Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

On December 8, President Johnson’s first morning waking up in the White House, the New York Times’s lead story claimed—no sources, no quotes—that Dwight Eisenhower, after satisfying himself that he bore no responsibility in the Diem assassination, endorsed Henry Cabot Lodge, America’s ambassador to Vietnam, for President. No matter that Lodge was reported farther down the column to have rejected the idea outright—or that farther down still, an AP dispatch had Eisenhower denying from his favorite golf course in Georgia that he had spoken to Lodge about the presidency in the first place. The idea had been planted.

  It wasn’t a few days before the papers had Richard Nixon hustling down to Gettysburg to call on the General. Insiders saw it coming. Shortly before the assassination, Nixon, deciding he was out of the running, was on the verge of signing a contract to publish a chronicle of the 1964 election. After the assassination, he broke the deal and began campaigning for party elder statesman: setting up magazine articles, speaking tours, and trips abroad on “official” duties for his law firm. Rumors were he wanted to swoop down to dutifully accept the prize after maneuvering for a convention deadlock. In Gallup’s first December sounding of which candidate Republicans preferred for the nomination, Nixon scored highest, with 29 percent. (Before, it had been Goldwater, with well over half.) The Washington Post’s Herblock, long a Nixon bête noire, drew Goldwater and Rockefeller unsuspectingly striding forth as Nixon waited for them to stumble into twin graves he had dug in their path.

  Goldwater was digging his own grave. “I’m still wishing something would happen to get me out of all this,” he told Time in an interview that ran in the issue dated November 22, 1963. The assassination, and a bone injury in his right heel that left him in searing pain, had sent him into a tailspin of depression, to which he was prone; within days he told Denny Kitchel to spread the word that he would not run. He wrote people like the editor of Human Events to implore them to stop watering the grass roots. Goldwater had relished the idea of running against JFK, whom he found an honorable man. He hated the idea of running against LBJ—whom he considered a ruthless opportunist. When their names had begun to show up together as convenient, charismatic bookends for lazy reporters seeking to frame the political scene, Goldwater and Kennedy had started taking pleasure in displaying their mutual affection in public, and had talked idly about sharing a campaign plane and debating at every campaign stop, Lincoln-and-Douglas-style. (Goldwater seemed not to notice that Kennedy was ruthless, too; Goldwater always had trouble thinking anything but the best of his friends.)

  He liked his freedom: flying himself to speeches, maybe dropping in at an Air Force base somewhere and begging a turn at the controls of the latest model, overflying Navajo country, poking around on his ham rig, listening to Dixieland jazz records full blast and then fussing with his trombone, or cranking up the air-conditioning full blast, building a roaring fire in his library, and settling in with a good Western or Indian Art of the Americas. He liked rocketing around Washington in his two-seat Thunderbird, the dashboard built to look like a jet cockpit, or ducking down to the Capitol’s basement machine shop to pull some gadget apart and put it back together. Twice a year he liked flying to Michigan to buy the new Heathkit electric hobby kits the day they came off the line.

  And he was scared. He had a favorite Western maxim: A good man knows the length of his rope. “Doggone it,” he told the Chicago Tribune, “I’m not even sure that I’ve got the brains to be President of the United States.” He worried whether he had the courage to do what he said he wanted to do in the White House. And what if lightning struck and he won? What would he be then but master of the world’s most Byzantine bureaucracy?

  Any day now, Clif White feared, Goldwater might file that dreaded Sherman statement: he would not run if nominated, would not serve if elected. And White had to decide whether to continue.

  The answer came with the mail. In the seven days following the assassination, Draft Goldwater pulled in the same $25,000 in donations they did just about every week. They decided to do what they always did: act like it didn’t matter what Barry Goldwater did or didn’t say. Telegrams urging Goldwater to run were pouring in from young conservatives who were unaware that the office had no official connection to the senator; now Carol Bauman and Lee Edwards began to tap YAF’s mailing lists to coordinate a deluge. The next week White was off to New Mexico, to continue his lonely tour of party district conventions: wandering the ballroom, working the phones, making sure his deputy’s hand-picked candidates had the votes they needed and knew their orders to the letter. He would do just what his President counseled: he would continue.

  He had to pretend it didn’t matter that the previous fall, Denison Kitchel had moved to Washington—into Goldwater’s building—to take over contingency plans for the possible presidential bid. White was singularly unimpressed by this short, introverted man whose manner was as bristly as his flat-top haircut. It was said that no one was better at beating a union organizing drive. Could anyone be worse at organizing a political campaign? When Kitchel asked him how national conventions worked, White had to pitch the explanation at a kindergarten level.

  At first there was just Kitchel and a secretary. Then Dick Kleindienst began working in the field. Then came an administrative assistant, Dean Burch, a Tucson lawyer and former Goldwater Senate staffer. None had a day’s experience in national elections. The rumor around Washington was that Burch had never crossed the Mississippi before he went to work for Goldwater at the age of twenty-eight. “A bunch of cowboys,” they called themselves; proud, almost, of what they didn’t know. They were dubbed the “Arizona Mafia.” They socialized mostly with the senator—cursing like sailors in Navajo, sharing inscrutable Southwestern maxims about breaking one’s pick and the length of one’s rope—and they seemed uncomfortable around anyone else. Burch wore dark suits and black ties and was perennially asked if he was heading to a funeral. “I always wear black ties,” he would reply serenely. “I like them.”

  White had even more reason to fear because the previous fall dark, stout, suave William J. Baroody, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute “think tank,” had begun offloading the cream of his associates to Kitchel’s staff: Edward McCabe, Eisenhower’s old congressional liaison, became director of research; Karl Hess, AEI’s director of special projects, a Buddha-like man whom an admiring Goldwater called “Shakespeare,” wrote speeches; Austrian émigré Robert Strausz-Hupé, a hard-line Cold War theorist, became foreign policy consultant; Chuck Lichenstein, a Yale teacher and ex-Nixon staffer, became a factotum. Baroody was exploiting the vacuum of political experience in Goldwater’s new inner circle to become its brain.

  First, after buttering up Kitchel with intellectual flattery (the Arizonan studied constitutional law in his spare time), Baroody humbly offered himself up to Kitchel as a guide to Washington’s curious ways. Then he moved to eliminate a possible rival. Goldwater’s association with National Review, Baroody told Kitchel, would play into the hands of enemies who wished to isolate Goldwater on the right-wing fringe. Bill Buckley had approached Jay Hall with some ideas for the campaign. Hall lured him to a dinner with Kitchel and Baroody to discuss them. Then Baroody leaked news of the meeting to one of his contacts at the New York Times—who dutifully ventriloquized Baroody’s story that “the Goldwater for President ship just repelled a boarding party” that had “cornered some Goldwater aides” for a “share of the Goldwater command.” No more William F. Buckley.

  That was in character. Baroody was cagey, Machiavellian, hungry—a conservative empire builder. A devout Maronite Christian, like his father, who was an immigrant Lebanese stonecutter from Manchester, New Hampshire, he also did not know how to compromise when it came to principle.

  His American Enterprise Institute began in 1943 as the American Enterprise Association, a little business lobby against wartime price controls. By 1953 it was little more than a luncheon club for visiting executives. The outfit was on the verge of shutting down when Barood
y, then a chamber of commerce staffer, was brought in to see if he could resuscitate it. His partner, W. Glenn Campbell, a Harvard-trained economist, assembled a top-notch stable of scholars; Baroody worked tirelessly to make them indispensable to the city’s workings. Washington was complex, and AEA made its name by making it simpler—providing legislators with a steady stream of issue guides that meticulously and fairly spelled out both sides of a pending bill, amendment, or policy question. Every word was vetted by an advisory council of professors.

  In 1962 Baroody changed AEA’s name to the American Enterprise Institute—trade groups in Washington were called “Associations,” and he was selling a research center. He took in enormous sums of money; Howard J. Pew gave $100,000 that year alone. AEI began producing scholarship—monograph after monograph, with dozens of tables and graphs, promising things like “essential cost data, much of it never before assembled, on which any rational policy of public education must be based” (any rational policy of public education, it turned out, reserved no role for the federal government). Ideas once enforced at union-busting manufacturies by goon squad and court injunction now received scientific demonstration by economists with Austrian names. At his home, Bill Baroody convened grand salons where he sketched dreams of a conservative counterestablishment. To reporters he blandly proclaimed, “I really can’t say whether I am a liberal or a conservative.” He called himself a social, not political, friend of Goldwater’s. He kept pictures of himself with people like Hubert Humphrey on his office walls. That was for the feds: AEI had a tax exemption to preserve. Admirers called this style intellectual entrepreneurship.

  White was unmoved. The first project of Kitchel’s eggheads was contracting for a “Recordak”—a computer programmed to file everything Goldwater ever said on any subject on punched cards for handy cross-referencing. White found the $10,000 expense about as relevant to the task at hand—lining up delegates—as, well, hiring a foreign policy consultant. White collected stories of Denison Kitchel’s incompetence. “Who’s Arthur Summerfield?” Kitchel asked when advised to consult the former RNC chair; “What line of work are you in?” he queried an uncommitted Republican senator. (It was then that White prepared a detailed notebook outlining the peculiarities, loyalties, and peccadilloes of every important name in the Republican Party for Kitchel to consult whenever one should happen to call.) When White learned Kitchel was hard of hearing—in a field where the most important work was done in whispers!—that clinched it: it was only a matter of time before Goldwater recognized the web spun out from Suite 3505 for the rare and marvelous thing that it was and relegated Kitchel to the background.

  If he ever decided to seek the nomination.

  The day the New York Times revealed Eisenhower’s fondness for Henry Cabot Lodge, both White’s and Kitchel’s top men—along with Republican Johnny Rhodes, former senator Bill Knowland, and current senators Carl Curtis and Norris Cotton—teamed up to confront Barry Goldwater in his Washington apartment. They spoke in terms he understood best: duty. “Barry,” began Carl Curtis, who had been the first politician to openly identify himself as a Goldwater delegate way back in May of 1963, “the time has come to either fish or cut bait.”

  The moral authority in the room belonged to Norris Cotton. He was a moderate—perhaps, by the flinty standards of New Hampshire, a liberal. He had gone far out on a limb for Goldwater the previous fall by becoming the first GOP leader in New Hampshire to back him, and Goldwater’s refusal to back him up in return with an announcement of his candidacy had created a political hardship. So Cotton spoke last. He compared Goldwater to de Gaulle holding out against the Nazis; he brought much of the room to tears. It wasn’t enough. Goldwater interrupted the waterworks to politely inform them that he wasn’t yet ready to make a decision. It was excruciatingly awkward. Goldwater felt trapped. He had felt trapped ever since Clarence Manion had shoved him forward as a potential nominee in 1960. And he also felt obligated. Conservatism was his life’s cause.

  The crowd dispersed, leaving behind only two old friends, two glasses of Old Crow, and a plenitude of silence. “Barry,” Denison Kitchel finally said, “I don’t think you can back down.” He reminded Goldwater of the thousands upon thousands of lesser Norris Cottons who had staked so much on him. There was no opinion Barry Goldwater respected more than Denison Kitchel’s. Goldwater told him to inform his two Senate colleagues, in confidence, that he would run. Publicly, he kept his counsel for another agonizing three weeks.

  Draft Goldwater met on December II. A new strategy of entering as many primaries as possible to prove Goldwater’s popularity was discussed. The committee turned over the idea of recruiting Len Hall, the party’s top operative, as campaign manager. The finance committee reported that fund-raising was ahead of schedule.

  They were going through the motions. The meeting had been called by White to inform them that their organization was being absorbed into the new Goldwater for President Committee, overseen by Denison Kitchel. When White had learned that Goldwater would announce his candidacy after the New Year at his home in Phoenix, he prepared for Kitchel a list of National Draft Goldwater Committee volunteers who deserved recognition in Goldwater’s speech. White booked hotel rooms and a banquet hall in Phoenix to celebrate with his comrades. Then he was told that Barry wanted only his Arizonan political team present. And White canceled his reservations.

  Soon afterward Len Hall rebuffed a plea to run Rockefeller’s campaign. It was rumored he wanted to go to work for Goldwater. Kitchel met him for lunch. Washington protocol demanded that newcomer Kitchel address old hand Hall as supplicant. Instead Kitchel blustered: “I want you to understand, Mr. Hall, that we’re not asking you to work for us.” The Republicans’ most competent operative, trusted by all factions, glad to oblige, never set foot inside the Goldwater nominating campaign. Clif White, an old friend, probably could have won Hall in a heartbeat.

  New Year’s Eve: Governor Rockefeller announced the expected arrival of a child in early June (the Washington Post also reported that Rockefeller would make a nationwide TV and radio broadcast to plea for “tolerance and understanding” on the issue of remarriage, but apparently someone talked him out of it). Lyndon Johnson had just signed a $4.4 billion public works bill; six liberal Republican senators announced a measure to guarantee medical care for the elderly, financed, as JFK wished, out of Social Security. In Pasadena, General Eisenhower grand-marshaled the Rose Bowl Parade (he told the Kiwanis Club Kickoff Luncheon that football helped mold the American character and that “every game means something to the United States”). Among those crowded streetside was Richard G. Kleindienst. He was heading back home on January 3 when he was greeted by a highway patrolman at the Arizona Border Inspection Station: “Dick Kleindienst? You are to proceed directly to Senator Goldwater’s home in Phoenix.”

  “Why, is there anything wrong?” (He hadn’t been told that his friend had decided to run.)

  “Don’t ask me—that’s all that I know.”

  He drove faster than he should have. He snaked up the steep, winding road just outside the city limits to the base of Goldwater’s still-steeper, windier driveway and was waved through by the Young Republican girls tending the electric gate with its Navajo-style crest. Local press had begun arriving at 7 a.m. Goldwater, who had recently announced that his daughter was to wed in June, ambled out in jeans and bedroom slippers and joked to the familiar faces that he had called them out to his home to announce that his daughter had been knocked up and they were having the wedding next week.

  Kleindienst marveled at the scene. He glimpsed Peg, looking entirely too listless, herding Maricopa County sheriffs in tight brown slacks and ten-gallon hats to their appointed positions. Her mother had just died; her brother was ailing. The cops were there because of a bomb threat. She couldn’t be pleased at turning over her garage to Western Union and the telephone company, or at the TV crews trampling her yellow roses, marigolds, bougainvillea, and desert blooms (may they back into an organ
-pipe cactus!), or at catering tuna-fish sandwiches for the strangers who had banged and clanked their way through the night in her backyard. Peggy was part deaf, and abhorred publicity. She had given up dreams of becoming an artist to be a politician’s wife. She and Barry had a good marriage, taking Caribbean cruises one year for her and outdoor adventures the next for him. Barry never asked her to appear on television with him except late on the last day of a campaign. But he had first informed Kitchel of his intentions—and only then his wife. She was a creature of her generation. She said, “If that’s what you want to do, go ahead and do it. I don’t particularly want you to run, but I’m not going to stand in your way.”

  Kleindienst handed over his keys to the Young Republican men parking cars, feeling a bit conspicuous in his casual dress, and was led across Bia-Nun-I-Kin’s shining green floor (slate mined from Navajo country), past tables inlaid with silver-and-turquoise Indian designs, to the master bedroom in the back, where Kitchel, Burch, and Goldwater—the crutches from his recent bone surgery by his side—awaited him. He wondered where Steve Shadegg was.

  The answer was: in the doghouse. In 1962, to ensure passage of crucial water legislation, Arizona Republican leaders had planned to let eighty-five-year-old Carl Hayden run unopposed. Then a hotheaded Pontiac dealer, Evan Mecham, a Bircher who considered Goldwater’s bunch an unaccountable establishment, decided to run for the Republican nomination. Shadegg entered the primary to block him—against Goldwater’s wishes. Goldwater was a stickler for loyalty. Shadegg was never close to him after that—although one wonders whether the resentment hadn’t been building up for some time before. Shadegg had run Goldwater’s Senate campaigns all the way down to what he wore and what he said. Now Goldwater was caught up in this whole business again, this time with Clif White’s grasping hotheads trying to call the shots. That, in fact, was why these men were here. Goldwater had decided this campaign would be different. He would run it his way. Kitchel learned he was going to be campaign manager. Burch would be his assistant. And Kleindienst would be director of field operations.