Alf Landon, Republicans’ Beloved Loser, Dies at 100

Death came Monday to Alfred M. (Alf) Landon, the plain-spoken Kansas Republican who lost the 1936 presidential election in an unprecedented landslide but won the enduring respect and affection of his countrymen with his grace and dignity in defeat.

Landon, who was 100 years old, died in the elegant Colonial-style mansion he built on the outskirts of Topeka in 1937. His wife, Theo, said Landon simply stopped breathing at 5:25 p.m.

Physically vigorous until well into his 10th decade--and intellectually and spiritually vigorous almost until the moment of his death--Landon had been in declining health since the spring of 1979.

He was hospitalized for several days in May of that year, after experiencing an irregular heartbeat, and again in January, 1980, after a slight dizzy spell. In March, 1980, he was afflicted with a painful skin condition called “shingles” but remained active around his 14-room home, kept a hand in his oil and radio enterprises and maintained his lifelong and lively interest in politics.

Landon was last hospitalized two weeks ago at Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center after complaining of internal pain. He was treated for a gallstone and a mild case of bronchitis before returning home Saturday.

President Reagan issued a statement mourning the death of the GOP elder statesman.

“Alf Landon exemplified the very best in public service,” Reagan said Monday. “He deeply loved his country and he was motivated by a genuine desire to help his fellow man. . . . Gov. Landon was a true elder statesman, whose expertise and views were sought and valued by many of us in public life.”

And Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, who is seeking the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, called Landon “a friend and mentor.”

“He was a legendary Republican who taught generations of politicians what integrity and leadership were all about. Always way ahead of his times, his life was a solid century of achievement.”

At least part of Landon’s interest in politics was very personal and familial--his youngest daughter, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1978. Kassebaum had been scheduled to speak Monday night in Hartford, Conn., but headed back to Topeka after learning of her father’s death.

Landon maintained that he played no role in his daughter’s election--in fact discouraged her because of the physical strains of campaigning--and that he had little political influence with her, never offering her political counsel.

But he was obviously proud of his Republican daughter, the only woman currently in the Senate.

“Nancy,” he said shortly after her election, “was a whole lot better campaigner than I was.”

It was precisely this kind of common-sensical human and humorous style that endeared Landon to the public and politicians alike.

And although he had not been a political force for years, he was sought out by politicians and reporters for advice and analysis right up to the last months of his life. Reading as many as a dozen newspapers daily, listening to radio and watching television, he was always up on the latest political developments and liked nothing better than discussing the details with reporters or politicos by the hour.

One of his last public observations on international political affairs--made in an interview with The Times in February, 1980--was that in invading Afghanistan, the Soviet Union had engaged itself in “a religious war.”

“No nation has ever won a war against religion,” he added.

In the same interview, Landon declined to predict who would win the 1980 presidential nominations. But he made it clear that he considered Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan the front-runners.

This role of studying, observing and commenting on the political scene had been Landon’s for more than four decades. He always insisted, however, that politics was not his vocation but his avocation.

Indeed, although trained at the University of Kansas as a lawyer, he never practiced as an attorney and worked full time as a politician for only four years. Like his father before him, he earned his comfortable living primarily as an independent oilman. Late in his career, he also owned and operated four radio stations in Kansas and Colorado.

Spoke at Convention

Landon’s last formal political outing was at the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, 60 miles east of his hometown. It was strictly a ceremonial ritual, but he was given a rousing ovation.

Characteristically, his response to the convention was hearty and humorous:

“You warm the cockles of my heart, whatever that means.”

Although Landon won in two of his three runs at political office, it was as the landslide loser to incumbent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he earned his place in history.

That was in 1936 in the midst of the worst economic depression in American history. But the electorate perceived it as a crisis that was being beaten by the free-spending New Deal measures of the Democrat they had elected four years before.

Landon was elected governor of Kansas in 1932, the same year Roosevelt had been swept into the presidency. He was the only Republican west of the Mississippi to be elected to a state house in that bleak season for the Grand Old Party.

As governor, Landon’s approach to state government was one of strict economy. In his first days in office, he tried to slash his own $5,000-a-year salary by 25%. When the state Legislature refused to vote the cut, he simply returned 25% of each paycheck to the state treasury.

Between 1932 and 1935, he reduced state spending from $29 million annually to $25 million.

In 1934, Landon was reelected, this time the only Republican governor to win anywhere in the country. Almost immediately he became the center of speculation that he would be the national GOP candidate two years later.

His uncle, Pennsylvania public relations man William Mossman, was one of those who urged him to work for the nomination.

“I don’t have any political bees in my bonnet,” Landon wrote to Mossman at the time. But he didn’t quash the idea either. “You might drop a friendly word to your friends,” the Kansan added.

By December, 1934, Landon-for-President clubs were being organized--and the governor was being referred to by friends as “The Kansas Lincoln.” By 1935, Roosevelt was predicting that Landon would be his opponent in the next election.

And by late that year, Chicago publisher Frank Knox and former President Herbert Hoover, among others who hoped for the 1936 GOP nomination, were forming a “stop Landon” movement.

In part because of his personal amiability and integrity--which always came through on a person-to-person level--and in part because he simply worked harder and with more political shrewdness than his rivals, Landon went into the 1936 convention with the nomination locked up.

By a vote of 984 to 16 (for Sen. William Borah of Idaho), Landon won on the first ballot. Frank Knox became his vice presidential running mate.

Pundit-humorist Irvin S. Cobb called Landon’s nomination “a quiet interment for the Republican Old Guard.”

And in many ways it was, for Landon was, by the party’s standards of the time, a Republican liberal. To this day a number of political observers consider him the first “modern” Republican, forerunner of those who finally worked for and won the presidency for Dwight David Eisenhower in 1952.

But, although his folksy charm, sincerity and down-to-earth intelligence came through strongly in one-to-one and small-group settings, Landon seldom sparked enthusiasm among the masses at Depression-era grass-roots rallies.

Poor Speech Writing

One reason was that he was a hesitant, often awkward orator compared to the witty and frequently eloquent Roosevelt. Landon’s speech writers didn’t help him much, providing him more often with phrases turned of solid lead than of sparkling gold. For example, in one of his first campaign speeches, he was given this ludicrous line to deliver:

“Wherever I have gone in this country, I have found Americans.”

He did utter one phrase, according to his biographer, Donald McCoy, that became immortal--but not until nearly 25 years later, when it was spoken by John F. Kennedy: “A New Frontier.”

Landon’s publicist-poets did not serve him well either. They gave him a campaign song, sung to the tune of “Oh, Susanna,” that went:

“Oh, Alf Landon!/He’s the man for me!/’Cause he comes from prairie Kansas/His country for to free!”

By contrast, Roosevelt’s campaign song was the rousing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” catchy and bright and just what Depression-weary folks wanted to hear.

Despite Landon’s hard-working campaign, despite expenditure of $9 million in his behalf by his party (the Democrats spent about half that) and despite predictions by such distinguished figures as columnist Walter Krock of the New York Times and by the respected Literary Digest that he would beat Roosevelt, the personable Kansan suffered the greatest loss, up to that time, in American political history.

The popular vote was Roosevelt 27,478,945, Landon 16,674,665. The electoral vote was 523 to 8. Landon failed to carry even his home state. He did win in Maine and Vermont, giving rise to this revision of an old political axiom: “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”

When news photographers gathered to take pictures of him the day after the disaster, Landon posed in front of what was supposed to have been his victory cake. Smiling wryly, he turned to his wife, Theo, and urged her to join him for the pictures: “Come on, Mother, and get your picture took--it will be the last chance.”

Political analysts, their vision sharpened by the focus of hindsight, later saw Landon’s defeat as inevitable, particularly in view of the public’s perception of him as a knee-jerk conservative Republican, even as an anti-labor tool of Wall Street. It was a perception intensified by Landon’s endorsement by such old-line Republicans as Hoover, whom voters blamed for the Depression, and such right-wingers as publisher William Randolph Hearst.

Landon complained that during the campaign he was surrounded by “Republican stuffed shirts instead of working men,” although he was, by contrast to most of the GOP at that time, a friend of labor unions.

Whatever Landon’s feeling in his heart of hearts, he never expressed any sourness or personal sense of failure at his stunning defeat. In one of his last interviews, the old campaigner claimed he never felt any personal animosity toward Roosevelt, even though each had denounced the other during the campaign.

“I don’t feel any bitterness at all,” he said, “I don’t believe anyone could have beaten him at that time.”

Paradoxically, Landon’s defeat by Roosevelt was both the zenith and nadir of his political career.

As titular leader of the GOP from 1936 to 1940, he rejected the idea of ever seeking political office again, but spoke out often on the issues. Usually, he was strongly critical of Roosevelt and what he called the “dictatorial” drift of his Administration, although he sometimes supported the President, mostly on national defense issues.

In May, 1940, Landon fended off a not too subtle maneuver by the crafty Democrat to include him in a “coalition Cabinet” that might have stifled his opposition to Roosevelt’s third-term presidency.

“That,” he said in an interview four decades later, “would have destroyed the Republican Party.”

Although he originally backed Thomas Dewey for the 1940 GOP nomination, he supported Wendell Willkie in his losing campaign to oust Roosevelt.

As war approached, Landon’s position was seen by many as isolationist. He opposed the Lend Lease Bill to provide arms to Great Britain. Instead, he advocated a strong defense of the Western Hemisphere.

“Let us arm ourselves so terrifically that we can lick any nation or combinations that are foolish enough to attack here,” he urged.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Landon wired Roosevelt: “Please command me in any way I can be of service.”

And he gave his full support to the war effort and to the nation’s allies, but he continued to speak out on his suspicions about Russian motives and Roosevelt’s increasing power.

He opposed Roosevelt’s fourth term, split with Willkie and supported Dewey in the 1944 presidential campaign. Four years later, he was one of the first to promote Eisenhower as a potential Republican candidate for President.

Influence Ebbed

But by then, his political influence was definitely in decline; through the 1950s and 1960s he didn’t even attend GOP conventions. Always independent minded--he had with his father bolted from the Republican Party in 1912 to support the “Bull Moose” Progressive Party of Theodore Roosevelt (who remained his political hero the rest of his life)--Landon still spoke out during this period, sometimes taking positions that boggled GOP regulars.

At one point he called for the resignation of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. In 1953, almost unthinkable for a Republican of the time, he called for America to consider admission of Communist China to the United Nations. And occasionally he even expressed a certain admiration for Harry S. Truman and, later, for John F. Kennedy.

Meantime, he devoted himself to his family and his businesses. Landon’s first wife, Margaret, died in 1918 after bearing him a daughter, Peggy Anne. He married Theo Cobb in 1930, and she bore him a son, John, and another daughter, Nancy, the future U.S. senator.

Born in Middlesex, Pa., on Sept. 9, 1887, Landon was raised in Ohio and Kansas, moving west with his father, John Landon, as he looked for new oil fields. As a youngster, Landon was both athlete and scholar, and after his political influence began to fade in the late 1940s, he returned to athletics and scholarship with a passion.

He jogged around Topeka long before jogging became a fad and continued the exercise well into his 80s.

A horseman all his life, he rode his beloved Big Red along the Kaw River near his home almost every day for a quarter of a century. He finally gave up riding, but not caring for, Big Red in the fall of 1979.

When not busy with his family or oil and radio enterprises, he read and studied history and politics. He kept up a constant correspondence with politicians, reporters, businessmen. Often he hosted them in his book-lined study. Invariably the subject was politics.

Silver-haired, rumpled and a bit hard of hearing, Landon was still a delightful--if sometimes challenging and cranky--conversationalist. He loved throwing out such aphorisms as: “The art of governing must be preceded by the art of getting elected.” Sometimes he would demand: “Now argue with me on this if you don’t agree!”

Occasionally, as when he was asked about Richard M. Nixon, his lined old face would cloud with what seemed a mix of anger and sadness. Although he had supported Nixon in 1968 and 1972--in fact had seen something of a revival of his own political standing as a result--he allowed that he was wrong in his assessment of him.

“Sure, I was disillusioned with him,” he told an interviewer late in 1980. “I was asked to review that last book of his, but I wouldn’t do it.”

His point was that he didn’t want to do anything that might promote or apologize for Nixon.

“I thought he should keep out of the limelight,” he said. Then, in what may have been a slip of the tongue: “I thought he should just stay there in San Quentin (did he mean San Clemente?), but now he’s back in New York, worming his way back into public attention.”

He quickly changed the subject.

When his interviewer finally asked a question that infringed upon the old man’s own sense of modesty (“How do you account for the affection in which you are held after all these years?”), he flared up angrily in his embarrassment.

“Goddamn it, sir, why do you ask a question like that? How can I answer a question like that?”

Then, realizing his irritation had taken his guest somewhat aback, his tone softened and his face creased into a smile.

“Whatever it is, it’s up to you to observe it if you see it. It’s your business to tell it--I don’t lie awake nights thinking about it. I don’t try to analyze me the way you do.”

And he smiled again.