Once Upon a Time in Wisconsin
By BOB GREENE - NYT
Bob Greene is the author of the forthcoming "Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents."
CHICAGO — The storefront portrait photographer gave orders to the stranger who had walked off the Wisconsin street and into his studio. The photographer — from his flat tone he might have been talking to someone who had come in to pose for a picture for the Kiwanis Club dinner-dance program — instructed: "Try to intertwine the fingers a little."
The stranger — John F. Kennedy — did his best to oblige. He placed his wrists on the table in front of him and, as directed, touched his hands together. "Not time to smile yet?" Kennedy, passing through town, asked.
The photographer took a gander at Kennedy's sleeves protruding from his suit jacket. "About a quarter-inch of cuff," the photographer advised him.
In another part of Wisconsin, a man in a light-colored fedora and a dark-colored overcoat, standing alone on a sidewalk, did his best to stop passers-by. "Let me give you one of my cards," the man implored. "And my name is Humphrey."
That is how Hubert Humphrey was campaigning: by handing out his business cards, one at a time.
Wisconsin holds its presidential primary today. But this is how it looked 44 years ago — and what takes you a moment to notice, as you examine the black-and-white film footage, is what isn't there: the clumps of TV crews around the candidates, the machine-gun nests of microphones aimed at the men's faces. Kennedy and Humphrey — head-to-head in pursuit of their party's nomination — moved through Wisconsin in splendid isolation, looking for individual votes in near silence. Save for a single lens, they ran for the presidency virtually unobserved beyond the ends of the streets on which they stood.
The lens belonged to a filmmaker named Robert Drew — and to spend time today studying what Mr. Drew and his crew shot in Wisconsin in 1960 is to get a glimpse of what has been gained, and what has been lost, in the campaign years since.
Mr. Drew's footage was said to be the first time a camera moving freely with synchronized sound was used to follow politicians through the course of a developing news story. Before Wisconsin in 1960, the American public was not able to see a primary campaign outside the formal settings of occasional paid local telecasts, or static press conferences. It might as well have all been a rumor.
Then Mr. Drew showed up, and the candidate visits became moving pictures (although that first film was not seen publicly until after the voting was over).
Today the primary process itself has evolved into a perpetual moving picture: it's not as if the press comes to a state to record a political event, it's that the manic movie travels from state to state, like a tornado with a timetable, descending on waiting political actors. The moving picture is no longer the document — it is the event. Citizens cannot be blamed if they sometimes consider themselves extras, present to provide atmosphere.
How complete is the change? In "The Making of the President 1960," Theodore H. White, reporting on that same Wisconsin primary, wrote of Kennedy: "At noon he stood at the head of the street in the one-street village of Phillips and looked down its length and saw no one; he entered its hardboard factory and spoke to the workers on the line, who grunted and let him pass . . . he circulated the cafes on Phillips's main street, courteously interrupting the men and women slurping coffee and eating sandwiches, saying, `My name is John Kennedy, I'm running for president in the primary'; and they went right on eating. He left the town shortly after noon and the town was as careless of his presence as of a cold wind passing through."
Today the tree cannot fall in an empty forest, because the forest is never empty. The solitary way of looking for votes, unwitnessed by the wider world, may have been lost forever once the cameras came. This year, for a time, it appeared that Internet campaigning might circle us back to one-on-one vote-seeking; for now that prospect remains mostly unfulfilled.
Yet no matter how many or how few people are looking, certain hungers, seen in the eyes both of those doing the seeking and those being sought, remain unchanged. John Kennedy in Wisconsin, talking to people as he gets into his car: "If you will write me at the Senate, I'll send you a picture and an autograph, and something about the Capitol. Just write Senator Kennedy, the Senate, Washington, D.C."
Unchanged also is the feel of a primary campaign not going as well as a candidate had hoped. Hubert Humphrey, weariness on his face and in his voice, to a volunteer driver on a bleak, drizzly day: "How far is Mindoro?"
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
