Scorpion Tongues New and Updated Edition by Gail Collins

Author:Gail Collins [Collins, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780061139628
Google: ahl6rgEACAAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-01-30T22:33:49+00:00

Chapter 8

The Deluge of Defining Events

1964–1980

1. The Election of 1964

“An appalling shock to the moral sensibilities”

On the final days before the New Hampshire Republican primary in 1964, Nelson Rockefeller was on the stage of the Hollis High School auditorium, talking about defense policy. But Theodore White, the chronicler of presidential campaigns, noticed that no one in the audience was looking at the New York governor. They were staring at his pregnant wife, Happy, who was sitting near him on the stage, her head lowered. “They might have been a gathering of Puritans come to examine the accused,” wrote White.

The election of 1964 occupies a kind of no-man’s-land in American memory, between the prosperous, discreet, credulous postwar era and the rebellious, cynical, exhibitionist days of Vietnam and Watergate. The Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire was perhaps a preview of things to come. Rockefeller had been the early favorite for the GOP presidential nomination. But his standing became shaky when he announced in 1961 that he and his wife, Maty, were ending their thirty-one-year marriage. In 1963, when he married the newly divorced Margaret “Happy” Murphy, who was twenty years his junior, it prompted the most comment on a politician’s romantic life since Grover Cleveland’s day. “Questions and eyebrows are bound to be raised,” editorialized Long Island’s Newsday. Reporters scrambled for details about the new Mrs. Rockefeller, her former husband, and the whereabouts of their children. “Good God, what is wrong with you people? Leave me alone,” cried Dr. Murphy as he tried to get into his front door through a press stakeout. Religious leaders weighed in, but if there were any who thought that true love should triumph over all, they kept it to themselves. Philadelphia’s Methodist bishop declared the union “an appalling shock to the moral sensibilities and sense of fair play of the rank and file of Americans.” Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr reported that his cleaning woman disapproved, “and I share her view.” The minister who performed the wedding service was disciplined for violating a Presbyterian ban on marrying people who had been divorced less than a year.

Rockefeller was risking his career for the woman he loved. When Douglas Fairbanks did it, he swept the nation off its feet. But the public looked at Happy and saw not Mary Pickford but Ingrid Bergman. The voters seemed most upset that Happy’s children, who ranged in age from three to twelve, were living with their father. Neither Dr. Murphy nor the new Mrs. Rockefeller ever explained their arrangement, and Rockefeller made it clear that he thought the details of his marriage were none of the public’s business. But the public was free to speculate, and in New Hampshire, Life reported, “many persons remain morbidly curious and mistrustful.” The gossip, Theodore White wrote disapprovingly, “was to echo and re-echo through every turning of the Republican struggle of 1964—from a supermarket rally of housewives to smoke-filled gatherings of politicians.” White himself was very much in the same camp as those 1920s journalists who refused to punish Mayor Jimmy Walker for doing openly what other politicians did on the sly.

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