The Power of the Savior

By GARRY WILLS

On April 27, 1951, I stood in the window of a high school building in Milwaukee, watching (I was assured) the next President of the United States drive by through cheering crowds. The night before, in Chicago, he had addressed 55,000 people who turned out in drafty Soldier Field despite chilly weather. Before reaching Milwaukee, he had passed people, clustered all along his route, who broke into applause at the sight of his car.

It had been this way all over the nation, ever since Governor Earl Warren and half a million people turned out to meet General Douglas MacArthur in San Francisco on his return from the Far East. President Harry Truman had dismissed the outspoken General, but Congress invited him to a love fest where members wept openly. The people supported MacArthur against Truman, 66% to 25%, according to Gallup.

The support for MacArthur far exceeded the numbers of the minority (Republican) party in those days. MacArthur claimed to speak from above the parties -- and TIME believed him: "Soldier MacArthur was speaking his convictions, and they were tailored to no political wind." MacArthur himself said America's only hope was for the people to take back their government. "I have clearly seen that the soul of liberty is still living in the American heart. It is neither Democratic nor Republican, but American." The people sympathized with a military man done in by the politicians. He turned to the people for the way to the country's salvation: "You can always trust them and believe in them, for in their hearts they are good and true." The people, in turn, looked to him as a savior. MacArthur for President organizations mushroomed.

It actually helped MacArthur that most of the press was critical of him. While the people were behind him, 85% of journalists surveyed backed Truman. That showed how out of touch were the news people. MacArthur knew that entrenched powers would try to muzzle him. "I am told in effect I must follow blindly the leader -- keep silent -- or take the bitter consequences." It helped too that he was not a politician: "I have been impelled as a patriotic duty of simple citizenship -- and a disagreeable duty it has been -- to expose for public consideration the failures and weaknesses, as I view them, which have brought our once righteous and invincible Nation to fiscal instability, political insecurity, and moral jeopardy at home and to universal doubt abroad."

The literal frenzy of MacArthur's reception -- Herbert Hoover called him "the reincarnation of St. Paul" -- faded over the months when he took his "Crusade" to the people. The lofty rhetoric, repeated from town to town, took on a road-show tinniness. His act verged on self-caricature. Yet enough appeal remained for Robert Taft, who was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, to offer him the vice-presidential slot. When MacArthur said he did not want to waste his time presiding over the Senate, Taft desperately offered to create a special role for him as overseer of military matters, his "deputy Commander in Chief." MacArthur said he would consider that. Taft was still negotiating with MacArthur as Taft's aides worked to bring about a second ballot in the Chicago convention of 1952. But Dwight Eisenhower, another hero, won on the first ballot. If Eisenhower had not entered the race that year, MacArthur might have been our President, since Taft died in the middle of the next term's first year.

Like carousers who do not want to know too much about what happened the night before, Americans tend to forget or downplay emotional binges like the idolization of MacArthur. I was talking with a young journalist at the height of 1987's spasm of "Olliemania," when Oliver North seemed -- to some -- to be speaking truth to power. The reporter said he had never seen anything like it -- and I tried to contrast the few weeks of Ollie with the months of MacArthur's heroization. There are many cases in America's recent past in which people have turned from an excess of disgust with things as they are to an excess of blind trust in the one man who seems to offer an escape from everything "political."

One such episode overlapped the MacArthur phenomenon and went deeper than it did. Senator Joseph McCarthy has become something of an evil joke when seen in retrospect. But he stood high in the polls for longer periods than MacArthur did. Even at the end of Eisenhower's first year in office, McCarthy was supported by 50% of the people in a Gallup poll, with only 29% opposed to him. The history books tell us that many national figures -- including Eisenhower himself -- were afraid to defy McCarthy in his reckless early days; we neglect the reason -- the outpouring of popular support for him. His continued attack on Eisenhower's Republican Administration showed that McCarthy too was not a mere partisan. He was outside the system, able to see its fatal weakness -- so the system, through the press, was trying to destroy him. Many had called for McCarthy to run for President, and he tried to revive their efforts as the Senate considered censuring him.

Savior politics occurs when distrust of the electoral system reaches a point where only a simple "truth teller" can put an end to the suspicion. The pervasive fear of communists in the late 1940s and early '50s bred many petty "saviors" who were going to rescue Hollywood, or the radio industry, or publishing. MacArthur and McCarthy were the supersaviors atop this pyramid of subordinate redeemers.

The '30s too shuddered with waves of yearning for a savior. Economic disorientation made people respond to the confident voice of Father Charles Coughlin. He is now remembered more for his anti-Semitism than for his immensely popular attack on what he called a financial system run by powerful bankers through their puppets in Washington. As a Roman Catholic priest, he was even further outside the system than a general or a businessman; yet millions once thought his message was our only hope. He had, for a while, a weekly radio audience estimated at 30 million.

The Great Depression, like the indecisive Korean War, led to anxieties that only a savior-politician could, in the eyes of his followers, dispel. But why should the current period throw up another outsider at odds with politics and the press? The U.S. is still a prosperous nation. Long-range prospects of decline are disputed, and should not, in any case, cause immediate panic. Americans are recent victors, not only in "little wars" like Grenada, Panama and Kuwait but in the great half-century war of nerves against communism.

Yet triumph can be almost as disorienting as loss -- a truth as old as Aeschylus. The removal of the communist peril has taken away the ordinating superprinciple of all our recent politics. Opposition to that tyranny was the one thing people were willing to agree on, sacrifice for, take pride in, compete vigorously in opposing. Without that foe to be continually thwarted, we no longer draw an obscure comfort from our ability to throw glittering rockets up from a rotted infrastructure.

Under cover of anticommunism, governmental business went on without our noticing how it had been hollowed out for all other purposes. Americans have had a succession of Presidents who said in effect that government is good for nothing but fighting communism. Even Eisenhower sold his interstate highway system as an anticommunist measure by arguing that it was necessary for the country's defense. Sputnik allowed people to care about education, since it was seen as a tool in the cold war. More recently, the Reagan-Bush era has treated government as an obstacle, not an instrument, when it was not fighting the reds. In other areas, all government can do is get in the way. Freeing ourselves from it will give the economy back to the market, which alone can create jobs, prosperity and a nation in progress.

The feeling of drift, the sense that we Americans are no longer in control of ourselves or the world, manifests itself in a variety of ways. Politics can do nothing to counter this feeling, since its one "legitimate" purpose has been removed. This feeling shows in the readiness of JFK audiences to entertain the notion that the country's major institutions are criminal, hiding assassins the way Joe McCarthy said the government was hiding communists. One event that betrayed such feelings -- an event triggered by pugnacious radio broadcasts, the same medium that brought us Father Coughlin -- was the outcry against pay raises for Congress. The same attitude appeared in this year's primaries, which registered huge support for "undecided" in the polls or "none of the above" in the voting. Sometimes "none of the above" was called Buchanan, sometimes Brown, sometimes Tsongas. But even those voting for these candidates had little positive enthusiasm for them. Brown was a brick to hurl at Clinton; Buchanan was one for beaning Bush.

Ross Perot seems to offer more, even to those who thought Brown a flake, Buchanan a thug, Tsongas a simp. Perot inspires us, as MacArthur did. Few know enough about him to dislike him. Besides, he has a confident can-do attitude that escapes mere grumbling. He does not think government is totally useless. It has merely broken down. He will stick his head under the hood (no danger of grease getting on curly locks here) and save the contraption. Perot's appeal may fade like MacArthur's. But if it takes months for it to do so, as with MacArthur, or years, as with McCarthy, Perot will affect politics far more than they did. Americans are off on another emotional binge.

This sudden gush of affection has more similarities to the MacArthur days of bliss than to issue-oriented third-party movements like Theodore Roosevelt's or George Wallace's. That is why issues have seemed so unimportant -- as unimportant as the factual evidence for McCarthy's claim that communism had seeped through the Establishment. Saviors can dispense with dossiers.