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Faith and Political Paralysis

By Gordon Francis Corbett

Faith is the conscious or subconscious refusal to think critically about specific subjects in anticipation of some kind of benefit.  In Hollywood, a close cousin of faith is known as "suspension of disbelief."

When watching a movie, suspension of disbelief is wonderful;  but failure to think critically about a candidate or his platform is folly.  When a candidate seems to model a voter's philosophy, the voter may cease judging him critically.  For practical purposes, he may forget that the fellow is a politician.

Put me at the top of the list.  As a college student, I had read a lot about Barry Goldwater, and what I read thrilled me, but only up to a point.  His early ratings from Americans for Constitutional Action were around eighty per cent.  They only rose to one hundred as the election approached.  Nevertheless, I still worked and voted for him.

I learned maybe three years ago that my misgivings had been sound.  I read in "Ayn Rand's Letters" a letter she had written to Goldwater in which she referred to his ghostwriters.

How she knew about them, I do not know.  She may not have guessed how much he used them.  In his book, "What Happened to Goldwater," Stephen Shadegg reported that the man used ghostwriters to write newspaper columns, speeches, and even books that bore his name.  Few knew that they flowed mostly not from Goldwater's own mind, but from the pens of hired strangers.

My youthful inexperience led me to think that Goldwater was, well, "Goldwater."  "Goldwater" was the fellow I saw on television defending what, at the time, were my values.  Sure, he was no Dan Smoot.  He did not base every political comment on the Constitution, and his words' compositional quality was often inferior to Smoot's.  Regardless, his statements echoed most of my Dad's political opinions;  and, as modified by Smoot and Rand, those were good enough for me.

Shadegg's book revealed that Goldwater was not "Goldwater" at all.  "Goldwater" was an actor who recited lines from a phalanx of speechwriters and historians.  

The real Barry Morris Goldwater was a department-store magnate's son who had served honorably in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, and who eventually became an Air Force general and a United States Senator.  True, he had more than his share of charisma.  Granted, he believed in his conservative nostrums.  But he was not the fellow on my parents' television screen.

Ronald Reagan was another, and far worse, example.  He was a lifelong democratic socialist who supported FDR four times and who had served on the Board of Directors of United World Federalists.  When changes in the public's cinematic tastes wrecked his acting career, he began giving public relations speeches for General Electric.

General Electric's bosses were generally conservative, and Reagan echoed their thinking.  When General Electric's employees asked what he had known and done about Communism in Hollywood, he answered more or less honestly.  When they began asking questions he could not answer, he began doing research.  Some of it consisted of cutting items out of newspapers.

That tedious labor taught him a great deal about Communism and American conservatism.  He used those facts and ideas in his speeches.  Gradually, as his knowledge, rhetoric, and charisma elicited more and more cheers, he decided that he would like to run for political office.

So, from the talking-points he had used in his public relations speeches, he gave one filmed speech for Goldwater.  After Goldwater's defeat, democratic socialist Nelson Rockefeller reclaimed the Republican Party.  Guess whose real philosophy matched Rockefeller's?  And, guess who was California's next prominent Republican gubernatorial candidate?

We grass-roots Republicans did not know, as was disclosed later, that Reagan began co-operating with Nixon and Rockefeller almost immediately.  No, we just listened to all those wonderfully conservative speeches.

After Reagan moved into Sacramento, "Life" or "Look" ran an article about him.  One page carried the caption, "Conservative is the Way to Sound."  The piece described what happened when Reagan said he would execute convicted murderer Aaron Mitchell.  Some liberal clergymen threatened to protest his death by ringing their churches' bells.  Later, when criminals killed four California Highway Patrolmen in a gunfight, these same clerics held their tongues.  "I am still waiting," the magazine quoted Governor Reagan, "for these gentlemen of the cloth to ask for the church bells of California to be rung for them."  The article's text made Reagan sound very conservative indeed.  Unfortunately, we conservatives (as I then was) just read the text and forgot the caption.

Reagan did indeed know that conservative was the way to sound.  Only when he had begun his second gubernatorial term did I learn that he had cancelled his 1966 call for a bipartisan and bicameral investigation of the University of California to get Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh to help pass his proposed big tax increase--as though "Big Daddy" needed any incentive to do that!

I approached Reagan after he spoke to the 1971 convention of the California State Employees' Association.  As I walked toward him, looking up at him on the stage, I joined the crowd who were urging him to run for the presidency.

At that moment, I sincerely wanted him to run for that office, despite the fact that I had almost never seen him give a straight answer to any critical press-conference question.  To my critical question, he gave me the same evasive answer he had given two years earlier.  Only when I stated that fact did his facade crack.

Flashback:  at Auburn, California's, Placer County Fair in 1969, I had asked him, "When are you going to do something along the Angela Davis-[Donald] Kalish line?"

Dr. Donald Kalish was UCLA's Philosophy Department Chairman.  He had proclaimed that he stood further to the left than did the Communist Party USA, and he had hired Communist Angela Davis as a lecturer.  Many Californians thought that her philosophy disqualified her for a tax-paid teaching position.

"Well," replied Governor Reagan, "they've got a new president down there, and I'm going to let him put his own house in order."

I let that answer go.  I had not imagined that, as Governor and as an ex officio University Regent, Reagan would not press for the firing of a member of the Communist Party USA.  Besides, perhaps President Charles Hitch would get tough.  

Silly me.  Hitch did nothing.  

Now we fast-forward back to the State Employees' Convention.  When I stood before the stage, looking up at Reagan, I asked my 1969 question, got Reagan's 1969 answer, and remonstrated, "Governor, you gave me that answer two years ago."

Reagan's reply was startling.

"Well," he said, "the Regents are having a budget meeting next week, and I might have to hold it [the Davis-Kalish issue] over them."

Wait a minute.  Out-and-out Reds are instructing at a State University;  presumably, they are teaching at least the philosophical basis for Communist armed struggle;  and conservative Governor Ronald Reagan is thinking of using that issue to obtain a smaller budget?!

I have no excuse.  As I walked away, I thought only that Reagan's answer was inadequate.  I could not bring myself to realize that the man who had spoken so eloquently for "Goldwater," and whose speech, "Encroaching Government Controls," had eviscerated the Tennessee Valley Authority in two elegant paragraphs, would not even try to oust Communists from a publicly funded State University.

I would have denied the possibility if someone had suggested it, but I was psychologically hamstrung.  I was a prisoner of a political faith I did not even know I had.

 Alas, I was not alone.
 

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