On May 4, according to Robert Novak, the phone rang in the Goldwater apartment in Washington. The senator was on the roof trying to fix his TV aerial. Mrs. Goldwater answered. A voice said, “Hello, this is Nelson Rockefeller.” Thinking this a joke, she said, “Well, hello yourself, this is Mamie Eisenhower.” He convinced her that he was really Rockefeller and she called Goldwater down. Rockefeller said he wanted the senator to know before it broke in the press: he had just married Happy Murphy. Goldwater was stunned because he realized that Rockefeller had destroyed his candidacy. He stammered out congratulations and hung up. Within a few days a Gallup poll showed that 14 points had switched from Rockefeller to Goldwater, who now led 40 to 29.
The Goldwater movement grew steadily during the summer and fall of 1963, and White concluded that the nomination was in the bag. But the Kennedy assassination on November 22 seemed to cut off the bottom. There was a widely held rumor that right-wingers had murdered the President. Since this was false, the more important fact was that Johnson’s candidacy transformed the Republican strategic problem. The assumption that Goldwater would carry the South now must face up to running against a southerner who would almost certainly capture the big prize of Texas. Further, moderate Republicans who thought that Kennedy had been a shooin in the Northeast now felt that Rockefeller had a good chance against Johnson there.
Goldwater became certain that he would lose and fell into a mood that White described as “approaching deep depression.” On December 8 he met with close friends and advisers and told them, “Our cause is lost,” and that he would withdraw from the race. They refused to accept his decision and insisted he had a duty to lead the conservative cause, even if it resulted in defeat. Goldwater was deeply shaken and asked for time to think it over. He soon changed his mind.
On January 3 Goldwater, following surgery for a painful foot spur, hobbled on crutches onto the patio of his home in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale to face the press. He said, “I will seek the Republican Presidential nomination.” The reason he gave was based on a fateful strategy: he would run on his principles. He would not curry favor with the moderates by posing as a “me-too” Republican. The resonant line was, “I will offer a choice, not an echo.” Since he was sincere, he would divide rather than unite his party.
Goldwater made another early critical decision, to put management of the campaign in the hands of his home state friends, the so-called Arizona Mafia, and to freeze out the Draft Goldwater leadership, particularly Clifton White. He did this, he wrote later, because he felt “more comfortable” with his old pals—Denison Kitchel, Dean Burch, Richard Kleindienst, and others. Since these people were innocent of national campaigning and White was a genuine professional, this was, as Goldwater would admit, “a serious error on my part.” “Clif White,” Novak wrote, “came close to quitting more than once—mainly because he now had no authority, partly because of the confusion and uncertainty.”
The fact that Goldwater’s painful heel was supported by a cast was symptomatic of the wrong foot on which his campaign began. A fundamental problem that should have given any Republican candidate pause was that the polls showed that Johnson would beat any of them 70 to 30.
Goldwater’s rookie managers started disastrously and got steadily worse. Kitchel seemed to have no idea of how to go about it and he alienated the Draft Committee people. The committee itself disbanded on January 14, while the field organization continued to work for Goldwater. White repeatedly urged Kitchel to file and prepare for the primaries but was talking to deaf ears. White received a stream of complaints from committee members. On February 16 they cornered an anxious Goldwater at the O’Hare Inn in Chicago and peppered him with complaints, which he did not even try to resolve.
The candidate’s performance in the crucial first primary in New Hampshire, scheduled for March 10, was a catastrophe. “Barry Goldwater’s ultimate defeat on November 3, 1964,” White wrote, “was first etched out, indelibly and irrevocably, in the New Hampshire primary campaign.” In early January he had held the high cards: leadership in the polls, the enthusiastic support of virtually all the important Republicans in the state, plenty of money, Rockefeller on the ropes, and reactionary William Loeb’s Manchester Union-Leader, the largest and sole statewide paper fanatically for Goldwater and hardly allowing a day to pass without a nasty piece about Rocky and Happy.
The Arizona Mafia, evidently, did no research on the state, assuming that it was safely conservative and would succumb quietly to Goldwater’s charms. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It was the second most industrialized state in the nation, with many new high-tech firms. While traditionally Republican because of its old Yankee citizenry, it had just elected the first Democratic governor in 40 years as industrial workers, French-Canadian, Italian, and Irish Catholics, streamed to the polls. It had a higher percentage of old folks than Florida. The Republicans were internationalist in outlook and strongly supported the United Nations.
January 5 was an exhausting day for Goldwater. He flew from Washington to Grand Rapids for a speech and then on to Concord, New Hampshire, arriving at 3 a.m. With little sleep, he faced tough questioning that morning at a press conference. He said that Social Security should be made voluntary, which experts agreed would wreck the program, and he called for another Cuban exiles’ invasion of the island with U.S. air support. The banner headline in the Concord Daily Monitor read: “Goldwater Sets Goals: End Social Security, Hit Castro.” The first, Novak wrote, was “sheer disaster” and the second fortified his image as a “trigger-happy warmonger.” Thus began a long parade of goofs.
The campaign was maddening for the candidate. There were not enough New Hampshire Republicans to provide large audiences; Goldwater had to meet small groups over coffee. But his mind was not quick enough for this give-and-take. Moreover, the Rockefeller people stacked the audiences with bright Harvard Law School students who bombarded him with tough questions that embarrassed him. Lacking the stamina, he had to slog through 23 days of punishing campaigning in the snow. When it was over, he ruefully recalled his bad heel: “I remember every footstep of that campaign.”
Most bizarre was the Lodge “candidacy.” Henry Cabot Lodge was the ambassador to Vietnam and was not running for President. Four political amateurs, one in the mail-order business, decided to have some fun. They rented a store in Concord, got a mailing list of the 96,000 registered Republicans in New Hampshire, and sent them a letter urging that they write in “Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Saigon.”
The results in the New Hampshire primary were as follows: Lodge 33,521, Goldwater 21,775, Rockefeller 19,496, Nixon 15,752, and others 4,097. Lodge, who did not lift a finger, got 35 percent of the vote and, more shocking to Goldwater and Rockefeller, captured the entire slate of 14 delegates to the convention. “For mismanagement, blundering, and sheer naivete,” Theodore H. White wrote, “Goldwater’s New Hampshire campaign was unique in the campaigns I have seen.” In fact, “never thereafter was he to recover from it.”
In the Oregon primary on May 15 Rockefeller triumphed. The results: Rockefeller 93,000, Lodge 78,000, Goldwater 50,000, and Nixon 48,000. The faltering Goldwater candidacy desperately needed a victory in giant California in June. He barely made it with 1,120,403 votes (52 percent) to Rockefeller’s 1,052,053. His victory was due to an immense margin of 207,000 votes among the extremely conservative Republicans in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
The Republican National Convention that met in the Cow Palace in San Francisco from July 13 to 16 was a rogue elephant. Governor William W. Scranton of Pennsylvania, elected in 1962, had announced for the presidency on June 12. Three days later Rockefeller abandoned his quest and endorsed Scranton. On June 28 a Gallup poll of Republican voters showed, that Goldwater and Nixon each had 22 percent, Lodge 19, Scranton 18, Rockefeller 8, and others 11. Goldwater was far from having a majority. Republican voters seemed to be in a state of confusion. Nixon, Lodge, and Rockefeller together got 49 percent of the vote and
none was a candidate. Scranton was only 4 points behind Goldwater. Gallup took another poll, matching Goldwater against Scranton with these results: Scranton 55 percent, Goldwater 34, and undecided 11. Scranton had picked up most of the Nixon, Lodge, and Rockefeller votes and had far outdistanced Goldwater.
But such gentle brushes with reality had no effect upon a large majority of 1,308 delegates to the convention. As a result of the masterful coup engineered by Clifton White, they were far more conservative than the party’s voters. It took 655 votes to win. White predicted that they would get 884 on the first ballot, and he was off by only one vote. According to Goldwater, the Republicans had studied Larry O’Brien’s manual, which described the system installed by the Kennedy people at the 1960 Democratic convention, and copied it exactly. White set up a system that allowed him through 16 walkie-talkies and 30 telephone lines to control all these delegates.
Thus, Goldwater, despite his miserable showing with Republican voters, was guaranteed a handsome first ballot victory and had total command over the convention. Everett Dirksen’s wet finger was up and he knew the direction of the wind. He helped put the Illinois delegation in the Goldwater column. Though he had been appalled by the Arizonan’s vote against the Civil Rights Act and had publicly upbraided him, Dirksen put Goldwater’s name in nomination and lauded his “blazing courage” for voting for measures that “gained him nothing politically.”
The Goldwater supporters not only dominated the floor; they also packed the galleries where they caused the most disgraceful incident of the convention. After the very conservative platform had been read, Rockefeller was given five minutes to propose a change. Much concerned about extremists, he tried to offer an amendment denouncing them by name, including the John Birch Society. Its lobbyist said that 100 delegates were members. The Cow Palace erupted in fury against Rockefeller. He taunted them and they screamed back. He said, “These things have no place in America.” John Bartlow Martin wrote, “All America saw a spectacle on television that could only be described as one of savage fury.”
Goldwater’s victory was overwhelming and at the conclusion of the roll call Scranton moved to make it unanimous in the interest of party unity. As the senator was working over his acceptance speech, written by Karl Hess and Harry Jaffa, he learned of the latest poll: Johnson would beat him by almost 80 to 20. Nevertheless, he was furious with those who had opposed him and was totally uncompromising. Instead of picking a moderate like Scranton for Vice President to unite the party, he chose William Miller, an almost unknown conservative from Buffalo. Goldwater’s speech contained two sentences that became the most famous he ever delivered. They seemed designed to drive the moderates out of the party: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. … Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The nation was shocked by this language. Clifton White wrote, “I was as stunned as anyone that night by the abrasive quality of his words.” The columnist Drew Pearson wrote from San Francisco, “The smell of fascism has been in the air of this convention.”
Despite White’s masterful performance, Goldwater nailed him. He had lobbied hard to be named chairman of the national committee so that he could run the campaign. Without discussing it with White, Goldwater picked Dean Burch. Even his good friend Kleindienst argued against Burch on grounds of inexperience. But, according to Stephen Shadegg, Goldwater wanted someone “personally loyal to him and willing to serve him without question or contradiction.” Two weeks later White learned that he would become co-chairman of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller. He would form organizations with such names as Dentists for Goldwater-Miller and Mothers for a Moral America.
Barry Goldwater was a study in ambivalence. He insisted that he wanted neither the nomination nor the presidency, but at the critical junctures he always said “yes.” In a sense Lyndon Johnson was possessed by a similar ambivalence. But there were differences.3
Lyndon Johnson did not invent the phrase “the great society.” In 1776 Adam Smith had used it several times in The Wealth of Nations. Graham Wallas, the British economist, had made it the title of a book he published in 1914. Early in 1964 it began to pop up in Johnson’s speeches, inserted there by Richard N. Goodwin. He had written speeches for Kennedy and was now doing so for his successor. Johnson liked the phrase, the press picked it up, and it began to appear in capital letters.
In early April Bill Moyers phoned Goodwin to tell him that the President wanted to see them in the swimming pool. As was his custom, he was swimming in the buff. Goodwin wrote, “The massive presidential flesh, a sun-bleached atoll breaching the placid sea, passing gently . … Moby Dick, I thought.” Under orders from the commander-in-chief, they stripped, entered the water, and absorbed a Johnson monologue.
He said he had “two basic problems—get elected and pass legislation the country needs.” Kennedy had some good programs, but they got stuck and “I had to pull them out of the ditch.” There was still some legislative mucking around left—civil rights, Medicare, education. “We’ve got to use the Kennedy program as a springboard to take on the Congress, summon the states to new heights, and create a Johnson program, different in tone, fighting and aggressive.” He told Moyers and Goodwin, “You start to put together a Johnson program.” Goodwin sensed the President’s “immense vitality” and was inspired.
Over the next month Goodwin talked with a number of people in order to define goals. His deadline was May 22, 1964, when Johnson would make the commencement address at the University of Michigan. The place was symbolically important because in 1960 Kennedy had proposed the formation of the Peace Corps there. Now Johnson would use the university to proclaim the philosophy of his presidency.
Goodwin conceived of his assignment to establish “a concept, an assertion of purpose, a vision, if you will, that went beyond the liberal tradition of the New Deal.” This was extremely difficult to do, probably impossible. Visions, after all, are not expressed in words. The President ruled out laundry lists of grievances or programs. He wanted “a statement of national purpose, almost prophetic in dimension, that would bind citizens in a ‘great experiment.’ ”
Goodwin finished the speech the night before its delivery. Moyers was enthusiastic. The next morning the President went over it very carefully and made a number of penciled notations. Then he said, “It ought to do just fine.”
The address, delivered with many interruptions for applause, was, Goodwin wrote, “a triumph.” Americans had settled and subdued a continent, Johnson declared, in order to create plenty. The challenge of the next half-century will be whether “we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life.” As they advanced in years, he told the students, “We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.” Johnson continued,
The Great Society … demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed. …
[It] is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect. … It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. … It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed. …
Goodwin, who did not accompany the President, watched the delivery of his speech from the White House basement. He was moved because his “idea had become a reality. So I clapped for the President, and for our country.” The precise meaning of “Great Society” was elusive. Kermit Gordon viewed it as a “phrase,” a “slogan,” a “tag.” Like many others who supported Johnson’s domestic program, he did not care for its sound. “I remember wincing
a bit when I first heard the phrase.” But Johnson now at least had a name for what he was trying to accomplish which he could carry forward into the election campaign.4
Over the years of his quest for the presidency Lyndon Johnson had suffered from intermittent periods of self-doubt. Doris Kearns thought it was a case of what Freud had called the repetition compulsion, variations on a theme the person had neither overcome nor learned to live with. “By escaping and returning, if only in fantasy,” she wrote, “Johnson could reassert his personal and political autonomy; and thereby seem to himself the determining force of his own destiny.”
In May 1964 Johnson seemed to have the world eating out of his hand: he had a firm grip on the presidency; his legislative program was moving through Congress; his nomination was assured; he would pick his own running mate; and the Republicans seemed bent on self-immolation by nominating Goldwater. Nevertheless, he fell into a depression. He suffered from anxiety, he wrote, because he had reached the White House “in the cruelest way possible”; he and his family were subject to “scathing attacks” which he was certain would become worse; and he worried that his health “would not stand up.” Perhaps he should retire, which, after three decades of public service, he could do in “good conscience.” He discussed this with his good friend Senator Russell, with his trusted staff men Walter Jenkins and George Reedy, with several old friends in Texas, and with, “of course, Lady Bird.” He asked his wife to write her views down in a memorandum and she put the pros and cons neatly down on paper. Her unsurprising conclusion: “Stay in.”
While he accepted this advice, he continued to be nagged by doubt. He felt personally abused by the race riots in New York and other cities and by the crisis in the Gulf of Tonkin. His greatest worry, he wrote, was “national unity,” which was of the utmost importance to him. Johnson did not believe that a southerner could unite the American people because “the metropolitan press of the Eastern seaboard would never permit it.” He spoke to James Reston of the New York Times, the dean of Washington correspondents, who tried to reassure him. Reston got Johnson’s old friend, Jim Rowe, to step in. Rowe wrote the President that as long as Scotty Reston and Walter Lippmann backed him, as they did, he was assured of eastern press support. But he remained troubled.
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