Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Margaret Chase Smith’s motto was “Women are people. A woman’s place is everywhere.” All the same, she unironically embraced the most rigid feminine stereotypes. Interviewed in a new magazine for federal employees, Government Girl (filled, mostly, with ads for party dresses, dance lessons, and dictation machines), she gave this advice: “We all want to be mothers and wives. Many of us can’t be. Many who don’t have a home go out into the world and follow some business or profession.... And one thing a girl should do is pay a great deal of attention to her clothes.” She said that was how she chose her secretaries. She herself wouldn’t dream of appearing outdoors without the frilly, flowery bonnets and architectural studio hats every woman over the age of fifty was still sporting in 1964, and her trademark rose corsage.

  Her foray into New Hampshire was serious—serious enough for her to prove herself by ostentatiously starting out the campaign up at the 45th parallel, halfway to the North Pole, where it was 28 degrees below zero, posing for a photograph with her press corps as the only one not wearing a hat. Then she drove her own sedan 1,000 miles, crisscrossing the state in six days—the same way she covered 8,000 miles in Maine for two months every summer. “You got a lot of zip to be up here this morning,” an amazed logger said. Out of earshot other men called her “a disgrace to the Republican Party.” It remained to be seen whether she would be taken seriously.

  Everyone took Richard Nixon seriously. A Harris poll had already come out listing him as the most popular Republican in New Hampshire. He had a reputation as a sterling New Hampshire vote-getter ever since he had won 22,000 “spontaneous” write-in votes for vice president after Harold Stassen tried to dump him from the ticket in 1956. It had actually been a concerted campaign to make the votes look spontaneous. But this time the spontaneity was (almost) real. New Hampshire voters were craving familiarity. Nixon responded by stepping up his speaking schedule—appearing but rarely in primary states, and never in New Hampshire, which would destroy his above-the-fray image. His speeches were loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he’d called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides. The day after the Harris poll he appeared on Arthur Godfrey’s radio show with Jackie Gleason. Gleason and Godfrey started to gab, awkwardly, about how none of the three of them seemed ever to wear hats; Nixon chimed in, “I never wear a hat. So it must always be in the ring.” The joke certainly sounded like a setup.

  Foreign policy brush fires abounded in those Strangelove-obsessed weeks. In Panama, anti-American students rioted and burned the flag; in Cuba, Castro shut off water to the Marine base at Guantanamo Bay; General de Gaulle was shopping neutralization deals for Southeast Asia and, with the United Kingdom, was selling durable goods to Cuba. Goldwater called for sending in the Marines to Cuba and Panama and said that de Gaulle wouldn’t defy American policy if we would only give him more nuclear weapons. Johnson resolved the first two crises through negotiation, without, apparently, getting anything in return, and seemed to be doing nothing about the third. This laid down a perfect middle road upon which Nixon, in his speeches, gladly cruised to an admiring response. At the White House, President Johnson began to prepare for the eventuality of running against Nixon by taking steps to meet with Khrushchev and ordering the Democratic National Committee to prepare a memo on every flip-flop Nixon had made in his eighteen-year career.

  Nixon was about to make one on race. On February 12, two days after the House began debate on the civil rights bill, 450,000 of New York’s one million public school students had boycotted class to protest de facto segregation—a disruption designed to artificially lower school populations during the week when the state gauged attendance to decide how much education money to dole out to municipalities. Evidence of discontent among blacks in the North still had the power and terror of revelation. It was partly because newspapers honored gentleman’s agreements with local authorities not to report racial disturbances ; in Chicago, few outside Mayor Daley’s high command knew, for example, that his Human Relations Commission had documented 260 such occurrences in July of 1961 alone. But you couldn’t hide a school boycott. Bayard Rustin told reporters: “By running to the suburbs, the whites are leaving to the Negro the total burden of improving schools. Whites must learn to share this burden. We will force them to learn—and I say force.” The ploy sparked a movement. Cincinnati schools emptied in a boycott, too. And Nixon, as it happened, had a speech scheduled for Cincinnati the next day.

  He used the occasion to condemn the “irresponsible tactics of some of the extreme civil rights leaders” who have “created an atmosphere of hate and distrust which, if it continues to grow, will make the new law a law in name only.” (He neglected to take note of the threat to the law posed by the jury that four days earlier had acquitted Byron de la Beckwith of shooting Medgar Evers, although the defendant’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon; and the Alabama mayor who had just turned away six Negro students at an elementary school, because he said they would constitute a fire hazard; and the state troopers who, accompanied by a notorious local sheriff named Jim Clark, tortured a photographer with cattle prods for daring to cover the event.) For Nixon, the new civil rights militancy was a political opportunity.

  He was not the only politician taking to the pulpit around Lincoln’s birthday to preach moderation. In Springfield, Illinois, Adlai Stevenson declared: “Lawlessness, even verbal violence, that seeks to wound but fears to strike, destroys more than the image of America. They undermine its political foundations as well.” Texas representative Henry Gonzales dug up an old issue of the Minutemen newsletter On Target that listed the twenty congressmen who had voted against extending HUAC’s appropriation and that warned, “Traitors beware! Even now the cross hairs are on the back of your necks.” Papers were filled with stories about the University of Illinois classics professor Revilo Oliver, who had published an article in Robert Welch’s American Opinion, entitled “Marxmanship in Dallas,” claiming that Kennedy had been slain for “becoming a political liability” to his Communist handlers. At the convention of the National Association for School Administrators, delegates commiserated over the Daughters of the American Revolution’s campaign to ban a popular first-grade reader because of its “subtle way of undermining the American system of work and profit and replacing it with a collectivist welfare system.” CBS’s The Defenders presented a harrowing episode, entitled “The Blacklist” and starring Jack Klugman, on an innocent man ruined by homegrown fascists; Point of Order continued to pack theaters. America was still worried about right-wing extremism.

  Unsettling things didn’t issue only from the fringe. On February 7 the Beatles landed at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York for their first American tour, which would not have seemed to pose much danger to anyone—except that within two weeks of the event a Time cover article lamented “the Second Sexual Revolution”; the Washington Post’s entertainment columnist complained of “the virtual surrender of the motion picture industry to the adolescent” ; novelist (and Strangelove screenwriter) Terry Southern’s outrageous sexual satire Candy was burning up the best-seller lists; the FCC renounced the right to censor “provocative” television shows; the Supreme Court narrowly overturned Florida’s ban on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer; and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy announced he was prosecuting a brazen “art” periodical called Eros under the Comstock Act. America was worried about something else, something new: rapidly changing cultural mores.

  These developments brought further consuming thirst for normalcy to New Hampshire’s upstanding burghers. But as more and more candidates bid fair to quench it, none seemed able to distinguish him- or herself from any of the others. Until, finally, one began pulling away from the pack.

  In Boston, “the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God”: of Henry Cabot Lodge’s background, little more need be said. “Cabot,” as he was known to intimates, became a Republican hero by winn
ing a Senate seat in the 1936 Roosevelt landslide and became a national hero by resigning it to command a World War II tank brigade. Defeated in his 1952 reelection bid by Jack Kennedy (Lodge was preoccupied with campaigning for the man he personally recruited into the Republican Party, General Eisenhower), he found even greater celebrity as Eisenhower’s United Nations ambassador—answering every outrage from the Soviet delegation with stinging rebukes that would invariably show up on the evening news as what a later generation would call a “sound bite.” He won the vice-presidential berth on the 1960 Nixon ticket; and, in the summer of 1963, he was given the ambassadorship to Vietnam. A walking embodiment of the bipartisan principle in foreign policy, a man of peace, a bulwark at the farthest outpost of American freedom, he was tall, charismatic, debonair, handsome, reassuring. In one poll, half the respondents had strong opinions on him, and 96 percent of those were positive.

  And in New Hampshire his managers—although they were not quite that, given that they were never certain whether Lodge welcomed their activity at all—put on a political campaign unlike any seen in American history: a public relations campaign. Their leader, Paul Grindle, was a Harvard dropout who had married a circus performer, gone into public relations, then settled into making a comfortable living as an importer of scientific instruments, exploiting the booming Cold War science market by mastering the new technology of computerized direct mail. New to politics, he saw no reason a candidate should be marketed any differently. That the product he was promoting was half the globe away was, if anything, an added convenience. Grindle and his associates contacted Lodge through his son, George, who had lost the 1962 Senate race to Teddy Kennedy. The ambassador agreed not to interfere. He was in the catbird seat—realizing he could take up the mantle if his managers were successful and refuse it if they were not, with no risk to his stature in the meantime.

  The first step, Grindle decided, was market research. After the December 8 Times story naming Lodge General Eisenhower’s choice for President caught them unprepared, Grindle adopted an invention of direct-marketing pioneer Lester Wunderman: the preaddressed postage-paid response card, usually bound alongside an ad in a magazine. Its simplicity was deceptive: for the first time Madison Avenue could calibrate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. Just before Christmas, Grindle had volunteers pass out 33,000 cards to passengers on New Haven line commuter trains. They could mark a preference for Nixon, Goldwater, Rockefeller, or Lodge. Four thousand returned the cards. Over half checked Lodge. The campaign was on.

  The next step was convincing New Hampshire that writing in Henry Cabot Lodge was not a wasted vote. Grindle and his team turned to Washington publicist Robert Mullen, who had ginned up the Draft Eisenhower fervor in 1952. He was able to plant a (false) item in Roscoe Drummond’s Herald Tribune column on Christmas Eve: “My information is that the unresolved question is not whether Mr. Lodge is going to resign his ambassadorship and become an open, active, and campaigning candidate for the nomination—but when.” Mullen then announced a fifty-state campaign to get a million signatures advocating Lodge’s nomination. It was a publicity stunt. There were no resources for doing anything of the kind.

  Next, Lodge’s campaign crew rented a storefront in Boston’s financial district for a “Lodge for President” headquarters. They unveiled their new office with great fanfare on January 3 to steal the thunder from Goldwater’s candidacy announcement in Arizona and the Rockefeller trip into New Hampshire. It was another publicity stunt. Their action was illegal: Massachusetts law required permission from the candidate to open a campaign office. Reporters did their duty, passing on word throughout the country of an exciting new entrant into the presidential field; the organizers did theirs and shut the place down the next day. The president of New Hampshire’s largest printing firm, Richard Jackman (his company printed Reader’s Digest), read the item about the unveiling of Lodge’s campaign headquarters in the Concord Monitor and marched up to the state capitol with ten signatures and $100 to sign up as a Lodge delegate candidate. Grindle read about Jackman in the Monitor and recruited him as state campaign chair, giving him responsibility for coming up with the remaining delegates—who, since every Republican luminary in the state was already claimed by Goldwater and Rockefeller, were all friends of his.

  Only then did Grindle and his cronies secure an office in Concord and set up in earnest. They set a goal: if they won 12,000 votes and three or four delegates, they would enter the next big primary, in Oregon. Mullen sent a background memo to the D.C. press corps: Don’t expect to see Lodge showing up at any GOP fund-raisers any time soon—he had a nation to save from Communism, after all. “On the other hand,” the memo continued, “I personally have no question but that, given any sort of respite in South Vietnam and given a clear signal that he has a fighting chance for the nomination, Cabot will make the race.”

  There was no respite; that very day five American helicopter crewmen died in hard fighting over the Mekong River Delta. And Mullen, whatever his assurances, had plenty of questions about whether Lodge would come back from Vietnam whatever the situation there. But Nelson Rockefeller didn’t know that. Around his office, his people had begun referring to the ambassador as “Henry Sabotage.” Rockefeller dispatched his Northeast regional coordinator, Sandy Lankier, to Lodge headquarters. “I wouldn’t say this if you had a chance to win,” the dapper, high-placed Washington attorney said conspiratorially. “But as long as all you’re doing is hurting us and helping Goldwater, why not pull out?” Grindle laughed Lankier off. “How many people do you have?” he asked. Rockefeller had sixty on staff in New Hampshire alone. Lodge had four. Since the third and fourth were beautiful twenty-three-year-old women (immortalized by Teddy White as “fresh with first bloom”), the office became a favorite, festive redoubt for reporters. Everyone was having a good time. The Lodge outfit thought he would make a good President. They thought Rockefeller would not. Why quit?

  By the end of January they had made some progress: a former state rep told a newspaper he had endorsed Rockefeller in the interests of stopping Goldwater, but, he said, “my first personal choice is Ambassador Lodge.” Reports were that the State Department had begun contingency planning in case Lodge left Saigon; the Herald Tribune noticed Lodge as a “conspicuous absentee” at GO-Day. Each poll revealed more undecideds than the last—potential Lodge voters, Grindle dared dream. Mullen sent out a second backgrounder: “We know that if the clear call is sounded, he will report for duty, and that he will report with the full elan of a good soldier, full of fight and spirit, and with the smell of victory in the air. His own commitment to an all-out campaign is the least of the worries.”

  At this point their worry was sending brochures to each of New Hampshire’s 97,000 Republican voters—Lodge pictured on the front flap, standing ramrod straight behind a podium, looking presidential, and on the inside everything patriotic but the slice of apple pie: young Lodge beside an antiaircraft gun (“This military service now stands him well in Saigon, where on some days he can hear Communist gunfire through his embassy office windows”); Lodge at the UN (under his watch “Communist expansion was brought to a halt”); Lodge with Eisenhower’s arm draped around his shoulder (“It was natural that this relationship should culminate in President Eisenhower’s recent request that Ambassador Lodge return to the United States and seek the Republican nomination for president”). The brochure cited a Gallup poll showing Lodge running better against Johnson than Goldwater or Rockefeller (neglecting to note that Nixon ran best of all); it concluded by flattering Granite Staters’ abundant political vanity by inviting them to “lead the nation in drafting Lodge.” An enclosed card bore a write-in pledge to sign, preaddressed to “United States Embassy, Saigon.” They were to send the card in a postage-paid envelope to Draft Lodge headquarters in Concord—where hundreds piled up each morning. The names were entered into a database, and only then were the cards forwarded to Saigon, where they served as a campaign within the campaign to convince thei
r man he had a chance.

  It worked. On February 18, Bill Loeb took a break from running photos of Rockefeller embracing Khrushchev, and proclamations of Goldwater’s “holy crusade against those who have stolen the birthright of America,” in order to abuse Henry Cabot Lodge on his front page. He ran a picture of a group of weeping mothers of Korean War MIAs who claimed that in 1954 they had tried to petition their UN ambassador—“an appeaser ... partially responsible for the cynical betrayal of our missing fighting men”—only to be turned away. At Lodge headquarters there was rejoicing: now they were a threat.

  Within a few days, a curious episode sent Draft Lodge past the tipping point. The mysterious goings-on in Vietnam had hardly been mentioned on the presidential stump that winter. Then Goldwater, returning to the state after ten days’ break surlier than ever (“I’m not one of those baby-kissing, handshaking, blintz-eating candidates,” he blurted out at a Hanover coffee hour), opined that Lodge had “kind of balled up” Vietnam. Candidates who criticized ongoing American military operations were vulnerable to backlash, by the principle that politics stopped at the water’s edge. Even so oblique a criticism as Goldwater’s was enough for the Lodge camp to become terrified that Rockefeller would surge into the lead any minute by impugning Goldwater’s unpatriotic lapse. For two days his people waited with bated breath. They were almost ready to close up shop and go back to Boston.