by I. F. Stone
The man who sought a new harmony in the heavens and in the atom also sought for order and justice in the relations of men. As the greatest intellectual in the world of our time, he fought fascism everywhere and feared the signs of it in our own country. This was the spirit in which he advised American intellectuals to defy the Congressional inquisition and refuse to submit themselves to ideological interrogation. In that position he was interpreting the First Amendment as Jefferson would have done.
Professor Einstein—if I read him rightly—felt like a failure rather than a success: he died without quite achieving that unified theory he sought. But his was a beautiful and satisfying life, and nothing would have pleased him more than how many—and such diverse—people remember him with affection, especially the children of the neighborhood in Princeton who recall the cookies he gave them.
In that Olympus where he goes to dwell with his few peers, this is something all his own. Newton and Copernicus and the misty Pythagoras, too, could sweep the heavens with their grasp—but none of them were remembered by so many humble friends, for so many simple human kindnesses. In this realm, far beyond politics and physics, Einstein reigns alone in warm human memory.
Goldwater and His Tribe
In July 1964, the Republican Party nominated Senator Barry Goldwater for president, then by far the most right-wing candidate in the party’s history. Goldwater was overwhelmingly defeated that fall, but his candidacy made a national political figure out of Ronald Reagan and laid the groundwork for the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s. In this essay, I. F. Stone offers a portrait of Goldwater and his sunbelt conservative followers, the new breed of Republicans who would eventually come to dominate national politics.
. . .
July 27, 1964
THE PROCESS OF PICKING A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE bears only a distant relation to sober discussion of political issues. To see one in action is to see first of all that politics is a form of sports; the atmosphere in the crowded lobbies of the St. Francis and the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, where each candidate had his rooters and his pennants, was much like that before a football game. At some of the most exciting moments, the convention seemed to call for coverage by an anthropologist. To descend from the galleries into the depths on the Cow Palace floor during one of the many demonstrations was to dive into a brightly lit jungle, a high forest of banners, with the horns blaring and the drums beating, as if for tribal war. At duller moments, during the long stretches of venerable clichés in the nominating speeches, the convention seemed to provide a psychic massage through semantic manipulation; all those familiar phrases about free enterprise began to seem like incantations, handed down from the past as sure formulas for the ills of the body politic. The platform could be read as ritual, as a form of verbal magic, the reassuring recitation of a secular mass.
We are familiar with the politics of insecurity when it exploits the insecurities of the poor. At the Republican convention one could see in action the politics which plays on the insecurity of the rich. The Goldwaterites made their appeal to people who were afraid—rich, powerful, fortunate beyond any dominant class in history, yet afraid. Some of the fears were obvious: fear of losing their property and power, fear lest the value of their dollars be diminished by the inflation which accompanies the welfare state. Above all they did not want to lose the old familiar devil of their neatly Manichean universe, the need for a devil being as deep as the need for a God. Communism as the devil had long been one of the main pillars in the edifice of their simple faith. Now it, too, was threatened by more sophisticated and pragmatic attitudes.
Goldwater expressed their alarm when he told the platform committee, “I was surprised, and am concerned, that during these platform hearings, mention even of the word ‘communism’ has been the exception rather than the rule.” He complained that “even in the keynote address” it seemed to be taboo. “This Administration,” he protested, “pretends that communism has so changed that we can now accommodate it. Our party cannot go the final and fatal step and pretend that it doesn’t even exist.” They didn’t want to hear about the differences between Russia and China or the deviationist tendencies in Rumania or to be told that some communists were better than others. They wanted their old comfortable picture of a monolithic communism restored. A pragmatism without a devil frightened them more than a communism without a God. To realize that even at Republican platform hearings people had stopped speaking of communism seemed to them almost impious, if not evidence of the subtlest communist plot of all.
The Goldwaterite picture of themselves, as of their hero, is as distant from reality as the rest of the private universe they are defending. The frontier virtues they claim to embody are as synthetic as the frontier they inhabit. Their desert is air-conditioned and landscaped; their covered wagons are Cadillacs; their chaps are from Abercrombie & Fitch; their money, like their candidate’s, is mostly inherited from grandpappy, or acquired with their wives. In their favorite campaign photos, on that horse and under that ten-gallon Stetson, looking into the setting sun, is no cowboy or even rancher but a Phoenix storekeeper. The Western trade he caters to, in business as in politics, is dude ranch.
This he-man’s claim to fame in business is the development of “antsypants,” men’s underdrawers decorated with ants, a cute specialty item he advertised some years back in the wide open spaces of Manhattan through The New Yorker magazine. He roughs it in a $150,000 gadget-filled show-place of a home, designed, his architect said, as “a rough-hewn house for a rough-hewn guy,” a sort of de luxe model log cabin to give one that authentic latter-day Lincoln decor. Low education and low intelligence, Goldwater once declared to the delight of his equally well-upholstered followers, are the real causes of poverty. One wonders what he, who did not last out more than one year of college, would have done if a family fortune and a family business did not await him back home. What he preaches is the same “rugged individualism” with which Herbert Hoover sought to combat the New Deal thirty years ago. Its essential phoniness could not have found a more perfect embodiment. The crowning touch is that this half-Jewish grandson of a Polish Jewish peddler who won acceptance for himself and his family on the tolerant frontier should emerge into politics as the hero of the racist forces in our society. It’s enough to make one anti-Episcopalian.
This Mr. Conservative of 1964 is quite different from Taft, the Mr. Conservative of 1952. In foreign policy Taft was an isolationist; he wanted to keep the country out of trouble. Goldwater, though not an internationalist, is an ultra-nationalist, who’s ready to get into trouble anywhere. Taft fought NATO; Goldwater wants to strengthen it with nuclear weapons. Taft was what used to be called a Republican standpatter but with progressive fringes; Scranton was right when he declared several times in San Francisco that on such specific issues as labor education and housing, he was closer to Taft than was Goldwater. In the political spectrum Goldwater is half reactionary, half rightist European style. The same man who, in The Conscience of a Conservative, wrote that “our tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a few men deeply concerns me” could also say on ABC-TV’s Issues and Answers (April 7, 1963), “I don’t object to a dictatorship as violently as some people do because I realize that not all people in this world are ready for democratic processes. If they have to have a dictator in order to keep communism out, then I don’t think we can object to that.” It is no wonder that his nomination was regarded with dismay abroad everywhere but in Franco Spain and South Africa, and among the neo-fascists of Italy and Germany. For this has been one of the principal alibis for fascism ever since the March on Rome. Il Duce, too, only acted to save Italy from communism, and there are rightists who would emulate him here if they could.
The menace of the Goldwater movement, however, is not that its ranks are full of “kooks” but that on the contrary most of those who showed up at the convention were upper middle class solid citizens, no more (or less) looney than their fathers were thirty years ago when the Ameri
can Liberty League and the Un-American Activities Committee under Martin Dies readily led them to believe the New Deal was a communist plot, and that American workers then, like Mississippi Negroes today, would be wholly content were it not for foreign agitators and conspirators. Even the Southern delegation, whose headquarters at the Jack Tar Hotel I visited, in no way matched the dangerously delusive picture of this movement as made up of little old ladies in tennis shoes. The one Texan I talked to there said Johnson would probably carry Texas. Every one of the half dozen Southern delegates I talked with put “fiscal responsibility” not civil rights as the No. 1 issue. Whether this was how they really felt I have no way of knowing, but I believe it was an accurate reflection of a major concern. The retired bulk large in the ranks of the Goldwaterites; the perpetual inflation with which we have been accustomed to financing the welfare state taxes them, like all others (including workers) on fixed incomes, unfairly. The declining value of the dollar haunts them, and as one nice lady from North Carolina explained to me sweetly, “money is one of the most important things in the country.” Significantly another reporter told me he found hostility to Wallace among these Southern Republicans; they saw eye-to-eye with him, of course, on race but regarded him on non-racial issues as too much of a “liberal,” i.e. a social welfare spender.
Goldwater’s support shades off toward the right into a wide variety of offbeat organizations and stray woozy millionaires. Most of them were loosely united under “Independent Americans for Goldwater,” which opened a headquarters at 1175 Mission Street in San Francisco during the convention. The organizers were Kent and Phoebe Courtney, authors of such works as “Disarmament—a Blueprint for Surrender” and editors of The Independent American. Books by Goldwater and Welch of the Birch Society were on sale along with a wide selection of pamphlets proving that Rockefeller was a tool of an international socialist conspiracy and that Nixon was soft on communism. The size of the movement may be indicated by the fact that a pre-convention rally drew only 700 people and the paid circulation Courtney claims for The Independent American is only 20,000. He turned out to be a blond, stout man with a high-powered salesman’s manner. He said he was Minnesota born, but had lived in New Orleans since he was ten. He still has no trace of Southern accent. He said he was in marketing research before launching his publication and movement. He claimed to “pick up where the Birch Society leaves off.” He said he was still a member of the Society but no longer an organizer for it. Courtney is also affiliated with the Citizens’ Councils in Louisiana and told me that if the U.S. cut off relations with the Soviet Union “the whole civil rights movement would die on the vine.” He claims to have sponsored the first Goldwater for President meeting in i960 and thinks Goldwater will win unless, he hinted darkly, “we run into a contrived international crisis.” He boasts of defeating Judd for re-election in Minnesota as “soft on communism,” and regards the Council on Foreign Relations, a high-collar group which includes Allen Dulles and publishes Foreign Affairs quarterly, as the center of the Communist conspiracy in America. This is the kind of character Goldwater was asked to disavow by those who wanted a strong platform plank against extremists.
Several times Goldwater challenged his critics to define “extremism.” I am convinced that in his mind the difficulty was a real one. The common denominator of these right-wing crackpot groups is that America is menaced by a worldwide communist conspiracy. But this is also a common article of belief in America. In Germany the way to Hitlerism was prepared by several generations of paranoid inculcation in the existence of a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy. So the emergence of rightists in control of the Republican Party was prepared by more than thirty years in which, first as part of the fight against the New Deal and then as part of the cold war, Americans have been led to believe in a communist conspiracy. The differences are in degree, but the effect is to push all of American politics rightward, so that groups which in any other country would be recognized as hopeless reactionaries or crypto-fascists can parade here as conservatives. While the left in this country has shriveled since 1948, rightism has flowered; it is almost impossible to tune in a car radio at any hour without hearing rightist speakers financed in part at public expense via some tax-exempt foundation or some oil millionaire grown rich on depletion allowances.
Interlocking with these civilian extremists is a broad band of military extremists to which Goldwater belongs. His affinity for the German militarists is instinctive; he belongs to the same breed as the right-wing German generals who thought they could use the Nazi riff-raff for their own purposes. Goldwater told Der Spiegel the German generals could have won the war but for interference by Hitler; the war itself might have been avoided if they, by interfering in politics, had not helped bring Hitler to power.* Goldwater’s simple-minded ideas are precisely the kind the military has been spreading in this country through those “strategy for survival” conferences Fulbright attacked in 1961 and Goldwater and Strom Thurmond, both Air Force Reserve generals, defended. These reserve generals make up by the ferocity of their politics for the paucity of their combat records. They may not be as wacky as General Walker but they buy ideas from the same sources. Goldwater’s speech writer, Karl Hess, the man who wrote those phrases about extremism in the defense of liberty never being a vice, is an example. He was a former editor of Counterattack, the vehicle of the entertainment blacklist; a contributing editor of the American Mercury during its worst years under the anti-Semitic Russell Maguire; a member of the anti-communist liaison set up by the evangelist Billy James Hargis in 1963 which included Birch Society members. Yet he was also made a consultant to the Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Defense on Non-Military Instruction set up in the wake of the famous Fulbright memorandum. From such sources does Goldwater obtain support, ideas and phrases. For him to condemn “extremism” would be to undercut his main political stock in trade.
The Goldwater candidacy gives the nation a clear choice but it is not a choice between conservatism and liberalism. The Goldwaterites who shrieked like a lynch mob at Nelson Rockefeller and responded with the wildest enthusiasm of the convention when Eisenhower attacked “columnists” are in no real sense of the word conservatives. The true conservative is their pet hate; he disturbs their most cherished dreams and nightmares by insisting as Rockefeller and Lippmann do, that the Republicans must adapt themselves to the real world. The Goldwater movement is a merger of the worst Southern racists, the right wing military and the obsessed inveterate anti-Communists, with those elements which have never reconciled themselves to the New Deal. Their candidate is ready to dabble in any irresponsible demagogy if it promises votes. The man who is so strong for states’ rights when it comes to civil rights spoke as if the federal government had police power to protect Northern cities from maurauders—(Negro, that is)—but not Mississippi Negroes from mobsters. I don’t think he can win but to assume from the polls that his defeat is a foregone conclusion would be criminal folly especially after the Wallace withdrawal; popular majorities are in no event the same as electoral college majorities. The Harlem riots are a foretaste of what could happen elsewhere to magnify that “white backlash” on which Goldwater and the white supremacists count. We are fortunate that, as in the final censure and political destruction of McCarthy, the forces opposing Goldwater are headed by a conservative and represent a coalition of civilized forces, conservative and liberal. The anti-McCarthyites found a leader in the Midwestern conservative Watkins. The anti-Goldwater forces are lucky to be led by a moderate conservative Democrat from Texas. But the victory will not be easy, and no one should stand aside from the struggle for it. The peace of the country and of the world may be decided by the outcome.
* * *
*One reporter after hearing Goldwater’s remark suggested a plank in the Republican platform condemning Hitler for having lost the war.
Curtis LeMay:
Cave Man in a Jet Bomber
Curtis E. LeMay was a general in the U.S. Air Force, an architect
of the successful bombing campaign in the Pacific during World War II, and George Wallace’s vice-presidential running mate in 1968. He was also a vocal advocate of the aggressive use of military force, for example urging that the U.S. bomb the North Vietnamese “into the Stone Age.” In this essay, a review of LeMay’s 1965 autobiography Mission With LeMay, Stone eviscerates LeMay and the jingoist, militarist philosophy he represented.
. . .
January 20, 1966
ONE OF GENERAL CURTIS LEMAY’S earliest memories*—he thinks it must have been at four or five in the winter of 1910—11 or the next—was the sight of his first plane. He ran as fast as he could to try to catch it. He felt when it vanished that “I had lost something unique and in a way Divine.” At least this is the recollection, after a lifetime of bomber command, as he told it to the writer of his story, MacKinlay Kan tor. The general is not a religious man; this early feeling for the plane is the one note of piety in the account he helped prepare of his life. Nor is he a man ordinarily moved by beauty. It is the memory of the first plane he saw close-up on the ground that evokes the one moment of aesthetic enthusiasm in the book; what he remembers is “the appealing gush of its engine—the energy and beauty of the brute.” He went from Ohio State with an engineering degree to the old Army Air Corps in 1928. In 1937 at Langley Field, he met the plane which was to be linked with the most heroic episodes of his life—the B-17. There he saw “seven of the Flying Fortresses squatting on the ramp.” Of these he writes “I fell in love with the 17 at first sight.” Six years later he led an entire Air Division of these bombers over the European continent. It was not until 1944, when he began the first fire raids over Japan, that he switched to the bigger B-29. He can remember the smell of the B-17 as different from the smell of any other plane. This ability to differentiate these mighty metallic monsters by his animal sense of smell is even more impressive than the love and worship that so closely linked this man to his machines. He emerges in this story as much their instrument as they were his. LeMay’s later, long and stubborn rear-guard action to keep the bombers flying in the age of the missile begins to seem touching, like any attempt to maintain the vanishing familiar in a world of change without pity. So, unexpectedly, on the bomber, too, Vergil’s lacrimae rerum fall.