Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  The National Draft Goldwater Committee workers hardly worried about the atrocious publicity. They had an armory to fill, and they didn’t have Goldwater as a draw. O’Donnell was so awed by the size of the D.C. Armory (it had been filled only for the Eisenhower and Kennedy inaugural balls and a Billy Graham crusade) and its stifling temperature (even Graham wasn’t confident enough to schedule the space for the middle of summer) that he begged White to cancel. Shortly before curtain time the committee peered onto the floor from a dining room in the building’s upper reaches. A band was playing patriotic songs; the spots danced on platform guests—Governor Paul Fannin, grade-B stars Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Chill Wills; there were enough buntings and banners for two national conventions. But only one-third of the seats were filled. Prayers were mumbled.

  They needn’t have fretted. When Clif White stepped outside later, he had to blink: chartered buses from as far away as Texas stretched practically to the horizon. By the time the spectacular reached its peak—some thought it was White’s slide presentation of “The Republican Opportunity to Win”; others Zimbalist’s speech, in which he told the story of Goldwater’s life, pausing expertly before declaring, “He didn’t go to Harvard,” bringing down the house—they had a fire hazard on their hands. The Washington press corps left awed by the crowd’s zeal—and, incidentally, by the fact that there were as many Confederate flags in the hall as American flags. The Washington Star ran two front-page stories, one by Mary McGrory and another by David Broder, who wrote: “The entire evening—from the first bit of oratory to the last button on the costumes of the Goldwater Girls—showed a professionalism surprising in a group that opened its headquarters less than a month ago.” It was reported that moderate Charlie Percy, in his bid for the Illinois gubernatorial nomination in 1964, was frantically tacking to the right as a result of the rally. New York Times columnist Arthur Krock found anti-Goldwater forces in the party suddenly “less visible” now.

  The National Draft Goldwater Committee could not lose. Goldwater’s support among independents had tripled since November of 1962. Goldwater was running twenty points ahead in early primary polling in California. Half the Republican county chairs in patronage-heavy Pennsylvania favored him over their own governor Bill Scranton.

  Nobody seemed to worry over the fact that Goldwater’s momentum rose the more the peace was disturbed. On Independence Day in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley, who had proudly hosted Martin Luther King on his triumphant post-Birmingham tour, was booed off the stage at the Grant Park Bandshell because he had recently stated that there were no ghettos in Chicago. (Later in the year, two black college students tested the mayor’s contention by renting a bungalow a block and a half from the Daley family home. The Eleventh Ward Regular Democratic Organization broke in, spirited the kids’ possessions to a nearby police station, and invited locals to have their way with the place. After the real estate agent was forced to sign over the lease to two young local white men—real estate licenses were controlled by the Daley machine—neighbors pitched in to clean up the excrement they themselves had smeared on the walls.) “The Polish-American community,” a director of the city’s Polish National Alliance told Ted Humes, “quite generally imputes racial stirring to the Kennedys and are moving out of Chicago as fast as they can.” Kennedy’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic, John Bartlow Martin, on a trip home to the Chicago suburbs, was amazed at the rancor his well-off neighbors were expressing at the Administration.

  In Oxford, Mississippi, three hundred troops remained to safeguard James Meredith’s life. At the Commerce Committee hearings on the Kennedy civil rights bill, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett (whose state maintained a surveillance apparatus within its “Sovereignty Commission” with no analog closer than that of the East German Stasi) reminded senators that Communists were “championing the cause of the Negroes in America as an important part of their drive to mobilize both colored and white for the overthrow of our government.” George Wallace showed a photograph of Martin Luther King at the Highlander Folk School, a camp that instructed activists in nonviolent methods. He declared Highlander a “communist training school” (King had the bad fortune to be sitting next to a member of the Communist Party in the photograph). President Kennedy was worried enough that Wallace was right, and terrified enough of the political consequences, that he spent the rest of the morning investigating. If he had known that Wallace borrowed the gambit from billboards put up by the John Birch Society, he mightn’t have taken it so seriously.

  Nelson Rockefeller preferred to launch his bombshells on weekends. This one came on Sunday, July 14, Bastille Day. It was said that his staff at the townhouse on 55th Street could knock out a statement or a speech on any subject in thirty minutes. The Bastille Day declaration they belabored over. They were searching for a way to use the events at the Young Republican convention in San Francisco to fan the dying embers of Rockefeller’s presidential hopes.

  An investigation had appeared in Look, a magazine with a circulation of seven million. “The Rampant Right Invades the GOP” depicted a California Republican Assembly chapter meeting in which a hostess expecting fifteen members was set upon by a roving band of eighty-seven Birchers, who voted out the previous officers, installed their own, absconded with the club records and checkbook, and left behind cigarette burns in the carpeting and an unplugged refrigerator, dashing off to do it all over again somewhere else. A tuxedoed William F. Buckley was shown addressing a staid Manhattan banquet; below that, an Indiana YAF chapter (“led by an adult counselor”) was shown feeding a raging bonfire with wicker baskets because they had been manufactured in Yugoslavia. The placement of the two photographs conveyed an argument: behind the conservative movement’s respectable façade lay jeering fascist mobs.

  Rockefeller’s July 14 statement placed the responsibility at Barry Goldwater’s feet. The Republican Party, it began, “is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority.” They were “wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principle.” They “have no program for the Republican party or the American people except distrust, disunity, and the ultimate destruction of the confidence of the people in themselves. They are purveyors of hate and distrust in a time when, as never before, the need of the world is for love and understanding.” The conservatives “have no concern with and offer no solution to the problems of chronic unemployment, of education and training, of housing, of racial injustice and strife.” Instead they would destroy the Republican Party with a chimerical strategy to write off the Northeast and black Americans everywhere.

  The transparent purpose behind this plan is to erect political power on the outlawed and immoral base of segregation and to transform the Republican party from a national party of all the people to a sectional party for some of the people.... It cannot stand the light of day. It will be rejected out of hand by the party. It will be rejected by the nation. It will be rejected by the South.... A program based on racism or sectionalism would in and of itself not only defeat the Republican party in 1964, but would destroy it altogether.

  The Bastille Day declaration backfired. It was incoherent. On the one hand, it said that the conservatives’ sin was sponsoring a grand conspiracy under cover of night (evidence never ranged beyond what the statement termed the “totalitarianism” in the Sheraton-Palace ballroom) because conservatives couldn’t win any other way. On the other, Rockefeller said that the conservatives’ sin was to win masses through a demagogic appeal to racism. This was a contradiction—one sharpened by the fact that the statement also called Republicans who had not spoken out against the conservatives’ demagoguery “opportunists.” By arguing that “the path to victory is in seeking out the people in the areas where they live” and in “accepting the responsibilities of leadership in the solution of their problems,” the statement embraced the very approach Nelson Rockefeller had rejected in 1962 while courting conservatives. And the larger message
was politically foolish: the millions of ordinary, honest Americans who agreed with conservative positions were now being equated with “vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements.”

  Rockefeller was the real opportunist. The immediate goal appeared to be winning Senator Tom Kuchel to head his delegate slate in the California primary by joining Kuchel’s battle against the far right. It didn’t help. The accuser—who only months before had been proud of his role as healer between the right and left wings of the GOP—was judged more extreme than the accused. “Our party is in no position to incite political mayhem by ruthless intramural attacks,” said Mark Hatfield. Even New York senator Ken Keating moved away from an alliance with his governor, saying he didn’t consider Goldwater in league with the far right at all. The main effect of the speech was to unify conservatives even more virulently against Rockefeller. The Bastille Day declaration, said Newsweek, was “an act of desperation that failed.”

  The leaders of the proverbial Eastern Establishment had already cut themselves loose from the Rockefeller presidential bid in the wake of his remarriage. Nonetheless his Bastille Day declaration bespoke their deepest fears. Stewart Alsop quoted one of them on the prospect of a Goldwater candidacy. The source nearly choked on his tongue: “My God, we’d be the apartheid party!” Jackie Robinson, a loyal Republican, published an article in the Saturday Evening Post pointing out a “striking parallel” between the Black Muslims and the Goldwaterites: Both “want to detour from the highway to racial integration. Both groups feel they can reach their goals by traveling the road of racial separation.” One party blue-blood told the San Francisco Chronicle: “Barry doesn’t know any more about the world than my 8-year-old grandson.”

  It was time, someone in some leather-lined boardroom deep within some marble-columned Wall Street edifice seemed to have intoned, to put the nonsense to a stop. And all at once, a cabal seemed to have spoken. The Harris poll had reported that only 19 percent of Americans recognized Pennsylvania governor William Warren Scranton’s name. Yet there it was: suddenly, every newspaper editorial page in the country seemed to be haughtily presuming that he would be the Republican nominee in 1964.

  An insider explained the mystery to Life magazine: “People fail to realize there’s a difference in kinds of money. There’s old money and there’s new money. Old money has political power but new money has only purchasing power. Sure, everyone knows that when you get to a convention, you don’t buy delegates. But you do put the pressure on people who control the delegates—the people who owe the old money for their stake.” The first sign that Old Money had spoken came from Time magazine in its June 14 cover story on Goldwater. It had included a sidebar article: “Bill?” Those in the know understood: Pennsylvania governor William Warren Scranton’s brother-in-law James Linen was president of Time Incorporated. Time was the Establishment’s newsmagazine. The word had passed: Scranton was Old Money’s man. Newsweek soon ran a lead story “The Block-Goldwater Movement in the GOP.” The last word was given to White House sources predicting that Scranton would be the one to do the blocking.

  New Money’s man seemed to be doing everything he could to block himself. “You know, I think we ought to sell the TVA,” Barry Goldwater told Stewart Alsop in a major interview for the Saturday Evening Post. Alsop was so incredulous he asked the question a second time—and Goldwater repeated the conviction. Republican Richard Fulton of Tennessee wrote Goldwater: You don’t really mean to sell the dams that had brought great swaths of the American Southeast electricity for the first time? Goldwater—speaking in a time before the more sonorous designation “privatization” had been coined—released the letter and his response to the press: He meant it. Pete O‘Donnell shot off a memo warning about “shooting from the hip”: “your entire position should be spelled out at one time, rather than spread out over a period of days and weeks as the original statement is clarified, amended, or supplemented.... TVA puts your supporters in an important area on the defensive.” (And so it did. Telegrams flooded his office: “I HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO YOUR CAMPAIGN AND HELPED ORGANIZE THE GOLDWATER CLUB HERE ... I AM TAKING OFF MY GOLDWATER STICKERS.” A Dixie GOP committeeman announced that Goldwater would have to choose between his TVA position and his support.) “Keep your ammunition fresh,” O’Donnell advised. “If you spell out your position on all issues at this time, you will have fewer new things to say come next October. Also you will be presenting a nice, fat target to some group or other every time you take a stand.” Goldwater ignored the advice. Who the hell was Pete O’Donnell to tell him what to do?

  This was not how successful presidential candidates were supposed to behave. Pundits took note of the TVA affair and began numbering Barry Goldwater’s days. Few noticed what Clif White was doing in the hinterlands. He had 200,000 one-dollar petition signatures. He was sucking in cash through a state-of-the-art program of direct mailings to subscribers of conservative magazines and the like. Many who might have deplored the YR tactics in San Francisco nodded appreciatively at Goldwater when he called the Kennedy civil rights bill a threat to their property rights. A Capitol Hill insider told Stew Alsop, “A few race riots in the North and Barry might make it.”

  Riot fears, just then, centered on the civil rights movement’s massive “March for Jobs and Freedom” scheduled for August 28 in Washington, D.C. Later generations would remember it as an apogee of democratic idealism. As it loomed, however, public opinion was divided, broadly, in three parts. A small minority (around 20 percent, according to Gallup) considered the demonstration a welcome expression of black aspirations for overdue justice. Most, though, thought that the protest was insolent and ungrateful considering Kennedy’s recent gestures, and that there was a dangerous potential for violence. Another minority wondered whether the event wouldn’t spark a race war. “I’d kill,” a white South Dakota housewife told Newsweek in an interview for a special issue, “What the White Man Thinks of the Negro Revolt,” when asked what she would do if she suffered the same indignities as a Negro. “And I’m not a violent person.”

  It was hard for white America to see anything benign in a mass gathering of Negroes. The fears were primal, subliminal. “I don’t like to touch them. It just makes me squeamish,” one Northerner told Newsweek. Another said, “It’s the idea of rubbing up against them. It won’t rub off, but it don’t feel right either.” The magazine’s polling showed that 55 percent of whites would object to living next door to a black person—and 90 percent would object if their teenage daughter dated one. Over half thought that “Negroes laugh a lot,” “tend to have less ambition,” and “smell different.” “It is an oft-repeated statement among humans that the color of the hair and the pigment of the skin produce certain recognizable characteristics,” observed the latest edition of Training You to Train Your Dog by Blanche Saunders (preface by Walter Lippmann)—the “excitable nature” of those with dark skin, for example. “If this be true, there is no reason why color of coat and pigmentation should not affect dogs as well.” In an article that year, Harper’s editor John Fischer congratulated himself for his courage in pointing out that much antiblack prejudice “is not altogether baseless”: “Take the case of five Negro drivers who worked for a taxi company in Williamsburg, Virginia. On the first day of the fishing season, not one of them showed up for work.” Even among the right-thinking and the respectable, seeing Negroes as civic equals was sometimes a stretch.

  Washington emptied as the day of the march approached. On Meet the Press, Martin Luther King and NAACP head Roger Wilkins were asked whether “it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possible rioting.” President Kennedy worried discreetly about the specter of marchers rushing the aisles of Congress. The Pentagon readied 4,000 troops in the suburbs; hospitals set aside beds. A contest between the Minnesota Twins and the Washington Senators at Griffith Stadium four miles away was canceled on account of what National Review called the “mob deployment.”

 
The event itself proved transcendent. Martin Luther King’s remarkable speech was shown live on all three networks: “I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.”

  But the situation it left behind could only be called peaceful in the sense that Soviet-U.S. relations were peaceful: even if tensions were relaxing, that didn’t mean that the world might not blow up. The sum total of the dread among the 50 percent of Americans who thought Kennedy was pushing civil rights “too fast” was hardly diminished. Civil rights supporter the Reverend Billy Graham, for one, was pessimistic: “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”

  The dialectic sharpened as summer became autumn: America became more frightening, Goldwater’s stature grew; that made the world appear to the Establishment all the scarier—and Goldwater’s stature among those who distrusted the Establishment grew all the more in the shadow of the Establishment’s denunciations.

  On August 29, the President had secretly passed the point of no return in Vietnam, maneuvered by zealous aides into approving a plan to overthrow the inconveniently corrupt Saigon government. On September 2 Walter Cronkite debuted his groundbreaking half-hour evening news format (all the other networks ran 15 minutes of news), instituted to establish CBS’s news dominance in time to reap an advertising bounty during full coverage of the 1964 conventions. On that evening the entire show consisted of an interview with President Kennedy. “In the final analysis, it’s their war,” he told Walter Cronkite of the exotic land where forty-seven Americans had already met their end.