Presidential Lottery (20 page)

As for what the Democrats accomplished in that city, I can speak only with awe. In four days they converted certain victory into defeat, with superannuated bosses from a bygone age cavorting on television, with police revoking every ideal being mouthed on the platform, and with insolence of office replacing exchange of ideas. It left me ashamed and prepared for defeat; in time my own sense of history erased the former, and my dedication to a good fight made me do what I could to avoid the defeat; but I can say that in spite of that dedication this convention nearly finished me in politics. Many young people quit entirely, but perhaps we can win them back with the kind of convention I am thinking about.

I know of no one who wants a repetition of either Miami or Chicago, but I do know many who look forward to Republicans and Democrats meeting, each in their own time, to fight the intellectual and tactical battles of national politics, and I am one.

As to the length of the campaign, I realize that common sense dictates a shorter one. If England and France can run
successful national elections in a third of the time we take, it can obviously be done; but I find that I have no strong feelings of support for change in our system. When I ran for Congress, I campaigned from February to November, a murderous route, but I learned so much in the process that each day was worth the effort. I look with grave apprehension at a system which would eliminate face-to-face encounters and substitute campaigning by television; I do not want to be governed by men who have appeared only on television, in some insulated studio far from the milling crowds of living human beings, for I know that such men will have missed that vital contact with cantankerous human beings which knocks sense into the politician’s skull and humility into his arrogance. I would, therefore, speak neither for nor against shortened campaigns, trusting that whatever the majority decided would probably be right. This leads us then to the last two steps for immediate action:

My own estimates as to timetable are as follows. We ought to be able to formulate, pass in Congress, submit to the states, and pass before 1972 a constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College. The chances for this are about 40 per cent in favor, 60 per cent against, but these could be improved by public pressure.

There is a smaller chance that we could produce and pass an amendment abolishing House elections. I would estimate the situation to be about 30 per cent in favor, 70 per cent against, but again, public pressure could improve this.

The likelihood of getting one of the major amendments through Congress within the immediate future is not good. However, if one did get through, I would judge that the states might ratify it rather promptly. In my own mind I am shooting for 1976 or 1980, which would be about the best I could foresee. However, if the groundswell of popular demand continues, and if the polls in 1970 sustain the enthusiasm evident in 1968, there would be a slim chance that something might be accomplished sooner.

Nothing, of course, will be accomplished in any of these areas unless an extraordinary public pressure is maintained, so the determination really rests with the citizens.

A FINAL FANTASY

I have saved till last an aspect of our present system which seems totally bizarre, for I want the reader to savor the stupidity of the system under which he governs himself. My previous arguments have been to reason; this one involves sheer folly.

In the period following the November election I was much amused at editorial writers who congratulated the nation on having escaped the formidable dangers that could have grown out of the Electoral College or a House election. Everyone wrote as if the nation were home safe after a perilous voyage, but I did not share this feeling of assurance.

I was especially apprehensive about those articles which found satisfaction in the collapse of Governor Wallace’s effort to steal the election. The authors wrote as if Wallace had been completely defeated and had no more power to do harm; whereas I thought the little judge now posed an even greater threat, though one less likely to materialize.

“Suppose,” I asked myself the morning after election as I listened to congratulations over our narrow escape, “that in the interval between now and December 16 Richard Nixon either dies or withdraws. What then?”

I am aware that in his final pre-election speech to the nation Nixon spoke harshly of people who speculate like ghouls on such matters, and I apologize for mentioning this one now; but I am concerned about the liberty of two hundred million people and the destiny of my nation, and it is my duty to contemplate
such possibilities, especially since they exercised me much in that critical period.

I am not asking a hypothetical question, nor am I wasting the reader’s time with speculation on something that could not happen. Indeed, it has already happened, except that in this instance the man who died was not the winner but the loser. In 1872 Ulysses S. Grant was the nominee for a second term on the Republican ticket and was opposed by Horace Greeley on the Democratic. Grant won a clear victory in the popular vote, a majority of 728,612 out of a total vote of 6,466,138, and this would have produced in the Electoral College a commanding majority of 286–83, except that Greeley’s vote was never counted, because on November 29, 1872, two weeks before the College met, Greeley died. Since his death could have no bearing on the Presidential succession, the Democrats did not bother to nominate a substitute. Of those votes which would have gone to Greeley, 63 were scattered arbitrarily, with 3 of the faithful electors still voting for the dead man out of respect and 17 not voting at all. In accurate histories the electoral vote in this election is recorded as 286–0 for a reason which will become apparent in the next paragraph.

When the Electoral College passed its results along to Congress, that body decided that it was preposterous for the electors to have voted for a man who had died before they convened, and Congress refused to record any votes cast on his behalf. And tradition is clear that Congress will not accept electoral votes cast for dead men; they are automatically nullified. I judged, therefore, during those anxious days when
I was studying this eventuality, that this precedent would be honored, and that if Richard Nixon were to die in that gray interval, any electoral votes which might be cast for him would be disregarded.

This would mean that unless the Republican party could decide swiftly and securely upon someone to replace Nixon, the election would be inconclusive; it would fail to produce a President and would be thrown into the House. (It is clear that when the Electoral College elects a Vice-President they are doing just that, and only that; the man so designated is Vice-President and remains so until such time as the House indicates that it is unable to settle upon a President, in which contingency the Vice-President serves as President, holding the office only until such time as a President is agreed upon, however tardy the House might be in settling that issue. Upon retiring in favor of the newly designated President, he resumes the Vice-Presidency.)

Had Nixon died, it would have been obligatory for the Republican National Committee to designate some individual to stand for the Presidency and to hope that their nomination would be acceptable to the Republican members of the Electoral College. The nation would then have held its breath to see how the 302 Republican electors who had been pledged to Nixon would react to the new man. If they accepted him, he would be the next President. If they wavered, and if thirty-three defected, the Republicans would not have won and the election would have been thrown into the House, where because of their control of the state delegations, the Democrats would possibly have been able to elect Humphrey.

What are the chances that the Republicans would have been able to nominate a candidate quickly and impose him upon the electors? I trust that the reader will follow my reasoning carefully so as to appreciate what might have happened between November 5 and December 16, 1968.

To begin with, at the moment Nixon’s death was announced, the 302 Republican electors pledged to him would have become the most important citizens in the United States, for they alone would have held the fate of the Presidency in their hands, and all decisions made as to a substitute nominee would have had to be made with one question in mind: “Will the electors agree?” It would not have mattered what the Republican National Committee or the general public thought of the new man, but only what this handful of 302 men and women, arbitrarily and capriciously chosen, thought.

Again the forty-five electors pledged to Wallace would have become of crucial importance, because if any of the Republican electors did waver, unable to accept the nominee which the national committee proposed to ram down their throats, the Wallace men could have rushed in to arrange a deal which would either grant or deny victory to the Republicans. Remember that the Republicans would have had to settle this matter in the Electoral College; their prospects would not have been bright in the House, and if to win in the College they required the Wallace votes, the temptation would have been great to arrange a deal for them. Governor Wallace would have been in a better position to exercise leverage than before; and his offer of a covenant, more attractive.

And finally, the 191 Democrats would have found themselves
in a position to dictate to the Republicans whom the Republicans should nominate to the vacancy, for these electors were free to swing one way or the other, depending upon what tactical situation developed.

If Nixon’s removal had occurred early in this period, there would have been time for the Republican National Committee to reconvene its members in emergency session and to hold, in effect, another complete convention with the same procedures as had operated in Miami earlier in the summer. This convention, by a careful display of honesty and fair play, might have come up with a candidate who would satisfy the electors and enlist their undivided loyalty.

But at the very beginning of the convention the party would have faced a crucial decision. In the normal course of events it would be natural for any party so faced with crisis to elevate the Vice-Presidential candidate to the Presidency and then to select a new Vice-President. But I doubt that in 1968 the Republicans could have promoted their Vice-President to President with any hope of keeping their electors pledged to vote for him when the College convened. The great newspapers of the country, the television commentators, the news magazines, and the general public would all have protested in the name of patriotism and reason and would have applied such tremendous pressure on the Republican electors that some would surely have defected, enough I think to have put Wallace and the Democrats back into a bargaining position. This possibility the Republican leadership would not have risked.

Let us suppose, therefore, that the Republicans would have
had to choose between candidates who had come before the summer convention and that the final choice had been between two men, say Ronald Reagan of California and Nelson Rockefeller of New York—two men even farther apart in ideology than in geography—and let us suppose further that the Rockefeller forces had been able to blast out a victory. Would the 302 electors have stood firm behind this choice? I doubt it. Fantastic pressures would have been applied to every Republican elector, and those whose hearts inclined toward Reagan, or whose egos had been scarred in the fight, would have been susceptible to that pressure. I doubt that the Republicans could have maintained discipline; I doubt that Rockefeller would have been able to collect the 270 votes required.

At this point the Wallace people would have had every right to try to put together a coalition behind Reagan or some other attractive conservative in hopes of drawing to their candidate the support of Democratic conservatives.

The Democrats, meanwhile, would have been undergoing their own agony. At first they would have judged rather smugly—and incorrectly, I think—that if they stood firm they would wind up with a good chance of throwing the election into the House, where they could elect Humphrey. But they would soon have awakened to the fact that it was George Wallace who really held the balance of power, and whereas he did not like Rockefeller and had spoken disrespectfully of him, he liked Humphrey even less and was determined to deprive him of the Presidency. The Democrats would thus have found themselves in a position in which the Electoral
College vote was going to be decided without their participation.