RICHARD SCHWEIKER, LIBERAL REPUBLICANS, AND JFK

Last week I couldn't get any papers here to take an obituary of Richard Schweiker, best-known as a liberal Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, but his career is fascinating for two reasons.First, he represents the last-gasp of the now virtually extinct 'liberal' wing of the Republican party. That wing, which was largely eastern, and which you might argue represented old Yankee money, was dominant in the party up until after the JFK assassination. They were the ones Time magazine idolised, and hence got a lot of respect in the household where I grew up, even though my parents were strict FDR Democrats.

Even the Republican rabid right, represented by Robert Taft of Ohio, was relatively moderate on social issues despite being vehemently anti-union and pro-business, while always pushing a militaristic foreign policy. The Republicans could occupy this political middle ground because the Dixiecrats, southern Democrats, were the far-right on social issues, specifically civil rights.

Goldwater's nomination in 1964 was the first break-through of the 'Cowboy', new-money: a more triumphalist greedy, defense-industry-dominated turn right. He lost heavily to LBJ, but Richard Nixon, basically an older-style Republican at heart, was brought along by that very new breed from California, and realised the southern states were there for the taking after LBJ got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed. He approached this 'southern strategy' with coded reference to states rights, and by the time Reagan sought a second term, the 'solid south' was solidly GOP.

Schweiker was the prototype liberal Republican swimming against this flow. Although he inherited his family wealth (his liberal Republican counterpart in the state house in Pennsylvania, William Scranton, was also a child of inherited privilege) he possessed a keen social conscience, what the British might think of as noblesse oblige. The Republicans were full of them: Rockefellers, Chaffees, Cabots and Lodges, even Bushes. Representing some very wealthy Philadelphia suburbs as a congressman, then out-polling his party to win a Senate seat, he supported civil rights and Medicare, opposed Vietnam, and voted against Nixon's Supreme Court nominations of Haynesworth and Carswell, the Alito and Thomas of the 60s.

In 1976 Reagan, looking to balance the prospective Republican presidential ticket, announced Schweiker as his potential running mate. In this too-long running age of Don Ron's hagiography we forget Reagan started out as a 'liberal' and went with the flow of money and power to the right. Looking at Schweiker and the Great Prevaricator exchanging a reverse Republican high-five makes me think Richard Dreyfuss would play Schweiker in a bio-pic (with Will Ferrell or Dan Ackroyd as Reagan). But Reagan actually remained committed to some New Deal social programmes, just as Nixon had, which today's greed-is-good upwardly mobile tea partiers have pledged to destroy. They forget about his raising taxes, and his major recession too, but memory isn't a strong point with the wingnut right, fast becoming America's de facto centre. More on this in a moment.

The second key thing about Schweiker was that he and Gary Hart headed the Senate's Church Committee's investigation in the role of the CIA and FBI in the investigation of the JFK assassination, and their conclusions, that the agencies had deliberately lied to, withheld information from, misled and misdirected the Warren Commission, created a firestorm. I'd recommend reading Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation (here's a link to my obit of Fonzi from the Independent in 2012). Schweizer had hired Fonzi, a Philadelphia journalist, as an investigator for the Church Committee; the book details among other things the interference by the intelligence agencies in the House Select Committee's JFK investigation which sprung from the Church and Pike reports. 

In May and June of 1976 Schweiker went public with his and Hart's conclusions. A few months later Vice President Gerald Ford, a Warren Commission member who was later shown to have been leaking the commission's workings to the intelligence agencies, managed to hang on to his party's nomination; he lost to Jimmy Carter and four years later when Reagan ran, Bob Dole was his VP. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, though we all know what happened to Gary Hart's presidential aspirations.

By coincidence, or not, Schweiker's voting record moved significantly to the right for the next four years, and in 1980 he did not contest his Senate seat. In 1981 Reagan appointed Schweiker secretary of Health and Human Resources; for the next two years he enacted many of the cuts Reagan had promised to Social Security, welfare, Medicare and the like, but can be said to have held them back from the draconian measures Reagan's backers were expecting. He left in 1983 to become head of the American Council of Life Insurance, a typical game-keeper to poacher move in the Beltway.

Ironically, Schweiker's Senate seat was taken by Arlen Specter, on the surface another 'liberal' Republican (he switched from Democrat to Republican in 1965, then switched back at the end of his career in 2009 while facing severe threats from the right--he then failed to get the Democrat nomination for the Senate in 2010). Specter's voting record had always been firmly on the Republican spectrum; you might say he played a liberal to placate an electorate used to voting for liberals. But more telling, given Schweiker's principled stance on the JFK assassination and the intelligence community, Specter's greatest claim to fame is that as counsel to the Warren Commission he invented the 'magic bullet' theory to explain away the idea that Kennedy and John Connally were hit, as Connally believed, and as the Zapruder film strongly suggests, by separate shots. If that were the case, there would be too many bullets for one assassin to have fired. Specter's stroke of genius saved Warren and has sparked criticism and argument for the past six decades. You might argue, in our post-Santorum era, the Keystone State deserves another Schweiker.

RICHARD BEN CRAMER: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the journalist Richard Ben Cramer appeared in the Independent on 30 March, but I somehow missed it at the time. You can link to it here, but because there were a few literals in article, including my listing only five of the six candidates profiled in What It Takes (I left out Dick Gephardt, of course), I've reprinted it below with a few small corrections. Sadly, it appears that piece may be the last I do for the Indy, at least for some time...I've always appreciated them for their willingness to both cover some unusual people and allow me to present their obits while assuming the audience will understand the usually American context.

I've been reading What It Takes lately--it stands up superbly after 25 years, particularly because of its sympathy, its non-judgemental understanding--his one paragraph take on the essential difference between George Bush and Ronald Reagan is alone worth the price of admission. It was also fun to recall that Cramer had wanted to include one more of the candidates in 1988, Jesse Jackson, but couldn't because alone of the contenders, Jackson would not grant him the necessary access. What It Takes spawned many imitators, but by then few candidates would allow the same openess, but mostly because none of those who followed could actually do what Cramer was able to do so well...understand people, and put that understanding down on paper. Were I writing the obit again, I would probably compare it more to The Right Stuff--but Cramer has a sharper, less romantic, conception of the American drive for success than Wolfe. Anyway, here's the piece:

Richard Ben Cramer: Journalist noted for his empathy with his subjects

The New Journalism opened the floodgates for writers of non-fiction to use the materials of fiction. When Richard Ben Cramer produced his landmark study of the 1988 US presidential campaign, What It Takes, it was criticised widely for its perceived lack of seriousness. Reviewers seemed to expect Cramer's 1,000 page study of the six contenders, George Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Biden, to creak under its accumulated gravitas. Instead they got Tom Wolfe typography and bursts of wild metaphor they'd expect from Hunter S Thompson, blinding them to the fact that, with his energy and empathy, Cramer was able to explore deeply these lives, and uncover the dilemma faced by all of them: the price they needed to pay to achieve their ultimate goal. Today, What It Takes is considered a classic.

Its theme was something Cramer has addressed before, in the showcase article from the famed June 1986 special "The American Man: 1946-86" issue of Esquire. Cramer's profile of the irascible and notoriously private baseball star Ted Williams was both revealing and endearing. Half of Williams' quotes appeared in all capital letters, emphasising his awkward bellow. Asked how old he was, Williams answered 'WELL HOW DO I LOOK?.. HUH? WHAT DO YOU THINK OF TED WILLIAMS NOW?' That provided the story its title, but what made it was Cramer's realisation that what drove Williams' insecurity was the other side of his drive to be the greatest hitter of all time, the best sport fisherman, the top fighter pilot. It was deeply American, and it became Cramer's theme: "He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America's dust."

His own lack of success in sport drove Cramer to journalism. Born in Rochester, New York in 1950, he joined his high school newspaper after being cut from the baseball team. He edited the paper at Johns Hopkins University, where he took his degree in 1971. He fell in love with Baltimore, but after failing to land a job with the Baltimore Sun he took an MA at New York's Columbia School of Journalism, before getting hired on the second attempt by the Sun in 1973. In 1976 he left for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who sent him to Israel, where his reporting from the Middle East won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979.

He went freelance and moved to Maryland's Eastern Shore, writing for Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated as well as Esquire. His wife Carolyn White was a talented editor who, while he worked on What It Takes, gave up her own work to, in the words of one friend, 'become his Maxwell Perkins'. It took Cramer six years to research and write the book; a heavy smoker and prodigious coffee-drinker, he suffered health setbacks, including phlebitis, pleurisy, and Bell's palsy, before finishing it. It was published to coincide with the 1992 elections; the four-year delay was a factor in its cool reception.

Cramer wrote the copy for The Seasons Of The Kid (1991), a photo-book about Williams based on his article, and with The Choice (1992) began writing and narrating documentaries for America's Public Boradcasting System, PBS. The Battle For Citizen Kane (1995), made for their American Experience series, was nominated for an Academy Award. He expanded part of What It Takes into a 1995 biography of Bob Dole, and in 2001 returned to his theme of the demands of fame with Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, the first warts-and-all portrait of another American baseball icon.

Cramer returned to the Middle East with How Israel Lost: Four Questions (2004), whose thesis, that Israel was a victim of its own victories, and whose straightforward answers to its four questions, provoked some predictably contentious reviews. His final book, in 2011, was a return to his 1986 article, but by this time the title, What Do You Think Of Ted Williams Now, became an invitation to reflect on time passed.

Cramer died of lung cancer. He is survived by his and White's daughter Ruby, and by his second wife Joan. In a tribute, Vice President Joe Biden recalled reading about himself in Cramer's book: "It is a powerful thing to read a book someone has written about you, and to find both the observations and criticisms so sharp and insightful that you learn something new and meaningful about yourself. That was my experience with Richard."

Richard Ben Cramer, journalist: born Rochester, New York 12 June 1950 died Baltimore 7 January 2013.