Finally Scranton spotted an opening. In Mississippi, vigilantes were setting upon black churches, tearing them apart for “weapons” they assumed were being stockpiled as a prelude to the Communist takeover, then burning them to the ground at a rate of one a week when no weapons could be found. Barry Goldwater seemed to be affording the vigilantes aid and comfort. Goldwater made a courtesy call to General Eisenhower in Gettysburg to confirm the rumors that he would vote the next day against final passage of the civil rights bill. Eisenhower, livid, suspected Goldwater was doing it for political advantage. That was the furthest thing from his intention. When Goldwater returned to his Senate office he was met by his Mississippi field man Wirt Yerger and Southern coordinator John Grenier. What they saw was a shaken man afraid he was signing his political death warrant, convinced that the Constitution offered him no other honorable choice.
In 1962, after Goldwater had proclaimed Kennedy’s dispatch of troops to the University of Mississippi unconstitutional, Denison Kitchel had commissioned a brief on the subject from one of Phoenix’s most prominent constitutional experts, an ally of theirs in the local party, William Rehnquist. The brief changed Goldwater’s mind. (Kitchel also advised, “Make Barnett”—Governor Ross Barnett, who was holding firm for segregation—“their victim, not your hero”: sage, enduring political advice that meant that he could uphold both the principle of integration and the principle of states’ rights.) When it came time to decide how to vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Goldwater turned to Rehnquist once again. Rehnquist had aggressively fought local antidiscrimination laws in Phoenix, where Goldwater had valiantly fought for them as appropriate and morally imperative. As a Supreme Court clerk, Rehnquist had even written a memo arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson should be upheld. And, not surprisingly, Rehnquist confirmed Goldwater’s instincts that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unconstitutional. Goldwater approached Professor Robert Bork of Yale University for a second opinion. Bork was on the record already as arguing that the matter was “not whether racial prejudice or preference is a good thing but whether individual men ought to be free to deal and associate with whom they please for whatever reasons appeal to them.” He reiterated that opinion to Goldwater in a seventy-five-page brief.
Their counsel to steel him, Yerger and Grenier dismissed, Goldwater changed into his darkest blue suit, made his way to the Senate floor, and gave the most closely watched speech of his political career—rapidly, tonelessly, head down, as if reading into the record. “There have been few, if any, occasions when the searching of my conscience and the reexamination of my views of our constitutional system have played a greater part in the determination of my vote than they have on this occasion,” he said. He reviewed his own record fighting discrimination, his conviction that racism was fundamentally a problem of the heart and not the law. He described how Titles VII and II entailed “the loss of our God-given liberties” and would constitute a “special appeal for special welfare”; that to work, the bill would
require the creation of a federal police force of mammoth proportions. It also bids fair to result in the development of an “informer” psychology in great areas of our national life—neighbors spying on neighbors, workers spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen, where those who would harass their fellow citizens for selfish and narrow purposes will have ample inducement to do so. These, the federal police force and an “informer” psychology, are the hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society.
Of the genuine police state in the nation’s midst—Mississippi—he said nothing at all. Precinct day had come and gone in the Mississippi Democratic Party. Black activists dutifully showed up at the meetings at the appointed hour, found the doors locked, then retreated to form their own “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” following state election law to the letter. Another church burned, and three civil rights workers went to inspect the damage. They were arrested and locked up in the Neshoba County jail. They were released; then they disappeared. A few days later, Walter Cronkite announced that the search was “the focus of the whole country’s concern.” The regular Mississippi Democratic Party chose its delegates to the convention, extralegally and in secret, then emerged to hint that they would endorse Barry Goldwater. “It is impossible to doubt that Senator Goldwater intends to make his candidacy the rallying point of white resistance,” Walter Lippmann wrote.
Everett Dirksen closed the civil rights debate on June 19 with a withering attack on Mississippi’s new golden boy. Never mentioning him by name, Dirksen listed all the other reforms wrongheaded conservatives had once declared unconstitutional: child labor laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the minimum wage, Social Security. He thrust his arm in Goldwater’s direction: “Utter all the extreme opinions that you will, it will carry forward. You can go ahead and talk about conscience! It is man’s conscience that speaks in every generation!”
The New York Times found it impossible not to conclude that Dirksen was fighting against Goldwater’s nomination. Scranton seized the moment. He traveled to Washington to tell the minority leader he would make a fine favorite-son presidential candidate. But whatever the wishful thinking, Dirksen had not gotten that far in life without knowing how to count. When it was time to orate, he orated. When it was time for politics, he did politics. Goldwater had the nomination; there was nothing more to discuss. Dirksen dismissed his guest summarily, telling an aide, “What do they think I am, a rookie or a patsy?”
Scranton pressed on. “It looks good in North Carolina!” he proclaimed after a trip to Charlotte. (The delegation voted against Scranton 36 to o at the convention.) He whistle-stopped across the Illinois prairie: if he couldn’t have Dirksen, perhaps he could win over some of the senator’s fifty-eight-man delegation. In Springfield Scranton planned to speak from the hall in the old state capitol where Lincoln had made his great “house divided” speech. The sheriff wouldn’t let him in. In Kankakee he was egged as his train pulled away. Then he went to the O’Hare Inn, where the delegation was holding its last caucus before the convention—and there Dirksen chose to bludgeon him. In exchange for a promise from Goldwater to include a plank supporting the civil rights bill in the platform, Dirksen emerged from the proverbial smoke-filled room to announce that he would nominate Barry Goldwater at the convention.
Scranton arrived and was met by two separate groups of pickets: conservatives, including a clutch of Goldwater Girls wearing phony bandages and carrying signs that parodied the commercials for Tareyton cigarettes (slogan: “I’d rather fight than switch”), and civil rights activists for whom his Republican identification was enough to brand him as the enemy. Scranton spoke to polite applause. Goldwater spoke; the room lit up. Dirksen delivered a peroration redolent, to all present, of his famous speech nominating Robert Taft in 1952: “We followed you before,” he had cried then, wagging his finger at Thomas E. Dewey, “and you took us down the road to defeat!” This time he pounded the podium and cried, “Too long have we ridden the gray ghost of me-tooism! When the roll is called, I shall cast my vote for Barry Goldwater!” The delegates were polled: 48 for Goldwater, 8 passes, 2 abstentions, no one for Scranton.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed on July 2, Johnson told his staff, “I think we just gave the South to the Republicans for your lifetime and mine” (some among them wondered whether signing the bill could conceivably lose Johnson the election altogether). Blacks seeking to exercise their new rights at a Selma, Alabama, movie theater were assaulted by whites, and made a celebrity of an Atlanta restaurateur named Lester Maddox who chased them away with a pistol (the Los Angeles County Young Republicans unanimously passed a resolution commending Maddox and asserting that the federal government “has no legitimate business protecting civil-rights carpetbaggers in the South”). Scranton traveled to Utah and was received warmly by banner-wielding “Smith Girls for Scranton”—not exactly the Beehive State’s most important voting bloc. In Seattle, he claimed there were sti
ll “literally hundreds of delegates who are still moveable”—and then his forces folded before a Clif White juggernaut that denied even the granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt a seat at the national convention. In Oregon Scranton was desperate enough to write the Civil War out of American history: fights over racial matters, he said, are “not in our tradition, not in our custom, not in our manner!”
It was the end of the road. He had managed to peel off a grand total of two delegates in his last five meetings. Goldwater, busy riding his palomino in the Prescott Rodeo Days parade and buying drinks for the house at the Elks Club bar, would go to San Francisco with about three-quarters of the delegates, and the nomination, apparently, in his hip pocket.
It was more than some people could accept. “I doubt he’s got it completely locked up,” Hubert Humphrey told Lyndon Johnson. “The big money in the East there, you know, will move in, as they’ve done before.”
“I seen ’em do it,” LBJ agreed, mentioning a friend who had gone to the 1952 convention strong for Taft. “The next morning, when steel got through with him, he turned the flip.”
The Eastern Establishment had no clothes. But to many it was still garbed in the cloak of limitless power.
On this, at least, the Goldwater for President Committee agreed with their President. “The 1952 tricks will be used again,” Bill Middendorf warned Dean Burch: “planted ‘bum dope’ stories”; “whispering campaigns”; “threats and cajolery”; “shanghaiing and spiriting of delegates and alternates to distant points”; “political Mata Haris” (“Be on the lookout for any unexpectedly easy companionship from new-found female friends”).
What Clif White knew told him Middendorf was paranoid. But White acted as if he were paranoid, too. He had been ensconced full-time at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, whose fifteenth and seventeenth floors Goldwater had reserved, since June. He joined an assistant, Jim Day, who had been there since April. White had an agenda over and above mere victory: when Scranton entered the race, White became determined to roll up the biggest delegate total of any contested nomination fight in history. It would be the capstone of his career. It would pave the way to his goal: to leave San Francisco as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Though there was also a lingering worry: What if the Establishment really could bully its way to victory?
So White created a command-and-control apparatus that put the legendary Kennedy organization in Los Angeles in 1960—his model—to shame. The platform had been drafted by Wisconsin Republican Melvin Laird to ventriloquize Goldwater’s views. When the platform came up for debate the week before the opening gavel, Scrantonites could be expected to introduce sugary, “harmless” amendments in the hopes that the Goldwaterites would let them save a bit of face by granting them one or two concessions. The door thus opened a crack, a bigger amendment might follow, then another. Scranton operatives would try to discredit the chair during debate, whisper in conservative ears about business deals and called-in loans. Then they would take the platform fight. White briefed his platform committee members: This was war. If Scranton came out for motherhood and apple pie, apple pie and motherhood would just have to be voted down.
His delegates were ready to submit—they had chosen to submit—to military discipline. As they were named through the spring, White had his state chairs assign each delegate a buddy, whom they were to contact at least once a week to develop a bond—and the buddies were to travel together at all times in San Francisco lest either be led into temptation. The airport was a vulnerable flank. When they arrived at San Francisco International, delegates were to report immediately to the Goldwater hospitality room, where staffers would contact headquarters at the Mark, where the delegates’ arrival was noted in the pages of big black cross-indexed loose-leaf binders which contained intelligence on each one of them (“Can be influenced and expect economic pressures can be important when the chips are down. He also is actively and economically involved in real estate in Arizona, has made several trips there in the last few years”). Neither were they to trust the transportation the RNC was providing. They would be spirited to their delegation’s hotel—there were twenty-eight hotels, inconveniently scattered throughout the sprawling city—by radio-equipped cars. The routes had been timed, so if a delegate was tardy, an APB could be put out. “We can’t predict the accidents,” said White, “but we must be prepared for the incidents.”
The key was communication. In the days before direct-dial hotel phones, whoever tied up a hotel switchboard had a distinct advantage over the competition. (White bore painful memories from the 1948 conclave in Philly, when, as a factotum for Dewey, he was assigned to feed a pay phone just off the floor with nickels at regular intervals to keep open a line to the governor’s suite at the Bellevue-Stratford as angry reporters waiting outside the booth to call in their stories threatened him with castration and worse.) White wired enough new custom phone lines across San Francisco to service a small town. At each delegation’s headquarters, an extra room was reserved to accommodate a phone—connected for just these two weeks—wired directly between the hotel and the campaign’s mammoth switchboard in a room on the fifteenth floor of the Mark. Six regional command centers (the Southerners called theirs “Fort Sumter”) were wired still more elaborately.
Telephones had been chosen over walkie-talkies because radio frequencies were easier to intercept than phone lines were to tap. (Scranton chose walkie-talkies; the Goldwater side had already cut into their frequencies.) But should the phone system be compromised, Goldwater’s people had VHF walkie-talkies. Should the VHF ones fail, they had backup UHFs. They also devised a secret code for when they had to use the walkie-talkies on the convention floor, and installed a jam-resistant antenna in the rafters of the Cow Palace more powerful than the ones the networks had, to prevent interference from the iron beams. They did it in secret; nobody outside the Goldwater camp knew this setup existed.
Unwilling to trust the media, the Goldwater campaign workers had created their own. In one suite on the fifteenth floor of the hotel they built broadcast facilities. The campaign had purchased time on a local radio station every half hour, to which Goldwater delegates were to tune for general news. They tried whenever possible to interview Goldwater luminaries upon arrival, then offer them as exclusives to local TV stations, lest their words be twisted by biased reporters. They aired their televised roundup on purchased time thrice daily. Another room had a huge board on which all staffers marked their entrance and egress, even to duck out to get a pack of cigarettes; a closed-circuit television camera was trained on that board at all times, the image shown on monitors in Burch‘s, Kitchel’s, Kleindienst’s, and White’s rooms. One of the original Draft Goldwater group had committed nearly to heart the arcane rules of procedure of the House of Representatives under which the convention would be governed and was on call at all times in his room, where he had a library of law books at the ready.
The seventeenth-floor Presidential Suite was reserved for the candidate and his brain trust, led by Bill Baroody. By coincidence, Scranton’s headquarters (an operation of perhaps a third the size of Goldwater’s, created originally for Nelson Rockefeller) was sandwiched in between, on the sixteenth. Goldwater’s team barricaded the elevator exits on the fifteenth floor; all personnel had to enter on the fourteenth—then show their privilege to pass the armed Pinkertons guarding the staircase in between through an elaborate system of stickpins and ribbons. It was the most heavily guarded piece of San Francisco hotel real estate since Molotov’s Soviet delegation took over a floor of the St. Francis for the founding conference of the UN. Reporters were virtually banned. One time the guards wouldn’t let Mary Scranton through the stairwell on her way to her husband’s offices. When not on duty, the Pinkertons slept off their shifts in a room full of cots.
When it came time to move the delegates out to the convention site, the Cow Palace, an overgrown Quonset hut set amidst the scrub hills of the nondescript San Mateo County working-class hamlet of Daly City, the
re would be a fleet of buses. But the only route from downtown San Francisco to the Cow Palace, the Bayshore Freeway (seeded with Goldwater billboards donated by National Airlines chairman L. B. “Bud” Maytag), might be congested. So in case of emergency, Jim Day had rented a railroad train to keep on reserve. White’s piece de resistance was perched on concrete blocks in a back corner of the Cow Palace parking lot: a green-and-white command trailer that reproduced the whole setup at the Mark in miniature—so precious it was secured not by Pinkertons but by lawyers armed with tape recorders and Polaroids, ready to file affidavits in case of enemy sabotage. Phalanxes of volunteers across the country were held in reserve if a telegram barrage was needed. A pool of eager Youth for Goldwater volunteers, shipped in from every corner of the country via chartered trains and planes, were on call for odd jobs. At the outskirts of town, warehouses bulged with mountains of Western hats, boxes of buttons, and like ephemera for the greatest demonstration an American convention had ever seen.
Clif White surveyed what he had created, and he saw that it was good. A Goldwater delegate who twitched his nose in Scranton’s direction could be set upon by a swarm of friends in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. A parliamentary double cross could be plowed under even more quickly. The Republican National Convention at last belonged to them.
Or so Clif White thought. To see how mistaken he was, all one needed to do was look up at the Cow Palace’s tier of glass broadcast booths, swept up off the floor by spindly struts like the legs of some giant metallic spider, hoisting each superstar anchor above the firmament as if king of all he surveyed. These booths were new, a function of the cramped floor space at the Cow—and a testament to just how highly the three networks judged the stakes of winning news dominance for themselves. It made news at the 1960 Democratic Convention when there were nearly as many reporters of all kinds as there were delegates. In 1964, the number of radio and TV people alone was double that number. Their priorities had become the party’s. The pageant would be broadcast almost continually (and, via the new Telstar satellite, internationally), but the RNC scheduled key sessions for prime time—and considered calling delegates to their seats with pom-pom girls instead of a pounding gavel. General Eisenhower would be there—under contract as a commentator to ABC. Thirty-foot camera scaffolding blocked the gallery’s view; meandering cameramen weighed down by fifty-pound loads of equipment threatened to knock over delegates like bowling pins. Beneath the bleachers, the networks built villages—control rooms, reception rooms, maintenance shops, copy rooms—lavishly furnished, catered around the clock, and built as if to last, in Sheetrock, not plywood. The great alabaster towers of the brand-new multibuilding Hilton downtown, convention press headquarters, were girded around by so many miles of television cable that a hotel executive joked that the building might collapse if it was removed. A correspondent marveled on camera that politicians could walk the streets unmolested, while “us television types” drew swarms.
Before the Storm Page 53