MICHIGAN: Governor and God

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Luren Dudley Dickinson, the Governor of Michigan, balanced himself on a milk stool on the lawn of his capitol at Lansing one afternoon last week, milking Miss Ormsby, a Holstein cow. The occasion: National Milk Week. Suddenly His Excellency shifted his seat, toppled off his perch. Unless Luren Dickinson, aged 80, abandoned one of his cardinal tenets as he sprawled on the grass, he prayed.

Governor Dickinson is a Republican and a Methodist. Each Sunday at the Center Eaton Methodist Church near his home town, Charlotte, he still teaches a Bible Class. Dry and anti-tobacconist, he was elected Michigan's Lieutenant Governor seven times, presided over the State Senate in decent obscurity. Then last March conservative Republican Governor Frank Fitzgerald died and Luren Dickinson succeeded him. In the past three months he has given Michigan its godliest and goofiest government.

Craving guidance, octogenarian Governor Dickinson first imported from Charlotte two cronies: Dr. Henry Allen Moyer, his personal physician; Emerson R. Boyles, old-line political warhorse who had served under Governor Fitzgerald as his legal adviser. Dr. Moyer's duties include protecting frail, doddery Mr. Dickinson's health, driving with him back & forth to the Governor's Charlotte farm (20 miles from Lansing), where Mr. Dickinson putters in his garden. Dr. Moyer also spends a good deal of time behind a newspaper in the gubernatorial office, occasionally offering his patient nuggets of statesman'y wisdom ("I have a few ideas about government, too"). For these services, he receives $3,000 a year from the State as a medical secretary.

At $7,000, Crony Boyles is more active. The Governor's official legal aide and unofficial Pooh-Bah, he not only dispenses legal advice, but sometimes signs State papers in the Dickinson name. Himself and Colleague Moyer he modestly characterizes as "just a couple of fellows hanging on to the public tit." Other Dickinson indispensables include: smooth, young Secretary Leslie Butler—who siphons callers so carefully into his master's office that the Detroit Citizens' League once complained: "Honest citizens can't get in" —and Personal Secretary Margaret Shaw, whom, the Governor says, God sent him. ("I know there is a girl in my office answering letters in exactly the language I would use. I snooped one time, and there were the letters just as I would have written them. Who has been giving her that language? There is but one answer.")

No. 1 counselor to the 54th Governor of Michigan is God. In his office every morning the Governor prays for five minutes (see cut). Prayer, he says, brought him Boyles & Moyer, helped him choose many another political appointee. ("We were looking for a man to fill a certain State office. Suddenly the name . . . was made clear to me. I mentioned it. My legal aide, Emerson R. Boyles, said to me: 'You have a pipeline.' 'Yes,' I said, 'I have a pipeline to God.' ")

Other Michiganders, however, are not so sanguine about their Governor's brain-trust, view with alarm many an example of Luren Dickinson's recent statecraft. Since March he: