New Lineup, New Ball Game

By Hugh Sidey

In politics when something is born, something must die. That is what has happened to the Democratic Party.

An era ended last week. It was an era that began with the assassination of John Kennedy, setting back the political clock and, for eleven years, giving us rejects for President (Johnson and Nixon) and denying the middle generations--educated, aware, pragmatic--their rightful heritage. Some Democrats insist that Jimmy Carter's ascendancy represents an even greater change--that half a century of political innovation, a period that transformed America, ended in New York.

There was a melancholy reminder of the change only a month ago, when James A. Farley was buried outside New York City. Farley, who as Franklin Roosevelt's political virtuoso helped create modern politics and government, was absent from the national convention for the first time since 1924.

Jimmy Roosevelt, the youth who helped his crippled father to the inaugural stand in the dark days of 1933, was an aging, unrecognized figure one morning last week, searching for the entrance to Madison Square Garden, surprised when someone greeted him in the crowd. Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran, an F.D.R. wonder boy, was reported by the newspapers to be in New York as the escort of the convention's chairwoman, Lindy Boggs. And somebody looked around the room at a party given by Arthur Schlesinger, Roosevelt historian, Stevenson partisan and Kennedy aide, and remarked, "Ah, we have here all the best minds of the '60s."

Jim Rowe, a New Deal White House aide and party workhorse for Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey, got a floor pass and wandered out among the delegates while Hubert gave his short speech. "It's his last hurrah," thought Rowe to himself as he watched his friend on the podium and surveyed the unfamiliar faces around him. Then, he had another thought. "It is the last hurrah for all of us."

There were still a few in the delegate ranks who reminded the nation of the past. Chicago's mayor, Richard Daley, presided over the Illinois contingent. But he and everybody else knew the political actuarial tables were about to expire on him. The new delegates who came down the aisles stopped, looked and snapped a picture or two of the woolly mammoth of Democratic legend.

Clark Clifford, who helped engineer the great Truman victory of 1948, stayed home in Washington. From his quiet office overlooking the White House, he described the Carter phenomenon as "the second political miracle of this century" (Truman's triumph over Dewey being the first). But not a miracle of chance, Clifford insisted, a miracle of planning and perspicacity. The politics of want--learned during the New Deal and Fair Deal, turned into the New Frontier and Great Society --was no longer pertinent. "New generation coming," said Clifford.

The Lyndon Johnson crowd--Carpenter, Moyers, Califano--were around the hall. But they were on the edges of the event, more observers than participants. Larry O'Brien, as skillful and engaging a pol as ever ran the party, spent most of his time in his 20th-floor office above the Garden negotiating a merger of the American Basketball Association and the National Basketball Association, of which he is commissioner. The faint strains of Happy Days floated up to his office from the bands on the street. He looked down and saw the people surge into the arena. He knew how far away it now all was. "New ball game," he mused.

Both political birth and death were handled gently by the soft-voiced Georgians and their followers. The old order was hailed, but not renewed. The Carter delegates were calm, but unyielding. When it was over, they took the Democratic Party power with them and they installed it not in Washington, but in Atlanta, from where they will fashion a new political future.

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