I'D RATHER NOT BE GOVERNOR
Neuberger, Richard L.
I'd Rather Not be Governor By Richard L. Neuberger THE MOST embittered men I know are those who have held high public office and then had it snatched away. This is why I have decided not to run...
...I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it...
...The mere prospect of running for governor made me intellectually timid...
...Under the British system, he remained a member of Parliament and even of the cabinet...
...This lure is certainly not evil per se...
...We must try to understand why cowardice is so often the hallmark of the politician...
...I am sure I could have stood being governor of Oregon...
...This discriminates against low-income families willing to do their own "toting...
...I am convinced politics is a disease...
...Obscurity has replaced the spotlight...
...But what of politicians...
...He felt, as do all vanquished office-holders, that the circumstances of his defeat had been grossly unfair...
...He ended his career with months of invalidism in the Mayflower Hotel, while members of his family disagreed over his exact views on vital issues...
...Politics is as close to war as we get in peacetime...
...Would I spend all my time chasing the temptress, politics...
...Would that mine adversary had written a book...
...I ruminated on all these things when I decided not to run for governor...
...Could I speak my mind on the discriminatory Oregon laws which forbid the sale of colored oleomargarine...
...cessor would be an unworthy public servant, which must have made more distasteful the telegram of congratulations he had to send the victor...
...Couldn't I discover something else to denounce besides a law important to so many voting farmers...
...What accounts for this...
...Justice Brandeis said that the "pocket nerve" was the most sensitive in the human body...
...He walks down the street unnoticed...
...In other words, he would not have descended at a stunning pace from political power to private citizenship...
...My wife's family owns a dairy farm...
...A repudiated politician in the United States must pack and leave, like a kitchen cook who has burned one souffle too many...
...Steel executives retire at 70 and Ford craftsmen at 65...
...I thought of the self-disciplined Norris, who could not step down even at 80, and I knew that as weak a character as I never would cork up the jug before it was drained...
...The ornate satisfactions of political power, especially to the human ego, inevitably produce the moral compromises which William Allen White deplored...
...A man may put aside the bottle and even conquer the urge for hashish...
...Would I have the patience to return to a writer's lonely career...
...This must be second to the sensitory apparatus which carries warning to a politician's brain...
...A free-lance writer, Neuberger has written for Harper's, The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, Survey Graphic, and The Nation...
...Louis Post-Dispatch 84...
...Somewhere in this age bracket, locomotive engineers must relinquish the throttle...
...The illustrious George W. Norris was 81 when he filed for his sixth senatorial term, a fact which probably contributed to a disheartening defeat...
...I don't count precincts when I hit the pillow...
...Suppose you must promise a pension which can never be paid...
...Comparatively few of these politicians have returned to their homes in the Pacific Northwest...
...I believe he was nearly capable of tragic action...
...On some future election day, I might decide all my present conclusions were mere obiter dictum...
...I realize this explanation will seem selfish...
...The region where I live has defeated a considerable number of men for reelection as Congressmen and U. S. Senators...
...This often is more than flesh and blood can endure...
...Then, in a twinkling, the governor is again a farmer or lawyer or grocer...
...Oregon is a state in which 51% of the voters now are registered as Republicans and 49% as Democrats...
...But, more important, at least half the states impose strict limits on the number of terms a person may serve as governor...
...Many stayed on in Washington, D. C. Others simply moved elsewhere in the nation...
...I prefer to believe I did not throw away a punched ticket...
...I know of few such examples, however...
...In the United States there is no such gradual abandonment of authority...
...Because I am just as frail a reed as the next man, I am afraid I could never go back to pounding a typewriter...
...To begin with, the political mortality in executive posts undoubtedly is greater than in a legislative niche, where a man seldom must shoulder responsibility...
...Hollow-eyed, shaken, and pale, he confessed he could neither eat nor sleep...
...I have no regrets...
...This is the age today of Kenneth McKellar, the Senate's president pro tern...
...The average American politician leads a desperately insecure existence...
...Wayne Morse has spoken many times in praise of TVA, but, with the Oregon Republican primaries approaching, he has denounced CVA as a "bureaucratic straitjacket...
...A number told me they could not go back as an ordinary citizen to a locality where they once had been die dominant public official...
...But men do not have to win majority approval to continue as doctors or engineers...
...But I had to take into account my own personality and propensities...
...If we are to credit the Army's elaborate personnel methods, some men are better suited for a particular assignment than others...
...I imagine it is rewarding to cure people's ills or to sit at the controls of a 6,500-horse-power diesel streamliner...
...Humphrey is from dairying Minnesota...
...At the time I renounced gubernatorial hopes, every straw poll showed me leading the other possibilities within my party...
...The politician must do it to save the people from a greater peril—viz., his opponent...
...Is it the damnable lust for expediency which guides his feet to Hell...
...Other professions must be fascinating, too...
...I believe the explanation is simple...
...How bad is it to be for economy in the afternoon and a $20,000,000 Corps of Engineers seawall at night...
...I am not discounting this possibility...
...I also sleep a little better at night and eat more contentedly at mealtimes...
...So be it...
...But the will-o'-the wisp of political power he pursues to the grave...
...I might have filed for governor were I convinced of this...
...Could a person defy the bigots and prudes and vested interests, and still seek votes at the polls...
...If my ambition is dull, at least my nervous system is in the same shape...
...We liberals like to think that only the conservatives ever bow to political expediency...
...Our state has a milk control law which forbids the sale of grade "A" at grocery stores for a lower price than it can be delivered on back porches...
...He commits his prestige, his reputation, and frequently his bank account to a quest which may be foiled at the 11 th hour by a blunder perpetrated by some other member of his party 3,000 miles away...
...I don't jump every time I hear that someone disapproves of me...
...this has not deterred me from upbraiding a restrictive local law which enriches milk producers at the expense of the public...
...I have yet to hear Taylor talk about the 14-year penitentiary sentences dealt four young Indians in his own Idaho for the theft of one $12 sheep...
...Banquet kails rise in tribute when he reaches he rostrum...
...Yet the majority of human beings, within limitations, like to choose the emotional climate in which they will spend their lives...
...I have seen an ex-governor shortly after he was retired from the gubernatorial chair...
...Temptation first appears when the politician tells himself he is a more desirable alternative than his adversary...
...Not very many human creatures are sufficiently secure in their own right to make this adjustment...
...Many of my friends assured me I could serve a term as governor of Oregon and then return to journalism...
...James Marlow of the Associated Press has written: "While some men emerge from the hurly-burly of public life shining and with a feeling of success, some creep away hurt and broken-spirited, even to the point of death...
...The abandonment of political pomp and power is evidently more than the majority of men can bear...
...I am not so sure I could have endured the sudden cessation of being governor...
...The president of our dominant newspaper publishing company said that I probably let the governorship trickle through my fingers...
...I feel my personal independence has been strengthened...
...This is why I have decided not to run for governor of Oregon...
...I had been promised unstinting support by trade unions, PTA clubs, farm organizations, and other important segments of Oregon's population...
...He is the author of several books, including "The Promised Land," and "Integrity— The Life of George W. Norris...
...But Hubert H. Humphrey was one of the most zealous defenders of the restrictive taxes on oleo— taxes which have kept that food off the poor man's table...
...Any red-blooded man with a normal hemoglobin wants to best his foe...
...But he would have remained in the House of Commons as leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition...
...Perhaps, to save myself from cowardice, I made the cowardly decision...
...Without this restriction, we might see governors in one-party states who had sat under the capitol dome for 25 years...
...Adolph J. Sabath, dean of the House of Representatives, is 84...
...For what future accomplishment might I be fit psychologically if I left the governorship at the age of 41...
...Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure...
...Carter Glass was running for re-rfaction to the Senate at the age of Fitzpatrick in The St...
...III So I am not a candidate...
...In such an event, I predict what I have set down in these pages might be used against me...
...The great editor of the Emporia Gazette, William Allen White, once asked: "What is there about a man when he becomes a professional politician which makes him lose all moral sense...
...I cite these things to prove that only the most exceptional men and women ever quit politics of their own free will...
...It is reasonable to assume that this close balance between the parties, might limit any gubernatorial tenure to one term...
...He was certain his sucRICHARD L. NEUBERGER, a member of the State Senate of Oregon, was subjected to extraordinary pressure to accept the Democratic nomination for governor of that state...
...But governors seem to be younger than Congressmen...
...But if my name were on the ballot for governor, I am sure I would find discretion to be the better part of valor...
...Of course it is a man's privilege, like that of a woman, to change his mind...
...Dared I say that $100 old-age pensions could not possibly be financed without drastic new taxes...
...Thereafter all pussyfooting and demagoguery can be rationalized...
...The opportunity to speak up, within the boundaries of decency and good taste, means a great deal to me...
...If the quest is temporarily successful, he nevertheless faces the risk every two or four years of being plunged back into oblivion...
...Under the parliamentary system . of government, the blow of rejection is somewhat softened...
...Yet the demotion suffered by Churchill was not comparable with that which overtakes an ousted American politician...
...It gets a firm hold on the practitioner...
...Glen H. Taylor got into a well-publicized scuffle in Alabama over the violated rights of Southern Negroes...
...Did I have to apologize because my wife's picture appeared in a local paper wearing a skimpy 1950 Jantzen bathing suit...
...It may be possible to leave the throne room gracefully...
...He can stop straying into strange boudoirs...
...said Job, who evidently knew something about politics a long time before the direct primary...
...Any change in the fortunes of war could restore him to his post...
...Had Prime Minister Attlee's party lost the recent British election, he of course would have relinquished the seals of the prime ministership...
...I did not want to start tormenting myself at the age of 37 with the goading, nagging ambition which is the curse of American politics...
...Yet no Oregon politician can emphasize this without antagonizing the milk-drivers' union and the owners of Holstein herds...
...Do they ever quit, short of that decisive injection of embalmer's fluid...
...You are either in or out...
...A governor's ar-rival calls forth trumpets and drugs sycophants trail in his wake, seek- if favors and patronage...
...II In The World Crisis Winston Churchill has described his personal feelings after he was relieved as First Lord of the Admiralty .following the disastrous Galipoli campaign during World War I. "The change from the intense executive activities of each day's work at the Admiralty left me gasping," writes Churchill...
...The element of personal rivalry is intense...
...As a candidate for the state senate in 1948, I had polled the largest legislative vote in the history of the state...
...Why do innumerable Congressmen indorse the Hoover economy in one breath and pork barrel appropriations in the next...
Vol. 14 • May 1950 • No. 5
