Robert E. Hartley, Charles H. Percy: A Political Perspective. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1975, 255 pp. $8.95
THE COUNTY chairmen and other wheel horses who largely control Republican party decisions in Illinois didn't stand up and cheer two years ago when Charles H. Percy was a full-steam-ahead candidate for the presidential nomination. As a group they have never liked Illinois' senior U.S. senator whose ambitions bring out their suicidal impulses.
This leaves Percy, an outspoken moderate who started in politics at the top as an Elsenhower protege, with the problem of being a leader of a conservative party. His grass roots following twice elected him to the U.S. Senate by impressive majorities. And, as a member of the committees on economic policy and foreign relations, he votes and speaks for policies approved by conservatives.
But most of the state's county and district leaders have no affinity with the self-made millionaire who at the age of 29 was president of a major corporation, Bell and Howell. They are the men who in mid-1952 thought that Elsenhower would be a loser. They didn't learn anything in 1964 when Goldwater didn't sweep the country, and now they privately prefer Ronald Reagan as their 1976 nominee.
The story of Percy's 18-month campaign, which closed down when Gerald R. Ford became President, is told in Charles H. Percy: A Political Perspective. It is one of the best political biographies in years.
Robert E. Hartley, the Decatur-based editor of the Lindsay-Schaub newspaper chain and author of this book, avoids the usual conservative-liberal tags and classifies Percy as a moderate. The non-Percyites, many of whom believe that Richard M. Nixon was treated unfairly, he calls traditionalists. Nixon, while still in the White House, vowed that Percy would never live there.
Percy's presidential committee raised $230,000 — more than it spent — as a start toward the millions that would be budgeted for midwestern primaries and a hoped-for final showdown in California. Hartley says that 51 per cent of the statewide vote in the 1976 Illinois primary in March would have been regarded by Percy as a mandate. That would have been questionable, since the preferential voting is only a popularity contest that does not bind the district delegates elected the same day.
Before he withdrew at the start of the Ford presidency, Percy had not faced the delegate problem. Hartley isn't certain that Percy would have challenged the traditionalists by entering his own slate in his home state. Independence and the surmounting of obstacles have been Percy's trademarks, and he expected to do well in other states. But, at the convention in Kansas City, Percy could have been the Illinois non-favorite son. It would have been one of the most interesting chapters in Illinois political history. (Illinois Gov. Frank 0. Lowden failed to win the 1920 GOP nomination in part because 17 delegates controlled by Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson would not vote for him.)
Hartley reveals that Percy is not sorry that he failed in his first candidacy against Otto Kerner for governor in 1964. That was when the county chairmen, during the early counting of their chickens, caused trouble by wanting Percy to be as conservative as Goldwater. A third-term reelection in 1978 would put Percy near the top of the Republican Senate leadership. In these uncertain times, it is not impossible that he will be on the national ticket this year.
Hartley also tells us that in 1962 Percy brashly considered running against Sen. Everett M. Dirksen, the pride of the county chairmen. In 1968, two years after Percy replaced Paul H. Douglas in the U.S. Senate, Percy endorsed Nelson Rockefeller for president when Nixon was certain to get the nomination. At that time, Nixon was considering tapping Percy for vice president. And if that had happened, who would be president today instead of Gerald R. Ford?
February 1976/Illinois Issues/13