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The archetypal insurgent is John Elder, Massachusetts Democrat, Presbyterian minister and assistant to the dean of the Harvard Divinity School. Elder, 36, is married with five children, a nine-year-old partially blind foster child and a six-year-old Negro boy living with the family. He is president of the Arlington, Mass., Committee on Viet Nam. "As a clergyman, I suppose I'm most sensitive to some of the moral issues involved, and I have been very much impressed with the grounding of McCarthy's thought in Christian moral theology. He says the war in Viet Nam is an immoral war, using the criteria for a just war that have a good many centuries of Christian thought underlying them." Elder long ago decided 'to work within the Democratic Party to reform it." This spring, when he ran as a McCarthy-pledged delegate, Elder and his running mate defeated organization opponents who were mayors of sizable towns. Since Robert Kennedy's death, he has also decided to run for Congress.
Party bosses come to conventions in all shapes and sizes. Consider the contrast between Victor Smith, Illinois Republican state chairman, and Jesse Unruh, Democratic speaker of the California assembly.
Vic Smith is slim, white-haired, countrified in speech, friendly in manner. He publishes the tiny (circ. 2,000) weekly Argus in the midstate town (pop. 7,400) of Robinson. He golfs and fishes, is a Rotarian and a former statewide vice president of the Elks. Fascinated newsmen describe him as the healer who wound up as Illinois Republican chairman in 1960 because, in a party ripped and bloodied with faction, "he was the only man nobody was mad at."
Smith has attended every convention since 1944; he supported Dewey, Taft and Goldwater. He now "leans" toward Nixon, though "I'm not a zealot for him like some members of the delegation. I think that people who've been in the political process as I have are comfortable with Dick Nixon, I've always trusted him and felt grateful to him, I could feel this way about Rockefeller or Reagan if I knew them better, but I don't, There's the old saying here—stay with a friend."
Jesse Unruh, who sports the longest sideburns in the game, is the old pro converted to the new politics. Once the literal Big Daddy of California's Democratic machine, Unruh has shed 90 lbs. since he fell in love with dissent; he now chairs the 172-member delegation that won a three-cornered primary contest in support of Robert Kennedy against groups committed to McCarthy and to Humphrey. Unruh is uncommitted and angry. Through cigar smoke: "The gap between political leadership and the people is widening at the very time it ought to be narrowing . . . We're not going to the convention simply to validate decisions someone else has made in some back room in Washington."
Representing & Responding