Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Workman was a popular columnist and TV commentator, and his 1960 book The Case for the South was a masterpiece of courtly segregationism: the Southerner, he wrote, merely demanded “the right to administer his own domestic affairs, and he demands for himself the right to rear his children in the school atmosphere most conducive to their learning.” His campaign was based on the argument that although his opponent, the legendary sixty-six-year-old three-termer Olin D. Johnston, was a fine segregationist himself, any Democrat was necessarily in hock to the national party leadership. And since the “Kennedy Klan” had staked the party’s future on cynical civil rights demagoguery, Johnston would be helpless to preserve the Southern way of life.

  It was tough sledding. Workman tried to tie Johnston to the dreaded Kennedy Klan’s tail by reminding voters that he had been a leader in the fight for Kennedy’s Medicare plan and a point man for the Administration’s farm support legislation. But most South Carolinians liked farm supports and the idea of medical insurance for the aged. And they still instinctually recoiled at the idea of joining the party of the carpetbaggers. Whenever Edens received a letter of support, he answered it by asking the correspondent to join or start a GOP precinct organization. Few had the courage to do so. They feared they would become local pariahs.

  Then the campaign received a boost: South Carolina, like the rest of Dixie, would soon come to hate Washington more than ever. In late September federal marshals began massing to protect the matriculation of the first Negro student at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Thousands of Oxfordians massed behind Confederate battle flags and prepared for a vigilante war. (Such flags were everywhere in 1962, a year of centennial observances of the War Between the States. The South Carolina legislature even decided to fly a Confederate flag temporarily above the statehouse.) General Walker came to lend moral support, announcing that he had been on the “wrong side” in Little Rock. On September 30, President Kennedy announced that the White House was committed to seeing James Meredith enter Ole Miss. There immediately followed an attempt to breach the building holding the federal marshals, the oldest and most venerated on campus—hrst with bullets, then with a bulldozer, then with an armada of cars. The violence escalated to furious rioting. By the end of the week two were dead, and 23,000 federal troops were stationed in Oxford, Mississippi. The South called it another invasion, same as the one a hundred years earlier.

  Goldwater immediately criticized the Kennedy Administration’s actions. “We haven’t turned over to the federal government the power to run the schools.... I don’t like segregation. But I don’t like the Constitution kicked around, either.” He also said that the Administration was now the “best tool the Republican Party has.” And South Carolina’s Workman, at least, was proving Goldwater right. Now the candidate for the Senate spoke with Confederate flags behind him and cried that the Oxford invasion “takes on the earmarks of a cold-blooded, premeditated effort to crush the sovereign state of Mississippi into submission.” He readily compared Kennedy to Hitler. “When South Carolina’s turn comes, she’ll defend her rights,” he promised. A high school band struck up “Dixie”; he shouted, “I just hope that song could be heard all the way from Oxford, Mississippi, to Washington, D.C.” There was little for Senator Johnston to do. He agreed with Workman. It was all he could say to implore voters not to abandon “the sacred party of their fathers.” And on Election Day, the Republican Workman won 44 percent of the vote. Anywhere else that would have been considered a landslide victory for his opponent. But in South Carolina—where a more typical general election vote was “W. J. Bryan Dorn, Democrat, 65,920; write-ins, 47”—44 percent of the vote for a Republican was a revolution.

  In Alabama, thirty-seven-year congressional veteran Lister Hill was challenged for the first time in a general election. His Republican opponent, Gadsen oil distributor James Martin, lost by nine-tenths of a percent. In the race for the congressional seat representing Tennessee’s Ninth District, Memphis—which hadn’t seen a GOP candidate since 1936—the Republican came even closer. GOP congressional candidates across the South polled over two million votes in 1962. They had received 606,000 in the last off-year election. The Republicans, for an ever increasing number of Southerners, were carpetbaggers no more.

  The pundits declared the off-year elections nationwide a draw. In Republican races moderates prevailed statistically over conservatives; among the gubernatorial winners were such pitch-perfect Republican moderates as Chafee in Rhode Island, Romney in Michigan, Love in Colorado, and Rhodes in Ohio. Forty-two percent of Americans thought Kennedy was pushing integration too fast. That kept Democratic totals down, although the Democrats still kept both houses of Congress. Though the Republicans likely would have done better if the world hadn’t nearly ended.

  On October 22, President Kennedy went on television to announce a quarantine of Soviet ships that had been fortifying a nuclear battery in Cuba capable of striking two-thirds of the territory of the United States. Then he went eyeball-to-eyeball with the Russians to demand the missiles’ removal. A dull shock fell over the nation: the Armageddon that had been merely possible during the Berlin crisis was suddenly probable. The other guy blinked. The nation closed ranks around its President.

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  The pundits who declared the off-year elections yet one more endorsement of the responsible center had not read between the lines. To conservatives, the 1962 elections were a historic triumph.

  Politics is not, except on the most elementary level, a game of raw numbers. It is one of margins. In a Senate party-line vote, 51 votes is as good as 91; in presidential nominations, the received wisdom on which states are “Republican” and which “Democratic,” once upset, forever shifts calculations about which kind of candidate is a sure thing and which a hopeless case. Any game of margins is one of portents—where a trend, once rumored, can become the gust that blows the straw that settles on the proverbial camel’s back. That is why the “Big Six” states and their black swing vote were so doted upon in conventional political speculations. More imaginative prognosticators, however, were beginning to argue that the next tipping point might be found somewhere else.

  Or so National Review publisher Bill Rusher argued in an article published the winter after the 1962 elections called “Crossroads for the GOP.” Rusher was sure that the message of the 1962 elections was that the Republican Party had to nominate Barry Goldwater over Nelson Rockefeller or face certain doom. The reason was the South. “Goldwater, and Goldwater alone, can carry enough Southern and border states to offset the inevitable Kennedy conquests in the big industrial states of the North and still stand a serious chance of winning the election,” he wrote. He asked readers not just to take his word for it; he cited a Southern senator who claimed Bobby Kennedy had told him that the people in the White House considered Rockefeller a pushover, but were terrified of facing Goldwater.

  Perhaps Goldwater could even win the second biggest state in the country. In California, Richard Nixon, without real issues to campaign on against an effective incumbent, was reduced to telling California voters that he would make an excellent governor because he knew how to handle Khrushchev. His attempt to win back Joe Shell’s conservatives was doomed by an initiative on the ballot, the proposed Francis Amendment, to give grand juries power to identify “subversive organizations” and bar their members from public employment. Nixon’s conscience wouldn’t let him support it. So the Orange County types who voted for Shell in the primary refused to vote for Nixon in the general election—just as Shell had darkly warned months earlier. Nixon lost, 47 to 53. Nixon’s ticket mate, Tom Kuchel, won by 700,000 votes. “You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more,” Nixon growled in his acid concession speech, in which he also announced his retirement from politics. ABC broadcast a special called “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.”

  And the media’s ongoing exposes of conservative excesses did nothing to stop California’s far right f
rom doing well. Every candidate who was a member of the John Birch Society got over 45 percent of the vote. John Rousselot lost only because his district was ruthlessly gerrymandered against him. And a stunning upset in the state school superintendent race, usually fought quietly on issues of competence, was won by Max Rafferty, a man who claimed progressive education could render students the tools of “red psychological warfare.”

  The New York Times’s top pundit, James “Scotty” Reston, wrote that Rockefeller had about as much chance of losing the Republican nomination as “going broke.” It was a dubious claim. Rockefeller had been judged such a shoo-in for reelection in 1962 that New York Democrats had to go to extraordinary lengths just to find someone willing to run against him. The lucky fellow, State Attorney General Robert Morgenthau, was believed to be such a weak candidate that the party refused to waste more than $420,000 on his campaign. Rockefeller spent $2,184,000. On election eve it was widely reported that Rockefeller’s margin of victory would be a million votes. He won by only 500,000. It was his ticket mate Jacob Javits, his ideological twin, who won by a million. And, most tellingly, a poll concluded that 80 percent of New York Democrats who voted for Rockefeller said they would vote for John F. Kennedy against Rockefeller in the 1964 presidential election. This was hardly the recipe for an ideal presidential nominee. But Reston knew who always controlled Republican presidential nominations; and this year, Rockefeller was the Establishment’s man. There seemed nothing else to say. He was unaware of the extraordinary underground insurgency that was determined to write another ending to the story. He wouldn’t have made anything of it if he was.

  The revolutionary was never seen without a bow tie. Tall, gangly, gracious, Frederick Clifton White was a country boy from upstate New York who only partially overcame his shyness in public by becoming the star of his high school debating team. He also made it onto the basketball team, although it took him four years of untiring practice. His grades were below par. But there was also that aw-shucks charm. He entered Colgate University after talking his way into a personal meeting with the dean. He studied to be a schoolteacher and earned pin money giving patriotic speeches to local Kiwanis and Daughters of the American Revolution chapters. He entered the Army Air Corps as a private and emerged with a Distinguished Flying Cross. He reminded friends of Jimmy Stewart; you almost expected him to say “gee whiz.” When he entered politics as a profession, he found his calling working behind the scenes. There, he was tougher than steel—Mr. Smith gone to Washington, exchanging intimacies with Plunkett of Tammany Hall.

  White found his calling after the war, entering graduate school to study political science at Cornell and forming a chapter of the American Veterans Committee, a left-wing advocacy group. No leftist himself, he simply wanted to organize to fight the gouging Ithaca landlords who were taking advantage of a housing shortage and students rich with GI Bill cash. He found he liked doing politics much more than he liked studying it. It thrilled him. He became a statewide organizer for the AVC. That was how he learned that the AVC, like many liberal groups at the time, was the object of a takeover attempt by the American Communist Party. At the next state convention, he decided to run for chairman. He was on his way to easy victory when, during the balloting, a rumor suddenly swept the floor that the married White had shacked up with his secretary, using AVC funds to maintain their love nest. White was stunned.

  But his floor manager, Gus Tyler, a veteran of the 1930s wars between socialists and Communists for control of the garment unions in New York, recognized exactly what was happening. The Communists had lain in wait to discredit White. That meant they were about to present their own candidate as an eleventh-hour white knight while their minions scurried about the floor convincing delegates that the Communists’ secret man was the very embodiment of sweetness and light. Tyler hurriedly withdrew White’s candidacy and substituted another from their faction, a respected law professor, but it was too late: the Communists had already lined up their votes—including two from White’s own Cornell chapter. Now White was disconsolate. He felt violated. Tyler reassured him that the Communists had won because they were peerless organizers. “Learn from them,” he said. “I’ve been fighting these bastards for a long time. The first thing you need to know is whom you can trust, who will stand up with you, whom you can work with.”

  And so, with customary earnestness, White learned. The Communists organized as cells, small face-to-face groups under the discipline of a single benign dictator, chosen for his willingness to act as an extension of the Party’s will. White organized his AVC chapter into cells. “Each leader,” he told his people, “will be personally responsible for his ten men, and he’s going to tell them that we have an AVC meeting they all have to attend. I don’t care what else is going on, short of death. When there’s a vote coming up, everyone has to attend and cast his vote against the Communists”—even if the Communists put up a resolution in favor of motherhood and apple pie. That often was the opening wedge to ram through a resolution endorsing accommodation with Stalin.

  The Communists deployed honeyed words to seize the chairmanship of a meeting, then manipulated parliamentary procedure to control it: by relocating a meeting to a room so small that they could crowd into it before others arrived and turn their minority into a majority; by making endless stalling motions to hold off critical votes until the wee hours of the morning, when only their troops remained; by slowly calling the roll votes that were going against them, using the window of time to lobby the swing votes, in then jacking the roll call to lightning speed once they had them; by maneuvering for their forces to vote at the point in a roll call where a candidate had 49 percent so they could nego tiate concessions in exchange for putting him over the top; by imposing the unit rule—whereby a delegation votes as a bloc so that a proposal with majority support can be made to appear unanimous—whenever the vote was auspicious to them; by calling a lightning vote when enough of their opposition’s forces were out of the room, and then calling for adjournment.

  There was no reason, White decided, that anticommunists couldn’t use the same techniques to defeat them. Later he would use them to take over the Republican Party.

  The next year, when White came up for reelection as chair of his AVC chapter, he gaveled the meeting to order and his Communist opponent immediately rose to observe that, as a candidate and an honorable man, surely he was going to relinquish the chair. No way, White said. The opponent put forward a heartfelt motion for “fair play.” White ruled it out of order. At the national convention in Milwaukee, White booked his delegation’s block of rooms far enough in advance to assure they would stay in the hotel where the meetings took place—so that, when the Communists began their predawn maneuvers, he could ring his soundly sleeping deputies in their rooms and call them down to vote. Robert’s Rules of Order was a Promethean tool.

  While teaching political science at Cornell and Ithaca College from 1949 to 1951, he attracted the notice of a Republican reform group seeking a congressional candidate to run against the local machine. He ran and was defeated. Then he joined the machine. He would do any menial job they asked; everything was an education. Driving little old ladies to the polls election after election, he found they began asking for his advice on whom to vote for: loyalty was powerful; so was getting your people to the polls on Election Day. Before long he was Tompkins County GOP chair—an exceptionally inventive one, with a thousand little political tricks up his sleeve. Mayoral candidates in small towns were advised to introduce themselves personally to every registered voter, then “pray for a low turnout.” Party poll-watchers were instructed, “Never leave anything to people’s imaginations. When you go through a [sample] ballot form with voters, mark it up the way you want them to vote.”

  All the while he got swept up in Young Republican politics. It had nothing to do with ideology; members of the Young Republican National Federation were constitutionally bound to help elect whatever candidates the party happened to nominate. It
was a hobby. In 1948 White had struck up a friendship with Bill Rusher, then a young Wall Street lawyer who was eager to have upstate allies in the Hatfield-and-McCoy-like feud his New York YR faction was fighting with another faction led by the charismatic young John Lindsay. No one really remembered its origins; all were moderate Republican loyalists of Governor Thomas Dewey. It seemed more a cultural thing than anything else. Rusher and his friends bristled at the blue-bloodism of Lindsay’s group; a third group set itself apart because its members worked in midtown Manhattan, as opposed to Lindsay’s and Rusher’s Wall Street, and were mostly Jewish. Rusher and White’s team prevailed. They dubbed themselves the Action Faction. And they decided their next project would be to build a national Young Republican political machine.

  The key was manipulating regional balances of power. Midwesterners controlled the national organization. So at the 1949 convention in Salt Lake City the Action Faction ran a Michigander, John Tope. That gave them two of the biggest delegations, theirs and Michigan’s, right out of the gate, meaning that they needed only a few more states to win—which they did. In 1951 they perfected the technique of finding a nonentity willing to submit to their discipline. The man was Herbert Warburton, from Delaware. White, Rusher, and deputies sprinted across the convention hall with voting instructions to their people on how to handle the tortuous procedural votes, meanwhile lining up delegates for a Willkie-style upset that took five ballots. It took a week of advance work at the site, during which time they had gotten the equivalent of a single night’s sleep between them. Rusher was so spent at the climax that he sat down on the convention floor and cried tears of exhaustion and euphoria.

  White sat alone in his hotel room, beset by an enveloping gloom, watching bland Herb Warburton harvesting accolades on television. “How would you like to be chairman of the Young Republican National Federation?” he had asked Warburton long ago. For the first time in days the phone wasn’t ringing.