I said that if all aspects were aboveboard I’d consider it, but he pressed: ‘No, we’ve got to get this straightened out right now. Time is crucial,’ and after more conversation I said: ‘If it’s as you say, I’ll give you my answer at sunset tomorrow. You can wait one day.’ Then he dropped his voice: ‘There is, as you suspect, one catch I haven’t explained. Because the government is so eager to get this mess cleared up, and because we think we can trust you, we’re prepared to pump a considerable amount of money into the operation to rescue it, but you must stand ready to accept the money, and if trouble breaks as it might, to take on your shoulders alone public responsibility as to how the money was spent. In other words, you stand surety for the funds, and you simply cannot waffle if heat is applied.’
‘And where will these funds come from?’
‘The federal government. We’re dead serious about restoring this organization to what it should be, and we’re convinced that you’re the man who can be trusted to do it.’
It was a heady offer and in a field in which I had slowly acquired a good deal of expertise. I no longer thought of it as the mysterious East, for I now knew Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Rangoon and Jogjakarta rather better than I remembered Philadelphia and Boston, so the intellectual challenge was immense. But as I walked with my dogs at twilight and into the night, I formulated for the first time the end goal of my life. I had never dreamed of being a great writer, nor a college president, nor a political leader, nor a prominent businessman. My childhood, as the reader will see later, had been so unusual that such ambitions had had no time to mature; my job had always been to survive from Monday morning through Friday afternoon and the rest could take care of itself. But rather early in a precocious adulthood that was forced upon me I saw that one of the greatest boons on this earth was to be part of a well-organized society that provides safety, a free education and the opportunity to find one’s optimum level. The only ambition I would ever have, the only one I would ever mention, even in my dreaming, was to be a good citizen. I had no higher aspiration, nor could I envisage one. I wanted to be known as a man who could be trusted to do honest work and relied upon to make those moves that would help hold society together, and as I struggled with the government’s invitation well past midnight, I assessed it only in those simple terms. I could never be a flag-waving patriot, nor did I care to be a hero in any aspect of my life, but I did want to be a responsible citizen and this invitation to serve my society in an important sphere was tempting.
But then, as the night wore on, I came back to the code of the writer: I should be able to move into any situation with credentials that were clean and visible to all. I would come as a secret agent of no one, a supporter of no party, a proponent of no special interest or hidden agenda. This was not a trivial consideration, for those of us who worked in Asia in the tumultuous years of World War II and the Korean War knew several cases in which persons who were ostensibly newsmen had turned out to be secret agents and, in two instances, possibly double agents. Once such men were exposed, as they always seemed to be, their careers were ruined. I remember two who pleaded with me desperately to help them restore credentials that were irrecoverable. They may have been deluded by such books as Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, which is about a British agent, and the exploits of John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir) and Sir Compton Mackenzie, who were reputed to have combined writing and espionage. My two young men, each younger than I and in many ways more gifted, had destroyed themselves and there was no way I could help to save them.
The next day the government man was back with assurances that all would be up front and clearly stated if I would agree to be a moral custodian of the government funds, and on those terms I agreed to take on the assignment. It was a difficult one, requiring attention to tedious details in trying to save an organization that had begun to fall apart.
A good deal of government money came our way. We used it to clean up the difficult situation, and in due course I informed the government that because I had to be so constantly in Asia, I could no longer serve as head of the organization in the United States. Our board had done an excellent job. Scandal and theft of government funds had been prevented, and if the agency had had hard-core subversives they had either been expelled or driven to dig themselves even deeper underground. Most important to me, I had served my country without compromising my own integrity. It was in connection with this assignment that I underwent my first extensive F.B.I. check, a ritual that would be repeated numerous times in the future and right down to this day. I always knew when an investigation was under way because frightened neighbors would come whispering: ‘Jim, the F.B.I. is on your trail. What have you done wrong?’ and I was not allowed to tell them the real purpose of the questioning. In certain instances suspicious friends convinced themselves that because of the repeated checks—I would ultimately work in many branches of the government, each requiring its own check—I was a crypto-Communist, and they stopped associating with me, but even in such circumstances I had to keep my mouth shut.
In the election of 1960 Professor Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Sr., with whom I had studied at Harvard, suggested that I volunteer my services in John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. So I worked as chairman in one of the critical suburban counties in the Philadelphia area.
Our strategy was well outlined by Johnny Welsh, the longtime Democratic leader in our area: ‘We have no chance of winning our county. Republicans are simply too strong. But we will win Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by big margins, so what we’ve got to do is fight like hell to keep the Republican margin as small as possible in our county so they can’t eat away our big city totals.’
We were thus engaged in a holding action made more difficult by a local phenomenon that threatened to engulf us in a flood of hitherto unknown Republican votes. Our problem was this: Kennedy was known to be Catholic, and this would alienate our rural voters, who tended to be staunch Lutherans vigorously opposed to his religion, but we also had in our county a huge Pennsylvania Dutch population, plain-dressing Mennonites mostly, and their opposition to the Pope was deadly. They could be expected to vote unanimously against Kennedy, but even so we might have been able to win some of our other rural areas to vote for him had it not been for an unexpected turn of events.
Rural German families took politics seriously, but they never allowed their womenfolk to vote; it was unthinkable for a farm wife in the German area to go to the polls, and in all my years in Bucks County I had never seen one vote. But now with the threat of Catholicism hammering, the stolid Mennonite burghers ignored their custom and herded their women to the registration booths in numbers that appalled us. Johnny Welsh, watching this horde of confused women in black dresses marching in to make themselves eligible for the November voting, realized that something drastic must be done. For the first time we Democrats scoured the county to find Catholic convents, minor religious orders and individual nuns who had never registered before, and I spent much of September taking nuns to such places as garages and cigar stores to register them: ‘It is,’ said one Democratic helper, ‘our women in black against their women in black.’
In the hottest days of the campaign, when all seemed to hang in the balance, a group of us received calls from Washington headquarters: ‘In state after state we’re not getting exposure in the newspapers and on television. Will you join a high-caliber barnstorming troupe and fly into those states to force them to give us space?’
When I received the call, I said I’d stop trying to find elusive nuns and join the team, but I wasn’t sure what I could add, to which they said: ‘We need you. We want to put together a classy mix they can’t ignore. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and you for the people who read. Stan Musial for the men who love athletics. Jeff Chandler, Angie Dickinson, and Shelley Winters as our movie stars. En route five of the Kennedy family will join you, one by one in the various cities, and we’ll see what we can accomplish.’
It was a three-week crusade, as I remember
, in which each of us did whatever he or she could do best. Angie Dickinson was a treasure, a fragile-looking blonde with a ravishing smile and the ability to work endless hours. Jeff Chandler was as gracious a movie star as I would ever know. Schlesinger overpowered the newsmen who came to interview us, and Shelley Winters was her explosive self. But the star of our troupe was someone I had not expected to fill that role. I had always known of Stan Musial, the immortal baseball player with so many records to his name, but what I associated with him most was an unequaled feat: in one doubleheader he hit three home runs in the first game, two in the second. When men in the farmlands heard that we had Stan aboard, they drove out to the airfields in their pickups, waiting around in the dark till our plane landed, and I remember walking near a chain-link fence at some forlorn stop in Nebraska at one in the morning and hearing a father telling his son: ‘You’ll never forget this night, Claude. You saw Stan Musial.’ But we lost Nebraska.
If our goal was to get media coverage for the party, we were a success, but if it was to win votes for Kennedy we were a flop. We went into eleven states where our ticket was weakest, and we used whatever tricks we could muster to get media attention not only for Jack Kennedy but for local candidates as well. We had some appalling disappointments, as when grass-level Republican leaders obstructed us at the airport or kept us from newspaper rooms or television cameras, but with Angie and Jeff and Stan the Man that was not easy to do. We were fighting tough local politics, and when someone like Ethel Kennedy flew in to join us, we gave as good as we got. In the course of that campaign, I would develop an enormous respect for Ethel, as tough a mind as I have known, as sharp an infighter.
On one emotional night in Denver when Byron “Whizzer” White, the football star and future Supreme Court justice did his futile best to bring Colorado into the Kennedy camp, I, as a kind of local boy well known in some quarters, gave what I thought was a rousing speech, but when I sat down, Ethel sitting behind me gave me a sharp cuff to the ear: ‘Michener, damn it. There’s a lot of Germans in this state. When you tell about Jack’s older brother being shot down in an air battle, do not say that a German pilot did it. Just makes people angry.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘That he gave his life for his country over the North Sea.’ We lost Colorado.
Our most amusing contretemps occurred in Boise, Idaho, a fine town, which in later years I grew to admire. Somehow or other the local Democratic leadership had maneuvered a bid for us to address a luncheon in the local country club, but when the regular members heard that a gang of Democrats was going to invade their sanctuary, they—especially the women members—put their collective feet down. When we were met at the door and refused admission, it was decided that since I was the least political of the group and might be known for my books, I should do the negotiating, but I failed. I heard one woman say: ‘It would contaminate the club.’ We managed to find another venue, but that didn’t accomplish much because almost no one came to hear us. We lost Idaho.
As a matter of doleful record, despite the fact that two other Kennedy girls flew out to help us, as well as Teddy and his beautiful wife, Joan—they were real campaigners—our fighting team lost every state into which we adventured, and Shelley Winters said afterward: ‘If they’d sent us into more states, we’d have lost the whole election for them.’ But there was a happy side to the story: minor candidates from several states assured us later that the media coverage we attained had helped in winning their local fights.
Our campaigning was a gallant effort, and it introduced me to some of the finest people I’ve ever known. I’ve traveled other times with Stan Musial, an American original. I have kept in touch with the Kennedys and have admired their dedication to public service. I consider Teddy Kennedy an admirable senator, and so will history. I mourned the death of Jeff Chandler, a solid citizen with both modesty and a sense of humor. And my heart skips a beat whenever I see Angie on the screen, younger year by year while the rest of us age. I never spent a better three weeks.
We spent election day in our home district, and when my wife, Mari, saw that extraordinary parade of German women in black dresses marching to the polls, followed by the Catholic nuns in their black habits, she cried: ‘My God! They’re coming out of the woodwork!’ Our Dutch Republicans mustered far more of their first-time women voters than we Democrats did, but our nuns helped hold down the margin of the Republican victory in our county, and on that long, frenzied election night when the returns poured in, it was clear that whereas all the suburbs like Bucks County had been carried by the Republicans, our heroic efforts had kept the margin of their victory to a minimum, which meant that Democratic victories in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were large enough to deliver Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Kennedy, who certainly needed them.
The experiences of this campaign, and the excellent politicians I met, Republican and Democrat alike, converted me to involvement in politics, a field of operation in which I would work for the rest of my life. I love politics and find it increasingly fascinating.
In 1962 I ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket in a district that was heavily Republican, and on the opening day of the campaign I was invited to address a Ukrainian church in Allentown. After a brief and what I considered inspiring series of comments, I asked if there were any questions and a dour man in the front row leaped to his feet: ‘What is your attitude on House Bill 418-97?’ I had never heard of it. Later I learned that it had something to do with granting political asylum to a high dignitary of the Ukrainian Church, which is totally different from the Russian Orthodox Church. Afraid to fake an answer, I said: ‘I haven’t studied that proposal yet,’ and right there lost the entire Ukrainian vote in my district.
The district was unique in the United States in that it contained two massive steel mills, Bethlehem in the north, United States Steel in the south, and in those first months of campaigning I would learn that politics in this region consisted of reassuring one group after another, each in its own severely segregated church and club, that if the members voted for me they would have a man in Washington marvelously qualified to look after their separate interests. There were the big groups that you would expect in a steel area: Irish, German, Italian. But there were also small enclaves you had not been aware of before: Latvians, Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, Greeks and a dozen others. It is very sobering for a man to present himself to such an electorate.
My opponent was a capable little Napoleon who had served ten terms in office; he had never lost an election and did not propose to lose this one. Like a true master he fended off every advance I tried to make and was content to sit back and run a campaign exactly like all the previous ones that he had won with ease. I campaigned valiantly and did cut down his usual margin of victory, but he preserved his unbeaten record. I was disheartened by my loss and never made sour-grapes comments that it was just as well that I hadn’t won because if I had I would probably not have been able to write certain books. I wanted to win; I gave it every ounce of energy I had; and I believe I would have been a good representative had I won. However, when my opponent retired from Congress, his place was taken by a younger Republican, who, I must admit, served the district rather better than I might have and progressed from a seat in the House to other positions of distinction. When he retired, a vigorous young Democrat won the seat and I was elated.
Running for Congress was one of the best things I’ve done because campaigning in public knocks sense into a man. He begins to see his nation as a carefully assembled mosaic whose individual pieces require close attention. He also discovers that the timeless struggle between conservatives and liberals is good for the nation, for it ensures that procedures will be overhauled periodically under new managers. He develops an intense admiration for the men and women who keep the political process operating, and at the end of a campaign he finds that he has far more respect for an honest hardworking Republican opponent than for a wishy-washy Democrat who has never matched his
energies with his hopes.
I do not want ever to be governed by men or women who have not subjected themselves to the election process and have thus learned humility. This conviction was strengthened in 1974, after President Nixon left office. A large poster showed sixty-four members of his team who had either landed in jail or been forced to resign under pressure, and not one of them had ever run for office, not any kind of office. They had all been called from private life to positions of great power without ever undergoing the sobering experience of asking voters for their support or the humbling experience of having lost. I am terrified of being governed by such men whose worth has not been tested. Let them undergo public scrutiny and prove themselves.
My lasting memory of my race for Congress is a joyous one. In the industrial southern end of my district a powerful political club existed, the Bensalem Loyal Democrats, and if a candidate wanted to win, it was obligatory that he enlist and keep the support of its members, because they did vote in sometimes surprising numbers, considering the relatively small registered population of the area. The club was run in heavy dictatorial fashion by the strangest ward politician in memory, a big, blowsy sixtyish woman with a brusque manner and no teeth. Josephine Morris was one of those clever gregarious people for whom politics was designed, and few played the game better than she. To encounter her loud, enthusiastic chatter for the first time invited laughter, but to watch her run her big district with an iron hand evoked awe.
Incredible as it now seems, the feature of any long campaign was the formal dinner Josephine threw on the Saturday night before the Tuesday election. Then her husky cohorts dressed in rented tuxedos, their wives appeared in new gowns, and Josephine, in a special dress acquired for each ball, reigned, assuring everyone that the vote she was going to turn in on Tuesday would be better than ever. She was one of the few leaders I would know who could deliver, a typical vote in her district being something like 816 to 7 in favor of the candidate she backed.