From Robert A. Taft to Watergate

...To this black cloud, however, there is a silver lining...

...Actually, however, the choice of Eisenhower over Taft, at Chicago on July 10, 1952, was a major milestone on the long road of our political evolution...

...This fear of change necessarily implies great faith in restrictive authority, even in police surveillance, to maintain the status quo...

...A serious trauma is to be expected as the unused brakes are belatedly applied to executive arrogance...

...He fully realized that while a mania for security promotes dictatorship it consequently damages the cause of liberty...

...There is, however, great and perhaps unrealized significance in the fact that Bob Taft's political courage and transcendant honesty for a time made him generally known as "Mr...

...The essential meaning of that catastrophe is not obscured by the ocean of publicity aroused...

...Are there any other elements in which an assertively Conservative Party might root...

...He was opposed to militarism because he knew it for an open door to national socialism...

...But in the United States, where social eminence and material wealth are so closely equated, less chivalrous characteristics tend to dominate...

...He meant by that remark not to scorn the assistance all intellectuals might give to the Party, but to make a distinction between Conservative gentlemen of intellect and left-wing intellectuals...

...From Robert A. Taft to IVatergate It is now a little over twenty-one years since Senator Robert A. Taft failed in his third and final effort to obtain the Republican nomination for the presidency...

...As perhaps our best-known British Conservative politician, Enoch Powell, has said, "Only in politics does personal experience make up so large a part of the material used to form judgments...

...The Conservative mind is historical (though to a degree ameliorative) and defensive...

...Now, we can well argue that the left-wing thinker is fundamentally 6 The Alternative November 1973...

...Johnson's biting reminder that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel...

...Libertarian is a clumsy word...

...Any such attempt is certain to arouse the antagonism of labor and probably agriculture, which with the secret ballot can always cast a majority of votes...

...In this instinctive reliance on governmental authority the conservative is curiously akin to the communist, who likewise considers it entirely proper to prevent change by the use of force...

...change was not apparent under Eisnehower, an honest apolitical figure who essentially marked time in office...

...Consumed by hubris a smooth and competent politician has irretrievably ruined his claim to veneration...

...But the true-blue conservative still considers massive expenditures on "defense" as being somehow less socialistic than parallel governmental outlays in the field of domestic welfare...

...Its final effect on persons and politics cannot yet be foretold...

...The phrase nob* lesse oblige is still meaningful for the remnants of European aristocracy...

...Nixon's untenably defensive posture, finding it "inoperative" as the charming euphemism of Mr...

...He cannot escape the ultimate responsibility, nor the fact that those guilty were the type of henchmen he wanted...

...In America, where there is no birthright elite, this assumption of superiority may take curious and often highly arrogant forms...

...That miniature flag in the buttonhole is too closely akin to Hitler's omnipresent swastika...

...Ziegler has it...

...It is the halfeducated conservative who displays a bumper-sticker saying: "America, Imve It or Leave It...

...Like Madison, Taft opposed all arbitrary power, which is endorsed, often with striking similarities, by both Conservatives and Socialists...

...Taft was bitterly, indeed viciously attacked by the leadership of organized labor for his effective role in passage, over Truman's veto, of the Taft-Hartley, so-called "Slave Labor," Act...

...An able and dynamic Republican President, virtually certain of easy reelection, nevertheless permitted the most unsavory tactics by his entourage in order to secure a Ja vote of National Socialist proportions...

...Conservative thinking, of course, has many fine attributes...

...It is subject to many cross currents, such as the conflicting positions of free-traders and protectionists...

...On his last essay Taft was outmaneuvered by Ike's lieutenants and then submerged by the "father image" of the popular war hero...

...Nor did the alteration surface in the disastrous Goldwater campaign...

...Nixon was personally cognizant of all the illegalities and "dirty tricks" involved is really a secondary matter...

...it is pessimistic by nature...

...it is optimistic by nature...

...One that is obvious is a rather craven fear of change, usually connected with personal anxiety about a threatened position or possession...

...Bob Taft was frequently called "Mr...

...But with the reduction of executive pretensions should come, quite quickly, that restoration of balance on which our federal system depends, along with that individual initiative which authentic liberalism has always served to promote...

...And there is no salvation from his present purgatory...

...Republican"--even as pusilanimous leadership cut him down...

...And for many radicals the GOP is quite simply the party of Big Business...

...But he was equally opposed to all other forms of plausible coercion...

...In European and Latin-American countries these elements have usually been the landed aristocracy, the church, or the military, sometimes all three linked together...

...Whatever about the other activities of the mind, a marked feature of politics is this--that intellectual activity is imposed on tendency and experience...

...But, before proceeding to those reasons, it is important to grasp something quite fundamental about the intellectual (defined now as somebody who is especially concerned with the contribution which can be made to politics by the independent activity of mental analysis) who is predisposed towards Conservatism, and his equivalent who is drawn to Socialism or any of the other creeds of the Left...

...Yet he was a strong party man, taking his Republicanism very seriously, and perhaps the most influential party leader the Senate has ever seen...

...But with Nixon, matured under Eisenhower, but more intelligent and less principled than his sponsor, the turn away from Taft's unflinching political morality became pronounced...

...Taft argued, however, that it is extremely difficult, in any democratic country, to build an enduring political machine primarily on business support...

...There are, I think, many reasons, most of them arising from British history: not all of them, however much Americans may envy the success of the Conservative Bow Group compared to the (relative) failure of the Ripen Society, are conducive to Conservatism considered as a coherent philosophy having a distinct relevance to modern political problems...

...The trouble with our conservative thinking is not that it is dishonest or insincere, but simply that it is inapplicable, as a reasoned political philosophy, for the United States...

...In their efforts to establish privilege for the presidency, to make it a monarchistic office, both Alexander Hamilton and John Adams failed...

...Justice was everything to him...

...too reminiscent of Dr...

...Taft can't win" was the parrot cry within his own party, which really sank the Ohio Senator...

...Now we see a rising generation happily recalling that under our system, as the Federalist Papers amply prove, political powers were separated precisely because they could be checked and balanced against each other...

...It was highly disagreeable for Aesop's bullfrog when he found that he could not inflate himself to the size of an ox...

...Whether this rectitude can be restored will be the underlying issue in choosing the Republican nominee in 1976...

...The leftwing mind is ameliorative and particularly disposed to attack...

...For the causes of a man being attracted to one stream of politics or another are not frivolous causes, even if they are instinctive...

...He was, therefore, no conservative but rather an outstanding exponent of that classical liberalism which James Madison, above all others, embedded in our sadly neglected Constitution...

...Big Business is certainly conservative, in the negative sense of opposing socialistic practice which it does not itself control...

...To all this mdlange of fundamentally emotional characteristics Bob Taft was both instinctively and intellectually opposed...

...That this is a misnomer is demonstrated by that party's triple repudiation of his leadership, at the GOP nominating conventions of 1940, 1948, and 1952...

...In this country the latter have cleverly captured the label of Liberal, so there is no longer any distinctive name to clarify the philosophy of political balance which Taft espoused...

...It is timely now to reflect on the validity and the value of that reiterated assertion...

...Here was a man of virtue, in the strict Roman sense of that fine word, disproving the sorry legend that to be a politician is to be tarnished...

...Moreover, business, so long as it remains competitive, will never exhibit lasting political solidarity...

...The military, fortunately, have never attempted to raise a Napoleon, though the electorate often shows a weakness for much-publicized generals...

...privilege nothing...

...Pawick Cosgrave The Mind of Toryism American friends continually ask me why it is that the political climate of British Conservatism seems much more amenable to the intellectual and intellectual activity than does the climate of American Republicanism...

...Xenophobic belief in "The American Century" is now happily at a discount...

...Republican" was dead, of disappointment many thought...

...An immigrant construction worker, eager to keep Negroes from diluting his tightly organized union, can in his limited field be just as conservative as any Wall Street tycoon...

...In the first two of these Willkie and then Dewey were chosen as the unsuccessful Republican standardbearers...

...So, well over a century later and partly because of Taft's opposition, did FDR, a superficial Democrat with many conservative traits...

...Whether Mr...

...This probably explains why The Alternative November 1973 5 folTner communists, disillusioned with the way they run the show in Russia, have been disproportionately active in the more malleable American conservative movement...

...Constitutionalist will scarcely serve for an electorate where the vast majority have never even read our organic law...

...Still another characteristic of conservatism is its belief in an elite and a consequent mistrust of democratic procedure...

...Certainly it turned the Republican Party away from any considered philosophy of government and towards a dubious opportunism which has reached its natural climax in all that Watergate implies...

...To my mind there are still some important reasons why a Republican of such eminence could not and would not be called conservative, and why he was indeed denounced by some as socialistic because he believed that a country as rich as ours should give moderate support to public education, public housing, and other welfare measl.tres...

...His party realized this and therefore proudly called him "Mr...

...Old Whig, preferred by F. A. Hayek in his discerning essay on "Why I Am Not A Conservative," requires historical knowledge possessed by few Americans...

...This trait is by no means confined to the Upper Crust...

...But this did not endear him to doctrinaire "conservatives" because he so resolutely refused to accept that classification...

...Republican," a title chosen for the recent solid biography of him by Professor James T. Patterson (reviewed elsewhere in this issue...

...But with confidence one may predict that the next Republican candidate for the presidency will be much more in the character of Bob Taft than is the present incumbent...

...For forty years now a few old-timers like myself have apprehensively watched the rapid enlargement of presidential power and the subordination of legislative, judicial, and local autonomy by self-serving claims of national security and executive privilege...

...There is further cause for optimism in the fact that so many nominal conservatives pointedly divorced themselves from Mr...

...In several discussions on the subject which I had with him the Senator argued that conservatism, in party government, is necessarily linked to some element in the population which is legally privileged and wishes to remain so...

...Where there is no firmly established church, keeping parishioners in the station to which God is said to have called them, the less mystical substitute of "law and order" must be invoked...

...And thus we come back to Robert A. Taft, a man of the center who could not be drawn into pitfalls on either right or left...

...Indeed, the more recent the acquisition of status the more pronounced the antagonism to its disturbance is likely to be...

...Almost he gave to that party not only the skillful leadership but also the spiritual magnitude that it had in Lincoln's day...

...He even doubted the applicability of conservative thought to American politics, because of the essentially revolutionary principles of our Constitution...

...And then, in a few short years, it plunged to Watergate...

...It is a tragedy in the antique Grecian mold...

...Where men of such great and varied talents could not undermine the federal balance it was unlikely that the Nixon-Agnew combine would succeed...

...The magnitude of this...

...So the American conservative, despite his loud disclaimers, is actually a believer in strong government, meaning in this country strongly centralized government...

...Bob Taft, certainly, was never under the thumb of business or any other organized interest and, sadly, this seems to have been his chief political weakness...

...In this country there is no established church, no artificial nobility and, since the defeat of the Confederacy, no landed aristocracy...

...Now, this is not a frivolous distinction-indeed, it is an essential one...

...Stanley Baldwin, one of the most electorally successful of British Conservative Prime Ministers, once observed that "the difference between a man of intellect and an intellectual is the same as the difference between a gentleman and a gent...

...So, for all not yet beyond college age, this occurrence may quite reasonably be seen as part of the insignificant trivia in American history...

...Not much more than a year later, "Mr...

...Watergate is no mere summer storm...