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                                                                                U.S. POLITICS, Page 41

The Power of the Savior


Forty years ago, MacArthur set off a frenzy by vowing to rescue
America from decline. Now Perot is doing the same.

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.