The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
Читать онлайн книгу.
York by drawing more votes away from Abraham Beame than from Lindsay, as regards which analysis, more anon.
A Conservative Party was finally organized in 1962. Its existence, I think, is a very good example of the fact that however obvious the need, things don’t necessarily get done unless someone does them. The Party owes its existence to the energies, physical and moral—I shall maintain—of two young men who set aside their law practices and worked feverishly over a period of months beginning in 1961, ending with the certification of the Conservative Party of New York on Election Day in 1962. J. Daniel Mahoney was then twenty-nine; his brother-in-law Kieran O’Doherty, thirty-four. Mahoney, relaxed, humorous, wise, a peerless conciliator, had been a magna cum laude graduate from St. Bonaventure’s University and graduated from the Columbia Law School. O’Doherty, intense, fascinated by politics, prodigiously informed, with an infinite capacity for righteous indignation, was a cum laude graduate of City College of New York, and received his LL.B from Columbia. They had, as the saying goes, no funds, no machines, no underwriters—and only an inexplicit mandate, but one they never doubted—namely, that a significant number of New York voters felt disfranchised.
“It is by now a mark of advancing years,” the young founders of the new party wrote in a memorandum privately distributed on July 4, 1961, “for a conservative to have voted in a Presidential election with enthusiasm. . . .
“Witness the plight of the conservative voter in New York State who approaches the critical 1962 gubernatorial and senatorial elections with the foreknowledge that the Republican Party, the normal vehicle of conservative political policies, will offer him the uncherished opportunity to cast his ballot for Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits. . . .”
The Declaration of Principles of the prospective party emphasized the necessity for realistic anti-Communist policies abroad and, “at home, [opposition to] a crushing burden of taxation for purposes unconnected with defense, [to] never-ceasing inflation, [to] a constantly delaying educational practice [which] combine to transform America gradually but unmistakably into a socialist society, in which the individual person will count for nothing.”
The founders put concrete emphasis on ending government support for special privileges to special groups through:
I have never seen a better one-sentence statement of the problem.
As for the principal political vehicle through which they intended to exert influence, the founders were unequivocal: “We agree that the conservative political movement cannot place its ultimate faith in a third party, but must instead seek its ultimate political realization within the Republican Party.”
The New York Daily News’ James Desmond, who, by avocation, is a biographer of Nelson Rockefeller, got wind of the memorandum and wrote in the News, November 16, 1961, that “some far-out conservatives,88 many aligned with the right wing of the Republican Party, were surveying the feasibility of entering a candidate against Rockefeller in next year’s election. The group, which has been talking informally for several weeks, includes the principal backers of the National Review, and has been meeting in the magazines office.” And the conservative columnist and political expert Raymond Moley remarked that the Conservative Party’s sponsors, “no doubt sincere young people,” would in due course recognize how meager was their experience, and predicted that “their cause will vanish in two or three months, when the hillsides, along with Christmas jewelry, turn green.”
The far-outers, in addition to Messrs. Mahoney and O’Doherty, included Joseph H. Ball, former Senator from Minnesota; Charles Edison, former Democratic Governor of New Jersey and Secretary of the Navy under FDR; Devin Garrity and Alex Hillman, New York publishers; Professors Thomas Molnar, Charles Rice, and Sylvester Petro; journalists Suzanne La Follette, Frank Meyer, William Rickenbacker, and George Schuyler; and New York attorneys Godfrey Schmidt and Thomas Bolan.
Murray Kempton, getting wind of the organization, predicted (New York Post, November 16, 1961) that “the Conservatives, if they go through with this, should handsomely reward their enemies. Nothing destroys a dedicated fanatic faster than going into politics, particularly independent politics. . . . It is never wise for any group which says it speaks for hundreds of thousands to test its statistics at the ballot.” Four years later, the Conservative Party rolled up 340,000 votes in New York City alone.
In 1962, Governor Rockefeller was running for re-election, having increased the state budget by 44 per cent over the peak reached by a Democratic predecessor identified in the public mind as a profligate spender. His methods of financing had been exposed, by diligent analysis, as relying heavily on sleight-of-hand fiscal manipulation. (He was given to the device of capitalizing current expenditures so as to get around the legal obligation that the state’s budget balance.) In 1960, having failed to cop the nomination for himself, he had done everything he could to torpedo Richard Nixon on the eve of the Republican Convention in Chicago by springing a series of demands which rocked the Republican Convention—and Nixon, whom he may very well have thrown fatally off balance in that close election. (The Democrats made the most of the schism Rockefeller had publicized.) For Senator, the Republican Party renominated Jacob Javits, whom the Americans for Democratic Action had acclaimed with a hundred-per-cent rating for his dutiful record during the current session of Congress, and about whom the late columnist George Sokolsky, while greatly sympathetic to the Kennedy Administration, had thundered that “he has made his own record, and it is not a record for which a conservative of any hue can vote.”
The response of the New York State Republican Party, which belonged, in usufruct, to Governor Rockefeller, was—after courtly preliminaries by the Governor professing his joy at any civic-minded movements—to do everything possible to abort the establishment of the Conservative Party. Mr. Leo Egan commented (March 12, 1962) in The New York Times (“Right Wing Irks GOP”) that Governor Rockefeller and his aides were determined not to make the “mistake” the Democrats had made when the Liberal Party was formed. The Democrats had originally viewed the Liberal Party as simply another organizational adjunct, useful for seining extra votes. They did not pause to consider the quid pro quo, namely that the Liberals intended to exercise a veto power over Democratic designations, and would proceed to do so.99 The Republicans, the word went out, must discourage the projected Conservative Party, by pressures rhetorical and legal.
Leo Egan in The New York Times, March 12, 1962:
The emergence of a militant conservative movement in New York State is raising serious political problems for Governor Rockefeller and other Republican leaders. Depending on how these problems are resolved, they could have a major impact on elections and government in the state for many years to come. In many respects the problems