The Road Untaken ...
No doubt it is useless to speculate, but here’s fruit for speculation
nevertheless. If you only did useful things, you wouldn’t be on this site
anyway.
From Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time, a history of
the home front in World War II: “In truth Roosevelt’s mind that
summer (1942) was moving in a different direction; his dream was to join
hands with Republican Wendell Willkie in the creation of a new liberal party
that would combine the liberal elements of the Democratic Party, minus the
reactionary elements in the South, with the liberal elements of the
Republican Party.
Since Willkie had been defeated at the Republican
convention by the conservative wing of his party, Roosevelt hoped he would be
receptive to the idea. ‘We ought to have two real parties,’ Roosevelt
told his aide Sam Rosenman, ‘one liberal and the other conservative. As
it is now each party is split by dissenters ... ’
“Willkie was instantly drawn to the idea. ‘You tell the President
that I’m ready to devote almost full time to this,’ he said.”
(Nothing came of the idea, as Willkie died of a massive heart attack that fall.)
•
From H.R. Haldeman’s The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House:
April 22, 1972:
“The P said that he thought he (Treasury Secretary John Connally) was the
only man who could be P, and that led us back to a discussion we had started
with E (Presidential Assistant John Ehrlichman) on the restructuring of the
two-party system, the feeling being that the P and Connally, after the
election, could move to build a new party, the Independent Conservative
Party, or something of that sort, that would bring in a coalition of Southern
Democrats and other conservative Democrats, along with the middle-road to
conservative Republicans. Problem would be to work it out so that we included
Rockefeller and Reagan on the Republican spectrum, and picked up as many of
the Democrats as we could. By structuring it right, we could develop a new
majority party. Under a new name. Get control of the Congress without an
election, simply by the realignment, and make a truly historic change in the
entire American political structure ... If we formed a coalition, with the two
of them being the strong men, Connally clearly would emerge as the candidate
for the new party, in 1976, and the P would strongly back him in that.”
(Nothing came of this idea, either, as Mr. Nixon resigned the presidency
on August 9, 1974, following a massive ethical attack.)
•
March, 2002
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Copyright © 2004 by Jerome Doolittle
remnant@badattitudes.com
