Round about May 12, rioting ensued when George Wallace, contesting his third and final primary, spoke in the racially troubled shoreline community of Cambridge, Maryland. In a bourbon-soaked meeting in Hubert Humphrey’s Senate chambers, Senator Dirksen was finally won over once and for all to the civil rights bill, and he immediately set off on the task of convincing 80 percent of his fellow Republicans to vote for cloture. And Barry Goldwater was affording his audience the warm assurance, “You cannot pass a law that will make me like you—or you like me. That is something that can only happen in our hearts.” Goldwater’s audience was unlikely aware that this was a close paraphrase from the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson: that “prejudice, if it exists, is not created by the law of the land and cannot be changed by the law.” They just gave Goldwater his biggest applause of the speech.
And since he was in Madison Square Garden, that was a lot of applause indeed. Goldwater’s Manhattan rally on May 12 was perhaps the most elaborate television commercial ever filmed. The buttoned-down New York audience who, according to one observer, “put the accent on the old arena’s middle name”; the raft of Republican congressmen on the dais; the Negro choral group (one tenor had to sing the parts of a baritone who was boycotting the performance); the bunting, the banners, the red, white, and blue balloons—all were but props in a stage play designed to convince California moderates that Barry Goldwater was not the plaything of the kooks who dropped flyers in their mailboxes decrying the Council on Foreign Relations’ plot to poison the water supply.
The effect may have been undermined when Representative John Ashbrook drew peals of laughter by referring to a certain prominent columnist as “Walter Looselippmann,” or when the crowd booed every time the President’s name was mentioned. But something seemed to be working. Rockefeller had been gaining. Now he was fading. It likely wasn’t the literature the Goldwater campaign had finally put out—Senator Goldwater Speaks Out on the Issues, a booklet of one-page position statements in room-temperature prose on subjects like “Defense Strategy for the Space Age” and “Labor-Management Relations.” And Goldwater certainly wasn’t playing to his base. Sometimes he proclaimed an ideal that his more perfervid supporters would generally denounce as Lippmannite “one-worldism.” “The next logical step” after NATO, he told one interviewer, would be “a political alliance” that “united much of the world.” When asked accusingly on a radio call-in show whether he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he answered, “I don’t know, frankly, if it even exists anymore.” Sometimes he spoke of his supporters as if they came from another planet. “I hope I’m as wrong as I could be,” he spluttered in an ABC interview, “but these—this is how hard these people are. They want a conservative; they’ve been thwarted at convention after convention, and this time I think they’re in earnest.”
But he had no intention of rejecting the kooks. With 2.5 million registered Republicans to convince, he needed all the warm bodies and cold cash he could get. “The senator is too busy to run a security check,” a candid staffer told a reporter. “Anybody who wants to carry a leaflet can carry a leaflet. We’ll take the money of anybody who isn’t on the Attorney General’s list. They’re not going to stop each check and ask, ‘Does this guy think right?’ All they’re going to do is deposit the checks as fast as they can and hope to God they don’t bounce.”
Then May 15, and apparent disaster. Immediately after Rockefeller won Oregon, he leapfrogged Goldwater in California polls by 11 points. The swing, his campaign leaders were thrilled to note, came just in time for every registered Republican in California to receive a Rockefeller mailing designed to finish Goldwater off once and for all.
The brochure’s cover asked, “Whom do you want in the room with the H-bomb button?” Goldwater was pictured with the caption “This Man Stands Outside—By Himself.” Rockefeller was pictured alongside Nixon, Romney, Lodge, and Scranton, with the caption “These Men Stand Together on the Party’s Principles.” The tag line was “Which Do You Want, a Leader? Or a Loner?,” which was ironic: the purpose of the pamphlet was to hint that Rockefeller would not necessarily be the leader that stopped Goldwater—that by voting for Rockefeller’s delegation, you were really voting for whichever person moderates anointed at the convention to stop Goldwater from his first-ballot victory.
The brochure blew up in Rockefeller’s face. With greater and lesser degrees of dispatch, Scranton, Nixon, and Romney, who had never given their permission for the use of their names in this tacit endorsement, all disowned themselves from the ad in open letters. And whatever Rockefeller support there had been in the GOP’s highest reaches commenced to unravel. Lodge had already officially bowed out of the race and donated his organization to Rockefeller—but only a third of the California volunteers Lodge’s campaign had recruited agreed to switch their allegiance to the governor. Then Eisenhower told reporters, “I personally believe that Goldwater is not an extremist as some people have made him, but in any event we’re all Republicans.” Goldwater responded in a triumphant press release: “Governor Rockefeller stands alone in his refusal to commit himself to support the party’s choice.”
Two weeks before its primary day, Mississippi responded to an epidemic of church bombings by acquitting Byron de la Beckwith for the second time and increasing bail thirtyfold for misdemeanors such as disturbing the peace, and 43 percent of Maryland Democrats gave George Wallace their vote in the largest primary turnout in state history. They “went to the polls with big grins on their faces,” a local editor marveled. “I never saw anything like it.” Wallace’s opponent Governor Brewster said the voters had been duped by a “pack of mindless thugs... stewed in the vile corruption of the same ruthless power that one finds at either end of the political spectrum, right or left.” Rockefeller switchboards began lighting up with callers spewing invective after his ugly “Leader or a Loner?” pamphlet—and to issue the occasional bomb, and even assassination, threat. Rockefeller changed the locks on all his campaign offices. He recited these outrages in every speech: “This is the kind of extremist tactics that have been evident throughout this campaign.” Given that he employed thousands for his campaign, Rockefeller found it hard to believe that all the nastiness being hurled his way could be the work of volunteers acting unbidden. Goldwater, more courtly, neither mentioned nor blamed Rockefeller for the Goldwater billboards that were mysteriously chainsawed at the base in the middle of the night; the Rockefeller agents provocateurs in Goldwater buttons bellowing at TV cameras that Rocky was a nigger lover; or the black-suited security guards Goldwater’s people hired to walk beside him, scan windows, and lie in wait sniper-style on rooftops as he rode his palomino in Phoenix’s “Rodeo of Rodeos” parade in the face of a death threat. Since the Kennedy assassination, such threats had become relatively routine.
Many a political science professor was taking class time just then to sum up the semester’s lesson on the unique genius of the American political system for quieting the voices of violence, discord, and extremism.
A television blitz for “the responsible Republican governor of New York” made it difficult to find anything else on TV in the Golden State, and Rockefeller’s 1,200 paid phone solicitors made it hard to sit peacefully through dinner (though Clif White shut down the entire operation for some time by situating hundreds of volunteers at pay phones to jam the lines). Spencer-Roberts had subcontracted separate public relations agencies to court raisin growers and wine makers, Spanish speakers, blacks, and more; among their other coups was to compile the names and addresses of all graduates of Negro colleges now living in California, who were importuned once more to change their registration from Democrat to Republican. A Rockefeller “truth squad” of California assemblymen now followed Goldwater wherever he spoke (“If they will step up and say I am a liar to my face,” Goldwater told reporters on his campaign plane, “they’ll get the reaction of a Westerner to that kind of treatment”). Rockefeller’s media men followed TV producers in Los An
geles with offers of an expense-account lunch. One day Rocky was scheduled to make six stops, and just before he headed out, his schedulers added twelve more. He sunk to (not entirely unfair) accusations that Goldwater was working to divert precious Colorado River water from California to Arizona.
It was a Rockefeller juggernaut that Dean Burch beheld when he traveled the state for an inspection tour in the middle of the month. That, and the fact that in many areas of the state an official Goldwater campaign did not exist at all. Radio and television time had been bought, but no spots had been produced; not a single ad, not even for newspapers, had been produced. Knowland’s strategy appeared to be to travel around the country repeating, like a broken record, that Goldwater would win by half a million votes; the firebugs had given the campaign such a bad reputation that once-reliable conservative businessmen refused to let their names be used in ads for fear of economic backlash. Some wouldn’t even contribute money lest their names be on record. Goldwater confronted Knowland at a hotel by the airport and unceremoniously dumped him. A team from the Washington office was on its way west to rescue the campaign, as if it were starting over from the very beginning.
They worked in a rented suite rumored to have once belonged to Greta Garbo. It was like something out of the movies—Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland throwing up a show in the old barn. Chuck Lichenstein journeyed to Los Angeles with only a toothbrush, a change of underwear, and a satchel filled with $15,000 in cash, expecting to fly back the next morning; he ended up returning to Washington two weeks later, exhausted, with an entire new wardrobe. One day, after plating a brochure responding to Rocky’s “Leader or a Loner?” salvo, he called a printer, introduced himself, and said, “You don’t know me and you’ve never heard of me. We need to print a million pamphlets. The problem is, I need them tomorrow.” The printer demanded $35,000 up front. Lichenstein spent the day at the plant, signing over checks as they arrived to cover each new run of a few cartons more.
The pamphlet itself was weak: hemmed in by the diktat not to attack any Republican, it consisted of a dreary wall of quotes from worthies like Nixon, Scranton, Romney, and Eisenhower, counterpoised by Goldwater’s almost identical ones, to demonstrate that it was Goldwater, not Rockefeller, who was in the Republican mainstream (“If he is, it must be a meandering stream,” Rockefeller now joked superciliously in speeches). The Goldwater campaign’s TV spots were little better. One opened with a shot of Goldwater upside down as a voice-over reeled off misconceptions about his positions, and the image slowly turned right side up as the record was set straight; another featured Goldwater ad-libbing rambling responses to the same points, answering questions asked by men on the street—terrible politics, letting the opponent seize the agenda by repeating his charges; the effect was mainly to remind viewers of them.
Back in Washington there was a mass mailing to supporters urging them to scour their address books for “relatives, school chums, business associates, old army buddies, and Christmas card lists for persons you know that are living in California.” In the finance office, George Humphrey, Arthur Summerfield, and other very rich, prestigious, conservative Republicans availed themselves of their own Christmas-card lists to raise $500,000 in two days to pay for the homestretch push. The Greta Garbo crew hardly slept. Some even missed the candidate’s appearance on Sunday morning, May 24, on Howard K. Smith’s political chat show Issues and Answers.
Smith addressed a question of the moment. McNamara had returned from his latest trip to Vietnam (where he had almost been assassinated by a Vietcong demolition team) proclaiming, “We’ll stay for as long as it takes.” The situation was now clearly deteriorating; “ERROR UPON ERROR,” read a recent Wall Street Journal editorial headline. The Administration had just asked Congress for $125 million in new aid to the beleaguered Khanh government. And all the while, resupply and reinforcements continued to pour in for the Vietcong from the North over the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail; if anything, they increased. How, Smith asked, did Goldwater think it could be stopped?
“It’s not as easy as it sounds because these are not trails that are out in the open,” Goldwater allowed, removing the glasses for emphasis, revealing uncharacteristic bags under his eyes. “There have been several suggestions made. I don’t think we would use any of them. But defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done. When you remove the foliage, you remove the cover.” It could be done, he added, “in a way that would not endanger life.”
Wouldn’t that risk a fight with China? Smith asked. “You might have to,” Goldwater responded. “Either that, or we have a war dragged out and dragged out. A defensive war is never won.”
Months earlier Goldwater had gone even further in an interview—insisting that atomic weapons should be used—and no one had paid any attention. But after Dr. Strangelove, a threshold had been crossed. Now merely mentioning the Bomb as a bad idea that had been proposed was enough to seal the conclusion for much of the voting public: Barry Goldwater was a maniac.
“GOLDWATER’S PLAN TO USE VIET A-BOMB,” blared the San Francisco Examiner (subhead: “I’d Risk a War”). Bobby Kennedy joked that Goldwater had come up with “a solution for crime in Central Park. He would use conventional nuclear weapons and defoliate it.” The Herald Tribune tendentiously, maliciously observed, “Goldwater wasn’t asked, nor did he comment on, the point that U.S. use of weapons in Southeast Asia producing fallout would violate the U.S.-British-Russian pact of 1963 banning both nuclear testing and explosions except underground.” The article went on to note that Goldwater had also prepared for the homestretch in California by changing “his view that it is improper for the federal government to intervene to integrate local school systems”—even though he had abandoned that view years, not days, earlier. And then, in the same issue, the Tribune dropped yet another bomb. Walter Thayer had prevailed upon his friend Dwight Eisenhower to write an essay setting down his views on the Republican nomination. The former President said he preferred a candidate representing “responsible, forward-looking Republicanism.” The word “responsible” was unmistakable: Rockefeller repeated it so often to describe himself that it was almost a chant. In case anyone missed the message, the paper helpfully ran Roscoe Drummond’s column right below Eisenhower’s, in a box. It began: “If former President Eisenhower can have his way, the Republican Party will not choose Sen. Barry Goldwater as its 1964 Presidential nominee.” The Herald Tribune waived its copyright—so Eisenhower’s piece also ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Reporters swarmed around the former President to ask if he meant to disavow Goldwater. He replied, in a trademark garbled Ike-ism, “Try to fit that shoe on that foot.”
The New York Times said Eisenhower’s words “may well be the decisive factor” in the primary. But there was nothing decisive about the California Republican electorate. Pollster Sam Lubell noted that seven of ten people agreed with Goldwater that government spending was out of control, but he’d never seen an electorate so confused as to whom to vote for. “He’s just too, too—too much,” said one housewife; another commented, “With all the men in the country, isn’t it terrible that we must choose from just those two men?” A friend rang up one of those confused California Republicans, eighty-nine-year-old Herbert Hoover. “You can’t pin it down,” the friend said, “but the feeling is that he might get us into war.” Hoover found it hard to disagree.
He might get us into war.
In Honolulu, the Pacific Command’s map room was now being prepared for a conference of Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy team to discuss a long memo by Mac Bundy, “Basic Recommendations and Projected Course of Action on Southeast Asia,” commissioned by a President who was now having trouble sleeping at night. “If you start doing it, they’re gonna be hollerin’, ‘You’re a warmonger,’ ” he told McNamara, tacitly imploring his defense secretary to find some honorable way out.
He tacitly implored Dick Russell to stiffen his backbone in case a way out was not to be found: “
They’d impeach a President, though, that would run out, wouldn’t they?”
He rehearsed rationalizations with his staff: “If you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you into your own kitchen,” he told Bundy.
“Yeah, that’s the trouble,” said Bundy. “If this thing comes apart with us—that’s the dilemma. That’s exactly the dilemma.”
“It’s damn easy to get into a war,” said the President, “but it’s gonna be awfully hard to extricate yourself if you get in.”
Firebugs ginned up their own precinct organizations. They quit school and job to work full-time; marriages were put in jeopardy. Some Goldwater freelancers were more sophisticated than others. “You’ve got to warn the senator right away!” one cried to a Goldwater staffer at a rally in Glendora. “There are men out there taking down every word he says!”—gesturing in the direction of the press corps.
One piece of homemade campaign literature that was circulating in California like chewing gum, A Choice Not an Echo, came from one of the sophisticated ones. Phyllis Schlafly claimed to be a housewife from Alton, Illinois, and in that she was busy raising five children, in a sense she was. But this housewife had worked her way through college as a test gunner in an ordnance plant, had a master’s degree from Harvard, and devoted forty-plus hours a week to right-wing agitation—from chairing the Illinois Federation of Republican Women to running the Cardinal Mindzenty Society, a right-wing volunteer group, with her husband, a lawyer who operated the right’s answer to the ACLU (a typical client was a farmer who refused to follow government quotas), and hosting her own radio show, America, Wake Up! The Schlaflys had been among the few nonbusinessmen on the Clarence Manion committee that published Conscience of a Conservative in 1960. Which in 1964 gave Phyllis Schlafly, home pregnant with her sixth child, an inspiration: to publish a slim little book on how “a few secret kingmakers based in New York” conspired to steal Republican conventions, “perpetuating the Red empire in order to perpetrate the high level of Federal spending and control.”
Before the Storm Page 50