Jackson's Image Problem
GORDON, WALTER R.
Washington-USA JACKSON'S IMAGE PROBLEM BY WALTER R. GORDON Washington I spent a day recently in the offices of Senator Henry M. Jackson, talking to his political and policy aides about the...
...and Jackson tying Ford one percentage point lower...
...An April Harris poll showed the perennial favorite, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, defeating President Gerald R. Ford (50-42...
...In 1974 he campaigned for a broad spectrum of Democrats, including such liberal congressmen as Father Robert F. Drinan of Massachusetts and Abner Mikva of Illinois...
...posture...
...Another lambasted "Henry's nauseating public neurosis about the future of the Western world...
...One must conclude that they have reason to be...
...Jackson aides deny heatedly, and with considerable persuasiveness, that the Senator has sold out his views to win the backing of the Democratic Left...
...Like the Nixon pols, too, the Jackson staff seems more worried about Governor George Wallace of Alabama than any of the more mainstream politicians in the race...
...That, of course, makes detente impossible in any real sense...
...He wanted it delivered privately to the Arab leaders rather than publicly, and he thought it should have been backed up by hard contingency planning for military deployments so the warning would carry conviction...
...Elsewhere his support is holding up...
...Yet in the next breath it is suggested that, given Soviet intentions, equivalency would be inadequate...
...In part, at least, this may merely be a reflection of the feud between the Senator and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger...
...He added, "Mood and personal feelings are not the way to make policy...
...Indeed, Jackson seems to be encountering major problems in his effort to expand his constituency...
...And through whatever process, his views are diverging less than ever from the party's mainstream...
...The Jackson position is that while the Soviet Union is not seeking a first-strike nuclear capability (one that would enable it to launch a successful surprise attack and escape devastation itself), it is seeking a "counterforce" or "damage limiting" capability...
...The dislike of Kissinger is now so deep that policy differences seem almost peripheral...
...Perhaps more important, the effect of the Jackson offensive was to make him appear to be far more critical of the Secretary than he actually was...
...Yet developing the ability to limit one's own damage by destroying opposing missiles before they have been fired is an expensive and difficult feat that would hardly be worth attempting if it were not actually the essence of a first-strike capability...
...A direct mail fund-raising effort appears well organized and successful...
...The candidate is perceived of as cool, aloof, above the battle, too busy demonstrating his competence (his strongest card) to engage fully in the hurlyburly of battle...
...In 1973 he backed American military aid to Indochina, in 1974 he voted to reduce the Administration's aid request, and this year he has been in the vanguard of the opposition to further military assistance...
...Shifts of this kind have led critics of Jackson to charge him with demagoguery on vital national security issues-a charge that the staff angrily rejects...
...Similar confusions abound...
...Asked about Jackson's model for a secretary of state, the staff refused to name names (although one aide finally came up with Dean Acheson), but there was general endorsement of the opinion that "His every quality would be exactly the opposite of Kissinger's...
...The abhorrence of the Jackson people for everything involving Kissinger far surpasses the normal rivalries that are the daily meat and potatoes of politicians here...
...For so far they have not found a strategy to project a clear image of their man as practicing something more than politics as usual...
...A careful examination of the Senator's recent statements in fact shows few direct contradictions with earlier ones, except on Vietnam, and a lot of people have been doing contortions on that subject lately...
...Wallace is repeatedly referred to as the best known contender among the voters, the best organized and the man with the best fund-raising operation-the last being regarded as the key element of the early campaign...
...And for the Jackson of 1975, as for the Nixon of 1972, the political campaign has led to a fuzzing of once clear-cut positions...
...Still, among many, in and out of the Democratic party there lingers a deep distrust of Jackson-of the Senator from Boeing, and of the hawk whose stridency and reputation for pressing adversaries hard could prove a threat to world peace...
...A February test mailing drawn from 60 massive lists cost $77,000 and netted $132,000, which will be matched by $132,000 in Federal funds...
...Nevertheless, on the policy plane the Middle East seems to take precedence...
...But he is also specifically spoken of as sharing "the strengths of Nixon": a strong foreign policy orientation together with the "ability to do the job...
...Jackson's staff dismisses such fear as "more apparent than real," confined to a small segment of the electorate...
...The trouble with this was that it ignored two of Kissinger's three intended audiences, the Europeans and the American public...
...Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine tying him (45-45...
...He has generally favored the B-1 bomber in the past, but now he wants to take a "close look" at it...
...It is not entirely clear, though, what Jackson's reaction is to the concept itself...
...Later, reviewing my clippings of previous campaigns I had covered, in 1968 and 1972, I realized what disturbed me: the recurring parallels between the Jackson preprimary campaign and the early Nixon reelection effort as it was gathering momentum in the pre- Watergate spring and summer of 1972...
...It is, rather, more a matter of an attitude-some might say a cynicism-that one had perhaps naively hoped would not be with us in '76...
...Intense personal animosity toward the Secretary is pervasive and is accompanied by unmasked sneers and imprecations...
...Moreover, because the appearance of strength is no less important than the reality, overwhelming nuclear power is necessary lest there be any possible misreading of the U.S...
...The polls are less encouraging...
...Let me hasten to make clear that I do not mean to imply any illegal, underhanded or corrupt activity on the part of the Washington Senator or his staff members...
...The Jewish community continues to be solidly behind him...
...Washington-USA JACKSON'S IMAGE PROBLEM BY WALTER R. GORDON Washington I spent a day recently in the offices of Senator Henry M. Jackson, talking to his political and policy aides about the Democratic Presidential campaign, and I came away troubled by a feeling I could not at first identify...
...Yet time and again his aides raise the subject on their own initiative, and they are clearly defensive about it...
...A leading Jackson strategist who has been close to the Senator for 20 years told me, "Issues are only grist for the mill, and people, in my judgment, are looking at the mill and not the grist...
...With the decision of the AFL-CIO to sit out the selection of a Democratic candidate, inspired partly by Jackson's recent foreign policy pronouncements, he has lost his most important power base...
...Upon closer examination, it turns out that Jackson did not mean the statement should never have been made at all-only that it should have been made differently...
...We don't make any secret of the way we feel about Kissinger," one staffer laughed...
...The Senator, for instance, was critical of Kissinger's not-so-veiled threat of armed intervention in the Arab world should some actual "strangulation" of the industrialized world result from a renewed oil boycott...
...Jackson is for a "strong" defense budget, but he voted for cuts last year and has not taken any overall position this year...
...As a Jackson staff member put it, "What we have now is the Soviet definition of peaceful coexistence...
...Many commentators interpreted this as a rejection of saber rattling...
...In a closely related argument, the Jackson position on arms reduction -recalling the two sides of the divisive debate of 1969-is that there should be equivalency of strategic weapons between the Soviet Union and the United States...
...The word "Presidential" is frequently used to describe his demeanor...
...Nonetheless, the Jackson stand on a wide range of foreign and defense questions-the areas of his acknowledged expertise and his greatest forcefulness-are becoming often muddled and sometimes undermined by profound logical contradictions...
...In another echo of the not too distant past, Jackson people speak of the Senator as a leader handicapped by an uncharismatic manner...
...The Russians have an insurmountable military advantage on the Eurasian land mass in conventional terms, it is pointed out, and will feel free to use, or threaten to use, this might if it is not deterred by American nuclear weapons...
...Here again, however, the Jackson approach does not suffer from conveying the consistency that Ralph Waldo Emerson once dismissed as "the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines...
...It is a point of sensitivity due to the political setback the Senator has suffered on the labor front...
...Such contradictions exist, for example, in the case of weapons policy...
...An underlying assumption of Jackson thinking is that the Soviets are trying, in his words, to become the "predominant force" in the world...
...Issues, thought by some voters to be the vehicles available to the candidate for demonstrating his Presidential attributes, appear to be viewed as of negligible importance...
...Now, as then, politics and issues seem to exist in separate worlds and be subject to different levels of calculation...
Vol. 58 • May 1975 • No. 10
