The trouble was rooted in a culture clash. Hess and the Arizonans’ conservatism was rooted in contempt for fast-talking Easterners and their wily ways; to their mind Goldwater’s choice of a bunch of hip-shooting cowboys to run his campaign was practically the message of the campaign. That couldn’t have been further from what made Clifton White and his boys tick. To them, the thrill of politics was operating in the midst of the Establishmentarians, drinking with them, joking with them—then stealing their party out from under their noses. To the Arizonans, Clif White looked like just one more operative, feathering his own nest, hogging the headlines, hedging his bets with Goldwater until a better opportunity came his way, ready to heap scorn on a guy like Kleindienst just because he didn’t belong to the Century Club, even though he had finished third in his class at Harvard. White did what he considered his solemn duty (“When you get a phone call,” he kept on hectoring Kitchel, “look in the book so you know who the heck you’re talking to. It’s important!”); the Arizona Mafia could only see a grasping, condescending ass; they kept talking about “Eastern lawyers” as if they were an occupying army.
When Goldwater and his Mafia came to Chicago for a confidence-building meeting with their state chairmen just after New Hampshire, White gathered his original Draft Goldwater group to confront Goldwater directly about his mistakes. But when the drafters finally got the draftee to meet with them, they lost their nerve: the candidate was so overwrought he looked like he was ready to snap. Charlie Barr pinioned Karl Hess instead, imploring him to seed Goldwater’s speeches with local concerns and pocketbook issues. Hess looked him in the eye and saw the enemy: an operative, a species whose craft he once dismissed as “whomping up spontaneous demonstrations, buying and distributing buttons and bunting; wagging their cigars and talking tough to one another as they parceled out committee assignments and head table seats.” He said Goldwater could never pander to the electorate like that. “You goddamn Boy Scouts are going to ruin everything!” Barr bellowed back.
But they were grown men. The two sides needed each other. On March 18 White put aside his reservations, chose to stick out the campaign to the end, and sent a memo proposing a truce. A few days later Dick Kleindienst burst into White’s office. “Get your hat. We’re off to Barry’s apartment.” That was a surprise; White had never been there before.
The senator was aglow from his successful first tour of California. Icy Kitchel sat in a stiff, straight-backed chair, though he looked perfectly at home. White, sinking into a supple couch, looked like he was in the midst of strangers. He grew more comfortable as the meeting began. An agreement fell into place: White would run the convention, Kleindienst and White would divide up the remaining states between them as co-directors of field operations, access to the candidate’s ear would be relaxed. On White’s way out, Goldwater gave him a grapefruit. White was given to understand that it was an Arizona grapefruit. He wondered whether he hadn’t been handed some ritual talisman of acceptance. Buoyed, he began a quiet second campaign: lobbying for his dream job. If Goldwater was nominated, White decided, he deserved to become chairman of the Republican National Committee.
The two directors of field operations settled into a working comity: White would handle most of the conventions and a few primaries; Kleindienst would cover most of the primaries and a few conventions. Both would help in pivotal California. Kleindienst, who was subject to constant entreaties from the experts to resign his post and hand it over to White (which Goldwater explicitly forbade), welcomed White’s expertise; White respected Kleindienst as the most independent-minded of the Arizonans. (Kleindienst had recently been banned from strategy sessions after questioning one of Baroody’s ideas in front of two outsiders. Not for nothing was this called a “Mafia.”) The D.C. office was reorganized, which strengthened it: Karl Hess as full-time speechwriter, Chuck Lichenstein as advertising coordinator, and Lee Edwards as acting director of information.
The candidate, however, stayed the same. When Edwards called on the senator to propose exploiting his glamorous hobbies, Goldwater listened politely, then replied, “Lee, we’re not going to have that kind of crap in this campaign. This is going to be a campaign of principles, not of personalities. I don’t want that kind of Madison Avenue stuff, and if you try it, I will kick your ass out of this office.”
“Well, Senator,” young Edwards replied, “I guess you’ve made that very clear.”
It had been a busy winter for George Wallace. There was Alabama to keep segregated, for one thing. There was his ego to attend to, for another. In November the governor had undertaken a weeklong tour of Ivy League colleges. Then he took the show national. First he honed the act, blue-penciling his speechwriters’ racist turns of phrase, having his aide Bill Jones pepper him with every hostile question they could think of. Audiences, expecting a monster, were charmed by talk of how “property rights are human rights, too”—so sweet it almost sounded sensible, yet so incendiary that he led the evening news everywhere he spoke.
Wallace’s people booked eight days in the West in January. At each stop Jones set up news conferences, speeches to civic groups, and three TV and radio interviews a day. Each time Wallace appeared on the air he outflanked smug liberals by mentioning the uprisings they were ignoring in their own backyards—the defeat of open housing in Berkeley (“they voted just like the people in Alabama”), the “sleep-in” in the office of liberal Republican Colorado governor John Love. Wallace said he disagreed with Abraham Lincoln when the great man said that Negroes should not vote, serve on juries, or hold public office—although he agreed with Lincoln that equality for Negroes could come only through education, uplift, and time. “Perplexed convulsions,” was how one newspaper described it when half an audience exploded in laughter at one of his jokes, half the chucklers worrying whether this made them sympathizers with the Ku Klux Klan. At the University of Oregon field house the Alabama governor outdrew Goldwater by 1,500 (he got a bit carried away and shouted, “The Confederate flag will fly again!”). Vague hints were dropped about a presidential run—trial balloons ignored as too fanciful for print.
Shortly after the House passed the civil rights bill, Wallace did ten days in the heartland (on Alabama’s dime; he claimed he was there to attract industry to the state). After his success in the West, politicians couldn’t ignore him. Ohio senator Steve Young called him “a buffoon” who had “tarnished the image of our country throughout the world.” Wallace took this remark as evidence that he was getting somewhere.
He was. Speaking in Cincinnati just before CORE’s school boycott, he noted the protesters outside and said, “There are more good people like you in this country today than there are these little pinkos running around outside. But we must band together. When you and I start marching and demonstrating and carrying signs, we will close every highway in this country.” Audience members leapt to their feet. Dozens made for the exits to advance on the pickets. Richard Nixon, who knew a political opportunity when he saw one, happened to be speaking in the same city the very next day. He gave a kinder, gentler version of the same speech.
On Irv Kupcinet’s TV show in Chicago, Wallace collected gubernatorial candidate Charlie Percy’s scalp. “Martin Luther King said that Chicago was the most segregated city in the nation,” Wallace pointed out. Percy, the blood draining from his face, was forced to grant the point. Wallace cracked his most winsome grin. At a news conference he said he might run in some primaries. “If I ran outside the South and got 10 percent, it would be a victory. It would shake their eyeteeth in Washington.”
In Madison, Wisconsin, where professed socialists practically outnumbered conservatives, he awoke to the words “FUCK WALLACE” inscribed in blood-red Kool-Aid on frozen Lake Mendota outside his guesthouse room. It was February 20, a snowy day, but the weather had not kept an Oshkosh couple from making the hundred-mile drive over two-lane roads to hear him. Lloyd Herbstreith and his homemaker wife Delores wouldn’t have missed the opportunity for a hurricane. The
Herbstreiths had just chaired a massive, failed grassroots campaign to make Wisconsin the fifth state to ratify the Liberty Amendment. Since Wisconsin’s primary on April 7 was “open”—Republicans and Democrats could vote for either party’s candidates—the outcome was politically meaningless. Every Republican chose to pass it up. Conservative political junkies like the Herbstreiths were deathly bored.
Accounts vary over just when the Herbstreiths put aside their reservations about a man who, except for civil rights, had never met a government program he didn’t like, and decided to approach his camp with the proposal to run a Wallace presidential primary campaign from their Oshkosh kitchen. All it took to enter, Delores explained to intrigued aides, was to file sixty delegate and alternate candidates by March 6, no signatures required, a task she could take care of with one hand tied behind her back. She laid out the odds like a seasoned Washington operative. Governor John Reynolds, President Johnson’s favorite-son proxy, was unpopular among Milwaukee’s hundreds of thousands of Catholic white ethnics because of his unsuccessful drive for an open housing law, and he was reviled in the rural Republican precincts that had once revered Joe McCarthy. By turning over their Liberty Amendment organization (and turning their three children over to a housekeeper), they could donate to Wallace a veritable statewide machine. Herbstreith confidently predicted a third of the vote.
Wallace didn’t need much convincing. That a majority of Northerners had the same ideas about civil rights as Southerners but were chicken to say so had been a commonplace of Dixie political folklore at least since Strom Thurmond ventured to New York to scrounge up support for his Dixiecrat campaign in 1948. Thurmond’s debating tricks anticipated Wallace’s: “If you people in New York want no segregation, then abolish it and do away with your Harlem. Personally, I think it would be a mistake.... And by the same reasoning, no federal law should attempt to force the South to abandon segregation where we have it.” Then, ten years later, there was Jim Johnson, writing Clarence Manion : “States’ Rights have become household words in Ohio as much as in Arkansas or Mississippi. How well would Orval Faubus do in the North, the Midwest, and the West Coast states?”
A week before the filing deadline, Governor Reynolds made a mistake: he ventured a joke about Wallace’s presidential ambitions at a press conference. The free publicity brought enough unsolicited calls to the Herbstreiths to round out their delegate slate. Wallace flew to Madison in his official jet (the Stars and Bars on the nose replaced by the Stars and Stripes; his motto, “Stand Up for Alabama,” with “Stand Up for America”), met the couple for the first time, then formally applied for his spot on the ballot. He opened his campaign in Appleton, McCarthy’s hometown, and stumbled nervously over lines the Herbstreiths scripted for him about the sellout at Yalta. The papers hardly noticed. Polls gave him 5 percent.
Senate debate on the civil rights bill began on March 8. It was as if the opening gun had been sounded for a fortnight of race skirmishes. The next day Seattle voters, juiced by a Wallace visit in January, repealed the city’s open housing law. Two days later Malcolm X said that black “rifle clubs” were preferable to civil rights bills, and CORE’s ultramilitant New York chapters, gathered in protest against some vague enemy they called “the System,” massed at the ramps leading to the Triborough Bridge, armed with bag after bag of garbage, in an attempt to strangle traffic around the city. A second school boycott the next week roused police commissioner Michael Murphy to riot preparations against blacks seeking, he said, to “turn New York City into a battleground.”
Cleveland already was a battleground. Militants who had been beaten by white vigilantes for the sin of marching with “SEPARATE IS NOT EQUAL” signs in front of an all-white school responded by sitting in at a school construction site. A bulldozer driver chose to stay the course rather than yield to the Presbyterian minister in his path, and crushed the man to death. In San Francisco, two thousand civil rights activists, most from Berkeley’s hardy contingent, emboldened by a successful February action at the Lucky supermarket chain—filling their carts with groceries, they abandoned them at the checkout counter with the refrain “I’m so sorry, but I seem to have forgotten my purse until you hire some Negroes in public positions”—grubbed up the lobby of the Sheraton-Palace with the demand for a racial hiring agreement. Columnists Evans and Novak, recalling perhaps that at least the Young Republicans had worn suits when they had terrorized the same hotel the previous June, wrote, “Here as elsewhere the Negro is in danger of losing control over the civil rights movement to thugs and Communists.” In Washington, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama hurled a pipe bomb into the Democratic coalition during his turn to filibuster by announcing that the civil rights bill would gut labor unions’ seniority and apprentice systems. Segregationist Florida officials announced they would boycott Johnson’s Democratic National Convention. Brooklyn congressman Emmanuel Cellers, the civil rights bill’s floor manager, warned that his beloved movement was falling into the slough of “nihilism.”
Suddenly it looked like the Negro revolt might rewrite every political rule. A new word was on all lips: “backlash.” Governor Reynolds publicly goosed his estimate of how many votes Wallace would get—100,000 (his actual guess was 50,000)—to spur his volunteers, who now seemed worryingly unenergetic ; Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant clergy united to condemn “a threat to the moral quality of our nation”; a letter from the AFL-CIO to four hundred Wisconsin affiliates denounced “one of the strongest anti-labor spokesmen in America”; COPE’s brochures said that Wallace’s real goal was stealing Wisconsin jobs. And Wallace surged ahead all the while.
He had an answer for every heckle: “How many of you have read the civil rights bill? ... I am an Alabama segregationist, not a Wisconsin segregationist. If Wisconsin believes in integration, that is Wisconsin’s business, not mine.... You might spend a little less time worrying about Negroes in Alabama and a little more worrying about the Indians in Wisconsin and the conditions they live in on the reservations.” He bragged about how many more Negro college presidents there were in Alabama than in Wisconsin, told workers at the American Motors Corporation plant in Racine that under the civil rights bill a Japanese person could take their job by merely walking in and claiming that there weren’t enough of his kind on the payroll. Horrors would ensue if well-meaning senators legislated with their hearts, not their heads, and passed this monster bill that would subject state governments, corporations, and labor unions to federal takeover, install police-state kangaroo courts, and make “government master and god over man” for all time.
It almost sounded reasonable, except when it didn’t. Milwaukee’s sizable Serbian community, which had raised the roof for Kennedy in 1960, hosted Wallace at their weathered, low-ceilinged meeting hall on 57th and Oklahoma. Wallace took to the podium and scanned the seven hundred bodies packed in front of him like sardines and despaired of finding any common ground on which to reach them. The band struck up the national anthem; two or three blacks in the audience refused to rise. The MC, Bronco Gruber, a burly ex-Marine and popular tavern owner, ordered them out. The shrieks and dagger-eyed glances convinced the blacks it was wise to comply. Gruber began introducing Wallace. A black minister in clerical garb cried, “Get your dogs out!”
The veins popped on Bronco Gruber’s forehead. “I’ll tell you something about your dogs, Padre! I live on Walnut Street and three weeks ago tonight a friend of mine was assaulted by three of your countrymen or whatever you want to call them—” (the rest of the sentence was obscured by applause). “They beat up old ladies eighty-three years old, rape our womenfolk. They mug people. They won’t work. They are on relief. How long can we tolerate this? Did I go to Guadalcanal to come back to something like this!?”
It took a rousing chorus of “Dixie” to calm things down enough for Wallace to speak. It didn’t take much to bring audience members to their feet again: “A vote for this little governor will let people in Washington know that we want them to leave our houses, s
chools, jobs, businesses, and farms alone—and let us run them without any help from Washington!” It took Wallace an hour to make his way out of the building for the mobbing admirers.
Lyndon Johnson was shaken. He ordered his postmaster general, John Gronouski, a local boy, to speak at a televised rally on election eve; their President, he told viewers, was counting on Wisconsin to turn back George Wallace. Governor Reynolds now leaked another inflated estimate, that Wallace would win 175,000 votes. And when the returns came in, Wallace parted the crowded ballroom with a war dance performed in full Indian regalia, a gift from the grateful Consolidated Tribes of Wisconsin. “We won without winning!” he cried of his 265,000 votes, a quarter of the total cast. Reynolds lost his home district. Wallace won 30 percent in rock-solid-Democratic Milwaukee. He received a startling 47 percent from the brand-new Ninth Congressional District, carved out of Milwaukee’s wealthiest, best-educated suburbs.
It felt like an earthquake. But media outlets did their best to argue it meant nothing at all. “An anachronistic Southern demagogue,” sniffed the New York Times—a strange choice of words to describe a man who seemed now to occupy politics’ cutting edge.
Clif White faced the same dilemma debated in National Review’s editorial offices in 1961: the very anger that fed the right’s fires threatened to engulf its fortunes. In the Illinois primary, Margaret Chase Smith supporters had their cars egged inside and out. In California, kids snuck in and spiked the punch and stomped on the sandwiches before a huge Rockefeller reception. Another gang of zealots began stamping “GOLDWATER IN ’64” on every greenback that came through their hands. “Printing or impressing any notice or advertisement” on money was punishable by a fine of $500 per bill. The first place the Secret Service agents began looking for culprits was inside the official Goldwater campaign.
Before the Storm Page 46