Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Clif White began his ten-year rule as puppeteer of the Young Republican National Federation from behind the desk of a patronage job at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Albany, quid pro quo for running National Youth for Eisenhower in 1952. The YR’s geographical margins were shifting: at the 1953 convention White won by getting loyalists from the South and West. These delegates were considerably more conservative. But the Action Faction was tacking to the right, too. Rusher heard Barry Goldwater speak for the first time in 1955 and found a hero. The next year he left Wall Street to become a counsel to the Senate Internal Security Committee, the upper chamber’s HUAC. By 1957, shortly after Goldwater won his first spurt of renown with his speech savaging Ike’s budget, Rusher and White’s faction won handily by running a fierce conservative, Ohio’s John Ashbrook. The resolutions committee, traditionally a fount of milquetoast pronouncements on patriotism and the grand-ness of the Grand Old Party, now won a front-page headline in the New York Times: “YOUNG GOP HITS IKE ON 4 OUT OF 5 ISSUES.”

  By then Governor Dewey was out of office. Clif White had gone into business. His company, Public Affairs Counselors, ran seminars for corporate executives interested in getting involved in politics, which once would have seemed a thankless task: for Fortune 500 executives, politics had long meant little more than sending along a few well-placed checks and making a few phone calls every fourth summer to vouchsafe an acceptable nominee at the Republican Convention. Politics, as opposed to lobbying, meant taking a side; lobbying a congressman was difficult if you’d just filled his opponent’s coffers to the gills. Customers, suppliers, employees, local governments—all stood to be offended when a corporation took a stand. And if there was one thing that marked the corporate world in the 1950s, it was a disinclination to offend. The success of the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education in getting out the labor vote in 1958 to decimate pro-business congressmen began changing all that. Suddenly White had the corner on a new industry. GM hired him to create a system of seminars for its entire executive staff. Allen-Bradley did the same. And such was Harry Bradley’s stature in Wisconsin—and so powerful was the example of the Kohler strike—that just about every sizable company in the Dairy State followed suit. Newspapers began to speak of the businessmen-in-politics movement as a new force to be reckoned with.

  For White, it was another chance for him to expand his political education. Public Affairs Counselors’ approach was relentlessly local. In every city where he spoke, White compiled a booklet explaining the local election codes—how Democratic and Republican convention delegates were selected, how precinct meetings were organized, how the city and state governments were arranged, and on and on. Sometimes there had never been such a publication before; most times the information was out of date—and in Missouri (the Show-Me State, supposedly) electoral rules had never been fully codified before (White presented his work to the state as a gift). White’s political erudition was becoming epic. So was his political network. It was said that Franklin Roosevelt used to impress visitors to the Oval Office by telling them to draw a line across a map of the United States; then he would proceed to name every county through which it passed and the political peculiarities of each. Clif White might have been the only other human being by the end of the 1950s who could have worked the same trick. And he was about to get a chance to put it to work.

  In 1959 White lost control of the New York Young Republicans to an influx of loyalists of the new governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Without White’s New York keystone, many assumed his control of the national body was over. The judgment was premature. His coalition earned a new nickname after that 1959 convention: the Syndicate. They won by stretching their South-West-Midwest conservative coalition—New York notwithstanding—to the breaking point. It got White thinking. Young Republican delegations mirrored Republican National Convention delegations. Could a presidential candidate now do what Bob Taft could not—eschew New York and still win the nomination?

  One day in the summer of 1961 Bill Rusher, by this time National Review publisher, lunched in Washington at the House restaurant at the Capitol with his friend John Ashbrook, then a freshman congressman. They fell to nostalgic reverie; then talk turned, as it always did when Republicans gathered in 1961, to their party’s pathetic condition. “If we held a meeting of our old Young Republican group,” Rusher said, “it would probably comprise about the third or fourth largest faction in the Republican Party.”

  It was an offhand remark. But Ashbrook perked up. There hadn’t been a contested Republican nomination since the Taft-Eisenhower fight in 1952. Most of the old Establishment pros were too old and tired to win one if they tried. Ashbrook dragged Rusher back to his office and pulled open a file drawer: there was his correspondence from 1957 to 1959, when he was Young Republican chair, all of it arranged alphabetically by state, then alphabetically within state, folder after folder. Many of their old allies were now powerful men. Rusher and Ashbrook looked at each other, exchanged a few words, and began copying down names.

  Rusher called Clif White. White had sold his stake in PAC when he became organizing chairman for Volunteers for Nixon-Lodge in 1960. The Nixon presidential loss had disillusioned White badly. It was his staff that had discovered the notorious irregularities that had so famously and closely swung Illinois for Kennedy. When Nixon declined to demand a recount, White wondered what damage all those ideological twists and turns had done to Nixon’s soul. White was forty-one, a full-time political operative—one of the best. And he was at a crossroads. He began to wonder just what all this expertise was for.

  His midlife crisis had come at the right time.

  Rusher and White met for lunch in the city. Rusher related his conversation with Ashbrook three days earlier about all those tired old pros. “Sitting ducks,” White agreed. By a coincidence worthy of a novel, at a nearby table sat two of those ducks: Tom Stephens, Ike’s old appointment secretary, and Bill Pfeiffer, the former New York GOP chair. “They are plotting nothing less than the election of Nelson Rockefeller as the next president of the United States,” White joked. It was a bit of psychological projection. Rusher and White were the ones doing the plotting. Rusher introduced the idea of reorganizing their old Young Republican machine to nominate the next President. But White was already one step ahead of him. He unspooled his own plan to do the very same thing.

  White called Charlie Barr in Chicago, an old business contact and lobbyist for Standard Oil of Indiana, for advice. It was said of Barr that whatever he didn’t know about politics in the Midwest wasn’t worth knowing. Barr was not a wide-eyed ideologue; neither did he suffer fools gladly. He was the acid test. And he liked their idea. It couldn’t be that crazy.

  That week Rusher, White, and Ashbrook chose twenty-six people to invite to a secret meeting in Chicago on October 8, 1961. Barry Goldwater had just appeared on ABC’s Issues and Answers and said, “I am not interested at all in 1964 in any way.”

  The twenty-six men were told only that Rusher, White, and Ashbrook were getting together some old friends to talk politics in Chicago, and that it was important that they come. The bonds were tight: on the strength of that call alone, twenty-two made the trip. Two were congressmen, another a state treasurer, two were lobbyists. There was a small-town newspaper publisher, a national party committeeman, and the chairman of Maine’s Republican Party. Another was chief counsel of the Senate Internal Security Committee. A few were political affairs officers at large corporations. Gerrish Milliken, Roger’s brother, represented one of the biggest fortunes in the conservative movement. These men were not dilettante factory owners; they were political professionals.

  They met incognito, at a Chicago motel best known as a place for romantic assignations. They felt delight at just being together once again. White did the talking; it took him three hours to explain his strategy to upend the Republican Party and nominate a conservative for President. He didn’t dare mention the name Goldwater—as if that would be tempting fate. They all knew who
he meant. They adjourned, forgetting that the fourth game of the World Series had just taken place. No one asked the score. They were so engrossed that they hadn’t given the Series a thought.

  Rusher contacted Goldwater to ask for a Washington meeting on behalf of the group, including Roger Milliken and John Ashbrook. Smelling one more outfit wanting to run him for President, but casting his eye over the list and seeing that the people were not influential enough in the Republican Party to do too much damage, yet were of sufficient stature not to warrant offense, he told his secretary to fit them in. When the day came, the man before them wearing the vest with the Navajo glyphs under his suit jacket was not pleased. He had been promised Rusher, a magazine publisher, Ashbrook, a congressman, and Milliken, one of the richest men in the South; he saw before him only Rusher and a failed candidate for Nebraska lieutenant governor, Charlie Thone. Goldwater was mollified, at least, to hear that the men were only interested in doing a little organizing for the conservative electoral cause for the 1962 elections, a year away, and perhaps to get a hard start thinking about nominating a conservative for the presidential race. (Their secret hope was that by the time their effort was well under way, their momentum would be so undeniable that Goldwater would have no choice but to commit to a run.) They left the meeting with a copy of his speaking schedule. He promised to make time for their people whenever they crossed his path. White breathed a sigh of relief.

  They filled out their roster with a few more trusted friends and scheduled a meeting for December. White unfurled a map of the United States and explained the grand strategy. States were colored in blue, green, or red, for those that possibly, probably, or almost certainly would go for Goldwater at the 1964 Republican Convention. Bob Taft’s ugly convention defeat at the hands of the Northeastern swing vote in 1952 had been a formative political memory for these men. When White explained that a convention could be won without the Northeast, they understood that what he was describing was a revolution. No one had ever convincingly claimed that a Republican presidential candidate could be nominated without winning New York. He said 637 of the 655 delegates needed to win the nomination were likely already in the bag. Many Republican organizations across the country, he explained, withered from eight slack years under Eisenhower, enervated by the agonizing 1960 Nixon loss, weren’t really organizations at all. If five people showed up for precinct meetings, it took only six conservatives to take the precinct over. Enough precincts and you had a county. Then a congressional district. If you got enough congressional districts, then you had a state. With just the people in this room and a network of loyal friends, they could have the Republican Party, as easy as pushing on an open door.

  The room was buzzing.

  He explained their base: the Midwest, the Southwest—and the South. In 1964 their delegates wouldn’t be available to the highest bidder as in the old “post office” days. Now there were real Republican organizations in Dixie. And their members worshiped Goldwater. White gestured at his map, and proceeded to explain in dizzying detail what hardly anybody else in the nation understood: the occult process by which a presidential candidate won delegates to the Republican National Convention.

  At the convention, he explained, each state got four at-large delegates plus a delegate for each congressional district that cast two thousand votes for either Nixon in 1960 or the Republican House candidate in 1962; plus an extra at-large delegate for each Republican congressman; and six additional delegates-at-large if the state had gone for Nixon or elected a Republican senator or governor in 1960. The formula overrepresented the smaller states, where Republican activists were most conservative. And the balance of power, he explained, had been turning in their favor. In 1940 34.9 percent of the convention’s votes came from the South and West. In 1964 it would be 43.4 percent.

  He talked about the Rube Goldberg-like system for selecting delegates. Different in each state, the rules were generally set by statute, usually in concert with a body of obscure tradition. Sixteen states had binding primaries, and together these states selected about a third of the delegates to the convention. They would enter few of these. Winning pluralities in the beauty pageants was an expensive, wild-card proposition; dark horses like Nixon could be expected to pour massive resources into the “Big Six” states with early primaries, like Illinois, to signal their electability. No candidate was ever guaranteed a nomination because of a dramatic primary win; but plenty—Stassen in Oregon in 1948, Humphrey in West Virginia in 1960—had slunk away after an embarrassing loss.

  The fact was, most delegates were chosen not in voting booths but in hotel ballrooms at state party conventions. The old saw was that state delegates were highly susceptible to manipulation by congressmen, senators, governors, and mayors—now dangling, now withholding patronage to delegates to get them to agree to run for a berth at the national convention “uncommitted,” whence power brokers could cash them in for a candidate desperate to go over the top in exchange for a handsome consideration. But bosses only controlled delegates if their bait was taken, and White’s plotters would search for conservatives who were more interested in saving Western civilization than in gaining a spot on the streets and sanitation commission. The rules were often so obscure and complex that just knowing them would give the insurgents an enormous advantage.

  Their work would begin at the dewiest grassroots level, recruiting and training candidates to stand for election to the precinct conventions; those people, in turn, would select delegates to the county conventions; these, finally, would choose the national convention delegates. Some states nominated favorite sons for President, a gambit that allowed them to hold their delegates in reserve on the first ballot and to sell them to the highest bidder on the second. Where appropriate White and his people would encourage this—a favorite-son delegation could become a powerful Trojan horse if all the members were really gung ho for Goldwater. Sometimes it paid to look weak. That made you more intimidating once you proved yourself strong.

  It was just as Clif White learned from the Communists—and also from John F. Kennedy’s Irish Mafia, who had started working the precincts shortly after the 1956 convention. A single small organization, from a distance and with minimal resources, working in stealth, could take on an entire party. They didn’t need the big fish, the governors, senators, mayors. They didn’t need the little fish, the individual voters. They just needed enough middling fish. The plotters left the meeting with their heads spinning. Roger Milliken pledged $30,000 on the spot. They were on their way.

  White rented an office high atop the Chanin Building, across from Grand Central Terminal. It was an art deco masterpiece, surely a monument to the glories of the civilization he had consecrated himself to save. But White just liked his suite because it was tucked into the back corner of the floor, invisible from the elevator. The door read, simply, “3505.” That became the group’s code name: Suite 3505. He squeezed desks for himself and a secretary between forests of file cabinets, filled with intelligence on every Republican worth knowing in the country. White then set out to assemble his nationwide team. His wife, Bunny, steeled herself for political widowhood.

  He prepared for his first organizing trip by having his comrades identify the solid, trustworthy conservatives in their region, whom White would gather for slide talks. In Texas, that effort was superfluous; he learned that their Goldwater organization was nearly in place already. In Jackson, Mississippi, he ran down his national delegate projections with Wirt Yerger and came up with an estimate that they had two hundred more than were needed to nominate a candidate. In Shreveport, Louisiana, he talked the night away with an oil man, Charlton H. Lyons, who said he’d never gotten involved in politics before, but would be glad to join the Goldwater effort now. (In a few months, Lyons would be running for governor of Louisiana.) White hit the Midwest, then the West, posting confidential memoranda with no return address to his co-conspirators on his progress. In March he hit California. That was a sticky situation. The Birch wars
in the gubernatorial primary were going full tilt, National Review had gone to press with its attack on Robert Welch, and the YAF-Walker controversy had boiled over. Two ministers’ homes in the San Fernando Valley had been bombed after they decried right-wing extremism. Congressman John Rousselot had been one of the twenty-six at White and Rusher’s original meeting. Now they had to decide whether it was safe to invite him to the second. If the press found out that their group existed, that would be bad enough. If they found out that the group harbored a Bircher, that could be their end. Rusher wanted to find out if Rousselot still took this Robert Welch nonsense seriously. He gave Rousselot a call—and the congressman asked Rusher how he could be absolutely certain that Eisenhower was not a Communist. Upon hearing this, White decided that it would be better to keep Rousselot off their rolls. He was asked to work on their behalf in secret. Rousselot—a good soldier and a good spy—agreed.

  The third meeting, on April 13, was at a fishing camp in the still-frozen Minnesota lake country owned by 3M, one of White’s old corporate clients. The big news that week was that U.S. Steel had defied the Kennedy Administration’s voluntary “wage-price guideposts.” That morning’s Herald Tribune quoted Kennedy as saying that “businessmen were a bunch of s.o.b.’s.” Those who thrilled at one of their number defying the creeping advance of the central planners responded with buttons reading “S.O.B.: SONS OF BUSINESS.” For these particular s.o.b.’s, reading the news was like a pep rally. Fired up, they got an enormous amount of work done—when they weren’t sitting in front of roaring fires clinking whiskey glasses or horsing around like frat boys. They had appointed regional directors; now these were presented with state-by-state rundowns of delegate procedures to memorize. White said it would take five grand a month to keep him on the road. They went around the room, and each pledged to raise generous amounts. White set a deadline of December to have in place a chairman, a women’s chair, and a finance chair for each state. Things were going better than expected. Going to the Republican Convention with a majority of delegates now seemed within their reach. And, as White reminded them in his closing pep talk, even if they didn’t go in with a majority—they knew every trick it would take in order to leave with one. They left Minnesota in a glow.