It was no use; Mitchell’s critics were impotent. Americans in the millions who were not Birchers, who had not read Conscience of a Conservative, who had not heard of National Review; whose families did not own factories, who did not live in military-industrial-libertarian enclaves like Orange County—all read the Thirteen Points, liked what they saw, then tuned out the voices of the experts who pointed to their unimpeachable evidence, moralists who demanded that they care more, and highbrows who compared them to Nazis. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before.
Mitchell was now a right-wing hero. Two hundred YAFers took a festive boat ride up the Hudson from Manhattan to march down Newburgh’s Main Street to present him with a two-foot-long plaque, which Mitchell accepted, banana republic-style, speaking from a second-floor balcony: “What more could a Communist want? Here is the realization of a dream of conquest: How to wreck cities, then counties, then states, and then the national government; how to ruin the moral fiber and social and economic structures without the expenditure of anything but an idea.” (Later, when the affair concluded, Marvin Liebman arranged to take possession of the cartons full of citizens’ letters, adding seven thousand new names to his mailing lists.)
Goldwater adored Mitchell. He wrote him an exuberant telegram: “Reading the account of your stand on welfarism in this week’s Life magazine was as refreshing as breathing the clean air of my native Arizona.... The abuses in the welfare field are mounting and the only way to curtail them are the steps which you have already taken.” When Mitchell traveled to Washington, he met privately for twenty minutes with Goldwater, who was immediately mobbed by reporters: surely his meeting with Mitchell was a warning to Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican front-runner for President, to beware of a Goldwater challenge.
The reasoning was sound: Rocky was the officer ultimately responsible for the disposition of the Newburgh case. “There’s nothing political in this,” Goldwater responded. His protestations were genuine. But few believed him. Goldwater was now the hottest politician in Washington. Everyone assumed that his lust for higher office would erupt at any moment; that was how Washington worked. Rockefeller knew how it worked; he knew the law was on the side of the liberals, but he commissioned a poll: one-third of New Yorkers believed half of welfare recipients were chiselers, so Rockefeller responded to his political dilemma by retreating to his Venezuelan finca until things blew over.
Barry Goldwater’s fame had been steadily increasing ever since the Republican Convention the previous summer. He made 177 speeches across twenty-six states for the GOP ticket, a good portion in Dixie. Nixon staffers seeded the crowds with buttons reading “GOLDWATER SAYS DON’T DODGE: VOTE NIXON AND LODGE.” Many already wore ones reading “GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT.”
By the month before the election, with the presidential candidate professing timid echoes of the Democrat line, a Times reporter remarked to Goldwater that he was hearing the word “Nixon” less and less often in the Arizonan’s speeches. Goldwater denied it—then undercut himself by saying that if Nixon lost the race, he might run for the nomination in 1964. On October 15, two nights after Premier Khrushchev was seen on TV banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations in rage at the American imperialists, Goldwater treated Nixon to a bruising private workout session at the Westward Ho Hotel in Phoenix in an effort to get him to put more partisan blood into his campaign. They stepped out together into the Thunderbird Room to greet an assembly of Republican campaign workers, a fifteen-foot cactus scrim as backdrop. Nixon was intimidated. “I traveled the country in ’58. It was not a pleasant job, I can assure you,” he said self-pityingly in his speech. “Frankly, if the time ever comes when I’m not proud of my party and proud of the candidates I’m running with, then, of course, the thing for me to do is get out of the party. So I can only say, since I don’t intend that, I’m going to continue to support every Republican candidate in this state, and also in the nation.”
In the last televised debate, Nixon performed atrociously. It wasn’t even his fault: Kennedy, in a legendary dirty trick, cheated by asking why the Eisenhower Administration hadn’t attempted to take back Cuba militarily—exploiting the fact that he had been given a top secret briefing that that very thing was being planned. It forced Nixon to sound like a dove so he wouldn’t blow the invasion’s cover. But Goldwater didn’t know that any more than any other viewer. He promptly wrote Nixon: “What this nation wants is firmness in its president.... They want to hear a tough attitude toward Russia—an attitude that might run the risk of war but which would guarantee us a fight for our freedom instead of the slow dribbling away such as the Democrats have been doing at Versailles, Pots-dam, Yalta, Tehran, and Korea.” He warned Len Hall, “Conservatives of both parties are now speaking of staying home. They are being prodded in this by Dan Smoot and Bob Welch, each of whom has a large following.”
In the desperate final days before the 1960 election, Nixon, Rockefeller, Lodge, and Eisenhower met in New York to regroup and plot strategy. Goldwater was not invited—an absence so conspicuous that Senator Kennedy joked, while campaigning in Phoenix, that those Republican potentates would have invited Barry to the New York meeting, “if they can just get Barry out of that Confederate uniform that he has been using in the South.” The laughter was nervous. Opinion polls were showing that Kennedy might become the first Democrat in over a hundred years to lose Dixie. If he did, Barry Goldwater would be a prophet.
It had been an autumn of reckoning for the parties. When the Senate passed a mild civil rights bill in 1957, Republicans unanimously hewed to the tradition of the Party of Lincoln and voted for it. Sixty-two percent of Democrats supported it. When the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1960 in April, once again the Republican senators were unanimously in favor—or at least the ones who voted; thirty-one GOP senators stuck their finger in shifting winds and avoided the session entirely. Thanks to Rockefeller, Nixon hit the campaign trail with a platform supporting voting rights, desegregation, and a commission on equal job opportunity. But in Los Angeles the Democrats—whose 1956 platform complimented the South for resisting Brown—did the GOP one better: their unprecedentedly liberal platform (the platform hearings had been chaired by National Review whipping boy Chester Bowles) demanded timetables for federal integration efforts. It almost dared Dixiecrats to do anything about it—a passel of them immediately obliging by coming out for Nixon.
Richard Nixon’s first campaign tour was through the South. What greeted him there was a revelation: the biggest party in Atlanta, wrote liberal Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, “since the premiere of Gone With the Wind.” A crowd of 150,000 spectators blanketed the route; on the platform with Nixon at Hurt Park before acres of delirious fans, the most enthusiastic demonstration Nixon had seen in fourteen years in politics, the Democratic mayor William Hartsfield warmly welcomed the coming of the two-party system to the South. In the capital of South Carolina, Columbia, Nixon drew 35,000 rooters. Kennedy drew 10,000.
The turnout for Nixon in the South presented a dilemma. Conventional campaign wisdom held that all America was divided in three: some states tended to go or always went Republican (Midwestern strongholds like Indiana and Ohio, New England ones like Vermont and Maine); others never did (the Southern states). The swing states that decided elections were the “Big Six,” the industrial states Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Michigan, and California. And the swing voters in these states—it was believed—were blacks. Nixon’s original strategy was to concentrate on the Big Six, which meant saying things that would scare off the Southern Democrats who suddenly seemed so tantalizingly within his grasp. After Kennedy’s nomination, the Reverend Billy Graham, an old Nixon friend, shaken at the thought of a Catholic president, dangled before the Republicans hints concerning his two-million-name, overwhelmingly Southern Democrat mailing list. Race was not on Graham’s mind; his other advice to Nixon was to draw closer to Martin Luther King. But Richard Nixon, not so high-minded, understood how you won
elections in the South.
The Democrats whistle-stopped Lyndon Johnson through the South in a train reporters tagged “the Cornpone Special.” In town after town the Texan, in exaggerated drawl, would speak of the rewards loyalty to the Democratic Party had brought and would bring. In a tiny hamlet in Virginia he delivered the most memorable line of the campaign: “What has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpeper?” (What, indeed, compared to Virginia senators Harry Flood Byrd and A. Willis Robertson, and their congressman Howard Worth Smith, each of whom had served since 1933?) Goldwater toured the South, too; he called Johnson a “counterfeit Confederate.” In the North, Nixon sat on the fence concerning civil rights. But when Henry Cabot Lodge impulsively promised (others heard him predicting) in Harlem that a Nixon-Lodge Administration would include a Negro cabinet member, Nixon raged at him.
Then, an astonishing development: Martin Luther King was arrested and sentenced to four months at hard labor for taking part in his first sit-in, in Atlanta. Kennedy’s civil rights point men Harris Wofford and Sargent Shriver fervently lobbied his campaign managers to have the candidate issue a call for King’s release. The managers—Bobby Kennedy foremost among them—were horrified at the thought of scaring off Southern whites. Shriver rushed to the candidate’s Chicago hotel room, waited until backs were turned, and buttonholed Kennedy with the suggestion that he phone King’s wife, Coretta, with a few words of comfort. Offhandedly, oblivious to his high command’s urgent efforts to head off just such a prospect, Kennedy agreed.
That Sunday, Nelson Rockefeller spoke against the King arrest from pulpits at four black churches in Brooklyn. At his side was Jackie Robinson, a longtime friend of Nixon who had nearly broken down in tears trying to convince him to throw in for King. Robinson’s argument wasn’t only moral; he had been warning Nixon over the course of the entire campaign that his neglect of blacks might lose him the election. Goldwater had been warning Nixon during the entire campaign that his neglect of the South might lose him the election. It is unlikely that this purebred political animal misunderstood the portent of the decision he would have to make: Speak for King and lose the Southern vote; ignore him and lose the black vote. Nixon’s final campaign stop broadcast which bloc he had chosen to court: he spoke at the South Carolina statehouse.
Meanwhile Mrs. King told the New York Times about John F. Kennedy’s call. Since King, coincidentally, was released at almost exactly the same time, Shriver and Wofford spotted an opportunity. Behind the Kennedy brothers’ backs they hastily cobbled together a pamphlet, “No Comment” Nixon versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy. Two million copies—nicknamed the “Blue Bomb” after its flimsy paper stock—were distributed the Sunday before Election Day at black churches around the country. They were clutched with reverence by people startled that Kennedy would take this risk in support of their freedom. Georgia Republicans responded with a pleading last-minute flyer: with a President Nixon, “there will be no compromises between the national administration and southern segregationists to pay off for votes.... PLAY SAFE! VOTE FOR NIXON AND LODGE!” When the ballots were counted, Kennedy overwhelmingly won the black vote. So has every Democratic presidential candidate since.
Kennedy also won the election—by an average of one-tenth of a vote per precinct. Republicans affixed blame to a hundred factors: Nixon would have won if Eisenhower had stumped more; if Eisenhower had pump-primed the economy; if not for Henry Cabot Lodge’s afternoon naps; if not for the Chicago Democratic machine; if Henry Luce hadn’t at the last minute timorously pulled a Life article by Billy Graham preaching that it was wrong to vote for a candidate simply because he was “more handsome or charming.” (Ironically, this last one was among Nixon’s favorite explanations.) Liberals said that Nixon lost because he didn’t speak against segregationism; conservatives said he lost because he didn’t speak for states’ rights. They also pointed out that in Illinois sixty thousand voters who marked their ballots for House and Senate, the majority for Republicans, didn’t indicate a preference for President. The fact shored up a conservative nostrum: millions of people would rather stay home than endorse the Republicans’ leftward drift.
This last message was heard most loudly from the party’s conservative star. “It’s just what I’ve been saying,” Goldwater told Time. “We cannot win as a dime-store copy of the opposition’s platform.” He began acting like he was positioning himself for something. For the first time he hired a press secretary, a former newsman and chamber of commerce staffer named Tony Smith. He turned to Brent Bozell, the hardest of National Review’s hard-liners, to write him a head-turning speech on declining American prestige for an appearance at the Air War College November 14, the first foreign affairs address for a politician who “[had] no foreign policy to speak of,” Bill Buckley had complained only a year and a half earlier. The next month, speaking to the Congress of American Industry in New York, Goldwater lambasted the Eisenhower Administration’s parting stroke of authorizing $500 million in foreign aid for Latin America. The following morning the New York Herald Tribune’s cartoonist had Barry ministering to an elephant stretched on a psychoanalyst’s couch: “You’ve been in the hands of quacks.”
After the New Year, the GOP’s most liberal senator, blunt, intense Jacob Javits of New York, organized an effort to try to dump Goldwater as chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. It gained momentum within the caucus, then sputtered when senators were swamped with protests from conservatives. On January II Goldwater took to the floor to deliver “A Statement of Proposed Republican Principles, Programs, and Objectives”—a stem-to-stern Republican legislative agenda for the 1960s, perhaps what the Republican presidential campaign would have looked like with Barry Goldwater at the helm. In the address, later dubbed the “Forgotten American” speech, Goldwater argued that in a political scene jammed with minority and pressure groups, the only population left unorganized were those Americans “who quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving.” The GOP, he said, must become the party of these “silent Americans.” This language would become influential in Republican presidential campaigning—seven years hence. In 1961 Goldwater made no attempt to build a coalition around these ideas or shepherd the statement’s clauses into bills; soon he dropped them.
He spent more energy that winter organizing a congressional wing of the Air National Guard, the 9999th Air Reserve Squadron. He was never one for legislating. His business was casting “no” votes: against an emergency increase in price supports for grain; against restricting federal aid to states making progress on segregation; against the foreign aid package; against aid to depressed areas to relieve chronic unemployment in places like New York’s Orange County; against a wilderness preservation bill years in the making (it passed 78 to 8); against the Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (93 percent of Republicans voted in favor); against an authorization of money to irrigate Navajo lands in New Mexico (although he introduced a bill to authorize funds for the dam-building Central Arizona Project). In a monumental statement, he said Kennedy’s school assistance bill was a farce, designed to address a teacher shortage that did not in fact exist. Then, naturally, he voted against it.
The word “no,” apparently, was all it took to get him on the cover of Time.
“Salesman for a Cause,” the cover line read. It went on to call Goldwater the “hottest political figure this side of Jack Kennedy.” A fawning feature in the March 25 Business Week reported that “the most sought-after man on Capitol Hill for speaking engagements around the country used to be a glamorous, liberal senator named John F. Kennedy. Today he is a glamorous, conservative senator named Barry Goldwater.” Conscience of a Conservative had sold three-quarters of a million copies. Newsweek put Goldwater on the cover on April 10—“a handsome jet aircraft pilot with curly gray hair, dazzling white teeth, and a tan on his desert-cured face,” who began his day by swinging “out of his bed as though he hadn’t partied until the small hours the night before.” Even
the country’s most liberal major daily, the New York Post, fawned: “Like Kennedy, he has a devastating impact on the ladies; he also projects an aura of rugged masculine competence with which men like to identify.” The number of newspapers featuring Goldwater’s opinion column climbed from 26 in April to 104 by summer. His suite in the Old Senate Office Building, besieged by eight hundred pieces of mail each day, was mobbed every morning by well-wishing families on summer vacations craving a scrawled autograph, eye contact, a handclasp—anything. (“If you’d like to see the Vice President, he’s right over there,” a reporter overheard a guide say. She was answered by a chorus: “Where’s Senator Goldwater?”) “GOLDWATER IN 1964” bumper stickers began appearing (”GOLDWATER IN 1864” stickers soon followed). A negative profile in Life by the novelist Gore Vidal, who called Goldwater a fascist, came off making Vidal look like the crank, the intended victim an altogether affable fellow.
Kennedy, meanwhile, was floundering politically in his first year in office. His only real legislative victory had come in the second week of his term, when the House voted to enlarge the size of the Rules Committee to dilute the power its reactionary majority of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats had used to bog down enough social legislation to render the liberal Democratic triumph in 1958 moot. But he won the victory by only a single vote, through the severest arm-twisting by House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Kennedy’s only big foreign policy move was the shameful loss at the Bay of Pigs. His Rules Committee coup availed him nothing: the school bill died a slow death; his depressed areas bill was only able to pass at half strength after Southern obstructionists were bought off with far more patronage than they deserved; the minimum wage was increased slightly, but thanks to business lobbying, the number of workers it covered decreased. A sweeping federal housing bill and one providing medical care to the aged through Social Security appeared ready to meet the same fate.
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