Poor Mr. Bliss! He is expected to accomplish what at a sublimer level even Pope John XXIII could only hope to accomplish. Ecumenism is in the air, but so, the world continues to discover, is sectarianism. Mr. Bliss took on the job of knitting together the Republican Party, and so far he has greatly failed to do so, in part his fault, in part not his fault.
It is a platitude to say that the Republican Party is deeply divided. It is not a platitude to say that the reasons for the division within the Republican Party are profoundly important. One of the difficulties Mr. Bliss faces is, for a change in Republican affairs, a moderately intransigent right wing. A great many Republicans—not inconceivably they are a majority—are concerned for the welfare of their party only for so long as it represents a substantial alternative to the programs of the Democratic Party. Mr. Bliss, who is primarily a technician, and very probably has not divulged even to his wife what are his own ideological sympathies, accepted his job as chairman of the Republican Party on a dubious assumption. His reasoning was: Senator Goldwater’s Republican Party was soundly trounced at the polls. Therefore, the “other” Republican Party, the Republican Party of Rockefeller, Scranton, Romney, Eisenhower, Nixon (a rough attempt to move from left to right), is the Party to nurse back into a position of predominance. Having taken these reckonings, Ray Bliss went to Washington and started, as a beginning, to conduct a blood purge of anyone working for the Republican National Committee who had ever smiled at Barry Goldwater.
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