The breakfasts began upon his return. It wasn’t a moment too soon for Nelson Rockefeller. He was about to get a divorce. The people who nominated Republican presidential candidates, even if they had no problem with the minimum wage or negotiations with the Soviets, could be a puritanical bunch. There had been a divorced presidential candidate before. That candidate had been Adlai Stevenson. But no one knew how, exactly, Republicans would react to the same news about one of their presidential contenders.
Goldwater, a live-and-let-live kind of guy, certainly did not look down his nose at his new breakfast partner for the fact that his marriage was breaking up. Soon he was doing favors for Rocky: making personal phone calls to Republican leaders urging a warm reception for a friend about to speak in their city. “He’s not really such a bad fellow,” Goldwater would say. “He’s more conservative than you would imagine. You ought to talk to him someday.” Goldwater, in turn, received the satisfaction of hearing Rocky mouthing conservative positions—although in private Rockefeller compared Goldwater’s supporters to “cattle that aren’t going anywhere. They’re scared and they’ll fly off in any direction.” Rockefeller shot past Goldwater in the polls at the beginning of 1962. Everyone who was anyone put short odds on him for the nomination.
Everyone-who-was-anyone did not include febrile college kids, southern California right-wingers, or Southern segregationists. And these groups had different ideas.
Young Americans for Freedom had weathered its rocky patch. Rusher and Liebman had consolidated their purge of Caddy’s faction by taking out an ad in the back of National Review for an executive director. It was read by a young lawyer from Houston, Richard Viguerie—one of those devout Catholics with Democratic parents. He had spent all his time in the office of the Harris County Republican Party, fell in love with the nuts-and-bolts side of political organizing, was desperate to go out East to work in the conservative movement, and got an interview on the strength of testimonials from his Texas friend David Franke. When Viguerie came to New York, Liebman showed him his mail room: thousands and thousands of three-by-five cards, a Robotype machine, the accoutrements of a veritable propaganda factory. Seeing Viguerie’s eyes widen, Liebman knew he had their man. When Viguerie reported to begin the job, the first thing Liebman told him was that YAF was $20,000 in debt, with only 2,000 paid members, although the organization claimed a membership of 25,000: “It’s important that membership be perceived at 25,000,” Liebman explained. He gave him a list of 1,200 conservative donors and showed him the phone. Viguerie’s first three calls brought in $4,500.
Young Americans for Freedom reserved Madison Square Garden on March 7 for the group’s second rally, and it spooked them to the bone. JFK’s popularity rating was approaching 80 percent. Where would YAF find 18,000 conservatives in New York City? Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, a former FBI agent and the Democrats’ most assiduous red-hunter, was lined up to speak at the rally—but when he returned from a trip to Africa and learned that the honorees included General Walker, he withdrew his name. Walker’s participation was also too much for publicity-savvy Liebman—who made his living crafting massive bipartisan anticommunist coalitions for his groaning letterheads backing some beleaguered pro-West government or other. He promptly resigned from his consulting position with YAF. A month before the rally, Dodd released a statement attacking the “extremist coloration of the gathering” —at which Goldwater briefly refused to appear. YAF finally cut Walker loose. The contretemps was reported widely in the press.
The Tshombe affair brought more bad publicity. When the southern African state of Katanga seceded from the Republic of the Congo, it took half of the country’s mineral wealth with it. The new state’s leader was a pro-West, virulently anticommunist Methodist named Moise Tshombe (“Uncle Tshombe,” to the American black press). Lumumba had accepted Soviet aid to put down the rebellion. The White House chose to publicly back UN forces supporting Lumumba, which put the United States on the record in an apparently Soviet-sponsored enterprise (at the same time, the CIA soon saw to Lumumba’s assassination). Mineral companies began a massive PR campaign for their friend Tshombe’s claim on Katanga. The publicists found an active partner in conservatives eager to preserve a “Christian West” bulwark in Central Africa. Tshombe was scheduled for a U.S. tour that would include an appearance at the YAF rally—which had the potential to pose enormous complications for Kennedy’s Africa policy. So, as the date for Tshombe’s junket approached, the State Department denied Tshombe a visa.
But this time the silver lining trumped the cloud: by March, everyone in New York knew about Young Americans for Freedom and their rally. Even though a vicious storm whipped the entire Atlantic Coast for the occasion, thousands had to be turned away at the doors. They were forced to yell at the counterdemonstration instead.
At first it seemed that the left-out conservatives might have gotten the better part of the bargain: outside, lefties, having earlier almost broken up on the shoals of a disagreement between the Americans for Democratic Action kids and Students for a Democratic Society over what to print on the leaflets, were now advancing to fisticuffs. Inside, the program was a bore. Platform guests invited to say a few words droned on and on. Bob Schuchman couldn’t begin the awards presentation because of the noisy claque chanting “We Want Walker! We Want Walker!” Brent Bozell, flown in from Spain, was supposed to be warming up the crowd for Goldwater. But he began sententiously lecturing the crowd on something called the “Gnostic Heresy.” The rafters were buzzing with paper airplanes fashioned from the glossy special edition of New Guard when Bozell finally changed his rhetorical tack. And suddenly the grand old auditorium came to life as he ripped into the peroration:
“To the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Prepare an immediate landing in Havana!
“To the Commander in Berlin: Tear down the wall!
“To our chief of mission in the Congo: Change sides!”
The crowd leapt to their feet.
It was almost 11 p.m. when John Tower, who had won Vice President Johnson’s Senate seat (thanks, in part, to the help of Stephen Shadegg), and who was the first Republican senator from the Old Confederacy since Reconstruction, took the stage to give the penultimate speech. Now the place was pulsing with energy. It was something special; something to remember your whole life.
Barry Goldwater was unimpressed. The thought of addressing a rally that was designed to look like a nominating convention—his nominating convention—made him nauseous. The hours of speeches had tested his patience. And backstage he let loose a stream of profanity—against Bozell, against YAF, against all these damned amateurs who were so eager to decide his political future—that would have done a sailor proud.
Goldwater’s impatience made his introduction, by a kid named William Schulz, the shortest speech of the evening: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the conservatives’ choice for president, Barry Goldwater!” It was also the best received: five minutes of applause broke over Goldwater in waves, as he stood at the podium in plain annoyance. Streamers and balloons fell from the ceiling. Banners waved. The crowd began chanting “We Want Barry! We Want Barry!” When he finally got an opening, he snarled, “Well, if you’ll shut up, you’ll get him.”
The next morning the New York Times gave over three columns on its front page to a dramatic photograph taken from the stage, a sea of faces, balloons, placards, and American flags. YAF took home $80,000. Leaders laid plans to fill Yankee Stadium the next year. They were so carried away that few noticed that Goldwater’s speech, streamers still dribbling down from the rafters, was more appropriate to the rubber-chicken circuit than to a rally. Supposedly entitled “To Win the Cold War,” it turned out to be a dry examination of the Republicans’ electoral chances in New York City in 1962. The New York Times gave half its space to sympathetic coverage of the counterdemonstration.
Three thousand miles to the west, Richard Nixon was suffering.
The pressure for him to run for governor had begun sho
rtly after he had moved into his little apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in February of 1961. The California GOP, decimated from 1958, needed a strong figure to bring it back to health. The incumbent Pat Brown’s popularity was at an all-time low. The idea of running was tempting. Boredom was driving Nixon out of his mind. Perhaps he really believed that summer that he was still undecided. But anybody who advised him not to run, state Republican chair Caspar Weinberger recalled, “he barely spoke to again.” Nixon felt no great desire to be governor of California. The plan was to cruise to an easy victory; then he would have an excuse not to run for President in 1964. He had had enough of running against the Kennedys. They fought dirty. He would wait and reach for the brass ring in 1968 with a unified California Republican Party as his base.
Little did he know that the political rules had been rewritten in California: the Orange County style was taking over the Republican Party. Nixon had never considered that another announced Republican candidate, a far-out conservative state assembly minority leader from Orange County and erstwhile University of Southern California football star, Joe Shell, would stay in the race. Shell had 2 percent in the polls. He would be running against a former U.S. vice president and Republican presidential nominee. But Shell had no interest in withdrawing. Doing so would mean making an accommodation with the liberal Republicans, which in Orange County Republican circles was but a few steps removed from accommodation with Communists.
California’s unusually weak party system, created by early-century progressives who viewed the two parties as mere instrumentalities by which the railroads expedited graft, profoundly amplified the power of extra-party volunteer organizations such as the Young Republicans and the California Republican Assembly. Nixon assumed he would own such groups, given the tacit accord that had long obtained in California Republican circles: conservatives supported moderate candidates in exchange for back-room influence in party and policy decisions. That, he learned, was then.
Young Republicans nationwide had a reputation for being innocent spoils-seeking toadies—energetic but harmless, like their mascot, the cute little boxing elephant “Punchy.” Nixon, the returned veteran made good, had once been their hero. But the Los Angeles County Young Republicans brought Nixon his first shock of the gubernatorial primary season. The “difference between a ‘liberal’ Republican and a ‘liberal’ Democrat,” wrote the organization’s new president, a pale, silver-haired, mercurial fellow named Bob Gaston, “is the difference between creeping socialism and galloping socialism.” The movement that swept Gaston into office was experienced by the old regulars as if it were an alien invasion. Two thousand attended meetings where once there had been two hundred; the two hundred were branded “country club Republicans” and red-baited. In return, they Birch-baited the newcomers. Nixon’s first move in the campaign seemed obvious: denounce the group that was causing all the trouble, the John Birch Society. The LACYR responded by censuring Nixon for attacking “patriotic organizations”; then they endorsed Shell.
Going into the annual California Republican Assembly convention, Nixon could write off all this business as the impetuousness of youth. Nixon’s strong right hand, Murray Chotiner, was a former CRA president. The CRA was Earl Warren’s creation—like Warren himself, leaning toward the progressive wing of the party. Nixon and California’s popular senator Thomas Kuchel, the minority whip, who was up for reelection, brought a resolution to the convention condemning the “dictatorial and totalitarian” John Birch Society. But the CRA, too, now included a swarm of right-wingers. A Newport Beach optometrist named Nolan Frizzelle had spearheaded an effort to charter dozens of new CRA chapters, and for conservatives to flood existing ones. They had turned the CRA inside out. “I don’t consider the John Birch Society extremists,” Frizzelle said. “Except maybe extremely American.”
Nixon left the CRA convention with an embarrassingly close endorsement vote and a humiliating compromise on his resolution, condemning Robert Welch but professing neutrality on the group that was constitutionally an extension of Robert Welch’s will. Shell called the result “a major move in breaking the old Establishment machine in California.” Kuchel was enraged. Two right-wing nuts were scratching each other’s eyes out to replace the senator in the primary. Loyd Wright, a divorce lawyer whose campaign was chaired by Ronald Reagan (after Reagan turned down entreaties to run himself), advocated an offensive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Howard Jarvis was a loud, angry man who proclaimed himself “to the right of Barry Goldwater.” (His campaign was led, Nixon was aghast to learn, by Murray Chotiner.)
This was Shell’s army. It was lubricated by some of Nixon’s wealthiest supporters from 1960: Walter Knott; Union Oil’s Cy Rubel; Western Geophysical’s Henry Salvatori; dog-food king D. B. Lewis; Joe Crail of Coast Federal S&L; Patrick Frawley, maestro of Paper Mate, Schick Safety Razor, and Technicolor. Shell campaigned with veiled threats. At a May 23 rally, aided by the benisons of a sixty-two-voice choir and pom-pom-waving “Shell’s Belles,” he hinted to the fifteen thousand assembled at the L.A. Sports Arena that “a large number of Republicans would not vote for Richard Nixon” in a general election. “A sizable part would not get out and work for him.” And thanks to powerhouse organizing by Shell’s campaign manager, Rus Walton, a brilliant, driven former corporate publicist and National Association of Manufacturers administrator who had somehow managed to pull together the chaos of southern California’s multitude of conservative groups into an integrated strike force, Shell had the power to make good on the threat.
Nixon hadn’t even expected to have to campaign. Now he found himself once more bumping along forlorn highways in the most remote corners of this enormous state, just as he’d done back in 1950 when he ran for the Senate. The highways were less bumpy now, but they were also dotted with billboards with Earl Warren’s face: “WANTED FOR IMPEACHMENT FOR GIVING AID AND COMFORT TO THE COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY,” “THE MORTAL ENEMY OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.” While Shell addressed rallies, Nixon was spending an interminable 100-degree afternoon shaking hands in the desert in the southeast of the state. Pat Brown had pulled ahead of Nixon in the polls for the first time. Day after day, fanatics pressed into his hand yet another copy of that damned little blue pamphlet with the United Nations insignia on the cover, Department of State Publication 7277, which they claimed was proof that the government was about to sign over America’s armed forces to a Soviet colonel. (Actually it was a woolly UN report setting a course for atomic disarmament over something like a century “through the progressive strengthening of international institutions under the United Nations and by creating a United Nations Peace Force to enforce the peace as the disarmament process proceeds.” One of the assistant secretary-generals of the UN was a Russian colonel. Q.E.D.) It could have been just then that Richard Nixon cemented his title as the Job of American politics.
Shell won 35 percent of the ballots in the June 5 primary. In return for delivering his supporters in the fall, he demanded control of one-third of the state’s delegation to the 1964 GOP Convention, and that Nixon pledge to slash the state budget. Nixon refused the deal. Shell said Nixon would be sorry.
The RNC chair who replaced Thruston Morton in 1962, Bill Miller, a brash conservative from upstate New York, poured resources into Operation Dixie, the party’s Southern organizing drive. It had paid off handsomely. Time enshrined the young Republican operatives as “The New Breed”: “furrowbrowed, button-down, college-trained amateurs who, one by one, took control of the state parties from apathetic and aging professionals.” Alabama’s John Grenier had registered as a Republican after reading the Democrats’ liberal 1960 convention platform. At twenty-nine he became the chairman of Birmingham’s twelve-member Young Republicans chapter. Now, as part of Operation Dixie, he traveled the state five nights a week on the RNC’s dime—conducting forty-four meetings in one forty-day stretch, sometimes in a town’s general store. In South Carolina, colleague J. Drake Edens Jr. used the AF
L-CIO manual How to Win to organize precincts. His rule was that a precinct had to have six members. He wouldn’t give up until a county had three precincts. For some counties it took a dozen trips. “We’ve got a product and a sales force, just like a business,” Grenier told Time. “The product is conservatism.”
Regulars in other regions were cooking up schemes just to keep the party from shrinking. Conservative Wisconsin congressman Melvin Laird led an ecumenical committee of conservatives and moderates that produced a boiler-plate “Declaration of Republican Principle and Policy.” General Eisenhower convened an “All-Republican Conference” at the Gettysburg farm to which he had retired to charter a “National Citizens Committee”—to attract the great quantities of Americans he assumed were sympathetic to Republican values but blanched at the Republican Party. Goldwater smelled a liberal power grab, but kept his criticisms from the General out of respect. Not so his new Dixie acolytes. “The fact that you were politically naive has been obvious for quite some time,” thirty-two-year-old Mississippi chair and insurance executive Wirt Yerger wrote the man who had faced down Adolf Hitler. “I don’t blame all the troubles of the Republican Party on you, but I do think that you will have to take responsibility for a great many.” He then laid plans to convene a meeting of Republican state chairmen in Dallas after the November 1962 elections to force a reckoning with a new balance of power in the party.
In South Carolina, Drake Edens managed the campaign of William D. Workman Jr. for Senate. The campaign perfectly crystallized what the Republican Party was up to in the South—and the incredible progress it would make in 1962.
Before the Storm Page 24