Elly Peterson: "Mother" of the Moderates

8. A Crisis of Conscience

CHAPTER EIGHT A Crisis of Conscience As the new year began, Peterson was invited back to the White House. It was not to discuss political appointments for women, voluntarism in urban neighborhoods, or the upcoming congressional elections. Rather it was to attend church. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, of Marble Collegiate Church in New York, led the worship service, and the Vienna Boys’ Choir sang. As she sat through the service, Peterson found herself pondering “the idea of the President inviting God to the White House, instead of going to church himself.”1 In his sermon, Peale addressed two problems that were “upsetting people generally”: dealing with stress and standing up to crises.2 The message was well timed. Eight days later the president responded to the rejection of his ‹rst Supreme Court nominee from the South by naming U.S. Circuit Judge G. Harrold Carswell instead. Within days, newspapers revealed that twenty years before Carswell had supported segregation as“the only practical and correct way of life.” For Peterson, it was becoming increasingly dif‹cult to be a Nixon cheerleader. At the RNC,Whitman recalled, Peterson“was loyal on the surface,”but the staff knew she was unhappy, particularly because of their after-hours conversations.“She wouldn’t hesitate to con‹de in some of us who she knew were of the same persuasion,” Whitman explained. It was “disappointment more than frustration,” disappointment over “missed opportunities, disappointment in the message. . . . But she wasn’t somebody who bitched and moaned and complained. She wasn’t disloyal in that sense.” 146 After Carswell was nominated, Whitman said the White House asked the RNC staff to make phone calls to state Republican chairmen to drum up support. Whitman didn’t think Carswell was quali‹ed and didn’t want to make calls. Peterson’s example, she said, “emboldened” her to refuse. Peterson’s message was that “if you feel strongly about it, that’s what you do, stand up for your principles.” There were no repercussions at the RNC. “The attitude,” Whitman said, “was, ‘Okay, if you don’t want to do it, there will be somebody else here who does think he’s quali‹ed.’ . . . I’m not sure the White House would have been happy had they known that . . . but the attitude at the committee was . . .‘We’re all in this and we’re not going to agree on everything all the time, but that doesn’t mean we have to take it out on one another when we don’t.’”3 She counts Peterson, along with her parents, as her role models.“You don’t set out to be a role model, it’s not something you consciously assume , but unconsciously she was an enormous role model for a lot of people. . . . She never compromised on her principles and that was a message that came through, without preaching, loud and clear to those of us who worked there at the time.”4 The party’s conservative wing, however, viewed things differently. The American Conservative Union’s January 1970 newsletter noted with alarm that Peterson was listed as a member of the dinner committee marking the seventh anniversary of the liberal Ripon Society. A commentary observed, “Mrs. Peterson, thought to be a moderate Republican in her views, seems to have veered to the left. She apparently sees no clash between her of‹cial party post and lending her name to a GOP splinter group which constantly attacks the President.”5 The Carswell nomination contributed to another decision of conscience that was personally painful for Peterson: the resignation of Marttila as coordinator of the action centers. In a prominent story a few months later, the Detroit Free Press quoted Marttila as saying that he had resigned because he thought“the policies of the present administration are racist.”The article noted that through their organizing techniques Marttila and his associates had captured 45 percent of the black vote the previous fall for an ultimately unsuccessful Republican candidate for mayor of New Haven, Connecticut. But, the article said, Marttila “had reached the point where he could no longer justify staying with the Republicans.” A Crisis of Conscience 147 Marttila told reporter Clark Hoyt, “Here I was, under the guise of some social program, recruiting people to be involved in the Republican Party and the administration just wasn’t responding to their problems. I’d go out and try to get minority persons...