Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Securing the second front, at the Young Republicans convention in February, was but perfunctory. Young Republicans had already turned back a proposed resolution denouncing “accusations, charges, and actions which tend to divide rather than unite the Republican Party.” Nelson Rockefeller, one of their leaders noted, was an “international socialist.” Why would they want to unite with that? A resolution the Young Republicans did end up passing declared liberals “regressive reactionaries” who “seek to drag the American republic into the Dark Ages.” A speech by Ronald Reagan—“We can’t justify foreign aid funds which went to the purchase of extra wives for some tribal chiefs in Kenya”—was received with delirium. It was the prelude to a vote of 256 to 33 to boycott the Republican presidential campaign if Barry Goldwater wasn’t the nominee (which was tantamount to mutiny; the bylaws of the Young Republican National Federation outlawed participation in primaries in the first place). Regarding the thirty-three who were in the minority, a woman cried, “Everyone says they’re for Goldwater—let’s find out who the finks are!”

  United Republicans of California was the third front. The group was masterminded by Rus Walton, the man behind Joe Shell’s shockingly close gubernatorial challenge against Richard Nixon in 1962, as a sort of CRA insurance policy—an organization chartered of, for, and by conservatives, under the assumption that liberals kept the California Republican Party from the control of a conservative majority only through conspiracy. The group’s paranoia was soon confirmed: the state’s Republican Party chair, Caspar Weinberger, responded to the founding of UROC by invoking a party rule banning groups with the word “Republican” in their name from raising funds without approval from the California Republican Central Committee. So UROC organized to take over the Central Committee. This party governing body’s membership was appointed, per state law, by a caucus of all Republican candidates running for state office. Veterans of Shell’s campaign revived a dormant fund, United for California, first established in 1938 to combat the far-left Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair, and used it to quietly file Republican candidates for every office in the state. Since most of the incumbents were entrenched Democrats, many far-right Republicans ran in primaries unopposed. The far right would have taken over the party—if Republican and Democratic state legislators hadn’t conspired in mid-June to amend the election code after the fact.

  Goldwater zealots, said a harried staffer, now “ran through the woods like a collection of firebugs, and I just keep running after them, like Smokey Bear, putting out fires.” Or, sometimes, helping them build fires. Outgoing California Young Republican chair Bob Gaston independently mustered eight thousand of these people to circulate petitions to put Goldwater on the primary ballot. The first candidate to file 13,702 signatures would be listed at the top of the rolls—an automatic boon in votes that in some elections made for the margin of victory. By noon on March 4, the first day signature-gathering was allowed, Goldwater had 36,000. Learning that Rockefeller (who took weeks to get enough signatures) was paying fifty cents per name, Gaston immediately mobilized to get 7,000 Rockefeller signatures—turning the money over to Goldwater. Teddy White, whom Gaston had befriended after everyone else in the office, labeling White the enemy, refused to speak with him, had never seen anything like it. Gaston, for his part, was amazed at how easy it was; the work had already been done in the previous year. He just called a loyalist from his campaign for state YR chair in every precinct—and the job took care of itself.

  And now, May 3, with the fight of their lives on their hands, over two thousand firebugs met in convention in Bakersfield. Their chairman kicked things off, from a podium draped with both the American flag and the Confederate flag, by calling Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign chairman, Tom Kuchel, a “leftwing extremist.” When Goldwater spoke, he begged to differ. As he did in his every California address, he urged party loyalty: “I am not interested in defeating any Republicans in 1964,” he said. “Let me say it again: I am not afraid of what any Republican would do to this country.” The firebugs thought entirely otherwise. But they screamed themselves hoarse for their hero nonetheless.

  Nelson Rockefeller’s big California push could be said to have kicked off two months earlier, on his Face the Nation appearance of March 8. Having ordered up enough polls to practically reproduce the state in a test tube, what Rockefeller learned was that California Republicans were terrified of increased federal spending, of Fidel Castro, and of the specter of Communist subversion of the United States from within—all issues on which Barry Goldwater enjoyed a monopoly. But Graham T. T. Molitor reminded Rockefeller of an elementary political fact: negative attacks were more effective than pushing issues anyway. Their advertising man, Nixon’s Gene Wyckoff, chipped in that they needed to construct “a first-class villain to make a first-class hero.” His PR man, Stu Spencer, thought they had to “destroy Barry Goldwater as a member of the human race.” If all voters could think about how terrifying a Goldwater presidency would be, who would worry about something so trivial as a remarriage?

  Molitor combed his Goldwater transcriptions until he found the perfect quote to begin the assault. Goldwater had argued for the development of “small, clean nuclear weapons” for battlefield use as far back as Conscience of a Conservative. Since then he had become enamored of a portable nuclear mortar called the “Davy Crockett”—whose relatively small punch (about as much as a sortie by a World War II bomber wing) he believed made it a marvelous bulwark against Soviet aggression precisely because it was tame enough to be used without fear of setting off a nuclear escalation nigh to apocalypse. Secretary McNamara—and the physicists at Lawrence Livermore who designed the portable weapon—entirely disagreed; they thought it would incinerate civilians no matter where in Europe it was fired. No one really knew; it was a question of which experts you asked. So it was, one October day in 1963, that when he was asked what he thought of a recent suggestion to cut NATO’s ground force, Goldwater opined that troops could be cut “at least by a third” simply by clarifying the power NATO commanders had to use the Crockett—which he called “just another weapon”—in the event of a Soviet advance.

  Or at least “commanders” was how it was quoted by the Washington Post, which subheaded its report “Would Give NATO Commanders Power to Use A-Weapons”—apparently placing that authority in the hands of dozens of officers, perhaps among them some real-life General Jack D. Ripper. Goldwater would later insist that the word he had used was “commander”; he may have in fact said “commanders” but meant the plural in the chronological sense—the current commander, General Lyman Lemnitzer; then the one who came on after he retired; and so forth. Be that as it may. Nelson Rockefeller launched his California campaign strategy two days before the New Hampshire balloting by casually dropping the matter into a conversation with the panel on Face the Nation. He was all for a strong defense, he said. But calling nuclear arms “just another weapon,” as Goldwater had—that was “appalling,” a tempting of “world suicide.”

  The audacity of Rockefeller’s remark was rather breathtaking. “The distinction between nuclear warfare and conventional warfare, which is paramount in the public mind, leads to unrealistic policy decisions”: that was the point argued in the very Rockefeller brothers report upon which he had based his campaign strategy in 1960. He hadn’t disclaimed it since; in New Hampshire, in fact, he had accepted a warm endorsement from the author of these words, nuclear scientist Edward Teller. Eisenhower had said the identical thing about battlefield nukes—that they could be used like “a bullet or any other weapon”—in 1955, when Rockefeller was Ike’s special assistant for psychological warfare.

  But it was Goldwater who had blundered into the role of scapegoat for all America’s nuclear fears. It was an opportunity too ripe to be missed. “Responsible Republicanism rejects this irresponsible approach to the conduct of American foreign policy!” Rockefeller would cry in his speeches. Then he would make a plea to honor “the brotherhood of man, the
fatherhood of God.” Reporters began referring to the refrain as BOMFOG. At the White House, Lyndon Johnson was taking notes.

  But it wasn’t enough to make California fall in love with Nelson Rockefeller. Through back-breaking effort, Spencer-Roberts was able to drum up capacity crowds for Rockefeller’s rallies, but mostly by relying on non-Republican audiences, especially blacks (whom Rockefeller urged to change their registration to Republican to stop Goldwater “and his John Birch supporters”). But if publicists could lead the masses to Rockefeller, they could not make them drink. At Berkeley, Rocky was swamped by some five thousand students outside the university’s symbolic portal, Sather Gate; he then addressed a crowd that spilled into an auditorium lobby and stood outside listening to loudspeakers. They interrupted him with applause exactly once—when he praised “this great educational institution.”

  Molitor was desperate to raise the stakes. He had found another bombshell: Goldwater had suffered two psychological episodes in the 1930s. But higher-ups said that exploiting the fact was stepping over the line. Molitor kept on pushing the idea; the image of a mentally unstable man with his finger on the nuclear trigger would be absolutely devastating. He pointed to the Goldwater pamphlets collecting at headquarters in an ever-mounting pile accusing Rockefeller of every sin short of congress with domestic animals. Anything was justified, Molitor said, against a man who produced this swill. (Of course, Goldwater wasn’t producing it at all: the firebugs were too numerous for the candidate to control even if he wanted to.) Then the May issue of Good Housekeeping hit supermarket shelves. It featured an interview with Peggy Goldwater. She described how, when working eighteen-hour days opening a new store in Prescott in 1937, her husband’s “nerves broke completely.” The problem abated, she said, then resurfaced two years later, never to come back again. It was the interviewer, a journalist named Alvin Toffler, who chose to describe these incidents with the fateful words “nervous breakdown.” Muckraking liberal columnist and radio commentator Drew Pearson picked up the story and started the drumbeat: Goldwater wasn’t mentally fit to be Commander in Chief.

  If Nelson Rockefeller had been a candidate of more ordinary means, he might have begun to question the expense of maintaining an elaborate opposition research operation to impugn a campaign so skilled at delivering knockout blows against itself.

  Barry Goldwater would have had to have been revealed as Beelzebub himself for his partisans to abandon him. His appearances in California were festivals. In the parking lots, where cars were decked out in “ARRIBA CON BARRY” bumper stickers and “AuH2O + GOP + 1964 = VICTORY!” license plates, a group of YAFers calling themselves The Goldwaters (whose banjo player, Dana Rohrabacher, organized a 120-member Goldwater club at his high school) sang selections from their LP, “Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals.” Vendors hawked gold-plated jewelry, pins of every size and description, Goldwater trading stamps, Goldwater crayons, Goldwater cologne and aftershave. Then the throng would stream into sweltering halls, stuffing the “Barrels for Barry” at the entrances to bursting with small bills. Lissome young things in cowboy hats and sashes—“Goldwater Girls”—guided traffic, cooling themselves with ice-cold Gold Water (the guy from Atlanta followed the campaign in his truck) or cardboard paddles with “GOLDWATER FAN CLUB” printed on one side and a winking elephant crushing a donkey to death on the reverse.

  The crowd might be warmed up with a choir singing patriotic songs, by organized cheering or an elaborate flag presentation of parade-ground proportions. When they were whipped to a fever pitch the candidate would enter with family in tow (emphasizing the integrity of his own family was one of Goldwater’s few concessions to competitive strategy—Rockefeller’s wife was, after all, entering her eighth month of pregnancy) flanked by a retinue that kept jubilant crowds from mobbing him. Reporters wedged themselves in for a few seconds of chitchat (after the disasters in New Hampshire, press conferences were no longer scheduled); a minister offered an invocation. There were interminable addresses by local pols. The inevitable cry: “We Want Barry! We Want Barry!” Goldwater approached the stump, suffered the noise for a few minutes. Then came the raised hand, the growl: “If you’ll shut up, you’ll get him.”

  Then he’d stick a hand in a pocket, slouch into the podium—and deliver overcooked broccoli to a crowd demanding raw meat.

  Sometimes the rallies were broadcast on TV, now that there was more money coming in. The rich, well-connected, and clever Washington finance committee Clif White had put together—the one that was always calling for Denison Kitchel’s head—was hitting its stride. The maximum any individual was allowed to donate to a single campaign committee being $5,000, they established ten separate paper committees—and brilliantly arranged for Goldwater’s photograph book, The Face of Arizona, to be sold to businesses in bulk, 100 percent of the proceeds going to the campaign. California oilman Henry Salvatori had raised $1 million for the primary; the Goldwater committee in Montana, where victory was assured, turned over its treasury. Goldwater’s finance crew was also knocked off guard by a new phenomenon. Small donations—the kind that in most campaigns proved mostly symbolic—were making up a considerable portion of the take. A thirteen-year-old sent $5 from his allowance, a twelve-year-old $15 earned cutting grass, a seven-year-old girl a card with three pennies taped on it and the message “I say a prayer for Senator Goldwater every night.” Two young steadies pledged to give up their Saturday night movie and donated the money they saved. No one knew quite what to make of the development.

  But Goldwater didn’t play well on TV. Letters and numbers darkened his presentations: RS-70 and B-70 (bomber programs the Pentagon was scrapping); A-11 (a plane Lyndon Johnson claimed was a new fighter but Goldwater said was really just a reconnaissance plane); TFX (a fighter General Dynamics was building in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas despite the brass’s insistence it could be built better and more cheaply in California); 1970 (by which time a bomber gap would turn “the shield of the Republic into a Swiss cheese wall”). He attacked Johnson’s poverty program, which, since Johnson had cleverly named it the War on Poverty, made it look like Goldwater was rooting for poverty to win. He did little better with another new theme: Vietnam. Johnson said American involvement was the same as it had been a decade before. Goldwater implored his listeners to acknowledge that America was in a war in Vietnam. U.S. News had printed letters from a flier killed in action, Captain Edward G. Shank Jr. of Winamac, Indiana: “The American people are being told that U.S. military forces are merely training South Vietnamese flyers and fighters,” he wrote his wife and children. “We are doing the fighting.” Goldwater angrily read from the dead flier’s letters on the stump, and rained insults on his old enemy “Yo-Yo” McNamara (so nicknamed for his practice of jetting off to Southeast Asia every few months), who “has done more to tear down the morale of our military establishment than any secretary we’ve ever had.” But viewers were not finding the rhetoric compelling. There was no political advantage to be gained from bringing up Vietnam; Rockefeller spoke out on it just as often and more critically. Johnson was lying about Vietnam—Gold—water knew it. But how could someone accusing the President of the United States of lying be taken seriously? It just wasn’t done.

  He was ahead in the polls, although his Wilshire Boulevard headquarters, which was knotted through with so many plots and subplots it could have been a Victorian triple-decker novel, had little to do with the fact; it was all they could do to nail down next week’s itinerary. The firebugs helped, though sometimes they hurt. What really seemed to be winning voters were Goldwater’s gentle sallies on civil rights.

  Property values had become religion amidst the sun-dappled lawns of suburban southern California. “The essence of freedom is the right to discriminate,” CRA’s Nolan Frizzelle explained. “In socialist countries, they always take away this right in order to complete their takeover.” After the state legislature passed a bill prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, it hardly took the blink of an eye for the
California Real Estate Association’s new “Committee for Home Protection” to collect 583,029 signatures—326,486 from L.A. County alone—to put on the November ballot Proposition 14, an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting for all time laws that impinged upon the right of individuals to sell or rent property to “any persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses”—segregationism in its politer, more patriotic form. The California Real Estate Association’s billboards soon blanketed the state: “FREEDOM: RENT OR SELL TO WHOM YOU CHOOSE: VOTE YES ON 14.” (“DON’T LEGALIZE HATE,” read the enfeebled opposition’s.) The Los Angeles Times—which had endorsed Nelson Rockefeller—agreed, more or less, with Nolan Frizzelle: “Housing equality cannot safely be achieved at the expense of still another basic right,” the “ancient right” of the property owner of “using and disposing of his private property in whatever manner he deems appropriate.” The argument couldn’t withstand scrutiny; after all, no one complained that owners were constrained from disposing of their private property in whatever manner they deemed appropriate when they inked formal and (after the Supreme Court outlawed them in 1948) informal racial covenants. And not all support for Prop 14 was couched so patriotically: blacks “haven’t made themselves acceptable” for white neighborhoods, a Young Republican leader declared. Polls showed that 58 percent of voters of both parties supported Prop 14. Goldwater held fast to the position that it wasn’t his right as an Arizonan to come in and tell a Californian what to do about this thing. But it wasn’t hard to infer which side he preferred. Nor, for that matter, Nelson Rockefeller—who had seen to it that New York became one of the first states with an open housing law.