Eternal husband
AMERICA-1 MURRAY KEMPTON
New York—Mr Nixon has created, or at least inherited, a Republican party in his own image. It is anxiously agreeable if not entirely likeable. His gamble, and a plausible one it should be, is that the country's main desire is to be let alone.
Alienated Republicans distorted his party's history in 1964 and the alienated of other per- suasions have disturbed his country's history since. Mr Nixon subdued the former by seda- tion; it is likely that he will try and dispose of the latter by exclusion.
He has proved that he has one ultimate cour- age, which is to suffer and triumph over humiliation; but, brave as he is, he has been forced to endure too many desperate enterprises not to prefer tedium to excitement.
The convention which crowned him seems to have been tedious beyond memory or even imagination, but it was the tedium he needed and which he had done his best to contrive. When a Republican's blood raced wildly, it has most often been in rage against another Re- publican; and last week's torpor was the most impressive possible evidence of the unity this most latitudinarian of Republicans has brought.
He had a cast determinedly out of character. It fell to General Eisenhower, the most pacific of our Presidents, to deliver the hardest anti- communist speech at the Convention, and to former Senator Goldwater, the most belligerent of his party's candidates, to plead for amity at home and, by implication, in that he gave only a parting mention to Vietnam, abroad too. General Eisenhower thus gave the Goldwater Republicans the chance to applaud in word what he was always too prudent to grant them in deed; and Senator Goldwater gave the East- ern Liberals a ration of the sentimentality which he so sternly and so fatally denied them four years ago.
Mr Nixon then has established a Solemn League and Covenant. He seems to understand that its best chance to endure is as a religion of faith and not works. He has, on occasion, shown himself capable of being quite reckless, but he has had any such tendency under the severest command so far.
His new model seems to be the films of Miss Doris Day: long openness to suggestions of adventure followed by refusal to take a chance. He had talked of going to the Soviet Union to engage and test the enemy face to face. But the first travel plan he announced after his anoint- ment was not to go to Moscow. All week he discussed tendering the vice-presidential nomi- nation to Mayor Lindsay of New York, who is not merely the most exciting young Repub- lican but almost the only exciting young poli- tician in sight; and then decided against any such distraction to the healthy boredom of the progress of his affairs.
His choice of vice-president indicated how well Mr Nixon knows that he is the only Repub- lican acceptable to all the factions he has lulled into unaccustomed concord and how well he has mastered the delicacies required to maintain it. He seems to have judged with entire detach- ment what he might gain or lose as a candi- date if he chose either Governor Reagan, who has suggested making Vietnam a parking lot, or Mayor Lindsay, who says the war has never had the smallest excuse either in morals or policy. In the end, he had to recognise that to choose a vice-president whose name was to any degree familiar to most of the delegates was immediately to risk affronting a substantial number of them; since he had no noticeable candidate whose designation would not raise somewhere the cry of `No, not him,' he could only settle for a name to which the first general reaction would be 'Who?'
Governor Agnew of Maryland fits that criterion of decent obscurity. He has had a career which, short as it is, has been honour- able, interesting and illustrative of the main problem about this year's Republican ticket, which is less a matter of bow well it will run, than a matter of how it can govern.
Governor Agnew began as a Republican liberal, elected by the votes of negroes alarmed at his Democratic opponent. His beginnings were brightened by close cooperation with the civil rights groups. But this cooperation was surprisingly and rancorously broken up by last spring's riots after the death of Martin Luther King.
The governor has since indulged no ex- cesses except in language, but it is plain that he feels his negro friends betrayed him and are his friends no longer. His reaction to this wound has been vocal enough to give the 'If things get much worse we may even have to watch the BBC Southerners a dubiously founded assurance that he is one of their own.
The Republicans have composed the most liberal platform in their history and deserve the assumption that they really mean to implement it. Any doubts about them arise less from their intentions than from their temperament, which is badly afflicted by their being so conscious of their good intentions. They are in the average persons sympathetic to the poor and anti- pathetic to the Poor People's March. Repub- licans are as a class rather ashamed to be de- scribed as politicians; they prefer to think of themselves as engaged in the public service.
Persons this certain of their virtue are peculiarly disabled for useful quarrels. Call a politician a bigot, and he may recognise only the heightened discourse of the discontented; call a public servant a bigot and he is outraged at the wound to his virtue. What can be mal- leable hypocrisies in the politician are fixed as adamantine pieties in the public servant. Governor Agnew's experience may suggest what we can expect once this party of the accepting takes on the job of governing for the alienated.
Still, all of the country is tired of the war and much of it of disorder and quarrel. The 'fifties were an inglorious decade but one which most Americans remember for the pleasure at least of being generally left alone; and, when Mr Nixon evokes them, he is a very potent candi- date indeed. He was discarded and forgotten and then found and summoned back again, be- cause he alone among Republicans could make a majority of Republicans feel comfortable. If he can make the rest of us feel comfortable too, he will be very difficult to defeat. For he is the Eternal Husband, a little ponderous, more than a little abstracted, but always on hand, not to be loved but resignedly to be lived with.
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