Recruitment picked up. Manion already had his friend J. Bracken Lee, recently voted out as governor of Utah after he refused to pay federal income tax, and whose Committee of 50 States was working on a constitutional amendment to dissolve the federal government when U.S. debt reached a specified amount. Now Herb Kohler signed on to the Manion committee, and his fame drew dozens more prominent conservative names: movie stars and HUAC-friendly witnesses Joel McCrea and Adolphe Menjou; erstwhile FDR Naval Secretary and New Jersey governor Charles Edison, son of the inventor; Spruille Braden, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia and Chile; Robert Welch, a former candy executive, now convening mysterious two-day symposia across the country laying out a sweeping and gothic new vision for fighting the Communist conspiracy; the fire-breathing anticommunist lecturer from Alton, Illinois, Phyllis Schlafly. Now Manion had a movement. “Dear Clarence: Please pardon the informality of this salutation,” one committeeman began a letter. “If we are working together for the world, first names are now respectably in order.”
There was considerable doubt whether Manion was worthy of this man’s confidence. He didn’t have a publisher. He had hired Brent Bozell as ghostwriter, but then the ghostwriter promptly went missing for the next three weeks. (He was sojourning in Spain, where he had begun a romance with Catholic monarchism.) When Bozell resurfaced, Manion celebrated by announcing in mid-July that the booklet would “appear about the time our Committee is announced—not sooner than 60 days hence.”
That wasn’t even in the ballpark. For, sixty-two days hence, Khrushchev would visit the United States, in a trip just announced, and presently all other political activity on the right ground to a halt. Bozell convened a Committee for the Freedom of All Peoples, Manion a National Committee of Mourning (to greet Khrushchev, he announced, with public prayers, the tolling of bells, and black arm bands). Robert Welch’s Committee Against Summit Entanglements circulated petitions accusing Eisenhower of treason; Buckley’s National Review held a melodramatic rally at Carnegie Hall, with Buckley promising in a press conference to dye the Hudson River red to greet the Butcher of Moscow. Milwaukee’s Allen-Bradley Company bought a full page in the Wall Street Journal: “To Khrushchev, ‘Peace and Friendship’ means the total enslavement of all nations, of all peoples, of all things, under the God-denying Communist conspiracy of which he is the current Czar.... Don’t let it happen here!”
Khrushchev left; the republic stood; new headaches arose. Manion had secured a publisher—Publishers Printing Co., in tiny Shepherdsville, Kentucky, whose specialty was trade magazines (it was the only printer that didn’t say it was impossible to publish and distribute a book in time for the Republican Convention in July). But now a rival group, We, The People!, hosted Goldwater at the group’s fifth annual “Constitution Day Convention” in Chicago, where there was much backroom talk of drafting him for President. Manion let the leaders in on his plans, and they agreed to back off. No sooner had Manion tamped down those flames than the wild-eyed New Orleansian Kent Courtney, the most scabrous pamphleteer on the right, and his wife, Phoebe, held an “Independent American Forum and New Party Rally” in Chicago. “I have been busy on the phone continuously trying to keep this group from going off half-cocked,” Manion wrote despairingly to Dorn. It took a trip to New Orleans, and negotiations until 2 a.m., to ward off the Courtneys. Manion, losing heart, had even considered joining Jim Johnson in an attempt to draft Governor Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina for an independent elector scheme, or perhaps dropping Goldwater in favor of General Wedemeyer. There was still no text for what was tentatively being called “What Americanism Means to Me.” On November 16, Manion penned a stiff note to Hub Russell: “Keep after Bozell! ”
By then Brent Bozell was at home in Chevy Chase writing like a house afire, starting and finishing the Goldwater manuscript within six weeks. All he had needed was an incentive. Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller provided it. Rocky had begun approaching party activists around the country to back him in a run for President. And if Nixon and Rockefeller deadlocked at the convention—perhaps Goldwater’s moment would come.
The second son of John Davison Rockefeller Jr. had been the first of his clan to broach the unseemly world of politics. It was a matter of family temperament. If the reserve, discipline, and Baptist discretion of the patriarch John D. Rockefeller Sr. was legendary, these traits were only bested by John D. Jr. His “never-ending preoccupation,” wrote one of the family’s many chroniclers, was “with what being a Rockefeller meant.” It did not mean slapping boozy ward bosses on their overly broad backs.
There was also the matter of a certain realism. A spawn of the houses of Aldrich and Rockefeller could not exactly have been expected to inspire devotion among the unwashed masses: there had never been a more forthright defender of the prerogatives of Big Business than Nelson Aldrich, the industrial magnate that muckraker Lincoln Steffens labeled “the boss of the United States.” John D. Rockefeller Sr. did not exactly win his oil monopoly in a manner calculated to win his progeny the loyalty of 50 percent plus one of the voters. When the idea of running Nelson Rockefeller for New York governor was proposed in high Republican councils in 1954, the room erupted in laughter: “For the Republican Party to nominate a Rockefeller,” chortled one, “would be suicidal!”
For Rockefellers there were better—quieter—ways to place one’s stamp on the world. If some exquisitely principled soul sought to avoid the taint of the Rockefeller billions he would have a job on his hands. If he were the descendant of slaves he might want to forgo a university education (Rockefeller funds kept the nation’s Negro colleges in the black); if he were a New Yorker he should boycott milk (the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research had sanitized the city’s supply); if he were Chinese he’d better stay healthy (the family’s China Medical Board trained a generation of physicians); if he was of a wandering bent he would forgo the pleasures of Versailles (renovated with Rockefeller cash), Grand Teton National Park (Rockefeller land), the Agora in Greece (excavated thanks to the family’s largesse), and Tokyo’s Imperial University (rebuilt by the Rockefeller Foundation after the disastrous earthquake of 1923). And on and on—all welcome expense for the privilege of serving God and country without ever having to venture into the distasteful task of grubbing for votes.
Nelson was a different story.
He grew up in the typical family fashion: born at the vacation cottage at Seal Harbor, Maine, shuttled in childhood between the 3,500-acre family estate on the banks of the Hudson, Pocantico Hills (the rambling, two-story Tudor “Playhouse” had a bowling alley, billiard room, squash court, indoor tennis court, and swimming pool), and the nine-story townhouse at 10 West 54th Street in Manhattan—but compelled all the same to mend his clothes, weed the garden, keep strict accounts of his thirty-cent-a-week allowance, and conduct himself with the modesty and dignity befitting a Rockefeller. But he was a scampish, impatient boy—qualities much in the way of his beloved and vivacious mother, but unbecoming to his towering father. So early on Nelson developed an unmistakable gift to, as a biographer put it, “diligently attend to the Rockefeller rituals, while stealthily subverting them at the same time.” For all his advantages in life, he honed a skill for working the system more proper to a man without means. He grew up seeking something that would resist him. Late in his life an interviewer asked him how long he had wanted to become President of the United States. “Ever since I was a kid,” he answered. “After all, when you think of what I had, what else was there to aspire to?”
In 1937, around the time Goldwater was penning nasty open letters to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rockefeller, not yet thirty, began consummating that aspiration in earnest. He had invested much of his massive trust in the Venezuelan arm of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Long fascinated by Latin America (some said it was the hot-blooded, effusive, and physical Latin temperament—his temperament—that attracted him), he spent two months traveling its length and breadth on the pretense of inspecting his holdings. The unspeak
able poverty in the squatter towns that had grown up around the oil fields, and the imperial condescension with which workers were treated, overwhelmed him. Upon returning, he addressed Standard’s board of directors in perhaps the most succinct statement he would ever make of his evolving patrician liberalism: “The only justification for ownership is that it serves the broad interests of the people. We must recognize the social responsibilities of corporations and the corporation must use its ownership of assets to reflect the best interests of the people.”
By 1940, with the Nazis making diplomatic and commercial inroads into South America, Rockefeller bluffed and hustled his way to an appointment by President Roosevelt to a position he invented: “Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.” By the height of the war Nelson had seven personal secretaries and 1,413 employees and projects ranging from producing propaganda cartoons by Walt Disney to a failed scheme to manufacture wooden, sail-powered warships in Latin American shipyards (which Navy man FDR latched onto with delight); he had even, incredibly, persuaded FDR to insert an unnoticed clause into the Appropriations Act of July 1942 giving his office power to act “without regard to the provisions of law regulating the expenditure, accounting for and audit of government funds.” By 1943 he was laying fantastic plans for a massive (American-funded) social welfare program for the entire South American continent—budgeted all the way through 1953. Later it would serve as blueprint for a key aspect of U.S. foreign policy: using foreign aid to win the loyalty of the world’s multitudes in the struggle against Communism.
When the Republicans—the Rockefeller family’s ancestral party—took over the White House in 1953, Nelson made an even greater imprint in Washington, first as undersecretary of the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—where, practically serving as acting secretary, he was the guiding hand in the agency’s every attempt to preserve or extend the welfare state, from Social Security to his own failed plan for instituting guaranteed national health care—then in the State Department’s top propaganda post. He was in line for the number two job at State when he was blackballed by Ike’s thrifty treasury secretary, George Humphrey, who blanched at Rockefeller’s reputation for fiscal profligacy. The experience galvanized Rockefeller: checked by bureaucracy, he decided his ticket upward was the electorate. He saw no reason in his first campaign, in 1958, not to run for what was widely regarded as the second most powerful office in the nation: governor of New York. Three men had made the governorship of New York a stepping-stone to the presidency; Nelson Rockefeller wanted to be the fourth. He made his political ambitions impossible for the state Republican Party to ignore. They tried to shunt him into the New York City postmastership or a congressional seat from Westchester County. These he rejected. They suggested a run for U.S. Senate. “All they do there is talk,” he grumbled.
He planned his gubernatorial campaign by refining a political vision. After he quit his State Department post he joined his brothers in assembling the best minds of the American establishment in a half-million-dollar project to produce a series of definitive reports on ... everything. The goal of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation’s Special Study Fund was to define an American mission for the 1960s. Its eight subpanels (“The Moral Framework of National Purpose,” and so forth) included magnates like Justin Dart of Rexall Drug, Thomas McCabe of Scott Paper, and Charles Percy of Bell & Howell; generals like Lucius Clay, former U.S. commander in Europe; media impresarios Henry Luce and David Sarnoff; university presidents, union leaders, and foundation bosses. Their reports were digested by the project administrator, a young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger, into some twenty volumes over three years and finally distilled into a summary paperback, Prospects for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports. It became a literary touchstone of the ideology—Rockefeller’s ideology—future generations of scholars would label consensus, managerial, or pragmatic liberalism: the belief that any problem, once identified, could be solved through the disinterested application of managerial expertise.
Rockefeller surprised the world with his effortless populism on the campaign trail (though to be sure he was a populist who instinctively threw his arms back whenever he stepped outdoors to accommodate whomever—there was always someone—was putting his coat on for him). Some days he reached out with his muscular right arm to shake two thousand hands, giving most people his trademark salutation, “Hiyah, fella!” At a county fair he rode a harness racer’s sulky at full gallop. At Coney Island he stripped to swim trunks and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. In Rockland County he spoke in the rain atop a wooden plank suspended between two oil drums. (“I hope my platform is stronger than this plank,” he said in that ever so slightly patrician voice with the rumble at the bottom.) And in an encounter that came to symbolize the Rockefeller campaign style, he trooped into Ratner’s delicatessen on New York’s Lower East Side and stuffed cheese blintzes, one after the other, into his chiseled, handsome face. “I recommend the blintzes,” he told anyone who would listen, shaking a hand, autographing a napkin, flashing a billion-dollar grin with a double wink of his left eye. He won handily. The planning for a presidential campaign began soon after.
A year later, he launched his opening salvo, in Los Angeles. The Republican Party was holding its Western states meeting the weekend of November 14, 1959, at the Biltmore in Pasadena. Rockefeller rented a hall at the Sheraton nearby for a luncheon. He delivered a technical address carefully calibrated to establish his foreign policy bona fides—the classic move for a governor seeking presidential credibility. Reporters exhibited little interest in his views on strengthening the Western alliance. They wanted to know whether all these efforts meant he was challenging Richard Nixon for the nomination. He would reply with a grin that he was only an innocent “toiler in the Republican vineyards” working for victory in 1960. Then he sped off for a series of back-room meetings with Republican chieftains. For Nelson Rockefeller was an innocent toiler in the Republican vineyards that fall like the family’s 107-room redoubt at Seal Harbor was a cottage. The machine he built merely to explore the possibility of a presidential run was larger than the machine Kennedy’s “Irish Mafia” built to execute a presidential run. Within the two three-story buildings at Nos. 20 and 22 West 55th Street in Manhattan that served as the governor’s executive offices whenever the legislature wasn’t in session, some seventy deputies probed the Republican waters that autumn and devised methods to bring them to a Rockefeller boil. The names, faces, and dispositions of every local GOP grandee worthy of note from Maine to Malibu were filed by the Research Division for quick consultation by the Logistics Division, which planned one-on-one backslapping sessions, luncheon meetings, and conference-room dinners after addresses written by the Speechwriting Division, while the Citizens Division worked with the local “grassroots” Rockefeller Clubs which, one veteran correspondent marveled, “seemed ready to sprout fully armed like a dragon seed, all across the country.” There was also an Image Division and an office where an author scribbled away at a book-length Rockefeller biography.
In Los Angeles it did him little good. Rockefeller was received by his 2,600 lunch guests with the polite applause befitting a dry speech written by committee. Behind the closed doors the panjandrums told the governor they would back Nixon against all comers. And the next day, Rockefeller was resoundingly upstaged.
Goldwater had just wrapped up a marathon forty-three-state tour for the Senate Republican Campaign Committee with a morning hearing in southeast Arizona on water rights. He hopped into his Beechcraft, speechwriter Shadegg in tow, for a two-and-a-half-hour routine flight to a routine speech at a routine party conclave at the Pasadena Biltmore. The expanse of his beloved state passed beneath his eyes for the hundredth time, then California’s eastern desert; he then approached the stunning pass that threads through the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains. Low, menacing clouds rolled in. He prepared an approach on instruments. Forty miles out he opened his flight case with a start: the tables he needed to execute
a blind landing at Burbank Airport were missing. Only at the last minute did the clouds break and he was cleared for a visual landing. His luck ran out at the airport. It was the taxi driver’s first day on the job. “Have either of you gentlemen ever been to the Biltmore before?” he asked. When they finally arrived at the hotel, the desk clerk wouldn’t cash a check Goldwater wrote for pocket money (he kept to habits from childhood: he never carried cash). By the time he got to the meeting it was already in progress. A sergeant at arms, who didn’t recognize him, refused him entrance to the overflowing hall. Goldwater said to hell with it and went to grab a bite to eat. He was persuaded to return to the hall by the pleas of the chairman of the Western Conference. They were counting on him, he said. An appeal to duty was always the best way to Barry Goldwater’s heart.
Maybe it was the adrenaline from the day’s wild rides. Maybe there was something in the rubber chicken. Whatever it was, when Barry Goldwater spoke, the room sparked to life in a way that startled even those who had seen Goldwater do this many times before.
First came the body blow to the Democrats: “Not long ago, Senator John Kennedy stated bluntly that the American people had gone soft. I am glad to discover he has finally recognized that government policies which create dependent citizens inevitably rob a nation and it.s people of both moral and physical strength.”
Then there were the home truths of his pioneer forebears: “Life was not meant to be easy. The American people are adult—eager to hear the bold, blunt truth, weary of being kept in a state of perpetual adolescence.”
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