The Hughes Campaign

To Webster, the political sense of the noun issue ranks only eighth in importance:

"A point in debate or controversy on which the parties take affirmative and negative positions; a presentation of alternatives between which to choose or decide."

Peace cannot be an issue in this sense, because everyone is for it.

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where the rationality and precision of Webster do not always prevail, an issue is something around which you rouse strong feelings, upon which you evoke substantive personal commitment, and with which you get votes.

Stuart Hughes's baby-blue sound truck insists that "the nuclear age is no time for politics as usual," but still, the success or failure of his campaign will be measured in votes. These will come in quantity only if Hughes succeeds in presenting the cold war as a politically meaningful subject.

SANE has tried, at great expense, to publicize the magnitude of possible disaster, and to exploit the consequent fear. This was not successful, because the very nature of thermonuclear catastrophe, in which whole cities and nations burst into flame, makes the horror impersonal. It becomes abstract, like the galloping leukemia rate...hardly relevant to any given individual.

So it is not in future fear, but in present dissatisfaction that Hughes finds material for an Issue. He finds himself emphasizing not the holocaust tomorrow, but the frozen economy today, the society losing its mercy and perspective and sense of humor, the cold-war trade-and-aid policies that make the well-being of American workers at home, and the fight for democracy abroad, secondary to fleeting cold-war alliances and advantages.

But to many in the Hughes camp, and at times to Hughes himself, this shift in emphasis is made reluctantly. It seems characteristic of people in the so-called peace movement that they see themselves as visionaries; they have a tragic insight into the future, which they seek to impart to a not-so-visionary populace.

Unfortunately, too, the Hughes campaign has established a sort of Peacenik level of purity: to talk of disengagement or paramilitary initiatives shows more intellectual integrity (and respect for the voters' intelligence) than to talk of the arms economy in bread-and-butter terms.

Similarly, Hughes is not quick to identify himself as a man who entered the United States Army in 1941 as a private, became chief of Strategic Service operations in the Mediterranean by 1944, and left as a highly decorated lieutenant colonel in 1946. To present such an outstanding record would be politics-as-usual, perhaps.

Tonight Hughes goes on television with George Lodge once again and has his finest opportunity to discuss the domestic implications of the cold war. If there is an organic connection between the arms economy, America's anarchic response to automation and unemployment, this is Mr. Hughes' chance to show it. If he can prove none, he must rely on leaden slogans and intangible fear.

Hughes can either let the paradoxes of his candidacy impose an artificial and monomaniacal integrity on him, or he can weld the protest vote into a large and significant one. He must make the cold war seem more than dangerous; he must make it seem relevant to every citizen of the Commonwealth.