Smoke-Filled Rooms

By Hugh Sidey

Presidential Contender Walter Mondale, the grand acquisitor of political endorsements, publicly spurns his most passionate devotees. Across this land some 10 million cigar smokers yearn for a front-page picture of Mondale, the only dedicated cigar smoker among the Democratic contenders, with his Punch panatela at a defiant angle. Or maybe 30 seconds on Tom Brokaw's news, showing a sweet cloud of Partagas No. 1 smoke carrying off the burdens of another campaign day.

What comfort that would be for a nation weary of chemical purity. The great English writer John Galsworthy had it right: "By the cigars they smoke ... ye shall know the texture of men's souls." But Mondale will not allow the camera when he lights up or even just chews a bit on a fragrant Montecruz No. 55. "It makes Fritz look like a politician," declared Joan Mondale a few years back. Heaven's sakes, Joan, what is he?

We have not had a serious cigar smoker in the White House since John Kennedy, and it has been downhill ever since. Kennedy loved a couple of postprandial H. Upmann Demitasses. He could see the world better after his smoke. Indeed, in the tense days of 1962 he sent Pierre Salinger, his cigar-loving press secretary, out one night to round up a thousand of the Upmanns. A bewildered Salinger appeared next morning to assure the President he had commandeered this great treasure, whereupon J.F.K. sighed, "Thank goodness, I can sign this." He pulled the Cuban trade embargo from his desk and penned his signature, ending, among other things, the importation of Havana cigars. The world, as we well know, has never been as mellow since.

Walter Mondale became serious about cigars when he was in the Senate. His taste was, well, rather random. He took anything offered. Once he became Vice President, he had access to the really fine leaves, like Hoyo de Monterrey. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who relished the Cubans and other top grades, tutored Mondale. "You better take advantage of the good cigars," he counseled. "You don't get much else in that job." Mondale listened.

History gives cigars their just place in civilization. Without his huge Jamaican cigars, Winston Churchill might not have led the Allies to victory in World War II. Wrote Churchill's fellow Brit, Rudyard Kipling, who, like Churchill, got his start in the wars in India: "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."

Sad to say, both Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge were cigar smokers up to and through the White House years. They could not have been true connoisseurs, since historians have dealt rather harshly with them.

It is time for Mondale to stand up for his cigars. One of his illustrious predecessors in the vice presidency achieved immortality by such an astute move. Thomas Riley Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's Vice President, was listening to a Senate debate, a dreary recitation about what was needed in the U.S., when suddenly he had a grand vision. Said Marshall: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar." Marshall, a Hoosier, was a man of consequence. He was a Phi Beta Kappa from Wabash College and was judged the most popular Vice President the country had ever had up to that time. His wisdom knew no bounds. "Democrats, like poets, are born, not made," he said. Late in life Marshall gathered his thoughts in a splendid little volume written, as he put it, "in the hope that the tired businessman, the unsuccessful golfer and the lonely husband whose wife is out reforming the world may find therein a half hour's surcease from sorrow." Along with cigar smokers, these folks could make a national majority for Mondale.

Only Mondale's lack of imagination keeps him a clandestine cigar smoker. In the desperate years of 1932, Marshall's "five-cent cigar" plea was upgraded by Columnist Franklin P. Adams to "What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel." The possibilities for Mondale along that line in today's world are limitless.