The Struggle for Power

BY DAVID S. BRODER

IT IS odd, sometimes, how an event will trigger the memory of an almost forgotten earlier occurrence. One day last August, I received a brochure announcing the opening of the Washington office of F. Clifton White and Associates, Inc. Clif White is the brilliant and articulate New Yorker who invented and directed the Draft Goldwater movement, one of the most impressive feats of political management in our era.

Now, the brochure said, he had formed a public affairs consulting firm that would offer “on a nationwide basis, an in-depth program designed to generate maximum support for the client’s political and governmental objectives in connection with its corporate goals.” In short, a superlobby.

As I read this, my mind was jogged backward more than a year to the week of White’s triumph, the Goldwater nomination in San Francisco. In the booming confusion of the St. Francis Hotel, I had been talking to Alexander M. Lankier, a Washington lawyer who had worked for Nelson Rockefeller’s nomination. We had been debating the Republican future — after the drubbing for Goldwater which both of us believed to be inevitable. I said it might be well to let the conservatives get it out of their system; after the debacle, I thought, the proprietors of the defeat would have no choice but to confess the bankruptcy of their dream.

Lankier shook his head and said, “You’re wrong. No matter how badly mauled the party is, they will still want to control it. It may not be much, you see, but it’s still bigger, more effective, and more salable than any other lobby they can get hold of.”

Odd notion, I thought, to confuse a political party, which exists to elect men to office, with a lobby, which tries to exert influence on behalf of its clients. Odder still to suggest that a national party would abandon its responsibility for the affairs of state and its chief goal, winning the presidency, and instead transform itself into a superlobby, serving its clientele by marketing influence. But now, a year later, here was the chief organizer of the Goldwater drive setting up his own superlobby.

I began to reflect on some of the things I had seen as a reporter covering the Goldwater phenomenon — seen but not probed. White had been a pioneer in the corporate public affairs field before he nurtured the Goldwater drive. Many of his major associates in the movement were from the same background — men like Charles Barr of Standard Oil of Indiana, Tyrone Gillespie of Dow Chemical, and William McFadzean of ArcherDaniels-Midland.

They had been helped by the thousands of Goldwater volunteers. But equally significant were their allies among the semipermanent Republican cadre in Congress. These congressional Republicans miscalculated political realities to their own peril: out of fifty-four Representatives who signed a statement in the spring of 1964 saying, “We are convinced that the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater will result in substantial increases in Republican membership in both houses of Congress,” twenty-one were not re-elected.

Finally, White had the help of the most influential Republican of them all. Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, who at a critical juncture rejected Governor William Scranton’s plea for help from the Illinois delegation and agreed, instead, to make the speech that nominated Goldwater.

It appears that Lankier was right when he said that the struggle would continue, and right when he said that the men who had put over Goldwater would try to use the party as a superlobby. What light does this cast on the party’s future? What does it tell us about the nature of its internal divisions? The more I thought about it, the more I began to suspect that the real struggle within the Republican Party is more basic than the much publicized differences between liberals and conservatives.

The real struggle is between, on one hand, the relatively few men who are still trying to expand the party’s base to the point where it can again compete effectively for the presidency and, on the other hand, the many Republican officials and officeholders who have long since resigned themselves to a minority role — and do not really desire to have it change. It: is a struggle, to put it in the bluntest terms, between the few who want to see the Republican Party again exercise responsibility for the affairs of cities, states, and nation and the many who are quite content to market its influence to its financial clients.

The first group includes most of those few Republicans who now hold positions of executive responsibility: mayors like John Lindsay of New York and Theodore McKeldin of Baltimore; county officials like Marlow Cook of Jefferson County, Kentucky; and governors like Scranton, George Romney of Michigan, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Nelson Rockefeller of New York, Dan Evans of Washington, Robert Smylie of Idaho, and John Chafee of Rhode Island.

Their natural allies are the Republican state chairmen, because state chairmen don’t stay in office long and they want a victory to show lor their efforts. They are also helped by a certain number of politicians, like Robert Merriam of Chicago and George Lodge of Massachusetts, who had a taste of power in the Eisenhower era and are young enough to want more of it; and by an increasing number of young lawyers and eggheads, like those in the Ripon Society, who happen to be interested in public issues and are stubborn enough to think their own party can contribute to their resolution.

The “Republican Rcsponsibles,”if I may call them that, are anything but monolithic in their ideology; indeed, some of their members, like Governor Evans, a civil engineer, are determinedly nonideologieal. What they share is a common courage about using the tools of government to solve the problems confronting their states and cities; a pragmatic willingness to grapple with people’s concerns, not to flee from them; and, most important of all, a willingness — in fact, an ambition — to take responsibility for public needs.

Their typical figure, perhaps, is Governor Romney, not because he is necessarily the smartest, ablest, or strongest of the group, but because he exemplifies their drive for personal power and responsibility, a drive that will probably make him this group’s representative in the battle for the 1968 nomination.

THE INFLUENTIALS

On the other side, there are what might be called the “Republican Influentials.” This group includes some of the party’s chief financial clients, including those organized by White in the 1964 campaign. It also includes most of the members of the Republican National Committee, who are, on the average, older and richer than the state chairmen and less subject to removal for failure to bring victory. But the great strength of the Republican I nfluentials comes from the Congress and the state legislatures, with Republican lawmakers from safe districts who return election after election, with enhanced senioritv, regardless of who is elected President or governor. Despite the ravages of 1964, dozens of them remain. Men like James Utt of California, Les Arends of Illinois, and William Bates of Massachusetts in the House; Frank Carlson, Karl Mundt, and Wallace Bennett in the Senate.

The Influentials, too, are not altogether united in their ideology. But their relative political immunity inclines them to prefer the status quo to abrupt changes, and their longevity in oflice promotes a cozy relationship with the interest groups that surround state legislatures and Congress, just as it increases the value of their favors to the lobbyists. Finally, as creatures of the legislative branch, these men have a natural jealousy of the executive, which, together with the other factors already mentioned, generally pits them against the positive, pragmatic use of governmental authority to deal with public problems.

What this group prizes, and what it basically can offer its clientele, is influence, not responsibility. The Republican Influentials would rather amend a bill — or block it — than pass it. If a governor or President from their party is elected, their joy, if any, will be muted by the realization that they may be forced, in the name of party unity, to support legislation they would prefer to oppose. Many of them in Congress were frankly miserable during the Eisenhower years, just as many Republicans in the state legislatures are unhappy under Republican governors now.

Even more fundamentally, many of the Republican Influentials have ceased to believe that their party will ever be anything but the opposition during their lifetime. The will to win a party victory has been drained from them. Many of them gave up the struggle when their hero, Robert Taft, was denied the nomination in 1952. Gold water mayhave given them a flicker of life, but his crushing defeat just strengthened their belief that the kind of Republican Party they feel comfortable with will never be the majority.

There are numerous Republican Influentials, but the archetype is Senator Dirksen. We will talk more about him in just a moment, but first some notice must be taken of a third group, whose members occupy an interesting sort of middle ground between the Responsibles and the Influential. I think here of the young activists in the House of Representatives, men like Gerald Ford of Michigan, Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, and Charles E. Goodell of New York.

These men, because they are young and ambitious, are spiritually kin to the governors and state chairmen who are dissatisfied with the status quo. Gerry Ford, like Charlie Halleck before him, hankers for a vice presidential nomination, and Laird would like to be Speaker of a Republican House.

But their freedom of action is limited by their congressional colleagues; they are subject to the pressures and temptations of the influence politics of Capitol Hill. When the young activists tried to put up a Republican plan for medical care for the aged, they were balked because many of their colleagues were under contrary instructions from the AMA. When they have tried to force a foreign policy issue with the Administration, the cosy relationship of Dirksen and some other Senate Republicans with Lyndon Johnson has interfered.

I hope I have cited enough examples to indicate my view that the split between the Republican Responsibles and the Republican Influentials is not wholly one of governors versus Congress, or liberals versus conservatives. Mark Hatfield can be as responsible a Republican in the Senate, for which he is running now, as he has been as governor. Conversely, Ronald Reagan does not automatically become a Responsible by seeking the governorship. No one, I venture, can safely judge what the gentleman-actor will turn out to be politically. But as a general rule, I think, governors have to be more responsible and can exert greater benefit for their party than senators.

Thus, it was a matter of regret that good men like Thomas Kuchcl of California and Clifford P. Case of New Jersey chose to stay in the relative comfort of a minority role in the Senate rather than run for the governorships in their home states. Similarly, it is unfortunate for the party, I think, that Charles Percy was maneuvered into running for the Senate, rather than waiting for another crack at the Illinois governorship. But there are exceptions to every rule: Mel Laird, a congressman and a conservative, is a Responsible in my book because he judges ideas by their potential for damaging the Democrats and boosting the Republicans, not by their popularity among the lobbyists. And on the other hand, Governor James A. Rhodes of Ohio, despite his great personal popularity, has not exerted himself significantly to build public support for the Republican Party in Ohio or the country.

TWO IN THE MIDDLE

Besides the House leaders there are two other prominent Republicans-in-the-middle: Richard M. Nixon and Ray C. Bliss, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Nixon is an equivocal figure, successful in every race he has made for legislative office, beaten both times that he ran for a post with executive responsibility. Because he still wants to be President, his political instincts tell him he must support the group trying to expand the party’s base. But he has no base himself, except among his old friends in the status quo congressional ranks, for whom he can still perform some campaigning and fund-raising chores. The irony of Nixon’s position is that if he runs again for the nomination, as he clearly would like to do, he will probably have the support of the very men who care least whether a Republican is elected President and be opposed by the governors, the mayors, and the intellectuals who really think the presidency can be won with the right candidate and policies, and can do the most to make that possible.

Bliss is in a somewhat different position. His entire commitment as a professional politician is to win the big one — the presidency. His instinct as well as purpose is to expand the base. But his timidity — particularly his deference toward Dirksen as the leader of the congressional hierarchy — makes him draw back from the very lights that would point the party toward its presidential objective and away from the influence politics of the permanent Republican minority on Capitol Hill.

One reason for Bliss’s caution is the relative weakness of the Republican Responsibles in the intraparty battles. There are seventeen Republican governors, most of them from small states. Of the handful of potentially powerful allies, Scranton is leaving office this year, Rockefeller is in a desperate light for re-election, and Rhodes of Ohio is no friend of Bliss’s.

Nor are the state chairmen any tower of strength to Bliss. An astonishing percentage have not yet been through their first election. They don’t intimidate anyone.

By contrast, the Republican Influentials led by Dirksen are, though reduced in numbers, secure in their posts. Anyone who survived 1964 is likely to survive anything, and they have shown no disposition to yield command of party policy making. Moreover, they are in control of their own financial resources, a point of considerable significance. In April, 1964, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised over $400,000 at a single testimonial dinner for Dirksen. In February, 1965, they duplicated their success. The lobbyists who bought their $500-a-plate tickets were buying access to the Influentials — and specifically to Dirksen, the most influential Republican of them all.

Now, influence politics is not restricted to the Republicans. It occurred on the Democratic side under Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson during the Eisenhower years, when Bobby Baker, among other duties, was a liaison man between the lobbyists and the National Democratic Senatorial Committee. The crucial difference is this: The Democrats have never fallen so far out of power that they have been tempted to abandon their pursuit of the presidency; but Republicans have been so divorced from the responsibility of executive power for such an extended period that many in their party have resigned themselves to the easy course of influence politics.

A NO-WIN POLICY?

Is this unduly harsh on Dirksen and his colleagues? I am certain many of my journalistic colleagues will think so, for in the bloodless conformity of Lyndon Johnson’s Washington, Everett Dirksen shines forth as the most delightful, most quotable free spirit still functioning. He also happens to be about the hardest-working man on Capitol Hill and the most skilled legislator. On occasions in recent years — as with the civil rights bills and the test-ban treaty — he has lent his great talents to projects of major national interest. But his tremendous influence, I am forced to say, is inimical to his party’s welfare.

His motives in the test-ban and civil rights episodes, for example, may have been as pure as the day is long. But undeniably, when Dirksen shelves “influence politics” for one of his dramatic embraces of “responsibility,” he deposits certain “money in the bank” at the White House, for the President must always be alert to opportunities for trading with the opposition. At least in part because of Dirksen’s support for the Administration on major foreign policy and legislative issues, the White House has carefully pulled its punches in several other fights in which Dirksen has staked out forthright anti-Administration stands. Thus, for a man of Dirksen’s abilities, does “responsibility” buy “influence.”

Dirksen’s overt interventions into Republican presidential politics have been misguided, from his finger-wagging admonition to nominate Robert Taft instead of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 to his velvet-voiced pleading for Barry Goldwater at the convention of 1964.

A deliberate no-win policy? I do not know. But it is, I think, unarguable that Dirksen’s political influence has risen steadily as the position of the Republican Party has declined. He leads thirty-one other Republican senators today, two fewer than the already depleted group he took command of in 1959; but he is more quoted by the press and more courted by the White House than ever he was when General Eisenhower was President. Is it his deepest desire to see another Republican in the presidency?

Dirksen’s desires would be a mere matter of academic interest were it not for the fact that he is setting priorities for Republican policy making today. Who was it, if not Dirksen, who decided that the Senate Republicans would fight a knockdown battle against repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act. Not, you can be sure, Ray Bliss, who saw disaster overtake the Republican Party in Ohio in 1958 when pressure from business contributors forced GOP candidates for governor and senator to endorse a right-to-work referendum in the state. Not the governors of Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the largest jurisdictions now under Republican administration.

The right-to-work issue is a perfect example of the basic opposition between the Republican Influentials and the Republican Responsibles. The whole question is more than a little phony. The demonstrable effect of union shop agreements in thirty-one states, or their ban in nineteen others, on the quality of labor relations in the states is much less than the symbolic importance of right-towork to certain labor and business executives.

The labor leaders, whose attitude toward the Democratic Party is nearly as selfish and shortsighted as some businessmen’s attitude toward the Republicans, have pressured incessantly for the repeal of 14(b). But President Johnson put a low priority on the project, delayed it until the rest of his 1965 domestic program was passed, and then contrived to say the absolute minimum about the issue. Dirksen, on the other hand, made the retention of 14(b) almost his top objective and organized two filibusters on the subject. The reason, I suggest, is that Dirksen is playing influence politics, while Johnson now is playing the politics of party responsibility.

If the Republicans were to deal responsibly with labor policy, they would not have to drop their opposition to repeal of Section 14(b). But instead of giving top priority to a phony issue, they would concentrate instead on proposing answers to some labor problems that actually might win their party some votes. Why not a Republican Party plan for avoiding crippling strikes in public service industries, such as newspapers and transit systems? There are votes in that issue; in 14(b) the only rewards are cash from contributors and the continued enmity of organized labor.

THE SUBURBAN VOTER

The battle over apportionment shows even more clearly the undeclared civil war between the Republican Influentials and the Republican Responsibles. A political party simply cannot fight the population trends and hope to survive. Republicans have every reason to welcome the flight from farm and city to the suburbs; they should thrive in the suburbs if they can thrive anywhere. How they came to be opposed to judicial rulings recognizing the rights of the suburban voter is almost incomprehensible.

A bit of history is useful. On June 16, 1964, the day after the Supreme Court handed down its one-man, one-vote ruling, William E. Miller, then Republican national chairman and later vice presidential candidate, was asked to comment. Mr. Miller is, Lord knows, anything but an automatic defender of the Court and anything but a liberal. But his comment was: “This [decision] is in the national interest and in the Republican Party’s interest.”

Miller was talking on the basis of a carefully documented study by the national committee’s research division on the political consequences of malapportionment. Andrew Hacker, the political scientist who has made the most painstaking study of the subject, later came to the same conclusion: “Republicans would be well-advised to work for the equalization of districts; they can only profit by such a move.” Both the Hacker study and that done by the Republican National Committee staff concentrated on congressional districts. But the same major point also applies to state legislative districts. The areas of most rapid recent growth, the areas most underrepresented in the legislatures, are the suburbs and smaller cities, where Republicans should be able to run their best races.

Just ten days after Miller had accurately stated the Republican Party position on one-man, onevote, Dirksen and Representative Halleck, then the House Republican leader, issued a statement saying they would take the lead in an effort to overturn the Court decision. “We Republicans,” it said, “believe the historic geographic-populationlegislative balance which has protected minority rights and interests for 175 years, should be maintained.”

That was the start of what has become the celebrated Dirksen amendment, the most publicized issue of the most publicized Republican of them all. Whatever the constitutional merits of the argument, the Dirksen amendment fight has become a classic battle of economic interests.

Until the 1964 decision, conservative business and farm groups could depend on the malapportioned legislatures — and particularly their state senates — for their leverage against the urban and suburban majorities. So long as they could elect (or successfully influence) even one third of the state senators, they could, under many state constitutions, exercise a veto power over inimical provisions of tax codes, cut the budgets of regulatory agencies, or block appointments of unfriendly administrators. It is this veto power, this tool of the Influentials, which they are striving to preserve through the Dirksen amendment.

The groups that are fighting the battle include employers who want to hold down unemployment compensation benefits; truckers who want lenient load limits; insurance companies and private utilities who think that the best regulation is the least regulation; farmers who want no minimum wage for agricultural workers; and every business with a stake in state taxation.

These groups have no special interest in the Republican Party or its future. They have done business with anyone from either party who would help block progressive legislation and strict regulation. But through Senator Dirksen, they have identified the Republican Party with their lastditch fight against the effects of population change.

All this, ironically, has happened at a time when Bliss and the other Republican Responsibles are focusing their efforts on the metropolitan areas. Last June, at the first meeting of the Republican National Committee after he became chairman, Bliss arranged for William O. Cowger, then mayor of Louisville, to speak. Cowger was blunt: “Today, over 70 percent of Americans live and work within the urban areas of our country. By 1980, according to the census bureau figures, we will be 90 percent urbanized. These are cold, hard facts that should be known to every Republican politician. Yet we find many who would fight against more legislative representation for the urban areas. They support plans that they feel will favor traditional rural Republican sections. Just how shortsighted can we really be?”

In November, 1965, just four months after his speech, Cowger proved again the validity of his argument. Barred from seeking another term, he managed the campaign that elected a Republican successor as mayor and re-elected Marlow Cook to the chief executive post in Jefferson County (Louisville and suburbs) by the biggest margin in history. The election was remarkable for many things, including a near-even split among Negroes, who had gone 97 percent Democratic a year before. But one of the major talking points for Kenneth A. Schmied, Cowger’s Republican successor, was the fact that he was the man who filed the lawsuit that forced the reapportionment of the Kentucky legislature. As a result of that reapportionment, metropolitan Louisville went from fifteen seats to twenty-three seats in the state house and senate. Twenty of those seats were contested in 1965; Republicans won eighteen of them.

The Louisville-Jefferson County victory is one that Bliss has cited as a guidepost on the path to future Republican successes. But Cowger, despite dozens of speeches, letters, and private pleas, has not yet begun to budge the Republican Party from its disastrous marriage to the Dirksen amendment. It has been endorsed at least twice in official statements since the 1964 platform.

Will the Republicans ever learn? Will the Cowgers, the Blisses, the Romneys, the Evanses, and the Scrantons — who want to win and have proved they can win — will they have the courage and the backing required to assert their voice in Republican policy decisions? Will the men who can make Republicanism make sense in the biggest cities and biggest states start making it credible to the nation?

I do not know the answer, but I think I know where it will be found. Not among the Influentials in Congress, who define national Republican doctrine today in the conscious perpetuation of a party that has lost its significance to ail but the handful of lobbyists and interest groups who find it useful for their purposes. That Republican Party is a party of perpetual opposition. It is an Avis which is not trying harder.

To find a Republican Party with signs of vitality, with hope of future success, you must leave Washington and go to the states and cities with Republican governors and mayors. There, Republican Responsibles are broadening public support for their party, not by old slogans, but by daily innovation in seeking solutions to the people’s problems.

One sign of their success is their own remarkable political strength: with one or two exceptions, the incumbent Republican governors look almost unbeatable this year; several of them have only token opposition. A wise political party would recognize these men for what they are: the only base on which a new party, a Responsible party, can be built. But the Republicans have not yet done so.

To one observer who has been watching the internal Republican battle for five years now, the choice is clear: It is responsibility or sure extinction.

I am rooting for the Responsibles, but I am not betting on them.