JoePa Takes the Fall

by Bill Keisling

  But The Letter was incendiary. At the volatile, unscripted convention it was a match thrown into a pool of gasoline. There was an explosion, and the wheels came off the Republican Party at the convention in the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

  Pandemonium ensued. This was in the day when political conventions were real human affairs, not the pre-programmed, canned commercials they’ve become. When Nelson Rockefeller took the podium to address the convention, he was shouted down and drowned out by Goldwater partisans, who would not let him speak, and who choked the hall for sixteen minutes with boos and catcalls.

  “The scene was set for the battle over the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” is how the PBS show American Experience recounts it:

  “’This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen.’ Standing before the hostile crowd at the 1964 GOP Convention in San Francisco, a defiant Nelson Rockefeller could barely make his words heard above the booing. The atmosphere at the Republican convention was heated as Nelson Rockefeller stepped up to the podium to address the belligerent crowd: ‘During this year I have crisscrossed this nation, fighting … to keep the Republican party the party of all the people ... and warning of the extremist threat, its danger to the party, and danger to the nation,’ he said, taking his time as the crowd cheered ‘We want Barry!’ ‘These extremists feed on fear, hate and terror, [they have] no program for America and the Republican Party... [they] operate from dark shadows of secrecy. It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now any doctrinaire, militant minority whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan or Birchers.’ It was, according to many, Nelson Rockefeller’s finest moment -- but it did little to stop the conservative wave that was transforming the GOP.”

  The progressive wing of the Republican Party would never really recover, or be allowed to speak up again. It was hung out to dry, and left to wither and die. Pity. Our country’s the worse for it. None dare call it intolerance, and elitism.

  Bill Scranton refused to withdraw his name from nomination at the convention until the first roll call vote had been cast. The first round of balloting gave Goldwater 883 votes to Scranton’s 214.

  Following the first roll call vote, Bill Scranton entered the convention hall with his wife, Mary, and campaign manager and state Attorney General Walt Alessandroni at his side.

  “Let it be clearly understood,” Scranton told the convention, “that this great Republican party is our historic house. This is our home. We have no intention of deserting it. We are still Republicans -- and not very still ones either.” He asked his supporters “not to desert our party but to strengthen it.”

  Perhaps, I suspect, at least partly goaded and angered by The Letter, Goldwater took the podium for his acceptance speech and delivered his cup of poison, a Kool-Aid elixir they’re still drinking today:

  “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Goldwater told the country. “And let me remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

  At least the damn fool went down swinging.

  As for my father, a few days later the phone rang. Nelson Rockefeller was on the other end.

  “Are you the guy who wrote The Letter?” Rockefeller gushed. “I want you to work for me!” Rockefeller set up a meeting with my father.

  “The funny thing about Rockefeller was,” my dad says, “for all his millions, he would take off his eyeglasses and stir his coffee with his eyeglass stem.”

  At the governor’s desk

  What we do with our children, and what we expose them to, casts long and unexpected shadows. While I was still a tender preschooler in kindergarten pants, my father on weekends sometimes took me with him into the governor’s office.

  The place back then still had the drowsy feel of the early 20th century. The governor’s office would be quiet and empty, except for us, and maybe a state trooper. (A trooper in those days ran the governor’s office 24-hour telephone switchboard and WATS lines.)

  On several occasions my father took me into the governor’s conference room, across the hall from the attorney general’s office. Or sometimes he’d have me sit at the governor’s desk. He’d tell me, for reasons still unknown to me, to sit at the governor’s place at the table and to practice writing my alphabet. With that, he’d close the door, and leave me alone in the still, august chamber.

  A child of five, I found myself sitting at the governor’s desk. An empty legal tablet sat before me. I clutched a pencil. I looked around. The office was opulent. The carpeting, thick. The doors and walls were of fine carved wood. Appointments of stone, marble, or heavy brass. It seemed to me like some sort of public sanctum. But what was this place for? I wondered.

  And something else, by far the most striking thing to my young, impressionable mind: On the walls of the room, lining the great high-ceilinged chamber, staring down at me as I sat at the governor’s desk, hung exquisite oil portraits of past governors of Pennsylvania. Some of the portraits were of great men. Most of them were long forgotten.

  I can still see the faces of the great, gifted and inspired governors, like Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot was one of those rare and most dangerous of political animals: a blue blood who was considered by some to be “a traitor to his class.” The aristocrats are not much afraid of you or me. But once or twice every hundred years or so there comes one of their own -- Thomas Jefferson, the Roosevelts, Gifford Pinchot -- who knows how to hit them where it hurts.

  Pinchot, before he became governor, helped create the American parks system with his friend and ally, Teddy Roosevelt. “Among the many, many public officials who under my administration rendered literally invaluable service to the people of the United States, he, on the whole, stood first,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote of Pinchot in his Autobiography.

  Sometimes when Pinchot would visit his bully friend TR, they would strip down to their skivvies, Roosevelt would pull out a wrestling mat, and he and Pinchot would have a go wrestling on the office floor.

  Pinchot served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania, from 1923-26 and 1931-34. Gov. Pinchot established state parks, built roads for farmers, and electrified rural Pennsylvania.

  For the great ones, like Pinchot, to be governor is not a be-all, or end-all. Pinchot reflected that he was “a governor every now and then, but I am a forester all the time.”

  And there was a portrait of poor Andrew Curtin, from Bellefonte, Centre County. Curtin suffered severe physical and mental breakdowns from the strain of supplying men and materiel to Union forces during the Civil War at Gettysburg.

  Most impressive of all to me was the portrait of Benjamin Franklin. (Franklin was actually the sixth President of Pennsylvania, serving before a new constitution in 1790 created the office of governor). For me Franklin stood out from all the rest.

  Ben Franklin stared down at me as I sat at the governor’s desk like he expected something good to come of me, but with a hint of a suspicion that I was, after all, goofing off. He seemed like a stern teacher, expecting me to do good work for Pennsylvania, and wondering if I was up to the task.

  Something else about those portraits in the governor’s office always stuck in my head. The likes of Governors Franklin, Pinchot, and Curtin were far outnumbered by the forgotten governors who were merely good, and of their own time. A friend of mine, Corey Stein, actually cared for a former governor who was at the end of his life. This former governor was left to die pretty much alone in a rest home outside Harrisburg, visited only by his daughter. The cheers from the crowds of decades past by now were only a faint, tinny memory. Stein would pick the former governor up out of his hospital bed, move him around, and talk to him. How did he get here? Where had all the crowds gone? Where was his constituency now? Where was the roar of the conventions?

  The governor’s quiet office is like a seashell. Listen carefully, and you can still here a whisper of the roar of the crowds from a century ago.

  Most people imagine the governor’s office as a whirling control room, at the
center of events. In actuality, more often than not, the governor and his staff must respond to events beyond their control.

  More often than not, it’s the things you ignore, or take for granted, that bite you.

  “Jim Reichley was Gov. Scranton’s legislative secretary,” former AG Bill Sennett recalls, “and he knew how bad the revenues were. Reichley used to say, ‘We’ve got to watch the revenues.’ We should have paid more attention to him, because that was the problem that hobbled us in the Shafer administration.”

  All around me at the governor’s desk, as I sat as a boy, seemed quiet, serious, and solemn. A thoughtful place.

  I was terrified. It seemed to me like the whole world had gone off and left me to do the thinking. It’s a feeling I still carry with me today. I thought about what made the great governors different from the ones who weren’t so great. The difference, I thought, was that the great ones always considered what was good for everybody in Pennsylvania. Ben Franklin didn’t make his stove and his bifocals, nor fly his kite, for the elite. Franklin, in fact, never took out a patent for his inventions. He enjoyed, instead, seeing people use them. His reward was seeing the lives of everyday Pennsylvanians, and Americans, improved.

  In my young mind I thought of the governor’s desk as something like an altar, where good things can be summoned, and done. It should be approached with clean hands, I thought, like when you go to church. Sitting behind that desk you should look out for everyone’s interests, and always think about, and weigh, the consequences of your actions and inactions, for the benefit of ourcommonwealth and its future. You should be honest with other people. Truth has power. Truth, in the end, is the biggest power there is. Truth is reality. Truth is God.

  Sometimes you have to take a stand against things, even if it runs against the grain, and is counter to what everyone else is doing. What you tolerate is what you become.

  Just as importantly, you should be honest with, and about, yourself. The words and deeds you use at that desk should be true and honest, like when you’re talking to a girl you really like and you want her to see your true face, warts and all.

  The Japanese have a saying: “A man is whatever room he is in.” I guess that applies to boys (and girls) too, sitting in the governor’s office. While I sat at that table I was the governor. I could look out the windows from the governor’s desk and see, beyond in the capitol complex, all the departments and bureaus and offices of state government. I would measure them by the same simple criteria to which I held myself: Were they doing their best, and how well were they working for Pennsylvania? This government is all of ours to care for.

  Sitting at the governor’s table as a young boy, with Ben Franklin staring sternly over my shoulder, I buckled down and practiced my alphabet… one letter at a time.

  In both a real and figurative sense, I started writing at the desk of the governor of Pennsylvania.

  I’ve kept this singular perspective about the governor’s office and state government in my head ever since, all my life.

  So I know, like most of us do, that what we are exposed to as kids casts a long shadow across the rest of days of our lives.

  Do you recall the day the music died?

  There would be for decades bad blood between my father, his circle of friends, and the growing tide of ‘Goldwater Republicans.’ It’s true, in my father’s case, there was a certain amount of personal vitriol running through the veins of a young man whose nose got bent out of shape at his first and only national convention.

  But, in essence, my father and his circle simply did not like the politics of this new breed of Republican. Goldwaterites were essentially small-minded, greedy, and spoke of their own self-interests as if they were doing everyone a favor by insisting on every scrap on the table for themselves.

  This was not what my father and his friends had been taught by the Jesuits. It certainly was not the politics of Lincoln, a founder of the Republican Party, who spoke in a far more critical and dangerous time of binding up our wounds, of charity toward all and malice toward none, the dangers of a house divided, and who appealed, not to a partisan Supreme Court, but to the better angels of our nature.

  The only thing that trickles down in the real world, Lincoln and TR knew, is blood, and piss.

  In my mind’s eye I still see my father and his friends as they were at their simple and modest little lawn parties in the 1960s, when they were young and hopeful men, with their lives in front of them. Their wives all wore simple Republican sundresses and cloth coats, as Nixon said in his Checker’s speech.

  The thing that strikes me, and my friends, today about our fathers is their great sense of fairness. They were all remarkably fair, and open-minded men. They would listen, hear what you had to say, and go away and think about it. They didn’t presume to have all the answers. They seldom made snap judgments.

  My father, the progressive Republican, has, and had, an amazing capacity to be fair. Dad would always tell me, “Well, the jury’s still out about that. Don’t rush to judgment. Keep an open mind.” Dad had other friends, old hands around the governor’s office, who had the same great natural inclination to be fair, and to ask for fairness for others. They are a dying breed in this age of snap judgment.

  Once, when I was no more than ten or eleven, I foolishly spouted to one of my father’s friends that every American was sitting at a table of plenty, so far as I could see. A few days later, he quietly mailed me a copy of The Other America, by Michael Harrington. The book, published in 1962, still speaks eloquently of Americans left behind, in grinding and unacceptable poverty. “Just something for you to think about,” he inscribed the book for me.

  What happened to these progressive Republicans? Where did they go? Most of them left politics.

  “Please put out the light, James,” were Teddy Roosevelt’s last words, spoken to his valet.

  In 1966 Bill Scranton could not run for reelection. At the time the state constitution permitted only a single four-year term.

  Attorney General Walter Alessandroni still harbored ambitions to be governor.

  “Walter was a great guy, and he was a really good politician,” remembers former AG Sennett. “And he was Scranton’s choice to be governor to succeed him.”

  But Scranton’s lieutenant governor, Ray Shafer, of Meadville, wanted to be governor too.

  “It was Shafer’s turn,” my father says bluntly. Alessandroni agreed to run for lieutenant governor on Shafer’s ticket. Next time, in 1970, it would be Walter’s turn.

  My father left the governor’s office to work on the Shafer/Alessandroni campaign. He got into advertising, and would later partner with his friend Bill Greenley, who recently passed away. Greenley and my father, back in the 60s, became Mad Men.

  As the May ‘66 primary approached, polling data suggested some softness for the Shafer/Alessandroni ticket in the western part of the state. In retrospect, the polling should have been ignored, as a week later Shafer handily won the election, mostly due to Democratic infighting involving Philadelphia businessman Milton Shapp and a young Scrantonian named Bob Casey. Some of these names begin to reverberate later in our story.

  Because of the weak polling data, a week before the ‘66 primary, Attorney General Walter Alessandroni decided he’d best travel to Uniontown, in the far west corner of the state. To help shore up support, he’d speak on a Sunday night before the Fayette County Tavern Association. Since this was a gathering of the Tavern Association, he’d bring along with him Jim Staudinger, a member of the state Liquor Control Board. Staudinger was also chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Committee, and at the time was himself one of the most influential Republicans in the state. Today Staudinger could be compared in stature in state politics to someone like Bob Asher, also a one-time Montgomery County GOP chairman, party stalwart, and close adviser to Gov. Tom Corbett.

  Also planning to take the campaign trip with Attorney General Alessandroni and Staudinger were Alessandroni’s wife, Ethel, and my fat
her, who was working on the campaign. They planned to fly out that Sunday to Uniontown and spend the night.

  But the Thursday before the flight, on May 5, fate intervened in both a cruel and amazing way. My father’s mother -- my grandmother -- tumbled down a flight of stairs at home and died. Her funeral was set for that Saturday, May 7. My father was unable to make the flight he likely would have made with Alessandroni and the others to Uniontown.

  The next afternoon, on Sunday, May 8, Walter and Ethel Alessandroni took off in a private twin-engine Piper Aztec from the Harrisburg-York state airport. It was a strangely serene yet snowy day in Harrisburg. As they were taking off an unusual spring snowstorm was whipping in from the west, blowing from Pittsburgh all the way up into Scranton.

  It was to be a quick hop over the Allegheny Mountains to Fayette County. With the Alessandronis and Chairman Staudinger was their pilot, Melvin Ladin, A short time after takeoff, pilot Ladin radioed a Morgantown, West Virginia, airport for an instrument check.

  “Conditions are not good and there is some icing,” Laden told the control tower. Nothing was heard after that. The plane flew off into the snow.

  The next day, Monday, no one in the governor’s office heard anything from Attorney General Walter Alessandroni. At first they didn’t much think of it, as he’d planned to stay over in Uniontown. His aides thought maybe he’d changed his plans. As the day wore on, his friends grew concerned. They learned the plane hadn’t arrived in Uniontown the day before.

  Bill Scranton declared the plane missing. He ordered the state police, the civil air patrol, game wardens and civil defense personnel to search for his friend Walter, the Pennsylvania attorney general.

  The search was delayed by continued bad weather and snow. A search pilot flying out of Somerset finally spotted wreckage at nightfall. Ground crews then had to work their way through the snowy, mountainous terrain.