Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  It must have felt good for Kennedy to feel he could covertly shape events in a jungle thousands of miles away, given the mess he faced back home. Gallup had the President getting trounced in Dixie. Even in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas, Kennedy’s approval rating was only 38 percent. The press did not report the savagery that lay behind the numbers. A theater in Georgia showed the JFK-glorifying film PT 109, the marquee reading “SEE THE JAPS ALMOST GET KENNEDY!” (as Pete O’Donnell reported with delight in a September report to Draft Goldwater activists). It was a challenge for enterprising reporters to get a quote on the record from one of the 40 percent of Southerners that polls said supported their President; the least angry statement a Newsweek reporter could find was “He’s stirred up all the colored people to get their vote.” Billboards across Alabama reading “KAYO THE KENNEDYS!” competed for attention with ones labeling Martin Luther King a Communist and bumper stickers reading “KENNEDY FOR KING—GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT.”

  Polls suggested that as much as 5 percent of the American public could be said to hew to Birch-like views. The President had just been given a report by his White House counsel on twenty-six conservative organizations that together raised between $15 and $25 million annually—“successful, politically ... all the way down to the various state capitals, to county seats, and to local communities at the grass-roots.” Since many of these groups were tax-exempt, the attorney general ordered IRS commissioner Mortimer Caplin to start in on aggressive audits.

  In Northern cities, activists met the new school year with a bold new remedy for de facto segregation. The President was asked about it at his September 12, 1963, press conference: “As a parent, do you think it is right to wrench children away from their neighborhood-family area and cart them off to strange, faraway schools to force racial balance?” He began his answer optimistically—“Passage of the civil rights bill in the Senate ... would surely improve the atmosphere”—then fell back into realism: “The country will by lucky to get by without a summer of violence that could have incalculable effect on the election next fall.”

  The country would have been lucky to get through the week. Governor Wallace was now standing in the doors of his state’s elementary and high schools. If integration went ahead, he said, he didn’t want any bloodshed—although if it happened, he said, civil rights agitators would be held responsible. Klansmen in Birmingham took the hint. The explosion inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15 was heard for two miles. Four little girls died in their Sunday school dresses. King wired Kennedy during the tensions that ensued: only the President’s intercession could prevent the “worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen.” Ten days later another incendiary device exploded on Dynamite Hill, then a second, a shrapnel bomb intended to wound police if they investigated the first. The Klansmen who were responsible copped pleas for misdemeanor possession of dynamite.

  Cronkite’s next half-hour interview was given to Goldwater. The New York Times reported that he had already reserved the entire fifteenth floor of San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel for the convention (the hotel, coincidentally, that Khrushchev had decided during his 1959 visit to someday make the headquarters for the International Communist Conspiracy, according to Dr. Fred Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade). Kitchel’s new field deputy, Phoenix attorney and recent past Arizona party chair Richard Kleindienst, reported that party rank-and-filers were telling him that if Goldwater wasn’t nominated, there wouldn’t be a rank and file. In Massachusetts, Establishmentarians like Senator Leverett Saltonstall were cowering under Clif White’s back-room threats that his people would organize their way past the Massachusetts party leaders’ traditional prerogative to name the state’s delegates-at-large. No one had thought to challenge that prerogative before.

  Goldwater was traveling: a ten-state tour, including New Hampshire, throngs of cheering young conservatives following him like iron filings to a magnet. It felt like a campaign, but for the fact that he refused the basic technique of having a few aides tag along to build a card file of the names behind the hands he shook. “You leave me alone,” he told the aide who suggested it. “I’m doing all right just pooping around.”

  Rockefeller, who traveled with an entire research staff, corralled a major chunk of the Washington press onto his Convair jet for a visit to the humble Ogle Country Fair in central Illinois. All the candidates in the three-way Republican gubernatorial primary had already declined the chance to appear with him. The reporters watched as the crowd at the fair ignored Rockefeller and his wife as if they had the mange. (Yet the New York Times reported, incredibly, that “Rockefeller’s surprisingly successful visit to this Goldwater bastion yesterday was evidence that the Governor could command conservative support in a race for the presidency.”) The week after, the three Illinois gubernatorial candidates virtually pawed the clothes off Goldwater when he visited Chicago for the National Federation of Republican Women convention. He had to give his speech twice to accommodate all his fans. Behind the scenes at the meeting—Draft Goldwater operatives worked behind the scenes at every Republican meeting—Pat Hutar set in motion a purge of delegates who had voted against Goldwater in a straw poll.

  White was traveling too, more than ever, working eighteen-hour days with a new partner, former RNC finance committee staffer Frank Kovac. “I have never been with Frank Kovac when he showed any compunction whatever about asking for a contribution,” he noted in amazement. At the new Washington Draft Goldwater office—which was accumulating enough half-filled coffee cups, full ashtrays, and envelope-licking housewives to resemble a party headquarters a month before Election Day—petitions were pouring in with checks attached, $1,000 a day. Roll Call reported that the Goldwater campaign organization had $7.5 million in the bank. It was really $125,000, although White hardly minded the publicity; it would only bring in more. He brought a full-time finance director aboard (Dan Gainey of Minnesota, retired CEO of class-ring manufacturer Josten’s, a former RNC treasurer who wintered in Arizona); on September 16, Carol Bauman (nee Dawson) began work full-time putting together a nationwide Goldwater youth organization.

  The date was auspicious. That night, in California, where there were already some one hundred Goldwater youth groups in operation, Robert Gaston’s organization, despite a concerted sabotage attempt by party regulars, filled Dodger Stadium for a Goldwater rally—on an odd-numbered year, on a Monday night when the pennant-chasing Dodgers were playing a crucial game on TV, for a man who wasn’t even officially a presidential candidate. The crowd groaned when Goldwater said he had to fly back to Washington afterward to debate the test-ban treaty; they gave him a bone-crunching roar when he said that he was voting against it.

  “Almost everybody in Washington has violent views about it pro or con,” wrote Scotty Reston of Goldwater’s front-runner status for the nomination, “except Barry himself.” Mary McGrory followed Goldwater back to Washington as he ducked in at the Chevy Chase Women’s Republican Club for an off-the-cuff Q&A; one of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was. “Senator Goldwater doesn’t strain at all,” she marveled. “He is entirely himself.”

  Kennedy certainly wouldn’t have voted with only eighteen other senators against the Partial Test Ban Treaty, as Goldwater was about to do. The treaty marked a transforming moment in America’s relationship with the atom. It began as a friendship. Within hours of the bombing of Hiroshima, the Washington Press Club had an “Atomic Cocktail” on offer; no one blanched at naming a sexy new bathing suit after an atoll that had been nearly wiped from the Earth in a hydrogen bomb test in 1952. That same year, in fact, an airborne nuclear test was broadcast on TV to Chet Huntley’s thrilled comm
entary. Casinos scheduled outings to watch tests at the Atomic Energy Commission Proving Grounds northwest of Las Vegas. The AEC’s propagandistic “Project Plowshare” produced glowing stories of the possibilities of using nuclear devices to carve a new canal in Central America and a new harbor in Alaska. The bomb was something to be proud of. It protected us. Its more imminent dangers were only discussed behind scientists’ closed doors.

  Atomic testing began showing a darker face in the mid-1950s, when physicist Ralph Lapp and chemist Linus Pauling began publishing widely on the dangers of “nuclear fallout,” a mysterious toxin that “cannot be felt and possesses the terror of the unknown”—although it was known that it was released in the air in tests, was linked to cancer and genetic damage, and had a half-life of twenty-eight years. A full-blown fallout scare ensued in 1959 when high levels of strontium 90 were discovered in the bones of children under four. Anti-testing forces launched a brilliant scientific and public relations project, the “Baby Tooth Survey,” which collected teeth from 80,000 children and released findings in 1962 of a fourteenfold increase in strontium 90 levels in children born in 1957 compared to those born in 1949. It might have been an ad that ran in newspapers in April 1963 that clinched public opinion: “Dr. Spock Is Worried,” it read. “Your children’s teeth contain strontium 90.”

  Test-ban talks began in Moscow in June 1963, around the time of Kennedy’s American University address arguing that peace that “does not require that each man love his neighbors—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance.” It was a message that, for the most part, only the kind of conservatives who went to Dodger Stadium rallies weren’t thrilled to hear. Negotiations were completed in record time; the treaty was signed on July 25. (An informal part of the agreement was being carried out even as Martin Luther King delivered his stirring peroration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial: a “hotline” was installed connecting the White House and the Kremlin.) And the ratification vote was quickly set for early September—just in time for Goldwater to vote against it at the height of his boom. He saw the treaty as an inexcusable strategic compromise. “If it means political suicide to vote for my country and against this treaty,” he said on the Senate floor, “then I commit it gladly.”

  It wasn’t that Goldwater wasn’t interested in running for President. In fact, he had been flabbergasted by his reception of Dodger Stadium and promptly appointed a twenty-three-member committee, chaired by former senator Bill Knowland, to advise him on entering the California primary. One early October morning, the customary bustle at Draft Goldwater headquarters was parted by the screech of the switchboard operator. “It’s Barry Goldwater!” she cried. “He’s on the line now!” White hadn’t spoken to him for months. Goldwater had never set foot in their office. Now the man in the bow tie was summoned down to Capitol Hill and given the order to travel to San Francisco to begin preparations for the national convention. Goldwater had checked with the Arizona attorney general: it was legal to run for both President and senator.

  As early as his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann had come to believe that the world was so complex that political decisions would best be left to a specialized class of experts. Three years later the Scopes “monkey trial” confirmed his conviction that a public uninstructed by expert opinion would succumb to the tyranny of the majority—the very worst tyranny of all. Ideologically, the columnist vacillated from decade to decade, sometimes coming out liberal in foreign affairs and conservative in domestic, sometimes vice versa. But always, always, his thinking betrayed a constant: that he and his fellow pundits—Hindi for “wise men,” a title first given to him by an admiring Henry Luce—were the nation’s best defense against the terror of the mob.

  With World War II within the living memory of almost every adult in the early 1960s, that did not seem an idle fear. In 1961 Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for genocide was a television staple. Highbrow readers absorbed Hannah Arendt’s courtroom reports for The New Yorker with a terrible awe: she argued that what made Eichmann so frightening was not that he was a monster but that he was an ordinary man. Her articles were published as a book in 1963, and the ensuing ferment among intellectuals was so enveloping that Look assigned a reporter to do an article on the debate—the same month that the magazine ran a photo of Indiana YAFers hurling Communist-made wicker baskets into a raging fire. “The most essential criterion for judging the events of our time,” Arendt had written elsewhere, was “Will it lead to totalitarian rule or not?” What led to totalitarian rule, it seemed to most educated Americans, was when an extraordinary man, bound by the same limited moral horizon as everyone else, became swept up in the act of anointing himself a nation’s redeemer.

  That was the subject of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King’s Men (1946): the story of a rootless man (named Burden) who heals his alienation by filling himself with devotion for a charismatic strongman modeled after Louisiana governor Huey Long, then frees himself over the course of the story from what he increasingly realizes is an existential horror. Warren had Burden exclaim, “There is nothing like the roar of a crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing which is in every man in the crowd but is not himself.” Teddy White, in The Making of the President 1960, used similar language in pondering a delirious moment at the 1960 Democratic Convention: “If demonstrations and noise alone can sway a national decision at a nerve center of national politics,” he wrote, “then American politics could be reduced to that naked violence that has so frequently and tragically swayed the history of France and Germany.” That the object of the crowd’s roar was hardly führer material—quiet, cerebral Adlai Stevenson—hardly mattered. After Hitler, the crowd’s roar was frightening enough in itself.

  The American two-party system, it was thought, was a sublime bulwark against just such dangers. “Each party is like some huge bazaar,” wrote the sociologist Daniel Bell, “with hundreds of hucksters clamoring for attention.” To win party leadership, the successful huckster must be bargainer, splitting most issues down the middle—and as long as that was the case, extremists like Huey Long could never be more than a single yelping voice among the teeming throng. So it was that Walter Lippmann wrote in August that Goldwater’s candidacy “strikes at the heart of the American party system.” So it was that, faced with the spectacle of a stadium of youth chanting Barry Goldwater’s name, Lippmann had but two choices: predict Goldwater’s imminent movement to the ideological center, or brand him a fascist in the making.

  He chose to retreat into the cocoon of theory rather than record the evidence of his senses: Goldwater, he reported, was becoming a moderate. “It is interesting to watch him, and comforting to think that the system is working so well.” Lemminglike, others rushed to confirm the master. Pay attention to “a fascinating political biological process,” The New Republic’s columnist TRB instructed readers, “like watching a polliwog turn into a frog.”

  These journalists didn’t consider Goldwater’s test-ban vote, or his recent correction of the Congressional Record to revise a passage giving the mistaken impression that he had denounced the radical right, or, indeed, the day after Lippmann’s pronunciamento, a major speech Goldwater made on the Senate floor reaffirming his conviction that “profits are the surest sign of responsible behavior”—or that he was only becoming more popular in the event. “Barry Goldwater could give Kennedy a breathlessly close race,” the Time then on the newsstands reported. Look ran the banner “JFK COULD LOSE.” On the best-seller list sat JFK: The Man and the Myth, in which conservative journalist Victor Lasky, who had made his career attacking Alger Hiss, portrayed Kennedy as a pretty-boy empty suit. (It reduced dignified Republican outlets to spluttering. “Mr. Lasky,” lamented the Herald Tribune, “knows how to use the knee.” The Wall Street Journal deemed it “a hatchet job.”) Like Lippmann, many liberals simply denied facts that seemed too unlikely to countenance. At a party celebrating the opening of a pres
s liaison office in D.C., the AP’s top political analyst, James Marley, sniffed disdainfully over his cocktail that the polls showing Goldwater’s overwhelming popularity over Rockefeller simply couldn’t be true.

  John F. Kennedy was not a theoretical man. He read the polls—and had a brother-in-law open discussions with an ad agency for 1964. The “conservation trip” he embarked on at the end of September was suspiciously sudden. He started in Scranton’s Pennsylvania and moved to Barry Goldwater’s West, where he spoke on campuses, joining Goldwater in the battle for young hearts. He preached about the accelerated public works program he had passed the previous year, which had produced a million man-months of new employment. At the University of North Dakota he spoke of the 97 percent of farms that had gone without electricity in the state before the Democrats instituted the Rural Electrification Administration; at the University of Wyoming he bragged about the government’s massive subsidies for petroleum research. (No one shoots Santa Claus.) He also made a rare assertion that nuclear war could mean the deaths of 100 million people in a day. It was a week of parrying and feinting with Barry Goldwater.

  Then, at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, the sturdiest redoubt of the Republican right in America, Kennedy went on the attack—going for the flank that had been softened by Nelson Rockefeller in July. It was testament to the novelty of paying serious attention to conservatism that Kennedy’s speechwriters’ blows shot past Barry Goldwater and landed on Robert Alonzo Taft. “It is little wonder that there is a desire in the country to go back to the time when our nation lived alone,” Kennedy said, patronizing the members of a church renowned for the sweep of its foreign missions.