Portraits of Power: Ohio and National Politics, 1964-2004

Part I. The 1960s Watershed, 1964–1970

Part I The 1960s Watershed, 1964–1970 The 1960s Watershed, 1964–1970 Introduction The 1960s were a watershed in American politics, and Abe Zaidan’s writings reveal what this watershed looked like on the ground in Ohio. The first essay in this section reports on the 1964 election and Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater, two political giants of their time.This story was actually written in 1973 (on the occasion of President Johnson’s death) but provides a vivid picture of the impact of the 1964 election on the Buckeye State. In electoral terms, the 1964 campaign was the center of the 1960s watershed. Indeed, the seeds of the polarization that characterized the 2004 election were planted in 1964.And both the Democratic and Republican parties were hothouses germinating those seeds. For the Democrats, the election represented the fullest expression of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Like all governing coalitions, the Democrats of 1964 included disparate forces: urban machines and white ethnic communities, labor unions, rural and Appalachian working class voters, soon-to-be enfranchised African Americans, college-educated professionals, and a host of new ideological interests: environmentalists, feminists, peace activists, and the counterculture. In Ohio, this disparate coalition had been competitive but not always successful prior to 1964.And over the next forty 3 years, the tensions among its constituencies steadily undermined the Democratic coalition. For the Republicans, the 1964 election unleashed new conservative forces that disrupted a pragmatic alliance of business interests , the white middle class, farmers, and traditional conservatives. In Ohio, this alliance had been especially successful at the polls before 1964. Over the next forty years, it was laboriously reconstructed . But unlike the nation as a whole, the major parties were evenly balanced in the Buckeye State, so that even small tensions within either could produce defeat at the polls. Zaidan’s columns capture this competitive balance despite the 1964 landslide, noting the Republicans’ difficulties in “Afterlash” and the Democrats’ problems in the “Democrats’ Dilemma.”These essays were written for The Commentator, an opinion magazine Zaidan edited in Columbus in the mid-1960s.The Commentator won several awards,including one from the National Conference of Christians and Jews for its coverage of the civil rights movement. In a sense, The Commentator noted many of 1964’s new liberal voices. At the state level,the Republican pragmatic alliance was still alive in Ohio, and it had no better practitioner than Governor James A. Rhodes. Surely the giant of Ohio politics during this age, Rhodes served as Ohio governor four terms (1963–1966; 1967–1970; 1975– 1978; and 1979–1982), beginning his career as the mayor of Columbus and then serving as state auditor. Zaidan picks up the Rhodes story in 1966 with an in-depth profile on the eve of his first reelection (having been first elected in 1962).“The Wonderful World of Governor Rhodes” is still one of the best portraits of Ohio’s legendary Republican governor, describing the essence of Rhodes’s approach to politics. He navigated the tricky shoals of the state’s political waters with a mix of economic populism (“jobs and progress” was one of his mantras), temperamental conservatism (hostility to taxes, suspicion of government workers, and a fear of disorder), a folksy touch (his fractured syntax was a source of popular appeal), and unabashed hucksterism (he endlessly praised the “wonderful world of Ohio”). Pragmatic with conservative tendencies, Rhodes had an uneasy 4 Par t I relationship with the new right-wing forces embodied in the Goldwater campaign. The greatest practitioner of GOP pragmatism,however,was Ray C. Bliss, the legendary Republican Party leader from Akron. Here Zaidan offers a vivid picture of Bliss near the end of his career,right after he returned from his service as Chairman of the Republican National Committee (“Ray Bliss:The ‘Retired’ Mr. GOP Will Still Keep a Hand in Politics”).A gifted political organizer with extraordinary personal integrity, Bliss rebuilt the GOP after the 1964 debacle , repeating at the national level a feat he had achieved at the state level in 1949 and 1959. His achievements included the election of Rhodes as governor and Richard M. Nixon as president.Although he had rocky personal relationships with both Rhodes and Nixon, he distrusted the newly aroused conservative forces. Zaidan painted fine miniatures of these right-wing forces. One example is his satirical Commentator column,“Col. Umbus...