A Boy Named Newt… A Boy Named Mitt…

#39

 “There is no one way of becoming President of the United States…Over almost two centuries of national life…only the paradoxes of Presidential politics have remained permanent: the paradoxes of the open forum and the closed room, of conspiracy and inevitability, of cynicism and nobility.”[1]

   So began Theodore H. White’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1960 U.S. presidential election, the first contest to spark my interest in politics. Starting in the autumn of 1959, White charted all the primaries, then the party conventions and eventually the general election campaign which would lead to the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy one cold Washington day in January, 1961. The presidential primaries come around on a four year cycle. They always take me back to the beginning of the Kennedy years, to my time of absolute political innocence – before the encroachment of knowledge and experience made the world turn sour. “Innocence”, of a sort, persists in the primary elections, except that now it takes the form of a calculated appeal to the politically naive. The simple, democratic, directness of the process induces candidates to address the voters with stunningly vacuous sound-bites. They promise their better tomorrows without any troublesome specifics concerning how they imagine getting there. They are candidates, after all, running not for office but only for the right to run for office. The primaries are not the real campaign; the goodies the candidates offer at this stage are sentiments, not real political programmes. No one whispers the essential truths of politics: that scheming in the ‘closed room’ manipulates the ‘open forum’ and that – eventually - ‘cynicism’ trumps ‘nobility’ every time.

    Taking down White’s book again after more than forty years – I bought my copy as a student in 1965 – two other aspects of the primaries continue unchanged. The first is the geographical sequence (for the Republicans this goes Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Nevada…). The second is the dynastic pretensions that drive many Americans to inflict peculiar names upon their children. In November 1960, ‘Jack’ Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) ran against Richard Milhous Nixon[2] and Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. Other, earlier, contenders for the Democratic nomination had been Hubert Horatio Humphrey and Adlai Ewing Stevenson II.

   The hopefuls contesting this year’s Republican primaries are a distinctly dubious bunch; Newton Leroy Gingrich, Willard Mitt Romney, Ron Ernest Paul and Richard John Santorum. Despite the enduring absurdity of many candidates’ names, there is – as yet - no nomenclatorial theory that would enable us to predict electoral success or failure in the USA.

   In 1776, fifty-six men put their signatures to the Declaration of Independence. The first was John Hancock of Massachusetts and his name thereby became immortalized as American slang for anyone’s signature. Almost all of the fifty-six signed familiar names of Biblical, Latin or Gaelic origin. Two of them – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson - went on to become US Presidents. The only two with genuinely unusual names were Robert Treat Paine and Button Gwinnett. ‘Treat’ and ‘Button’ had been the maiden-names of their respective mothers. Treat was briefly famous in the Continental Congress for his habit of objecting to almost every proposal while never putting forward any alternatives of his own. Button managed to get himself killed in a duel less than a year after signing the Declaration. Consequently, examples of his signature are extremely rare and are thus of extraordinary value amongst collectors of such things.

   The mother’s maiden surname has remained the most frequent source of an American politician’s middle name. FDR, JFK and LBJ received 'Delano', 'Fitzgerald' and 'Baines' from their respective mothers and Nixon got ‘Milhous’ from his. The only other vaguely “interesting fact” about Nixon’s childhood is probably what he told Dwight D. Eisenhower; “We were poor, but the glory of it was, we didn’t know it.”

   The mother’s maiden-name does not invariably explain the middle name. Eisenhower’s ‘D’ was for ‘David’, his father’s first name. Confusingly, in that family, the boys were all called ‘Ike’ anyway, and then distinguished by the use of a prefix; hence ‘Big’ Ike, ‘Little’ Ike and ‘Ugly’ Ike. Eisenhower’s predecessor as President - Harry S. Truman - sported a middle initial that had no actual name attached to it at all. Harry’s ‘S’, it seems, was purely decorative. Many of George W. Bush’s foes suggested that his ‘W’ should be replaced by a ‘D’ – “Dubya” being the letter ‘W’ as spoken by Texans.  The truth is more prosaic; his ‘Walker’ had been handed down from his paternal grandmother. Dubya’s younger brother (and sometime Governor of Florida) is John Ellis Bush - known as “Jeb”.  It cannot be a coincidence that he shares Jeb with James Ewell Brown Stuart - Jeb Stuart - the most successful Confederate cavalry commander of the American Civil War[3].

   The claims, counter-claims and personal mud-slinging of Newt and Mitt and Ron and Rick give plenty of scope for conspiracy and cynicism. It’s the vector of nobility that seems largely missing this time around. Last year, dedicated conspiracy theorists must have near wet themselves when Donald Trump hovered, however briefly, over the field of potential candidates. Since then they have had to eke what little delight they could from the Herman Cain debacle, followed by the inevitable withdrawals of Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman. Rumour has it that Huntsman lost support amongst the Republican right-wing when his ability to speak Mandarin was publicised. More recently, Newt and Mitt have accused each other of being able to speak French. It comes to something when an ability to speak a language other than English (and Spanish) is regarded as potentially “un-American”. Whenever Tea Party activists gather in significant numbers whispers of closet-liberalism abound. Can it be their belief in ‘intelligent design’ that encourages them to see conspiracies in every shadow to establish European-style social democracy in the USA?

   Santorum prefers to be known as ‘Rick’ rather than the more formal Richard John. At school he acquired the nickname of ‘Rooster’ and his similarity to a crowing cockerel must shortly justify a revival of his student appellation. Romney was named ‘Mitt’ after his father’s cousin, the illustrious Milton Romney. Quite why they favoured ‘Mitt’ over the more poetic ‘Milton’ remains a mystery, but it does give him something in common with Gingrich who inexplicably favours the diminutive ‘Newt’ over the grandeur of either Newton or Leroy.  For a more complete explanation of the persistence of both ‘Newt’ and ‘Mitt’ I am persuaded to look no further than the lyrics of a song recorded by Johnny Cash. After years of separation, a father and son have been re-united by chance in a bar-room card-game. Recognition leads them to fight each other almost to the death…

            …He went for his gun and I pulled mine first,

               And he said “Son, this world is rough

               And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough

               And I knew I wouldn’t be there to help you along.

               So I gave you that name and I said goodbye,

               I knew you’d have to get tough or die,

              And it’s the name that helped to make you strong.

              He said, “Now you just fought one hell of a fight,

              And I know you hate me and you got the right

              To kill me now, and I wouldn’t blame you if you do.

              But you ought to thank me, before I die,

              For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye,

               ‘Cause I’m the son-of-a-bitch that named you Sue.

               What could I do? Yeah, what could I do?

               I got all choked-up and I threw down my gun,

              And I called him my pa, and he called me his son,

              And I came away with different point of view,

              And I think about him, now and then,

              Every time I try and every time I win,

              And if I ever have a son, I think I’m gonna name him

              Bill or George! – Anything but Sue![4]

     

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[1] The Making of the President 1960 Theodore H. White. (Jonathon Cape 1964).

[2] Nixon had previously been Vice-President under Dwight D. Eisenhower.

[3] Jeb is a popular name in American conservative families. See also Jeb Stuart Magruder, member of Nixon’s White House staff in its ‘glory days’.

[4] A Boy Named Sue. Lyrics by Shel Silverstein.