When Veeps Go Solo
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr When Veeps Go Solo One of the more fascinating rites of our constitutional democracy is the transfer of political leadership from the incumbent...
...King cracked back, "I think he will get a rabbinical dispensation...
...His last letter, to the daughter of an innkeeper, included the following verse: You are young and I am older...
...That only served to keep the President front and center in the media, diverting attention from the nominee...
...Unorthodox Choice On Larry King Live, when Vice President Gore was still considering his running mate options, humorist Bill Maher joked about the situation that might arise if Senator Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, became vice president...
...Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, says: "Anti-Semitism is a reality in the United States...
...Ideally, it should work like a smooth rocket launch...
...At the Los Angeles convention itself, Clinton offered strong praise for Gore amidlavish praise for his own record...
...Thus it must be assumed that Governor George W. Bush, in initially rejecting the proposal of the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates for three all-network encounters, wanted to minimize the size of his audience or derail the debates altogether...
...Al Gore, since his November 1993 debate on trade with Ross Perot, has acquired a reputation for his forensic skills...
...On the night of the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson delayed a Cabinet meeting to write in longhand to the Kennedy children...
...In Gore's unorthodox choice of an Orthodox Jew as his running mate, America has another opportunity to test the limits of its tolerance...
...Senate candidacy gave him further exposure—at Gore's expense...
...And, as the first Jew on a national ticket, he confronts America once again with the issue of latent bigotry...
...President Bill Clinton's difficulty with the rite of passage has not been any particular discord with Vice President Al Gore...
...The same day Democratic Party chairman Ed Rendell, himself Jewish, was asked what he thought of the Connecticut Senator's chances for the slot Gore was vacating...
...Unlike Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson and Reagan, Clinton does not have a problem of ambivalent feelings about his co-pilot, now engaged in a solo flight...
...The President attended the RepublicanNational Convention in Chicago only for the opening day "Thank You, Ike" session...
...Now Lieberman's candidacy confronts America with another test of latent bigotry...
...Bush, under pressure, sometimes mixes his words...
...In 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter from nine-year-old Robert F. Kennedy...
...Asked at a news conference that August to cite some contribution that Nixon had made, the President irately replied, "If you give me a week, I might think of one...
...Four years later, Kennedy confronted the Catholic issue head on in the Presidential primaries...
...It is hard to say precisely why Governor Bush interposed obstacles to the bipartisan commission's debate plan, especially since he had become the avowed underdog...
...The loyal Humphrey extolled Johnson in his acceptance speech...
...he simply does not play second fiddle very well...
...In West Virginia, Kennedy appealed for "fair play and a fair chance...
...Enjoy life ere it grow colder...
...If Lieberman were Episcopalian, it would be a slam dunk," Rendell said...
...But people are not always candid with pollsters...
...President Dwight D. Eisenhower is remembered in history for his antipathy to Vice President Richard M. Nixon...
...True, Governor Bush has to watch his tongue, as he showed on Labor Day in Naperville, Illinois, where he was heard on an open microphone labeling veteran political reporter Adam Clymer of the New York Times with an obscene epithet...
...Maher asked...
...He has had differences with the Administration on issues such as school vouchers and capital gains taxes...
...Finally, in May 1975 ex-President Nixon, in the hospital, received a get-well card from Jonathan Schorr, nearly seven...
...Presidents to Children With all the emphasis on children by both Presidential candidates, it occurred to me to look at how Presidents past addressed them...
...Then, on to the challenges of prejudice because of color, gender and ethnicity...
...Abraham Lincoln introduced an intimate style...
...But a tendency occasionally to pop off at a reporter could not be a reason for throwing the whole plan for televised debates into turmoil...
...That has happened four times in the past 40 years...
...He was the first Senate Democrat to denounce President Clinton on grounds of morality...
...In 1960, he tried to derail Nixon's nomination as the GOP standard bearer...
...The ultimate choice of Senator Lieberman was bold in three ways...
...President Lyndon B. Johnson, having decided not to seek re-election, stayed away from the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago altogether...
...Nixon wrote expressing appreciation and his hope for a world without war...
...Before the nation's newspaper editors, he spoke words that some older Americans still remember: "If there is bigotry in this country, then so be it...
...President Kennedy insisted on seeing one out of every five youthful letters, and answered questions about everything from space travel to the "little people" of Ireland...
...You are hopeful, lam not...
...As Kennedy went on to win the nomination and then the election against Nixon, the Catholic issue began to fade from national politics...
...A decade later he phoned Hunt to apologize...
...If that bigotry is too great to permit the fair consideration of a Catholic who has made clear his independence, then we ought to know it...
...The tactic of letting the sun shine in on the dark recesses where anti-Catholic bigotry lurked succeeded...
...The question is why...
...In 1986, he approached Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal in a Dallas restaurant and called him a "son of a bitch" in the presence of Hunt's wife, Judy Woodruff, and their four-year-old son...
...Kennedy added: "Are we to say a Jew can be elected mayor of Dublin, but a Catholic cannot be President of the United States...
...What happens if there is a nuclear war on a Saturday...
...So he has come to terms with the debate commission...
...Later, Eisenhower told a biographer that he found a "lack of warmth" in his Vice President...
...Yet, because of strong egos and sometimes strained relationships, the transfer is usually attended by a certain amount of tension...
...His appearances over the ensuing weekend at fund-raising events for his library and his wife's U.S...
...Nixon did debate with John F. Kennedy in 1960, and President Gerald R. Ford debated with Jimmy Carter in 1976...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr When Veeps Go Solo One of the more fascinating rites of our constitutional democracy is the transfer of political leadership from the incumbent President to the incumbent Vice President...
...This I was able to do thanks to Stanley and Rodell Weintraub, whose collection of letters from Presidents to children, Dear Young Friend, is being published this fall...
...Clinton's problem appears to be an inherent inability to take a back seat...
...A Gallup poll taken before his selection showed 92 per cent of respondents willing to vote for a Jew as President compared to 46 per cent in 1937...
...Reagan gave a brief endorsement of his eight-year companion in a speech to a Republican fund-raising dinner...
...George Washington urged his nephew, George Steptoe Washington, "not only to be learned, but virtuous, clothed decently and becoming your station...
...There will be voters who will judge Lieberman on the basis of his religious beliefs...
...Some supporters of Senator Hubert H. Humphrey were using a campaign song to the tune of "Give Me That Old-Time Religion...
...Thomas Jefferson counseled his daughter, Martha, to be more careful about her spelling...
...Early Presidents wrote to youngsters with the formality of the time...
...both had reason to regret it...
...But, from his ranch in Texas, he exerted enormous pressure on Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey not to budge from the hawkish White House position on the Vietnam War, threatening a drying-up of campaign funds...
...I don'tremember...
...President Harry S. Truman would not debate with Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, nor President Johnson with Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, nor President Nixon with Senator George S. McGovem in 1972...
...The contemptuous Johnson telegraphed an endorsement two weeks later...
...Pluck the roses ere they rot...
...FDR sent him some postage stamps and invited him to the White House "some time" to see FDR's stamp collection...
...Beyond Debate A rational person is generally considered to intend the natural consequences of his acts...
...Havfng come close to dropping him from the 1952 ticket because of a "slush fund" allegation, Eisenhower was reluctant to delegate responsibilities to him during their two terms together...
...Nevertheless, if he were perceived as fearing to debate with Gore, he would suffer in the eyes of the voters...
...Woodrow Wilson, writing to newsboys in Trenton, New Jersey, told them how glad he was that "you youngsters are starting to take care of yourselves...
...Janet Brown, the executive director of the debate commission, said, "We don't think it's possible to improve on the dates or the sites that we have named" as long ago as last January...
...Bush's resistance ran counter to the tradition that it is usually the challenger who is anxious for debates and the incumbent who is reluctant...
...I say "again" because in the discussion of religious prejudice one could hear echoes of 1928, when New York's popular Governor Al Smith was crushingly defeated for the Presidency because he was Catholic...
...2 when, four days before the Los Angeles convention, he told evangelical ministers in Illinois that Gore should not be blamed for Clinton's "mistakes...
...He ended, "Perhaps you will choose to follow in your father's footsteps, and if you do, I trust I will live long enough to see you on television...
...The booster provides propulsion and then drops off...
...It sounded so perfunctory that the next day the White House represented the President as "mortified" that his endorsement had been taken as "lukewarm...
...So traumatic was the defeat among Democrats that JFK was denied the second spot on Adlai E. Stevenson's ticket in 1956 because Stevenson's advisers feared an anti-Catholic upsurge...
...there is bigotry...
...And that was not his first antipress explosion...
...In 1988 there was tension between President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush over issues like the Iran-contra scandal...
...He sent a telegram of congratulations when Nixon was nominated...
...Clinton was presumably trying to help his No...
Vol. 83 • September 2000 • No. 4
