Column: 2016 — the new 1952?

One of my all-time favorite political columnists was Murray Kempton, whose elegant prose adorned the New York Post and later Newsday for many years through the latter half of the 20th century.

Along with other enthusiasms, Kempton was a connoisseur of national political conventions, which he once described as “the quadrennial assault on decency and reason.”

I’ve been thinking about Kempton’s delightful epithet a lot lately. There are promising signs that at the Republican convention this summer, the “assault” will be more vigorous and unpredictable than it’s been in many years. There’s even ample reason to hope that the hoary ritual, the presidential roll call, will extend beyond the first ballot – and that hasn’t happened since 1952.

That year was a rite of passage in America’s political history. Those who were fortunate enough to witness the conventions in the summer of ’52 saw the last hurrah of the old-style politics that, for more than a century, had dictated the way we chose our national leaders.

The delegates from both parties that year have the distinction of being the last of their breed to nominate presidential candidates in the heat of convention battle, instead of merely rubber-stamping the winners of state primaries and caucuses.

Never again, at the conventions to come, would there be any real suspense over who would emerge as the nominee. There would be quixotic challenges from time to time, but once the power of the convention process gave way to the power of the primary elections, the party conclaves were largely reduced to noisy pageants of coronation.

In 1952, the Republicans were the first to assemble. The big story there was the fierce contest between the party’s conservatives, who supported Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, and the moderates, who were backing General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

All the early signs favored Taft. He was the seasoned political pro who had most of the party’s leaders in his corner, as well as a slight but clear lead in delegates.

But the Taft forces made a big mistake in their failure to grasp the importance of a glaring new medium in their midst. This was the first national convention that was televised live, coast-to-coast, which meant millions of Americans were tuning in to arcane proceedings they had never seen before.

The Taft power brokers controlled the committees that would be ruling on delegate challenges and other pertinent matters, and when they refused to allow television coverage of those meetings, the networks cried foul. In retaliation, they focused their cameras on the closed doors of the meeting sites, thereby inviting the inference that secret deals were being made in the sinister confines of “smoke-filled rooms.”

Eisenhower’s strategists were quick to exploit the blunder and that was enough to shift the momentum away from Taft and in their direction. Scores of delegates, many of whom were responding to calls or telegrams from indignant viewers back home, switched their allegiance to Eisenhower. After a couple of days of lively debate, the general was nominated on the first ballot.

Thus Robert Taft became the first major presidential candidate to be done in by television. He would not be the last.
As for the Democrats, their eventual choice, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, wasn’t even a declared candidate when their convention opened two weeks later.

If they had been bound by the conditions that prevailed in later years, their nominee almost certainly would have been Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who had entered – and won – all the major primaries. But in 1952, primary momentum was not yet taken all that seriously.

Still playing by the old rules, the real power was in the hands of party leaders – who rejoiced in being known as “bosses” – and the biggest boss of them all was the incumbent president, Harry Truman.

Although Truman had decided not to seek re-election, he was nonetheless determined to have a big say in choosing his successor. For a variety of reasons, he didn’t fancy Kefauver. So, working behind the scenes at all the right pressure points, he helped fuel a last-minute bandwagon for Stevenson.

The only problem was that Stevenson, a reluctant hero, kept protesting that he didn’t want to run for president. But he did concede that he would be willing to accept a draft, and after a few days of being subjected to some serious arm-twisting, the delegates were persuaded to nominate their coy candidate on the third ballot.

I was a high school kid in 1952 and as such, I didn’t pay that much attention to the conventions that summer. But in later years, after I became a political junkie (an occupational hazard for reporters drawn into that arena), I deeply regretted that I hadn’t given those first conventions of the television age the scrutiny they deserved.

From 1964 until the dawn of the current century, I covered quite a few conventions and revisited some of them in books I wrote about politics and/or media. Most of them, I’m happy to say, had memorable moments of one kind or another, ranging from eloquent speeches of high purpose to scenes of rank buffoonery.

But when it came to the main order of business, the outcomes were utterly predictable. At every gathering since 1952, the candidate who came to the convention with the most delegates proceeded to nail down the nomination on the first ballot, usually by a large margin.

As we moved through the decades, I and many of my media colleagues yearned for a revival of that bygone era of open conventions that featured raucous floor fights and dramatic shifts in delegate strength. And now, at long last, we may get our wish.

When the Republicans converge on Cleveland in July, there’s a good chance that the delegates will splinter into disarray. Then, once liberated from the fetters of their first-ballot commitments, they would be allowed to exercise their own free wills.

And after years of watching delegates dutifully vote by rote, what an entertaining spectacle that could be!