Learning From the Mistakes of Past GOP Reformers
Henry Kissinger is reported to have mused that if he could ever have wished for an assassination of any American, it would have been of Kingman Brewster, then president of Yale. That one story alone justifies a biography of Brewster – but Geoffrey Kabaservice’s The Guardians is much more than a biography. It’s a study of the last stumbling finale of the American Establishment.
Not so incidentally: the book also offers a harsh challenge to those of us who want to develop a more modern Republicanism. The men profiled in The Guardians tried to do it too – and failed miserably.
We still use the term “establishment,” but that term means something very different in 2010 than it meant three quarters of a century ago. Today, the American governing class is a meritocratic elite. For most members of this elite, the decisive event in their lives was the arrival in the mail of an acceptance packet from a great university.
But in the early years of the 20th century, the decisive event happened much earlier. It happened at birth. From the 1880s to the 1960s, the American governing elite was drawn from the distinguished families of New England and New York, promoted by friendships and family connections to the high offices of the land.
Kingman Brewster and his friends belonged to this elite – and then helped to unravel the system that had produced them. They did not nervously await the packet from Yale or Harvard. If they wanted to go – they went. To their credit, they ratified the privileges of birth with service in war. (Brewster had been a founder of the America First movement, but after Pearl Harbor he volunteered with the others.) They then returned home to swift immediate entry into their country’s leadership.
Brewster was soon teaching law at Harvard. His best friend McGeorge Bundy assisted with the memoirs of former Secretary of War Henry Stimson, then was appointed dean of faculty at Harvard at age 34. Their friend John Lindsay was ushered into Congress from the Upper East Side of New York. Paul Moore was ordained into the Episcopal Church. Elliott Richardson was nominated for Lt. Governor of Massachusetts. William Sloane Coffin joined the Central Intelligence Agency.
The next step up the ladder of honors came a little harder. Still – it came. Brewster was chosen president of Yale. Bundy was made National Security Adviser, then president of the Ford Foundation. Lindsay won election as mayor of New York City. Moore was ordained bishop of New York. Richardson was tapped for President Nixon’s cabinet. Coffin was appointed Yale chaplain.
Having reached the top, these men proceeded to do a very surprising thing: They attempted to break apart the structures of privilege that had elevated themselves. One symbol of the change: George W. Bush’s acceptance at Yale in 1964; Jeb Bush’s rejection two years later.
These men saw themselves as social reformers. They opened doors of opportunity to the children of the great immigration, and especially to Jews; determinedly tried to redress the wrongs of black Americans; and – after initial non-comprehension – at last accepted that women too had been denied their fair chances.
The Brewster circle had something else in common too: they were all Republicans, or anyway, they started that way.
The Republicanism of the Brewster circle was both inherited and chosen. These men were descendents of abolitionists and unionists. Their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had fought and won the Civil War and then profited hugely from the peace. They inherited their politics just as they inherited their religion and their trust funds.
But their politics were not entirely inherited. For Brewster and his friends, the Democratic Party was the party of southern racism, urban bossism, and presidential over-reach. Brewster and the others were liberals, internationalists, and reformers. The Republican party of Wendell Willkie and Tom Dewey seemed a more plausible home for them than the Democratic party of James Curley and James O. Eastland. That proved a very wrong bet. Over the next decades, both parties would evolve in ways that cast out Brewster and his friends. John Lindsay would actually run for president as a Democrat in 1972. And in turn, the bad end of John Lindsay’s mayoralty would do much to discredit the idea of liberal Republicanism. When Bill Buckley challenged Lindsay in the 1965 mayor’s race, he joked that if he won, he would demand a recount. But inside the GOP, Buckley won after all.
Kabaservice essays a bold revisionist defense of these now often disparaged men. He argues that they helped to mediate the social revolution of the 1960s. They diverted young people away from radicalism – coopting them (as was said in the 60s) for reform within the system. Brewster opened Yale to new sources of talent. Lindsay’s New York was spared the race riots that devastated other urban centers. Elliott Richardson’s resignation rather than firing Archibald Cox helped the country toward a consensus judgment on Watergate.
Yet even if you accept Kabaservice’s positive assessment of these men and their service, their attempt to invent a coherent and distinctive liberal Republican politics yielded nothing for the future. Their politics proved simply a better-tailored version of liberalism plain and simple.
In many ways, indeed it was liberalism at its worst: as unrealistic, but more arrogant. Brewster and his circle took for granted not only their right to rule, but other people’s duty to submit. Kabservice tells an unlovely story of Mayor Lindsay confronted by unhappy white ethnic working class New Yorkers who wanted to know why they seemed to be paying all the taxes, while black New Yorkers received all the benefits. His answer: there was 300 years of oppression to redress. The voters could be forgiven for thinking: Hey, my ancestors were toiling on the land in Sicily while your ancestors were doing the oppressing – and collecting the proceeds.
In time, almost all the Brewster circle followed Lindsay in migrating to a more comfortable home in a reinvented Democratic party. Urban ethnics and conservative Southern whites counter-migrated to the GOP. The country finally got the liberal vs. conservative party system for which liberals had yearned since the 1930s. Only – and to the liberals’ shock – when the choice was at last clearly presented, the country chose conservatism.
And so it kept choosing, culminating in 2000 with the election of a Republican president, House, and Senate all at the same time. Republicans would hold unchecked power in Washington for the next six years, the party’s longest tenure since the 1920s. The results were disappointing, to put it mildly. Conservative Republicanism has emerged from eight years of George W. Bush as battered as liberal Republicanism after eight years of John Lindsay.
The calamitous end of the Bush years would seem to call for rethinking. Yet in every direction we look, it seems the way is dead-ended or obstructed by rubble. Kabaservice’s liberal Republicans of the 1960s were defeated in their attempt to create something new. His story challenges modern Republicans to learn from these previous would-be reformers’ mistakes – and avoid their fate.