Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Other such mischief threatened to unweave the campaign organization itself. Back when reporters began surveying the ruins of the Young Republican convention in San Francisco in 1963 to discern whether the GOP was being overrun by its Birchite flank, they should have been paying attention to the sixth annual Human Events Political Action Conference two weekends later and three thousand miles away at D.C.’s Statler-Hilton. It was a huge event. Forty-one congressmen, including Goldwater, appeared. Each delegate received a thirty-page guide on how to be sure his or her state sent a conservative delegation to the Republican Convention. Most of the tips were practical, such as winning six delegates over a majority in district delegate elections, in case the Establishment stole the five at-large delegate slots.

  But attendees were also warned gravely that their enemies would “attempt to split the vote for legitimate conservative delegate candidates by entering ‘Trojan horse’ conservatives.” Word of such danger spread across the rightward fringe. And the result was splitting headaches for Clif White and Dick Kleindienst: now, no matter the state, they could be sure that at any Republican convention they would face wackos certain that White and Kleindienst were Trojan horses. At the Wyoming state convention Kleindienst was asked why, if he was really a conservative, he was fighting a resolution to replace the Supreme Court with a tribunal of the fifty individual state chief justices. Because, Kleindienst replied, Barry told him to. To which the militants, who preferred the expediency of assuming Goldwater’s views accorded exactly with their own, were only more convinced: this Kleindienst must be an impostor.

  White and Kleindienst fought sabotage attempts with preemptive strikes, asking volunteers outright if they were members of the John Birch Society. That strategy only redoubled the fringe’s paranoia. Sometimes the co-field directors tried co-opting what they called the “nuts.” When a Goldwater committee backed by Evan Mecham and rife with Birchers began chartering its own local Americans for Goldwater chapters around the country that, since the group was based in Phoenix, recruits assumed must be “official,” White decided he couldn’t afford to lose this organization—they had a membership in the thousands and rising, including a fantastic representation in vital California, sorted on IBM cards by all kinds of useful demographic categories—and he implored Mecham’s group to dump the Birchers from the payroll and merge its effort into his own. They agreed, and White retreated. But that didn’t work either: Americans for Goldwater brought back the Birchers and kept on establishing their maverick clubs, siphoning off volunteers and money wherever they alighted.

  The biggest headache of all was in Westchester County. Rockefeller had scheduled the New York primary for June 2 to coincide with California’s in the hope of sweeping 178 delegates, over a quarter of the total needed to nominate, in one hellzapoppin’ day. For Goldwater to shave off just a few delegates in New York would be a public relations coup. And to win the Twenty-sixth Congressional District delegate race—the Westchester district containing the Rockefeller estate—was a holy grail. The district also happened to contain Clif White’s own suburban home. He was expected to deliver it. Earlier, Birchers had taken over the county YAF chapter. Their newsletter claimed that the Soviets outlined a plan in 1931 promising to lull America, beginning in the 1960s, with “the most spectacular peace movement on record,” then “smash them with our clenched fist!”—and speculated about which traitors in the government were responsible for abetting the Soviets’ plan by pushing such “peace” initiatives as the visits of the Moscow Circus and the Bolshoi Ballet. Now members faced trial for infiltrating a Yonkers department store, opening packages of lingerie they claimed had been manufactured in some Iron Curtain country and inserting cards reading, “Don’t patronize Klein’s. Klein’s is Communist.” Then they reconstituted as Volunteers for Goldwater, filed a delegate slate for the New York primary—and were running a successful campaign to brand Clif White’s delegate slate Rockefeller stalking-horses.

  White’s deputy Vince Leibell entered a credentials challenge in state court. The Birchers won. White sighed, swallowed his pride, and did the only thing he could to shut these people up. “I VERY MUCH APPRECIATE YOUR INTEREST AND SUPPORT OF MY CANDIDACY,” began the telegram headed “Barry M. Goldwater, U.S. Senate, Washington.” “I KNOW THAT YOU WANT THIS TO BE THE MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN POSSIBLE, THEREFORE, IT MUST BE A WELL COORDINATED PART OF OUR NATIONAL STRATEGY. TO INSURE THAT THIS WILL HAPPEN, I ASK THAT YOU COORDINATE ALL YOUR ACTIVITIES, INCLUDING DELEGATE SELECTION, UNDER THE DIRECTION OF MR. VINCENT L. LEIBELL, JR., WHO IS HANDLING MY CAMPAIGN IN THE DOWNSTATE NEW YORK AREA.”

  It was humiliating. Bringing in the Big Gun was the last thing White wanted to do. More setbacks like this and Goldwater might decide White was an unworthy candidate for the RNC chairmanship. So he worked harder. It was the only thing he could do.

  One April day began at 5 a.m. in a hotel room in Topeka after White had wiped the sleep from his eyes from a forty-five-minute nap. He had spent the night lining up votes for a floor fight at the Kansas convention. Rockefeller, desperate to manufacture support in the Midwest, had quietly managed to secure the four at-large delegate slots traditionally chosen before the state convention convened. By customary droit du seigneur, Governor John Anderson had the right to select the remaining six at the convention, then name himself as delegation chair. White would have preferred not to have to disturb the tradition ; Anderson was chairman of the Republican Governors’ Conference, someone Goldwater would have to work with if he were elected President. But Anderson was also a liberal—and if he fell in line behind Rockefeller, White feared that a stampede of some dozen once-reluctant fellow governors might follow. That, White decided, could not happen. He made discreet overtures to secure Anderson’s support and was rebuffed. He threatened to put up his own candidate, outgoing committeewoman Mrs. Effie B. Semple, for delegation chair, and to demolish Anderson in the roll-call vote that was supposed to be but a rubber stamp of the governor’s will. Anderson laughed the threat off. White decided he had no choice but to crush him. The governor of Kansas would play ball or he would just have to watch the Republican National Convention on TV.

  White had lined up his ducks quite handily. And they followed his instructions to the letter. By the time the session opened, there was nothing left but to watch from the balcony as the confusion spread before him. What guilt conservative delegates felt at double-crossing their governor was vitiated by the sentimental appeal of crowning a frilly-hatted little old lady from Baxter Springs as their chair—another brilliant move on White’s part. Once Anderson’s courtiers realized what had hit them, they sprang the oldest trick in the book: they tried to railroad White’s pick by nominating another Goldwaterite to split the anti-Anderson vote. White was awfully proud to see the alacrity with which his floor runners set upon the unlucky dupe and demanded that she withdraw her name. The roll call was nip and tuck; Sedwick County’s chairman—unilaterally revoking his caucus’s decision to give at least half their votes to the governor—put Effie over the top. The room exploded.

  White felt someone tugging at his sleeve as he retreated for the victory party. It was Time correspondent Murray Garst. “Clif,” he said, “you were awfully nasty.”

  Nasty, maybe. But what other candidate had 200 delegates in the bag?

  White publicly claimed 165. His strategy was to pace Goldwater’s success so that it would peak by convention time—and to have a store of secret delegates to dangle before whichever other candidate should need disciplining down the line. But his plan wasn’t helped when Goldwater offered, unbidden, an estimate of 435 to the press, nor when Dick Kleindienst blurted out the number 600. White sighed to see his misgivings about his bosses confirmed once more.

  Kleindienst’s work in the primaries was amateurish. There was a string of them in the Midwest through the spring. Since Goldwater was the choice in polls of a mere 14 percent of rank-and-file Republicans, Rockefeller of 9 percent, in each state moderate contenders made delicat
e maneuvers to be the one candidate entered against Rockefeller, Goldwater, or both to try to capture that huge “anything but” vote and declare a popular mandate that might inspire a delegate stampede. It put the Goldwater campaign in a tight spot. Barry had to appear in each state a few times so as not to insult the troops—but if he appeared too often and lost, and that happened in too many states, it would make his delegate victory in San Francisco look like some kind of banana republic coup. Take Illinois. He spent a weekend in Chicago dropping in at a Republican women’s conference and attending a massive Captive Nations Day rally at the International Amphitheater. Four days later he scored 62 percent—a public relations disaster, because his office had predicted 80 percent. The press called him the loser. White knew the delicate game of expectations was as much a part of politics as the grip-and-grin. Kleindienst seemed either unwilling or unable to play it.

  In Indiana the “anything but” vote went to the redoubtable Harold E. Stassen: boy-wonder governor of Minnesota in 1936, a presidential prospect in 1940, the loser in an upset to Dewey in 1948, sold out by a young lawyer named Warren Burger in his favorite-son bid in 1952, architect of a failed Richard Nixon purge in 1956, the losing candidate for governor of Pennsylvania and mayor of Philadelphia in the years since—the Republican Party’s embarrassing old Don Quixote. (When he announced he was running for President once more, a politically precocious youngster in Queens dubbed his soapbox derby car “Harold Stassen’s Ticker Tape Parade.”) Stassen had managed to find his name the only other one on the Indiana Republican ballot besides Goldwater’s. He financed a raft of brochures promising “progress for all along the middleway, avoiding both extremes,” and asserting that a Stassen delegation would “open the door at the convention to consideration of the other five Republican candidates: Ambassador Lodge, Richard Nixon, Governor Rockefeller, Governor Romney, and Governor Scranton.” Anyone-but-Goldwater and the middle-of-the-road: that was all it took for oafish Harold Stassen to siphon off an embarrassing 27 percent of the votes from Goldwater in one of the most conservative states in the country. And thanks to Kleindienst’s inability to put up a publicity firewall, commentators continued to refer to Goldwater’s “wretched showing” in a primary where he won upwards of 70 percent of the vote.

  At any rate, few were paying attention to the Republican race. Indiana was George Wallace’s stand-or-fall battle. Open-primary Wisconsin could be written off as a fluke. But party loyalty was sacred in Indiana. If Wallace could peel off significant numbers from Johnson’s stand-in, Governor Matthew Welsh, that would mean the backlash was for real. Dozens of print and television correspondents descended on the Hoosier State; Walter Cronkite moved his newscast to a storefront in downtown Indianapolis. Wallace’s act had been polished until it gleamed; at Butler University, his kickoff speech began to jeers and closed with 56 percent of those present saying he had their vote.

  Since taking the podium in front of Bronco Gruber and his friends in Milwaukee’s Serb Hall, Wallace drew sustenance from a new theme. A crime upsurge was now the obsession of barrooms and water coolers across the land: on March 27 the New York Times reported that in a white middle-class neighborhood in Queens, thirty-eight neighbors were awakened by the screams of a young woman named Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered over the course of an hour, and no one bothered to call the police. That the perpetrator was black, although the Times did not print the fact, soon became well known. And Wallace began playing the attendant fears like a violin.

  “If you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today, the man who knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital,” he said.

  “They’re building a new bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia.”

  “Anyone here from Philadelphia? You know, they can’t even have night football games anymore because of the trouble between the races. And that’s the city of brotherly love!”

  The message was moving voters. Governor Welsh warned thousands of patronage employees that they backed Wallace on pain of their jobs. Registered Republicans requesting a Democratic ballot were forced to pledge to vote for the Democratic candidate for President in November (and were threatened with having their names published). The state’s two Democratic senators sent out franked letters pronouncing that a vote for Welsh was a vote for the memory of John F. Kennedy.

  In Indiana Wallace beat his Wisconsin totals by 5 percentage points. He earned almost three-quarters of the vote in one Gary steelworkers’ district. “The noises you hear now,” he declared, “are the teeth falling out in Indiana.”

  It was a good thing few people were paying attention to the Republicans in Indiana, because by now it appeared that White was presiding over a coup. He didn’t count the number of delegates he’d secured anymore; he counted down from the 655 needed to nominate. His secret ledger read 400, four-fifths of those chosen to date. He claimed 250 publicly. He wanted to have at least 172 with which to surprise the public if Rockefeller won California on June 2. But once more undisciplined Arizonans spilled the secret. Not long ago Time had declared Goldwater “flat on his back.” Now the magazine reported: “Suddenly, like a brush fire racing out of control, the word crackled among informed Republicans: Goldwater’s almost got it.... Goldwater kept collecting delegates while the unavoweds and disavowed collected press clippings.”

  Though how the party would sell a candidate to the nation that polls suggested only 14 percent of Republicans supported, White did not appear to consider.

  “Far more united and at peace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights, than it has been for a long time ”: future generations might be excused for wondering how many conflagrations need burn, or how few votes Bill Scranton need win, before columnists would break down and concede the point that America was a nation deeply divided against itself. But the architecture of their thought would not permit it.

  As usual there was much to see that was perfectly fantastic at Flushing Park in Queens at the World’s Fair that opened on April 22: the inevitable jet packs and videophones; the tractor of the future that could hew roads from unspoiled jungle as if scooping up so much ice cream; (slumless) underwater cities. But the true wonder of the 1964 World’s Fair lay in the things that weren’t futuristic, things American citizens could see right now, right out their windows. The candy-colored globules, hexagons, and floating wings of the great corporate pavilions were designed by the same architects, in the same manner, as their corporate headquarters downtown. The most popular attraction was simultaneously on view at your local Ford dealership: the sporty new Mustang, the first car designed and marketed as a second car for the kids. IBM’s pavilion, a tribute to its speedy new Selectric typewriter, was a giant ball with raised letters across the surface; AT&T arrayed its new “Touch-Tone” phones around the grounds; RCA hosted a “Color Television Communications Center.” The “audio-animatronic” tableaux Walt Disney designed for Pepsi’s “It’s a Small World,” G.E.’s “Progressland,” and Illinois’s “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” adopted technology from the wizards in Orange County who engineered missile guidance systems. (Mr. Lincoln uttered a quote that was popular among Orange County conservatives obsessed with the menace of creeping socialism: “If destruction is our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”) The whole thing, Time observed proudly, was not so much a vision of the future as a tribute to the present—a “glittering mirror of national opulence.”

  It was the apotheosis of the world according to Lyndon Johnson. “Hell, we’ve barely begun to solve our problems,” he would say. “And we can do it all. We’ve got the wherewithal.” The World’s Fair was forged by the kind of can-do middle-of-the-road industrialists he was so successfully recruiting away from Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party. Everywhere it rebuked Goldwater’s untoward insistence that the world was a battleground of opposing worldviews. Wycliffe Bible Translators’ “2,000 Tribes” exhibit depicted the world’s dark-skinned masses
falling peaceably in line behind the Christian West. The pavilion sponsored by a consortium of conservative groups, the Hall of Free Enterprise (where perhaps they spent their time bemoaning the tens of millions of dollars the federal government appropriated for the fair), didn’t even show up on the official map.

  The future would embarrass the 1964 World’s Fair. One pavilion “demonstrated” the safe harnessing of nuclear fusion. The fair’s megalomaniacal promoter, Robert Moses, gutted many a peaceful Queens neighborhood to lay down his new Van Wyck Expressway in time for the opening (though the streets had been less peaceful since Parents and Taxpayers began agitating in the vicinity against the board of education’s latest busing plan). Architect Philip Johnson was given free rein to commission pieces by exciting young artists outside the New York State pavilion. A funny little man called Andy Warhol contributed Thirteen Most Wanted Men, a mural consisting of old FBI mug shots, mostly of men who had since been exonerated. No one expected that spitting on J. Edgar Hoover’s good name (instead of producing, say, sweeping, high-gloss, colorful abstract shapes) was something exciting young artists would care to do. Moses ordered the mural whitewashed. Though the Unisphere, the enormous stainless-steel globe at the center of the grounds, was not dismantled when its patron, United States Steel, was convicted in a price-fixing scheme.