He also deeply wanted another term, and he was prepared to wage one of the dirtiest campaigns of the twentieth century to get one.
THE CANDIDATES
DEMOCRAT: LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON The man known as LBJ—the last of the midcentury Democratic three-initial presidents—was a garrulous Texan whose folksy, back-slapping manner hid an extraordinary desire for power and an intimate knowledge of how to get it, honed in twenty years in the United States House of Representatives and Senate. His vice-presidential running mate was Hubert Humphrey, a true liberal and civil rights activist whom Johnson treated as shabbily as possible. When he chose Humphrey for veep, he said to him: “If you didn’t know you were going to be vice president a month ago, you’re too damn dumb to have the office.”
REPUBLICAN: BARRY M. GOLDWATER The fifty-five-year-old Goldwater was born in Arizona to a Jewish father and Presbyterian mother. He worked in the family’s successful department-store business, served as an air force pilot, and became a U.S. senator in 1952. Goldwater was an ultra-conservative who favored giving army field commanders the right to use tactical nuclear weapons and liked to say very provocative things, such as, “Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea.”
These were not the beliefs of Republicans like Eisenhower or even Nixon, but in 1964, the Republicans were controlled by ultra-conservatives—and Goldwater was the result. His running mate was a complete unknown, William E. Miller, a conservative ideologue and upstate New York congressman.
THE CAMPAIGN
When Barry Goldwater was nominated at a Republican Convention that saw moderates and conservatives fighting tooth and nail, the Democrats were gleeful—one Democratic politician laughed that the Republicans were on a “kamikaze mission.”
Johnson knew he was going to beat Goldwater, but a simple victory wasn’t enough—he wanted to destroy his opponent and thereby gain a huge mandate for his first elective term. At the outset of the campaign, Johnson received a report from his media advisors that the way to really cremate Goldwater was to portray him as “ridiculous and a little scary: trigger-happy, a bomb-thrower … to keep fear of Goldwater as unstable, impulsive, [and] reckless in the public’s mind.”
The president didn’t lose any time. At campaign stops, he would point to the sky and say that John F. Kennedy’s spirit was “there in heaven watching us!” Who would the martyred JFK, and this audience, like to see in the White House—Johnson or Goldwater? “Which man’s thumb do you want to be close to the button … which man do you want to reach over and pick up that hotline when they say, ‘Moscow calling’?”
This might seem like alarmist rhetoric, but Goldwater only encouraged the remarks when he said things like, “Let’s lob one into the Kremlin and put it right into the men’s room.” He also played to the racial tensions that were increasingly present in America, particularly in urban areas. “All men are created equal at the instant of birth … but from then on, that’s the end of equality,” he said. Goldwater struck at white Americans’ fears of black criminals: “I don’t have to quote the statistics to you. You know. Every wife and mother—yes, every woman and girl knows what I mean.”
Since Goldwater would often couple these announcements with statements like, “You know, I haven’t got a really first-class brain,” many Americans were terrified of him. Newsweek called him “the fastest gun” and Life said he was a man of “one-sentence solutions.” A nationwide survey of American psychiatrists found that a sizable percentage thought Goldwater was unfit to serve as president because he suffered from clinical paranoia.
As the campaign heated up, Johnson instructed his staff to influence the press in whatever way they could (“reporters are puppets,” he told them). When Goldwater attacked vice-presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey as a draft dodger (Humphrey had actually registered for the draft in World War II but received a deferment), top Johnson staffer Walter Jenkins and press secretary Bill Moyers influenced editors at the Washington Post and New York Times to report on how degrading the Republican charges were. White House aide Walter Heller wrote a secret memo to Johnson in which he suggested that “it might be healthy to get some respected columnist to give wider circulation to adverse Goldwater impact on the stock market.” The person he picked was syndicated financial columnist Sylvia Porter, who wrote two columns about how a Goldwater victory would be bad for America’s economy.
Goldwater fought back. His campaign produced a scurrilous book entitled A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power, which brought together all the nasty stories about Johnson and harkened back to nineteenth-century campaign pamphlets in its free-swinging slurs. Johnson, according to author J. Evetts Haley, was guilty of all types of vote buying and sleazy politicking; even worse, he was responsible for the murder of several business associates and even the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the first year of its publication, the book supposedly outsold the Bible in the state of Texas.
Two conflicting bumper sticker slogans of the time say it all.
Goldwater Supporter:
IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT.
Johnson Supporter:
IN YOUR GUT YOU KNOW HE’S NUTS.
THE WINNER: LYNDON JOHNSON
In the end, the American people were suitably frightened. On November 3, NBC News called the race for Johnson in a landslide by 6:30 P.M., well before the polls closed. Sixty-two percent of voters showed up at the polls and Johnson received the biggest percentage of the popular vote in U.S. history (61.1). His 16,000,000 vote margin (43,129,566 to 27,178,188) was the largest until that time (though it was later eclipsed by Richard Nixon’s 1972 margin of victory and Ronald Reagan’s 1984 totals). Republicans were horrified, Democrats joyful. It looked like a long reign for the corn-pone president.
But in the 1960s, things had a way of changing very quickly.
“DAISY” What may well be the most famous and effective campaign commercial of all time debuted in the 1964 election.
On September 7, during NBC’s top-rated “Monday Night at the Movies,” viewers were treated to a lovely shot of a little blonde girl walking through a field. She stops to pick up a daisy and begins pulling off the petals and counting in a high, innocent voice, “1 … 2 … 3 … 4.” As she finishes, a military voice begins a countdown: “10 … 9 … 8 … 7 … 6.” As the counting reaches zero, the little girl looks up, startled. You stare into her frozen face and … a huge mushroom cloud explodes, filling the screen. Over the mushroom cloud, Lyndon Johnson’s voice says, “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must love each other, or we must die.”
Johnson’s team paid to air the ad only once—but to the delight of the Democrats, newscasts continuously replayed the spot in its entirety, driving home the message and offering free exposure. The more the Republicans screamed, the worse it was. Perhaps the ad was overkill. Yet no one who saw it could ever forget its stark simplicity.
IF IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK, IT MUST BE DIRTY TRICKS TIME It is amazing that Lyndon Johnson wasn’t impeached for some of the dirty tricks he pulled on Barry Goldwater—they were as bad as the unethical tactics that got Richard Nixon thrown out of office ten years later.
In order to smear his opponent, Johnson set up a top-secret sixteen-man committee, which was dubbed the “anti-campaign” or the “five o’clock club” because of its after-business-hours nature. Johnson directly controlled this committee through two of his aides, who chaired each meeting. Among their activities were:
• Developing books to smear Goldwater, with such titles as: Barry Goldwater: Extremist of the Right; The Case Against Barry Goldwater; a Goldwater joke book entitled You Can Die Laughing; and even a children’s coloring book, in which the wee ones could color pictures of Goldwater dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes.
• Writing letters to columnist Ann Landers under the guise of ordinary people who were terrified of
Goldwater becoming president.
• Secretly feeding hostile questions to reporters on the Goldwater campaign.
• Sending CIA agent E. Howard Hunt (later infamous for his role in the Watergate break-in) to infiltrate Goldwater campaign headquarters. Hunt got access to advance texts of Goldwater speeches and fed the information to the White House staff, who undercut Goldwater initiatives on a number of occasions.
THE REPUBLICANS FIGHT BACK The Republicans didn’t just sit on their hands, of course. They fought back with plenty of dirty tricks of their own:
• The Republican National Committee planted numerous newspaper articles wondering how Johnson had amassed a personal fortune of ten to fourteen million dollars during a lifetime in public service. One innocent answer was that his wife, Lady Bird, owned a radio station, but Johnson was also not above taking advantage of sweet real estate deals offered by admiring Texan friends.
• A Republican congressional aide spread the probably false story that Johnson had been given a large sum by the State Department for his personal use while visiting in Hong Kong as vice president in 1961.
• Republican ads in Western newspapers spread rumors that Johnson had kidney cancer and speculated on how long he had to live.
• A poll published in October showed Goldwater making gains in numerous states. The group taking the poll was called Opinion Research. When suspicious Democrats questioned these results, other pollsters proved that Opinion Research worked for the Goldwater campaign and appeared to be falsifying its results.
CHOICES A group calling itself Mothers for a Moral America made an extremely controversial pro-Goldwater film called Choices, which showed Americans that they had a “choice between good and evil.”
On the positive side, the film portrayed conservative young people having good clean fun, the American flag flying high, the Statue of Liberty gleaming in the sun, and Barry Goldwater giving impassioned speeches.
The bad side included pornographic books with such names as Jazz Me Baby and Men for Sale, dances like the Twist, women in topless bathing suits, black kids dancing and throwing rocks while rioting, and a speeding Lincoln Continental from the windows of which beer cans are hurled (this last bit was a knock at LBJ, who loved to drive at high speeds on his Texas ranch while tossing down a few cold ones).
Which side would you choose? Tough call. Mothers for a Moral America turned out, in the later words of a Goldwater aide, to be a “front group” for the Goldwater campaign. The film was scheduled to air on television late in the campaign, but Democrats found out about it and raised such a fuss about its racist content that Goldwater was forced to pull it.
JOHNSON’S GAYDAR In early October, the Goldwater campaign received an unexpected gift—the arrest of Walter Jenkins, Lyndon Johnson’s top staffer, on a public morals charge for soliciting sex in the men’s room of a Washington, D.C., YMCA.
The forty-six-year-old Jenkins had worked for Johnson for years. He was married with six children but mainly seemed to live for his work. On October 7, 1964, he went to a Washington party, drank about five martinis, and then went around the corner to the YMCA, where he encountered another man in a basement men’s room. Just as things were getting hot and heavy, they found themselves surprised by three undercover cops.
Johnson was horrified—he later told a biographer, “I couldn’t have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I’d heard that Lady Bird had killed the pope.” The president was certain that the Republicans had framed Jenkins, although it was soon revealed that Jenkins had another arrest for soliciting sex in the same bathroom five years earlier.
Despite LBJ’s best efforts to suppress the story, it hit the wire services. Jenkins resigned, and Goldwater, who had served in the air force reserve with Jenkins, publicly claimed that Republicans should make no use of this personal tragedy. Privately, he gleefully said to reporters: “What a way to win an election, communists and cocksuckers!” But before his operatives could use the Jenkins arrest to push home the message of immorality in the White House, larger events, including the explosion of China’s first atomic bomb, took over the news.
There is one tragicomic footnote to the affair: Some weeks after the incident, LBJ was talking to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about what had happened, a conversation that was captured on routine White House tape recordings and later released under the Freedom of Information Act. “I guess you’re gonna have to teach me about this stuff,” Johnson said, “I swear I can never recognize [gay people.]”
And Hoover—long rumored to be gay himself, as LBJ must certainly have known—reassured his commander-in-chief: “There are some people who walk kind of funny that you might think may be queer. But there was no indication of that in Jenkins’s case.”
Democrats encouraged children to color pictures of Barry Goldwater dressed in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
RICHARD NIXON
VS.
HUBERT HUMPHREY
“I say categorically that I have no contemplation at all of being the candidate for anything in 1964, 1966, 1968, or 1972…. Anybody who thinks that I could be a candidate for anything in any year is off his rocker.”
—Richard Nixon, after losing the California gubernatorial race in 1962
By early 1968, Lyndon Johnson had become a prisoner of Vietnam. More than 500,000 American troops were caught up in the quagmire of a savage war that cost American taxpayers $80 million a day. The human price was far worse. Sixteen thousand Americans had died in combat in Vietnam as 1968 began. A thousand a month would die before the year was over.
Protestors disrupted almost every public appearance Johnson made, chanting: “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” They demanded that he bring the troops home. And it seemed that Johnson’s “Great Society” was crumbling around him. In the past two years, blacks had rioted in almost every major city in the country, and Richard Nixon, the Republican Party’s main hope for the presidency after the Goldwater debacle, had called the “War on Poverty” a cruel hoax.
It was too much for Johnson. On March 31, 1968, he made the surprise announcement that he would not seek another term as president.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: RICHARD M. NIXON He was back. After running for California governor in 1962 and being soundly beaten, he had famously told reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” ABC responded with a half-hour news show called “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” Nixon went off to practice law in New York.
Except he couldn’t stay away. After Johnson pulverized Goldwater, Nixon started to look quite attractive to moderate Republicans who wanted their party back. Nixon began fund-raising; put together a loyal staff, which included H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell; and found media advisors who would make over his image. He entered several Republican primaries and won the Republican nomination in August of 1968 on the first ballot.
His only miscue was to pick as his running mate Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, a handsome but not very bright politician who had far too big a mouth.
DEMOCRAT: HUBERT HUMPHREY Johnson’s refusal to run for another term left the Democrats scrambling. Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, was the anointed successor. Humphrey was smart and committed to civil rights, but he projected a soft, avuncular image. He was seen as such a lackey to LBJ that at one point in the campaign, he was forced to declare: “The president has not made me his slave, and I am not his humble servant.”
To make matters even more difficult, Humphrey had two powerful antiwar opponents in Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Senator Robert Kennedy of Massachusetts (the latter would almost certainly have captured the Democratic nomination for president had he not been shot down in Los Angeles in June of 1968). During a tumultuous Chicago convention in August, while protestors rioted in the streets, the Democrats nominated Humphrey as their candidate, with Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as his running mate.
As Joe McGinniss famously described in his book The Selling of the President, Richard Nixon surrounded himself with a team of media advisors who groomed him for success. No more relentless campaigning—Nixon would take frequent breaks for rest. No more debating—despite the fact that Humphrey taunted him as “Richard the chicken-hearted.” No more open press conferences in which Nixon might put his foot in his mouth. Now Nixon’s handlers scripted television “panel shows” on which “ordinary citizens” (all Nixon supporters) lobbed him leading questions.
According to the polls, Nixon started the campaign with a good twenty-point lead over Humphrey, with especially strong support from blue-collar voters. Nixon became the law-and-order candidate of the “Silent Majority”—the country’s long-suffering working people who were fed up with hippies and rioting students and blacks and bra-burning feminists.
Humphrey was in a tough position. Blue-collar voters didn’t like him, but the antiwar protestors didn’t like him either. His campaign was chronically short on cash because Democratic fat cats didn’t want to contribute to a losing cause. At one point, nearly in tears, Humphrey cried, “Why me? What about Nixon?” But Nixon was much harder to reach, isolated in television studios and traveling the country in his private Boeing 727 named Tricia, after his youngest daughter. He had perfected the art of the modern candidacy, the sound bite, whereas Humphrey just couldn’t stop talking. “I watched Humphrey give an eleven-minute answer to a question once,” said a Nixon advisor. “Even the host was looking off-camera saying, ‘What the hell did I ask this guy, I forgot.’ ”
Finally by September, the race began to tighten. Nixon’s vague pronouncements on ending the war—in fact, the vagueness of most of his stances—began to wear badly on a public desperately seeking answers. At the same time, racist third-party candidate Alabama Governor George Wallace began making inroads with conservative Republicans.
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