Almost President

by Scott Farris

  CHAPTER FIVE. AL SMITH

  Al Smith is the subject of two excellent recent biographies: Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (Free Press, New York and London, 2001); and Christopher M. Finan, Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior (Hill and Wang, New York, 2002). Slayton particularly focuses on Smith’s Lower East Side upbringing as key to understanding the man, while Finan is intrigued by the real motivation behind Smith’s rupture with Roosevelt. One of the few earlier biographies of Smith, Oscar Handlin, Al Smith and His America (Little, Brown and Co., Boston and Toronto, 1958), is less satisfying, perhaps because it seems to be less critical—perhaps in deference to the aspirations of the man whose recommendation appears on the book’s dust jacket: John F. Kennedy. Smith also receives insightful treatment in Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Vintage Books, New York, 1975), which chronicles the long partnership between Smith and Moses, dating to Smith’s time in the New York Legislature.

  The four books I most relied upon in regard to Smith’s legacy and how Kennedy’s Catholic faith impacted the 1960 election were W. J. Rorabaugh, The Real Making of the President: Kennedy, Nixon, and the 1960 Election (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2009); Shaun A. Casey, The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2009); Michael Sean Winters, Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats (Basic Books, New York, 2008); and Richard Nixon, Six Crises (Touchstone, New York and London, 1990). Nixon is obviously biased but had a knack for political analysis, and his own view of how religion played as an issue in 1960 seems right.

  The most accessible history of the Roman Catholic Church in America is Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (Times Books, New York, 1997). Also excellent is Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1992), which describes how Catholicism evolved as a church for poor immigrants into a church of the middle class. Also recommended is Dolan’s The Irish Americans: A History (Bloomsbury Press, New York, Berlin, and London, 2008).

  An especially interesting book is George J. Marlin, The American Catholic Voter: 200 Years of Political Impact (St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, Ind., 2004). Marlin has compiled reams of data and anecdotes in arguing that Catholics have always been a pivotal (and often controversial) voting bloc, and that the shift of many Catholics to the Republican Party is one of the key partisan developments of the last half-century. Though it also seems true to me, from reading Marlin, that it can also be said there is no “Catholic vote” anymore and that Catholics are now so fully assimilated and so diverse that their votes are divvied up in the same proportion as the overall vote.

  In offering my thesis on how Smith’s loss changed how Catholics interacted with the mass media, I was fortunate that a fine book had just been published: Anthony Burke Smith, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2010). Smith, however, believes the Great Depression was the impetus for the glowing portrayals of Catholicism in films and on radio because Catholic teaching on community resonated during this period. Since I am skeptical that even many of my fellow Catholics know much about Catholic social teaching, I will stay with my own thesis that the overt bigotry faced by Smith was the more likely stimulant. More closely aligned with my own thinking is Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (Columbia University Press, New York, 1999), which described the Production Code as being such a Catholic effort.

  Regarding other issues raised in the chapter, I thought Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1994), does a fine job of describing what the second iteration of the Klan was all about. For Prohibition, I relied on one of the more influential studies, Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (W. W. Norton and Co., New York and London, 1976), which makes the observation that not only were many Catholics active in the Anti-Saloon League, but many Catholics were leaders in that group and the Prohibition effort. Regarding the “Radio Priest,” Father Charles Coughlin, there is no better book than Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (Vintage Books, New York, 1983). To place Smith in the context of the 1920s, I used Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties: A History (Touchstone, New York, 1982), and the classic by Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (Wiley, New York, 1997).

  Persuasive data that the magnitude of Smith’s defeat was due to his Catholicism can be found in Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Lexington Books, Lanham, Md., 2000).

  CHAPTER SIX. THOMAS E. DEWEY

  Dewey is fortunate to have a particularly excellent and comprehensive biography by Richard Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982). Smith’s exuberance for his subject is indicated by his lively prose, though his judgments are sober.

  Dewey himself explained his political thinking in a series of lectures that were captured in John A. Wells, ed., Thomas E. Dewey on the Two-Party System (Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1966). Also influential in how I thought about Dewey and his development of “Modern Republicanism” was an article published in 1982, Robert Griffith, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” American Historical Review, Vol. 87, No. 1 (February), pp. 87–122.

  Dewey’s career as a prosecutor is well chronicled in Mary M. Stolberg, Fighting Organized Crime: Politics, Justice, and the Legacy of Thomas E. Dewey (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1995), though Stolberg is critical of the prosecutorial techniques pioneered by Dewey and emulated by most prosecutors today to the detriment of defendants’ civil liberties.

  The 1948 upset campaign has garnered quite a bit of attention, and I consulted both Harold I. Gullan, The Upset That Wasn’t: Harry S. Truman and the Crucial Election of 1948 (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1998), and Zachary Karabell, The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2000). I particularly enjoyed Karabell’s insight that Dewey’s campaign was made for the age of television just before television was much of a factor. By 1952, Eisenhower mimicked Dewey’s strategy to great effect.

  On major contemporary figures and placing Dewey’s contributions in context, see James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1972); Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1995); David McCullough, Truman (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992); John Robert Greene, The Limits of Power: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992); Richard Nixon, Six Crises (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1962); Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2003); and Michael Korda, Ike: An American Hero (Harper, New York, 2007).

  CHAPTER SEVEN. ALDAI STEVENSON

  So many Stevenson books were written by friends and admirers that an objective view of the man is not easy to find. Fortunately, many of Stevenson’s friends were scholars and students of history, unafraid to offer a more nuanced portrait of the man.

  There are George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (W. W. Norton and Company, New York and London, 1982); Alistair Cooke, Six Men (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1977); and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Journals: 1952–2000 (Penguin Press, New York, 2007). Each offers extraordinarily helpful insights into Stevenson’s character, the authors having been with him in every conceivable situation and environment.

  The more obviously laudatory memoirs that were helpful include: Edward P. Doyle, ed., As We Knew Adlai: The Stevenson Sto
ry by Twenty-two Friends (Harper and Row, New York, 1966), and Alden Whitman, Portrait: Adlai E. Stevenson: Politician, Diplomat, Friend (Harper and Row, New York, 1965).

  Full-scale biographies that strive mightily to provide an even-handed treatment of Stevenson include: Jeff Broadwater, Adlai Stevenson and American Politics (Twayne, New York, 1994); Kenneth S. Davis, The Politics of Honor: A Biography of Adlai E. Stevenson (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1967); John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois (Doubleday and Company, Garden City, N.Y., 1976); and Porter McKeever, Adlai Stevenson: His Life and Legacy (Quill William Morrow, New York, 1989).

  More critical of Stevenson’s role in allegedly unmooring the Democratic Party from its blue collar, middle class roots are Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (Free Press, New York, 1990); and Garry Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1994). The most influential book to address the role of intellectualism in American political life is Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage Books, New York, 1963), though Hofstadter’s tone is sometimes so condescending it seems to reinforce the reputation of intellectuals as snobs disconnected from ordinary Americans.

  Putting the Stevenson era in broader context are: David Halberstam, The Fifties (Villard Books, New York, 1993); Alonzo L. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: FDR to Reagan (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1985); and William O’Neill, American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960 (Free Press, New York, 1986).

  Of course, the most eloquent voice on Stevenson is Stevenson, and like John Steinbeck, I enjoyed reading Adlai Stevenson, Speeches (Random House, New York, 1952).

  CHAPTER EIGHT. BARRY GOLDWATER

  Many write about Goldwater, but most are partisans. The only truly scholarly biography of Goldwater is Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995). Goldberg, a Goldwater volunteer as a teenager in New York City whose politics moved to the left later in life, is tough but fair in assessing Goldwater’s career, particularly his personal attitudes on race. Not a biography, but a (justifiably) highly lauded recent study of Goldwater’s place in the rise of the modern conservative movement is Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, New York, 2001).

  Then, there is the host of tributes to Goldwater, particularly those that came after his death. As with Stevenson, Goldwater had friends and admirers whose academic integrity would not allow them to offer an only one-sided assessment of the man. Four worthy of recommendation are William F. Buckley Jr., Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (Basic Books, New York, 2008); Lee Edwards, Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution (Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington, D.C., 1997); J. William Middendorf II, A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement (Basic Books, New York, 2006); and Bill Rentschler, Goldwater: A Tribute to a Twentieth-Century Political Icon (Contemporary Books, Chicago, 2000).

  Goldwater himself produced two memoirs: With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater (William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1979), and Goldwater (Doubleday, New York, 1988). And no one can profess to have studied twentieth-century American politics without having read Goldwater’s manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative (Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 1960 and 2007). To see how that seminal book fits into the broader pattern of post-war conservative thought, see the dry but comprehensive George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Basic Book Publishers, New York, 1979). Goldwater’s son also helped develop a collection of speeches, articles, interviews, and public papers that tell Goldwater’s story quite well in John W. Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr., Pure Goldwater (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008).

  To understand the right and Southern turn made by the Republican Party in the 1960s, most particularly around the issue of race, I consulted John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., and London, 1997); Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of the Southern Republicans (Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2002); Mary Brennan, Turning Right in the ’60s: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1995); John E. Chubb and Paul E. Petersen, eds., The New Direction in American Politics (Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 1985); the particularly influential study by Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics (W. W. Norton and Company, New York and London, 1991); Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965); Jeremy D. Mayer, Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960–2000 (Random House, New York, 2002); Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1969)—another critical book in understanding late-twentieth-century American politics; Nicol C. Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans: From 1952 to the Present (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1989); William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right (William Morrow & Co., New York, 1984); and Louis M. Seagull, Southern Republicanism (John Wiley and Sons, New York and London, 1975)

  For a broader overview on the Republican Party and the 1960s, helpful books included Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (Random House, New York, 2004); Jon Margolis, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, the Beginning of the “Sixties” (William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1999); and Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1984), while two important Goldwater Southern supporters are profiled in Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Simon and Schuster, New York and London, 1995); and Nadine Cohodas, Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change (Simon and Schuster, New York and London, 1993).

  CHAPTER NINE. GEORGME McGOVERN

  The best single volume on McGovern, the 1972 campaign, and its legacy is Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2009). Miroff makes a compelling case that a supposedly radical “McGovernism” is a bugaboo that did not exist but that McGovern was a thoughtful, often conventional liberal.

  John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (A Lisa Drew Book, New York and London, 2002) joins Miroff in urging the Democratic Party to take a fresh look at the McGovern legacy and to build upon the McGovern coalition, rather than the long-gone New Deal coalition.

  Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1972: A Narrative History of American Politics in Action (Atheneum, New York, 1973) was the last of the “making of the president” series that White began in 1960. White is a gifted storyteller who offers a particularly riveting account of the whole Eagleton mess. White’s 1972 book was not as influential as his previous books, in part because he was then being imitated by other journalists, and because there was a new style of campaign reporting on the scene that got lots of attention, primarily gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (Warner Books, New York, 2006, c. 1973). McGovern aide Frank Mankiewicz called Thompson’s account “the least factual, most accurate account” produced.

  An interesting collection of essays, primarily authored by South Dakota academics, on various aspects of McGovern’s life can be found in Robert P. Watson, ed., George McGovern: A Political Life, a Political Legacy (South Dakota State Historical Society Press, Pierre, S.D., 2004). The essays emerged from a conference held on McGovern and his legacy in 2004 at Dakota Wesleyan University.

  With a PhD in history, McGovern wrote one of the more insightful and candid can
didate memoirs, Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern (Random House, New York, 1977). Also worth reading are McGovern’s other works, including Abraham Lincoln (Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., New York, 2009), a compact study of Lincoln that breaks no new ground, and Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism (Villard Books, New York, 1996), his tragic story of his daughter’s battle with mental illness and substance abuse.

  To understand the man McGovern ran against, two superb but disturbing portraits emerge in Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (Simon & Schuster, New York and London, 2001), and Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of the President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, New York and London, 2008).

  CHAPTER TEN. ROSS PEROT

  Gerald Posner, Citizen Perot: His Life and Times (Random House, New York, 1996) is the finest biography of Perot, written with his cooperation but not authorized. It is a scrupulously fair assessment of the man. Ted G. Jelen, ed., Ross for Boss: The Perot Phenomenon and Beyond (State University of New York Press, Albany, 2001) is a series of essays developed by political science professors from thirteen universities that assess the Perot phenomenon from the perspective of the year 2000. The essays cover such topics as the religious affiliation of Perot voters, his pioneering use of television in his campaigns, and an explanation of why his support plummeted between 1992 and 1996.

  Pat Benjamin, The Perot Legacy: A New Political Path (iUniverse, Inc., New York, Lincoln, and Shanghai, 2007), is written by a Perot volunteer who wanted to correct “misperceptions” regarding the Reform Party movement. Benjamin focuses on all the legal travails and disputes that helped bring the Reform Party down, but the book is also helpful in understanding the mindset of a Perot activist. Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone, Three’s a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2008) makes the argument that the great impact of the Perot candidacies was in revitalizing the Republican Party, which, having absorbed a significant portion of the agenda in its 1994 “Contract With America,” took back the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in forty years.