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SymbooPflo sl iLteiacdaelr ship SecoEnddi tion --_E,x panwdieathnd e,iw n troduction 1 I 1 ,b yth ea uthor -.--.J CHOOSIPNRGE SIDENTS SymboofPl osl iLteiacdaelr ship Second Edition Michael Novak ExpanWdietadNh ,e wI ntrodbuytc hAteui tohno r TransaPcutbiloins hers New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.) .. New material this edition copyright© 1992 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. Originally published in 1974 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo­ copy, recording, or permission in writing from the publisher. All in­ quiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 91-17280 ISBN: 1-56000-567-X Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Novak, Michael. Choosing presidents: symbols of political leadership/Michael No- vak, with a new introduction by the author. p. cm. Rev. ed. of: Choosing our king, 1974. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56000-567-X 1. Presidents-United States-Election-I 972. 2. Presidents-United States. 3. Symbolism. 4. National characteristics, American. I. No­ vak, Michael. Choosing our king. II. Title. JK526 1972.N68 1991 324.973'0924-dc20 91-17280 CIP CONTENTS Intdruocttitooh Tner ansEadcittiioonn Xl Acknowledgments XXV .. Preface XXVll PART ONE PRIEST, PROPHET, KING I. SymboRleiacl ism 3 6 2. WhaAtr Sey mbols? 3. WhoA rWee ? 12 4. UnsePeonw er 15 5. EgaliatnaKdri inagn 19 6. FivEel emeonfSt ysm boPloiwce r 29 7. MakitnhgMe o sotfI mprobTaablleen ts 32 8. A ProfesMseimoon al's 41 9.T hLei tuorfLgy e adership 48 PART TWO MORALISM 'AND MORALITY 10. BeiMnogr aanlBd e iPnrga ctical 57 ThCeo nstiotfCu oennsccyi ence I 1. 63 ThaWto r"dM oral" 69 12. VietMnoarmMe:o rTahla Tnh ou? 13. 74 ThRei asneFd a olfLl i beMroarla lism 14. 87 BeyoNnide bSuyhmrb:Ro elasilmci 15. 3 9 PART THREE THE CIVIL RELIGIONS OF AMERICA ThNea twiiottnhh Se o ouflaC hurch 16. 105 ThIen nocLeinncgOeen r s 17. Ill ThCei vRiell igions 18. 123 FivPere osttCainvRtie ll igions 19. 131 Hihg-CchhAu mrerica 20. 137 ThSee coGnrdeT arta dition 21. 147 P�T FOUR 97 SYMBOLS OF 1 2 TriatdiSoynmablo ls 22. 163 NewH ampsShniorwes 23. 166 24. The Wallace Sun 179 25. lvlcCarthy in Illinois 190 26. Sorting Out in Wisconsin 197 27T.og ether with McGovern at the Garden 217 28T.he Shooting of Governor Wallace 229 29. Eight lvfa jor Presidential Symbols 232 PART FIVE A NEW AND DARK FAITH 30A.m erica as a Business 241 3 Three Corruptions I. 247 32R.ef orming the Presidency 258 33T.he Necessity of Dirty Hands 270 34T.he Dark Night of Faith 286 35. The New Dark Civil Religion 302 PARTS IX AFfERWORD 36.C arter's Hidden Religious Majority 313 37.R ival Visions of "Community," 1988 320 38.M oiling, Muddling, and Malaise 334 39.M iracle in the Desert 337 A Select Bibliography 341 Index 349 INTRODUCTTOTI HOEN TRANSACETDIIOTNI ON I began with two convictions: that the presidency is the nation's most central religious symbol, and that American civilization is best under­ stood as a set of secular religious systems. Choosing our King, 197 4 Ever since childhood, presidential elections have stood out in my memory above the flux of public events. Elections are great public liturgies; they stamp imagination. My childhood was spent under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and my first campaign memory (I was seven) is of bright blue Wendell Willkie buttons in the school yard in 1940 and a flurry of competitive excitement. I can't recall whether it was he or Dewey in 1944 who had the button, "We don't like Fala ei­ ther." In the fifty-odd years since then, presidential elections have become no less important. The distinctive symbolic weight each new incumbent has imparted to that office is remarkable; the names Truman, Eisen­ hower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan still stir passion. Each man really did give special color to an era, and even Gerald Ford who served but two years brought peace to a troubled nation, just in time for the moving bicentennial celebration of 1976. Thus, the hypothesis that the American presidency is the most dra­ matic expression of our nation's "civil religion" has received further confirmation in the four elections since the book's appearance. A few words may serve to add those years to the perspective of this book. In the Afterword, new materials have been added to cover the Carter presidency and the Bush-Dukakis election in 1988. To complement these, I will give more space here to the Reagan years . . Xl .. Xll Choosing Presidents Since Choosing Our King appeared in 1974 its argument has demonstrated at least a little predictive power. Once an observer dis- cerns how well the two nominees of their respective parties speak �e five major symbolic languages of the nation, and which of the two can- did ates better personifies the nation's sense of itself, the likely outcome also looms into view. For example, the "civil religion" of American evangelicals, I had noted in 1974, must one day become visible and give us a new set of public symbols for presidential use. It did so through Jimmy Carter two years later. In 1975, I wrote a piece suggesting that Jimmy Carter, then at barely 1 percent in the national polls, might well seize the Democratic nomination ("Can a Protestant be Elected President?" The Christian Century). A little later, in April of 1976, before Carter was nominated and elected, I described for the Washington Post how his special "civil religion" would likely affect a Carter presidency. Evangelicals are a huge bloc of Americans whom our highly educated elites keep mis­ placing, and by April 1976, journalists were scrambling to "rediscover" them yet again. Reprinted here in an Afterword, this essay offered a predictive forecast of Jimmy Carter's strengths and weaknesses over the next four years. In 1980, using other symbolic materials, I came to believe that Ronald Reagan would show greater strength than George Bush in the nominating process and, to the surprise of most others too, would soundly defeat Carter in November. As readers of the original edition will know, I had worked for George McGovern after mid-July 1972 as a paid staff member of his Washington headquarters. At headquarters (1776 K St.) I didn't see much of the candidate, whose pursuit of the nomination I had followed on the campaign trail as a reporter and student of the presidency. Dur­ ing my first weeks on the job, after his nomination, my contributions to Senator McGovern's campaign were mainly three: trying to give it a focus on Catholic ethnic voters; writing one speech for the nominee to give at a Catholic high school in Chicago, whose delivery several highly placed campaign officials tried to block right up until the final hour; and writing (under the name "George McGovern") a newspaper op-ed piece arguing that security of life and limb is "the first of all civil rights," and that a ·war on crime, far from being divisive, would unite persons of all races who currently lived in fear of their physical safety. From mid-August on, vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver (whose acceptance speech I helped to draft) invited me to accompany .. XU Introduction to the Transaction Edition Xlll him on his campaign plane. We were assigned the "Catholic ethnic cities," doing tour after tour of Philadelphia, New York City, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Akron, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, with forays to many other locations ( often Hispanic) thrown in. We often made three different cities and seven or eight appearances each day. I learned to love both men-"Sarge" Shriver and George McGovern-a great deal. But the particular ideological and symbolic color that McGovern's staff gave to the Democratic Party seemed to me a sad mistake. I was then developing an allergy to the left wing of the party, which has not been cured since. With some difficulty I have remained a Democrat, while watching with sorrow the abdication by Democrats of most of the classic principles and understandings of the Democratic Party of my youth. The party has more left me, I think, than I it. In any case, the ground that the Democratic Party was giving up during the 1970s, not only regarding foreign policy but also regarding the principles of individual opportunity and individual merit, was easily occupied by a new sort of Republican. These were Republicans who had broken with the Republican Old Guard, Republicans who thought and felt and acted like the Democrats of yore. These new Republicans could plausibly be called "conservatives" (if only as foils to "liberals"), but they could by no stretch of the imagination be called Tories, Estab­ lishment Republicans, Isolationists, or "Green-eyeshade Republicans" (constantly worried about balanced budgets). In style, the most capti­ vating among them was Jack Kemp, then-Congressman from New York and a leader in the House. Kemp, in tum, seemed to capture the imagination of Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California. With both were a flock of Young Turks in the Congress ("the new right" as balance to "the new left" of the 1960s) among whom were Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber, joined by such older men of combat and initiative as Henry Hyde. Such leaders could well have been Democrats, if judged by their zest of ideas, their activism, their worldwide engagement, and their vi­ sion of a new future. They thought of the progressive left, from Mc­ Govemites to Johnson's "Great Society," as "the establishment." One could say they looked ahead to a Bastille Day of their own, except that being predominantly from the American heartland their models were hardly Jacobin but, on the contrary, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. They loved the American idea. They hated socialism Choosing Presidents XlV in all its forms, including French utopianism. For example, Jack Kemp's focus was practical, and as mundane as tax cuts for the sake of economic opportunity among his constituents in 'Buffalo. He and his friends believed devoutly in what moderns call "democracy" but our founders called "republican government" (" of the people, by the peo­ ple, for the people"). They saw vividly that what makes poor people and workers love democracy is not the fact of voting every two or four years but the steady economic betterment of their families, through economic growth, opportunity, and incentives. This group might well have been called "commercial republicans," like the generation of our founders. They especially liked to quote John F. Kennedy-for his ac­ tivism, his optimism, his tax cuts, his "let's get America moving again," and his willingness to engage in "the long twilight struggle" with the forces of tyranny abroad. By 1980, it seemed that Jimmy Carter had given the Democratic Party the foreign policy of the progressive establishment known as "McGovernites." Moreover, he and his young assistants Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan had a quite different "establishment" in mind when they called themselves "anti-establishment." They did not like those parts of the Democratic Party I thought of as the admirable and dynamic center of the party: labor union leaders, big city "bosses," longtime elected Democrats in the congress and local government, Jewish and other ethnic organizations, "cold warriors," and the like. They preferred "the new politics" crowd, a bit left of center. There were a lot of movie stars and rock singers in that crowd. For such reasons, an observer could see that President Carter's hold on the evangelical "civil religion" was weak and that his hold on tradi­ tional Democrats was even weaker. I had written in 1978 that the con­ tests of the future for the soul of the country would concern realities close to the hearts of most Americans, but more and more neglected by the new politics and the stars of the media: such "square" values as work, farnily, and neighborhood. Ronald Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin saw that piece (it had ap red in a series of articles by pea Democrats in the journal Common Sense), and tested it in public polling. The terms "work, family, neighborhood," and also " ce and pea strength," tested very well. Ronald Reagan made all five the leitmotif of his long-shot campaign in 1980. My son was at that time attending the Jesuit prep school in down­ town Washington, Gonzaga, alma mater of a great many Catholic sons of the Kennedy-Johnson veterans of the New Frontier and Great Soci-

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