A Question of Character
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN A Question of Character Politics are in style again, and it's down and dirty time here in the disco dive where the candidates, their advisors, friends, relatives, and...
...Is that a touch of the trimmer one notes in Howard Baker's record...
...There's the plumpish secretary who claims to have had concourse in a closet with Warren Harding...
...Does the fault lie in the character of the McGovern campaign or in the character of the American voter...
...All the candidates have been in full public view for years...
...Or do we...
...When the news began to circulate that Rosa-lynn was playing a leading part in formulating strategy for her husband, the depth of his problem was sounded...
...What are we to deduce from the fact that Adlai was divorced and Rocky went straying...
...phew, what a stink of booze and cee-gars...
...Now, to be sure, there are candidates who reek so that to vote for them, whatever their expressed views, is just stupid...
...John, Jerry and George John Connally has been acquitted of the wheeling-dealing crime with which he was charged...
...Rosalynn, Lillian and Amy Let us agree that drunken spouses, aberrant children and even low-minded pals have little to do with a person's fitness for the White House...
...Are they comparing notes on the pleasures of sobriety...
...What's that you're mumbling...
...Because he did not try hard enough to rescue the young woman...
...And right next to them, by gum, the brothers of Presidents...
...Oh, Teddy, are you less pure than Jimmy...
...There's Tom Jefferson's mulatto friend...
...How nice for them both...
...Lyndon's brother and Dick's brother and, yes, Billy Carter himself, belly button exposed and expounding on international affairs...
...but has he in fact shown a more deficient character than his colleagues...
...Anyhow, what signal of Senator Kennedy's ability to govern are we to draw from Chappaquiddick...
...What principles exactly, please...
...Does Ronald Reagan's record betray a want of compassion...
...Franklin Roosevelt, it is said, had a mistress of sorts...
...How hard is hard enough...
...See over there, far away from the bar, Joan and Betty and Mamie...
...Hi, Bert Lance...
...Clearly George McGovern is a man of principle, and he was demolished by the unprincipled Nixon...
...Speak up, Teddy...
...What can they have in common...
...If so, scratch Alexander Haig...
...Is it our character that keeps failing us...
...Can it be that Jerry Brown's record bespeaks opportunism...
...one may find his health-care plan a touch expansive...
...my, what a cute tyke she's holding...
...All right, that may be farfetched, but what are we talking about when we talk about character...
...Can it be that the experience has made a better man of him, a better potential President...
...One may not care for all his votes...
...Maybe an IQ test would be more useful...
...Is the test of Chappaquiddick the right test...
...Is character of more importance than intelligence or policy...
...Yet in the news of the Presidential campaign that will be inundating the nation during the year ahead, questions of character will abound...
...Who knows whither Barry Gold-water, that repository of character, would have led the nation...
...Yet must one vote against him...
...And over there, doing the hustle, are the male pals of Presidents...
...Richard Nixon was assuredly such a one...
...Hovering over the assemblage is a great, damp spirit...
...The skeletons have emerged from the closets...
...See those two young blades huddling in the corner there, near the men's room...
...The next time we are tempted to select a Presidential candidate by the respectability of his associates, the propriety of his loved ones, or the lack of blemishes on his character, let us take pause and reflect upon the pure, unblemished soul of Herbert Hoover...
...Soon it will be Miz Lillian who is giving her boy the counsel of the ages, and then Miz Amy bringing youth's wisdom to bear...
...But whatever his failure in this predicament, what does it presage for the Presidency...
...He cheated on a test at Harvard and he let a girlfriend drown and then muddied the waters...
...But how have his failings of character affected his career in the Senate...
...But the majority of today's candidates are, characterwise, somewhere between Warren Harding and Abe Lincoln, and will have to be judged more on what they say and how they say it, on what they have done and promise to do, than by the arcane art of characterology...
...Do we want President Connally to demonstrate his character by giving unto the oil companies all that he truly believes should be given to them...
...What would he do in the White House to save his skin —sell out to the Cubans...
...Is that you in the mob, Marilyn...
...Hi, Sherm Adams...
...So let their records speak for them...
...Yes, that's the Kennedy lad and Hamilton Jordan, the Georgia jork...
...Look there, the whole retinue of Ulysses Grant...
...Only the record can tell us...
...Would poor troubled Joan serve the nation worse than righteous Rosa-lynn...
...Can they sustain him from one hour to the next...
...Does Edward Kennedy's record in the Senate suggest that he is irredeemable...
...Tish, tosh...
...What does it mean that Ronald Reagan married into wealth and Howard Baker married into power...
...And there are no carpets on the dance floor under which to sweep anything...
...Can a character as sturdy as the one Gerald Ford claims compensate for a mind so weak...
...Hi, Bebe Rebozo...
...No one has ever charged Richard Nixon with an excess of libido...
...Oops, somebody seems to be stumbling...
...Is that a testament to Connally's character or to his adept-ness as a wheeler-dealer...
...In a year when no candidate promises to have anything useful, much less hopeful, to say about the drift of the economy, strength of character takes a central position...
...Dwight's friend, and Franklin's friend, and here come the innumerable friends of the Kennedy boys...
...Is Jerry Brown a man of principle...
...And see that troop of women, the close friends of Presidents and Presidential candidates...
...But character, surely, is something else...
...Oh, Miz Lillian, where did you go wrong...
...there are no closets...
...Not an edifying record...
...Do we want President Ronald Reagan to show the strength of character required to send troops to Panama and plant the American flag on the Canal...
...Why are they sniffing so...
...Does it signify, as Jimmy Carter certainly did not mean to imply, that Teddy is given to panicking in an emergency...
...Lacking such a tool, though, how is one to judge...
...We want a man who can act even though all about him, etc., etc...
...Because he was probably philandering...
...If an accurate character meter had been invented a couple of decades ago, we might have been spared Richard Nixon...
...It may be that Richard Nixon's offspring are straighter than the offspring of, say, Gerald Ford...
...What is the electorate to conclude from the sins of the children...
...Hi, Harry Vaughn...
...By gad...
...But enough...
...There is little guidance to be found here...
...Because he attempted to squirm out of it and has never come quite straight on the matter...
...Can it be that Harry was nonetheless of a different caliber than Warren or Jimmy...
...What is going on under Walter Mondale's neat haircut...
...Does Edward Kennedy have character...
...Okay...
...Nobody is going to vote for the Senator because of Chappaquiddick...
...It is not a frivolous issue...
...The cronies of Harry Truman were not of high quality, no classier than those of Jimmy Carter, about on the level of the Harding cadre...
...Why, of course, it is the spirit of Chappaquiddick...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN A Question of Character Politics are in style again, and it's down and dirty time here in the disco dive where the candidates, their advisors, friends, relatives, and loved ones come to let it all hang out...
...Are we to know a President by the company he keeps...
...Do we want President Brown to have the character to follow his deepest instincts and block whatever hopes lie in the development of nuclear power...
...And then we will know that Jimmy is sunk...
...There's one of Grover Cleveland's friends...
...Instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung...
...John Connally is another...
...Jimmy is understood to be faithful to Rosalynn...
...Did President Nixon serve us better than President Roosevelt...
...Character is at the heart of things...
Vol. 62 • October 1979 • No. 20
