Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Then they hit a brick wall.

  Suite 3505’s plan was secret. If they named their goal—a Goldwater nomination—Goldwater would get wind of it and shut them down. If they didn’t name their goal, why would people give money to them at all? All that White’s new full-time fund-raiser could reveal when he made a pitch was that a group of important people (he couldn’t say who) were working to advance the conservative cause (he couldn’t say how) and ask them to make out the check to something called the “Tope-Fernald Agency Account”—not quite the accounting practice your typical sober-sided Republican businessman (like Pennsylvania’s Richard Mellon Scaife, who turned them down indignantly) preferred. Meanwhile, back in November, White had squirmed through a meeting in which representatives of every major conservative organization in the country lines up behind Americans for Constitutional Action’s push to put eighteen field men on the road for conservative candidates in the 1962 congressional elections. Who would want to give money to some vague idea about electing a conservative President in 1964 when an army for 1962 was being mustered? Clif White watched that spring as ACA sucked in thousands that might have gone to them—$6,000 alone from G.E.’s Lem Boulware, Reader’s Digest’s DeWitt Wallace, and Johnson & Johnson’s Robert W. Johnson. That was the exact amount White had already siphoned off from his children’s college fund.

  Again and again he returned to Washington to get his hands on the card files of Nixon delegates to the 1960 convention. He failed, with ever greater frustration, every time. In June he attended an RNC meeting in Seattle. So did a gang of Harvard kids, led by Bruce Chapman, a member of the team that had drafted the Compact of Fifth Avenue in 1960, and George Gilder, David Rockefeller’s godson, who put out a new magazine called Advance—“flaming moderates,” they called themselves. Chapman and Gilder had recently drummed up a movement that once again almost got Goldwater dumped as chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Advance was all anyone talked about all weekend. While in Seattle, White was offered a corporate job. He almost took it. Suite 3505 took in a grand total of $300 in June. The organization let the rent slide.

  It was excruciating: the broker they got, the more celebrated Barry Goldwater seemed to become. Washington State Republicans passed a resolution to declare Goldwater the party’s only genuine spokesman. The 1960 delegates—the ones whose names and addresses White was still so desperate to obtain—were polled by the AP: 264 for Goldwater, 203 for Rockefeller, 137 for Nixon, 32 for Romney. In Texas, a straw poll gave Goldwater 1,115 votes to Rockefeller’s 90. At Yale University, of all places, the senator was awarded the prestigious Chubb Fellowship, whose holder visited the campus for a week of lectures and casual interactions with the student body. The honor had previously seemed to be reserved for liberals—people like Abe Ribicoff and Adlai Stevenson. Campus conservatives joked that the idea must have been to exhibit Goldwater as a two-headed calf. Instead he held crowds spellbound: speaking on the necessity of using force in Southeast Asia, on the disastrous effects of unbalanced budgets—and on how his grandfather once had an Indian bullet extracted from his hide without benefit of anesthesia. Political science professors argued with him that a true conservative should embrace the stabilizing forces of the New Deal. Students were unmoved—or at least the twenty-five who marched into President A. Whitney Griswold’s office with a thick petition demanding that more conservative faculty members be hired.

  But Goldwater proved overwhelmed by all the attention. He removed himself from the lecture circuit for the first time in half a decade. The Wall Street Journal’s Robert Novak described it as “all but a Sherman-style disclaimer”—referring to Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous wire to the 1884 Republican National Convention: “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” And White had to decide what to do. Goldwater’s amiable partnership with Rockefeller was by then well known. White, on the verge of eviction from the Chanin Building, told Rusher that Goldwater’s retreat was the last straw: he was throwing in the towel. Rusher convinced him to press on. He pointed out that their most valuable assets lay elsewhere—in the network of county party chairs, precinct captains, and conservative activists White had won through hard organizing efforts over the past six months. And Rusher reminded White of his success in winning three crucial organizational beachheads. These were bases of power no amount of money could replace.

  The first was the National Federation of Republican Women. The tradition in that group since time immemorial was for the annual September convention to rubber-stamp those officer candidates picked by a nominating committee. This year, Suite 3505 had run a slate of candidates to oppose them. Their candidates swept the election. This was invaluable. Women made up perhaps a fifth of the delegates to the Republican National Convention. Now Suite 3505 had taken over the organization best able to deliver these delegates to Goldwater.

  Then there was the American Medical Association. The AMA had been organizing physicians against the specter of socialized medicine ever since Earl Warren began pushing for guaranteed health care in California in the early 1940s. When Harry Truman proposed a national health insurance system, the AMA retained the California PR firm Whittaker & Baxter to convince the country that Truman’s goal was “to gain control over all fields of human endeavor.” Soon the AMA was lobbying tirelessly against any expansion of federal power—fighting for the Bricker Amendment; against a federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; against JFK’s campaign to expand the House Rules Committee. In the wake of the Rules Committee fight, the AMA formed the American Medical Political Action Committee. One of the committee’s first actions was distributing LPs featuring Ronald Reagan warning that Kennedy’s “Medicare” idea was “a foot in the door of a government takeover of all medicine.” White had no trouble convincing the group’s president-elect and the head of AMA-PAC to join Suite 3505 in a tactical alliance for 1964.

  Finally, there was the Young Republican National Federation. In 1961 White had let the YR chairmanship slip away. He had handed down Syndicate leadership to a new generation of activists, and they had made an awful botch of the job. Now, in time-honored fashion, the YR machine faced a reform faction. Its candidate was a genial Minnesota corporate publicist named Leonard Nadasdy who pledged to bring the organization back to its constitutional mission as a neutral clearinghouse for all Republicans—not a playground for ideologues. Nadasdy trounced the Syndicate candidate. And as chair he performed flawlessly. Literature flurried off the presses—manuals for organizing college chapters and teenage clubs, guides to programming speakers and fund-raising and registering voters, a thick primer on running a campaign. Elaborate civil rights conferences were organized to convince Negroes to stay in the Republican column. Membership had stagnated under the Syndicate (they had more interest in putting together tractable paper chapters than in expanding membership). Under Nadasdy the organization’s numbers were swelling. Now all fifty states had strong organizations, and thousands of members were ready to volunteer in the 1962 congressional elections. Nadasdy himself traveled the country campaigning for any Republican, conservative or liberal, who asked.

  The Syndicate, however, kept the college chairmanship and Young Republican co-chair, a position reserved for a woman, for which they had an ace in the hole: their candidate, Chicago society girl Pat Hutar, was beauty-pageant stunning. She also hid an iron fist in her velvet glove. As for college chair, that was a job no reform faction could touch. College Republican conventions were like the old Southern Republican Party: all it took to control them was to set up rotten boroughs at dozens of colleges and load the convention with loyal Syndicate delegates. The Syndicate’s college chair, Jim Harff of Northwestern, was as tough as Hutar. And for them, all of Nadasdy’s evenhanded efforts were not good government; they were the malicious spoiling efforts of an ideological villain. Hutar and Harff sabotaged Nadasdy’s efforts when they could—especially the civil rights conferences. And it wasn’t two weeks be
fore Hutar, Harff, and White met in Chicago to begin plotting to dominate the 1963 Young Republican national convention. White raised a travel budget for Hutar to begin lining up state delegations. And they got to work discrediting Nadasdy: learning he was about to leave for a European honeymoon, they circulated a rumor that he was abandoning the country for a month at the height of the congressional campaign.

  Still, for Suite 3505, all seemed for naught. “I have never sought the nomination,” Goldwater wrote pesky Wirt Yerger in September, “as I have told you many times. I have many reasons, but I wouldn’t put money and organization last and neither of these has reared its ugly head.” Of White’s magnificent organization, he was oblivious.

  The 1962 congressional elections—the “Crossroads for the GOP” that Rusher later celebrated in his National Review article—came and went. Conservatives’ promising showing opened Suite 3505’s fund-raising spigots. They had one party auxiliary and were on their way to taking back the other—both guaranteeing control of a nationwide organization, publicity apparatus, and a fat budget from the Republican National Committee’s coffers. Their alliance with the American Medical Association was an insurance policy against financial ruin. State conventions to pick national presidential delegates were less than a year away. Their cover hadn’t been blown. White met with Goldwater the week after the election and showed off his thick book of organizational charts, budgets, timetables, and delegate estimates. Once again the senator was neither encouraging nor discouraging—good enough for them. Suite 3505 had survived its Valley Forge. White called the company that had offered him that lucrative job and turned it down once and for all.

  The key meeting was around the corner, December I and 2, 1962, in Chicago, the week before the annual RNC meeting. This time, White was confident enough to expand his circle of plotters to fifty-five. “This meeting will determine where we go,” he wrote his original group, “—whether we are serious or dilettantes.” Rocky, he assured them, was serious—attaching a memo from Jud Morhouse to New York county chairmen listing twenty-eight supposedly “conservative” positions the New York governor had recently taken, “for your use in talking to people who feel the Governor is strictly a Liberal.” Morhouse concluded, “It must be used cautiously and should not be published because we do not want to emphasize the conservative side so much that we lose other votes.” Meanwhile, Rockefeller, Romney, Scranton, Javits, Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, and Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, reported the Herald Tribune, had been convened in some sort of meeting by Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey. They were likely hashing out an idea for a moderate unified front behind Rocky for the 1964 nomination. The stakes were being raised.

  When White’s fifty-five settled around the big table at the jet-set-modern Essex Motel, he did something bold: he introduced the organization as one specifically committed to a Goldwater nomination. The session was opened with a prayer for God’s blessing on their enterprise. Then he got down to politics. He displayed his map, delineating the twenty-eight states he had visited in the past year. They needed 655 convention votes to nominate. He said their goal was controlling 700 before the opening gavel. Of this number, 451 would come from nineteen states mostly in the West and South, and these states were already solid for Goldwater. Georgia, Kentucky, South Dakota, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, and Ohio could be counted on for 81 more—142 “with extra hard work.” They would enter Goldwater in the California primary on June 2; the winner of that contest was guaranteed the state’s entire 86-vote bloc. That was for insurance. White’s budget for the previous year had been $65,000. For the nineteen months remaining he presented a budget of $3.2 million. Then a rolypoly millionaire with a big cowboy hat—“Stets” Coleman, from Virginia—hoisted himself out of his chair and announced: “Look, everybody’s been talking about how we need all this money, but who’s going to put some up? I pledge $25,000.” Within an hour $200,000 was on the table; by the end of the meeting, $285,000. Alabama put up $25,000. The fifty-five divided themselves up into working committees. White proposed unveiling their secret fourteen weeks hence—by which time their momentum would be impossible to deny. Someone piped up that at last they would redeem Dwight D. Eisenhower’s theft of the nomination in 1952 and nominate an honest-to-God conservative Republican candidate for President. All they had to do was work hard, keep the faith—and keep things quiet until they were ready to trap the liberals in the magnificent conservative web they had spun.

  The next morning, back in Alabama, John Grenier answered his phone to find Arthur Edson of the Associated Press on the other end. Edson asked Grenier why he had just been to Chicago (for a Bears game, he said). Edson asked if Grenier had been at the Clif White meeting (silence). And where was he going to raise $25,000?

  There had been a liberal Republican spy at the meeting, and no one ever discovered who it was.

  The story went out over the AP wires that afternoon:A secret, highly confidential meeting of leading Republicans who want Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for president was held in Chicago on Sunday.

  The objective is to get, as one put it, “an honest-to-God conservative Republican candidate for president”—and incidentally, to try to block the road for Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York.

  Walter Cronkite rushed down to Chicago to do a stand-up in front of the meeting room at the Essex. His report was accompanied by a near-perfect reproduction of White’s electoral map. Front-page headlines blared: “SECRET MEET TO PUSH GOLDWATER IN 1964”; ”GOLDWATER ’64 BOOM: MOVE TO BLOCK ROCKY.” The Herald Tribune editorial bemoaned the group’s strategy as “bad timing, narrow motives, and poor politics.” Columnist Joe Alsop, describing the effort as an attempt to turn the Republican Party over to the segregationists, just called it immoral.

  White was able to get through to Goldwater before the reporters did, but the spy got there first—and did his best to convince Goldwater that White was a opportunist paying himself a lavish salary out of funds raised using Goldwater’s name. In his marathon of telephone calls to important Republicans begging forgiveness for disrupting the party, White kept hearing pledges of support from ones he hadn’t considered conservative.

  And the annual Republican National Committee meeting threatened to become an ugly forty-eight-hour disputation into what was now being called Clif White’s “Southern strategy.”

  In a session closed to the press, in front of a transparency of a montage of sensational newspaper headlines reporting on White’s Southern strategy, RNC chair Bill Miller declared, “Our successes in the South need no apology.” The fur was not long in flying. Northeasterners like Jake Javits called the White strategy a threat to “the very existence of the Republican party” and a conspiracy against liberal Republicans who needed black voters to stay in office. Conservatives shot back that they were making an effort to become the only truly national party—one that left special appeals to minorities to the Democrats.

  Another session was even uglier. That was when the finance committee gave its report that the RNC was limping along on a $100,000 emergency loan from the New York GOP, and that the budget for 1963 had been slashed. The party’s ideological wounds had been reexposed; now committeemen learned that it was also broke.

  Goldwater appeared cool to the Southern strategy. “I think you have summed up the problem of any conservative for the Republican nomination in 1964,” he wrote a South Dakota friend, Kenneth Kellard, the day of the RNC meeting. “No one from the larger states who might be delegates or who would head delegations have shown any interest in that type of philosophy.” Though perhaps he was bluffing. His problem with the strategy might really have been that it would push him into presidential contention.

  At the Phoenix Country Club, amidst the Christmas decorations, he and his cronies evaluated the “Chicago secret meeting” and the many other draft efforts that were competing for Goldwater’s attention. They agreed that it was within the realm of possibility that he could win the nomination, but t
hat Kennedy was unbeatable in the general election. Since Goldwater had chased around the country in 1960 accusing Lyndon Johnson of the blackest perfidy for running for vice president and the U.S. Senate at the same time, he could not very well credibly run for both the presidency and the U.S. Senate in 1964. And if he ran for President and lost, he wouldn’t have any influence in moving his party to the right.

  On January 14 White traveled to Capitol Hill to try to set things right. The suggestion that White was profiting off Goldwater lingered. Besides, Goldwater’s notions about how nominations came about were entirely conventional: senators, key congressmen, newspaper publishers—these were the people who controlled convention delegations. White had no such names on his rolls. There was also the matter of temperament. White had a tendency to display forced familiarity among people he was intimidated by; Goldwater was slow to trust, especially with Easterners like White: in the same room, they jostled.

  Goldwater was late for the meeting, and when he arrived he was furious. In Birmingham, Alabama, that day, a new governor, George Wallace, had delivered his inaugural address. It was a pure distillation of Deep South id: “We will tolerate their boot in our face no longer.... Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a young, handsome, moderate blue-blood named William Warren Scranton was inaugurated governor and was immediately dubbed by The New Republic (which preferred to identify the senator from Arizona as “Barry Sundust”) as “the first of the Kennedy Republicans” and pegged as a presidential dark horse. Perhaps the contrast between Republicans who would compete with Wallace and those who could be compared to Kennedy contributed to the mood in the room of Republican senators who had voted Barry Goldwater off the caucus’s policy committee that morning.