Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  The argument raged in the editorial offices through 1961: Was the groundswell to their right an opportunity or a nightmare? “There now exists in this country a conservative anti-Communist apparat that we all have hoped for,” Marvin Liebman wrote to the NR circle despairingly. “It is controlled by Robert Welch.” Bill Rusher, esteemed among the staff for his political savvy, gravely worried that “as the scope and pace of the free world’s collapse becomes apparent to the American people and desire for a scapegoat takes hold” Welch might find himself at the head of a literal fascist movement—a prospect that horrified these conservative pragmatists as much as it did their liberal enemies. Scotty Reston wrote in the New York Times that at the rate the far right was siphoning off its contributions, there wouldn’t be a Republican Party to nominate Goldwater in 1964.

  The question was whether the broad conservative movement itself was strong enough to survive a faction fight. Publicly, conservatives hid their dirty laundry and closed ranks: pas d‘ennemi du droite. “Next to the Twist and barely knee-length skirts,” the YAF newsletter declared after Tom Hayden’s Michigan Daily compared YAF to the Hitler Youth, “the most fashionable thing of the season is a rousing, vitriolic attack on the so-called ‘Extreme Right.’ ” Privately, Buckley brooded. He pored over a report on the John Birch· Society in Commentary speculating that if Goldwater lost the 1964 nomination to Rockefeller, he might take up the assembled forces of the extreme right as his fascist army. “Result: An American Raskol’niki,” Buckley scribbled in the margin. He glimpsed the abyss. Buckley liked to say that National Review’s purpose was “to articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.” If political surrealists like Welch ended up in control of the movement, all might be lost. But if National Review lost the Roger Millikens and Adolphe Menjous and couldn’t continue to raise enough money to stay in business ...

  He chose a stopgap: a signed editorial, worded with the delicacy of a hostage negotiation, that ran in the April 22 issue, in which Buckley availed himself of his Jesuitical temper to reduce Robert Welch’s sin to a logical fallacy: “I hope the Society thrives,” the editorial concluded, “provided, of course, it resists such false assumptions as that a man’s subjective motives can automatically be deduced from the objective consequences of his acts.”

  National Review already possessed an informal controlling interest in a membership organization—Young Americans for Freedom. But a feud was developing within its leadership that threatened to tear it apart. A mere six months after its founding, YAF president Caddy instituted a policy change to (he claimed) smooth the liaison procedures with local chapters. David Franke, his old partner, knew it was a power play, and lined up forces with the intention of purging Caddy. Caddy countered by organizing a faction within the twenty-five-member board—in which much of the group’s executive authority was vested—to wrest YAF from the National Review orbit altogether.

  The plotters were strange bedfellows. One, Harvard’s Howard Phillips, was frustrated by the older conservatives’ dominion over what was supposed to be a student organization. Another was said to harbor secret loyalties to Nelson Rockefeller. Others simply saw in the coup a way to advance their own ambitions. But one of the coup members, Scott Stanley of Kansas, was a Bircher—determined, the National Review editors decided, to place YAF under Robert Welch’s discipline.

  Meanwhile, two hundred YAFers descended on Madison for the fifteenth National Student Association Congress. Students for a Democratic Society hoped to use the meeting to establish a beachhead; YAF aimed to do the same. The conservative group’s efforts dwarfed the exercises in Washington the previous spring. An advance guard arrived early to set up shop like a general staff in a military campaign. When the sessions began, walkie-talkies were used to coordinate attacks on every live microphone and roll-call vote; to recognize friend from foe at long distances, YAFers wore suspenders. Meanwhile, at headquarters at the expensive Madison Inn, a staff of secretaries knocked out press releases, speech typescripts, flyers, and meeting proceedings (transcribed from clandestine tape recordings) full-time. They lined up a dummy “middle-of-the-road caucus” of enough unsuspecting dupes to keep the usual string of pro-civil rights and anti-anticommunist resolutions from even getting past committee. Spokesmen plied reporters with continual press conferences.

  It was incredible. And it nearly didn’t come off at all. Howard Phillips had raised thousands of dollars to finance the effort. Bill Rusher somehow got control of the escrow account that held the money. Phillips’s general staff encamped in Madison and started running up bills. Rusher called and told Phillips that unless he promised to vote against severing ties with National Review at the upcoming YAF board meeting, Phillips would have to pay all the bills himself. Phillips was not so easily intimidated—he was a veteran of hardball Boston politics, having run the campaign of Tip O’Neill’s Republican opponent at the ripe age of seventeen. He won back control of his money by threatening to expose the “middle-of-the-road caucus” as a sham.

  In January, Jay Hall—a GM publicist and close Goldwater adviser—Russell Kirk, Steve Shadegg, Bill Buckley, and William J. Baroody Jr., head of American Enterprise Institute, joined Goldwater at the palatial Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach for a council of war. It was time to settle the Birch issue once and for all.

  The attendees fell into two camps. Buckley and Kirk said they were ready to write the Birchers out of the conservative movement altogether. Goldwater and others counseled accommodation. He thought there were a lot of “nice guys” in the Society, not just kooks, and that it wasn’t the time to precipitate breaks in the conservatives’ fragile movement. They settled on a compromise: National Review would attack Robert Welch, not the John Birch Society. Goldwater would take the line that Robert Welch was a crazy extremist but that the Society itself was full of fine, upstanding citizens working hard and well for the cause of Americanism.

  The White House was undertaking parallel machinations. A few weeks earlier the Reuther brothers had delivered their study on the radical right. Its forces, “bounded on the left by Senator Goldwater and on the right by Robert Welch,” were strong and well organized, they warned. “It is late in the day to start dealing with these problems.” Another White House report urged that organizations allied with National Review—YAF, the Committee of One Million, the New York Conservative Party—not the Birchers, were the true danger, because they were focused on “the winning of national elections” and “the re-education of the governing classes,” not on numskull crusades. “The real goal may be to replace the erratic Welch with a man whose thinking parallels that of National Review”—to “channel the frenzied emotional energy presently expended on futile projects to impeach Warren and repeal the Income Tax into effective political action.” Meanwhile a group called Group Research Incorporated, bankrolled by the UAW, was about to open up shop in Washington. It was the mirror image of the political intelligence businesses that monitored left-wingers in the 1950s, identifying fellow-traveling organizations by counting the number of members and officers shared with purported Communist Party fronts. Group Research did the same thing, substituting the John Birch Society for the reds.

  It was a moment dense with opportunity, fraught with peril. Bill Buckley was about to begin writing a syndicated column; Goldwater’s column—the fastest-growing feature in Times-Mirror Syndicate history-appeared in over 150 papers. The Republican Party was weak—ripe for takeover. Maneuvers for the 1964 presidential nomination were beginning; the President was contemplating ways to turn his fire on the conservative movement. The stakes seemed inordinately high.

  9

  OFF YEAR

  The Republican Party was going broke. The debt from the Nixon campaign approached a million dollars, which in itself was no great problem; the parties always borrowed in presidential election season and paid off the deficit in between. This time, though, money wasn’t coming
in. Every Friday night the Republicans’ creaky old Senate and House leaders Everett Dirksen and Charlie Halleck went on TV to retail the tired argument that too much spending promised recession just around the comer (“Not this corner, that one. No, not that one, that one over there,” Bill Buckley japed); with economists predicting 10 percent economic growth in 1962 against 3.2 percent yearly during Eisenhower’s terms, the counsel of doom just wouldn’t take. The “Ev and Charlie Show” played so poorly against John F. Kennedy’s sparkling weekly press conferences that in a poll of thirty GOP congressmen, only two admitted liking it: Ev and Charlie. A program to sell “sustaining memberships” in the Republican Party for $10 showed promise. If only the leadership could agree on what they were selling.

  It was an embodiment of the parable of the blind men poking the elephant, each one describing a different beast: here was Jacob Javits claiming that “when a composite of our Party is taken, the thinking is Eisenhower (modern) thinking”; there Chicago Republicans were convening a banquet called “Real Republicanism versus Modern Republicanism.” Each was correct. Abraham Lincoln’s party was formed in the 1850s to fight the spread of slavery, and also to fight for something: the ideal that would later be called liberal capitalism—every man making the best for himself through his own hard work, every farmhand aspiring to be a farmer, every factory hand aspiring to own a factory. On this much the Republican homesteaders of the West and the industrialists and artisans in the East could agree. America prospered under Republican rule through the Gilded Age. But the Republicans themselves split. The Easterners desired, and got, high tariff walls that protected their manufactures from foreign competition. The Midwesterners—beholden to the Easterners for credit to buy machinery and finance mortgages, to their railroads to bring their goods to market—wanted free trade.

  In later years the issues would change. The split endured. As Eastern entrepreneurs became an Eastern Establishment, they came to prefer a settled economic order to a wide-open one; as America became an equal partner with Europe, the Eastern business titans became free-trade internationalists. Their noblesse oblige gave way to a taste for liberal reform. Republicans in the heartland, meanwhile, were protectionist, isolationist, and laissez-faire. Each faction decried the other’s monopoly in party councils. Here, too, both sides were right: Midwesterners sent a powerful obstructionist bloc of conservative congressmen to the Capitol; Wall Streeters got the presidential nominees by intimidating the Midwesterners at national conventions by threatening to call in loans or shut off credit. As long as a charismatic difference-splitter like Teddy Roosevelt held sway, the cracks could be papered over well enough. But that only delayed fixing the disrepair in the foundation.

  After FDR won his second term with a record 61 percent of the vote with the slogan “If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic”—then a third and a fourth—party elites in the East began to take stock of realities: in some years registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by as much as three to two. The Eastern elites decided that the only way to win was to find candidates who appealed to Democrats and Independents. The prototype was Alf Landon. The apotheosis was Wendell Willkie—“the Republican quisling,” according to Colonel McCormick’s Tribune. The gifted Wall Street lawyer from Indiana began his public career speechifying for American entrance into the European war—the very antithesis of Midwestern Republicanism. Willkie’s presidential draft in 1940 was the earnest doing of low-level Manhattan professionals acting spontaneously. But since his star was picked up by the likes of Ogden Reid, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, and Raymond Moley and Alfred P. Sloan—and Democrats like Al Smith—the Willkie boom smelled of conspiracy. His improbable nomination on the sixth ballot a week after France fell to Hitler heightened the suspicion; so many phony telegrams were sent to delegates that Alf Landon, returning home to Topeka, sent out eighteen sacks of notes acknowledging pro-Willkie missives—and received eighteen sacks in return marked “ADDRESS UNKNOWN.”

  Meanwhile the Republicans kept losing. Liberals said it was because the congressional Old Guard scared the majority of voters, who liked the New Deal, and they quoted Al Smith: “No one shoots Santa Claus.” Conservatives, meanwhile, said that Republican presidential candidates lost because millions of disgusted heartlanders stayed home rather than vote for so unnatural a beast as the “me-too Republican.” The distrust reached a peak at the 1952 Republican National Convention. On its eve, Taft controlled enough delegates to win. Tom Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Herbert Brownell—the “Wrecking Crew of ’52” to conservatives—who had manufactured the candidacy of General Eisenhower (who entered the race out of fear that isolationism would gain sway in the country) rammed through a phony “fair play” resolution that let them uncredential a number of key Southern Taft delegations. Taft’s loyal army entered the hall singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and left decrying the steal of the century.

  With Ike’s retirement and Nixon’s razor-thin loss in 1960 just behind them, the old feuds festered worse than ever. “The Republican Party is just a little bit pregnant with New Dealism,” Senator Jenner told Indiana convention delegates in 1960, “and you ladies know you can’t be just a little bit pregnant.”

  It fell to the RNC chair, Kentucky senator Thruston Morton, to heal the wounds. Winning would be a start. There was a congressional election coming up. Census statistics showed that an unprecedented 70 percent of Americans were living in urban areas. Precinct data from 1960 suggested that Kennedy’s margin of victory came from voters in the big cities. So Morton assigned Raymond Bliss, a high-strung, chain-smoking Ohio Republican leader who had dropped his Taft conservatism for a career as a nonideological political professional, the task of shaping up the party’s urban precinct organizations. One dreary afternoon in the middle of the Republican National Committee’s annual conclave, in Oklahoma City, fourteen months after the Nixon defeat, a committee Bliss chaired delivered their entirely technical solution on how to take the White House back.

  It was very much in the spirit of an age that was turning anti-ideological pragmatism into a fetish. Critics who scored the “far right” always accompanied their criticism with a token jab at the “far left.” At this prosperous moment in American history, President Kennedy insisted, we just didn’t need “the sort of great passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.” Just what counted as pragmatism, however, and what as ideology, was not always immediately apparent. L. Judson Morhouse, the New York GOP chairman and Nelson Rockefeller’s political right-hand man, explained to the press that the most pragmatic strategy for the Republicans to win the cities was to do what the Democrats did, only better: identify the people’s problems, then find government programs—urban renewal, health insurance, relief, and so forth—to solve them. It was the kind of plan only a Nelson Rockefeller could love.

  But Nelson Rockefeller hated it. His other top political deputy, suave, charming George Hinman, had been spending 1961 unobtrusively sucking up to conservatives around the country. His boss was willing to do whatever it took to win the Republican nomination in 1964. That meant placating the conservatives who had stonewalled him in 1960.

  Rockefeller quickly, angrily, disassociated himself from Morhouse’s ideas. Lincoln Day was coming up, the evening when Republicans across the country united in stolid bacchanals to pay tribute, literally and figuratively, to their party. There would be the usual fund-raisers linked by closed-circuit TV; Rocky would be speaking live from Des Moines. The crowd that watched him on TV at the Mayflower in D.C. was loaded with conservatives. When he began to speak, instinct kicked in: they booed. Then they stopped. They couldn’t believe their ears. The face on the screen talking about Kennedy’s Department of Urban Affairs proposal looked like Nelson Rockefeller. But he sounded a hell of a lot like Kent Courtney. The new department, Rocky said, “might well be used, in the form proposed, as a subterfuge to bypass the Constitutional sovereignty of the states and to gain direct pol
itical control over the nation’s cities.... What is this but political fakery?”

  It might have had something to do with the secret breakfasts. It was Thruston Morton who had proposed informal peace conferences between Rocky and Barry Goldwater on how to join the party’s warring wings. Rocky hadn’t cared anything about party unity back at the Chicago convention. Times change; now “unifier” was a title he coveted. Goldwater, who always worried about Republican unity, agreed to go along. It turned out they enjoyed each other’s company—they absorbed each other’s brashness—and found plenty they shared in common: a mutual antipathy for Richard Nixon, a disaffection with Eisenhower, an annoyance with overenthusiastic, out-of-control party volunteers. Goldwater also welcomed the chance to advocate conservatism with the person all the pros were saying would be the 1964 nominee. He was sick of people asking when he would begin running for President. Once he had toyed with the idea; no more. “I have no plans for it,” he told Time. “I have no staff for it, no program for it, and no ambition for it.”

  Steve Shadegg, who was serving as Arizona Republican chair, had corralled Goldwater to a meeting the previous November, ostensibly to talk about party unity—and soon Roger Milliken and Senator Norris Cotton and others were all but begging him to run. Goldwater told reporters that all the draft organizations popping up without his permission caused him “deep embarrassment.” By the time the Senate adjourned in September of 1961, Goldwater was so fed up he booked a cruise to Europe—on a cargo ship. He drafted his next book, on foreign policy, which would be entitled Why Not Victory? Just because he didn’t want to be President didn’t mean he didn’t want to advocate hard for a conservative political agenda.