Roche in the White House

...His magazine was the love of his life...

...By evening he agreed to visit the numerous state delegations that would assemble separately after the public dinner...

...he did not view himself as a political figure...

...Unfortunately, lack of space or curiosity prevented Breslin from pursuing this point in depth, or in print...

...He must also have known—or didn't he?—that the arrogance of his recital to Breslin would confirm the suspicion that his major qualification for the post of Presidential adviser was the assurance that he was free from doubt and prepared to slug it out against heretics...

...This was a sound, sensitive credo...

...Thus his advent could hardly be viewed as a sign that fresh winds of unfettered discussion were about to sweep through the White House...

...Having lured him this far, I found myself acting as his unofficial campaign manager, an unaccustomed role...

...He was a respected journalist who edited a national magazine that commanded serious attention in Washington, among other places...

...But in tilting with a few who were guilty of portraying the McCarthy outrages as a precise replica of Nazism, Roche succeeded in fostering the impression that nothing very serious had happened during that long nightmare...

...But whether he comprehends what the real function of such men should be remains obscure...

...This implausible comradeship turned to other matters...

...ADA elections are traditionally the unanimous ratification of the slate presented by the nominating committee...

...in one way or another, most of the convention must have known what was afoot by the time we decided to retire...

...Perhaps more important, it is the President who ultimately determines whether the men around him should ask questions, or dutifully take aspirin when he sneezes...

...A certain guilt-condition may impel this extended examination of Roche's role in the White House...

...I must still generously assume that, in our absence when the morning session started, it had been concluded that, some time during the night, we had retreated from our resolve...

...he was greeted with notable enthusiasm by students...

...Roche in the White House by JAMES A. WECHSLER In ordinary circumstances, the President's choice of a former national chairman of Americans for Democratic Action as intellectual counselor and emissary to the eggheads would seem an occasion for modest rejoicing in the liberal community...

...This remarkable meeting of minds produced some unforgettable dialogue in which, at times, Roche seemed to be trying to imitate Breslin's earthy style...

...It is astonishing that Roche should have forgotten his own words when he inspired Breslin to deal so obtusely with "visionaries and critics...

...That, then, is the inside story of John Roche's election as ADA chairman, and perhaps indirectly the saga of how he wound up, first, as a confidante to Vice President Humphrey and now as the number one White House intellectual...

...after all, the republic survived...

...We were not a spirited sight when we reassembled in my room...

...This saga should not be read as a bitter or conclusive remembrance...

...Among those cited with disdain were Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and Norman Mailer...

...The retirement of George Ball from the State Department means the disappearance of one of the last men in the Johnson Administration disposed to serve as "devil's advocate" and seemingly encouraged to do so...

...It must have been nearly 6 a.m...

...His ADA association is what makes him especially valuable as an exhibit, and perhaps even created the delusion that he could be an effective ambassador to the intellectual heathens...

...Fortunately, many of the delegates tended to stay up much of the night for their delegation parties...

...They intend to launch a revolution from Riverside Drive...

...The year was 1962...

...The ones we talk about when we mention the President's relations with them are only a small body of people who live in affluent alienation on Cape Cod and fire off salvos against the vulgarity of the masses," Roche explained...

...We had been up too late, smoked too many cigarets, shared too many drinks with prospective recruits...

...According to Breslin's account, uncontested by Roche after its publication, Mrs...

...The reluctant rebel candidate and I journeyed from one smoke-filled room to another through the long hours...

...And so the campaign went on, far into the night...

...I was to deliver the nominating speech...

...Such an appointment occurred in early autumn when President Johnson designated John Roche to replace Eric Goldman, the Princeton professor who had tried long but without visible success to make the White House a congenial home for academic dissenters and other species of thinking men...

...Yet it is hard to see how such a display could achieve any purpose except to widen the gap between the White House and the defectors, and to insure that the President would be spared serious contact with those who differ...

...Roche, a writer of talent, long Morris Hillquit Professor of Labor and Social Thought at Brandeis University, a spirited polemicist and a two-term ADA chairman, was summoned to fill the gap...

...More sinister observers assert that the time schedule of the election was moved up to insure a placid ceremony...

...Certainly such overstatement did occur...

...That Mr...

...It occurred to me and a few others that there was no real reason why Roche's election should be deemed an irretrievable certitude...

...my real quarrel with him is that he seems to feel a compulsion to prove the manhood of the intellectual by confusing sanity with "softness...

...Which, of course, is exactly what the historians of the American Right have been saying...

...There seemed one obvious choice if he could be induced to enter the combat...

...It is fair to assume that his present eminence is at least partly attributable to the two terms he served as ADA chairman...

...Unhappily Roche did little to alter these expectations when interviewed by Jimmy Breslin, an ebullient newspaper columnist who has never been accused of an obsession with complicated ideas...

...It would be ironic if no efforts were made to reestablish the critical dialogue that existed between John Kennedy and the intellectuals...

...Basically it's just a fund-raising group for the Civil Liberties Union...

...What created disenchantment about the appointment was the general knowledge that he was one of the few JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and a featured columnist for that newspaper...

...He knows that the overt dissi-dence and inner uneasiness stirred by the dead-end war in Vietnam are hardly confined to a small sect in a Cape Cod (or Manhattan) enclave...

...I assured him with a voice less resolute than it had been the night before that we were...

...Now his voice was cheerful...

...This has earned him the dubious salute from William F. Buckley's journal as a man who has made "a second career of dissent from dissent...

...In any case Mr...

...And it would be tragic if the Johnson Administration did not understand why these efforts are worthwhile...

...The vulgarity of Roche's remarks in this inaugural interview does him a certain injustice, and one must partially attribute the result to Breslin's capacity for creating a contagion of simple-mindedness in any dialogue he undertakes...

...perhaps the mere novelty of the event excited them, but there was also, I think, an authentic sense that the insurgent candidate would provide a fresh new voice for an organization too long identified with familiar faces and places...

...the next morning) he stubbornly resisted the proposal...

...The problem was to find a worthy rival willing to undertake this unusual contest...

...But now the moment of truth was near...

...Johnson's ambivalence about the sound of critical voices...

...to make our final plans for the convention-floor drama an hour later...

...There are also occasions when his eagerness to divorce himself from what he views as liberal "orthodoxy" leads him into a kind of exhibitionist excess of his own...

...What's the excitement about the John Birch Society...

...We had gathered in Washington in May for the annual ADA assemblage...

...It was my valued friend Joe Rauh, the indomitable figure known as "Mr...

...Well, it doesn't matter," he said exuberantly, "we've just had the election and Roche is chairman...

...The nominating committee learned on Friday that Len Despres of Chicago had finally rejected its designation for the chairmanship...

...He asked if we were still pursuing our "darn fool" enterprise...

...Perhaps veteran politicos are accustomed to such routines...

...Now, if things had happened differently in May, 1962, in that Washington hotel...

...Roche—or Nicholas Katzenbach—will play such roles, and that is why the "crisis of credibility" may increase rather than diminish...

...He had insisted the night before—despite his personal friendliness for the project—that we had started too late...

...Roche, who was present at the interview, added the thought that those whom Breslin was to describe as "high-class illiterates" were against Lyndon B. Johnson "the same way Republicans used to hate Franklin D. Roosevelt in the '30s...

...Roche exclaimed...

...Plainly Goldman had been unable to stimulate the kind of intimacy and warmth that prevailed during much of the Kennedy era...

...We drank a lot of black coffee in final preparation for the candidate's descent to the convention scene...

...Some years ago, as noted earlier, he found himself enthralled by the notion that the impact of McCar-thyism on American life had been grossly exaggerated by liberals...

...For one thing, Roche's discourse to Breslin may prove to be caricature rather than portent...

...Unfortunately the nominating committee had completed its work of unanimity by the time he agreed to run...

...It enlisted sympathetic comment from some of ADA's most influential figures...

...News of the insurrection had gotten around...

...when we parted, with the agreement that we would meet at 10 a.m...

...Perhaps he will find guidance in John Roche's 1964 remarks...

...John Kennedy did not appreciate criticism —who does?—but he obviously recognized that criticism was a national function of the intellectual and that it had both public and private utility...

...This profundity seemed consistent with a view advanced some years earlier by Roche that the rampages of Senator Joseph McCarthy had been grievously exaggerated by the liberal community...

...Ironically, it was Roche who, in the summer of 1964, took a wholly different view...

...After all, the vision of 'the Great Society' can hardly be fleshed out without the often irritating but essential participation of visionaries and critics...

...These observations inspired Breslin to offer certain parenthetical reflections of his own about the "West Side intellectuals" who "live in those old, highly fashionable apartment houses which tower over the Hudson River" and "send out a flow of words against the war in Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson...

...Roche offered a quick lesson in geography...

...Roche was its last minute choice, and he agreed to accept the unpaid and often-unrewarding post...

...Goldman went off to write a book and Mr...

...What has been generally forgotten is that he is the only ADA chairman whose initial election was a source of discontent, and might even have been averted if I had been less negligent and absent-minded...

...But finally after hours of entreaty—perhaps bulwarked most of all by the response of the younger delegates for whom he felt a special concern—he began to yield...

...He was a man long identified with the indigenous traditions of American progessivism...

...his institutional instincts had convinced him that the nominating committee could not be thwarted by such a coup without gravely upsetting ADA's internal system...

...he knows that men whose credentials of intellect surely as worthy as his own—George Kennan, Benjamin V. Cohen, Arthur Schlesinger, Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Goodwin, to name only a few— have long pleaded for a halt to the cycle of escalation and new efforts to escape a disastrous, full-scale entrapment...

...There are unhappily no clear signs that Mr...

...In contrast, I do not know anyone who questions President Johnson's intelligence, but give and take between the White House and the nation's intellectuals has virtually ceased . . . The nub of this problem is a conflict of parochialisms, and intellectuals have their own brand of snobbery...

...on some days of the week the President proclaimed his fidelity to the traditions of free debate, but on others he implied that such freedom could be most fittingly exercised by those who agreed with him...

...Who could such people be, Breslin wondered aloud...

...Naturally the discussion turned to the incorrigible conduct of some troublesome intellectuals...

...presumably the spontaneous explosion would follow...

...At a few moments before eleven the phone rang...

...Nostalgically recalling the close association that John F. Kennedy had achieved with those whose primary business is ideas, Roche wrote: "Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, seems to fall into the category of anti-intellectual politicians—or at least he has given little indication that he feels that intellectuals have a meaningful, creative role in American society...

...At luncheon on Saturday (the election was scheduled for 11 a.m...

...Johnson cares about the disaffection of Richard Goodwin and others is some tribute to his awareness of the nature of the loss...

...But there was unmistakable unrest among some of the delegates—especially the student contingent to whom Roche had become something of a symbol of "papa-knows-best" inflexibility (partially as a result of his own chastisement of some of the "young activists...

...He is one of the founders of ADA and has long served on its executive board...

...ADA leaders in the land who suffered from no large anxiety over the Administration's course in Vietnam and who, at last spring's ADA convention, frankly identified himself as a true believer, with only reservations of punctuation, in the Johnson foreign policy gospel...

...Roche is a man of authentic talent and animation who may ultimately confound us by original and even daring contributions to the talk around the White House...

...Roche's rhetorical gifts were beyond dispute...

...It seemed more plausible to assume that the President had chosen a man equipped to provide more skillful language in the rationalization of existing policy...

...Perhaps his mission was doomed by Mr...

...Yet in all fairness I think a heavy burden of responsibility for this deterioration of relations lies on the White House...

...He is not a dull pedant...

...we were journalists who usually let others make history in the morning...

...Mainly the New York artsy-craftsy set," Roche responded with the patience of a man sensitive to his new mission of enlightenment...