JoePa Takes the Fall

by Bill Keisling

  The state attorney general in the 1960s was, in deed if not word, basically the governor’s lawyer. It was nothing like the AG today. Attorney General Alessandroni’s portfolio involved mundane state legal affairs. He was not looked upon as the state’s ‘chief law enforcement officer,’or anything like it, as today. And the AG through the 1970s had no prosecutorial powers.

  The AG’s office itself, through the 1960s, was kept in the same suite of offices as the governor, in the main capitol building.

  “My offices were across the hall from the governor’s conference room,” remembers William Sennett, who was appointed AG in the 1960s following Walter Alessandroni. Sennett, as I’ll explain, today is the last living state AG from this 1960s Republican era.

  Close proximity to the governor made it easy for the AG to spend much of his time with his boss, patron, and appointer -- the governor -- and the governor’s staff.

  “I was over there all the time (in the governor’s office),” Sennett recalls. As was Alessandroni, when he was AG. “Sometimes I’d spend the whole day in the governor’s office and then get back to the Department of Justice to see what was going on there.”

  “It was vastly different from today,” Sennett tells me. “You were appointed attorney general to oversee the legal work of the executive branch of state government. If you gave an opinion to a cabinet officer, that opinion was binding. Sometimes the cabinet officers themselves would ask for an opinion.”

  Still the attorney general had an important job. Sennett recalls a state Supreme Court ruling that described the AG as the “second most important official in Pennsylvania, after the governor.”

  The AG’s office in the 1960s had a very small staff, former AG Sennett remembers. It was nothing at all like the 750 or so staffers working in the office of attorney general in 2012.

  “I had probably 20 or 30 deputy attorneys general working for me, and that was about it,” Sennett says. Of these, a deputy AGs was assigned to supervise the legal work of each state department. “One was assigned to the Department of Revenue, the Department of Transportation, and so on.”

  In addition to the deputy AGs, Sennett says, “There were maybe more than 100 of what were called Assistant Attorneys General spread out in the other departments.” This makes getting an exact head count of the AG’s staff back then difficult. The assistant AGs, back then, were considered employees of the individual departments.

  Though they were nominally under the command of the AG, the assistant AG’s often had loyalty to the individual department heads, not the attorney general. “Some of them would be in cahoots with the department heads, and you had to watch them,” Sennett says.

  My father worked for Bill Scranton in the governor’s office. At age 26 he became executive aide to the governor of Pennsylvania. He became friends and worked in trusted close proximity to AG Walter Alessandroni.

  “Bill Scranton didn’t have a hierarchical governor’s office,” my father remembers. He describes Scranton’s organizational style as more like a wheel, with Scranton at the hub. “We’d all be in the room, Walter included, and go at it with the governor,” he says.

  At the heart of it was Bill Scranton. He sought other people’s opinions, listened, but applied his own heart and conscience. He didn’t need a pollster to tell him what was right, or what he should do.

  The issue of capital punishment in the Scranton administration is telling.

  “Scranton had moral reservations about capital punishment,” my father remembers. “But he’d say, ‘I come from the generation where the Lindbergh baby had a great impact.’”

  Whenever it came time for the governor to consider a death warrant, “Walter would send this poor lawyer in to talk to Bill Scranton,” my father smiles. “I mean, every time there was a death warrant to be signed, this same lawyer would show up in the governor’s office to explain it. But Walter also would send me in to argue with the lawyer in front of Scranton. Of course I hated the death penalty. I’d tear into this poor lawyer. There never was a death warrant signed in the Scranton administration,” he says proudly.

  Attorney General Walter Alessandroni understood this: There may be a thousand ways to skin a cat, but there are 1,001 ways to protect a cat.

  Gov. Bill Scranton had an almost magical ability to build bridges.

  “He had Harv Taylor eating out of his hand, and Billy Meehan and the Philadelphia machine as well,” my father remembers. “I mean, Harv Taylor was eating out of his hand,” he emphasizes.

  State Senator Harvey Taylor of Harrisburg was the tough-minded and complex Republican majority leader of the state senate. By trade an insurance salesman, for decades Taylor was also political boss of mid-state Pennsylvania.

  Before Gov. Scranton was finished with old Harv Taylor, the governor had passed sweeping reform legislation and initiatives, some of which had languished for years in the state legislature under Democratic administrations.

  “When you look at the things we enacted -- community colleges; public television; schools; mental institution reforms; and unemployment compensation; a whole host of things -- most had been introduced by Gov. Leader in the 1950s, and Harv Taylor had shot them all down.”

  Now here was Harv Taylor helping Scranton push them into law.

  “Years later I became friends with George Leader and laughed with him about it,” my dad says.

  My father, for his part, over the years shared with me a few of the more practical insights he learned as a young man serving the governor:

  Rule # 1: Politicians in Pennsylvania can get away with just about anything so long as they do not raise taxes.

  Rule # 2: You can couch all manner of regressive nonsense as reform and it will likely sail through the, ahem, cough, ‘reform-minded’ legislature.

  To me the most interesting thing he had to say involved the important function of moderate Republicans in our body politic, and goes to the story about Sen. Harv Taylor:

  Rule #3: Only a moderate, conscientious Republican can act as a bridge to bring the two parties together.

  A moderate Republican, like Bill Scranton, can reach out to Democrats to do the right thing, and bring along his caucus. Moderate Republicans, when you think about, are the fulcrum upon which swings the progress of our country.

  I submit that without that fulcrum, without that pivot, without those moderate Republicans, the lever cannot, and will not, move.

  Today, that’s why we’re not moving.

  Gov. Bill Scranton enters 1964 presidential race

  The high water mark for moderate and progressive Republicans in Pennsylvania, and in the United States, came in 1964. Pennsylvania Gov. Bill Scranton was not only in the thick of it. He personified it.

  There were rumblings on the western horizon of a new brand of Republicanism, based unapologetically on extremism, zealotry, personal interest and greed, and intolerance of others and their views. Pluralism and diversity of ideas was, and remains, their enemy. They wrote and devoured hotheaded, intolerant books with titles like None Dare Call It Treason, and Communism, Hypnotism, and The Beatles. Red bating was a favorite scare tactic.

  Their hotheaded ideologue and hero, Barry Goldwater, ran for president in 1964. Helping him at campaign appearances was a telegenic former actor named Ronald Reagan. This campaign, as has been remarked by many others, set the stage for more than just Ronald Reagan. Goldwater’s 1964 campaign set the stage for the political world in which we in the United States find ourselves living today.

  “In your heart, you know he’s right,” was Goldwater’s slogan.

  “In your guts you know he’s nuts,” was incumbent President Lyndon Johnson’s damaging retort.

  Not helping his narrow-minded politics, Goldwater was a walking, talking disaster. Goldwater infamously joked that the military “should lob one (an atom bomb) into the men’s room of the Kremlin.” He loudly railed about, and ultimately voted against, the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying he believed these matters should best
be left to the states.

  Earlier, Goldwater described the Eisenhower administration as “a dime store New Deal,” a remark that angered Ike, who’d already harbored suspicions of Goldwater’s brand of politics. In a 1961 news conference Goldwater said, “sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea.” So much for pluralism, and a diversity of views.

  Needless to say, progressive East Coast Republicans saw all this as a threat. There was hope that Goldwater could be stopped by New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, champion of the progressive wing of the party. But Rockefeller’s support eroded after it became apparent he’d left his wife the year before to marry Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, herself a divorcee with children.

  A groundswell grew for Gov. Bill Scranton to enter the race for president.

  Scranton to some appeared to vacillate, as if he could not decide whether to run. He was called in the press “The Hamlet of Harrisburg.”

  Truth is, Bill Scranton didn’t want to run for president.

  What finally pushed Scranton into the race was Sen. Goldwater’s vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the weeks before the Republican National Convention.

  “He ran because of the Civil Rights Act,” my father candidly discloses.

  In the year leading up to the ‘64 convention, Goldwater’s campaign staff had done a fantastic job crisscrossing the country sewing up support from potential delegates at the state and county level.

  Bill Scranton feared that the Republican Party would be greatly wounded if Goldwater received unanimous acclamation at the convention following his loud vote against the historic Civil Rights Act.

  So Scranton’s belated candidacy was one of principle, plurality, and protest, to let Americans know that other Republicans favored and understood the importance of civil rights for all.

  Bill Scranton never thought he could win.

  With only weeks to go before the Republican National Convention, Scranton threw his hat into the ring. Gov. Scranton asked the state attorney general, Walter Alessandroni, to manage the campaign. A small contingent of staff, including my father, was dispatched to travel around the country with a million dollar war chest to scout out support.

  At the time the million dollars seemed like a crazy amount of money, my father chuckles.

  On a wing and a prayer, singing songs and with high hopes, everyone and their wives flew from Harrisburg to the convention at Cow Palace in San Francisco.

  Some have called the 1964 presidential election “liberalism’s last hurrah.” In reality, it was the last stand of moderate and progressive Republicanism. In a very real sense, it was Teddy Roosevelt’s last charge up the hill.

  “The object of government is the welfare of the people,” TR once wrote. “The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens.”

  The Goldwaterites sought to turn the Republican Party, and the American people, away from some of these basic inclusive tenets advocated by great party leaders of the past, like TR and Lincoln.

  In a 1910 speech delivered in Osawatomie, Kansas, Teddy Roosevelt summed up his vision for his party, and country. The Goldwaterites would be at war with almost everything in TR’s Osawatomie Speech.

  About one hundred years ago, before a crowd of 30,000, on a hot August day, Teddy Roosevelt climbed on to a table in Osawatomie and spoke for an hour and a half about what he would call his “Square Deal.” Among other things, he spoke of the importance of a strong federal government.

  “The American people,” Roosevelt thundered, “is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over-division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock.”

  Roosevelt told the people that it came down to a matter of priorities. Sometimes the Republican Party, and the American people, he pointed out, must choose between human rights, and property rights. On such occasions, TR told the crowd, Republicans should side with human rights, and human needs.

  “I believe in shaping the ends of government to protect property as well as human welfare,” Roosevelt declared. “Normally...the ends are the same, but whenever the alternative must be faced I am for men and not for property.”

  As TR saw things, it boiled down to this fundamental priority: People before things. Roosevelt pointed out that it would be necessary to realign and reprioritize all three branches of government -- the executive, legislative, and the judiciary -- to bring about these changes of priority.

  This rethinking of national priorities, Roosevelt told the crowd, “regards the executive power as the steward of public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.”

  It was this speech, and these mainstream, winning, progressive Republican ideas, that Barry Goldwater and his followers were at war with in 1964, and continue to be at war with today.

  Barry Goldwater had always personally liked Bill Scranton. Both men were pilots in World War II. In Washington, while Scranton was in Congress, a group of former war pilots would get together. Scranton would socialize with Goldwater and reminisce about flying during the war. The two men got to know each other fairly well, and understood each other, as men in arms do, and liked and respected each other. They were on good personal terms.

  The congressional pilots’ club even included a lawmaker who openly supported the John Birch Society. Scranton even got along with him, and shared war stories with the John Bircher in the pilots’ club. They all enjoyed talking piloting, even though Scranton didn’t necessarily agree with their politics.

  Bill Scranton had an impressive ability to get along with most everyone -- on a personal level. “But he never let personal issues interfere with politics,” my father says.

  Leading up to the convention, Goldwater considered naming Bill Scranton his running mate.

  But now Scranton was running for president, and wanted a debate. He asked my father to write a letter to a party official asking for a debate with Goldwater. Like most frontrunners, Goldwater was elusive, and had no use for a debate.

  My father sat down and composed a missive that to this day is infamously known in American political circles simply as ‘The Letter.’

  “It’s your daddy who wrote The Letter,” I still hear from smiling politicos and journalists alike.

  There is some level of confusion in some circles about the process used to draft The Letter, and whether Gov. Scranton knew of the contents of it. The short story: the governor didn’t know, but the state AG did. It’s worthwhile to relate a story told to me by former AG Bill Sennett.

  “The first time I met your dad,” Sennett tells me, “I was a lawyer in Erie, and an assistant to Lt. Governor Ray Shafer. Your father came up to Erie for an event, and there was a PR person who had a question for the administration. Your father was standing there, so I referred her to him. And your Dad, without missing a beat, told her, ‘Governor William Scranton said today...’ That was the first time I heard anyone do that. I thought it was great. I didn’t know we could do that!”

  My father often spoke on behalf of the governor. Which was how he wrote The Letter.

  But instead of sending The Letter to the party official, it was addressed directly to Sen. Goldwater himself.

  “Scranton really didn’t know about it,” my father says.

  In The Letter, Barry Goldwater was read the riot act. Maybe if my father had played the game, and climbed the ladder, I’d have grown up in Washington, and our lives would have turned out differently.

  But what is
it to gain the world if you suffer your soul? There were principles involved. This was a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. It was a fight about the future of the United States. We see that more clearly today.

  In The Letter, Dad wrote Goldwater, “you have too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” Further, he wrote, “Goldwaterism has come to stand for a whole crazy-quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions that would be soundly repudiated by the American people in November.”

  My dad handed the draft of The Letter to state Attorney General and Campaign Manager Walter Alessandroni, who made suggestions and edited it. A secretary who usually signed for Scranton then signed it with Scranton’s name. It was sent to Goldwater. And nothing happened.

  “It sat there for a day or two,” my father recounts. Goldwater either ignored it, or didn’t know about it, which seems unlikely.

  “People don’t know the story behind it,” my father says. “The Letter just sat there, and nobody knew about it. What happened was, at the convention I met Walter Cronkite. We wanted to kick it out there. So I said to Cronkite, ‘There’s an interesting story about this letter --.’”

  Cronkite said, “That’s very interesting. Let’s see this letter.”

  And that’s the way it was.

  Exposed by TV anchorman Walter Cronkite, The Letter caused a national uproar. Everyone from Barry Goldwater to Time magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer screamed for my old man’s head. Scranton protected him.

  My father became the enfant terrible of the national Republican Party. With almost forty years’ hindsight, though, The Letter today seems to me on the money, courageous, and prescient. Lincoln and TR, I’m sure, would be happy with it. It said what had to be said.