A Time for Governors

(See Cover)

The sight of Dwight Eisenhower beaming and bowing in their midst was a momentous symbol for 42 governors gathered last week in Seattle for their 45th annual conference. Not in 15 years had a President of the United States visited them, and after the death of Robert Taft, the governors thought that Eisenhower had sufficient excuse to break his longstanding date. But to Ike's mind, the conference was an all-important rendezvous.

Immediately after the state funeral for Taft, the President picked up Ohio's Governor Frank Lausche (who was in Washington for the funeral) and Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, boarded his silver Constellation and took off for the Northwest. On the way. he managed a brief catnap in one of the plane's berths; ten hours and 2,507 miles later, when the big Connie came down through grey clouds at Boeing Field, Seattle, he looked fresh and chipper. That night at the governors' black-tie dinner. Ike unexpectedly turned up as just another guest to listen to an unimpressive speech by Humphrey on monetary policy; at 10:30 p.m. (2:30 a.m. by White House time) the President was still going strong.

Next morning, in a snappy tweed sport jacket and slacks, the President attended a plenary session of the conference, where he delivered a meandering, off-the-cuff address, which was at its best when he shared with the governors his strategic theories on Asia (see Foreign Relations). But Ike's effectiveness at Seattle was not in what he said; it was in his hearty salutation and his deep bow of respect to the governors.

"I'll probably accept every invitation you send me," he told them, "and I'll send you more." After he climbed back into his plane for the weary trip home, the governors settled down in a warm glow to talk shop.

Thirty-Dome Command. The real news of the conference was in the clearly evident new stature of the governors--both collectively and individually--in the affairs of the nation. A White House aide put his finger on it: "In the President's mind, there are three U.S. governing bodies: the Senate, the House and the governors'." As head of the Republican Party, Ike had another good reason to go to Seattle last week: under 30 statehouse domes, Republicans are in command.

Compared with the perilous G.O.P. working majority in Congress, they are a steady force indeed. They represent real strength. The President would never forget how 23 G.O.P. governors, at their conference in Houston last year just before the Republican Convention, endorsed his position on the contested delegations --a move which was instrumental in swinging the nomination his way. During the campaign, Ike leaned heavily on such individual governors as New Hampshire's Sherman Adams, Nebraska's Val Peterson and New York's Tom Dewey for his crucial decisions.

Afterthoughts for Utah. At their early breakfasts and their late bull sessions in the Olympic Hotel, the Republican governors were pleased to discover how close their political views were to Ike's. Most Democratic governors, too (notable exception: Michigan's Fair Dealing G. Mennen Williams), were revealed as ideologically close to Ike. The governors are generally middle-roaders; they favor sound money before tax cuts, a firm foreign policy, the return of power to the states--all pillars of the Eisenhower political philosophy. At first, Utah's J. Bracken Lee, a Taftman from way back, stood out like a sore thumb in his dissent. He denounced the Administration for going "down the same road we did with the New and Fair Deal." But at the convention's end, Lee had some afterthoughts. "I guess I'm so far out of step I'll have to review my thinking," he said. "I guess there are a lot of things I don't know."

Important to the G.O.P.'s future was the fact that, for the first time, the governors were talking in terms of coordinated political action. In Washington, Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams was working out a plan for a governors' "speakers' bureau." The plan, originated by Arizona's up & coming Howard Pyle, will set the governors off on a Chautauqua-like swing through their own states, commencing next fall, to spread the Eisenhower faith and philosophy. Last week Pyle had signed up 15 prospective barnstormers. "A governor," Ike explained, "has the chore of trying to inform the people in his state so that they will in turn support reasonable programs nationally as well as statewide."

Enthusiasm at the Limits. Looking over the roster of G.O.P. governors, Ike could easily spot some able evangelists to lead his new political action team. He would, of course, lean heavily on Tom Dewey, who is internationally famous, a standout executive, and a veteran leader in the liberal Republican movement. Here & there around the country were others, not so well known beyond their state lines, who were heroes to the home folks, and adept at political infighting. Maryland's Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, the man who nominated Eisenhower at Chicago, was a seaboard internationalist; Colorado's popular Dan Thornton was a western conservative. Together they reppresented the limits of the Eisenhower faith, but both were enthusiastic Ikemen and both could be counted on to spread the word.

Not all the 30 governors were stars in the Republican firmament. Some of the newcomers (e.g., Vermont's Lee Emerson, Delaware's Caleb Boggs) had gotten off to weak and disappointing starts. But others among the freshmen looked like real comers. In Minnesota, C. Elmer Anderson had turned out to be a competent, careful administrator and a hail-fellow Eisenhower advocate whose performance has confounded the armchair analysts and won wide approval among the voters. In Illinois, Bill Stratton, another dark horse, had accomplished things that Adlai Stevenson had failed to get done (TIME, July 13). And in Massachusetts, Christian Archibald Herter, 58, a lean, blond giant (6 ft. 4 1/2 in.) with the searching eyes of an intellectual, the manners of a patrician and the pithy record of a politician, was causing a stir that rippled far beyond the shores of Massachusetts Bay. For Herter, Tom Dewey had a succinct appraisal: "He's the cream of the bottle."

That Indefinable Something. Herter's election last fall was in itself something of a political miracle. The man he defeated was, politically, as symbolic of life in Massachusetts as the baked bean, the sacred cod and the Bunker Hill Monument. Portly Democrat Paul Dever, a seasoned performer and a spellbinder among the masses, who had croaked his way to national TV fame as keynoter at the Democratic Convention last summer, had looked like a shoo-in winner. Herter, the slender aristocrat, was his exact antithesis. As a friend put it bluntly, "Chris never did have that indefinable something that makes children and dogs follow him down the street." But in his campaign, Herter combined polite persuasion (best effort: small pizza parties arranged by friends) with a slam-bang attack on Dever's record ("Dever . . . has become the tool of the contractors who are doing the same jobs over and over again at your expense"). Herter won by a hairline 14,440 votes. In his short six months as governor, he has managed to impress something of his character on Massachusetts and to give the Commonwealth government a refreshing sample of purposeful direction.

Though he is too honest to masquerade as a plebeian, Herter can be informal when he wants to be. Last spring, in Brockton for an official appearance, he heard that a local Korean veteran had just gotten home. He insisted on dropping in unannounced, overwhelming the veteran and his wife, who woke up the kids, opened a bottle of wine and had a thoroughly pleasant time with their amiable visitor. When word of the devastating Worcester tornado (TIME, June 22) reached him, Herter was in his Boston apartment, in the midst of a weekly dinner with his legislative leaders. He immediately left the table and drove to the scene of the rescue operations (without notifying his press secretary). Worcester's mayor was in England. Governor Herter walked into the city hall in the middle of the night, found the council in complete confusion. He calmly restored order by getting state agencies at work on emergency measures and promising that the state would do everything possible to-speed rehabilitation. Shortly afterward, Herter asked the general court for $5,000,000 in relief funds and tax abatements on damaged property, and personally led in the raising of public contributions.

As a working politician, he has turned his attention to consolidating his position in his own party. Long ago, in 1936, he had begun to build a Herter machine, in the shabby old Republican Club on Boston's Tremont Street. The club became Herter GHQ, and after the election, the engine-block of the state organization. With most of his Republican peers (Saltonstall, Weeks, Lodge, Martin) removed from the local scene, Herter has already been able to lay to rest most doubts about who is boss.

Gaveled Fingers. In both private and public life, he has what amounts to a phobia about letting decisions hang fire. (Once he starts a whodunit for relaxation, he cannot relax until he reads through to the end.) At the Statehouse he has tackled problems which have been gathering dust in pigeonholes for years. One of the most urgent economic problems concerns Massachusetts' migrating manufacturers. Herter is well aware that New England is in economic straits because much of her industry has been moving to other parts of the country. But he has not placed the blame entirely on immutable economic forces and waited for Washington to provide relief. Recently, he set up a Department of Commerce and Industry to assist Massachusetts industry in a program of self-improvement, encourage outside companies to move to the state and restore some semblance of industrial leadership.

As chief executive, he has been quick to bang the gavel on rebellious fingers. In February, when he discovered that his department chiefs had gone over his head to ask the legislature for $100 million more than he had budgeted, he gave them a severe dressing-down and a reminder: "I must reluctantly but sharply call to your attention the fact that the governor has veto power ... to reject items in the appropriation bill." He also demanded and got tighter controls around the statehouse, on everything from inventories to excessively long coffee breaks. The result was a new realization that the governor meant business.

When the legislature prorogued (Bostonese for "adjourned") last July 4, virtually every request from the governor had been granted. Herter had reorganized and streamlined a dozen departments. Appropriations had been cut by $8,775,000, the first time in years they have gone down instead of up. No new taxes were passed, and with a controlled budget a tax cut is a good possibility next year.

Carefree Expatriate. Although he looks and acts like a Yankee intellectual, Governor Herter has spent less than half his life in Massachusetts, and his background is more bohemian than Brahmin. His architect grandfather, the first Christian Herter, came to the U.S. from Stuttgart at a time when the country was accumulating culture as rapidly and indiscriminately as it was founding fortunes. He found an eager clientele, built great mansions from Fifth Avenue (for J. P. Morgan, William Vanderbilt) to Nob Hill (for Mark Hopkins), and gilded them with the treasures of Europe. But grandfather had no taste for business, and vowed that when he made a million dollars he would retire and paint. By 1885 he had the million, which he entrusted to his best friend. Then he casually bade his family goodbye and went off to Paris, where he died of consumption two years later.

Albert Herter, the governor's father, inherited old Christian's artistic inclinations, and he too settled in Paris. He married Adele McGinnis, a portrait painter, grew a Vandyke beard, and lived a carefree expatriate life in a pleasant apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. By the time his second son, Christian Archibald, was born in 1895, Albert Herter was a successful muralist, and young Chris came into a world of culture and comfort, if not luxury. German, learned from his governess, was his first language, and by the time he was ready for grammar school he was talking French and English as well.

He was a spindly child who wore an awkward, hip-high brace for six years to correct a curvature of the spine. But he was precocious and inquisitive, and when he arrived at the Browning School in New York at the age of nine, he was two years ahead of his class. At Harvard, where he was a shy and awkward youth, he concentrated on fine arts, was a second-string tennist and president of the literary Signet Club. He graduated with honors.

"Get Us Food." For the next 15 years, Herter refused to be tied down to any single career. In 1915 he went to New York's School of Applied Design with the vague idea of becoming an interior decorator, but a Harvard classmate who had gone into the foreign service talked him into accepting a minor post with the U.S. embassy in Berlin. When America entered World War I, Herter returned to the U.S. and volunteered for military service, but was rejected as overtall and underweight. His elder brother Everit was killed in France with the A.E.F.

In 1917, Chris married Mary Caroline Pratt, daughter of a straitlaced, enormously wealthy Standard Oil family, which looked askance at the peripatetic young son-in-law and his artistic family. Not long after the wedding, Chris left his bride and went to Switzerland with a special diplomatic mission to draw up a prisoner-of-war agreement. When the armistice was signed he made a quick reconnaissance of prison camps in Germany, was appalled to find red armbands and symptoms of Communism everywhere. Back in Switzerland he wired a friend from Berlin to come and meet him. "What can the U.S. do to stop Communism?" Herter asked him. "Get us food," said the friend. Herter sent an urgent wire to Washington, and food supplies were rushed to the starving country. "This was the first convincing example to me of food being a potent weapon," says Herter.

At the Versailles Conference, Herter served as the hearing aide to Delegate Joseph Clark Grew, who, because of his deafness, was unable to follow the proceedings. After the treaty he wandered over ravaged Europe with Food Commissioner Herbert Hoover, came back a confirmed believer in collective security. In 1921 Hoover became Secretary of Commerce under Warren Harding and brought Herter to Washington as his secretary. But Chris had nothing but contempt for the Harding Administration ("Washington is a dirty kitchen," he wrote later, "where cockroaches abound"), and he began to look around for a way out. The way came when he moved to Boston to become the salaryless co-editor and co-owner of Henry Ward Beecher's old magazine of opinion, the Independent.

Mahjong in One Lesson. There he was a thoughtful, graceful writer and an incandescent idea man, and he charmed some diverse writers into contributing to the Independent, including Andrew Mellon, Anna Louise Strong, Hilaire Belloc, Frederick Lewis Allen ("Mahjong in One Lesson") and John Dewey. Politically, Herter followed the Republican line, but sometimes the line chafed. He was a strong champion of the League of Nations, a scornful baiter of old Isolationist Henry Cabot Lodge, and he never hesitated to lash the administration in Washington.

Herter left the foundering Independent in 1928. For two years he was a lecturer on international affairs at Harvard, and could have stayed on had he chosen, but by that time another inamorata was beckoning. "He'd get a faraway look in his eyes," recalls an old friend, "and you'd have to speak to him three times before he came out of his trance." The faraway look meant that all the wandering, thinking and studying had finally focused on a decision to go into politics.

New Face in Court. Boston's bluestocking Back Bay Fifth Ward needed a new representative in the legislature. Herter had all the necessary social and political credentials and decided to run. In the effortless fashion of Back Bay politics, he got himself elected, and in 1931 made a gentlemanly debut in the House of Representatives of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (i.e., the lower house of the legislature). He was quickly recognized as a man of clear and analytical mind, who could cope competently with the most complicated legislative processes. In 1939, as a reward for his talents, he was elected speaker.

In 1942, under the impetus of war, Herter went to Washington between legislative sessions to work for his old friend Archibald MacLeish, in the Office of Facts & Figures. But Franklin Roosevelt's wartime administration by personal fiat outraged Herter's constitutional sensibilities, and he returned to Boston to seek a job that would enable him to appear on the national scene as a Republican critic. With the help of a fortuitous gerrymander, he got elected to Congress by a slim 2,900 votes. In 1944 his plurality rose to 20,000 votes; in 1946 it was 42,000, and in 1948 he was re-elected by a plurality of 67,000. In 1950, when Herter was challenged by a particularly strong Democratic candidate, his plurality declined to 25,000.

No Nonsense. Herter made his greatest impression on Congress--and on the nation--with the reports of his Select Committee on Foreign Aid. House Speaker Joe Martin, a fellow Bay Stater, set up the committee largely because Herter convinced him that Congress could not trust the Truman Administration's figures on European needs, should get its own statistics. Herter led his 17 Congressmen and a pride of experts off on a two-month trip to Europe. He sternly forbade his crew to bring either wives or tuxedoes, and so strict were his rules against extracurricular nonsense that this sign appeared on the door of the Queen Mary's lecture room:

Here sat the Committee on Foreign Aid And worked like hell, while the others played.

Herter's idea for European relief was to set up a corporation similar to the RFC and give it authority to buy and distribute fuel, food and fertilizer to Europe. But in setting up the Marshall Plan machinery, the Administration ignored all specific legislation that grew out of the Herter Committee's findings. Even so, the committee reports "rubbed Congress' nose in the realities of postwar Europe," as one of Herter's fellow Congressmen put it. "Without the Herter Committee's groundwork, the program of foreign aid would never have been passed."

Midwest Product. During a subsequent congressional tour of Europe in 1951, Herter met Dwight Eisenhower in Paris and decided Eisenhower was the kind of man for Herter's kind of Republican Party. The appointment was supposed to last five minutes, and Herter blurted: "If you think there's going to be an Eisenhower draft at the convention, coming from the grass roots, you're very much mistaken . . . You've got to let your friends know where you stand . . ." Ike did not commit himself, but he invited Herter to lunch, put him on a "Chris" basis, and spent two hours discussing politics after lunch. Herter was firm on one recommendation which was later adopted: Ike should be presented as a product of the Middle West, not of "Eastern internationalists." Herter came home to get in touch with Kansas Eisenhower backers, urging them to set up an organization.

Herter himself was cornered soon afterward by a group of prominent Bay State Republicans, including Joe Martin, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Sinclair Weeks. For the good of the party, they said, he should run for the governorship of Massachusetts. Strangely enough, their proposition made Herter angry. "You're just trying to get me out of Washington," he cried. He strongly suspected Dwight Eisenhower wanted him to be Under Secretary of State, and he liked the idea. In the end, his conscience and the importunings of his son Chris Jr.* took him into the gubernatorial campaign.

Special Strain. Herter took the oath of office last January under the State House murals his father painted, and set himself a breathtaking pace that allows little time for social life (which he doesn't care for), bridge (he is one of the best players in Boston) or even the leisurely perusal of a newspaper. In the past the Herters spent frequent holidays in South Carolina at Mrs. Herter's family's 12,000-acre game preserve (Herter is a crack shot). Nowadays they occasionally get away for a few 'days at Mountainy Pound Club near Bangor, Maine, but far more frequently go to their comfortable, 150-year-old country house, in Millis, or their summer home, on a bluff overlooking yacht-filled Manchester harbor--both within an hour's drive of Boston.

Herter's face is boyish, and he looks tanned and fit, but the breakneck pace of his official duties is a special strain because he suffers painfully from arthritis which is slowly stiffening his hips. Twice weekly he submits to the ministrations of a masseuse, and he keeps a bottle of Bufferin handy for use when the pain becomes too intense. The arthritis is degenerative, though cortisone and Terramycin have slowed its progress.

Persimmons in Sparta. As Massachusetts' 55th governor, Christian Herter joins a variegated pantheon of men who have occupied the handsome old Bulfinch statehouse. The first governor was John Hancock, a vain and arrogant aristocrat who was as popular as he was inept, won nine terms in office. Poor, plain Sam Adams tried and failed to turn the Commonwealth into a "Christian Sparta." The election of David I. Walsh marked the rising tide of immigration: he was the first Irish Catholic to win the governorship. Persimmon-faced Cal Coolidge reversed the trend, turned back to Yankee conservatism. In three terms, Leverett Saltonstall, the present senior Senator from Massachusetts, reduced the public debt from the highest in Commonwealth history to the lowest since 1900.

Chris Herter's opportunity is, perhaps, greater than that of any of his illustrious predecessors. It is Herter's good fortune to be presiding over the Commonwealth at a period when statehouses are once again rising in importance and esteem in the political scheme of things. To the Eisenhower Administration decentralization of government is an article of faith. But decentralization can be successful only if governors, among others, make the most of the chance to act intelligently in their own right. In such outlying leadership lies not only political opportunity for the Republicans but strength for the U.S. government beyond the fondest wish of the Founding Fathers.

*A rising Republican in his own rights. Last month he was appointed executive assistant to Vice President Nixon.

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