In God We Trust
The Facts about Nixon. By William Costello.
(Hutchinson, 25s.)
THE great thing about Mr. Macmillan is that he writes his own speeches. Indeed, it is not easy to think of anybody else who could manage those thudding clichés, those meaningless orotun- dities. those terrible, terrible jokes. Mr. Gaitskell, he writes his, too, and again I cannot think of anybody else who would wish him to repeat 'if I may say so with the utmost possible respect' quite so often.
And we think nothing of this. But in the United States, speech-writer to the President is a respectable trade, and to the Presidential can- didate scarcely less so. Nor could it very well be otherwise. One of the less alarming facts to emerge from Mr. William Costello's skilful piece of hatchet-work on Mr. Nixon is that during his 1950 Senate campaign its subject made over a thousand speeches in sixteen weeks. He will have made very many more before the current Presidential campaign is over (provided that knee holds up—and he'll make a good thing out of it even if it doesn't), and so will Mr. Kennedy. What is more the position of the professional campaign- manager has been developed in the United States to an infinitely higher degree than in this country : Colman, Prentis and Varley are the rankest amateurs compared to the image-makers of the United States, and the gigantic staffs of researchers, motive-hunkers, policy-framers, joke-writers, crowd-assemblers, slogan-coiners, patronage-promisers and other such riff-raff have no counterparts at all over here. All of which helps a lot to soften the blow. For it means, when all is said and done (particularly said) that neither Mr. Kennedy nor Mr. Nixon will be fully responsible for his actions or his words until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
Which is just as well. For the first impression gained from reading these two books is that the two candidates for the Presidency of the nation that leads the free world are what Mr. Spike Milligan would call a couple of steaming nits. Kennedy:
What we clearly need in the Middle East, and need quickly, in my opinion, is a final entente, a permanent settlement of all major problems which reasonable men and nations can accept —a settlement. in short; based not on armed truce but on comity, accepted not out of fear but out of civic friendship.
Nixon :
Mr. Stevenson has been guilty, probably with- out being aware that he was doing so, of spread- ing pro-Communist propaganda as he has attacked with violent fury the economic system of the United States and praised the Soviet economy. . . . His dislike for our own economic system is his own business, but when he links such criticism with praise of the rapid growth of the Soviet economy, he is performing a grave disservice to us and to the rest of the free world.
The prospect of one or the other of the great minds at work there becoming President of the United States is not all that comforting, even when you discover that Mr. Kennedy has been responsible for some excellent summings-up of situations as well as for the mush. But what
emerges all the way through both books is the lack of originality displayed by either contender. Mr. Nixon sports a kind of cunning, but at so low a level : little schemes for double-crossing Governor Warren, for smearing Helen Gahagan Douglas, for explaining away that 18,000 dol- lars. And Mr. Kennedy displays an ability to digest the main principles on which the modern world runs and reproduce them accurately. But what we need, after all, is leadership— which today means an ability to think faster than Mr. Khrushchev, and to keep on doing so all the time. We need a man who can think up something as spectacular as the trial of Captain Powers, if necessary on the spur of the moment, and who can go on producing ideas on the same scale twice a week for four years at least. We need a man who can galvanise the West into measuring its danger,. and then doing something about it, and that means a man who can make up his mind what the West ought to do about it.
And, of course, we must not be told that it is none of our business. As Senor de Madariaga pointed out recently, in an eloquent plea for some revision of American election procedures, which at present leave the initiative even more than usual in the hands of our enemies for a full six months, the President of the United States is the President of the free world. We can- not actually vote for him, but we must be left free to comment on him. And the comment of any dispassionate cisatlantic observer must be that 1960, Over There, is the year of the pigmies, the year in which Mr. Nixon, with his record of past political dishonesties, faced Mr. Ken- nedy, the Organisation Man. We fall back—I knew we would—on Mr. Mencken: It seems to be quite impossible for any wholly literate man to pump up any genuine enthusiasm for either of them. Each, of course, is praised lavishly by the professional politicians of his own party, and compared to Lincoln, Jefferson and Cleveland by the surviving hacks of the party press, but in the middle ground, among men who care less for party success than for the national dignity, there is a gone feeling in the stomach, with shooting pains down the legs. . . . Any State in the Union, at least above the Potomac, could produce a thousand men quite as good, and many States could pro- duce a thousand a great deal better. . . .
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move towards a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron
BERNARD LEVIN
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