Report of the County Chairman

by James A. Michener

  He looks like a hundred thousand other guys who could have been named Chuck Roche. In fact, he looks a lot like me, and one of my distinctions is that I have never gone anywhere without somebody’s saying, “You know, Mr. Michener, you’re the spitting image of so-and-so.” All I can say is that the average looks of this nation must be pretty average. Chuck has a big roundish face, wears glasses, has indiscriminate eyes and hair of no distinction. I imagine that wherever he goes people tell him that he looks like so-and-so.

  He does not think like this omnipresent so-and-so, however, for he has a driving interest in politics, and I suspect that he knows more about what is going on in the nation than all the rest of us together. He had an unusually realistic view of how states and areas were going to vote, and looking back on what he told me, he was surprisingly accurate. I first met him in a car that whisked us back and forth across Pennsylvania to attend political rallies at which Bobby Kennedy was speaking, and he talked with me of practical matters while Kennedy and my wife did what the newspapermen call “double-doming” in the back. Roche had an idea whereby we might take the edge off the Saturday Evening Post’s endorsement of Nixon, and he also wanted to know in brutal, operational terms what was happening in the religious field in Pennsylvania. I happened that day to have received a formal summary of the unfortunate incident in which a Bucks County Republican official had been caught distributing anti-Catholic literature and I said, “I haven’t read this yet, Chuck. It’s of no use to me. Take it, and if the heat gets too hot, at least you have the evidence.” About two weeks later, when the Republicans were making ugly charges against the Democrats, Bobby Kennedy simply cited the Bucks County case. There was an immediate blast from all quarters, with demands for retractions and apologies. At this point Chuck Roche coolly pointed out that he had the evidence and that he preferred not to use it. He advised everyone to cool off, and that was the last we heard officially of the religious issue during the campaign.

  It was Chuck’s job on the barnstorming tour to know what was happening in each area we visited, and his information network must have been good, for unerringly he told us what to speak about and what to avoid. He also worked with the local politicians and sought advice from them on what we might do that would best help the local ticket. In most Broadway plays about politics there is always the newspaperman with his hat on the back of his head who knows where all the skeletons are buried but nevertheless sticks with the tragic hero until he can stand no more. Then he makes a grandiloquent statement in defense of American democracy as it ought to function if it weren’t for slobs like the hero, tells the hero to go to hell, gulps a swig of whiskey and exits with his hat still on the back of his head. Chuck Roche could have played that role. I never found out exactly why he had the hard idealism he did, but he honestly felt that his Kennedy team could do a good job running the country. What was immediately important, he had some very good ideas as to how his team could win the election.

  He operated wholly behind the scenes. When our plane arrived at some city, Chuck would quietly disappear to talk with the local leaders, while the rest of us piled into convertibles for the long ride into town. The celebrities of our party were supposed to ride sitting on the top edge of the back seats so that the long motorcade would appear as impressive as possible. Arthur Schlesinger and Angie Dickinson rode together, and they made a striking and diverse pair waving to the crowds. I usually rode with Jeff Chandler, and because the crowds wanted to see him and not me, and because I did not want to detract from his reception, I refused to ride anywhere but up front in a normal seat. This amused Schlesinger, who chided, “Have you no pride in the republic of letters? A novelist is as significant as a motion-picture star.”

  “Not from the back seat of a convertible,” I replied and held onto my own plan.

  At the big formal meetings our speeches were always the same. Whizzer White made a few observations about the local scene and turned the crowd over to Jeff Chandler, who mixed wry humor with hard political sense. Angie Dickinson was adorable. Stan Musial was as handsome as a young god. And Arthur Schlesinger was powerful in his criticism of the drift of the last eight years. Listening to him talk, I used to wonder why so many newspaper editors hated him and used him as the whipping boy of the liberals who help guide the Democratic party. To me he talked sense, but perhaps I was prejudiced.

  I came on next to last, for I could accommodate myself to any exigencies of time or special situations. Thus I was told just before I started speaking, “Ten minutes and stress the patriotism record.” If we were running long I’d be told, “Three minutes and try to cover the local boy who’s been challenged on his war record.” If we had lots of time, I was expected to touch upon five or six basic themes and to wind up the straightforward electioneering, for after me came the Kennedy girls and I suspect that anything we first speakers accomplished was doubled by what these beautiful girls added. At any rate, they wound up the show with a bang and we all climbed into our convertibles for the fast ride back to the airport and the hurried trip to the next town.

  I have used the phrase, “I was told.” The person who did the telling was Chuck Roche, so we worked in rather close harmony. As a matter of fact, when we got onto the platform Chuck usually sat in the first row of the audience with some local leader to judge how things were going in the set speeches, over which he had no power. Angie Dickinson was going to say what she had prepared and that was that. So was Professor Schlesinger, for he knew that what he said gained votes. But different audiences received these set speeches in different ways, so Chuck, even though he had briefed me before I went on stage, now sat with flash cards advising me on last-minute changes.

  He was especially fond of a card marked “Cuba.” He had developed the startling fact that any American citizen who lived east of Los Angeles “is closer right now to the communists in Cuba than he is to his fellow Americans in Honolulu.” Somehow or other, whenever I repeated this, it made Senator Kennedy’s concern over Cuba seem legitimate. Chuck also had cards dealing with inflation, structure of Congress, war record and half a dozen other topics which I was supposed to weave into one coherent speech.

  The two best performances I gave involved Chuck in quite different ways. In the first, I ignored him completely, because there was something that welled up within me that I had to disgorge. But in the second, I followed his advice minutely, even though I didn’t trust it, and as a result gave a talk which had surprising results. That night Chuck Roche was a very perceptive man.

  The time I crossed him up was in Denver, where I had once lived and to which I had often traveled when I was an underpaid teacher in a town fifty-five miles to the north. I had a good speech prepared for Denver, and Chuck had approved it. But on the way to the cavernous auditorium it happened that our car passed by the long-forgotten and now demolished area where the Baker Federal Theater had once stood. And as I saw this old site which had given the impetus to so much of my adult work, I asked the driver to stop and I got out to look at the shadows of the theater in which I had grown up artistically.

  In the mid-1930’s the Federal Theater Project had operated in Denver a stock company composed of out-of-work actors and directors, and each week for several years this distinguished group of people gave a different play. The public was charged thirty-five cents, as I recall, and the plays they saw were the best that had so far been written. I was working in Greeley, a town to the north of Denver, and regularly each week I drove down to the Baker Federal Theater to see either a classical play or a modern success. I got to know the actors and to anticipate seeing them in different roles. I acquired a sense of drama, and an abiding love for the theater.

  I was therefore disgusted when Denver reactionaries began lambasting the Baker Federal as a colossal boondoggle, a waste of taxpayers’ money and an insult to the common sense of the people of Colorado. Every cheap critic of a government that was trying to do something productive and to keep creative people from starving got into the act
and earned a few headlines by abusing the concept of government-sponsored art. It made me furious at the time, but I was then impotent to defend the project, and it was killed. I remember when it was closed down, for I thought: “Of all that Colorado has offered me, nothing was more important to my life than this theater. I may never write a play nor act in one, but in this old building I found out what it was all about. It was as valuable to me as the colleges and the libraries.” I also remember thinking: “I’m against the people who are killing this theater.” I thought of the plays I had seen there. Shaw and O’Neill and Sinclair Lewis, Marc Connelly and authors whose names I had not before known had enriched my life and awakened my sense of the dramatic. But the project was ridiculed and killed by people who possessed a limited view of both government and life.

  Now, on a dark night in 1960, as I looked at the old spot where even the tinseled marquee had vanished, I thought: “Somebody estimated the other day that on dramatic works that have been derived from my stories the federal government has collected not less than $10,000,000 in taxes, and on the personal incomes derived from them another $20,000,000 at least. I wonder what it cost to run the Baker Federal Theater during the time I saw it? Probably not over $100,000. Yet it ignited my mind. So for every dollar that the government wasted in 1936, it got back $300 from me alone. What did it get back in imagination and happiness and the illumination of life from all the others who used to sit in the audience for thirty-five cents a night?”

  It seemed to me, as I stood there in Denver, that Democrats were people who believed that one dollar spent now on a creative theory of government was likely to be repaid three hundred times over during the later evolution of the nation. Republicans were people who believed that men should dedicate themselves to hard work now, and if any money was left over, it could be spent as creatively as one wished, but such expenditure must not be taken seriously. I wished then that I could have before me all the cynical critics of the Federal Arts Project during those depression years, and I wished that I could show them a balance sheet of what the projects had cost and what they had repaid the nation. For example, I would like to show them Sam Thompson, who had been kept alive by a theater project, and who survived to serve his nation well. Those disgusting, little-souled, lack-vision people, how I would have liked to show them such balance sheets that night.

  It was in this mood that I reported to the auditorium where Chuck Roche had an audience of six or seven thousand waiting. But I was so deeply agitated by my personal recollections of the powerful days of my youth in Colorado that I could not even consider the topics Chuck was suggesting, and when I stood before the Coloradans I gave what must have been the least effective talk of the tour.

  I began, “The Bible has a magnificent old phrase, ‘Let us now praise famous men,’ and tonight in the white heat of our campaign I should like to do just that, for in a democracy we sometimes forget the famous men who have made us strong. Colorado had such a man, Senator Ed Costigan, who in his day was one of the most gallant legislators this country had. Costigan grew up in the free spirit of Colorado, and here he developed those theories of government which he was later to advocate so ably in Washington.

  “He was a liberal. He was a fighter. He was a visionary. He was a man who spent hours of his time inculcating in younger men the same idealism that he practiced. In the years that I worked so happily in Colorado, every man of stature that I knew owed his philosophy of government to Ed Costigan. This great man taught Colorado to be free. He initiated the legislation that saw us through the depression and kept us strong. He served both his state and his nation as few men are ever capable of serving.

  “All the liberal ideas that have been so important in my life I learned from Ed Costigan. Before I came upon his remarkable career I thought it was proper for men to use the government for narrow purposes. Costigan knew that it should be used for the broadest possible human purposes. He illuminated my life, with insights that have grown constantly stronger the farther away from him I move. He was an adornment to this state, the noblest man you have so far produced.

  “Let us therefore do as the Bible suggests and praise famous men. Let us tonight praise Colorado’s foremost son, Ed Costigan, the fighting liberal. Because the man I have come here to speak to you about is cast in the mold of Ed Costigan. I couldn’t support him if he weren’t. If Ed Costigan were alive tonight I feel sure that he would be supporting Jack Kennedy, too, because Kennedy stands for all the broad-gauge human rights that Ed Costigan stood for, and I believe that Kennedy is the true inheritor of that great liberal tradition.”

  I then went into my set speech and I could see Chuck Roche relax a little, but after the program ended Whizzer White said, “I’ll bet not ten people in the audience knew who you were talking about. They forget awfully fast.”

  But Professor Schlesinger said, “I was deeply impressed that you should have mentioned Ed Costigan. What a great man he was and how we need to remember what he stood for.”

  White was correct. In our audience of six or seven thousand, hardly five people knew that Colorado had once produced a great man, but those five were leaders of the state, who came up to say, “I was a child of Ed Costigan’s.

  He taught me all I knew.” I suspect that if I had spoken differently in Denver I might have won a few more votes to our side, but if I had been the kind of man who could have spoken differently under those circumstances, I would probably never have given a damn about Jack Kennedy in the first place.

  In the speech where I allowed Chuck Roche to set the pattern completely, the results were more striking. On our way in from the airport to a small city that I would prefer not to name, the man and woman riding in my convertible explained, “This area is the center of the worst anti-Catholic agitation in the nation. Please keep your mouth shut on the religious issue. If you mention it, our side will be seriously damaged.”

  I assured them: “Mr. Roche, who is pretty canny on these things, has only two topics which are absolutely forbidden. Eisenhower and religion. You don’t have to worry about us.”

  My escorts sighed and said, “We’re both Protestants and we were just afraid that you might be a Catholic and that when you see what they are doing to us, you might blow your stack.”

  I laughed and said, “I face this every day in my own county and I’ve learned to keep my stack unblown.”

  “We’re relieved,” they sighed. “What you might hit in your talks is the farm problem and Cuba. We seem to be getting some mileage out of them.”

  I started adjusting my notes to include farm and Cuba, but when we assembled at the high school auditorium where the rally was to be held, one of the other speakers showed us some literature that had been circulated that day, and it was scurrilous. “Why don’t you comment on this?” they asked me.

  “I wouldn’t touch it,” I said. I related what my guides had told me and Jeff Chandler confirmed that his escorts had warned him about the same thing. The community was torn apart by religious strife and any mention of it could only exacerbate feelings more damagingly than they already were.

  But as I started to go onto the stage Chuck Roche called me aside and whispered, “Jim, have you seen what they’re doing in this town?”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’ve promised not to touch it.”

  “I think you should,” he said grimly.

  I was surprised at this and warned, “It can only bring trouble.”

  He took me by the arm and said, “I don’t want to win this town by pussyfooting on this issue. If we have to tear it wide apart, let’s do it right now. Are you game?”

  “I sure am,” I said.

  “How will you handle it?” he asked.

  “Not with kid gloves,” I replied.

  We went to Whizzer White, who was in charge, and said, “We’re going to tackle the religious question head on.

  “You’ll lose the area if you do,” he warned.

  “Some areas you want to lose,” Chuck s
aid.

  “How do you see it?” I was asked.

  “This time we lose,” I said. “Maybe we clear the air for next time.”

  “Go ahead,” White said apprehensively.

  I will not try to repeat all that I said, because it probably wouldn’t read well. I can only report that the words I said in that supercharged air that night were the best I have ever spoken. At another time they might not have been effective, and indeed they weren’t really effective in this case, for they were heard in sullen silence, but they were heard. I began in as shocking a way as possible by saying that I was supposed to be the speaker who told funny stories about the election so that people would go home in good humor, but tonight I would not speak of humorous things. I would speak of the most tense and terrible matters that were dividing this community. I said that whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not, on November 8 Jack Kennedy was going to win the election, and on November 9 we would all have to face up to the fact that America’s next President was going to be a Roman Catholic.

  Shock waves spread across the audience and I said quietly, “But it isn’t going to be so bad, really.” And I mentioned the numerous countries that have had Catholic chiefs of state with no disastrous circumstances: France, Belgium, Italy, Australia. I said, “Those of us who hate Catholicism most forget that both of our neighbors, Mexico to the south and Canada to the north, have often been governed by Catholics, and nothing very serious has happened. “In fact,” I challenged, “if I were to read off the names of Canada’s six finest prime ministers, you wouldn’t know which three were Catholic and which three were not, and neither would most Canadians.” I assured them that ten years from tonight, looking back upon the fears that gripped them now, they would laugh at their apprehensions.

  I said, “The people you see on this platform have been traveling together for some time, in very cramped quarters. We’ve had no great trouble. Did you know that Jeff Chandler is a Jew? I suppose the Kennedy girls are Catholics. Stan Musial bats left-handed so he could be almost anything. We don’t ask. Whizzer White’s some kind of Protestant, I think. And I’m a Quaker. That’s about as far from Catholicism as you could get. Jack Kennedy believes in priests and music and incense; I believe in no priests at all, silence, and no incense. Furthermore, I’m an officer in a group studying population pressures and we advocate birth control. On this I suppose that Jack Kennedy and I are as far apart as we could be. But that doesn’t keep me from supporting Kennedy for President, and Jeff Chandler’s different beliefs don’t keep him from working for a Catholic. Our nation has got to learn what we have learned on this trip.”