The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  John Doar, prosecuting for the Justice Department, called forty-one witnesses. They revealed that the murders had been no crime of passion. Schwerner, who had preceded the main body of CFO volunteers, had been marked for death by the Klan nine days before he was killed for having eaten and slept in the homes of Negroes. He and his two companions had been seized after a wild chase and taken to a lonely dirt road. One of the Klansmen had spun Schwerner around and asked him, “Are you that nigger lover?” Schwerner had replied, “Sir, I know how you feel.” Those had been his last words. Goodman, too, had been swiftly murdered. One Klansman had been disappointed because the two white volunteers had been put to death before he could fire. He had shot Chaney, saying, “At least I killed me a nigger.”

  One day after retiring to consider the evidence the jury reported that it was hopelessly deadlocked. Judge Cox refused to accept the stalemate. Instead he issued new instructions, among them the so-called “dynamite charge” which had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898 as a way to jolt a deadlocked jury into a decision. Under it jurors in the minority were urged to “carefully examine and reconsider” their opinions, weighing the feelings of the majority. The judge also told them that he would approve a mixed verdict. During a recess at this point Deputy Price and another defendant, Wayne Roberts, a salesman of automobile trailers, blundered. They told spectators in the federal building corridors that they were going to fix the judge. Roberts was heard to say, “Judge Cox gave the jury the dynamite charge. Well, we have some dynamite for him ourselves.” Word of this reached the judge. Ordering them to the bench, he said, “If you think you can intimidate this court, you are sadly mistaken. I’m not going to let any wild man loose on any civilized society.” With that, he ordered them locked up and denied them bail. On October 20 the jury found seven of the men, including Price and Roberts, guilty. Sheriff Rainey and seven others were acquitted. Over three years had passed since the crime, but the Justice Department was jubilant. The verdict had made history; for the first time, a federal jury of white Mississippians had convicted white defendants in a civil rights case. On December 29 Judge Cox sentenced the seven to jail terms ranging from three years to ten—the maximum.

  ***

  It was the year of Goldwater. In seven consecutive national conventions of the past, beginning with the nomination of Landon in 1936, Republican conservatives had suppressed their yearning for a presidential candidate from their own ranks. This time they did not suppress it. This time they turned to Au + H2O = 1964. They wanted A Choice, Not an Echo, as their placards proclaimed, and on July 15 they nominated Barry Morris Goldwater, Arizona’s senior senator and a denizen of deep right field.

  The fact is that the party felt desperate. George Gallup had discovered that during the past quarter-century the GOP had lost a third of its members; the number of Americans who regarded themselves as Republicans had diminished 13 percent, while the number of Democrats had increased 11 percent. Goldwater and his people had an explanation for this. The GOP, their argument went, had been choosing “me too” candidates—moderate Republicans who merely repeated Democratic promises. Their conclusion was that because the Democrats were originals and the Republican moderates mere carbon copies, the GOP had been repeatedly defeated, voters tending to prefer the real thing.

  Here the skating reached thin ice. Polls indicated that a majority of the electorate favored the middle of the road. The Republican right-wingers denied it. They were convinced that out in the country there was a hidden conservative majority. It was, they insisted, the key fact in American politics. Lacking a home, these disgruntled conservatives had scorned both parties. On election days they went fishing or stayed home. To them the result was a matter of no consequence; either way they were going to be stuck with liberals, leftists, socialists, “collectivists,” “bleeding hearts.” Nominate a genuine conservative, said the Goldwater ideologues, and this hidden majority would come swarming into the streets and elect a real American.

  Although President Kennedy had been convinced that Barry Goldwater would be the Republican nominee in 1964, Goldwater himself wasn’t so sure, and other GOP leaders were slow in taking him seriously. The struggle over who would become the standard-bearer turned into an odd one. The Arizonan had announced his candidacy from his sun-drenched Scottsdale, Arizona, patio on January 3. The next Republican to throw a hat in the ring had been a woman, Margaret Chase Smith. The first primary, in New Hampshire, was won with write-in votes by a man who hadn’t announced at all, Henry Cabot Lodge. Nelson Rockefeller then divulged that he was available; next William Scranton of Pennsylvania said he was.

  Until the last of the big primaries, in California on June 2, almost everyone seemed to believe that someone would take it away from Goldwater. The likeliest one was Rockefeller. Then, on May 30, a Saturday, the second Mrs. Rockefeller gave birth to Nelson A. Rockefeller Jr.—thereby reminding California Republicans of the New York governor’s recent divorce. Overnight he lost seven percentage points in the Lou Harris poll. On Tuesday Goldwater received 51 percent of the primary vote and Rockefeller 49 percent. At the convention the Arizonan’s well-organized legions then deflected all opposition and took the prize with an overwhelming 883 delegate votes on the first ballot. Thereupon the nominee deepened the division in the party by giving the moderates the rough side of his tongue in a memorable passage: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And… moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

  Barry Goldwater was fifty-five years old, a man of absolute integrity, and one of the most charming politicians ever to run for the Presidency. Handsome, leonine, silver-haired, with the black horn-rimmed spectacles which were his trademark, he had become one of the most celebrated public men in the nation and certainly the best-known conservative. Goldwater represented a love for the best of the past and defiance toward the worst of the present. In his crisp, low southwestern drawl he reminded the country of American maxims and ethical certitudes which had lost their validity but not their fascination. It was his special talent that he could make them seem both plausible and relevant.

  Away from the Senate he was a mishmash of anachronisms. For all his summoning of the legends of the past, he was a major general in the Air Force reserve, a hot jet pilot, and a tremendous admirer of sophisticated technology. (In San Francisco he buckled himself into the cockpit of his private jet and zoomed back and forth over the Cow Palace while his name was being placed in nomination.) He was an expert radio ham; he maintained expensive sending and receiving sets in his suburban Phoenix home and his Washington apartment, and he brought a third to the San Francisco convention. He was also a superb photographer; a volume of his desert studies had been issued. Perhaps his most significant acquisition was the twenty-five-foot flagpole at his Arizona home. It was equipped with a photoelectric device which automatically raised the colors when the dawn light reached it and lowered them as twilight deepened, thereby assuring a display of patriotism even when no one was home.

  “Viva olé! Viva olé!” chanted his faithful followers. They were passionate, they were exuberant, and sometimes they were frightening. One unforgettable moment came in the Cow Palace when Nelson Rockefeller took the rostrum to urge the adoption of minority resolutions which had been drafted by the platform committee. The galleries, packed with Goldwaterites, booed him and shouted, “We want Barry!” Some men would be daunted by this, but Rockefeller relished it. “This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” he taunted, and as their fury mounted and they roared with rage, he described some of the tactics which had been used against him in the California primary: “These things have no place in America, but I can personally testify to their existence, and so can countless others who have also experienced midnight and early morning telephone calls, unsigned threatening letters, smear and hate literature, strong-arm and goon tactics, bomb threats and bombings, infiltration and take-over of established political organizations by Communist and Nazi methods.”

  By
this time there were people in the galleries who were all but lying on the floor and drumming their heels. Chairman Thruston B. Morton vainly gaveled for order while the Goldwater delegates on the floor—aware that this demonstration of ferocity was hurting their man in the eyes of the television audience—pleaded for quiet. The storm of abuse continued unabated, and Rockefeller, grinning, delivered another thrust: “Some of you don’t like to hear it, ladies and gentlemen, but it’s the truth.”

  It was part of the truth. Goldwater and his managers permitted no little old ladies in tennis shoes in their organization. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of their campaign was that it was too disciplined, too lacking in spontaneity. After the convention the senator sent two of his very straight young men, Dean Burch and John Grenier, to take over the Republican National Committee, Burch as chairman and Grenier as executive director. They spent five full weeks putting it in order—five weeks when they should have been campaigning. The day after the election in November Goldwater’s finance chairman elatedly announced that his books were in the black.

  A shrewder politician would have used his acceptance speech to woo the losers. He might even have visited the vanquished, as Eisenhower had done with Taft in 1952. But Goldwater had been angered by dirty tricks, too, and for all his generosity of spirit he wasn’t a healer. In August, too late, he sat down in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with the party’s elders—Rockefeller, Eisenhower, Nixon, William Scranton, and George Romney—in an effort to bind up wounds and plan a master election strategy. It was a wasted day. They lacked a conciliatory spirit, and none had any useful campaign ideas. Mostly they complained. It was after this meeting, and in part as a consequence of it, that Republicans running for other offices began avoiding the presidential standard-bearer, even declining to share the same platform with him.

  IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT, read the Goldwater billboards, pins, and bumper stickers. There was some truth to it. In his three books and eight hundred newspaper columns he had tackled many sacred cows which deserved it. Over the past half-century the federal bureaucracy had grown to something in the order of fifty or sixty times its original size. Its officials were often arrogant and overbearing, and some of the practices that the government either employed itself or encouraged in others had plainly outlived their usefulness—among them labor featherbedding, depletion allowances, farm price supports, and subsidies to peanut growers. Senator Goldwater was trenchant on the subject of these, and here millions of Americans knew in their hearts—or at any rate believed—that he was right.

  The difficulty was that he had said, done, and written so many other things, some of them bizarre. He had offered to sell TVA for a dollar. He had said that he wished it were possible to saw off the eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea. He had depicted all of America’s great cities as sin-steeped Babylons. At various times he had advocated the elimination of rural electrification, the replacement of the National Labor Relations Board, and a new U.S. Supreme Court. Here Americans knew in their hearts that he was wrong.

  His opponent was one of the most masterful politicians in the history of the country; as a result, the flaws in Goldwater’s armor were deftly exposed, over and over, so that he was put on the defensive and remained there. Atomic warfare was a particularly devastating issue. Speaking in Hartford on October 24, 1963, Goldwater had said that he believed the size of the American military presence could be reduced by as much as a third if NATO “commanders” were authorized to use tactical nuclear weapons in a crisis. That put the Bomb in the campaign, and it remained there to the end.

  As exploited by Rockefeller in New Hampshire’s January campaign, it was a legitimate campaign issue. The Democrats probably went too far in what became known as their “Daisy Girl” television spot, first shown on September 7. NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies that evening, David and Bathsheba, starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, was interrupted for an idyllic picture of a child pulling the petals off a daisy and counting them; as she did, the picture dissolved into a mushroom cloud. The Republicans were understandably incensed. Yet Goldwater had failed and continued to fail to clarify his Hartford remarks. At the very least his manner of referring to nuclear weapons was disturbing. A candidate for the Presidency of the United States ought not to speak of “lobbing one into the men’s room at the Kremlin.” On one occasion when Goldwater was supposed to be exorcising the shadow of the Bomb, Charles Mohr of the New York Times counted almost thirty such phrases as “push the button,” “atomic holocaust,” and “nuclear annihilation.” That was not the way to reassure the people. IN YOUR HEART, the Democrats said in a wicked thrust, YOU KNOW HE MIGHT.

  Another issue digging graves for Republican hopes was social security. Here the trouble had begun on January 6 in New Hampshire. In reply to a question, Goldwater said that he favored improving social security by making contributions voluntary. The next day’s Concord, New Hampshire, Monitor carried the head, GOLDWATER SETS GOALS: END SOCIAL SECURITY. The senator protested, but plainly that would be the consequence of voluntary participation; payments to retired workers must come from young workers, who are no more eager than anyone else to pay taxes if they can get out of it. In the Democrats’ TV spot on this, two hands tore up a social security card. Since social security affects a hundred million Americans, it would have been hard to find a theme of greater interest.

  ***

  Goldwater had other problems; he had voted against the nuclear test ban treaty and—the previous June—the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights bill. The consequences of his record became clearer and clearer as one conservative newspaper after another endorsed Johnson, and ultimately even the Republican candidate could see it. Poll figures had never been so lopsided; Gallup had Johnson over Goldwater 65 to 29 percent. After the election the Arizonan remarked that he should have realized that it was all over in San Francisco, before the campaigning had even begun. As it was, he said, he knew in August that it was hopeless. That had the ring of hindsight. As late as October he was giving lip service, at least, to confidence in victory. Whatever his expectations, though, he never tried to improve his chances with low blows. He admonished audiences that hissed Johnson (“Don’t boo the office of the Presidency”). When F. Clifton White, one of his advisers, produced a documentary film called Choice, exploiting the ghetto riots with shocking scenes of marauding Negroes, Goldwater called it racist and suppressed it. And he refused to capitalize on, or even to discuss, reports of an impending scandal in the Johnson campaign—the arrest of the President’s chief aide on a charge of committing sodomy in a public toilet.

  The aide was Walter Jenkins, who, exhausted by overwork, had yielded to temptations he might otherwise have suppressed. Jenkins had left the White House for a few hours on October 7 to attend a cocktail party celebrating the occupancy of new offices by Newsweek’s Washington bureau. After several drinks he left and walked two blocks to the Washington YMCA. The basement men’s room was known to him as a trysting place for homosexuals. Unfortunately the Washington police knew it, too, and at about 7:30 P.M. Jenkins and an elderly army veteran were arrested by an officer who had been watching them through a peephole. They were taken to a police station, where it was discovered that five years earlier Jenkins had been arrested on the same charge. Newspapermen were reluctant to make this public, but they had no choice once Dean Burch called attention to “a report sweeping Washington that the White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security”—an early instance of incautious use of this phrase by the Republican right. Once the report was public, Jenkins entered a hospital with a diagnosis of “extreme fatigue.” Burch and many of Goldwater’s other advisers begged him to avail himself of this opportunity to hammer away at what they called a shocking example of immorality on the highest level of the administration. He declined.

  Johnson anxiously commissioned an Oliver Quayle survey to find out how many votes the disaster would cost. None to speak of, was Quayle’s surprising conc
lusion, and the sad incident swiftly faded from public memory. Goldwater’s compassion was only part of the explanation for this. Another part was that just as people had begun talking about Jenkins they were rocked by three startling developments in foreign affairs. Within forty-eight hours on October 15–16, Khrushchev was stripped of power and deposed, Communist China announced that it had exploded its first atomic bomb, and Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s Conservative government fell. The White House press corps talked of Johnsonian luck. He was having a lot of it; when Lady Bird Johnson headed south with a group of southern administration wives on a sixteen-car train christened “The Lady Bird Special,” they were met by hecklers—the one reception sure to win sympathy, and votes, elsewhere.

  Johnson met the Lady Bird Special in New Orleans, where he then delivered his finest speech of the campaign. It was risky—a fiery appeal for civil rights, delivered against the advice of Senator Russell Long—and that alone would have made it memorable. The last line, however, made it unforgettable. After appealing for an end to bigotry he said that he was going to enforce and observe the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“I’m not going to let them build up the hate and try to buy my people by appealing to their prejudice”), and then he told how, when Sam Rayburn first went to Congress, he had had a long talk with an ailing southern senator who said he wished he felt well enough to take one more trip home. “I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech,” Johnson quoted the senator as saying. “I just feel I’ve got one more in me. Poor old state, they haven’t heard a real Democratic speech in thirty years. All they ever hear at election time is nigra, nigra, nigra.” The audience gasped, recovered, and gave him a five-minute standing ovation.

  The record of other LBJ campaign highlights does not always read so well. This is particularly true in regard to Vietnam. Accusing Goldwater of loose talk and loose thinking about nuclear weapons was powerful political medicine. The Democrats couldn’t resist ever stronger doses of it. The “Daisy Girl” TV spot was followed by another on September 17 which was so outrageous that it was run but once; it showed a lovely child eating an ice cream cone while a voice told of strontium 90 poisoning the air and reminded viewers that Goldwater had voted against the test ban treaty. The senator’s suggestion that atomic bombs might be used to “defoliate” the Ho Chi Minh Trail was cited as an example of his irresponsibility and militarism. But this was a dangerous topic for Johnson. It reminded voters that Americans were in a hot war in Vietnam and that Goldwater hadn’t put them there. To keep the momentum of the peace issue, therefore, the President made certain pledges to the country which would not be forgotten.