Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  “And what am I supposed to do as—what did you call it?—director of field operations?” Kleindienst asked, more irritated than amused.

  What he was supposed to do was ensure Goldwater the 655 delegates he needed to be nominated—although Kleindienst had never worked on a primary before, and had barely attended a political convention outside of Arizona. Kleindienst told his dear friend he was crazy.

  “Listen, and get this straight,” Goldwater growled in response. “I’m not going to turn my life over to people I don’t know and trust if I’m going to go through with this. Either the three of you agree to go through this with me or I’m not going to do it!”

  It was a Friday—as President Johnson observed that night after cutting short a tour for reporters of the Texas hill country to watch a tape of the announcement on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. Johnson wondered why Goldwater didn’t announce on a Sunday: “He’d get more space in the Monday morning papers.” Goldwater’s advisers had said the same thing. They also insisted he would get more coverage announcing from Washington. But Barry was determined to do this his way or not at all.

  Goldwater stepped out from the bedroom to the living room, where thirty Arizona Republican leaders were gathered around the coffee table supported by a fifteen-hundred-pound ironwood log. Outside, a radio broadcaster said, “Any comment on his intentions would be premature at this time.” (Somewhere in New York, Rockefeller’s men transcribed the broadcast.) Inside, a cheer went up. The drapes opened. Camera shutters exploded. Goldwater prepared to hobble out onto his patio and into a typically beautiful Arizona day. He had a great photo of himself on that patio, on one knee, a shotgun resting on the other, in jeans, rawhide jacket, and a cowboy hat, a saguaro by his side and Camelback Mountain (and, dimly visible, slightly spoiling the effect, a set of pool furniture) in the background. Now, dressed in a dark blue suit, microphone draped around his neck, he looked uncomfortable. He paused. “Come on in, Barry, the water’s fine,” an Arizona reporter quipped to scattered laughs.

  The candidate placed two sheets of paper on the lectern. The words were stirring: “I will not change my beliefs to win votes. I will offer a choice, not an echo.” Their delivery was not. It came in a slow, drab monotone. He barely looked up.

  Reporters asked him what role students had played in the rise of his political fortunes. He said they did “more than any other one factor.” He was asked to repeat the name of his field manager—“That’s K-L-E-I-N-D-I-E-N-S-T.” (They whispered baffled inquiries.) Then they asked for another name he had mentioned. “Dean Burch. That’s not related to John Birch. B-U-R-C-H.” The reporters laughed, then remembered to ask Goldwater one more question: Would he accept the support of the John Birch Society? (Back at his office in Washington, White winced to hear his candidate expose his Achilles’ heel.) Goldwater gave the same answer as always: “I see no reason to take a stand against any organization just because they’re using their constitutional prerogatives even though I disagree with most of them.” White’s office girls broke out bottles of champagne. White was in no mood to celebrate. He had already been told Kleindienst was taking his job. He had, reluctantly, close to tears, taken a position as Kleindienst’s subordinate.

  Lyndon Johnson broke into a broad smile when Chet Huntley pronounced, “At the LBJ Ranch, meanwhile, the nation’s business went forward.” Between bites of gulf shrimp and smoked venison, LBJ’s guests asked him if he thought Richard Nixon would run. “I don’t know,” the President replied. “I don’t even know whether I will.” His close aide Walter Jenkins had just reported to him on a poll that 93 percent of Californians were “favorably impressed” with how he had taken over the presidency. The morning’s Gallup poll had him scoring around 70 percent against every Republican. Walter Heller, chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, flew out to the ranch to tell the President that the gross national product had risen $30 billion in 1963 and that 6.5 percent growth was predicted in 1964. But Lyndon Johnson was a man prone to melancholy.

  Nelson Rockefeller was in the midst of his second campaign swing in New Hampshire, dispelling rumors he was running as a placeholder until the Eastern Establishment united behind someone more electable. “I am neither a summer soldier nor a sunshine patriot of the political wars,” he told a crowd at Portsmouth High School. Then he told them he would save their navy yard.

  It looked like a Rockefeller-Goldwater showdown in New Hampshire—which led the more hard-nosed among Republican operatives to heave hearty sighs of relief. Now one or the other of these bothersome characters would receive the knockout blow each so richly deserved.

  The afternoon after Labor Day, 1963, Rockefeller had invited his neighbor, Richard Nixon, over for a cocktail. (As if in some fit of masochism, Nixon had bought an apartment next door to the very lair where he had capitulated to Rockefeller in 1960.) “I’m going for the nomination,” Rockefeller said. “I’m not going to back out this time. I have nothing to lose.” He leaned in: “What you and I both have to recognize is that you and I are the only ones qualified.” Nixon screwed on a poker face. It became difficult to maintain. “What I want you to suggest,” Rockefeller continued, “is that if you will support me now, if there is a deadlock at the convention, I will support you.” Nixon, having made enough deals within these particular precincts to last a lifetime, hastily turned Rockefeller down.

  Rockefeller had announced his candidacy on November 7, 1963, early in the morning for broadcast live on the Today show on NBC, then winged away for his first New Hampshire trip, ignoring every hint that he didn’t have a chance. One day that week he chartered a plane to bring forty-two Maryland Republicans to lunch in Manhattan. Then he traveled to Miami for a speech; then he was back to New York to speak to the AFL-CIO convention; then he ended the day in Missouri, with a speech to the St. Louis Press Club. Virtually all he had to show for such exertions was perhaps the most hedged endorsement in electoral history, from Baltimore mayor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin—“Until I find a better qualified man, I’m for Governor Rockefeller”—and the unqualified endorsement of Jimmy Hoffa.

  He tried everything. He borrowed Richard Nixon’s strategy of statesmanship through high-minded speechifying: to the American Political Science Association (for a national transportation policy); in hardscrabble Appalachian coal country (promising programs for the 20 million predicted to be unemployed by 1970); to the Indiana Bar Association (on civil liberties). He pressed the flesh, old school-style, in Illinois, in Oregon (where he hired a lighting consultant), in California (where his personal film crew tramped along to provide footage to local network affiliates). He arranged ostentatious meetings with clergymen to neutralize the only issue really on anyone’s mind—even, adding poignancy to the old saw that every presidential candidate visits Ireland, Israel, and Italy, arranging a private audience with the Pope. For an appearance at a closed-circuit Republican fund-raiser, his PR director prepared a long memo on the lighting, the makeup, what color to wear, and the distance the TelePrompTer would be from his face. There were paid Rockefeller staffers at work by the beginning of the year in states from Florida to Alaska.

  But his only promising gambit was negative. “Can you imagine the prospect of these policies being presented to the American people next year?” he said in Miami. “Advocacy of such proposals as having the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations ... of selling TVA, of ending immediately support prices for farmers, of leaving the protection of human rights up to the states—including Mississippi and Alabama. These ideas are not in the mainstream of American thinking.”

  And deep within the recesses of 22 West 55th a department was hard at work to provide him with stronger stuff. The effort was headed by a former undercover operative from the chief of staff’s office whose specialty had been destroying the public reputations of politicians in dozens of countries around the world. “I can take anybody—I don’t care who it is—and develop material that would annihilate them,” Graham Thomas Tate Molitor liked to brag, embracing
the label of Barry Goldwater’s “political assassin.”

  Molitor made arrangements with friendly reporters to record for transcription virtually every word Goldwater said in public. Agents would shout embarrassing questions at Goldwater, then shove a microphone into his face. Meanwhile, his staff clipped and filed every Goldwater utterance they could find going back to the 1930s, trolling them for gaffes which, if publicized correctly, could knock Goldwater flat on his back. By May, major speeches were being recorded by multiple operatives running tapes in relays to a nearby real-time transcription center at ten-minute intervals; sometimes they set up a telephone system so Goldwater speeches could be transcribed live at Rockefeller headquarters. Reporters—and operatives in the guise of reporters—strode into Goldwater headquarters to beg advance copies of speeches or, if need be, steal one off a desk.

  Rockefeller needed Molitor. He hadn’t a teaspoon of bargaining power within his own party leadership. His only hope was with the voters—the vast, fickle public. If he could win New Hampshire on March 10, he could capture momentum. If he could win in California on June 2—adding the second biggest delegate block to the biggest one, New York, which he already owned—he might have the base for a convention stampede.

  He was on the verge, his people were convinced, of owning California. Money had the advantage there; money could retain the best publicity agencies. The state’s open initiative system had concentrated the energies of wealthy groups to seek out ever-more-elaborate ways to bend the system to their ends. Aggressive and creative PR firms sprang up to help them. (One initiative passed with the slogan “Keep California Green”; it was a tax break to private country clubs.) Soon these publicists invented a new job description: full-service campaign consultant, covering everything from walking the (inordinately sprawling) precincts, to fund-raising, to building the candidate’s image—and, especially, advertising.

  By the time Rockefeller came looking for a firm in the summer of 1963, one was playing the game better than anyone else: Spencer-Roberts & Associates. They were wizards. A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman. But they worked only for candidates they thought could win. Rockefeller was twenty percentage points behind in the early polling. His political chief, George Hinman, begged; they turned him down flat. Then Rockefeller himself did the begging, on an October trip, armed with a persuasive tool no politician in history could match. Spencer-Roberts, after all, was a business. The $2 million operating budget Rockefeller offered the firm was unprecedented. They took the job. First they snapped up all of California’s prime outdoor advertising spots. No campaign had ever been able to do anything like that; advertising agencies demanded cash up front, and no other campaign could ever have dreamed of having enough.

  For his next task Hinman took up full-time residence in a bungalow at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel. In the California primary, voters picked not the candidate, but a delegate slate pledged to him. Hinman’s aim was to assemble a stellar cast of familiar names. He won over San Francisco mayor George Christopher; movie mogul Jack Warner; Eisenhower labor secretary Jim Mitchell; a member of the family who owned the Los Angeles Times; a scion of the Firestone tire family. Thomas Kuchel, preeminent heir of his state’s Progressive Era anti-partisanism, was reluctant to get involved in a primary. Hinman persuaded him to sign on as campaign chair. Kuchel came out fighting, with a statement calling for a party “that speaks the same political gospel on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line,” that would “not abandon the courageous doctrine it espoused in Lincoln’s day and through the years to Eisenhower’s time” to fight “for equality for all Americans before the law.” The enemy, on the other hand (he didn’t name names), “would endanger, if not destroy, the American two-party system.”

  Hinman convinced Kuchel the same way he had convinced most of his delegates. These were the men watching in horror as their party slipped away to the right-wing lunatics—people like the new state school superintendent, Max Rafferty. The board of education was about to vote on his recommendation challenging the teaching of evolution. “There is a new wind blowing in politics,” Rafferty told Fortune, “but it isn’t really political. I liken it to religion.” Hinman told his Rockefeller delegates that they weren’t really Rockefeller delegates, hinting that Rockefeller would step aside for another, more electable, moderate at the convention: they were fighting a crusade to save their party from the infidels.

  13

  GRANITE STATE

  In the first new year after the President was slain, the nation mustered a determined optimism. The New York Times ran a multi-article package on January 6, headlined “COMPANY PROFITS ASTOUND EXPERTS; EXCEED ALL EXPECTATIONS—RECORD FIGURES CERTAIN.” The Los Angeles Times was thrilled to be reporting “UCLA PUPILS NOT RADICAL, POLL SHOWS; MIDDLE-OF-THE-ROAD VIEWS PREVAIL.”

  Not all tidings were glad, to be sure; traffic deaths rose, farm incomes stagnated; in Washington, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, concluding a study of the draft pool, found one in three young men part of a “human slag heap of unemployables.” The Los Angeles Times was obliged to report of the UCLA students, in a subhead, “Sex Ideas May Shock.” The Surgeon General delivered a report that smoking was hazardous to your health. In Philadelphia, civil rights activists had attempted to get an injunction to ban the city’s celebrated, nationally televised Mummers’ Parade—a holiday-time tradition since 1834, in which hundreds of white revelers marched downtown in blackface as thousands lined the streets. The magistrate, declaring no harm intended, ruled that the spectacle, for which upwards of a million spectators were expected, could go forward so long as marchers “don’t poke fun at anybody.” The police chief canceled all vacation leaves for officers in order to get up a big enough force to ensure peace. But only 35,000 spectators showed up.

  There was the usual background noise of the Cold War: Chou En-lai attacking Tito as a “U.S. tool”; Ceylon nationalizing the oil fields; Britain and France selling buses and trucks to Cuba; France recognizing Red China. But in the wake of the test-ban treaty, said U.S. News, “It’s been a generation or more since the world was as quiet as now.” Vietnam, the magazine reported, was “a local war.... Big war is not threatened.” A New York Times subhead noted, of rocketing levels of consumer debt, “Experts Unworried.” In January of 1964, experts weren’t worried about much. Worrying was out of style.

  Perhaps that was why Barry Goldwater’s nine-year string of good press was about to vanish in a puff of smoke.

  His first public appearance as a presidential candidate came on a cool, clear Sunday, on NBC’s Meet the Press. Chafing at the idleness enforced by the injury to his foot, he refused a ride to the studio. (The thing on his foot was called a walking cast, after all.) It was the first mistake of his campaign. He tried not to betray the agonizing throb when the Washington Star’s David Broder asked him if he’d been briefed. No, he explained; the last time he had been on the show he hadn’t even been asked the questions he was briefed on.

  That was the second mistake.

  The half hour was excruciating. Barry hurt so badly he couldn’t think straight. Asked about his avowals that he would like to see the United States withdraw diplomatic recognition from the Soviet Union, he said that ultimately the decision was up to the Senate—although the Constitution vested that power in the President. He said he would break the test-ban treaty if he thought it would be to our military advantage, citing Dr. Hans Morgenthau, “one of the greatest physicists in the world,” as his authority—although Morgenthau was a political scientist and supported the treaty (months later, Morgenthau would write that Goldwater embodied “the threat of fascism in America”). Broder asked him if he would have used federal troops at Ole Miss. Goldwater said, wrongly, “If you will recall, he didn’t use federal troops.... He sent federal marshals in.” He said, bafflingly, that he didn’t worry about most of the countries lost to Communism because they were “going to go through the same period of growth tha
t the United States did, when we spent 110 or 112 years experimenting with socialism and communism and egalitarianism and monarchy and everything else, arriving at our constitutional republic.”

  Gaffes aside, the substance of his remarks wouldn’t surprise any reader of Conscience of a Conservative, Why Not Victory?, or the thrice-weekly column he had only recently stopped producing. Those numbers included practically all of the top Republicans—who were just then arriving in Washington for the annual Republican National Committee meeting. Which was just it; fence-sitters in the RNC, the ones still thinking about which candidate to back—like Len Hall, described as “a jockey looking for a mount”—were seeing Barry Goldwater perform under real pressure for the first time. They knew he had a reputation for loose talk. But if this was Goldwater under the studio lights with sweet-tempered Dave Broder, what would he be like across the table from Khrushchev? Then there were the millions who had never read, heard, or seen Barry Goldwater for any extended period. Many just found him unpleasant. Some thought he was terrifying.

  “If you were elected President of the United States, would you under no circumstances negotiate with the Communists on disarmament?” asked host Lawrence Spivak. “I don’t think negotiations are possible,” Goldwater answered. If invited to parley, he would respond, “If you mean what you say, Mr. Khrushchev, put up or shut up—as we Western poker players say.”

  Goldwater didn’t have time to rest before he was whisked off to Grand Rapids to give his first speech of the campaign, at a Michigan Republican Party dinner. He was met upon landing by over one thousand screaming fans, on a night almost too snowy to land the plane.