{"id":7507,"date":"2011-01-31T13:45:34","date_gmt":"2011-01-31T20:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=7507"},"modified":"2011-01-31T13:45:34","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T20:45:34","slug":"ghosts-from-the-political-graveyard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2011\/01\/31\/ghosts-from-the-political-graveyard\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts From the Political Graveyard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing my sometimes readings of Kansas political history …
\n… Right?
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Bill Roy was an unlikely cultural combatant.\u00c2\u00a0 An Illinois farmboy, he had grown up knowing no Jews, few Catholics, and only a handful of Democrats, identifiable because the Roosevelt administration had blessed them with postal jobs.\u00c2\u00a0 A self-starter who lost his father at fifteen, Roy got through college in two years and enrolled in medical school.\u00c2\u00a0 He delivered babies on Chicago’s South Side and saw women admitted to the Detroit Receiving Hospital after botched abortions.\u00c2\u00a0 A steint in the Air Force reinforced his distaste for militarism.\u00c2\u00a0 But he was not yet political.\u00c2\u00a0 He had a booming obstetrical practice in Topeka and a large family of his own.\u00c2\u00a0 In 1960 he voted for Nixon.\u00c2\u00a0 He thought Kennedy’s missile-gap issue was phony.<\/p>\n

Four years later Bill Roy voted for Johnson, and four years after that for Humphrey.\u00c2\u00a0 Roy had seen black men humiliated by police; he had inoculated black children in schools whose doors hung from hinges.\u00c2\u00a0 After King’s murder he and his wife, Jane Roy, attended a black church to deliver lay sermons on racial justice.\u00c2\u00a0 Someone poured acid on his car.\u00c2\u00a0 Roy was undeterred.\u00c2\u00a0 In 1970 he finished a law degree after years of squeezing courses into his obstetrical schedule.\u00c2\u00a0 Jane Roy attended with him, matching Phyllis Schlafly’s feat of earning her law degree while raising six children.\u00c2\u00a0 Something about the emotions of the 1960s, hope and anger, lit afire under people.\u00c2\u00a0 Nixon’s refusal to end the war stoked it.\u00c2\u00a0 Roy was attending a medical meeting when he read about Kent State.\u00c2\u00a0 That tore it.\u00c2\u00a0 The condo in Vail could wait.\u00c2\u00a0 He withdrew his savings, switched his party affiliation, and filed to run for the House.<\/p>\n

Kansas rarely sent Democrats to Washington.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet “Dr. Roy for Congress” had a nice logic.\u00c2\u00a0 He and his partners had delivered 20,000 babies in the Topeka area.\u00c2\u00a0 Every time he went to a coffee, he ran into patients or their relatives and friends.\u00c2\u00a0 Black; Hispanics; Junior League:\u00c2\u00a0 Babies were the common denominator.\u00c2\u00a0 Roy discovered that, while voters disliked long-hairs from the University of Kansas, they listened when a clean-cut obstetrician told them Vietnam was tearing families apart.\u00c2\u00a0 He won handily.\u00c2\u00a0 He landed a spot on the Commerce Committee.\u00c2\u00a0 He looked forward to shaping the universal health care he was sure was coming.\u00c2\u00a0 He planned a twenty year career in Congress. […]<\/p>\n

Politics became (Bob) Dole’s life.\u00c2\u00a0 He gained the US House in 1960 and the Senate in 1968.\u00c2\u00a0 He ran as a small-government conservative, aiming his caustic one-liners at LBJ’s Great Society.\u00c2\u00a0 A Nixon loyalist, he was going places, until his 1972 divorce and ill-starred service as Republican national chairman during the Watergate break-in made him vulnerable.\u00c2\u00a0 “It was a tough, tough time for Republicans,” Dole later said.\u00c2\u00a0 “I thought I was going to lose that race.”\u00c2\u00a0 Kansas Democrats scented blood.\u00c2\u00a0 When Governor Robert Docking decided not\u00c2\u00a0to run, they turned to Bill Roy as their natural candidate.<\/p>\n

Roy ran as Mr. Clean, much as Jimmy Carter would two years later.\u00c2\u00a0 By August Dole’s campaign was in disarray, and he was trailing badly in the polls.\u00c2\u00a0 Dole started to throw anything at the wall, trying to find something that would stick.\u00c2\u00a0 One charge that did stick was his accusation, made in the last minute of a debate at the Kansas State Fair, that Roy favored abortion on demand.\u00c2\u00a0 Roy, caught off guard, fumbled for a response.<\/p>\n

Though Dole exaggerated Roy’s position, the issue had undeniable legitimacy.\u00c2\u00a0 At first undecided what to do about Roe, Dole had finally come out for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.\u00c2\u00a0 Roy opposed all such amendments.\u00c2\u00a0 He had once had a woman, a divorced mother and private secretary to a bank president, fall on her knees in his office and beg him to name an abortionist who would not kill her.\u00c2\u00a0 He had written in favor of allowing abortion before twenty weeks of gestation and had helped secure passage of Kansas’s relatively liberal abortion law.\u00c2\u00a0 Under that law he had personally performed a handful of abortions, whose medical necessity had been certified by two other physicians.\u00c2\u00a0 Several involved psychiatric patients:\u00c2\u00a0 Topeka was home to the Menninger Clinic.\u00c2\u00a0 He and his obstetrical partners “never felt were dirty, or unlawful, or unchristian, or anything else, to do them under these circumstances.”<\/p>\n

The pickets at Roy’s speeches begged to differ.\u00c2\u00a0 Skull-and-cross-bones ads appeared in small newspapers.\u00c2\u00a0 Fliers with fetuses in garbage bagas and pro-fhoice quotations appeared under windshild wipers in church parking lots.\u00c2\u00a0 Dole continued to raise the abortion issue in public appearances, though he always denied orchestrating the anti-abortion campaign.\u00c2\u00a0 “We had some crazy people on the right showing these fetuses in jars, … running ads that I never approved.\u00c2\u00a0 ‘Save a life, vote Dole’ or something.\u00c2\u00a0 Crazy things like that.”<\/p>\n

Dole’s authorized ads did stick to conventional themes.\u00c2\u00a0 They charged Roy with voting “like a big city eastern liberal” and of slinging mud at Russell’s finest.\u00c2\u00a0 They did not mention abortion.\u00c2\u00a0 But they did not have to.\u00c2\u00a0 Dole’s verbal jabs — “Ask Roy about those abortions he performed” — had aroused a sleeping giant powerful though not yet well-coordinated.\u00c2\u00a0 “There was a base out there that really responded,” Dole reflected.\u00c2\u00a0 He thought abortion a “big factor” in his narrow, come from behind victory, though was not certain it was decisive.<\/p>\n

Roy was certain.\u00c2\u00a0 In some Catholic preceints he was off 50 votes from his previous tallies, in a race decided by fewer than two votes per precint.\u00c2\u00a0 […]\u00c2\u00a0 He came to see what had happened in 1974 as a parable, one in which the well intentioned amateur discovers that the hardened professional will pick up any stick to save his political life.<\/p>\n

— No Right Turn, David Courtwright, 91-94<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing my sometimes readings of Kansas political history … … Right? Bill Roy was an unlikely cultural combatant.\u00c2\u00a0 An Illinois farmboy, he had grown up knowing no Jews, few Catholics, and only a handful of Democrats, identifiable because the Roosevelt administration had blessed them with postal jobs.\u00c2\u00a0 A self-starter who lost his father at fifteen, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7507"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7511,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7507\/revisions\/7511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}