Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  “Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her,” railed Connecticut senator Prescott Bush at a prep school graduation, in a tongue-lashing Time called the most wrathful any politician had suffered in recent memory, “then persuade a young mother of youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?” (No one bothered to call Happy’s ex, who remarried as quickly as she did, to ask if he felt “abandoned.”) The Hudson River presbytery brought up for censure the minister who had performed the ceremony, branding him “a disturber of the peace and unity of the church”; he expressed “deep regret” at violating the Church’s requirement of a one-year waiting period before divorced people could remarry. Rockefeller attended the convention of the National Federation of Republican Women with Happy on his arm. They made their entrance into the ballroom to stony silence. An entire table of bejeweled, begloved matrons rose and marched out. The same matrons raised the roof when Barry and Peggy arrived.

  Cadres of forward-thinking psychologists and sociologists leapt at the chance to wax knowingly that the nation was ready to take it all in stride. Rockefeller’s backers did likewise. “I don’t think this marriage changes his political picture at all,” said the Michigan state chair; “Just because no divorced man has ever been elected president doesn’t mean we won’t have one sometime,” said a New Jersey committeeman. Rocky was still “the logical nominee,” proclaimed Thomas Dewey—the logical nominee from 1948. Politically it didn’t matter; for now public servants started hearing from their constituents. A Maryland woman’s club previously scheduled to meet its liberal Republican congressmen on an urgent matter of policy never got to it: the women begged him to cut loose from Rockefeller instead. A Denver representative heard from a woman who would “rather have Liz Taylor in the White House than that Happy.” In Randall County, Texas, the GOP chair declared he would have to quit his job if Rockefeller was nominated.

  The following Sunday, clergymen right and left sermonized in massed chorus. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the towering figures of American liberalism, reported that his pious Baptist cleaning woman was disgusted, paused a beat, then added, “I share that view.” Khrushchev denounced “parasitic capitalists who live a life of luxury, drinking, carousing, and changing wives.” Hearst columnist Frank Conniff borrowed the argot of another celebrity brought low by remarriage: “As a presidential possibility, Nelson Rockefeller is in deadsville.” On May 26, three days after Rockefeller returned from his honeymoon, Gallup pronounced the last word. Previously 43 percent of Republicans had been for Rocky, 26 percent for Barry. Now it was Goldwater 35 to 30 percent. The New York Times reported on mail received by New York congressmen—1 percent pro-Rockefeller, 99 percent against. And Rockefeller, the object of so much conspiracy theorizing, began spinning theories of his own: he suspected Goldwater was somehow behind it all. Goldwater, for his part, thought the reaction might have something to do with Richard Nixon.

  Rockefeller’s support had always been thin on the ground. A Congressional Quarterly poll had reported a month earlier that most 1960 delegates assumed Rockefeller would be the nominee. But they vastly preferred Goldwater. The conservatives Rockefeller had won through his recent insinuation that Kennedy was “appeasing” the Soviets in Cuba welcomed the remarriage as an excuse to cut loose from someone they were never excited about in the first place. His efforts to woo conservatives had already driven away much of his liberal Republican support (the Herald Tribune called his Cuba speech “unworthy of a presidential aspirant and quite revealing of the Governor’s qualifications, or, rather, the lack thereof”). And Rockefeller was in the doghouse in his home state. New Yorkers were incredulous at his attempt to disguise a $105 million tax increase as a mere increase in “fees.” His deputy Jud Morhouse resigned under a cloud during an investigation of corruption in the State Liquor Authority. The governor kept on trying to assess several hundreds of dollars per family for bomb shelters, embarrassingly oblivious of how few could afford the financial sacrifice. If it weren’t for a newspaper strike in New York City, Rockefeller would have been doing even worse.

  Deadsville for Rockefeller was ring-a-ding-ding for Goldwater. On April 20, Oklahoma Republicans resolved at their annual convention “that the HONORABLE BARRY GOLDWATER, Senator from the state of Arizona, champions the political beliefs of the Oklahoma Republican Party”—the closest thing to a delegate pledge state law would allow. From Suite 3505, one million copies of a brilliant petition form had gone out the door—signers pledged to donate one dollar when Senator Goldwater announced he was running for President, an efficient way to convince Goldwater that people were serious about supporting him, in addition to raising money—and were being returned to Box 1964 with exuberant abandon. White was so successful on a California trip that a report by the Los Angeles Times’s top political correspondent estimated that the National Draft Goldwater Committee had half a million dollars in its coffers—a vast exaggeration, but a handy lubricant for the bandwagon. Thruston Morton told Fortune that the power center in the party had lurched: “It’s out there beyond the Appalachians,” he said, “and its heart belongs to Barry.” Two Washington reporters, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, joined forces in a new column for the Herald Tribune, “Inside Report,” specializing in what Washington called the “inside dope” piece. In one of their first filings they reported that with his legislative agenda stalled worse than ever, and his dream of a European Common Market on hold, Kennedy could not coast on image forever—and that a presidential race with Goldwater could prove very competitive.

  Perhaps the most impressive indicator of Goldwater’s strength was the quality of the gossip: one rumor carpeting the South claimed that he had sent an emissary to ask H. L. Hunt for a million dollars to fund his campaign for the California primary. That couldn’t have been more wrong; when a friend told him he looked like the front-runner, Goldwater’s face turned ashen. “Don’t say that,” he implored. “Please don’t say that.”

  Other, more eager, entrants were jockeying in his stead. On May 2, Richard Nixon announced that he was moving to New York to take up a position with a Wall Street law firm. Nixon’s witty appearances on Jack Paar’s show were already the talk of Manhattan that spring. (“Which one?” he had quipped when asked if he would face Kennedy in 1964; thirty-year-old Teddy had just entered the Senate). As was his speech at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference, where he made a graceful, self-deprecating aside on his famous “Last Press Conference.” The media critic Marshall McLuhan opined that had Nixon displayed that same unhurried ease—“coolness” —on TV in 1960, he would now be President. With the assistance of a friendly Santa Monica newspaper that was sending out the ASNE speech in bulk as a “Freedom Doctrine for the Americas,” Nixon was settling into a reputation as the Republicans’ foreign policy guru. His people even tried to hire Clif White to run his presidential explorations. (White of course refused out of hand.)

  That same May 2 a New York Times front-page article brought a new name to the fore. Eisenhower and Nixon, it reported, favored George Wilcken Romney, the first Republican Michigan governor in fourteen years. Romney was one of the unique ones in American politics, and for a while he looked like the answer to the Republican Party’s prayers. He had the square jaw and booming mien (and dramatic middle name) of a President; he gave off an air of victory. He had taken over the American Motors Corporation back in 1956 when it was losing some $20 million a year; by 1959 the company was showing $60 million in profits. A Mormon bishop who brought a missionary’s zeal, integrity, asceticism —and self-righteousness-to his every activity (he reminded many of his friends of Walter Reuther, whose COPE machine he had beaten to become governor), Romney gained national notoriety testifying at a 1958 hearing on administered prices. First he suggested that any company with a market share bigger than 35 percent should be broken up (that is, GM and Ford). Then he said
that the UAW should be broken up. For good measure, he hit on “excessive concentration of government power.” Groups constantly misread his idiosyncratic agenda as their own. Off he went to $100-a-plate Republican dinners where he reviled the idea of $100-a-plate dinners, to radical right conclaves where he called for bountiful foreign aid. Even before his run for governor he was talked about as a presidential possibility. Then came a newspaper editorial from the governor’s biggest backer that yanked Romney out of contention as soon as the Times had ushered him in: “Come home, George,” wrote the Detroit News’s John S. Knight, “and let’s get on with the chores.”

  Meanwhile Pennsylvania national committeeman Craig Truax and gubernatorial aide Bill Keisling inaugurated a “Draft Scranton” movement. They had to do it behind Scranton’s back. When Thomas McCabe, chairman of Scott Paper, wrote Scranton, “My young son, Jim, who like many of his contemporaries can be quite critical of public figures, told me he liked you immensely and thought you were real presidential timber,” Scranton wrote back tartly, asking McCabe to “tell him for me that I hope he makes it as president, not me.” Scranton had turned down four thousand speaking invitations since November.

  The nomination seemed Barry Goldwater’s to lose. Washington correspondents hung on his every word at an airport press conference in Massachusetts, before one of Goldwater’s many speeches to young audiences, this one to a prep school. (He made backhanded swipes at attempts to draft him, then made himself sound like a candidate by complaining that Eisenhower and Nixon were behaving like “kingmakers” by trying to boost Romney on the sly.) Every Republican who mattered was in Washington the next night for the fête of the season: the $1,000-a-plater honoring Barry Goldwater. Four hundred people paid the sum. Only Rockefeller was missing—he cabled “regrets from Mrs. Rockefeller and me” from Venezuela. It was read at the dinner to a chorus of adolescent giggles—more inauspicious, really, than mere booing.

  It was enough to inspire Goldwater to call another meeting with his brain trust in Florida. All agreed he could win the nomination. Only two doubted he could win the presidency. He now searched his soul. “I ask myself, what’s my responsibility to conservatism?” he told Newsweek in a May 20 cover article. “Is the country ready to buy conservatism? If I am beaten at the convention, how much will conservatism be set back? If I’m nominated, and then roundly beaten by Kennedy, it could be the end of the conservative movement in this country. And I’d be through in politics.” The nation enjoyed a zesty romance with its young president—59 percent of those surveyed claimed to have voted for him, though, of course, only 49.7 percent had. But the conservative message was resonating more and more—even with sophisticated Eastern journalists like Irving Kristol, who sounded for all the world like the free-market economist F. A. Hayek when he asserted of big government in Harper’s that “only in rare instances ... can a large-scale plan encompass all the factors on which its success or failure depends.”

  Goldwater was now searching his soul. He was on the record saying he would consider running if he thought he could get within 5 percent of victory—because that would advance the conservative cause. He announced he would decide what to do by the middle of November. But very soon afterward, events began unfolding that forced the issue.

  11

  MOBS

  To its white citizens, Birmingham, Alabama, was a proud and grimy symbol of the South’s industrial future, presided over by United States Steel Company’s dwarfing works on its outskirts and a fifty-six-foot statue of Vulcan, Roman god of fire, in its bustling downtown—“Magic City,” they called it, in wonderment at its population’s doubling since the war. To its black residents, who could hardly be called citizens, Birmingham was an everyday hell of quiet humiliation and frequent terror. No segregation code was stricter (“It shall be unlawful for a Negro and a white person to play together ... in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers”); nowhere were the consequences of transgression more terrifying. In 1957 a local black minister named Fred Shuttlesworth announced his intention to send his children to white schools. In retaliation, the Klan abducted a black man at random, castrated him, and poured turpentine on the wound. Blacks lived on the east side of Center Street in Birmingham, whites on the west, and not for nothing were the borderlands in between nicknamed “Dynamite Hill.”

  Violence was burned into the city’s soul. U.S. Steel had been the last and the most vicious of the blue chips to accept industrial unionism in the 1930s. The savagery of the battle shaped Birmingham’s political culture. In the early 1950s, U.S. Steel slowed down its hiring, then took advantage of the ensuing anxieties to demagogically install a low-tax, low-service city government. As public safety commissioner, they chose a notorious savage who had got his start in police work as a union-busting goon: Eugene “Bull” Connor.

  In 1962 Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference had chosen the Georgia township of Albany as a wedge in their movement against segregation. Months of desultory marching and jailing had yielded but small concessions from officials, quickly broken; then a series of church burnings, quickly ignored. King’s method of nonviolence worked by putting evil on display, by absorbing oppression’s blows in a spirit of loving-kindness. But Albany’s police, smartly, handled their arrests peacefully—undramatically—or simply neglected to make any arrests at all. In 1963 King decided the movement would do better in Birmingham. He counted on Bull Connor as a more reliable outrage to the nation’s conscience.

  On April 3, protesters moved out in waves from their staging ground, Birmingham’s majestic big red-brick Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, to sit in at five different downtown lunch counters. Waitresses, having been carefully trained, turned off the lights and went home, and Bull Connor never got his chance to bash heads. A new plan was formulated: taking to Connor’s streets. This time there were a satisfactory number of arrests. Then there came new problems: recruitment for willing martyrs was slowed when the local Negro paper, outraged at the SCLC’s uncivil tactics, staged a news blackout. The SCLC’s activities were relegated to the back pages of the national papers if they were covered at all—even as Alabama governor George Wallace rushed through a bill raising maximum appeal bonds from $300 to $2,500, effective in exactly one city: Birmingham.

  Easter weekend was a proper time for a resurrection, and on Good Friday, King himself decided he would march. He was duly arrested and put in solitary confinement. Still nothing. A new, “moderate” city council and mayor, Albert Boutwell, was to be sworn in soon; there might follow an era of “mutual respect and equality of opportunity,” the New York Times editorialized—if King would only give things a chance. King, who knew better, could handle the wound to his strategy. An article that appeared in an issue of the Birmingham News smuggled into his jail cell, however, wounded his pride. Several of the city’s most liberal divines—some of whom had risked terror by admitting black worshipers to their congregations—now told the News, “Just as we formerly pointed out that ‘hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,’ we also point out that such actions as incite hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.”

  It was the word “extreme” that leapt out at him—implying that, just by the act of straying from the mainstream, however evil the mainstream, his movement was responsible for creating hatred. He had a pencil; he had newspaper margins to write on; and, in that dank and fetid cell, surreptitiously, patiently, over the next few days he betook himself to write. “Though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label,” he scrawled at a rhetorical high point. Was not Jesus an extremist? The prophet Amos? The disciple Paul? Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson? “The question is not whether we will be extre
mists, but what kind of extremists we will be.... Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

  The press was still ignoring King’s protesters. Four days later, an eccentric white postman from Baltimore embarked on a quixotic walk from Chattanooga, across Alabama, to Mississippi, wearing a signboard and pushing a shopping cart full of civil rights literature. He got as far a roadside near Attalla, Alabama, before he was shot twice through the head. The President’s press conference the next day was unburdened by questions about the killing or about the twenty-one unbroken days of demonstrations in Birmingham. No one seemed to care.

  King’s forces decided to raise the stakes. After grave debate, they invited the young people who had been packing their mass meetings to take to the streets with them. May 2 began with yet another line of protesters stepping off from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Connor’s police preparing to haul one more thin rank of singing Negroes off to jail. Only this time the ranks kept coming. The cavernous church disgorged hundreds of people: college students, high school students, even elementary school students, herded seventy-five at a time into cells built for eight—685 prisoners in all. “The whole world is watching Birmingham tonight,” a leader cried. And for the first time, it was true. The next day, another thousand radiant souls prepared to repeat the ritual. Connor prepared for them with new fire hoses capable of punching a brick out of a wall at thirty yards. That evening the nation saw shrieking children on TV, some as young as six, pinned down to the pavement from one end of the street to the other, refusing to retreat even as Bull Connor brought out his “K-9 Corps”—dogs set loose to tear chunks of flesh from their hides. The New York Times displayed three dramatic photos on its front page. The paper editorialized that the President must act. The President, for his part, said he had no authority to act.