The voice vote: a roar of nays. Tom Kuchel was asked how he felt. “Fine, physically,” he replied sorrowfully. “God save the Union.”
The next motion was called, Romney’s anti-extremism amendment. The hearing was more respectful; the voice vote was the same. For the next, which would add six resounding paragraphs specifically attesting to the constitutionality and desirability of the civil rights law, Scranton had arranged for a roll-call vote, banking that some delegates would be ashamed to go on the record as being against it. The result, 897 to 409, only served to give a reliable prediction of the roll call for the Republican candidates the next day. The amendment on control of nuclear weapons was called, Romney’s on civil rights (so innocuous that White even considered letting his people vote for it), speeches made for and against—two more walls of nays. The platform was ratified, as written, on the dawn side of 2 a.m.—breakfast viewing for early risers in the East. Scranton’s last chance at redemption had failed. The boys who weekended in Newport Beach had ground the boys who summered in Newport to dust. The winners were not gracious. “The South took the Mason-Dixon line and shoved it right up to Canada,” one Texas leader proclaimed to a Newsweek reporter.
The day Barry Goldwater was to be nominated Republican candidate for President of the United States he was nervous enough to cut himself shaving. He descended on the service elevator, squeezed for the umpteenth time between smelly garbage cans and the rolling carts—and was greeted in the kitchen by a brace of microphone-waving correspondents. “Do you think that the Democrats will make an issue of the GOP convention’s refusal to endorse the constitutionality of the new civil rights law?” he was asked. He snapped, “After LBJ, the biggest faker in the United States, having opposed civil rights until this year—let ’em make an issue out of it. I’ll just recite the thousands of words he has spoken against anti-poll-tax legislation, equal accommodations, and the FEPC [the Fair Employment Practices Commission]. Johnson is the phoniest individual that ever came around.” He did not seem to be savoring his day of triumph.
In another hotel Bill Scranton was fending off his own microphone-wielding mob. “I came here to address the delegates,” he said at a gathering of the Missouri caucus. “Will everyone clear the room except the live press and the Missouri press?” Each reporter considering himself either alive or from Missouri, all stayed. They saw the delegation vote 22 to 1 for Goldwater.
In the Cow Palace parking lot, all was chaos. Fifteen hundred screaming ticket holders and credential wielders were outside. The fire department had barred the doors because the hall was already thousands past capacity. Soon police had seized thousands of forged tickets, all entitling the bearer to Seat 4 in Row G of Section A. Some had been bought from scalpers; some had unwittingly been distributed by congressmen. But the lion’s share were held by Scranton ringers, some recruited outside Scranton’s downtown headquarters, most from a table set up on Berkeley’s Bancroft Way, just off campus, the traditional spot for student politicking (advocating partisan causes on university grounds was banned).
And, unable to stomach the thought of Republicans monopolizing the news, the President of the United States chose this particular afternoon to take a very public stroll in the park across from the White House hand in hand with his wife. “I think it would look very spontaneous!” his press secretary gushed.
It was the latest move in Johnson’s permanent campaign. In May he defused one potential problem—(untrue) rumors that the FBI had the goods on his once having belonged to a Texas branch of the KKK—by buying off J. Edgar Hoover by exempting him from the federal mandatory retirement law; then he defused another by goosing the economy through raising the debt ceiling and pushing through a generous federal pay increase (he also ordered his budget director to study what tricks he might use to keep unemployment down through the fall). The DNC was on its way to registering four million new voters; a “Salute to President Johnson” at the D.C. Armory raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then a tragedy reenergized a certain primordial advantage of the incumbent: after the civil rights vote, Senator Ted Kennedy was flying back to Massachusetts, where a roomful of Democrats were waiting to renominate him by acclamation, when his plane plowed into an apple orchard, killing the pilot and badly injuring Kennedy’s back. Everyone knew that Joseph Kennedy Jr., the oldest Kennedy brother, had perished in a plane crash, and sister Kathleen; the near-miss moved the cult of Kennedy martyrdom once more to the forefront of people’s minds.
Campaign planning began in earnest on July 11, when White House deputy Bill Moyers met with representatives of Doyle Dane Bernbach, the ad agency JFK had chosen for his campaign a year earlier. The agency’s ads for Volkswagen’s goofy Beetle—headed “Think Small”—caught Kennedy’s eye; it fit his wry, ironic take on the world, his instinctive grasp of the power of images, his compulsion to be new. Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science. Industry guru Rosser Reeves—Eisenhower’s adman—preached the doctrine of the “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP): a successful ad must stake a claim as to why the company’s product is different from the competition‘s, then pound it in like a jackhammer. (“You can have a lovelier complexion in fourteen days with Palmolive soap, doctors prove!”) A rival theory, David Ogilvy’s, held that ads should never be entertaining. DDB set all that on its ear. It was the best agency in the business, years ahead of its time. And Moyers—a shy, thick-spectacled ex-seminarian who at barely thirty was the youngest of LBJ’s inner circle, perhaps the most ambitious, surely the most ruthless—gave it a green light to unleash its full creative powers on behalf of the President.
Politics would not likely emerge from DDB’s clutches unchanged. In May the networks announced that for the first time they would sell thirty-second and one-minute spots during, instead of just at the end of, regularly scheduled programming. Under ordinary circumstances this would hardly have made a difference: the preferred lengths for political ads in the past had been five, fifteen, and thirty minutes. Doyle Dane Bernbach, which had never handled a political account before, never bothered to consult other agencies’ precedents. In The Making of the President 1960, Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, a politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB found nothing to lament in the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to know about a product, which in this case happened to be a human being, in half a minute—the speed not of thought but of emotion.
Bill Bernbach intuitively grasped the same insights that were making a Canadian literature professor named Marshall McLuhan the thinker of the moment. “The medium is the message,” went his gnomic injunction. A medium did not just neutrally deliver some preexisting bundle of information into the viewer’s brain; instead, each medium—storytelling, print, radio, television—conditioned users’ very perception in its own distinct way. A TV set was a box plunked in the middle of a living room, competing for attention with a dozen different household distractions. DDB TV commercials exploited this fact by making use of searing, disjunctive images designed to cut through the clutter. Or, because television, that most mass of media, projected built-in anxieties about conformity, other DDB spots flattered viewers by assuring them they were much too smart to be taken in by advertising—thus the VW ads, which mocked advertising itself by bragging about how small the car was, how ugly, what little power it had. That “cute little bug” image moved a mountain: never again would Volkswagen be primarily associated in the public mind with Nazi Germany.
From the agency’s eight hundred employees, Bernbach and account executive James Graham assembled forty dedicated Democrats thrilled at the prospect of savaging Barry Goldwater. They worked twelve-hour days in their own floor of DDB’s building on West 43rd Street. Through the spring of 1964 they produced a wealth of civil rights pieces; by the time of the July 11 meeting with Moyers,
these had been mothballed. Civil rights, they realized, was just as likely to lose votes as to win them. Now they were kicking around the idea of associating Goldwater in voters’ minds, as press secretary George Reedy put it, with the image of “kids being born with two heads.”
At the Cow Palace the doors were sealed before bad tickets drove out good. The senior senator from Illinois approached the podium to place his candidate’s name into nomination. But he made the mistake of uttering Goldwater’s name a few minutes into the speech—and then he had to wait impatiently for the plink of Thruston Morton’s gavel to finally shut down the delirium that followed.
At 3:10 p.m., Dirksen’s voice as smooth as his face was rumpled, he intoned, “I am proud to nominate my colleague from Arizona to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.”
The heavens opened.
Thousands of tiny squares of golden foil descended in a downpour, mingled with hundreds of golden balloons on their way up, both bathed in spots that made the air shimmer. A banner fluttered down from the rafters, so big that the legend “GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT—655” could be read amidst its billows; from one end of the floor to the other, innumerable phosphorus yellow and orange placards (“MAN OF COURAGE”) flickered like candles, and banners and flags unfurled like flowering buds (in defiance of the fire marshal’s orders, which permitted neither). Californians, as the host delegation right up in front and closest to the cameras, and as the second biggest delegation, taking up a tenth of the floor space, gyrated in fluorescent vests of the sort worn by road crews at night, their faces painted gold. The air became a stew of bass drums and bugles and tubas, air horns and whistles and cowbells, the rip-roaring of a Dixieland band, the pealing of an organ, none distinguishable from the other in the thickness of the din.
Twenty minutes passed—the agreed-upon time limit for candidate demonstrations. Thruston Morton rapped his desultory plinks, which were ignored by throngs marching about with state standards and homemade signs reading “LA LOUISIANA DIT ALLONS AVEC L’EAU D’OR,” or “INDIANA’S FAVORITE SON-IN-LAW,” or “WOJEICHOWICZ AND ALL OF BROOKLYN ARE FOR BARRY,” or a cutout of the state of Virginia wearing thick black Goldwater glasses. Indians paraded in full regalia, Nevadans in red silk, Texans wearing longhorns. Outside, a minister, wearing a donkey costume, pleaded with a sergeant at arms for admittance: on cue, he was supposed to be pelted with fake snowballs. But he had been locked out. So everyone just pelted one another. Morton hollered that “real friends of Barry Goldwater” would let him “get nominated this week.” The crowd would not be stilled. They continued to carry on for another twenty minutes. They still had plenty of energy left to cheer seconding speeches from the likes of Bill Knowland (“He, as every delegate in this convention, knows that the road to appeasement ... is only surrender on the installment plan”) and Clare Boothe Luce (“Do you believe these pollsters?” “No!!!”).
The demonstration process was repeated six more times for other official candidates. Rockefeller, Margaret Chase Smith, Scranton: only Scranton was able to stretch it to a full thirty-five minutes, marred, though, by Goldwaterites who popped a ten-foot “Scranton” helium balloon just as it was released; and by incidents like the one in which two teenage girls were intercepted on their way to the floor with the admonition “Get the hell out of here, you little sons of bitches” and the one in which a CORE member was led away by the police for attempting a lie-down in front of the rostrum; and by Scranton posters featuring a faded black-and-white picture on a plain white background that could hardly be seen on TV. Then followed the favorite sons, Romney, Judd, and Lodge. (Senator Hiram Fong, the first Asian-American to be nominated for President, forwent a demonstration because the only reason for his nomination was to boost his reelection fight back home in Hawaii.) Lodge, so disgusted with events he had booked a morning flight out of town, was not present to receive the honor.
The hoopla lasted seven hours before it came time for delegates to cast their votes. The roll of states was called. Alabama: all 20 for Goldwater. Alaska: 6 votes for Scranton (“for progressive Republicanism to carry on the great tradition of our great President, Dwight D. Eisenhower”), 2 for Smith, I for Judd, I for Fong. Arizona: 16 for Goldwater. Arkansas: 9 for Goldwater, 2 for Scranton, I for Rockefeller. California: 86 for Goldwater. Colorado: 15 for Goldwater and 3 for Scranton. It only took to the S’s to put him over 655—with South Carolina, the place where a speech five years earlier had ignited the whole Draft Goldwater hoopla in the first place, casting the deciding vote.
Scranton and his wife made their way down the ramp, and the crowd oohed as if acknowledging the courage of a daredevil. Scranton made the traditional gesture: moving to make his opponent’s nomination unanimous. Goldwater was back in his hotel room, following the tradition for putative nominees. He was shown Gallup poll results that Lyndon Johnson was favored by 80 percent of the public. “Christ,” he said, “we ought to be writing a speech telling them to go to hell and turn it down.” Rockefeller called to concede the nomination. Goldwater refused the phone. “Hell, I don’t want to talk to that son-of-a-bitch.”
The last session of the convention would include Goldwater’s acceptance speech and the nominating of a VP. The choice was congressman and RNC chair William E. Miller of New York. That Miller was Catholic and an Easterner suggested he was there to balance the ticket—but for the fact that, his boom having had been organized by a coalition of Draft Goldwater vets, the New York Conservative Party, and YAF officers, he was unlikely to impress any but already conservative voters in any event. His obscurity—he was better known for snipes at President Kennedy than for anything else, especially for citing guests dancing the twist in the ballroom as an example of immorality in the White House—inspired a ditty: “Here’s a riddle, it’s a killer / Who the hell is William Miller?” But Goldwater liked him because he was a party man, toiling loyally as Republican Congressional Campaign Committee chair before taking over the RNC, and he was a gut fighter. He said he chose Miller “because he drives Johnson nuts.” (Johnson, for his part, was barely aware of Miller’s existence.)
Miller was duly anointed by 1,305 votes to 3, and a turn by Art Linkletter at the podium was enjoyed by all. Olés followed Vivas, followed by Thruston Morton’s plinks. Goldwater’s introducer stepped up to the microphone. Dick Nixon had originally been on the schedule to speak on Tuesday. He swapped it for this chance to style himself party healer. Clearly he was positioning himself for the nomination in 1968. All agreed it was a joke. “Do you think he could make it?” a reporter asked an old Nixon hand. “Hell, no!” came the answer. “I never knew what they meant when they used to say those things about Nixon. Now, I know.” Teddy White called it a moment for nostalgia.
The fallen idol gave the crowd over to the man whose candidacy he had only a month earlier labeled a “tragedy.” Now he called Goldwater “Mr. Republican”: “And here is the man who, after the greatest campaign in history, will be Mr. President—Barry Goldwater.” Then he sat back with the rest and waited for Goldwater to usher the year’s rolling waters magnanimously beneath the bridge. He would be disappointed.
Goldwater, Baroody, Hess, and the rest of the brain trust had first met to discuss the acceptance speech the previous Saturday at Goldwater’s personal quarters—the seventeenth floor, which was closed to mere political operatives. Hess brought in a draft that did exactly what an acceptance speech after a divisive primary season was supposed to do: proceed as if there had never been any divisions in the first place. But it was precisely their contempt for such bromides that united these men; that was why they were the ones whom Goldwater had working on the speech. The members of the brain trust declared the draft dead on arrival. Neither Bill Scranton nor Nelson Rockefeller deserved conciliation.
Goldwater gave the task of composing a new draft to Harry Jaffa. He was impressed with Jaffa’s quick thinking in invoking Lincoln during the flap over the Scranton letter and by a memorandum Jaffa had written for the p
latform committee on the subject of political extremism. He had argued that extremism was a nonissue—a synonym, if anything, for “principle.” “Extremism”: Goldwater was sick of the word.
The brain trust fiddled over things for the next few days in Bill Baroody’s room, Goldwater testing out each new phrase on his tongue, occasionally adding lines from his own pen. (One began “Yesterday it was Korea. Tonight it is Vietnam.”) Another line came from Gene Pulliam, on “the growing menace of public safety, to life, limb and property, in homes, churches, playgrounds and places of business, particularly in our great cities.” Goldwater had just then read in the papers of a girl in New York who had apparently been detained for using a knife against a rapist. He was sick of this sort of thing. He thought Pulliam’s contribution was splendid.
There was a major row among his deputies over one line. Jaffa had lifted it directly from his memo; Goldwater had singled it out as his favorite. But half the group thought it was way too incendiary and would be utterly misunderstood. Then Goldwater put the argument to a stop by ordering the offending passage underlined twice. And that was that.
The final text, approved before dawn on Thursday as celebrant drunks straggled up and down Nob Hill, was guarded with the sort of care usually reserved for crown jewels. Two typists simultaneously prepared clean copies of the various sections. The copies were delivered upon completion to another set of workers, locked in a room cleared of telephones and sworn to silence for good measure, who set the TelePrompTer text. Reporters begged for an advance copy. Their requests were denied. Bill Miller, Clif White, and Dean Burch didn’t get to see one either. The brain trusters knew that if those three read it, they would raise hell. For this wasn’t a political speech. It was a cultural call to arms.
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