The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore H. White

Author:Theodore H. White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1961-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

Two simultaneous explosions now occurred: one in Chicago, Illinois, at the Blackstone Hotel; the second at the Newport Naval Station, Rhode Island, where Dwight D. Eisenhower was vacationing.

The first and most vivid explosion was, of course, in Chicago, and came from the Platform Committee. No words of pain, outrage and fury can describe the reaction of the Republican Platform Committee. The 103 members of the Platform Committee had been chosen by the machinery of the Party—which, as we have noted, had chosen them naturally and predominantly from the regulars who make up the bony structure of the Party. They had been presented with Mr. Percy’s spring labors in the draft platform and, after days of hearing witnesses, had been allowed to redraft and edit certain of the phrases of the platform to give them the illusion of participation. Even the moderate and compromise language of Mr. Percy had pressed these grass-roots conservatives as far as they could honestly go. They had been pushed hard, and they had stretched hard; one of the weary drafters who worked with them said, “Don’t you see, in this Party you have to run as hard as possible to stay in the same place; getting them to approve what Eisenhower has already done is an achievement in itself.” The Platform Committee had nonetheless approved a platform fundamentally more cohesive and substantially more reasonable than the platform the Democrats had adopted in Los Angeles several weeks earlier. Few members of the committee could explain how this draft platform had come about. Its ideas had been imposed on them by Eastern liberals—but, over twenty years of national conventions, the regulars had learned to accept such ideological impositions by the citizen wing of the party and resigned themselves to the belief that some mysterious Eastern conspiracy was always and permanently at work to frustrate both them and the Party from an expression of true faith.

Now, on Saturday morning, their conspiratorial theory of history was not only proved—their pride was rubbed in it. Never had the quadrennial liberal swoop on the regulars been more nakedly dramatized than by this open Compact of Fifth Avenue. Whatever honor they might have been able to carry from their services on the Platform Committee had been wiped out. A single night’s meeting of two men in a millionaire’s triplex apartment in Babylon-by-the-Hudson, 830 miles away, was about to overrule them; they were exposed as clowns for all the world to see. It was too much.

Thus on Saturday morning, two days before the Republican Convention publicly convened, it knew chaos. The delegates stormed; they would not be dictated to. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, leader of the Republican right, now raised his voice in bitterness at a press conference: he had spoken to Nixon by telephone in Washington the previous morning and been told nothing of the secret meeting; Goldwater styled the Compact of Fifth Avenue a “surrender,” the “Munich of the Republican Party,” the guarantee of “Republican defeat in November.” By noon, not even all Mr.

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