The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Columnist's Candidate I suspect that professional newspaper columnists have never enjoyed the prominence in this country that they enjoy today. Each...
...How, among other things, the Republican party would have been born he did not bother to explain...
...The secret is rather simple: whip up hate for the Democrats...
...But that piece of inspired analysis is not what I have selected for my text today...
...He has his information, it would appear, straight from God: The Democrats have done everything all wrong all along and have drawn down upon themselves the rightful contumely of all rightminded citizens—and that's that...
...He—and Lawrence with him—fears that the Republican faithful will, in their simplicity, go astray and fail to nominate him as their candidate for the Presidency...
...Certainly, Lawrence's sense of history is very interesting, not to say curious...
...And he makes clear how to avoid it...
...If the South had only been allowed to remain in the Union while retaining its slaves, it seems, everything would have gone along without a ripple...
...The result, sadly, will be that the GOP will then have no one to oppose Lyndon Johnson, except some non-Republican such as Governor Rockefeller...
...What Senator Goldwater and David Lawrence are now attempting is a hop-skip-and-jump back into 1929-33...
...Perusing their lucubrations, one cannot help wondering in what company they go browsing around for their ideas...
...Perhaps it might not be a bad thing at that if Barry Goldwater were nominated and the people given a chance to decide between 1929 and 1964...
...What I have chosen instead appeared in the same edition of my paper...
...it was an illustrious example of one of David Lawrence's political columns...
...Columnist Lawrence will allow such a tragedy to take place only over his dead body...
...The new President, after all, cannot be branded with such unpleasant epithets as "intellectual...
...Neither, for that matter, does he follow any particular logic...
...Lawrence's subject was Barry Goldwater and his title read: "Goldwater No MeTooer—Don't Count Him Out...
...The question of whether or not the assassination of President Kennedy was a piece of good luck for the Republicans aside, it is obvious that Kennedy would have been easier to beat than Johnson...
...And in Lawrence's case it is convenient to forget the conduct of the United States government during its crushing depressions...
...When that particular depression swept across America, the government's initial response was to stand back and allow it to run itself out, much as during the depression of the 1870s...
...What is impressive about Lawrence's pitch to the Republicans on behalf of Barry Goldwater is that the columnist doesn't care a jot about polls or primaries...
...In this he does indeed resemble his ideal candidate, the Senator from Arizona...
...But they cannot deny, or at least they are not able to do so very convincingly, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought great humanity to the government of this country...
...even "liberal" does not seem altogether fitting...
...Roosevelt and the New Deal intervened and, as is well known, with considerable success...
...True, they may dislike President Johnson less than they did President Kennedy...
...That, however, did not last long...
...Both have an enormous capacity to eliminate large stretches of history when it is politically convenient to do so...
...Each morning and evening the dailies in my own town, the Wilmington, Delaware Morning News and the Evening Journal—both, as is the present custom, published by the same firm —print eight or 10 pieces by recognized national columnists...
...Common people, according to Lawrence, just naturally dislike Democrats anyway...
...A while back, for instance, one of them submitted a neat little editorial in which he expressed sympathy for Abraham Lincoln for having been so thoughtless and naive as to fight the Civil War and emancipate the Negroes...
...Since that time a great many Republicans have made much of the fact that FDR's New Deal did not completely put an end to the effects of the depression...
...His mind is pretty much a blank, for example, on a period he himself not so long ago lived through: the depression of 1929...
...But Johnson, whom Lawrence seems to give little credit for political savvy, is making the terrible mistake of continuing the Kennedy program...
...The Lawrence column was really a sermon which ran something like this: The charming Senator Goldwater is worried...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 6
