REAGAN , ROMNEY, AND REPUBLICANISM
Wechsler, James A.
REAGAN, ROMNEY, and REPUBLICANISM by JAMES A. WECHSLER Tn this crisis summer of 1966 the assumption that President Johnson's re-election in 1968 is one of the sure things of politics has...
...there are no certainties...
...The reference may be unfair to McNamara...
...As The Washington Post observed, he "crowded into a pair of sentences all the neuroses, all the nightmare fantasies, all the paranoia Reckless Course "Despite the obvious breakup of authority in South Vietnam, an unrepresentative South Vietnamese regime, the continuing destruction of Vietnamese resources for national rebuilding and despite the increasing danger of a major power confrontation in Southeast Asia, 'the U.S...
...As for the indestructible Mr...
...From all of this it may appear that I am reverting to the "sure thing" view of a Johnson re-election in 1968...
...Nothing more clearly caricatures the futility of the liberals in Republican ranks than the sequel to John Lindsay's remarkable fusion election as mayor of New York...
...Somehow the Vietnam ordeal may have ended—but how, and on what terms...
...He is a shallow mediocrity engaged in a vulgar effort to convince many people that he would rather be President than Right, until elected...
...Vermont Royster, The Wall Street Journal's perceptive editor and columnist, has described Romney as a man who "won two victories in Michigan by not only talking conservatively but, as governor, acting conservatively . . . He has managed to make himself a national figure by preaching a sort of evangelical doctrine of virtues right out of McGuffey's Reader, all of which strikes a responsive chord in many solid, middle-class voters...
...James Reston, associate editor of The New York Times, has called Romney a curious blend of Robert McNamara and Billy Graham...
...Nixon will always have access to private medical service...
...but too many Americans happen to be less fortunate...
...Perhaps more fundamental has been the sterility of Republican leadership in the face of the two great issues of this decade—the civil rights revolution and the war in Vietnam...
...the issue is "Appeasement or Courage," he tells us, adding: "We are being asked to buy our safety from the threat of the Bomb by selling into permanent slavery our fellow human beings enslaved behind the Iron Curtain...
...After this conference, the Associated Press reported, the two men "teed off in almost identical terms on bigness in government...
...His books include "The Age of Suspicion" and "Reflections of an Angry Middle-aged Editor...
...That is not Kennedy's battle plan, and no one renders him a service by promoting it...
...In the' early phase of the Kennedy era the Republicans might have captured the banner of civil rights when the late President was inhibited and harassed by the Dixiecrats in his party...
...What of Romney's liberalism...
...When he abdicated any serious role in the battle for control of his party, he paved the way for the Goldwater breakthrough...
...Romney has said of himself: "I am not a liberal-moderate Republican...
...The New Republic's TRB (in real life the distinguished correspondent of The Christian Science Moniter named Richard Strout) covered Reagan's recital...
...government is reported to be on the verge of sending another 100,000 men to South Vietnam...
...Among other profundities voiced by Reagan on this occasion was the assertion that "one of the great problems of economics is unemployment...
...But the appendix to his autobiography is the giveaway...
...But there is no hint that he possesses any philosophy or conviction beyond the boundaries of the old conservative orthodoxies...
...They are Ronald Reagan, California's Republican candidate for governor...
...There is another possibility that must be mentioned...
...In language more ruthless than he usually employs, he described Reagan as "anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-intellectual, anti-planning, anti-20th Century...
...Reagan needs no further introduction...
...It is generally agreed that Romney is an amiable man with notable managerial talents...
...But its pages will haunt him if he should win the California governorship and become the new hope of the Gold-water legions...
...In the same hour of the same day he was calling for expansion of the air war...
...I do so with reluctance because too many liberals (dwindling in number) still deem any wise or recent utterance by Robert F. Kennedy as a calculated episode in an underground conspiracy...
...he is even reported to be questioning their validity as the figures record a perceptible if not calamitous decline in his standing...
...Johnson cherished so long have lost their luster for him...
...But Lindsay's first months in office have been shadowed by the obstinate obstructionism of a Republican state legislature, and neither Governor Rockefeller (facing a hard battle for re-election) nor Senator Javits (obsessed with his own national aspirations) has given him any conspicuous help...
...It is entitled Where's the Rest of Me...
...Reagan's autobiography...
...I want to get a doctor who is working for me and not for the government...
...It is described as "an excellent summary of Mr...
...But in the here and now, the striking circumstance is how quickly and capriciously even the "modern" Republicans have seemed disposed to squander the potential represented by Lindsay...
...This Romney strategy of "consensus" makes Mr...
...At this moment three names loom largest in speculation about the so-called Republican future...
...His appearance was viewed by many, The New York Times reported, as "the Washington debut of a potential Presidential candidate...
...It is a measure of the bankruptcy of the liberal Republican bloc that Romney is being viewed in so many places as the last great barrier to another right-wing conquest of the party's national convention...
...Two more years of this incredible investment in Dean Rusk's holy war could drastically alter the face of America...
...He has clearly been studying and absorbing the 1936 Republican platform, which swept two states...
...If that struggle should be interminably prolonged, if it should lead to a military confrontation with Red China, on any major scale, no present prophesy is relevant...
...The opinion polls which Mr...
...the unmistakable impression is that they view Lindsay as something of an upstart adversary seeking to usurp their places as the favorites of the Republican liberal set...
...Nixon, his spiritual leadership was also exhibited during this most recent period of national and world uncertainty by a fiery address to the American Medical Association...
...In late June he held a forty-five-minute meeting with Richard Nixon...
...It might lead to a deepening, McCarthyite hysteria in which Ronald Reagan—or some even more rabid version of the same breed— might become more than a theatrical footnote to political history...
...We oppose this as reckless, foolhardy, and destructive of the hope for peace and self-determination for the Vietnamese people...
...But the truth is, as Emmet John Hughes noted in his diagnosis of Republican disarray, that Kennedy has become dramatically identified with the two issues so ineptly fumbled by the Republicans— the world upsurge of the colored peoples and the quest for sanity in the nuclear age...
...JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and a regular columnist for that newspaper...
...We urge a cessation of bombing of North Vietnam and a de-escalation of the war in the South...
...In heralding his primary victory, National Review observed that "though he runs inevitably as a conservative, Reagan accepts the realities" and "has steered clear of sectarian narrowness and provocation...
...For what Reagan and his managers have been trying to do is to woo the "moderates" in the GOP while winking at the Goldwater faction...
...Johnson's secret weapon...
...He was everywhere...
...In a sense, of course, the destruction of the dream of the resurgence of Republican progressivism is traceable to the infirmity of the only successful Republican candidate since 1928—Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...That he learned no lesson from this debacle is apparent from his cordial rendezvous with Reagan in June...
...Reagan, the undistinguished film actor whose triumph in the GOP California primary gave William Buckley, the middle-aging prodigy of right-wing Republicanism, a new sense of hope, went to Washington to unveil himself before the National Press Club...
...REAGAN, ROMNEY, and REPUBLICANISM by JAMES A. WECHSLER Tn this crisis summer of 1966 the assumption that President Johnson's re-election in 1968 is one of the sure things of politics has suddenly been challenged...
...now we are told that his defeat was attributable to the fight waged against him by Nelson Rockefeller and others in the predomination period...
...His simplistic demagogy was a reminder of his infinite ability to nurse the prejudices of his audience...
...With the passage of each month, it becomes apparent how much our national future may hinge on the duration, direction, and dimension of the Vietnam war...
...That is not the case...
...On the one hand he was lamenting our involvement in a land war in Vietnam...
...What gives the Romney phenomenon certain interest is that, in his own fashion, he seems to be relying on his capacity to emerge as a triumphant split personality...
...He is increasingly depicted as the man under whose leadership the 1968 convention can be rescued from the cabal of reactionaries and kooks who staged the Goldwater coup four years ago...
...It would be premature, of course, to discount Lindsay as a major force in national Republican politics on the basis of this brief and often brutal tenure...
...But it is the final irony of the Republican condition that Kennedy, not Romney, Reagan, or Nixon, might be the central figure in the drama of 1968 if political upset is in the making...
...The symptoms are dramatically visible on many fronts as these lines are written in mid-July...
...In the face of the elaborate and costly press-agentry now being dedicated to the Reagan build-up, I found myself obliged to read Mr...
...Their common quality is their apparent acceptance, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by the Goldwater legions...
...I'm trying to be as conservative as the Constitution, as liberal as Lincoln, and as progressive as Theodore Roosevelt before the Bull Moose movement...
...Essentially this is a soap-opera description of his transition from wide-eyed fellow-traveler on the Left to dim-visioned wanderer on the Right...
...He has, that journal added, "kept out of the suffocating clutches of the John Birch Society without yielding to the right-baiters...
...As the commitment in Vietnam senselessly mounted, the Republicans might have been the voice of dissent and created a major national debate—but they surrendered that role to Senator Fulbright and other Democrats...
...This strategy has been officially sanctioned by Buckley's National Review, the bible of the non-Birchite Right...
...The Goldwater rout in 1964 was widely construed as proof that the GOP was doomed as a national party so long as it remained the prisoner of its so-called conservative faction...
...Romney is probably more conservative than any other likely contender and therefore could hold many of the conservatives who voted for Barry Goldwater...
...To the assembled doctors he proclaimed: "I want to be able to pay for my doctor...
...Prosperity may grace the land—or the Negro revolution may have produced new, angry conflicts in the nation's ghettos...
...This must be recognized as the most incisive analysis offered since the late Calvin Cool-idge observed that "when a great many people are out of work, unemployment results...
...Both issues, Emmet John Hughes, a White House aide under President Eisenhower, has observed, "could have been seized by a spirited and conscientious Republicanism...
...No doubt Mr...
...In world affairs he offers a familiar simplistic solution to our problems...
...No matter what agonies may torment the country, and no matter what limited gains the GOP may record in this fall's Congressional elections, its capacity for self-destruction on a national scale seems incurable...
...Reagan's political philosophy" and is the text of a banal television address that won him wide notice in the right-wing salons...
...It apparently did not occur to him that this course, lamentably embraced by President Johnson soon afterward, contained the clear risk of infinitely larger confrontation on land with Chinese as well as North Vietnamese troops...
...And where was Michigan's Governor George Romney during this critical summer when so much of mankind was preoccupied with the Vietnam tragedy...
...The surveys may prove nothing more than the one certitude I have learned in political journalism...
...who dares predict what the world will look like when the political battle of 1968 is joined...
...Goldwater's agents have successfully promoted the "stab-in-the-back" theory...
...No other figure of his generation seemed to offer the prospect of any serious long-range rivalry to Senator Robert F. Kennedy...
...Washington columnist Roscoe Drummond has said of Romney that "in the area of fiscal and economic policy, Mr...
...But anyone who undertakes a midterm assessment of the outlook must be impressed at this juncture by a basic fact of American political life...
...Another Republican debacle in 1968 might conceivably provoke the long-suppressed rebellion of Republican intelligence...
...Senator Jacob Javits, who allegedly personifies the spirit of Republican liberalism, has made no secret of his readiness to serve as Rom-ney's running-mate...
...ADA National Board June 12, 1966 of the AMA's view of Medicare...
...But history has been swiftly rewritten...
...Johnson seem a narrow sectarian by contrast...
...Here, then, are the names dominating the Republican scene—Reagan, Romney, and Nixon...
...It includes an assault on "the progressive surtax," on "socialized medicine," and on TVA...
...Javits' designation on a national ticket would end another taboo in our political life, but I do not feel impelled to rush to the synagogue to pray for this consummation...
...I think Mr...
...If President Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam leads us into large and shattering disaster, the ancient axiom that any incumbent can win renomination (once stated with colorful profanity by Harry Truman) may be challenged...
...Michigan's Governor George Romney, and, seemingly from now until eternity, Richard Nixon...
...What have they been up to in their most recent public exhibitions...
...its death-urge seems to grow more intense with the passage of time...
...The Republican Party remains Mr...
...and the reader remains in suspense after finishing the volume...
...Romney's contribution was the cry that "we must modernize state and local governments and bring a halt to the concentration of power in Washington...
...Two long years remain before the next nominating conventions...
...By any standard of rationality, Lindsay's triumph should have been the signal for joy and hope throughout the Republican progressive bloc...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
