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Summer Session Kansan
Tuesday, July 26, 1960
Portrait of Probable GOP Nominee - Nixon
IF FOR NOTHING else, Richard Milhous Nixon will go down in history for having raised the vice presidency to a new level of importance in the American political system.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave him the opportunity. The young Californian, ambitious but carefully self-disciplined, made the most of it. He became the nation's first real "understudy" for the presidency.
In 13 years of public service, Nixon already has lived what would have been, for most men, a political lifetime. Picked from private life by a newspaper advertisement seeking a 1946 GOP congressional candidate, he moved swiftly to the vice presidency in six years which spanned both House and Senate membership.
Three times Nixon was pushed close to the point of becoming "acting president" by Eisenhower illnesses. Each time that role was averted The vice president took on added duties under presidential direction but never the power of executive decision.
FROM THE OUTSET of his first term. Eisenhower made a "working partner" of the Quaker-bred young attorney from Whittier. Calif.
A politician to his fingertips, Nixon has paced his pre-convention campaign with care. Following New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller's December announcement that he would not seek the GOP presidential nomination, Nixon on Jan. 9, his 47th birthday, made his long-deferred announcement that he would be a formal candidate in the presidential primaries — but not personally campaign in them.
Nixon piled up impressive votes in the eight primaries in which he was entered. In most of them he had no Republican opposition.
NIXON WAS BORN Jan. 9, 1913 at Yorba Linda, Calif., the son of Frank A. and Hannah Milhous Nixon.
As a youth, he worked in the family grocery store, learned to play the piano and excelled in debate. He was graduated from Whittier College in 1934 and won a scholarship to Duke University, where he earned his law degree in 1937.
Back in Whittier, he opened a law office and soon met Patricia Ryan, a slender, brown-eyed graduate of the University of California who was then teaching at Whittier High School. They were married in 1940.
Nixon has enjoyed general good health throughout his public career. Except for an occasional cold and a tendency to pick up a virus infection when he is run-down from campaigning, he has had no illness of note.
In 1957, he made his first use of reading glasses, for close work in his office. He stopped smoking several years ago. His drinking is carefully restricted.
After the 1956 campaign, Nixon thinned himself down to keep his weight below 170.
Portrait of a Man Available for Draft
NELSON E. ROCKEFELLER has worn paper clips on his glasses to keep them from skidding down his nose — not because he can't afford new ones, but because he's too busy to send them out for repairs.
A member of one of America's richest families and grandson of John D. Rockefeller who founded an oil dynasty, he has overcome in the eyes of many observers the political handicap of being born to wealth and influence.
He has demonstrated that his viewpoint is not bound by dimes and dollars. He is governor of New York and a public servant. He is a philanthropist and a patron of the arts. He has been assistant secretary of state and has served in Washington at a policy level in the past three administrations.
But most significantly, in regard to the present and future national scene, he is a bright luminary on the Republican political horizon.
ROCKEFELLER HUMSELF, as does the overwhelming majority of professional politicians and pollsters, virtually concedes the 1960 GOP Presidential nomination to Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
He is but 51 years old. He can afford to wait four more years, or even eight more years, should Nixon win this year and decide to run a second time.
Rockefeller has been rebuffed by the party pros in his bid for the White House. But he has managed to come back bright-eyed and unembittered. A friend attributes that to the "feudal, Spartan but secure simplicity" of his upbringing.
Early in life he found out he was going to have to make his own way. He got a 25-cent weekly allowance as a boy, supplemented it by shining the family shoes and kept books which were inspected closely by his father and grandfather, America's first billionaire.
HIS FAMILY SAW to it that Nelson and his four brothers and one sister didn't become spoiled.
"I was totally unconscious of being a rich boy," Nelson has said. "When we lived on the estate at Tarrytown, my brother Laurence and I had the shoeshine concession at our house. We got a nickel a shine.
"We also had gardens to take care of and we'd sell vegetables to the family. We had some rabbits and we'd sell them to the Rockefeller Institute for Social Research."
A new Republican campaign song contains the information that Dick Nixon is "Heaven-sent." Democrats wonder if he was sent out along with Lucifer.
Convention Notes, News
Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower will get a gold bracelet from Republican women when she visits the convention with President Eisenhower tonight.
The bracelet, engraved with the Presidential Seal, will be presented by Mrs. Peter T. Gibson, president of the National Federation of Republican Women.
***
There's one point on which the Republicans and Democrats agree for sure. Every state is a great state.
. . .
Virginia Republicans are pushing Rep. Richard H. Poff as a favorite son candidate for the GOP vice presidential nomination.
There are advantages in solidarity. Whereas the Democrats took three nights to present a platform, nominate and select a presidential candidate and nominate and select his running mate, the Republicans plan to cram the whole slate into Wednesday night's schedule.
Rep. Charles A. Halleck, the House GOP leader, has an additional chore in his duties as permanent chairman of the convention this week.
But it might hurt the TV ratings.
He has to try to make up some lost ground scored by Gov. Leroy Collins of Florida, the Democratic chairman who captured the fancy of the nation's TV audiences from Los Angeles.
And it's too bad that Gov. Robert Meyner of New Jersey won't be on hand to add a little spice to the television interviews.
The Republicans are giving their womenfolk more of a say than ever in their convention proceedings.
Mrs. Clare B. Williams, assistant chairman of the GOP national committee, said that never before had so many women attended a national political convention or held so many top posts.
She said there were 609 female delegates and alternates on tap and 11 females in key convention jobs. The Democrats had 606 women delegates and alternates at the Los Angeles convention.
Republican National Chairman Thurston Morton, answering a newsman's query on whether Vice President Richard M. Nixon might throw open the GOP vice presidential race:
"That could be, but we would confine it to a small number of candidates acceptable to him. A situation like that could develop."
Wisconsin Rep. Melvin Laird, Platform Committee vice chairman, announcing the committee rejected key language of the Nixon - Rockefeller recommendations on defense and other planks:
"We're writing the platform in this committee."
Former New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, telling newsmen the Nixon-Rockefeller platform pact was not an effort to pressure the convention;
"I am sure that they were not trying to dictate to the convention. The agreement they reached has improved the GOP prospects this fall. They are two strong men, both seeking the best interests of the nation."
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Alaska delegates to the Republican National Convention said Chicago's 90-degree heat of the past few days proved no hardship. Mrs. Lucille Harkabus, Fairbanks' women's shop operator, said the temperature was 90 degrees back home when she left.
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
WARNINGS AND NOTICE
News Room DEPARTMENT Phone 711
Editors Dick Crocker
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Business Office... Phone 376
Business Manager... Clydeene Brown
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
FAMOUS AMERICAN PLAYS OF THE 1940s, edited and with an introduction by Henry Wewell. Dew Laurel Books, 75 cents.
Here is an arbitrary selection of American drama. The obvious name is missing, and one of the five plays selected pertains more to the 1950s. One selection admittedly is not the best work of the play-wright. Another seems sheer capriciousness.
But the selections are in line with the arbitrary kind of theatrical criticism that has characterized the drama in the last 15 years or so. Few critics would agree on a list of 10 best in any year. Hewes, and Kronenberger of Time magazine, are notorious members of the critical cult that contends: "It is my list; therefore it is the best possible list."
NOW THAT THE sniping is out of the way it can be said that these still are five fine plays. Hewe's selections are Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth," Arthur Laurents' "Home of the Brave," Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," Maxwell Anderson's "Lost in the Stars" and Carson McCullers' "The Member of the Wedding."
Where are "A Streetcar Named Desire" or "The Glass Menagerie"? Where is "Death of a Salesman"? Where is "The Iceman Cometh"? Where are "Born Yesterday" and "State of the Union"? The latter rates not a mention in the introduction, which deals more with the theater than with the drama—a strange approach, for the text is more important in such a collection than the physical stage and the rapport between cast and audience.
"The Skin of Our Teeth" belongs in such a selection, however. Audiences may have been puzzled by it, or have walked out on it, but like Wilder's other dramas it has that quality of agelessness that made John Mason Brown call Wilder "the philosopher of antitime." To Wilder, the problems of the caveman in the ice age easily can become the problems of man in the 20th century, and Wilder freely swings back and forth to demonstrate his point.
"HOME OF THE Brave" also was a non-commercial success, and it enjoyed greater fame as a motion picture. Hewes appears to regard the play more as a military vignette occurring on a Japanese-held island than a drama or prejudice. The Jewish hero became a Negro in the movie, and for my money his problem was greatly heightened in the process.
"All My Sons" surely must play second fiddle to Miller's "Death of a Salesman." But, although a weaker play, it has a family conflict, a problem with which Miller often seems concerned, and it deals, like "Salesman," with the subordination of spiritual to material values. Also like "Salesman," it has the quality of being able to rip at the insides of its viewer, or reader, as in the climactic scene in which the son finds that the long-admired father is a crook whose shoddy wartime practices may have caused the death of his own son.
"LOST IN THE STARS" is Hewes' nomination as the best work of Maxwell Anderson, an amazing comment when one considers Anderson's beautiful historical dramas, and also his "Winterset." But it is a fine play, a musical drama based upon Alan Paton's eloquent "Cry, the Beloved Country." Like "Street Scene" and "Regina" it stands as a musical which didn't quite measure up but which made ample pretensions of giving near-operative stature to the Broadway drama.
"The Member of the Wedding" is a beautiful play which I freely list as one of the best of the 1950s rather than 1940s. But Hewes seems overly concerned with the Broadway production that starred Ethel Waters and Julie Harris. Surely a particular production is irrelevant. It is the poetic quality, the textual beauty of two children growing up with an old Negro, that makes it a great play.
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