The Washington Post’s indefatigable conservative blogger, Jennifer Rubin, who’s been very critical of Rick Santorum of late, wrote a blogpost quoting a Chicago radio interview in which Santorum revealed he had never been to Afghanistan and then does some investigation herself and reports, in a blogpost headlined “Santorum the homebody?”, that his only reported foreign travel in his 16 years in Congress was three trips to Italy. Seems pretty minimal. Next question: where has Mitt Romney traveled? We know about the car trip with the dog, but not much about any other foreign travel.
Rubin thinks that lack of exposure to foreign travel is a liability for a candidate for president, a perfectly reasonable position but one which has not been heeded always by our great political parties. George W. Bush received some chiding from liberals in the press for not having traveled abroad very much (he did go to China when his father was the U.S. envoy there). But the champion in this regard, though none of the press liberals brought it, was the 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. An intelligent and well-informed man—it was said that his idea of vacation reading was a tome on Swedish land use planning—he evidently had no desire whatever to see foreign countries. His only travel abroad, as I recall, consisted of (obviously campaign-inspired) trips to Greece, where his parents were born, and Israel. Here I think I can breach a confidentiality agreement some 24 years after the fact. As a Washington Post editorial writer, I attended a meeting with Dukakis with Washington Post reporters and editors. Katharine Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Co., asked Dukakis, “Who do you see when you go to London and Paris?” Dukakis replied, “I’ve never been to London or Paris.”
Mrs. Graham was of a generation and a background in which it was assumed you made annual trips to the great cities of Europe. Franklin Roosevelt, 35 years her senior, traveled as a boy every summer to Paris and a German spa; he was fluent in French and German, which helped him understand Hitler’s speeches on short-wave radio. Walter Lippmann, a few years younger, had an annual routine in which he held a giant garden party at his house in Cleveland Park in June, then took an ocean liner and spent a couple of weeks each in London and Paris, then spent the rest of his summer at his house in Maine where he could hobnob with prominent New Yorkers also summering there. Mrs. Graham, as she makes clear in her beautifully written autobiography Personal History http://www.amazon.com/Personal-History-Katharine-Graham/dp/0375701044/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332269264&sr=1-1, made a point of maintaining friendships with many of the leading politicians, journalists and intellectuals in Britain and France. A well-informed person, she believed, should be in touch with the thinking of Raymond Aron, the French intellectual, and should be part of the conversation at the A-list dinners given by Pamela Berry (wife of the proprietor of the Telegraph and daughter of the witty politician Lord Birkenhead). For someone who had witnessed the upheavals of the 1930s, world war in the 1940s and the Cold War in the years thereafter, this made a lot of sense.
Michael Dukakis obviously did not share this view. As we were filing out of the room I could hear Mrs. Graham whisper, with astonishment, “He’s never been to London or Paris.” It would not be accurate to say that the Post’s endorsements are or were dictated by the proprietor; in my experience they were determined by a kind of consensus and with considerable deliberation in which discussion was led by editorial page editor Meg Greenfield and in which Mrs. Graham participated. But in any case it is a matter of public record that the Post did not endorse a candidate for president that year.
