Six Men by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Autobiography, Memoirs, Biography
ISBN: 0140048340
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1978-11-05T11:00:00+00:00

IV

Humphrey Bogart

* * *

Epitaph for a

Tough Guy

* * *

In the fall of 1952, we were coming to the end of the Eisenhower-Stevenson presidential campaign, and I joined the Stevenson train for its last lap through New England.

There comes a time in every campaign when the roving reporter, almost as much as the candidates, screams for surcease. He loses all sense of time, place, a daily pattern of life, or a routine of civility with his fellow men. There had always been the clanking monotony of the campaign train, swaying through plains and mountains and deserts while hunched-up foursomes clutching poker hands peer between the slats of the club car and say, ‘Is this still Texas?’ In the 1950s there had been added the peculiar nightmare of the campaign plane, which robs the candidate of all excuses that he cannot get to Oklahoma City, say, for an early breakfast rally after a night speech in New Orleans. Even more than the train, the campaign plane obliterates any continental sense of the country whose variety you are supposed to be remarking and reporting on. The engines throb and writhe and fall. There is no light but darkness visible up front—save two yellow blobs that fall on the notebooks of the only two reporters who are awake and sentient. All the others are sprawled like drunken cattle rustlers in a B film. Whistles blow through yellow teeth, gargles trip over a uvula, baritone groans come lurching up from the oesophagus. It would be a disgusting scene if it were not for its overwhelming pathos. Here are the Rover Boys, the unfooled agency men, and the crew of enforced buddies who have been assigned since the nomination to this candidate and no other. They have counted noses in Chicago, pondered the Polish vote in Pittsburgh, the old folks’ vote in Florida; they have alerted their readers to watch for the swamping of the liberal vote of Northern California by the conservative vote of Los Angeles and San Diego counties. They have weighed trends everywhere. But the anxieties that nag them are the unreturned raincoat borrowed in Oregon, the plastic food at every rally, the shirt they’ve worn for four days, and the fact that the plane begins to smell of rotten apples. Most of all, they have come to look with glazed eyes on the candidates as the club bores. A presidential candidate may start out bristling with energy and exhaling idealism. But after the first forty stops he has to strain for sincerity and to pump up the indignation. Of all the politicians I have followed on the stump, only Lloyd George and Roosevelt could make speeches in the last weeks sound like rhetoric newly felt and believed in. (This does not mean they were finer men. They had more consummate techniques and could maintain outrageous promises without the flicker of an eyelid.) Even a campaign that begins as a crusade ends as a vaudeville act. The same rousing perorations in the same

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