Eminentoes

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...Fred is no exception...

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

...might say...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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 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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...