One day in 1971, when the White House was under siege by antiwar demonstrators, John Connally came to see me. While he conceded that it was not pleasant to have to be harassed by these unkempt, noisy, frequently violent mobs, he remarked that in politics it was not necessarily bad to have enemies—especially when they are an obnoxious but small minority.
He recalled a meeting at the White House many years before when FDR was giving some practical political advice to a group of young Democrats. Roosevelt told them that if a leader didn’t have enemies, he had better create them. Politics is battle, and the best way to fire up your troops is to rally them against a visible opponent on the other side of the field. If a loyal supporter will fight hard for you, he will fight twice as hard against your enemies.
We sometimes forget that FDR was a master of invective. His most useful enemies were all members of the upper class, as he was. He attacked these “princes of privilege” and “economic royalists” with relish. Some criticize him for cynically instigating class warfare. But during the Depression, the nation was deeply divided between the haves and the have-nots. Since there were more of the latter, he became their champion and profited politically from doing so. This enabled him to get and keep power. What he did with that power is a matter for an entirely separate debate.
His distant cousin and predecessor in the White House, Theodore Roosevelt, also practiced class politics by attacking the trusts and the malefactors of great wealth. Since the two Roosevelts are generally considered to be among our greatest and most effective Presidents, it is surprising that most of today’s political pundits deplore the politics of confrontation and praise the politics of consensus. They overlook the fact that in a free society, having allies and enemies is a fact of life. It might be less inflammatory to use the term “adversaries” or, as they say in the House and Senate, “my good friend and distinguished opponent, the gentleman from Wisconsin.” But in the end it usually comes down to a contest between allies and enemies, white hats and black. Our fractious politics, where competing interests, ambitions, and ideologies clash, is the price we pay for avoiding dictatorship, where enemies are ruthlessly eliminated. After all, the Soviet Union is the ultimate consensus government, where the most frequently offered opinion, once Gorbachev states his, is probably “Oh, I agree, comrade.”
In the 1988 campaign, we saw a striking example of how helpful an enemy can be. Nothing did more to eliminate George Bush’s wimp image than his televised confrontation with Dan Rather. The media should have learned a lesson from the same event. When a commentator wants to hurt a candidate, he should not take him on frontally. A fight draws an audience, and the audience usually backs the candidate or official under attack rather than his interrogator. A better way to hurt a candidate is to make the program as dull as possible.
Enemies can be personal, professional, political, or ideological. Two people can be personal friends and yet enemies in one or more of the other three categories. The classic case is two lawyers who hurl vicious bolts of rhetoric at each other in the courtroom, only to get together for a few drinks afterward and have a good laugh about the show they put on for their clients. It also works in politics. We all remember the news accounts of how Tip O’Neill, after excoriating President Reagan in public, would be invited to the White House family quarters for cocktails and an exchange of favorite Irish stories. During my administration, Mike Mansfield, Carl Albert, and John McCormick were leaders of the opposition in Congress, but despite the Vietnam War and other contentious issues, we were always personally friendly during our regular breakfasts at the White House.
Powerful ideological differences cannot always be bridged with personal camaraderie. When people feel strongly about major issues, they do not easily put their arms around those who feel just as strongly the other way. For example, the debate in Great Britain on Suez in 1956 became so bitter that some Parliamentarians did not speak to each other for years afterwards. The same is true in the United States among those who disagreed violently over Vietnam. It is currently fashionable to urge people to put such disagreements behind them for the sake of tranquility and future progress. I think that view is wrong. Some disagreements are indeed trivial and should be forgotten. But issues such as Suez, which involved the fate of a great nation, and Vietnam, which involved the fate of the millions of young people who served and the millions of Indochinese who died as a consequence of our failure to stop Communist aggression, are not trivial. Those who propose to gloss over the issue before the nation understands the roots and consequences of such disagreements are abrogating one of the principal responsibilities of leadership and increasing the possibility of repeating the same mistakes in the future.
It is always a shame when such disagreements lead to personal invective. It is also always entertaining. Unfortunately for the historians of the future, House and Senate rules require that remarks attacking the integrity or paternity of opponents are “taken down,” or struck from the record. In spite of this sanitizing, it is widely believed that debate in the American Congress is rougher than in the more staid and mature British Parliament. Not true. Winston Churchill, for example, took some good shots from his opponents, and he could dish it out just as well. His classic characterization of Ramsay MacDonald as lacking political courage would probably have been ruled out of order in our House of Representatives:
“I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder.’ My parents judged that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”
While ideological differences are the most difficult to bridge, there are times when personal animosities are simply intractable. Some people, even when they are political allies, simply don’t like each other. Their chemistry can create an explosive mix. Senator Clinton Anderson’s hatred of Admiral Lewis Strauss, which led to the Senate’s refusal to confirm Strauss as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce, was an example. In such cases people will pick quarrels on ideological or political grounds where normally they would have no significant differences. When this happens, or when political or ideological differences get too personal, an impossible situation develops where no amount of soothing syrup poured on by well-meaning intermediaries can bring the enemies together.
In dealing with enemies—or if you prefer, opponents and adversaries—some guidelines should be borne in mind.
During the Fund crisis in 1952, I was blowing off steam about the viciousness and unfairness of some of those who were trying to drive me off the Republican ticket. Pat Hillings, who had succeeded me in Congress after I was elected to the Senate, interrupted me with a word of advice that anyone who has political enemies should always bear in mind: “Don’t get mad at them, just beat them.” The cooler you can remain while your enemies are hot under the collar, the better chance you have to win. In fact, you will usually find that the best way to handle your critics is to ignore them.
I question the dictum that was said to embody Robert Kennedy’s political philosophy: “Don’t get mad, get even.” Trying to defeat your political opponents is one thing. Trying to get even with them in a personal sense is something else again. When you become obsessed with getting revenge, you hurt yourself more than your enemies. For that reason, you should try not to allow political differences to become personal. You can question a person’s judgment, but never his motives. The tiresome American flag issue in the 1988 campaign was a case in point. Some overzealous Republican campaign strategists coupled criticism of Michael Dukakis for vetoing a bill requiring teachers to lead students in a salute to the flag with sly innuendo suggesting he was less than a patriot. Polls showed that the American people disapproved of such tactics.
On the other hand, strong ideological differences cannot be significantly reduced by fostering good personal relations. Again, the Vietnam War is a case in point. Two of my best personal friends in the Senate were John Sherman Cooper and Mark Hatfield. Yet both remained unalterably opposed to policies I thought were necessary to end the war. Still, we did not allow their differences to hurt our personal friendship, and we found other areas where we agreed and were able to work together.
Two candidates who have campaigned all-out usually put on a good show after the election, celebrating victory or accepting defeat with conciliatory remarks. This doesn’t mean that they have become lifelong friends but that they recognize that after an election is over, voters want candidates to bury the hatchet in the ground, not in each other. But while differences at the top may appear to be bridged over, those at lower levels find it hard to forgive the slings and arrows of a hard-hitting campaign. In 1952, Bob Taft accepted defeat for the Republican nomination gracefully and threw all-out support to Eisenhower in the general election. Some of Taft’s hard-core supporters, however, never forgave Herb Brownell and other Eisenhower campaign officials, accusing them of below-the-belt tactics by denying Taft southern delegates he thought he had wrapped up before the convention. Sometimes the top man can control his former supporters, but usually he can’t.
With all of the talk about the need for consensus and the desirability of conducting campaigns in a gentlemanly fashion, it is important to remember that it serves the public interest for the candidates to hit hard on the issues so that the voters have a clear choice. Real differences should be exposed and emphasized, not glossed over. Aggressive campaigning also helps a candidate keep on his toes. Harry Truman went too far in 1948 when he implied that Dewey was supported by Nazis. But his hardball tactics helped him to win by charging up his troops in a way Dewey could not with his commendable but dull calls for unity and responsibility in government. Ideally, candidates should hammer each other without destroying each other. They should avoid allowing deep political and ideological differences to be exacerbated by personal attacks. On the other hand, they must be realistic enough to know that some differences are irreconcilable.
During Watergate, much attention was paid to the “enemies list” that a member of the White House staff had prepared. I never saw it. Regrettably, some on the list were my personal friends. But others had prided themselves on being my enemies from the time I entered politics. Their opposition was primarily ideological rather than political or personal. In fact, that has been the case during most of my public career. Many observers have pointed out that long before Watergate, I had more intractable enemies than any postwar President. I believe the reason is that I played a major role in two of the most divisive issues of the postwar era.
The Hiss case involved the explosive issue of Communist influence in the government, particularly in the State Department. Many non-Communists violently objected to my role in exposing Alger Hiss because they considered our investigation to be an attack on the liberal foreign-policy establishment, even on an entire generation of idealistic public servants. I vividly recall a heated argument at a Washington dinner party when a prominent liberal Washington lawyer, Paul Porter, pounded the table and said, “I don’t give a damn whether Hiss is guilty or not. The committee’s investigation is bad for the country, because the attack on Hiss is an attack on the Roosevelt foreign policy.” Proving that Hiss was guilty not only did not help to reduce that opposition, it compounded it. It meant that thereafter such investigations could not automatically be dismissed as McCarthyism. Ironically, I got hit from both sides. Bill Rogers tells the story of a conversation he had with a little old lady in tennis shoes at one of our whistle-stops in the 1952 campaign. She told him, “I like Ike but I don’t like Nixon.” Rogers asked why. She replied, “He was involved with that Hiss fellow.”
President Truman’s paranoic opposition to our investigation of the Hiss case was hard to understand. No one could question the anti-Communist credentials of the President who asked Congress to approve aid to Greece and Turkey to halt Communist aggression in Europe. Yet even after the Pumpkin Papers so clearly demonstrated Hiss’s guilt, he continued to call the committee’s hearings a “red herring” designed to divert attention from what he called the terrible record of the Republican 80th Congress. Privately, he was enraged at Hiss. When he was shown copies of the documents that Hiss had turned over to Chambers, he said over and over again, “The son of a bitch, he betrayed his country. The son of a bitch, he betrayed his country.” Still, even after Hiss was indicted, Truman continued to take his “red herring” line. When one of his aides later asked him about this, he replied, “Of course Hiss is guilty. But that damn committee isn’t interested in that. All it cares about is politics. And as long as they try to make politics out of this communist issue, I am going to label their activities for what they are—a red herring.”
The Vietnam War divided the United States even more deeply than the Suez crisis divided Britain. When I spoke at Williamsburg in 1971, a young girl—I would guess that she was about seventeen—ran up to me as I was entering the hall, screamed, “Murderer!”, and spit in my face. I shall never forget the look of sheer hatred in her eyes. The incident was typical of the emotions tearing the country apart during the Vietnam War. It was worse among those who avoided or evaded the draft, because deep down they had a guilt complex. It was most inexcusable among those who played a role in getting us into the war and then did everything they could to sabotage my policies, which eventually got us out. The fact that we succeeded in getting a peace agreement in 1973 on terms they said were impossible to negotiate only added fuel to the flames of hatred.
The irony is that being right about Hiss and ending the Vietnam War increased rather than reduced the implacable hatred of my opponents. Henry Kissinger used to complain that the approval of our China initiative was strangely muted among some of his former colleagues who would have enthusiastically praised it had I been a liberal Democrat rather than a conservative Republican. I told him the reason in two words: Hiss, Vietnam.
We would all prefer to have no enemies. But as President Sadat told me when I saw him in Alexandria after the Shah’s funeral in 1980, “We have to remember that half the people are for you and the other half are against you on most controversial issues.” In a free society, stark political and ideological differences are inevitable and should be welcomed. We should not worsen them by injecting the personal element. But we must never be under the naive illusion that good personal relations will eliminate them. I would like to believe that an enemy is a friend you haven’t met. Unfortunately, it is seldom true.