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Tag: Richard Nixon

  • Gen ‘08

    In the July 30 “New Republic,” Michael Crowley has a thoughtful profile of McCain right-hand man, co-author, and speechwriter Mark Salter. Here’s the 53-year-old Iowan’s challenge as he heads to to his cottage in Maine to work on Sen. McCain’s acceptance speech at the GOP convention:

    Salter hints the speech will spotlight McCain’s moments of self-sacrifice, as when he refused early release from captivity in Vietnam or challenged his own party over campaign finance reform. The contrast, he says, will be the “selfishness” of “self-interested” political partisans–i.e. Obama–who, he argues, have risked nothing of substance in their lives.

    …[T]he challenge Salter’s convention speech encapsulates is the generational showdown this election has become. The baby-boomer speechwriter must come up with an address that explains why voters should choose the elderly McCain’s experience and grounding in traditional values over the youthful Gen-X audacity of Obama. In the Salter narrative, the self-sacrificing war hero could not meet a better foil than the Obamamaniacs’ narcissistic world of Facebook and YouTube and Scarlett Johansson. But voters aren’t likely to base their decision on the past. With the economy on fire, gas prices soaring, and the Bush presidency a disaster, voters are feeling the fierce urgency of now. Even many Republicans concede John McCain may be waging an unwinnable fight.

    A funny thing happens in that second paragraph. After reprising Salter’s somewhat overwrought argument that McCain’s narrative is redolent with self-sacrifice compared to that of the untested Sen. Obama and his self-obsessed, youthful hordes, Crowley doesn’t bother sticking up for the younger cohort. It wouldn’t be a tough argument. After all, aren’t Salter’s own boomers supposed to be the most narcissistic generation in history? Instead, Crowley nods in the direction of Salter’s world view but then suggests that voters will be so distracted by their troubles and worries that they…well, I guess he’s saying that they’ll vote for whomever more persuasively promises instant relief.

    That sounds like a voters-are-dumb argument. Since voters definitely aren’t dumb, perhaps Republicans shouldn’t be so discouraged. Obama is brazenly reaching for the Kennedy mantle, especially with his coming star turn in Berlin. Not much of a Kennedy person, even I’m offended. Obama’s no Kennedy. A 13-year veteran of the House and Senate, the son of a U.S. ambassador, Kennedy’s World War II and Cold War bona fides (together with his fictional missile gap and deft manipulation of state secrets about Cuba) even enabled him to edge to Richard Nixon’s right on foreign policy in the 1960 election. He didn’t shift a whole range of positions within weeks of winning primaries with them, and he never said blithely that he’d be President “eight to ten years.” He earned his aura by his easy style and humor in office as well as his martyrdom. Obama pretends to it as a national figure for under two years. If Europeans go nuts over him, what does that prove? That they’re as easily fooled as Americans and their lapdog network anchors?

    Sure, Obama may be the real thing. Inexperienced leaders have sometimes risen to historic, wrenching challenges. But nobody really knows if Obama is such a leader, because nothing in his record demonstrates it. Supporting him urgently is by and large an act of faith. Meanwhile, there’re ample grounds for Obamagnosticism. Ryan Lizza, who studied him carefully for “The New Yorker,” wasn’t even willing to say for sure that Obama puts the public’s interests ahead of his own political advancement. His policy shifts, even if some are in the right direction, add credence to the view that he’ll do whatever is necessary to win. I think voters will notice that and begin to hold him to a higher standard than either they or the media have so far. In the months to come, for the very reason that they’re worried about their future, as Crowley notes, voters in key states will look for a substantive debate about issues that matter to them, and they’ll know when they’re being spun and manipulated. In anxious times, authenticity counts. McCain’s “experience and grounding in traditional values” may yet come in handy.

  • The Great Pennsylvania Debate – in McKeesport

    Presidential debates, especially the intra-party variety we are witnessing these days, are frequent to the point of becoming common place, if not benign. They seem to prove what Marshall McLuhan said about medium equaling message. The recent gotcha-fest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could make even the wildest political animal long for the days when debates were fewer and farther between.

    Or at least interesting.

    I’ve found myself longing a bit for those sixteen silent years between 1960 and 1976, when debates weren’t part of presidential campaigns. In fact, they were rarely mentioned at all. Maybe Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were on to something.

    In spite of abundant current evidence of forensic mediocrity, there does seem to be renewed interest these days in the gold standard for political debate – those serious and cerebral verbal exchanges between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas one hundred and fifty years ago. And, even though their experience was part of a campaign for a U.S. Senate seat, and not the White House itself, comparing that historic dialogue with what political debating has become in our age tempts one to switch the television channel to something with more depth.

    Like a rerun of The Price is Right on The Game Show Network.

    It actually took ninety years for what Abe and Steve did so well to even begin to impact modern American presidential politics. In 1948, Republican hopeful Harold Stassen debated Thomas Dewey before the Oregon Republican Primary. In 1956, Estes Kefauver debated Adlai Stevenson before the Florida Democratic Primary. And, of course, all modern day discussion of presidential debates inevitably includes a reference to the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960.

    The first of those now legendary debates took place in Chicago on September 26, 1960. It was moderated by Howard K. Smith and watched on television by more than 70 million Americans. But, in fact, it really wasn’t their first debate.

    With this year’s Pennsylvania primary now on center stage, it’s interesting to note that Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy had their very own Keystone state debate moment many years before – back in 1947.

    The two young Navy war veterans were elected to Congress in 1946 – Kennedy from Massachusetts and Nixon from California. During their first days in congress, they were appointed to the House Education and Labor Committee and were, as Nixon later recalled, “like a pair of unmatched bookends.”

    In April of 1947, they traveled to McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a coal mining and steel industry town of around 50,000 citizens at the time, located about fifteen miles from Pittsburgh, at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny Rivers. They had been asked to debate before a Junto Forum (this kind of discussion-based group dated back to the days of Benjamin Franklin) and to argue the merits, or lack thereof, of a piece of legislation informally known as the Taft-Hartley bill (officially, it was “The Labor-Management Relations Act”).

    This legislation had already passed the House and was at that time before the Senate. It was designed to rein in what was referred to at the time as Big Labor, and was the most successful of more than 200 similar bills proposed in the immediate aftermath of the war, as the country faced significant labor unrest. It would eventually clear the Senate and be vetoed by President Truman, who referred to it as a “slave labor” bill. His veto was then overridden and he actually found himself using the act a dozen or so times during his presidency.

    The debate took place at the Penn McKee Hotel, with about one hundred and fifty people in the audience. Nixon spoke in strong support of the bill. Kennedy was opposed – but not without commending certain aspects of the legislation. Chris Matthews in his 1996 book – “Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America”- suggested that the crowd clearly favored Kennedy (being a largely blue-collar and pro-labor district) and that the catcalls from some had been so fierce that “a local business leader felt called upon to apologize to the Republican congressman in writing.”

    But Kennedy saw it differently. In October of 1962, just three days before he would see the first photographic evidence of the Soviet missile build up in Cuba, President Kennedy returned to McKeesport. In his speech that day at their City Hall, he recalled: “The first time I came to this city was in 1947, when Mr. Richard Nixon and I engaged in our first debate. He won that one, and we went on to other things.”

    Indeed.

    It’s a fascinating little bit of history in preview – a joint appearance of these two young men with such compelling and interrelated futures ahead of them.

    Following their debate that evening long ago, the two future fierce opponents made their way to the town’s Star Diner to eat hamburgers and talk about baseball. They were killing time before heading to the train station to catch the midnight Capital Unlimited back to Washington.

    Sharing a compartment on the train, they drew straws to see who got the lower berth. Nixon won that one too.

    By all accounts, Mr. 35 and Mr. 37 talked long into the wee hours of the morning about the issue that most resonated with them – foreign policy. The Cold War was underway, and these two men who would play such vital roles during its most critical moments, contemplated their world.

    If only we had a transcript of THAT debate. — DRS