Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Goldwater reacted with hell’s own fury. He and Scranton used to be friends; he had considered tapping Bill Scranton as his running mate. Scranton was a pilot, had served in Goldwater’s National Guard unit, sat with him for long bull sessions on tours of duty abroad. Goldwater had endured his abuse all week with equanimity. But this was the last straw.

  Someone pointed out that Scranton would probably release the letter to the press soon, and that their side should beat him to the punch. They cobbled together a statement, which began: “Governor Scranton’s letter has been read here with amazement. It has been returned to him.” Ohio State political science professor Harry Jaffa, a Lincoln expert brought to San Francisco by Baroody to spread the argument that were the Great Emancipator alive today, he would call himself a conservative, remembered a stinging rebuke Lincoln had written to Horace Greeley after a similar insult, and that was appended to the statement. Four thousand copies of Scranton’s letter and Goldwater’s response were run off. Clif White sparked his phone lines to life, quickly tracked down his six regional directors, and ordered them to see that the package was slipped under the door of every delegate, alternate, and Republican official within the next 120 minutes.

  As minions spread out over the city like gremlins to carry out the task, Goldwater ostentatiously boycotted that night’s $500-a-plate Republican Campaign Committee dinner-dance. With his absence it became, perforce, a Scranton event—which is to say, a wake. The delegates and alternates read the documents beneath their doors before turning in with nearly as much amazement as Goldwater’s inner circle had. The governor had boomeranged his best issue back on himself: now he seemed the reckless one. Many of Scranton’s delegates switched sides. And Goldwater’s delegates, which the letter so graciously dubbed “a flock of chickens whose necks will be wrung at will,” now inaugurated Scranton into the circle of contempt formerly reserved for Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Reuther, and Russia.

  The Monday papers brought news of the South Vietnamese army’s worst defeat yet; of two black reserve officers shot at random while driving home from Fort Benning, Georgia; and of a Lou Harris poll showing that voters disagreed with Goldwater on eight out of ten issues. At the Mark, the forty-five-minute wait for one of the three tiny elevators (the campaigns used a service elevator accessed through the hotel kitchen) was now giving zealots two chances a day at least to menace Ah-aystarn lab’ral prasss mainstays like Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “You know, these nighttime news shows sound to me like they’re being broadcast from Moscow,” muttered one to another on the way down, loud enough so the dastardly duo could listen in. “Why can’t we find Americans to do the television news?” mumbled the other. The staff at the Hilton began issuing a bottle of aspirin with every press badge. Brinkley forbade his young son to show his NBC insignia except when absolutely necessary.

  In the Cow Palace parking lot, in the shadow of a giant Goldwater sign pasted on the back of a screen belonging to the Geneva Drive-In next door (the owner was a partisan), thousands of CORE activists kept vigil with apocalyptic placards: “HITLER WAS SINCERE, TOO; DEFOLIATE GOLDWATER.” A security force drawn from eighteen separate police departments was there to keep them in line; 150 sergeants at arms were posted at the entrances to keep them out. A timorous black press had tried to keep the protesters from the site altogether, Jet accusing them of trying to “trigger a racial incident,” the Chicago Defender complaining that only by honoring the moratorium on demonstrations recently agreed to with the White House by mainline civil rights groups could their race “escape the diabolical enslavement that the triumph of Goldwaterism would ensure for us.” Down the coast in Long Beach, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins would soon address the Newspaper Guild: “We must not forget that a man from Munich rallied the rightist forces in the early 1930s.” The demonstrations were still going strong as the twilight stream of automobiles trickled out of the parking lot after the closing session Thursday night.

  Inside the cavernous hall the opening gavel had hardly quieted the small scattering of delegates before Scranton forces mounted their first desperate charge. For as long as anyone could remember, proud, aging Southern black men with patriotic names like George Washington Lee and Henry Lincoln Johnson had dotted the floor at these conventions—handy aids to rationalizations that the Republicans were still the party of civil rights long after blacks began deserting en masse to the Democratic Party during the New Deal. But this year, after Clif White’s juggernaut had rolled over the old black-and-tans in the South, the portions of the floor reserved for Southern states were bond-paper white. G. W. Lee, a Memphis man with a trademark wide plantation hat, had been a fixture as Shelby County delegate since the 1930s and had offered a stirring second of Robert Taft’s nomination in 1952. But this year, Memphis’s two-hundred-member all-black Republican organization, the “Lincoln League,” was deprived of its quadrennial tradition of electing Lee to represent them because John Grenier had arranged for the county convention to be held across town in a neighborhood where blacks were—to put it politely—unwelcome. A white conservative, Robert B. James, was chosen in Lee’s stead. And this, Scrantonites decided, was just the outrage they needed. They would force Goldwater to explain Lee’s exclusion in open session, on camera, before the eyes of the world. When the usually perfunctory opening motion was made to resolve that “this Convention be governed by the rules adopted by the National Convention of 1960,” Scranton’s Maryland campaign manager, Milton Steers, popped up and moved for an amendment that no delegate be seated if “this Convention shall determine there were rules, practices, or procedures ... which had the purpose or effect of discriminating in such selection on grounds of race, color, creed, or national origin.”

  The apparent nobility of the cause was misleading. The fact was, black Republican delegates often won their seats in processes less democratic than anything Clif White could dream up. Lee, for his part, was a longtime marionette of the late E. H. “Boss” Crump, who had set up the Lincoln League as a wholly owned subsidiary of his Memphis Democratic machine. The subtlety was lost on the TV cameras, which merely recorded the roar when segregation was maintained by a thunderous voice vote. It was a symbolic victory. Unfortunately, those were the only kind Scranton would win.

  Mark Hatfield gave the evening’s keynote speech. He attacked “bigots in this Nation who spew forth their venom of hate ... like the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society.” His intended audience was not there to hear it. By order of White, Goldwater delegates skipped the speech. They were all up on top of Nob Hill at the city’s WPA-style Masonic Temple screaming their heads off when Michael Goldwater explained how his father had taught his children to “be wary of any man who tries to take our land away from us or our God away from us,” and that Johnson’s self-professed Great Society “can only result in dictatorship.”

  On Tuesday—headlines: “U.S. SENDING 600 TROOPS TO SAIGON”; “2D MUTILATED BODY FOUND IN MISSISSIPPI RIVER” (tentatively identified as one of the three missing civil rights workers, but apparently the victim of another, yet unreported Klan hit)—Richard Nixon arrived by helicopter at Fisherman’s Wharf, where he was met by the black D.C. lawyer William S. “Turk” Thompson. He then traveled to the Hilton for a press conference and offered the contradictory statement that he was both satisfied with the platform as drafted and that “my views are exactly today as they were in Cleveland.” (CBS’s Paul Niven explained to viewers that Nixon was now all but irrelevant in Republican councils, and they needn’t pay much heed to him anyway.) In Scranton’s next press conference—to which he shuttled after a failed attempt to win Maine from favorite daughter Margaret Chase Smith—Scranton offered, jawdroppingly, that he agreed with Goldwater on most issues. At the St. Francis Hotel off Union Square, the Credentials Committee voted 69 to 19 against John Lindsay’s motion to change the rules to prohibit racial discrimination in the choosing of delegates, and 66 to 19 that there had been no irregularities in the selection of the delegate fr
om Shelby County, Tennessee. At the Mark Hopkins, Goldwater snuck out a secret tunnel on his way to buzz the Cow Palace in a rented airplane. The whole business bored him. Once he invited Clif White up to the Presidential Suite to “go over this delegate business.” White strode in proudly with an armful of loose-leaf notebooks and began with Alabama. He was barely to the second half of the alphabet before Goldwater drifted off altogether. “From the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco, California,” he said into his ham microphone, “the handle is Barry—Baker Able Robert Robert Yankee....”

  Inside the Cow Palace his delegates were detaining warm-up speakers for minutes at a time with applause whenever his name was mentioned. The man they were warming up was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was to deliver an appeal for party unity; it was to be the first major event of the convention schedule. It had been scheduled before the platform fight later in the afternoon for the express purpose of soothing factional passions. And, for three-fourths of his address, the former President accomplished this plodding task admirably. (“My friends, we are Republicans. If there is any finer word in the entire field of partisan politics, I have not yet heard it”; there was polite applause.) Then he went off, inadvisably, on a digression that he had worked up at the last minute. It was intended as a throwaway line: “So let us particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators—”

  He could barely finish the sentence. The conservatives leapt to their feet. Many, then most, spun around and waved their fists at the broadcast booths; one group stumbled through the forest of folding chairs and made as if to storm the glass aeries themselves. Someone said Ike looked like a lion tamer who had lost his chair and whip. The outpouring only stilled when Clif White, in his magnificent green-and-white trailer, pressed his special “all-call” button that rang all his delegation chairmen’s phones on the floor at once and ordered them to shut their people up.

  A few paragraphs later, Ike went off on another of his digressions. It might have been annoyance at the Supreme Court’s ruling three weeks ago declaring that suspects had an “absolute right to remain silent” that led him to say: “And let us not be guilty of maudlin sympathy for the criminal who, roaming the streets with switchblade knife and illegal firearm, seeking a helpless prey, suddenly becomes, upon apprehension, a poor, underprivileged person who counts upon the compassion of our society”; and to go on to deplore “the laxness or weaknesses of too many courts to forgive this offense.” The floodgates opened once again. Only this time it was even louder. Eisenhower looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  Now that nobody in the hall was soothed, it was time for platform debate.

  Scranton managers had made the brilliant tactical move of arranging the debate for prime time to showcase the Goldwaterites’ ugly displays to the greatest possible effect. Mel Laird had made the brilliant countermove of arranging to have the entire platform as it then stood read aloud. Hours passed as a team of readers traded off pages; blood did not cool in the interim. Goldwaterites had been amusing themselves all the while with a ritual that had begun in Texas Republican circles: one side of a hall would raise the ear-splitting cry “Viva!” The other side, challenged to scream louder, pronounced: “Olé!” In a rented gymnasium in Houston it sounded impressive. Over the yawning expanse of the Cow Palace, it was overwhelming—energizing to those privy to the rite, harrowing to those who were not. Norman Mailer, covering the convention for Esquire, heard in it “a mystical communion in the sound even as Sieg Heil used to offer its mystical communion.”

  The debate had been moved squarely out of prime time. But what followed assured it would be repeated in future prime times over and over again.

  Bored delegates were milling about. The crush in the aisles became so severe that local police moved onto the floor. John Chancellor of NBC—far outpacing the other broadcasters in the ratings thanks to flashy quick-cutting while the other networks had their anchors droning on endlessly in the booth—was interviewing Alaska delegates. Strongly liberal, they had suspiciously been denied passes to the gallery for their friends. One of White’s sergeants at arms told Chancellor to move along. The TV journalist pointed to his floor pass and refused. Police moved in. NBC producers ordered the scene put on the air.

  “Am I going to be carried out?” Chancellor asked the cop as a sheriff’s officer moved in as backup to help herd him toward the door. He was followed by one of those network cameramen in helmets sprouting a monstrous broadcast antenna, as if a visitor from outer space. “I’m in custody,” Chancellor announced into the camera. “I want to assure you that NBC is fully staffed with other reporters who are not in the custody of the Daly City police and the San Mateo sheriff’s office. I formally say this is a disgrace. The press, radio, and television should be allowed to do their work at a convention. I’m being taken down off the arena now.... I’ll check in later.” He signed off: “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.” Later an attempt was made to remove CBS’s Mike Wallace from the Alaska delegates’ area—although the action was thwarted when an Alaska delegate shouted into an open microphone, “This is an attempt by Goldwater or other forces to control the convention and prevent free airing of issues of the convention!”

  The reading was completed, gavels were banged, order was restored. Hugh Scott was recognized to offer the first amendment, which repudiated “the efforts of irresponsible extremist groups, such as the Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, and others to discredit our Party by their efforts to infiltrate positions of responsibility in the Party or to attach themselves to its candidates.” Five minutes were yielded to the first speaker for the motion, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. He strode to the great raised podium, beneath the enormous banner graced by the silhouette of Abraham Lincoln alongside the words “FOR THE PEOPLE,” to cheers—which didn’t outlast the accompanying chorus of Goldwaterite howls.

  With great difficulty, Thruston Morton gaveled the crowd into silence. Rockefeller began by repeating his July 14, 1963, warning about “a radical well-financed minority ... wholly alien to the sound and honest Republicanism that has kept this party abreast of human needs in a changing world; wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principles.” His partisans applauded. He told of a year spent defending the party against extremist takeover. A lone boo rang out. It came from a young man from Santa Rosa who had nearly bankrupted his family that spring by working for Goldwater in the California primary when he should have been out selling real estate. Rocky had jerked them around all spring. He had lost. Now he was lording it over them like he had won. It felt damned good to boo.

  Scattered voices joined him. Rockefeller smiled thinly as the ripple became a wave. A “We Want Barry!” chant proved too overpowering for him to continue. He cocked an eyebrow, smiled wider, and muttered under his breath, “That’s right, that’s right.” They were falling into his trap; they were displaying their brutishness for all the world to see.

  Clif White saw what he was up to. He pushed his all-call button. Thirty phones were picked up on the convention floor. He commanded, “If there is any booing in your delegations, stop it immediately.” But he was helpless. The delegates weren’t the problem. The noise came from the spectator galleries. He had drilled his regiments to the letter. There was nothing he could do about irregulars mounting a charge of their own.

  Standing next to Rocky with an imploring look on his face, his oversized gavel ringing with an oddly hollow plink, Thruston Morton seized the microphone. “The chair must ask for order. We’re going to have several speakers here on various amendments. We must proceed in an orderly manner. I think it’s only fair and right to all concerned.” Rockefeller continued, nodding as if to coax them on: “Their tactics have ranged from cancellation by coercion of a speaking engagement at a college, to outright threats of personal violence.”

  Now the noise was all-enveloping. There was a huddle at th
e rostrum. Rockefeller testily demanded an extension of his time; Morton granted it and turned around to return to his seat. It was as if he had given a cue: the sound now crashed the threshold of pain. “This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” Rockefeller simpered, relishing the moment—and they screamed some more.

  Jackie Robinson was hanging back near an exit of the hall—next to the Alabama delegation, as it happened. “C’mon, Rocky!” he cheered. A burly Alabaman glared at him menacingly and rose from his seat. His wife pulled at his coat. “Turn him loose, lady!” Robinson roared. (“Luckily for him, he obeyed his wife,” Robinson boasted later.)

  Rocky: “You don’t like to hear it, but it’s true—” (a network camera cut to Happy, in pearls, a pained and embarrassed look on her face) “—they engender suspicion, they encourage disunity, and they operate from the dark shadows of secrecy—” (the camera found a row of young Goldwater partisans who rhythmically slapped their thighs with glee) “—The Republican Party must repudiate these people.... I move the adoption of this resolution.”