Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  The tour ended with a whimper. The temperature began dropping as Goldwater spoke at an American Legion Hall that was so crowded he could touch the audience surrounding him on all sides. When it was time to leave for a kaffeeklatsch at the home of a pair of widows in Exeter, icy conditions were setting in at the airport. He stood the old ladies up.

  Rockefeller workers braved the chill. They were papering Exeter and every other town with flyers: “GOLDWATER SETS GOALS: END SOCIAL SECURITY, HIT CASTRO.”

  Goldwater might have dropped the missile charge and cut his losses. Instead, at the annual Republican National Committee conclave in Washington that weekend, he asked for a congressional probe. When the assembled Republicans saw him surrounded everywhere by his obscure Arizona cronies and learned that this was his campaign team (and that Clif White had been relegated to a subsidiary role, and that Pete O’Donnell had been purged entirely), the response was incredulity. Except among liberals, who responded with glee. They had come to Washington to find someone to knock Goldwater out. And to knock out Rockefeller, too—who arrived with his pregnant wife on his arm chirping, “I want to be with my husband as much as possible in the campaign.” Others came in the hope of being anointed. George Romney spoke at the National Press Club. Afterward he was asked the question he was waiting for: was he running? A grin spread across his jutting jaw: “I was afraid that question would not be asked,” he said, in Roosevelt-like deadpan. “I am not an active candidate seeking the nomination, but if it should come to me, I’d have a duty to accept it.”

  It wouldn’t come. George Romney was finished. The new man of the hour was “the first of the Kennedy Republicans”: William Warren Scranton of Pennsylvania. A week before the assassination, a meeting of Establishment giants straight out of a conspiracy theorist’s dream took place in the offices of Thomas McCabe, the septuagenarian chairman of Scott Paper and the former head of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve. Among those present were publishers Walter Annenberg and Walter Thayer, CBS’s William S. Paley, Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola, Pierre Du Pont, former Eisenhower defense secretary and financier Thomas Gates, and Eisenhower attorney general Herb Brownell. Scranton was the guest of honor. The official agenda was to congratulate him on his “effective and far-reaching program of industrial development” in Pennsylvania. It was more like he was a Yalie being tapped for Skull and Bones. They wanted him to run for President. He seemed perfect; he answered every need. He didn’t have enemies. He was a man of the center (the AFL-CIO gave him a 50 rating, Americans for Constitutional Action 58, Americans for Democratic Action 40). He had breeding.

  Scrantons were to the Keystone State as Goldwaters were to Arizona. Puritans who first came to these shores in the 1630s, they migrated to the central Pennsylvania county of Lackawanna in the 1830s, and by 1866 their town honored the family that had bestowed on them an industrial empire—and had helped found the Republican Party—by taking its name. Commissions from Abraham Lincoln hung over the mantle of the family manse where Bill Scranton grew up—tokens of a family history that perfectly described the arc of the Republican Party’s Northeastern wing. The forefather was a robber baron who organized an armed posse to shoot down workers in cold blood during the great rail strike of 1877. The son made amends through great philanthropies. And by the middle of the twentieth century, the grandchildren embraced business-tinged liberalism as the governing philosophy for a nation.

  Bill Scranton was born in 1917—like Nelson Rockefeller, in the family vacation cottage. He grew up under the shaping influence of his mother, Marion Margery Warren Scranton (of the Mayflower Warrens), whose favorite things were orchids, diamonds, flamboyant hats, and politics. She began picketing for women’s suffrage at the age of sixteen. Her son was gathering precinct returns by telephone on election night at age nine. The next year he joined his mother at the 1928 Republican Convention. At Yale he wrote a column in the Daily News that ran alongside McGeorge Bundy’s. Only wartime service delayed Scranton’s matriculation at Yale Law School. His fraternity pledge class there was nicknamed “Destiny’s Men”; it included future Supreme Court Justices Byron “Whizzer” White and Potter Stewart, Cyrus Vance, Sargent Shriver, and Gerald Ford (and, owing to some occult Ivy League formula that would have a conservative minted for each dozen moderates or liberals, future Colorado senator and Goldwater booster Peter Dominick).

  There was an organic reason that Bill Scranton became a liberal. It was the exact opposite of why Barry Goldwater became a conservative. A Pennsylvania squire who said that the free market brought only blessings would be run out of town on a rail. Scranton, the city, had been the anthracite coal capital of the world before the market for the fuel collapsed in mid-century, the nation’s industrial center began sliding southwest, and radical new automation techniques began sluicing off some 40,000 industrial jobs a month nationwide. In Pennsylvania, unemployment was 50 percent above the national average and fifty-six of fifty-seven counties were federally designated as depressed areas; in the same years that Phoenix grew from 50,000 residents to 500,000, Scranton shrunk. It was a quiet, underlying dread in the 1960s that these economic forces, as Rhode Island’s liberal Republican governor John Chafee put it, would “dump the unskilled and the semi-skilled worker into the human slag heap”—perhaps to evolve into some social Armageddon led by residents of industrial ghost towns like Scranton who couldn’t move because all of their assets were tied up in now worthless houses.

  Only activist government, it was thought, could stave off that awful day. Bill Scranton’s father was the architect of a new kind of centrist liberalism: combining private and public resources to spur industrial redevelopment. He helped lure fifty industries and twenty thousand jobs back to Lackawanna County. Upon his father’s death in 1955, Bill took over the “Scranton Plan,” which was already internationally celebrated, and led his city to win a Look All-American City award. By the time he was plucked to become a State Department briefing officer in 1959 (he was so trusted by the secretary of state that the press called him John Foster Dulles’s “private leak”), the chamber of commerce’s executive secretary described him as “the best-informed man in the United States on how to bring jobs back to depressed areas.” He burned with one of the core convictions of managerial liberalism: In a complex modern economy, only “labor market coordination” by centralized government could save the free market from bringing about waste, inefficiency, and ruin as a side effect of prosperity.

  It was no coincidence that the best-informed expert on industrial job creation in the country was a stalwart civil rights man. As Martin Luther King had taken to pointing out, automation’s social costs were borne by the last hired and first fired: the Negroes who had streamed north by the millions after World War II just as factory gates were slamming shut. Detroit, for example, lost half its manufacturing base in the 1950s—during which time 75 percent of job listings were reserved specifically for whites. In Philadelphia 70 percent of young black men were unemployed. Federal social legislation required racial covenants to win Southern support (Kennedy got his 1961 minimum wage hike by barring laundry, hotel, and food service workers—mostly black—from coverage). It was a far cry from the agriculture depression of the 1920s and 1930s, to which Washington responded by subsidizing farm incomes and pegging commodity prices to pre-Depression levels. No such response was forthcoming when industry in the urban North began to decay. In places like Newburgh, the problem was addressed by other means.

  When Scranton took a seat in the House of Representatives in 1961, he was one of only twenty-one Republicans to vote with Kennedy on the Rules Committee fight. He went on to vote with the Administration over half the time, and he introduced a depressed areas bill that was stronger than Kennedy’s. In 1962 General Eisenhower prevailed upon Scranton to take back the Pennsylvania State House for the Republicans: “What it boils down to, Bill,” Eisenhower said, “is a four-letter word—duty.” Scranton won the governorship in a contest so brawling that it ensured him a re
putation as a political comer. Then unemployment in Pennsylvania began dropping by percentage points. Liberal Republican leaders began paying court at the governor’s mansion at Indiantown Gap. Scranton was, simply, the anti-Goldwater: he answered every fear that Goldwater only seemed to stoke. One by one they came, waited patiently in a vestibule graced by framed copies of ads he had commissioned to promote his state (“Governor Bill Scranton Says, ‘You’ll Like the New Pennsylvania’ ”; “The New Pennsylvania Means Business”), and begged him to run for President—and heard him, after his customary scintillating banter, once more repeat that his duty was to serve out his four-year term.

  The week after Scranton had been summoned to the star chamber at the offices of Thomas McCabe, General Eisenhower docked his private Pullman car in Harrisburg and told Scranton it was now his duty to save the party of his grandfathers from capture by the radical right. Scranton emerged from that meeting seven hours later. He told the newsmen who had patiently staked out the rail yard, “I probably will give even deeper thought to this matter than I had expected”—nothing more. It was enough to yield reports that “Scranton appears to have opened a door for a build-up similar to that which won the GOP nomination in 1940” for Wendell Willkie. Walter Thayer’s Herald Tribune ran an editorial titled “Calling Governor Scranton.” On the Today show’s year-end political wrap-up Sander Vanocur predicted that Scranton would get the nomination. Scotty Reston predicted he would have it “forced on him.” Life assigned Teddy White, fresh off his historic “Camelot” scoop, to do a cover profile. “His unblemished record,” Life’s seven million readers were told by the nation’s most respected chronicler of presidential elections, was “an insurance policy against GOP disaster.”

  At the January RNC conclave, party leaders were determined to cash in the insurance policy. Len Hall, Meade Alcorn, and party general counsel Fred Scribner, Three Musketeers of the GOP’s Eastern wing (or, depending on your loyalties, Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse), were reportedly now Scrantonites; so were RNC head Bill Miller and his predecessor, Senator Thruston Morton. In Washington, as the convention was getting started, Scranton’s energetic young aides Bill Keisling and Craig Truax begged Eisenhower to pledge as a Scranton delegate and claimed that Walter Thayer had already done so. The boys from Advance, the liberal Republican journal from Harvard, distributed a 3,600-word manifesto announcing a new organization, the Ripon Society, calling for a presidential candidate with “those qualities of vision, intellectual force, humanness and courage that America saw and admired in John F. Kennedy, not in a specious effort to fall heir to his mantle, but because our times demand no lesser greatness.”

  Meanwhile their candidate of choice was back in Harrisburg, forbidding his 1962 campaign manager from starting a write-in effort in New Hampshire and presiding over a year-end joint session of the state legislature where he urged all Pennsylvanians to spend the year seeking “greater charity, greater equality, in relationships between the races.”

  Scranton eventually did make it to that Washington meeting. Coagulations of young admirers followed his every step. Bill Keisling, the twenty-seven-year-old political deputy who looked up to his boss as a puppy to a master, steered him into the paths of VIPs at dinners and receptions like a chess grand master moving a pawn. A reporter asked Tom McCabe why, if Scranton wasn’t running for President, he was wearing a Scranton button on his lapel. “The governor doesn’t know I’m wearing it,” he said. Meanwhile Rockefeller was in a corner, neglected, busying himself signing autographs for the porters and kitchen workers.

  That evening, Keisling and another aide threw a press party for Scranton, although the governor himself was not invited. It was the hottest ticket in town—besides Scranton’s press conference the next evening, which everyone agreed was the perfect opportunity for him to announce a presidential campaign. “Are we looking at our next President?” one state chairman asked another as Scranton parted the crowd to take to the podium—where, with great ease, assurance, and grace (the audience whispering comparisons to Kennedy), he announced that he was in D.C. to meet with his state’s congressional delegation, nothing more. Reporters pounced. If he wasn’t running, why the party on his behalf? “Why, 1 don’t know anything about that,” he answered. He turned to his hotheaded young aide. “Is that right, Bill?” Keisling, sheepish, answered: “Yes, sir, governor.”

  The boom was on, his wishes notwithstanding. The New York Times Magazine ran an article entitled “Portrait of a Not-So-Dark Horse”; the Saturday Evening Post did a profile packed with homey pictures of the Scranton brood, accompanied by a Stewart Alsop column headed “The Logical Candidate” explaining confidently that in Republican nominations “the candidate with the best chance to win has usually been chosen before the convention was called to order by a process of consensus among the party’s Grand Panjandrums.” And, opined his columnist brother Joseph, Goldwater, “the great favorite of the early winter books,” had “few remaining betters.” Newsweek put Scranton on the cover.

  On January 17 there was another all-star luncheon in Tom McCabe’s boardroom. The participants entered through an Eisenhower Administration revolving door: Jim Hagerty, press secretary, now an ABC executive; Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, head of Procter & Gamble; White House special counsel David Kendall, now at Chrysler. They were joined by Bill Miller, Len Hall, and Meade Alcorn. Scranton emerged with the same message: “Only if faced with a series of highly unlikely circumstances would I feel it my duty to become a candidate for the presidency.” Then again, when a supporter filed his name for candidacy in New Hampshire without his permission—a quirk New Hampshire election law allowed—Scranton didn’t file to withdraw it. At the White House, President Johnson inquired anxiously of Walter Jenkins about a new poll; “What does it show Johnson-Scranton?” (He needn’t have worried. The President still scored nearly 80 percent against all comers.) But then again Scranton refused to attend the Young Republicans’ annual training seminar on the twenty-fourth despite Eisenhower’s urging.

  His fervent admirers still held out hope. There was, after all, GO-Day coming up.

  “GO-Day” was the GOP’s annual closed-circuit TV fund-raising extravaganza. It ended up doing little more than neatly showcasing all the weaknesses of a party split clean down the middle: Goldwater’s Pittsburgh appearance was nearly sabotaged by liberals who put on sale only 500 tickets for a 2,000-seat room (Clif White’s western Pennsylvania chairman Ben Chapple saved the day, deploying his Draft Goldwater organization to sell the room to capacity); in Los Angeles, brigades of Young Republicans picketed Rockefeller with Goldwater signs. The speeches were flat, duds—except in Indiana, where the room thrummed with anticipation that the speaker, Bill Scranton, would throw his hat in the ring.

  He wouldn’t. His wife had hated the trip to Indianapolis—the campaign-style flesh-pressing, the constant comparisons to Jackie Kennedy, the awful accommodations. First she forbade Keisling’s attempt to put an opening witticism in the speech about “feeling a presidential draft.” Then she exercised the matrimonial veto: no more out-of-state political excursions. On February 3 Scranton removed his name from the New Hampshire primary rolls. It had been a whirlwind journey. But now it seemed over.

  Heading out each morning in his respectable Republican cloth coat—a belted-back model out of style for years—chatting up the barbershops, banks, and general stores, buying ice-cream cones for the kids as his grandfather used to hand out dimes, Rocky knocked them dead in New Hampshire. NBC’s cameras caught him in conversation with a little boy. Why are you running for President? “So that a nice boy like you will have a real chance to grow up in a country where there’s freedom and where there’s opportunity. And you are a wonderful boy.” They caught Goldwater in an off-color quip: “I don’t kiss babies because I lose track of their age too soon.” Rocky even babbled away in French to woo New Hampshire’s 18 percent French-Canadian population.

  But even in New Hampshire you can’t shake everybody’s han
d. And if you are Nelson Rockefeller, when you shake a hand with a glowing and conspicuously swollen Happy by your side, you are as likely to lose a vote as to gain one. As one stem matron told a reporter, eyes flashing with Old Testament wrath: “What can we tell our young people about this man’s immoral living? How many wives did God make Adam?” Goldwater was so solid with the state’s rock-ribbed Republican activists that Rockefeller hadn’t been able to hire a decent campaign team or delegate slate for love or money. Voters would choose twenty-eight names from scores of candidates for delegates and alternates, with only their candidate preferences to identify them. On the “bedsheet ballot,” familiarity bred success. And the Arizona Mafia had locked in the state’s most familiar Republican names: Delores Bridges, widow of the late senator Styles Bridges; former governor Lane Dwinell; ex-Communist FBI double agent Herb Philbrick, whose autobiography was the inspiration for the TV show I Led Three Lives.

  Rockefeller might have compensated with his customary blitzkrieg approach to staffing. But his New Hampshire managers insisted that local tastes demanded a puritanical front, limiting him to only three traveling companions (and a state police captain who insisted since the Kennedy assassination on accompanying him everywhere he went). He rode in the press bus and hired freelance stenographers by the day. (The effort at folksiness was blunted when NBC happened to run a special showcasing the country’s greatest private collections of art, his own most prominently.) One of his greatest political gifts had always been his ability to absorb facts and figures in complex briefing sessions. But now the men who fed him the facts and figures were languishing back at 22 West 55th, so he responded to reporters with mumbled generalities. He retailed his plan to save small business, played to Granite Staters’ fabled fiscal reserve, and worried over the projected 20 million people who would be unemployed by 1970; mostly, though, he bashed Goldwater. “How can there be solvency when Senator Goldwater is against the graduated income tax? How can there be security when he wants to take the United States out of the United Nations? ... Americans will not and should not respond to a political creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present.” A student at Keene Teacher’s College said he agreed with Goldwater that relief rolls were packed with free-loaders and called Rockefeller “a Robin Hood in a gray flannel suit.” Rockefeller replied that it was no wonder Goldwater thought that way, being a “Southern leader.”