Report of the County Chairman (26 page)

To see Arthur, Jr., at work was impressive, for he did what all of us intend doing. Whenever he read a newspaper he tore out relevant stories or bits of data and stuffed them into his pockets. Then when he got near a briefcase, he transferred them all to it, so that at the end of a week he had a small file of specific things that had impressed him or about which he might one day like to write. When it came time to write, a careless man like me would be asking himself, “I wonder where I could get a copy of that disgraceful newspaper story about the hecklers?” But Arthur, Jr., would not have to ask that question. Years before he had foreseen that some day he might want to quote that particular story, so he had it neatly filed away.

The precision of his mind was also noticeable to all who worked with him. One night after an especially difficult time with the religious problem Ethel Kennedy asked me what the distinguishing characteristics of the Mormon faith were, and I explained in rather good detail, I thought, how this strong religion had arisen and particularly how it had prospered in two regions I knew well, Utah and the South Pacific, where it has become a leading force. At this point I thought to ask Schlesinger, “When
did Joseph Smith receive his revelation of
The Book of Mormon?
”

Without even an instant’s hesitation Schlesinger looked up from a book he was reading and replied, “Smith was born December 23, 1805, in Vermont, but at the age of eleven moved to Ontario County, in New York State. On September 21, 1823, when Smith was eighteen years old, the angel Moroni appeared before him three times to tell him that the sacred book of Mormon was hidden on a hillside near Manchester, but it wasn’t until 1827 that Smith dug up the three golden plates on which the book was written in an unknown tongue. Smith also got two magic crystals, Urim and Thummim, which enabled him to translate the writing, but the book itself wasn’t published until about 1830.” Having provided this, Schlesinger ignored us and went on with his reading.

So that was our troupe: Schlesinger the satiric analyst; Hoffberger the surreptitious brewer; White the Rhodes scholar; Chandler and Musial, the big attractions; Angie Dickinson, the little sweetheart; and Joan and Ethel Kennedy, the extraordinary young women. It was an odd collection, but when they faced the microphones at meeting after meeting, they said something.

There was another member of the troupe, but so far as I know he never once appeared in public, yet he was the strong, hard brain of the operation, and since he represents the kind of young men who surround the Kennedys I had better speak fairly fully of him as I came to know him. Chuck Roche is a Boston newspaperman in his late thirties. I believe he went to Harvard, where he made the acquaintance of Bobby Kennedy, whom he has
always helped during political campaigns. Roche is the typical Catholic liberal, a good husband with five children to support, and with a sensitive, shrewd, well-organized mind. I would suppose that he had made somewhat above average marks at Harvard.

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.