“We have now come to a time of national testing,” Johnson told the country in a televised address before the bill passed the House on July 2. “We must not fail.” That day, he signed the bill in a White House ceremony. A Universal newsreel that played in theaters that summer captured perfectly the story that Johnson wanted told:
ANNOUNCER: Congress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill ever to be written into the law …
ONSCREEN, WASHINGTON: A pleasant summer’s day. In front of the Capitol dome, a flag flutters in a gentle wind.
ANNOUNCER:… and thus reaffirms the conception of equality for all men that began with Lincoln and the Civil War …
Cut to the LINCOLN MEMORIAL: A wide shot captures the glistening Reflecting Pool and the Washington Monument in the distance. Gone are the urgent masses who filled this setting at the March on Washington in 1963. In their place are summer tourists, ambling happily toward the memorial.
Cut to a white mother, wearing a white blouse, leading her two daughters toward the seated LINCOLN. The camera zooms in as they stop and gaze up at the Great Emancipator.
ANNOUNCER:… The Negro won his freedom then. He wins his dignity now.
Cut to interior, a glowing chandelier. Pull back to reveal it is the chandelier in the East Room of the White House, last seen draped in black crape to mark the passing of President Kennedy. Now its gold glitters and the faces in the room are full of smiles.
ANNOUNCER: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed at the White House … President Johnson calls for all Americans to back what he calls a turning point in history.
Watch as JOHNSON sits down at a desk festooned with bouquets of pens and prepares to sign the bill.
THE PRESIDENT: Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions. Divisions which have lasted all too long …
Pan back to the audience of assembled dignitaries, rising quickly to applaud JOHNSON. First to exuberantly pop up is HUBERT HUMPHREY, the jolly-faced Democratic whip.
ANNOUNCER: There’s warm applause from members of both parties as the president sets to work.
In the front row, a glimpse of BOBBY KENNEDY, staying seated while everyone else stands. The camera cuts quickly away.
ANNOUNCER: It is work. He uses nearly a hundred pens to affix his signature and date.… The president seems to have mastered the art of just touching each pen to the paper.
Watch as JOHNSON hands pens to DIRKSEN and HUMPHREY and a crowd of other silver-haired senators.
ANNOUNCER: Integration leader Martin Luther King receives his pen, a gift he says he will cherish.
Close-up to show KING approaching over JOHNSON’S shoulder. His is the first black face we have seen in this newsreel about the rights of the Negro. KING receives a warm greeting from the PRESIDENT, but when he slips back into the crowd, he looks out of place amid the backslapping bonhomie.
ANNOUNCER: The Department of Justice will enforce the law, if necessary, and G-man chief J. Edgar Hoover is present.
New camera angle. On the opposite side of the desk from KING we see the expansive profile of HOOVER, grinning obsequiously as he extends his hand downward to the president of the United States.
ANNOUNCER: Another group of pens is reserved for the Kennedys. And the attorney general is entrusted with a half dozen.
BOBBY, standing slim and straight, his youthful face unexpressive, looks like a petulant little boy amid the gray sea of legislators. JOHNSON hands him pens eagerly, as though they were lollipops, meant to coax him out of his ill humor. BOBBY takes the pens one by one but is unmoved.
ANNOUNCER: In this summer of 1964, the Civil Rights Act is the law of the land. In the words of the president—it restricts no one’s freedom, so long as he respects the rights of others.
Notably absent from the triumphant newsreel footage was Barry Goldwater. The Arizonan, now the presumed favorite for the Republican nomination, had been one of the six Republican senators to vote against the bill. Reporters assumed he was offering a banner around which the Southern racists could gather in advance of the Republican convention. “If he is nominated for President,” Walter Lippmann wrote, “he will stand out as the rallying point of nonobservance and of passive resistance to the law.”
But that wasn’t Goldwater’s intention—it wasn’t a crass political calculation. Goldwater didn’t do crass political calculations. If he had, he would have concluded that the immediate costs of a no vote on civil rights were too great. He was berated for his vote by no less a figure than President Eisenhower. His own party leader assailed him on the Senate floor: “You can go ahead and talk about conscience,” Dirksen said. “It is man’s conscience that speaks for every generation.”
Rather, Goldwater’s vote came from contorted constitutional reasoning. His legal advisers had convinced him that he could not vote for the bill—that it constituted an unprecedented usurpation of state powers by the federal government. Before announcing his vote, he was “a shaken man,” Perlstein writes, “convinced that the Constitution offered him no other honorable choice.”
Characteristically, he expressed his inner turmoil through outward surliness. Asked by a reporter if his position on the bill would hurt him in November, Goldwater exploded: “After Lyndon Johnson—the biggest faker in the United States? He opposed civil rights until this year!… He’s the phoniest individual who ever came around.”
This was the other story Johnson hoped the country would see that summer. The party that had produced two out of every three presidents for the past one hundred years, the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, the great Republican Party, was rapidly coming unhinged. After Goldwater’s June primary victory in California, the party’s moderate establishment wanted desperately to keep him from seizing the nomination at the San Francisco convention. But how? Or, more precisely, with whom?
Scranton, with his fresh, Kennedy-like looks, became the last, best hope of the anti-Goldwater faction when he jumped into the race in June. Rockefeller, conceding defeat after California, pledged the full resources of his campaign organization to the Scranton team. Eager to play the part of a vigorous young statesman in the Kennedy mold, Scranton threw himself energetically into the race. His stroke of luck, he believed, would come in the form of a benediction from Eisenhower, who had watched Goldwater’s rise with dismay. But Ike had always preferred to appear above crass politicking. Having seized the cliffs of Normandy and two terms in the White House, he was disinclined in his dotage to give an inch of high ground. Scranton was disappointed to learn Ike’s coveted endorsement would never come.
Without it, Scranton had no remaining strategy for stealing the nomination, save what Teddy White would call “the gallantry of hopelessness.” Hopeless was the key word. At the party convention, which opened in San Francisco’s Cow Palace on July 13, Goldwater’s grassroots strategists wrangled his delegates expertly, carefully choreographing the state delegations by radio connection from a trailer adjacent to the convention hall. Goldwater was nominated on the first ballot. In the end, all that the Scranton opposition at the Cow Palace achieved was the thorough discrediting of Goldwater at the hands of much of the party leadership. Scranton, making his desperate case, reminded voters of just how extreme Goldwater was. In a letter published days before Goldwater’s nomination, he called Goldwaterism a “crazy-quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions that would be soundly repudiated by the American people in November.”
But it was July, and this kind of talk made the movement diehards hot with rage. It was the kind of anger Reagan had seen in his political audiences throughout the year. Watching the assemblage in San Francisco, millions of Americans got to see the rage for themselves. The television networks, expecting a boring Johnson coronation at the Democratic convention in late August, had pinned their hopes for drama on the possibility of a bloody floor fight in San Francisco. NBC had 173 cameramen navigating the convention floor. CBS laid 180,000 feet of cable inside and outside the Cow Palace, aiming to capture every moment of the c
onvention’s experience. “When a delegate goes to the bathroom,” producer Bill Leonard said, “CBS wants to know.”
Mercifully, this was overstatement, but what the networks did broadcast of the delegates wasn’t much more pleasant to behold. Revved up to quash a moderate challenge that didn’t need much quashing, the Goldwater army plundered about in search of a suitable foe. They found it in the press galleries. Smarting over the coverage of his primary-season prevaricating, Eisenhower urged the delegates to “particularly scorn … sensation-seeking commentators and columnists.” Ike was far from a movement favorite, but this message was one the crowd could get behind. Time magazine described delegates who “leaped off their chairs, shook their fists at the glass television booths high above,” and “jeered newsmen in the aisles on the convention floor.” When Rockefeller addressed the convention in support of a platform amendment against extremism, he was shouted down with catcalls. The antiextremism measure failed.
Goldwater, who spent much of the convention holed up in agonizing tedium at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, was in no mood for making nice. Conventions were supposed to feature optimistic tunes like the Democrats’ “Happy Days Are Here Again.” When Goldwater approached the speaker’s stage on the night of July 16, the band blared “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” To his audience, and to the millions of Americans watching at home, the nominee described an America altogether different from the one described in the official narrative of prosperity and good feeling. In his America, the new GOP nominee saw a land marked by “violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders.”
His words crackled with resistance, the same resistance that had electrified the living rooms of Southern California. “Those who do not care for our cause we do not expect to enter our ranks in any case.” Then came the two sentences that would live with Goldwater in history: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” He paused as the crowd rose in sustained applause. “And let me remind you also: that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” More roars as reporters watched in disbelief. Watching from a remote location, Goldwater’s chief organizer, Clif White, turned off the television set broadcasting the speech, aware that the Goldwater general election campaign had just died in its infancy.
The nation was shocked by this display of vitriol. The press, feigning horror, was thrilled. The New York Times called the Goldwater show “a disaster for the Republican Party and a blow to the prestige and to the domestic and international interests of the United States.” The broad consensus among journalists now matched Lippmann’s assessment of Goldwater. “He is not a normal American politician who, as election approaches, is drawn toward the center. He is a radical agitator who must stay with the extremists.… The prospective nomination of Goldwater is a grave threat to the internal peace of the nation.”
From the White House, there was little overt acknowledgment of the Republican horror show. Asked that month about a Goldwater statement that “as of now,” Johnson could beat any Republican candidate, the president demurred. “I think the Republican Party has enough problems without my adding to them in any way.” Like most presidents of his era, particularly those sitting on a comfortable election year lead, Johnson strove to appear above the sordid business of a presidential campaign. “We really won’t do any campaigning until after Labor Day,” he told House Speaker John McCormack in June. “So we’ll let them show all their hole cards and then we’ll come in and trump ’em.”
It was an act, of course. Out of the camera’s view, Johnson thought endlessly about the campaign against Goldwater. Shortly after the Republican convention, Congressman Carl Albert escaped Washington for a vacation in Canada with his wife and son. Hoping to really get away, the congressman did not leave any details of his itinerary with his office or anyone else in Washington. One night, while waiting for Mrs. Albert to get ready in their Quebec hotel room, the congressman turned on the television news. He was surprised by what he saw. “The Canadian Royal Mounted Police are endeavoring to locate Congressman Carl Albert,” said the newscaster, “with license plate number PB827 driving a 1964 Thunderbird.… Anybody knowing anything about the whereabouts of Carl Albert will please immediately notify the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
Albert quickly phoned the Mounties, who informed him that they’d been running a national search for him on behalf of the White House. The president, it seemed, was desperate to reach the congressman.
“Boy, you sure are hard to find,” said Johnson when the congressman dutifully called in. “What I want you to do is be chairman of the platform committee at Atlantic City, and I need to make the announcement. I hated to bother you … but we’ve got to put this thing together right away.”
Still, a winking press corps mostly played along with the notion of above-the-fray Johnson. And so, while the Republicans argued over Goldwater proposals to abolish Social Security and sell the Tennessee Valley Authority, the president nonchalantly informed reporters that government estimates of deficit spending for fiscal 1964 would be $500 million less than previously thought.
Subtly, Johnson sought to make Goldwater the face of the unnamed, lurking fear so many in the nation felt. “What we really want to do with Goldwater,” he told his press secretary George Reedy, shortly after the meltdown at the Cow Palace, “is … leave the impression we’re not gonna do anything to incite or inflame anybody. And let’s leave the impression he is, without saying so.”
AND SO, BY midsummer, it was a truth universally acknowledged that Lyndon Johnson would win in November. Most likely, he would win by a large, even historic, margin. The story he had worked so hard to tell the nation—in which Johnson, with his endless energy and legislative genius, had steered the nation back on a course toward unprecedented prosperity and unimaginable greatness—had taken hold of the nation’s imagination. Washington was becoming a Johnson town again. Washingtonians assumed it would stay a Johnson town for some time, perhaps into the next decade. In Georgetown, the rebel outpost languished. Jackie Kennedy put out word in July that after only half a year in Washington, she would leave the capital to make a new home in New York.
And yet the more certain his victory became that summer—the more it seemed that there was nothing and no one who could topple him—the more Lyndon Johnson grew consumed by fear. On the phone with aides, his breathing grew heavier and louder. He complained of sleepless nights. His puzzled friends wondered if perhaps the president was in ill health. Time reported a rumor “swiftly spread[ing] through the capital and its environs that Johnson, who suffered a massive heart attack in 1955, was ailing again.”
His weight, which had dropped considerably during his action-packed first months in office, now soared. An expanding Johnson waistline was always a sure sign of psychological distress. For him, food was not an indulgence but an intoxicant, an object he reached for to fill a gaping void, one that he could never fill up. At lunch meetings in the White House, his secretary Marie Fehmer would often lay a plate of sandwiches on the table in front of him and his guests. Johnson would quickly devour the entire plate and then say to Fehmer, “I’m kind of hungry. Have you got anything to eat?” “But sir,” Fehmer would reply, “you had a whole plate of sandwiches.” Johnson would show no recollection.
So, too, he devoured any morsel of news that seemed to suggest catastrophe was near at hand, and he’d still want more. The network newscasts on his three television screens and the papers and newsmagazines were all reliable sources of worries. There were more stories in the press that summer about senseless crime and brutal killings. There were mounting fears about the inner cities. The same week as the Republican convention, a black student was shot by police in a predominantly white section of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Riots followed, first in Harlem, then in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Days after Goldwater’s warnings about a country descending into lawlessness, the television networks showed images that sug
gested his vision was coming true.
For white people already on edge, the riots hit a sweet spot of anxiety—the unnamed fear that soon the poor black mobs would stop burning and looting their own neighborhoods and come for them. The riots provided the press with a vivid illustration of the fear the nation was feeling. On its cover the following week, Newsweek showed three grim black faces above the headline “HARLEM: HATRED IN THE STREETS.” That was the establishment press consensus: it was hatred, deep and irrational—not a racist police force or employment discrimination or substandard housing and schools—that had caused these mobs to riot and loot.
A new word, “backlash,” was appearing in the press. The pollster Lewis Harris explained that white ethnics in Northern cities would be particularly susceptible to this phenomenon. By a two-to-one margin, these voters “feel that most Negroes want to take jobs held by whites.” Fertile territory for resentment could also be found in the suburbs, where whites “tend to feel that the pace of civil rights is too fast” and “that Negroes are getting ‘too uppity for their own good.’ ”
Johnson lapped up these kinds of dispatches. He was quick to imagine the worst. “If we aren’t careful,” he told Reedy, “we’re just gonna be presiding over a country that’s so badly split-up that they’ll vote for anybody that isn’t us.” When Goldwater requested a White House meeting to discuss responses to the riots, Johnson begrudgingly agreed, but he was paranoid about the outcome. “He wants to use this as a forum,” Johnson told John Connally. “He wants to encourage a backlash. That’s where his future is. It’s not in peace and harmony.” The president gorged on conspiracy theories. He hoarded rumors that the Texas oilman H. L. Hunt was funding the riots, trying to get the backlash started. Hoover fed him morsels suggesting Communist agitation was to blame. “Hell, these folks have got walkie-talkies,” Johnson told John Connally, speaking of the riots. “Somebody’s financing them big.”
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