Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Goldwater ushered White into his inner office, and White briefed him on why his group was so eager for Goldwater to become a presidential candidate. He was stopped cold after five minutes.

  “Clif, I’m not a candidate. And I’m not going to be. I have no intention of running for the presidency.”

  White plowed on. “Well, we thought we would have to draft you.”

  “Draft, nothin’! I told you I’m not going to run. And I’m telling you now, don’t paint me into a corner. It’s my political neck and I intend to have something to say about what happens to it.”

  White mustered his best Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington voice. “Senator,” he said, “I’m not painting you into a comer. You painted yourself there by opening your mouth for the last eight years. You’re the leader of the conservative cause in the United States of America, and thousands—millions—of people want you to be their nominee for President. I can’t do anything about that and neither can you.”

  “Well, I’m just not going to run,” Goldwater said finally. “My wife loves me, but she’d leave me if I ran for this thing.”

  White trudged down Capitol Hill considering another line of work. Rusher wrote Goldwater imploring him not to pull the rug out from under an unprecedented nationwide organization of dedicated rank-and-file conservatives, built up painstakingly over fifteen months. Goldwater wrote back that he felt double-crossed, used: no one had ever told him these “old friends” were a Goldwater for President group, or that White was on salary full-time, or that the group was raising money in the hundreds of thousands of dollars on his behalf. He said that since he was running for Senate, charges of presidential campaigning could irreparably hurt his reputation. That didn’t stop Rusher from writing an even more pleading letter the next day. Frank Meyer, one of National Review’s stable of apocalyptic ex-Communists, chimed in with a letter to Goldwater that “providence” had picked him to save the United States from “the verge of disaster.”

  Rusher’s “Crossroads for the GOP” article came out. Offered as a pamphlet, it became the most popular reprint the magazine had ever sold. Conservatives were sending Goldwater copies in the dozens. Rumors had it that he had read it—and was impressed with its reasoning. Perhaps that was true; not long ago, after all, Goldwater had given a speech to Georgia Republican activists proclaiming he “would bend every muscle to see that the South has a voice in everything that affects the life of the South,” and that since the GOP was never going to win back the Negro vote, the party “ought to go hunting where the ducks are”—that is, among white “states’ rights” audiences like the one he was presently addressing.

  But when White made his way again to the Old Senate Office Building on February 5, Charlie Barr in tow for backup, Goldwater cut him short once again.

  This time it was level-headed old Charlie Barr who piped up: “It’s a free country,” he said, leveling a glance at Goldwater. “We’re free to draft a candidate if we choose and there isn’t much you or anyone else can do about it.”

  The senator smiled archly and said that they might discover what he could do if they kept pushing.

  Half a dozen Suite 3505 leaders gathered in Chicago once more, wearied at their increasingly hopeless efforts to keep their recruits in the fold as word got out that Goldwater was absolutely refusing to run. It was as glum a conclave as any of them had ever attended. It certainly felt like a last meeting. They turned their dilemma over and over—Goldwater was the only possible candidate; Goldwater was determined to shun them—until, finally, a single brash voice rang out among the disconsolate. It was the normally colorless Indiana state treasurer, Bob Hughes. “There’s only one thing we can do. Let’s draft the son of a bitch.”

  He was answered by a voice of reason: “What if he won’t let us draft him?”

  Hughes: “Then let’s draft him anyway.”

  The room sparked to life. That was exactly what they would do. They decided they needed a front man of sufficient stature to impress Goldwater that they were serious. They settled as first choice on the new senator from Colorado, Peter Dominick, and as alternate, one of the men in the room: Peter O‘Donnell, the brash new Texas GOP chair who was a legend in the party for winning Dallas for Nixon with a massive house-to-house canvass and for managing John Tower’s Senate campaign. O’Donnell was a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, a young millionaire: how could Goldwater refuse him? A waiter arrived at their suite with the plate of sandwiches they had ordered, just in time to celebrate what they decided was a breakthrough.

  In fact Goldwater had exaggerated his reluctance. He always returned White’s calls within a few hours; he was willing to keep his options open. He just wanted to retain stewardship of his own political neck. In March he brought Denison Kitchel out to Washington and installed him in an office across the street from his, claiming that Kitchel was there to manage his 1964 Senate race. His friend and secret adviser, Jay Hall, the GM executive, prepared a confidential survey of Goldwater’s presidential prospects in all fifty states.

  Publicly—and even privately, because even Kitchel did not know about the secret survey—nothing had changed. On March 22 Goldwater appeared on The Jack Paar Show. Paar asked if Goldwater was running for President. “Well, I have said hundreds of times that I am not,” he responded. “I’m running for the United States Senate. I would hate to think the Republican Party has gotten so hard up for candidates they would only talk about two.” He certainly didn’t act like a presidential candidate. He told self-effacing little stories about getting arrested in Mexico in a barroom brawl; then he put the audience to sleep with an endless disquisition on a pet subject: military hardware (“The RS-70 has been abandoned. Skybolt has been dropped, manned bombers are being phased out, Nike-Zeus is being delayed, the Dyna-Soar is being re-examined for possible junking ...”).

  Goldwater was still breakfasting with Governor Rockefeller, who was still harvesting newspaper clippings anointing him heir apparent to the Republican presidential nomination—and also harvesting grassroots Republican disgust. If it hadn’t been for Goldwater’s interposition, the biggest political testimonial dinner in Nebraska political history, for Senator Roman Hruska, would have been the biggest humiliation in Nebraska political history; when Nelson Rockefeller was put on the program, conservatives began planning a boycott that would have left the room half empty—until one phone call from Goldwater shut the protest down.

  Kitchel shuttled between Phoenix and Washington, but spent precious little time on Arizona affairs. Robert Snowden, a Manion confederate from Arkansas who had fielded an independent elector scheme in 1960, paid court with a promise to raise $3 million for a Goldwater presidential campaign. (“A great guy and a fine gentleman [who] talks a little more than he produces,” Goldwater remarked about Snowden to Kitchel, laughing off the news.) Piles of mail were forwarded from Goldwater’s office to Kitchel’s from groups like the National Association of Americans for Goldwater (Tennessee), Americans for Goldwater (Phoenix), Grassroots for Goldwater, Inc. (Missouri), Citizens for Goldwater (Pennsylvania), the National Committee to Draft Goldwater (New York), the Goldwater Association (New Jersey)—and, from California alone, the Advisory Committee for Goldwater, the Goldwater Leadership Conference, and Californians for Goldwater, whose newsletter, The Goldrush, proclaimed, “Since Mississippi is visibly considered a far worse enemy of the federal government than Tito’s Yugoslavia, couldn’t we follow the usual pattern, and send Governor Barnett a few million in foreign aid?” White could have at least taken heart that Barry opened his stuff before sending it on to Kitchel.

  The cherry blossoms popped in Washington, and no one took much notice of one more press conference in the city’s endless cavalcade. Since Senator Dominick had excused himself from chairing the group (“I don’t think freshmen senators ought to be making Presidents”), it was Peter O’Donnell standing up in front of one of the Mayflower’s smaller meeting rooms, fiddling with the podium, alongside co-chair Mrs. Ione Harrington of Indiana, a sw
eet-natured matron except when the subject was conservative politics. White flitted about anxiously making sure everything was in order, briefed the speakers one more time, then retreated behind the scenes as usual. It was April 8, 1963. Suite 3505, in existence for a year and a half to the day, was about to go public as the National Draft Goldwater Committee, P.O. Box 1964, Washington, D.C.—frippery, because the group had no Washington office.

  O‘Donnell delivered a version of Rusher’s “Crossroads for the GOP” argument to a couple dozen reporters. He was patronized. No, O’Donnell answered, the National Draft Goldwater Committee wasn’t endorsed by Goldwater; no, they didn’t expect to get his permission to run him in any primaries; no, they didn’t know whether he was going to run for President. O’Donnell announced a rally for Goldwater on Independence Day in Washington, D.C.; no, they couldn’t promise Goldwater would be there, but they had invited him.

  The reporters retreated to file their stories (the New York Times’s stringer botched the job: “Another ‘draft Goldwater’ movement was mounted from Chicago late last winter, but apparently never got far”); on their way out they picked up full-color National Draft Goldwater Committee paraphernalia stamped all over with the slogan “THE REPUBLICAN OPPORTUNITY TO WIN IN 1964” (a long-memoried rebuke of the Easterners’ slogan in 1952, ”Taft Can’t Win”). Behind his hand, O’Donnell told a clump of reporters that winning it for Goldwater would be “a cup of tea”; the question was not whether their candidate would win, but by how much. “We have got the only show in town,” he said, smiling. He had a long face, a slightly bulbous nose, and droopy ears, and bore a passing resemblance in speech and visage to a young LBJ. The reporters tried to make it seem like they were laughing with him, not at him. The week before, Walter Lippmann had written in his Newsweek column that the Republicans would nominate Rockefeller, “barring miracles and accidents.” This crowd hardly seemed the stuff of miracles.

  The man who counted wasn’t laughing. Goldwater had just entertained Bill Middendorf, Draft Goldwater’s powerhouse treasurer and a top Republican donor, in Phoenix. The senator was plied with a $1,000 check for a May 9 testimonial dinner in his honor. He also might have been slipped a copy of the group’s extensive top secret strategy memo: “If the Republicans can shake off their fixation with the idea that they are engaged in a national plebiscite”—as opposed to an effort to win the majority of the electoral college by capturing the right strategic margins—“then it is quite possible Kennedy can be beaten.... In its hypnotic concentration on carrying New York, and in tailoring its candidates and program to appeal to the minority-bloc vote there, the GOP has put an intolerable strain on the Midwestern segment of the party.” And, it hardly needed saying, its new base in the South.

  However Middendorf did it, he seemed to have gotten to Goldwater. Shortly before O’Donnell’s press conference, Goldwater authorized Kitchel to release to a few key allies copies of a letter he had recently written to a Phoenix friend. In it, he explained that he had no more idea of running for President than he had of running for the Senate in 1952, but he was certain of carrying the South if he did. That was an encouraging hint. For Goldwater had, of course, run for the Senate in 1952.

  His office refused public comment on the White-O’Donnell committee. But reporters knew Goldwater usually forgot such strictures if you found him in a convivial enough social setting. A band of reporters cornered him at an afternoon reception of the District of Columbia Republican Committee, and recorded him growling, “I am not taking any position on this draft movement. It’s their time and their money. But they are going to have to get along without me.” The National Draft Goldwater Committee chose to identify that utterance as not-too-distant a cousin to an endorsement. They hired the YAFer who had handled the staging of the Madison Square Garden rally to do their planned Independence Day show, for which the committee had rented the 1,350-seat Federal Hall at 13th and M Streets. That was modest next to Madison Square Garden. But the capital emptied in the sweltering summer. They would be lucky to attract that many people. Goldwater would not be there. He rode his palomino, Sunny, every July 4 in the Rodeo Days parade in Prescott, Arizona.

  Nelson Rockefeller was behaving strangely.

  As soon as the pundits began declaring his nomination a lock, opportunistic politicians naturally began lining up to endorse him. As soon as they offered, he turned them down. An explanation would arrive soon enough. Among the first to receive it was Rockefeller’s friend Barry Goldwater. The Arizona senator was up on his roof high above Paradise Valley puttering with the TV antenna when Rockefeller called. Peggy answered the phone.

  “This is Nelson Rockefeller.”

  “Well, hello yourself,” she replied. “This is Mamie Eisenhower.” (Barry’s friends liked practical jokes.)

  Peggy was finally convinced. Goldwater climbed down from the roof to answer the phone. What Rockefeller told him so shocked him that it was a good thing he had climbed down from the roof. The most shocking part of all was that Rockefeller seemed not to realize just how shocking it was. Probably Rockefeller had been misled by his divorce a year earlier, which produced a sharp dip in the polls that was made up within a few weeks. Divorce was a tragedy; people accepted that sometimes it had to happen. Rockefeller’s shocked no one who had eyes to see; the flaws in his pairing with Mary Todhunter (“Tod”) Clark, a flinty Philadelphia society girl whom he had married just six days out of college in 1930, were evident before the union took place. The affairs began within the decade, abetted by Rocky’s tendency to administrative overreach: even in his wartime office he carried seven secretaries, each more lovely, clever, and voluble than the last; serially, he would set up a secretary almost as a second wife in the townhouse he kept eight blocks down from his 810 Fifth Avenue home. “I want you to know that Tod and I have an agreement that we will never get divorced but will live our own separate lives,” he would say. When divorce did come, most presumed that Rockefeller would remain a playboy bachelor (there were rumors that he was dating Joan Crawford). That would have served him in better stead. But that was never his intention. For he was in love. And now he was getting remarried. Which was a political disaster.

  Margaretta Fitler (“Happy”) Murphy had volunteered in his 1958 campaign. She lived with her husband, a microbiologist for the Rockefeller Institute, and four children aged three to twelve, within the vast Rockefeller compound at Pocantico Hills. She was thirty-six; Nelson and Tod were both fifty-five. Happy got a divorce on April I, immediately signing away custody of her children to her husband. The presiding judge announced that the case would be sealed “in order to protect the children”—a privilege rarely extended to those not about to marry billionaires. Four Sunday afternoons later, the couple wed at the cottage of Nelson’s brother Laurance at Pocantico with a handful of guests, the Reverend Marshall L. Smith from the family’s church nearby (a simple New England—style clapboard with stained-glass windows designed by Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse) presiding. A bulletin was dispatched to the press. The couple jetted off to the Venezuelan finca, thither to a Rockefeller-owned hotel in the Virgin Islands. Photographs reached the wires: girlish Happy and beaming Rocky striding through the Caribbean surf in matching shorts and low-buttoned shirts as if ready to reprise From Here to Eternity.

  Rockefeller’s enemies couldn’t have planned it better if they tried. Now he looked like a corrupter of the nation’s husbands and an accomplice to child abandonment. What if all men got the idea to dump their middle-aged wives? What if all women abandoned their children?

  It is hard to understand the response now, given the revolution separating their time and our own. Since women were expected to give up virtually everything else when they gave themselves to a man to form a family, losing a husband seemed to most women equal to losing everything. It was a time, according to Betty Friedan, when it was easier to find an abortionist than a minister willing to marry a divorce. “It is the plain fact,” the esteemed Columbia University literary crit
ic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, “that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Politically, he may have had something. But the popular graduate text The Psychology of Women clearly had not entered into his researches; it pronounced, “Woman’s intellectuality is to a large extent paid for by the loss of valuable feminine qualities.” Nor had Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which suggested banning women from college teaching outright and identified feminism as “at its core a deep illness.” Adlai Stevenson, the divorce, speaking at a Smith College commencement in 1955, said: “I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife.” (He spoke of the spiritual crisis of the West.) “You may be hitched to one of these creatures we call ‘Western man,’ ” Stevenson continued, “and I think part of your job is to keep him Western, to keep him purposeful, to keep him whole.... You can do it in the living-room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can-opener in your hand.” The week after Rocky’s nuptials, the Pulitzer board rejected the drama jury’s recommendation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? because the play depicted adultery. And that was among the intellectuals. The same message was repeated a thousandfold every day in every medium. A culture’s unspoken assumptions were laid bare by the reaction to the Rockefeller remarriage.