With Mr. and Mrs. Bridge in Kansas City
Burnside, Gordon
With Mr. and Mrs. Bridge in Kansas City GORDON BURNSIDE "But he seldom sold anything, because it seemed to him that if one invested in a substantial, well-managed corporation it should almost...
...Ordinarily they get mean on three subjects: communism, black people, and domestic radicalism...
...RobertM...
...Here at last is a real clue...
...The burden of his speech is a defense of liberty and an attack on—"Let's not pussyfoot around about it"— socialism...
...Bridge talks about socialism, he is especially dear to me...
...But then there are the things we don't hear about...
...A man suggests raising it with a helicopter...
...This, too, is beginning to sound far-fetched...
...A New Mexico delegate laughs sadly when I ask about November...
...She ran away from parents like the Bridges when she was fifteen...
...For communism most Bridges have substituted the word tyranny...
...Last week the Kansas City Star, a Bridge paper if there ever was one, ran this headline: "Big Oil Gets Boost in Plank...
...What the hell, though—we've kept our party...
...Bridge, 1958, and Mr...
...Bridge, 1969), was a Kansas City lawyer of the 1920s and 1930s...
...At Christmas Mr...
...She likes people like the Bridges, and has lately taken to raising Afghans and joining dog clubs in order to hobnob with all the Mrs...
...Of course, the really rich old daddies are not down at the Muehlebach, at least not today...
...But the Columbus Glee Club, in business since 1872, is Bridgism—wonderful old Harding-Coolidge Bridgism—purer than rain water...
...We are suddenly back in New York, ringside at the Cafe La Mama...
...We'll have to rethink this...
...Several of us bystanders climb on its legs to give it ballast...
...Tuesday he was down on the floor and stole a Reagan placard from the North Carolina delegation...
...Gary Whitmer sits under an umbrella the next morning with his head in his hands...
...When Mr...
...THE WAY WE SAW IT These excerpts from articles and editorials published during The Progressive's sixty-seven year history have been edited only to achieve brevity...
...still, he is received almost as rudely as poor Jake Javits, who expects such treatment from his fellows...
...He ate lunch nearly every day at the Muehlebach grill...
...October 1952 Far from being the responsible conscience of conservatism, Goldwater is a reckless, rattle-brained, radical rightist with an extraordinary penchant for befuddlement and an unrivaled gift for slippery evasion...
...Senator Stevens of Alaska kicks Khrushchev's ghost a little, but forgets his successors...
...You don't know if, full-scale, they're gonna fly" It's not gonna fly...
...they are at the Nelson Gallery, where Governor Bond is throwing a party for the Rockefellers...
...Connally is losing...
...More particularly, since he now controls the Presidency and the Supreme Court, he means the Democratic Congress...
...Whitmer says he doesn't understand it...
...Richard Nixon is never mentioned, which is eerie but unsurprising...
...Bob Dole will later miss this essential point when he demands that we "get Government out of the credit market...
...And in one sense everyone here is losing, or preparing to lose...
...Bridge's renegade daughter, Ruth...
...My suspicion is that liberals who predict a Republican demise are people who want an easy way out...
...Presidential Campaigns The nomination of Mr...
...cries Whitmer, for the north tower is threatening to topple...
...Bridges...
...On Tuesday she won again, hands down, by dancing ia the aisle with Tony Orlando...
...And still more particularly, he means Congressional appropriations that take any form other than that of risk capital for big corporations...
...He was, of course, a conservative Republican—suspicious even of Herbert Hoover's liberalism—and a man who prized propriety and continuity above all other values...
...Reagan...
...The most animated person in the place, a blonde lady from Topeka, says that her best friend, a woman from the same hometown as Kit Bond, has not been able to get even a visitor's pass to the convention hall...
...We have lovely irony in Kansas City...
...Naturally, we reporters hope they will...
...Like dealing with Latin America by offering more World Bank loans...
...I am now back at Nancy K's place, reading through this week's Star...
...the model worked...
...A lot of delegates talk as if they believe it...
...As with the Bridges at the Muehle-bach there is surprisingly little political talk here in the press section...
...Then the south tower starts to fall...
...Bridge in Kansas City GORDON BURNSIDE "But he seldom sold anything, because it seemed to him that if one invested in a substantial, well-managed corporation it should almost never become necessary to sell...
...Rockefeller is winning...
...It's like dealing with slums by carting kids to suburban schools...
...Nancy Reagan was ushered into the hall Monday during a Reaganite speech by South Carolina's Governor Edwards...
...We are entertained before the convention sessions by Manny Harmon and his Bicentennial Orchestra and the Republican Glee Club of Columbus, Ohio...
...Justice [Charles Evans] Hughes will be acceptable to the great body of progressive Republicans...
...But, heard or not, Goldwater strikes the real keynote...
...That's what the beleaguered Bridges have done...
...Hold it...
...LaFolletteSr...
...It's fun to watch these old redbaiters talk about the "People's Republic of China" as if it were Switzerland...
...There ought to be gobs of them down at the Muehle-bach...
...Well," he says, "that's like asking about the tooth fairy...
...They seem to be waiting for permission to let go...
...The Russians, presumably tyranny incarnate, do almost as well...
...The Muehlebach is closely associated with the career of Harry Truman, who as President kept a suite there...
...I cross, meanwhile, to Municipal Auditorium, where John Connally is holding a press conference...
...America's troubles are going to take radical solutions, but liberals like to think that everything will work out painlessly if only we can get rid of the reactionary Bridges...
...Even if he took our sign," says one, "you've got to admire him...
...The Movement was obviously disintegrating, as were a lot of Movement-connected friendships, and everyone felt guilty about one or the other or both...
...Given the "sinister threats to freedom of the mind concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism," Stevenson's clearly defined position holds out the greatest hope on the political horizon to reverse that un-American trend and breathe new vitality into our Bill of Rights...
...Old Rocky," says another, "that's the way a Vice President should be...
...They sip and wander, sip and wander, knowing they are supposed to be having the time of their lives but—being above all circumspect—not sure how to go about it...
...Stop...
...compulsive shopping, as such women still do, at the Country Club Plaza...
...There are city police, Missouri and Kansas police, Secret Service, Pinkertons, Burns and Frain ushers, Rocky Pomerance from the Miami force, and advisers from the NYPD...
...The key is Nelson Rockefeller, who somehow used to represent the approaching three evils...
...This is the part of the Arena where the good-guy celebrities come...
...Who's losing...
...What he means, of course, is the Federal Government...
...What about the helicopter...
...I have, like Nancy K, a congenital secret fondness for the Bridges...
...I mean the only one...
...Manny Harmon is said to be a Reaganite, though what a Reaganite is, besides someone who is for Ronald Reagan, still isn't clear...
...Up goes the chin like a window shade...
...since we've heard no more from him, we must suspect the worst...
...I would think it has...
...Many speakers, and especially Reagan, who will eventually stick him in the amended platform, lay about them with the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but even this is done in an abstract way...
...July 1920 We support Stevenson, warts and all...
...Then he generally brightens...
...I've got the training and the instinct...
...The Bridges—who don't mind throwing money at Lockheed, the Penn Central, or the makers of swine flu vaccine—ought to speak to their Vice Presidential nominee about this little misunderstanding...
...says Whitmer...
...June 1916 The Republican and Democratic conventions demonstrate that both these parties are completely controlled through political bosses by the great special interests...
...Besides Afghans, for instance, she is into charitable works, and has adopted forty refugee Vietnamese peasants, to whom she is teaching coin laundries and American courting behavior...
...We all know that the Bridges have their mean side, which they display as an eccentric proof that they are as lively as you and me...
...Ford and Mrs...
...its bar is called The Haberdashery and is lined with Truman memorabilia...
...His warm-hearted but confused and nearly functionless wife, India, did her Gordon Burnside, a Midwestern free-lance writer, wrote "Looking for the Lost Movement" in the April 1975 issue of The Progressive...
...The Star didn't say whether Representative Conte had been forced at gunpoint to remain a Republican...
...We would expect to do much second-guessing, criticizing, even opposing in a McGovern Administration...
...We both laugh, for that is the common response among Campbell Street people...
...novels {Mrs...
...We have never been enchanted with Lyndon Johnson, but in this campaign he towers heroically over the man who opposes him...
...This seems excessive—only some 250 of the 5,000 announced protesters have shown up in the lot across the street—but the security chiefs are hinting that perhaps the worst violence will break out among the delegates down on the floor...
...We have had only two real battles, one over New York's telephone, the other a series of applause skirmishes between Mrs...
...The Bridges, being Bridges, have strung wire fences around it, and we are further protected by about a dozen kinds of cops...
...The speakers themselves sound like ancient Columbus aldermen...
...I have been sneaking bus rides to the Alemeda Plaza with Reaganite delegates from New Mexico, and they can't stop talking about Rockefeller...
...He won't have the job much longer, of course, precisely because of his new fans...
...They have kept their party...
...They eat the nuts, but they don't gotta talk about them...
...I leave the hotel and cross the street to Barney Allis Plaza, a tiny park surrounding one of Kansas City's ubiquitous fountains...
...Bridge gave his family shares in Kansas City Power and Light...
...Next time he'll be a delegate...
...After all, "Most people are out to make a buck...
...The Bridges have their troubles too, though we sometimes forget...
...and then we change the subject...
...And we hear a lot about Jimmy Carter, whom the Bridges generally dislike, because he seems so inevitable...
...A convenient blonde then sits next to the ex-CREEP and flashes the poster for waiting photographers, while an embarrassed Dean ducks his head...
...She likes to shop in the Plaza...
...Hee hee, that's them Republicans...
...An illiterate delegate might well wonder who Solzhenitsyn is and what tyranny gave him all that trouble...
...If this convention may be said to be anybody's, it is his, just because he's having such a good time...
...Barry Goldwater gives one of the few speeches with real sentences and paragraphs, but not many of the faithful can claim to have heard it...
...Old Hiram," says Nancy...
...Neither of these parties can be expected to change the system by which the few have acquired the earnings of the many, for their leaders are the beneficiaries of that system and depend upon it for their wealth and power...
...Some leaders, particularly Senator Jesse Helms and the publicist Richard Viguer-ie, sound like they can't wait for the funeral...
...Nancy K and I used to be neighbors in a web of communes down on Campbell Street...
...Monday night he lifted our hearts with a paean to what he calls ' 'the enterprise system...
...But this Convention week only Senator Helms feels virile about his anti-communism, and the usual cutesy racism—crime in the streets and all that—goes almost completely unsounded...
...October 1964 We cannot see how Nixon's record leaves a choice to any American who cares about his nation's traditional values, aspirations, and ideals...
...Betty Ford is winning...
...The remaining question now is whether modest Bridgism has a future...
...And Kit Bond couldn't get her into a Republican convention...
...The story that catches my eye is about a man named Hiram Hiller, a leader of the Kansas City Coalition, the protest group so feebly in evidence throughout the convention...
...A Utah Reaganite then stole New York's telephone, but this was soon won back, and Rockefeller, striding up and down the aisle in his shirtsleeves, waved it boyishly for TV cameramen...
...What we mainly do is watch celebrities...
...Another says he is for Reagan because Reagan is a winner...
...he also had 30 per cent of the concessions that sold them their food...
...what he wanted was to be a popular boss, a Bridge among Bridges...
...In 1976, he's finally gotten his wish...
...The story went on to say that Representative Silvio Conte of the platform committee protested that the energy plank—which opposes dismantling of oil companies and favors deregulation of oil and gas prices—"threatened to tag us as the party of big oil, the party of big business...
...John Dean, a not-quite good guy, sits across the aisle from me, and will eventually be interviewed by nearly all of us...
...Several news commentators, and especially Eric Sevar-eid on CBS, have suggested that the GOP has come back to the Midwest like an elephant to its burial ground...
...Reagan, knowing she was licked, didn't try to compete...
...Their very stuffiness is a source of rich instruction...
...Who's losing...
...Have you ever been offered, or solicited, a bribe...
...The Kemper Arena, seen from the outside, looks appropriately like a huge refinery tank...
...Bridges...
...Unless an author's name is appended, the material appeared as editorial comment...
...They have kept it because neither side pushed too hard, and nobody pushed because they didn't feel mean, and they didn't feel mean because their real meanness issues—anti-communism, race, and radicalism—were at least temporarily buried long before the Bridges got to town...
...A mob of reporters is handling him rudely but ineffectually, and he is enjoying every minute...
...In the park is an intense, bespectacled young Bridge named Gary Whit-mer, the designer of an inflatable plastic elephant that, once raised, will be five stories high...
...The Haberdashery offers free peanuts to its drinkers...
...If they won't do it in bars, are they likely to here on prime-time TV...
...A handful of soreheads like Richard Viguerie, who is talking (mainly to himself) about a third party bolt, are losing...
...However . . . America simply cannot afford to keep Richard M. Nixon in the White House for four more years...
...Art Buchwald is tripping over our feet, and so is John Kenneth Galbraith...
...Bridge mistrusted the broker Avrum Rheingold—has won a lasting, if muted, triumph...
...They are like those uncles and aunts who, when you visit them, say: "We don't care what your folks let you do...
...But the really interesting omission here at the Convention is the word—no pussyfooting now—communism...
...I personally hope they are wrong...
...Kansas City Walter Bridge, the hero of the fine Evan S. Connell Jr...
...The Tory Republicans represent but a small minority of the seven million voters comprising the Republican party in the fullness of its strength...
...It did briefly, but was interrupted and overridden by the applause greeting Mrs...
...Put another way, Henry Kissinger—mistrusted here the way Connell's Mr...
...The delegates here are not hard drinkers...
...One man tells me he is for Ford because Ford is a winner...
...Several nice ladies from Le Petit Pachyderm, a nearby GOP hotdog stand, tell Whitmer they know he'll find a way...
...Nancy K might be Mr...
...He wasn't actually in the food trade himself, he says, but rather provided the concessionaire "protection" from possible intruding competitors...
...Wednesday she brought Sonny Bono...
...There were no boos as in 1964, and when he appeared in the Presidential party box, which is just to my right, he got an almost sexy stroke on the cheek from Betty Ford...
...I don't want to talk about it," he tells me...
...Narrowly right-wing, splintered by factionalism, resting upon the allegiance of no more than 19 to 22 per cent of registered voters, the Republican Party, so the story goes, is on its last legs...
...Who's winning...
...This is supposed to be Connally's week—James Reston, who has possibly the strangest politics in America, is booming him again in today's New York Times—and he stands at the podium rolling his chin up and down, which is his way of letting you know he's got the situation in hand...
...Maybe it was the IRS...
...Tuck has promised to unnerve the Republicans somehow, even if he has to go to jail to do it...
...Like the local rich of the present, he lived just across the state line in Mission Hills, Kansas...
...That's the Republican Party for you," says the man, over and over to anyone who will listen...
...It seems that Brother Hiller not only arranged campgrounds for the protesters...
...But during the day—and this, after all, was the point of his life—he kept these terrors under a numbed control...
...Another man says, "That's the problem with models...
...And she owned the only radio station in their town...
...It's likely he didn't want it anyway...
...The elephant, which so far looks more like a monstrous trash bag, lies stubbornly in the fountain, though the men on the center tower have got its rear end up and, while dodging a huge flat tail, are nudging the back on their shoulders...
...What I need now is a really rich old daddy...
...This is a recurring theme during Convention week...
...Whitmer has a hand mike and is giving directions to crews of men positioned on scaffolding towers who are trying to pull the elephant to its feet with ropes...
...People in our house and Nancy's used to trade long silent visits, just to keep the heat bills down...
...Delegates and their wives wander aimlessly in and out of the bar, inevitably stopping to kid bartender Gary Masters about those peanuts...
...We hear a lot about those awful socialist, liberty-hating Democrats (without whose cheerful help no money could be flung at corporations...
...There would be exceptions, the most prudent investor must be prepared to admit that times change-even so, as he reminded his wife every now and then in order that she should have this principle irrevocably planted in her head by the time of his death, it is better to trade too little than too much...
...Last month we had Shriners," he says...
...Ford, which was similarly planned by the Ford General...
...His sleep was often disturbed by night terrors—springing from his sense of his own mortality, his inexpressible love for the foolish India, and the growing willfulness of his three small children...
...This is ungrateful of us for we have the best seats in the house, and have been provided, by "the Railroad Companies of America," with all the free sandwiches and beer our tummies can hold...
...in Connell's novel, Douglas Bridge asks his father about ancestral horse thieves, and he doesn't get an answer either...
...But there are plenty of middling Bridges around the old landmark hotel...
...The un-person Nixon seems to have locked them into this game...
...Find me a really rich old daddy," Nancy says...
...We walked two blocks further and sold our newspapers in the Plaza, nettling the Mrs...
...That's the kind of plain talk we need...
...They're so sweet," she says, "I've made up my mind...
...Everyone says it's interesting...
...No one asked, why...
...They have been billed by the press as redhots, combatants in one of the fiercest party fights of the century, but today their political talk is like their drinking...
...RobertM...
...You ought to hear Nancy K say nice lady...
...at our house bedtime is eight o'clock...
...She went to Kit personally, right out there in the Muehlebach lobby, but he claimed he couldn't do a thing to help...
...October 1972...
...We did mescaline and then walked a block to the Nelson Gallery, to look at the tapestries and the giant wooden Buddha...
...I ask...
...Kissinger, who sits here quietly munching popcorn (while his wife plainly scolds him about getting salt on his vest) is winning...
...this was a tactical move by Reagan's General, John Sears, and was supposed to cause a small stampede...
...Those were generally pretty bad days...
...asks a reporter...
...He is hard to follow, because of the noisiness of the inattentive delegates, but he seems to say at one point that "leadership begins with honesty, with candor, and with goats...
...The Democrats' own "prankster," Dick Tuck, is passing out copies of his paper, The Reliable Source, which contains a poster of Dean, an "ex-CREEP" now (Tuck says) in Jimmy Carter's pay...
...I want to be a nice lady, just like them...
...The Star quotes him as saying that he'd like to make enough capital to start his own business...
...He has apparently failed, and settled instead for presenting Dean with a copy of the paper...
...Back across the street Gary Whitmer's elephant is sinking into a black vinyl puddle...
...Masters, a ruddy, tattooed man who obviously likes conventioneers, admits to being a little tired of Republicans and their Jimmy Carter jokes...
...I had forgotten what an awful speaker Goldwater is...
...Reagan is losing...
...She bats her eyes and laughs...
...The Bridges, bless their hearts, have learned to live with threats like that...
...I'll work for Ford, work strongly for Ford, but we'll be starting out with a loser's mentality...
...Winters seemed especially harsh and there was no work...
...LaFolletteSr...
...A reformed druggie, a mother of an illegitimate daughter, mistress for many years of one of Kansas City's most frenetic black businessmen, Nancy now acts out an ironically affectionate parody of the local bourgeoisie...
...The trash bag elephant floats in the fountain, while around it wades an obviously stoned man in long hair and war paint...
...Absolutely not," says Connally...
...Isn't that interesting^ she says, when I tell her that I am in town for the Republican Convention...
...Connally delivers a Republican version of the ornate nonsense Barbara Jordan gave to the Democrats in July...
...The Bridges are instructive because they are relatively more honest than Democrats...
...Since we no longer have much visible radicalism, no one here bothers with it...
Vol. 40 • October 1976 • No. 10
