Now, radical Democrats, who rightfully fear that the American people will reject their extreme program in November, are watching this convention with eager hope that some split may occur in our party. I am telling them now that no such split will take place. Let them know that the conservatives of the Republican Party do not intend by any act of theirs to turn this country over, by default, to a party which has lost its belief in the dignity of man, a party which has no faith in our economic system, a party which has come to the belief that the United States is a second-rate power....
While Dick and I may disagree on some points, there are not many. I would not want any negative action of mine to enhance the possibility of victory going to those who by their very words have lost faith in America.... Republicans have not been losing elections because of more Democrat votes—now get this—we have been losing elections because conservatives often fail to vote.
Why is this? And you conservatives think this over. We don’t gain anything when you get mad at a candidate because you don’t agree with his every philosophy. We don’t gain anything when you disagree with the platform and then do not go out and work and vote for your party. I know what you say, “I will get even with that fellow. I will show this party something.” But what are you doing when you stay at home? You are helping the opposition party elect candidates dedicated to the destruction of this country.... Now, I implore you, forget it. We have had our chance and I think the conservatives have made a splendid showing at this Convention. We have had our chance. We have fought our battle. Now, let’s put our shoulders to the wheel for Dick Nixon and push him across the line.
Now his voice was raised, the right corner of his mouth curled slightly above the left, his eyes narrowed; he was a stern father working over a recalcitrant child.
This country is too important for anyone’s feelings. This country, in its majesty, is too great for any man, be he conservative or liberal, to stay home and not work just because he doesn’t agree. Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this Party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work.
Goldwater was falling in behind the party establishment. It was all Brent Bozell could do to turn to the person next to him and mouth, “That son of a bitch.”
PART TWO
6
QUICKENING
To much of the nation, January 20, 1961, felt like a rebirth. It certainly did to most of the nation’s press corps. They would record how Washington, captured once again from the stolid stand-pat Republicans, crackled back to life at the arrival of John F. Kennedy’s brash young band of brothers, the day breaking cold and clear, the man, coatless and hatless in the stinging wind, still aglow from the birth of his second child.
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.... And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.
The joy of new life, of idealism, the promise of youth: this is how the day would be remembered. But another set of symbols could have been mined from these same events—omens of just how frightening the year 1961 would turn out to be.
The night before the inaugural a black-tied multitude fought its way through one of the biggest snowfalls in Washington history to an extravagant gala at the D.C. Armory, headlined by Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. The Rat Pack, that is, minus Sammy Davis Jr. Since he was about to marry a statuesque blonde, he was politely but firmly disinvited at the last minute so as not to risk Kennedy’s Southern support. Inaugural morning, after uniformed soldiers had swept the vicinity with flamethrowers to clear the snow, Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston began offering the invocation, then halted with a start: blue smoke, then flames, were issuing from his lectern from a short-circuit in the wiring. The nation’s beloved old poet, Robert Frost, reading the first stanza of the inaugural poem he had just composed (“Summoning artists to participate / In the august occasions of the state / Seems something artists ought to celebrate”), stopped and looked away helplessly—blinded by the sun.
Three days earlier Americans had tuned in to their TVs for a bit of comforting sentimentality from their warm and wise national grandfather. They witnessed instead a jeremiad. President Eisenhower’s boyish Midwestem-by-way-of-Southern voice darkened with gravity as he began his farewell address. He reminded his listeners of the century’s great wars (“holocausts,” he called them), of the “indefinite duration” of the Cold War.
Then, with the obliqueness of a difficult truth struggling for expression, he spoke of the psychic consequence of this indefiniteness—“a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” He warned, “Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”
Then he broached another subject: “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” The admission was startling: “we annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.” He called it a “military-industrial complex,” and said it had “grave implications” for “the very structure of our society.... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” The consequences of permanent war was a wartime mentality. America “must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate.”
Must never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came eleven times. In contrast, Kennedy’s rhetoric on January 20 was a cascade of permissions: the word “let” rang out fourteen times. It was as if, liberated from the daily tasks of administration, stepping back to survey the new America the Cold War had made, Eisenhower recognized an Icarus, a Tower of Babel, a fallible nation, angrier than it knew.
His speech was shrugged off as a puzzlement. Evidence supporting its wisdom piled up that week. But because America was seized by a wartime mentality, much of that evidence was secret. The Central Intelligence Agency was training Cuban exiles deep in the Guatemalan bush for an invasion to overthrow the Castro government; on January 17 the files were closed on a completed CIA mission in which rebels led by a military officer named Joseph Mobutu hunted down and killed the Republic of the Congo’s Soviet-leaning prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, on the country’s 203rd day of independence. The next day Adlai Stevenson denounced the coup at the UN. And the Kremlin officially declared “the only way to bring imperialism to heel” was through the “sacred struggle of colonial peoples, wars of colonial liberation.” On January 19, the American nuclear program suffered its thirteenth “broken arrow” when a B-52 exploded in midair in Utah, luckily without any of the missiles armed; the fourteenth was ten days later when a B-52 flying a routine Strategic Air Command training mission out of Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base crashed near a North Carolina farm. The aircraft’s two nuclear bombs jettisoned, and five of their six safety mechanisms were unlatched by the fall.
One day at an auditorium at Rutgers University in New Jersey a standing-room-only crowd of six hundred students back from Christmas break engaged in the kind of debate that had never taken place in the course of the presidential race that had just passed—sanguinary ideological combat, students facing off on radically opposed visions of what was moral and what was not, arguing politics as if their lives depended on it.
They had waded through a forest of pickets in order to watch what papers were calling the nation’s most talked-about film. Communist-Led Riots Against the House Committee on Un-American Activities in San Francisco, May 12—14, 1960 was better known by its informal title, Operation Abolition. HUAC claimed to have derived the nickname from the label “the Communist Party itself has given to its curren
t, greatly intensified drive to have the committee abolished.” The events the film depicted were rooted back in 1959, when HUAC subpoenaed 110 Bay Area teachers for one of its road-show hearings. HUAC was a lunatic outfit; its latest project involved hunting down the officer responsible for withdrawing an Air Force Reserve training manual because it contained the claim that “Communists had infiltrated our churches” to “teach Soviet Gospel from the Pulpit.” HUAC was not popular in liberal San Francisco. When the targeted teachers’ names were published in the local press, the outcry that ensued was such that the committee had to postpone its planned West Coast tour. By May of 1960, when HUAC finally rolled into town, a politically charged academic year was just winding to a close at UC Berkeley. A student began a hunger strike to protest compulsory ROTC participation. (President Clark Kerr responded by strengthening rules against students speaking on campus about “off-campus” issues.) The Congress of Racial Equality chapter picketed the local Woolworth’s; students massed in a vigil outside San Quentin protesting the execution of Caryl Chessman; and when the Board of Regents prostrated themselves before J. Edgar Hoover after a university document criticized the FBI, the Daily Californian editorialized that Hoover’s FBI was America’s own homegrown Gestapo. An anti-HUAC movement began.
On May 12 dozens of students went to San Francisco’s City Hall expecting to be able to observe HUAC’s public hearings. Barred entry, they lined up on an outdoor second-floor rotunda outside the hearing room and attempted a literal exercise of their First Amendment rights, delivering a document reading, “We petition this arm of the United States Congress either to move to a larger hearing room or to open its doors on a first come, first served basis.” Security officers were unmoved. The next day even more spectators were denied entrance to the proceedings. They beat on the doors and began singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” After San Francisco’s most open and unapologetic Communist, the wizened longshoreman Archie Brown, raised a cry from the witness table—“Open the doors! Open the doors! What are you afraid of?”—white-helmeted police closed in on him as he bleated, “Here come their goon squads!” The hearing room went up in pandemonium. A group in the back of the hall took up a rousing chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Outside, police pointed a firehose at the crowd of students, now sitting down civil rights-style. And, in a scene that looked like a visitation from some far-off world, white kids, most well-scrubbed and neatly dressed, were brutally washed down the stairs by firehoses. Slicing through fifties decorum as if through butter, they got back up and were washed right down again, the stairs now slicked by their blood.
HUAC subpoenaed news footage of the event. Representative James Roosevelt of California, FDR’s son, had recently introduced a daring bill to end HUAC’s congressional authorization once and for all. HUAC wanted to make a documentary demonstrating just how vital the committee’s work remained—by demonstrating how the Communist Party had duped innocent students into working on its behalf. Operation Abolition began with a still of a document labeled “Communist-front Literature”—a speech delivered by Jimmie Roosevelt. It went on to explain that Students for Civil Liberties had issued a “directive” on the front page of the Daily Californian to sabotage HUAC hearings. A scene was shown of a kid defending himself against a cop’s blows; but since HUAC assembled the shots out of order, it looked like he was assaulting the cop. The narration explained that the guerrilla attack on the police had been signaled by the singing of “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a song “lifted from the old Communist People’s Song Book.”
Operation Abolition was little noticed until J. Edgar Hoover published his own report on “the successful Communist exploitation and manipulation of youth and student groups throughout the world today,” Communist Target—Youth (later made into a film narrated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy). In a summer of left-wing student unrest on three continents, the idea that the Berkeley students had been duped by the Communists caught on. Private groups, first a trickle, then a flood, began screening Operation Abolition (the commercial film company that HUAC hired to produce it sold five hundred prints at $100 apiece). Soon it was being shown to entire staffs of cabinet departments. By the winter of 1960-61, its narrator, Fulton “Buddy” Lewis III, a young staffer on HUAC and the son of McCarthyite radio host Fulton Lewis Jr., and Herb Romerstein, an ex-Communist HUAC investigator, began touring it around colleges.
Thus the scene that January evening at Rutgers University.
It began when the MC, head of the county conservative club, rushed in late and announced, “I heard there were pickets from SANE here”—the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, a disarmament group—“and I wanted to see how you picketed while crawling on your belly.” (It was the same language Barry Goldwater had used before the platform committee in July.) He was answered by the first of the evening’s many choruses of boos. The film was rolled, interrupted throughout by laughter, applause, jeers. Romerstein took the floor. “I hope that those students who have been brave enough to jeer in the dark would be brave enough to stand up in the light, give their names, and make their comments.” They were, and they did. Angry, passionate debate ensued: on Communism, on anticommunism, on civil liberties, civil rights, questioning authority, respecting authority—an evening of sweaty brows, flailing arms, and outbursts, ending four hours after it began when a dean ordered dormitory dwellers back in time for curfew.
Then Lewis and Romerstein packed up for the next school. The same thing happened everywhere they went—which wasn’t supposed to be possible in consensus America. A history professor named John Higham had recently published an article in the liberal magazine Commentary called “The Cult of American Consensus: Homogenizing Our History.” In it, he complained that his colleagues were unaccountably bleaching out all the conflict in the American past—as if such conflicts weren’t important to the story at all. He watched, surprised, as those colleagues proudly claimed the epithet “consensus historians” for themselves. Conflict in America, in those rare moments it occurred, was an epiphenomenon, they argued—a footnote, in the past as much as the present. The political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset published a book called Political Man whose final chapter, “The End of Ideology,” reported that domestic politics were now “boring” because “the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved.”
It was a nice idea—and, since no one paid much attention to what politically active kids under the age of thirty were doing, it was catching.
The fifteen activists from Youth for Goldwater for Vice President at the Chicago convention whom Goldwater urged to make their group permanent did exactly that. They made their public debut as Young Americans for Freedom on January 2, 1961, picketing against HUAC abolitionists in front of the White House.
Their mentor had been instrumental in putting it all together. Marvin Liebman had begun a long romance with the Communist Party in high school; he joined the Army during the war, drew a dishonorable discharge for homosexuality, then settled down to what he thought would be a life of confirmed bohemianism in Greenwich Village. Desperate for cash, he took a job with a Zionist organization and found his calling. He designed a brochure, black with a jagged cutout that opened to reveal in stark white letters the words “HEBREW BLOOD.” The yield from the fund-raising campaign it announced broke the bank. Marvin Liebman began a new career. Soon he would also have a new ideology.
Liebman was taken on as an apprentice by top-drawer New York publicist Harold L. Oran. Oran asked him to help with a fund-raising campaign for a humanitarian committee led by Elinor Lipper, who had spent eleven years in a slave labor camp in Siberia. Liebman refused. “There are no slave labor camps in the USSR,” he told Oran. “The woman is obviously a fraud.” His boss asked him to meet her just once, as a favor. The two met for drinks at the Algonquin. Lipper calmly looked Liebman in the eye and related her experience in Stalin’s camps. A wave of revulsion washed over him. He felt personally responsible.
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br /> The experience was a common one among former-Communist leaders of the right—Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, John Dos Passos, and Herb Romerstein, among others. A chiliastic struggle between light and darkness was unfolding, they had believed as Communists. Everyone was responsible to one side or the other. And when they realized the side they had thought was the bearer of light was really the embodiment of evil, no less convinced of the stakes, no less fervent, no less driven—Communists became anticommunist warriors.
What made this anticommumist warrior unique was that he had received the best public relations education money couldn’t buy. He went into business for himself and became the right’s P. T. Barnum, the publicity arm of National Review’s literary revolution—maestro of the bipartisan committees, the testimonial dinners, the rallies, the full-page ads, the crowded letterheads with the preprinted signatures for committees with long names. His masterpiece was the Committee of One Million, which had supposedly collected a million signatures to keep Red China out of the United Nations.
Doug Caddy was one of Liebman’s apprentices. Liebman persuaded Bill Buckley to loan Great Elm, the family estate, as the site for an organizational meeting for their new conservative youth group on September 10. A call was posted from Liebman’s Madison Avenue office to 120 conservative student activists and journalists. “Now is the time for Conservative youth to take action to make their full force and influence felt,” it declared. “By action we mean political action!” He sent another letter to his prime contributors’ lists.
Almost one hundred students came to Sharon, Connecticut, that September weekend. For young conservatives who had discovered their idiosyncratic political faith from National Review, from ISI and Foundation for Economic Education pamphlets, from Human Events, who were ridiculed whenever they spoke up in class about the spiritual crisis of the West and against “peaceful coexistence” with a slave empire—for many of them, for the very first time they felt like they were not alone.
Before the Storm Page 15