Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  The demonstration was coordinated by Young Americans for Freedom, which was thriving. The group had moved from New York to Washington and hired a new executive director—which freed Richard Viguerie to pursue his true love, direct mail. One letter to donors brought in $10,000 in three weeks. Missives to prospective members were attracting four to five hundred new YAFers a month—true believers as ready to muster on a tarmac at a moment’s notice as the Eighty-second Airborne.

  The Kent County Republican Finance Committee was thrilled to find its routine fund-raising dinner suddenly a national event. Every Republican from miles around now wanted to hear what Barry Goldwater sounded like when he spoke not just to them, but to the nation. The answer was: the same. He gave his standard fusillade against the Democratic Party—it was “no longer the party of Jefferson and of Wilson, of principle and principled liberalism” and “seeks political conformity, social sameness, and regimented rules,” measuring “welfare by the number of votes it produces”; its youth and vigor had “vanished into the creaking gears of machine politics all over America.” He merely replaced the name Kennedy with Johnson. His opponent for the nomination was Nelson Rockefeller. The dinner attendees had just paid $100 to learn they shouldn’t vote for Lyndon Johnson.

  Two-thirds of the way through his speech, he did mention the campaign—to disclaim interest: “I want to assure you quickly that I haven’t sought this role. My conscience and the principles I hold have led me to it, and it’s because I believe in those principles and because I see no clear way to give this nation a choice that I have decided to seek the nomination of my party.” The next day he was asked if he expected pressure in New Hampshire to change his views. There hadn’t been any pressure in the past, he said, so he didn’t expect any now.

  The cognac was being poured in Michigan as Goldwater settled into his seat on the rented DC-3 for his first three-day trip for the March 10 New Hampshire primary. When he heard the itinerary Norris Cotton’s people had prepared for him, he cursed the New Hampshire senator’s very name. Wednesday began with an hour’s drive to a 9:30 a.m. coffee hour—a half hour, actually—at a home in Nashua; 11:30 at a parish house in someplace called Milford; 1:15 in Amherst. The next day—just about every day—began with an early-morning press conference.

  At Concord Airport, the snow was worse than it had been in Michigan. They landed in the middle of the night. The candidate lifted his cast for the first painful first step down the staircase to the tarmac—where hundreds of chanting fans awaited.

  He growled to Cotton, who was waiting at the bottom to meet him: “Don’t you New Hampshire people believe in going to bed?”

  They did, of course, and early—or so the stereotypes said. It was part of the Granite State’s political catechism. New Hampshire as we know it was invented in 1952, when Estes Kefauver, strapped for cash against commanding favorite Adlai Stevenson, took up the fool’s errand of visiting every hamlet big enough to have a room to host him. The sight of this lanky, drawling Tennesseean —taciturn and hardy like them—slogging through the snow up around the 45th parallel so impressed the natives that they gave him a surprise success that launched him into contention for the Democratic nomination. And the word was handed down for all time: A New Hampshire voter must see the candidate in the flesh, not just driving by in a car. He must not knock on a door, for Granite Staters loathed to be disturbed in the sanctity of their home. You must never pass up a town your opponent deems worthy of a visit. Then there was the handshake: it must not be too soft; nor should it be too firm.

  And if you were a Republican, you’d best get on the good side of William Loeb.

  Loeb published the biggest newspaper in the state, the Manchester Union Leader, with 40 percent of the state’s readers, three times more than his nearest competitor—its influence all the greater in a state with only one TV station, receiving the rest of its television news from Boston. Bill Loeb was a surpassingly strange man to control a state. He carried a pearl-handled revolver everywhere he went, claimed to have personally infiltrated the New Hampshire arm of the Communist conspiracy, reported the death of Joseph McCarthy in 1957 with the headline “MURDERED!” (His suspect was “that stinking hypocrite in the White House.”) He saw to it that any local office seeker who proposed raising taxes could expect not to live to see another political day. A presidential primary candidate whom he disfavored could expect daily front-page editorials of the sort Nelson Rockefeller was suffering now—“spoiled, rich glamour boy” and “wife-swapper” Nelson Rockefeller (Loeb was twice divorced himself). For Baroody (who was a native) and Kitchel (who had gone to prep school in the state), Loeb’s support clinched the case: New Hampshire was Goldwater country.

  No matter that almost everyone with any experience in the matter disagreed. In December Peter O’Donnell made a post-assassination inspection tour and told Kitchel they might get clobbered. Raymond Moley, the former Roosevelt brain truster (he coined the phrase “New Deal”) who wrote a conservative column in Newsweek, told Burch that if Goldwater won, the media would call it predictable, and if he lost, it might sink him altogether. Even Loeb (who sported a perpetual ruddy tan from his frequent visits to Arizona, where a favorite social companion was Barry Goldwater) thought that Goldwater should pass on New Hampshire. The Arizona Mafia listened—and lined up twenty-one days in New Hampshire, beginning January 7. White dutifully worked up a numbingly thorough advance report on every town Goldwater would visit and every luminary he would meet for his first trip. And suddenly the day was upon them.

  Goldwater got his three or four hours of sleep, then hobbled into his state headquarters on Main Street in Concord to entertain reporters’ questions. They covered the waterfront, and his answers economically laid out the positions he had been advocating for years: for considering withdrawal of diplomatic recognition of the USSR; against a progressive income tax, which “penalizes success”; for solving the poverty problem by getting government off the backs of business. He was in favor of the United Nations, so long as the charter was honored—which meant that Red China could never be allowed in—or perhaps revised to exclude countries from voting who haven’t paid their dues. Cuban exiles should be armed for a second go at Castro. Republicans shouldn’t divide the party by debating Republicans. There were no extremists in the Republican Party because extremists were those who called for violent overthrow of the government. America should reassure its allies by affirming the existing doctrine that the NATO commander had discretion to use tactical nuclear weapons in case of a surprise Russian attack. Then Social Security: “I would like to suggest one change,” he said, “that Social Security be made voluntary, that if a person can provide better for himself, let him do it”—a position he had been spelling out in lesser or greater detail (mostly lesser) since Conscience of a Conservative.

  It would have been a good performance—if the audience had been a group of National Review readers. To much of the press it seemed a blizzard of solecisms. What did he mean when he said there were no liberals in America? (He meant it in the classic European sense of a supporter of laissez-faire economics.) Why would loosening control of nuclear weapons reassure our allies? Did he really believe laissez-faire economics could end poverty? At the Concord Monitor, an editor slapped this headline on his paper’s report: “GOLDWATER SETS GOALS: END SOCIAL SECURITY, HIT CASTRO” (substituting his own actuarial projections for Goldwater’s words, he was implying that to make Social Security voluntary was perforce to bankrupt it). In the New York Times a caption read: “Barry Goldwater, aspirant for the Republican Presidential nomination, with the widow of Senator Styles Bridges in East Concord. She holds dog”—just in case New Yorkers were unable to tell dowagers in pillbox hats from senators in black-rimmed glasses.

  The slights were redeemed by a splendid day on the campaign trail. Four hundred Nashuans were shoehorned into one of Goldwater’s house visits where fifty had been expected; his evening speech at Baroody’s alma mater, St. Anselm’s College, had to be
moved from the campus theater to the field house. In tiny Amherst the candidate charmed the voters at George and Phyllis Brown’s stately colonial by solemnly discussing the meaning of democracy with local grammar school pupils gathered on the lawn. Then he ducked in on a Rotary Club meeting. (“Greetings, fellow Rotarians, this gives me a chance to make up a missed meeting back home.”) If this was New Hampshire campaigning, he was doing fine.

  It didn’t last a day. He kicked off the next morning’s press conference by holding forth on the President’s State of the Union address, given the previous afternoon, in which LBJ had concluded by intoning, “In these last seven sorrowful weeks, we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as faith, and nothing is so degrading as hate. John Kennedy was a victim of hate.” Goldwater heard it as a gratuitous swipe at the right.

  “This hate theme, which is the most overdone, most untruthful attack ever made in my—in this country!” Goldwater spluttered. “To simply say it was an act of hate is an attempt to obscure the real issue. The assassin was a product of the sort of hate taught by Communists, not by Americans.” To imply otherwise, he said, was to join “an attack that was started immediately after the trigger was pulled against the conservative members of the population.... The only time my life was threatened, bodily harm ever threatened me, came as a result of these writings and these announcements over the radio.”

  He moved to a favorite theme. Johnson had avowed that “even in the absence of agreement, we must not stockpile arms beyond our needs or seek an excess of military power that could be provocative as well as wasteful.” Goldwater said he heard in that a call for unilateral disarmament. “Our strength doesn’t provoke communist aggression,” he countered; “it only deters it.”

  Later a reporter asked what he meant. Goldwater began riffing out a response—any verbal discipline he might have mustered for the day vanishing with every word. “Now, when Russia says, ‘We want to disarm,’ and they start showing us they want to, then I’d say is the time to go ahead with it. But we, I don’t think, should now be downgrading our Strategic Air Command air fleet, for example, just because we feel we’re safe with our missiles in our silos over here. I don’t feel safe at all about those missiles, if you want to know the truth. I wish the administration ... would tell the American people how undependable they actually are.”

  The reporters began scribbling madly; this was something. “Senator,” one asked, “how undependable are they actually?”

  Goldwater: “I can’t tell you, you have to get that—that’s classified information, but they’re not dependable, I can tell you that, and I’ll probably catch hell for saying it, but they’re not dependable.”

  Reporters snuck off to the phones to be the first to file on this remarkable news. Before the day was through, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara made a rare political appearance before the television cameras: Goldwater’s charges, he said, were “completely misleading, politically irresponsible, and damaging to the national security.... There is no information, classified or otherwise, to support the false implication that our long-range missiles can’t be depended upon to accomplish their mission.”

  The facts were not entirely in McNamara’s favor. “I think both’em went to extremes on it,” Georgia senator Richard Russell, Goldwater’s colleague on the Armed Services Committee, told LBJ. “We have never fired a Minuteman missile with a warhead in it, and that’s where we put most of our billions, and I raised the devil about it and tried my best to get them to fire at least one before we ever got into that test-ban business, but they never did, so no man can take an absolutely categorical oath that he knows that it will deliver.” Soon Mississippi’s John Stennis, chair of the preparedness subcommittee, would order his staff to look into hearings on the issue.

  But politically, the technical merits of the case were moot. Taking on the Defense Department was another impolitic dinner-party habit Goldwater failed to break. In airing the missile charge, Goldwater publicly took a side in the complex behind-the-scenes Kulturkampf roiling the Pentagon. McNamara had been plucked to serve in the Kennedy Administration after rising to the presidency of Ford as one of the Harvard-bred “whiz kids” who won back market supremacy from GM through the method of “statistical control”—counting everything that could be counted, comparing everything that could be compared, and devising coldly rational solutions to the problems thus revealed. Senior officers who had been loyal to the military through the lean years of the 1920s and the 1930s, when it was small, insular, and unpopular, now found their beloved institution overrun with “computer types,” as Strategic Air Command chief Thomas Power put it, who “didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground”—who demanded that Defense Department staff race hither and yon to collect statistics to justify policies and programs that had existed since Adam.

  When Kennedy had cruelly scapegoated his Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the distrust had become almost total. The following fall, when Kennedy called in the Joint Chiefs to tell them of the deal that settled the Cuban Missile Crisis and to congratulate them for their assistance, Navy chief George W. Anderson shouted, “We have been had!” and Air Force chief Curtis LeMay—who was inordinately proud of commanding an operation that rained down more destruction on Tokyo in one day than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined—thought the American naval blockade was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” He pounded the table, bemoaning “the greatest defeat in our history.” Anderson was kicked upstairs to the Portugese embassy. LeMay was given a sort of one-year probation.

  The missile/bomber debate was but an emblem of the trouble. McNamara had committed the country to a “triad” standard of deterrence: enough each of bombers, land-based missiles, and submarine missiles to survive attack and still be able to independently obliterate the Soviet Union. Since the United States already had more than enough bombers to do that, the result of McNamara’s policies was massive new commitments to computer-guided missiles—the apotheosis of the technowar mentality these seat-of-the-pants old-timers distrusted. Since its founding in 1947, the Air Force had suffered from a looming low-level paranoia that the rest of the military considered its untested core doctrine of strategic bombing illegitimate and useless. Now McNamara’s new “whiz kids” wanted to base American strategy on the even more untested “deterrence” theory—which held that old-fashioned saberrattling via fleets of B-52s had been rendered obsolete by the weapons they now carried on their wings. At the 1963 military appropriations hearings Tommy Power said, “This is the first time in our history that much or even most of the nation’s striking power is to be entrusted to weapons that have never been fully tested operationally.” He didn’t mention that with missiles went the romance of the air, the manly daring sacralized in a dozen World War II pictures, renewed for the nuclear era in Jimmy Stewart’s Strategic Air Command (1955).

  When McNamara sought to kill development of two new high-speed, high-altitude bombers, code names B-70 and RS-70, Congress ordered an extension instead; there were, after all, 24,000 jobs depending on the project. It wasn’t the jobs that moved Barry Goldwater. He cited the strategic vision of the brass—whom he identified with entirely. He had won his dream berth on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and its top secret intelligence and preparedness subcommittees, in 1962. His closest Washington friends were the military men who testified before him; their words were his own. “I say fear the civilians,” Goldwater told a convention of the Military Order of the World Wars in October of 1963. “They’re taking over.” During the test-ban hearings he boasted that America’s missiles were accurate enough “to lob one into the men’s room at the Kremlin” (if they could be counted on to get into the air first).

  Now he was plunged neck-deep into a debate with McNamara on the “dependability gap.” But his opponent held all the cards. Once upon a time—in August of 1961, perhaps, when Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans supported going to war over Berlin shortly after Kennedy warned that such an
engagement could mean “more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history”; when hardly an eyebrow was raised when President Kennedy told Stewart Alsop, “In some circumstances we must be prepared to use the nuclear weapon at the start, come what may”—Goldwater might have gotten away with it. Not after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not after the test-ban treaty. Now, raising terrifying doubts about the entire nuclear program, alone, on the fly, with no more cover than vague promises of “classified information,” was enough to make it sound like Goldwater was courting either political or planetary suicide. Goldwater’s friends could only defend him by revealing classified information or by defying their civilian leader, McNamara. So McNamara simply denied the charges, isolating Goldwater as an extremist.

  ABC Reports ran the obligatory shot of old coots talking politics around a rural New Hampshire cracker barrel. Began one:“He’s a real Republican, regardless of what—”

  “Yeah, he’s a real Republican. He’s going to get us in a batch of trouble, that’s all.”

  “Oh no he won’t, either.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, he’s going around making statements which are going to absolutely eliminate him as a possibility for the election.”

  To add to Goldwater’s troubles, complaints were filtering into his office about his language. “What the hell’s that?” he asked of a boom lurking overhead, while he was on the air, and he said during another broadcast that he would be fine as soon as he was “rid of this damned cane.” It was a time when political candidates skipped campaigning on Sundays for fear of seeming impious. New Hampshire was shocked.

  At headquarters, meanwhile, his people were poring over the results of a canvass they had made in the little town of Pittsfield during Goldwater’s first day in the state—twelve hours before he had a chance to embarrass himself at his first press conference: 130 Pittsfieldians were for him, 50 against; 300 were undecided. The rosy predictions that New Hampshire was Barry Goldwater’s state were coming a cropper.