thursday scheme when he came across an elderly woman rummaging through a garbage can...

...Needless to say, they are scarcely so indulgent in other cases...

...He is the only candidate of either party who parts his hair in the middle...

...This fall we are faced with the appalling prospect of electing one of them Chief Executive of the land, of rewarding, in bald terms, his own vain, sanctimonious plans...

...It is not usual, however, that the intellectual community should debase itself so abjectly before the tenets of yahooism, as it began to do in the 1960s...