15 JULY 1960, Page 5

Electing an Activist

From RICHARD IJ. ROV ERIE

NEW YORK

EV the time this appears, the Democrats will 'almost surely have picked their man. Mr. Nixon will know his opponent's identity, and the main show will be on. The campaign will be one thing if the Vice-President finds himself running against Senator Kennedy (it will be killer against killer, many people believe) and quite another if the Democrats settle on Adlai Stevenson or Senator Johnson. But certain things are already as clear as they are ever going to be. Though the. leading Democrats are very different types of human beings, the political processmore sped- IleallY the process of reducing the number of candidates to a manageable three, four or five— tends by and large to eliminate those differences that do not have to do with temperament. educa- tion, and class and regional background. Bidding for ' the favour of a national constituency requires the aspirants to meet one another's terms and to take on the same protective coloration. This is Particularly the case when the field is clear of anyone like President Eisenhower, whose prestige Was gained outside politics and who was wanted for the Presidency because his character rather than his political outlook was held to be his Principal qualification.

The thing that is clearest of all, in fact a dead Certainty, at this moment is that the next Presi- dent will be very nearly the opposite of the Present one in his employment of the powers of rthe office. That is to say, he will, whether his maim is Nixon or Kennedy or whatever, use the Presidency and not merely grace it with his Presence. Two facts point to this conclusion. One is that no candidate—with the barely possible exception of Mr. Stevenson—has the kind of standing that would make the people feel that he was serving them merely by existing and by being kind enough to accept the highest gift they Can bestow. The other is that despite the continu- ing admiration in which the President is held, there is in both parties a feeling that too many things have been allowed to slide during the past eight years and that the next President will simply ibave to be an activist, a doer, an assertive .1rnanager of affairs of state.

Mr. Nixon, for his part, is in a difficult posi-

tion, since he must run largely on the President's record and must give the President no cause. to

regret the laying-on of hands, and all of the aspiring Democrats have announced their recog- nition of this hard truth. Senator Kennedy has built his entire campaign around his determina- tion to use the specified and unspecified powers of the office with all the strength at his command,

and he offers his youth and palpable vigour as evidence of his readiness for this awesome task. Though Mr. Stevenson has never been able to

convey an outward appearance of vigour to match the wisdom and decency that do get across to his audiences, the burden of his criticism of the administration over the years has been that Mr. Eisenhower has lacked the bite and decisive- ness and executive energy that a President should have. 'The case for Senator Johnson rests wholly upon the adroit and imaginative ways in which he has employed the powers of his present office, Majority Leader in the United States Senate; the basic premise of his campaign is that he would bring from Capitol Hill to the White House the ability he has long shown to have things as he wants them and not t(' take them as he finds them.

Mr. Nixon, as noted, has worked under a certain handicap in this matter of Presidential leadership, but he has gone about as far as he could go in saying that he will not repeat his patron's mistakes. He has said, for example, that he feels that a President must intervene with all the authority he can muster in the struggle to win the fullest measure of civil rights for the Negroes in the South. And to the degree that he has felt himself free to respond to the numerous criticisms of Governor Rockefeller (all of these being, fundamentally, attacks on the Eisenhower administration and on Mr. Nixon only because he must assume its liabilities), he has insisted that he is not lacking in aggressiveness and industry. This is a point that hardly needs to be made to those who have watched him closely, but he must make it nevertheless in order to keep up with every Democrat in the, field. Audacity has many uses, not all of them good, and there is in many quarters a fear not that the leading candidates will emulate Mr. Eisenhower but that they will replace his Presidential laissez- faire and laissez-passer with a grab for personal rather than purely executive power. The fear is that Mr. Nixon, once in office, would reveal what is held to be the reactionary and authoritarian side of his nature and that Senator Kennedy may prove only a Democratic Mr. Nixon. (In Senator. Kennedy's case, the Catholic issue increases apprehension among some people, but I think it fair to say that among informed critics the view brilliantly put forward by Christopher Hollis in a recent issue of this journal is the dominant one —i.e.. that the Senator's birthright Catholicism completely unfits him for using the Presidency to advance any politicai doctrines that might be labelled Catholic.) The office, of course, can work profound changes upon the man who holds it, and fears of vigorous misuse of its powers are always justified when the pledge of vigorous use is made. What one can say in the summer of 1960 is that everyone who wants, to get ahead in American politics must attempt to satisfy a con- stituency that is more generally stable and united on matters of public policy than it has ever been in this country.

Whoever he may be, the next President will hold to those. major lines of foreign policy that have extended through the last three administra- tions. He will be committed to the Welfare State to the degree that he will accept the need of government intervention to meet those social needs that are not being met by non-governmen- tal means and agencies. He will be for a steady expansion of civil rights in the South, even in the unlikely event that he happens to be a Southerner named Lyndon Johnson; because the South's power in Presidential elections can be ignored, it must be ignored by anyone seeking to establish strength in the North. The next President, one might say, must seek to use the office as Franklin Roosevelt did and must stand, ideologically, about on the middle ground occupied by Harry Truman. The Eisenhower era is at an end be- e a use , for one thing, we have run out of Eisen- howers.