ENEMY WITHIN

Correspondence

Gary Werskey

In Enemy Within Don Watson writes with his customary blend of affection, wit, insight and style about American politics. He also displays a degree of critical empathy for the United States sadly lacking in the work of many other Australian pundits. As an American-Australian citizen, I highly value and appreciate these qualities. 

However, if Watson still believes that the United States remains “the last great hope of humankind,” then he has provided a devastating benchmark for just how low our world has ebbed. Indeed, towards the end of his essay, he appears to affirm the late John Updike’s lament that his country was – already in the late 1980s – afflicted with a deep “malaise.” Almost three decades later one can only imagine Updike elegantly turning in his grave at how the malaise has so dramatically morphed into the malady of this year’s bewildering and dispiriting presidential election. 

Don’s instincts to try to make sense of the schizophrenic Clinton–Trump contest by focusing on Wisconsin are absolutely spot-on. On the one hand, much of the state has been for well over a century the centre of US progressive politics, and in some parts – not least its capital, Madison – still is. On the other, it has elected in recent years the corrupt ultra-conservative governor Scott Walker, as well as Mitt Romney’s running mate and Republican powerbroker, Paul Ryan. These divided loyalties were manifested in 2012, when Obama carried Wisconsin by a comfortable seven points (still a drop from his victory there in 2008 by thirteen points). But when you drill down into the 2012 results you note that in the white suburban counties that ring Milwaukee, Romney outpolled Obama two to one. This is the same territory that Trump immediately entered to fuel white angst and anger in the wake of a shooting in downtown Milwaukee. While in mid-October Clinton leads Trump by an average of six points statewide, Wisconsin remains, like the rest of the country, a strongly polarised polity. 

How did it come to this? My take is profoundly informed by my formation as the member of a staunchly Democratic family brought down by the Depression and then lifted up by FDR’s New Deal. Despite being an army brat who moved around the world, my centre of gravity was and still is the Midwest – and, more particularly, a small town in north-western Illinois close to the Wisconsin border, where I spent most of my boyhood summers with my mother’s parents. As it turned out, Wisconsin has figured quite often at critical moments in my (and my country’s) political evolution. Here then are four very short personal stories from or about Badgerland to add to Don’s collection. 

My first political memory (age nine) arose from a family holiday in the summer of 1952, when my grandparents hired a rustic cabin nestled in the beautiful Wisconsin Dells. One night we gathered round the radio to listen to Adlai Stevenson’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president. We were moved – a bit like a good sermon in church – partly because of Adlai’s wit and eloquence and partly because, as a former Illinois governor, he was our favourite son. His misfortune was to be running against the ultimate American war hero, General Eisenhower. Yet there was never any question that both my grandfather – a night watchman, World War I vet and American Legion stalwart – and my father – a World War II vet and US army captain then stationed in Germany – would remain “madly for Adlai” in both the 1952 and 1956 elections. However, fast-forwarding to 2016, I have to ask myself, “For whom would these proud veterans now vote?” Their demographic would put them firmly in the sights of the Trump camp, a ripe target for its mantra of wanting to “make America great again.” Here, then, is the first example of how the world of American politics has been up-ended. 

In 1960 Wisconsin came into view again for me when JFK decided to take on the far more liberal Minnesota senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey (HHH) in that state’s Democratic primary. Catholic Kennedy’s challenge was to demonstrate that he could defeat HHH in the latter’s Protestant progressive heartland. (Robert Drew’s pioneering fly-on-the-wall film Primary documented this epic contest.) JFK won narrowly, but only thanks to the votes of Milwaukee’s Eastern European immigrant Catholics. From there Kennedy immediately went on to Indiana in the hope of showing himself to be more electable in this even less promising state. There I was waiting – the fearless editor of my high school paper with a less than convincing press card – to encounter him at an early morning press conference in the steel-making and still largely white city of Gary. I even managed to ask him a question about his position on the Taft–Hartley industrial relations act! If I can’t remember his answer, it’s probably because I was so easily overwhelmed by his charm and Jackie’s otherworldly beauty. (Barack and Michelle would have something of the same effect on liberal Democrats nearly fifty years later.) But the broader point here is that the working-class whites who so readily voted for Kennedy and other far more liberal Democrats up until the ’60s were soon taking flight from cities like Milwaukee and Gary to the surrounding suburbs, which are today considered Trump strongholds. This is another instance of how Updike’s “malaise” has worked to the disadvantage of Democratic progressives (including myself as early as 1969, when I was assaulted by white thugs at a polling booth while campaigning for Gary’s first black mayor). 

Following LBJ’s overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, a group of moderate Republicans organised to take back control of their party from conservative insurgents. As Watson notes, they formed the Ripon Society, named for the Wisconsin town where the GOP had been founded more than a century earlier. One of their number was my former Northwestern debate partner (and native of Sheboygan, WI), who subsequently became a speechwriter in the Nixon White House. As Watergate threatened to cast a shadow on his own reputation, he was plucked from Washington by a scion of the East Coast Republican establishment and installed as the publisher of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Three decades later I caught up with him again in Washington during the 2008 presidential primary season. Over dinner with some of his well-placed Republican mates, he was asked which of the party’s candidates he would be supporting, to which he replied without hesitation, “None of them!” As for the Democratic contenders, he cheerfully confessed that he would be happy to vote for “All of them!” When I emailed him this year about how Trump was viewed within his networks, he admitted he had yet to meet anyone who supported his party’s nominee. So the “malaise” has also been at work in tearing apart the Republican Party and propelling it into unknown and troubling waters. 

My final Wisconsin story arises from Watson’s reference to one of my academic heroes, the University of Wisconsin’s great radical American diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams. I read his classic The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) in my final year at Northwestern, and its trenchant analysis of how much the pursuit of empire had shaped the United States certainly influenced my decision to oppose the Vietnam War in 1965. Two years later I brought this perspective into my work as a temporary staffer for a young Democratic congressman, Lee Hamilton, just into his second term, courtesy of Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964. Hamilton sat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and its Southeast Asian subcommittee. Despite his great intelligence and goodwill, none of my arguments and references was going to budge him from his support of the war engineered by defence secretary Robert McNamara. This intellectual rebuff weighed less on me than the emotional toll registered several times a week in his office as we received the Department of Defense’s notices of the servicemen from his district who had died in action. 

However, one experience from this period that kept me tethered for a little while longer to the Democratic cause was sitting in a room with twenty or so other young staffers listening to Senator Robert F. Kennedy talk informally about his growing opposition to the war and his increasingly radical views about the causes and effects of social injustice inside the United States. The impact of his saddened, serious, intense authenticity on all of us was tangible in the moment, powerful in the knowledge that he was about to challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination, and truly poignant in retrospect, given that he had less than a year to live. Along with Martin Luther King’s assassination shortly thereafter, it seemed there was nowhere else for a liberal Democrat like me to go except further to the left and ultimately out of the party altogether. We became part of the ongoing tragedy of American diplomacy and yet another facet of Updike’s malaise, thoroughly alienated from the Democratic establishment and profoundly doubtful that America any longer could lay claim to being humankind’s last great hope. 

Fifty years later, now that Bernie Sanders (our latest last great hope) has been sidelined, we and Wisconsin are left with a choice between the continuing more or less competent management of America’s empire/tragedy – by Hillary and the Clinton-era economic and diplomatic apparatchiks who dominated the Obama years – and the void/abyss of a Trump presidency, which can only drive America’s malaise into even deeper levels of violence and distress. And it will not only be US citizens who will bear the consequences of this choice. One can only hope that we in Australia will be ready to reappraise the American alliance unsentimentally in the light of our great and powerful friend’s demons and frailties, as well as the strengths of its progressive forces past and present. Meanwhile, on Wisconsin – you bet!

Gary Werskey

Gary Werskey studied history at Northwestern and Harvard universities and taught at Edinburgh University and Imperial College before immigrating to Australia in 1987. He is an honorary associate in the Department of History, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney and chairs the Blackheath History Forum.