Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Within two weeks, the Administration was wracked by another crisis. This one, though, they were better prepared for.

  Op Plan 34-A had rolled on through spring to no apparent military effect. Dean Acheson cornered a new Johnson aide to tell him, “Things are going to hell in a hack in Vietnam, and if the President does not do something that relates to getting the support of Congress in a Formosa-type resolution”—the blanket authority Eisenhower won from Congress to use military force if needed to protect Taiwan without declaring war—“it’s going to be too late, and we’ll go into this orgasm of a campaign period in which things will just have to stall.” Johnson’s men, reasoning they had to begin countering criticisms that Johnson was holding back in Vietnam because of the upcoming election, decided that proceeding with Acheson’s suggestion wasn’t such a bad idea. On May 22, with their boss away delivering a commencement address at the University of Michigan, they began to work on a draft.

  When the first U.S. reconnaissance planes were downed during the Cleveland governors’ conference in early June, William Bundy and Dean Rusk advised the President that they should begin polishing up the draft. Senate leader Mike Mansfield—coincidentally, for he knew nothing of any potential congressional resolution—gave similar advice: “If we’re gonna stay in there, we’re gonna have to educate the people, Mr. President.” Mr. President’s mind being on poll numbers showing that 63 percent of Americans were paying no attention to Vietnam, his answer to both was that he had no interest in making Vietnam an issue as the campaign approached, especially now with civil rights on the cusp of passage. But he was flexible. When GOP congressmen began chorusing against a “no-win” Vietnam policy in late June, Johnson obligingly dispatched hundreds more “military advisors.” He balanced that move by coining an artful new phrase for public consumption: “We seek no wider war.” The coinage left him euphoric.

  When the senator from Arizona’s nomination became imminent, Bill Moyers urged his boss to talk tough about Vietnam on TV to “defuse a Goldwater bomb before he ever gets the chance to throw it.” Once more, Johnson demurred. As the rubble was being cleared in the streets of Harlem, he ordered secret maneuvers in the Gulf of Tonkin stepped up. The CIA assured him that would be enough to hold the line until after the election was over. The idea that North Vietnamese PT boats might challenge U.S. warships seemed too incredible to consider. Although Communist insurgents thought otherwise. They embraced the heightened American presence in the Gulf as a chance to signal their determination to fight the imperialists to the death.

  On August 2, three PT boats advanced on the destroyer Maddox. Her captain retreated languidly out to sea. He was startled to see the scrappy little boats scooting out after him—then, twenty-five miles farther out, opening fire. Jets from a nearby aircraft carrier and the Maddox’s 5-inch guns made short work of these fleas, the Maddox emerging none the worse for the wear. It was around three in the afternoon local time, August 2—3 a.m., August I, in Washington—when the crisis report was brought to the President’s bedside. He saw not much in the incident, sending Hanoi a perfunctory diplomatic note warning that “grave consequences would inevitably result from any further unprovoked offensive military action” and ordering a second carrier and destroyer to the area to put such foolish displays of enemy bravado to a stop. The clash certainly wasn’t enough to distract him from more important matters. “Raymond Guest wants to contribute to you but he still wants to be ambassador to Ireland,” Florida senator George Smathers told him later in the morning. Johnson laughed and asked how much Guest was willing to pay. “Well, he’ll contribute fifty. Maybe you can get more.” LBJ: “He oughta give a hun’red thousand, as much as that fella’s worth.” Smathers: “Well, if he can get it, I can get a hundred thousand.”

  There followed a misunderstanding worthy of Strangelove. What Johnson thought was a stalling maneuver his field commanders thought was an answer to their long-stated recommendation to turn the Vietnam affair into a real fight. Admirals sent their ships—two carriers and two destroyers, sailing on instruments in the middle of a vicious storm—into the Gulf with orders to regard any vessel they encountered “as belligerents from first detection.” Suspicious bleeps showed up on the Maddox’s sonar—what appeared to be twenty-two torpedoes heading straight at them. At 9 p.m. the sailors set their guns ablazing, then flashed news of a North Vietnamese attack to Washington.

  Forty-five minutes later the President was on the phone with an old Texas pal, former Eisenhower treasury secretary Robert Anderson. Anderson was in charge of one of Johnson’s pet campaign projects—swaying Republican tycoons into the Johnson column. Presuming that the President was on the phone to talk about campaign matters, Anderson rattled off the names of the esteemed executives he was lining up—including, extraordinarily, the CEO of Borg-Warner, the auto-parts empire that once belonged to Peggy Goldwater’s family. Anderson brought up the name of a businessman he knew—the mobbed-up proprietor of a scandal sheet called the National Enquirer—who wanted to donate $250,000 to Johnson’s favorite charity, the Sam Rayburn Foundation, and kick in a few thousand more to the campaign. The wealthy contributor was currently being inconvenienced by a Justice Department investigation of a merger in which he had an interest, Anderson explained. Johnson promised to make a few calls and see what he could do to help him out.

  Then the President abruptly changed the subject. He told his friend about Op Plan 34-A and the retaliation it had brought on. “Make it look like a very firm stand,” was Anderson’s advice. “You’re gonna be running against a man who’s a wild man,” who would surely say that if it were up to him, he “would have knocked ’em off the moon.”

  Johnson rang Bob McNamara. He explained that in their briefing of congressional leaders later in the day they had to “leave an impression ... that we’re gonna be firm as hell”—lest Goldwater “[raise] hell about how he’s gonna blow ’em off the moon.”

  More storms. Three hours later the guns fell silent and the Maddox’s captain wired warning that what they thought were enemy attacks might well have been sonar anomalies created by freak weather effects. Johnson’s meeting with congressional leaders was fast approaching. So were deadlines for the morning papers. The President was in no mood for ambiguity. “Some of our boys are floating in the water,” he lied to the sixteen congressional leaders who had filed into the Cabinet Room.

  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was approved within the week with only two dissenting votes. Hubert Humphrey helped tip the scales by conjuring up visions of General Walker and Curtis LeMay. “There are people in the Pentagon,” he said, “who think we ought to send three hundred thousand troops over there.” None of the congressmen were aware of Op Plan 34-A; they thought they were voting to avenge a vicious, unprovoked attack. The resolution was the sole congressional authorization for a decade of undeclared war in Vietnam.

  The strikes were launched. Speechwriters prepared an address to the nation. Somewhat reluctantly, LBJ tried to reach Barry Goldwater, who was on a boat somewhere off Newport Beach, where he was vacationing instead of in Germany. Goldwater called back from the dock, his patriotic instincts kicking in, pleased that Johnson was finally doing what he had hoped for—turning the problem over to the military. He assured his President of his total support: “We’re all Americans and Americans stick together.” Johnson sighed with relief.

  Still, Johnson found the political risk in the speech excruciating. “We don’t have to make it, do we?” he pleaded with McNamara, who assured him that they did. The President waited until strikes were under way to speak. “We Americans know, although others appear to forget”—a reference to Goldwater—“ the risk of spreading conflict. We seek no wider war.”

  The Gulf of Tonkin affair, he now understood, was a blessing in disguise. With the patriotic Goldwater uneager to challenge him on Vietnam, it would only become a campaign issue if Johnson made it one—on his own terms.

  Racial politics was not nearly so amenable to control. Lik
e Richard Nixon in 1960, Johnson was busy writing the script for his own coronation—the Democratic National Convention, which was to open on August 24. And, like Nixon’s, the coronation threatened to become a war. The problem wasn’t Barry Goldwater. It was a Mississippi farmhand named Fannie Lou Hamer and her Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

  Richard Nixon’s chances of winning the nominationwere taken very seriously—though the behind-the-scenes conniving of a candidate many considered a pathetic has-been left some, including The Washington Post’s cartoonistHerblock, disgusted.

  George Wallace’s anti-civil rights run in three Democratic primaries thrilled many working-classwhite voters (above), while others were less than openly supportive (below). Everyone exceptWallace was stunned by the Alabaman’s relative success in the three races, and the word “backlash” soon dominated coverage of the presidential race.

  Goldwater beat William Scranton in San Francisco at a Republican National Convention the left many television viewers with enduring images of a party that seemed to have been cap tured by a violent fringe—an image bolstered by the civil rights protesters who flooded th city (above and bottom left). In Atlantic City, at the Democratic Convention, Lyndon Johnso was brought to the verge of withdrawing by his fears that the dispute between Fannie Lo Hamer’s Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Mississippi’s racist regular Democrats-whoboycotted the convention (bottom right) and favored Barry Goldwater—portended th nation’s cracking in two.

  WHICH SHALL IT BE?

  “We Americans know—although others appear to forget—the risk of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.”

  -Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson

  August 4, 1964

  “That word ‘brinkmanship’ is a great word.” - Sen. Barry Goldwater

  March 5, 1964.

  VOTE FOR JOHSON/ HUMPHREY ON NOV. 3rd

  Democratic campaign literature trumpeted Johnson as the candidate of peace, even though the White House had already made plans to begin a bombing campaign in North Vietnam. LBJ’s supporters publishedliterature that depicted Goldwater as, for instance,a snake oil salesman (left). Goldwater’s officialcampaign published dry pamphlets excerpting dry Goldwater speeches, but his freelance supporters produced such pieces as a fan depicting the Republicanelephant crushing the Democratic donkey to death (opposite, top).

  The Goldwater campaign gave birth to enormous coordinatednetworks of conservative activists outside official Republican Party channels. They distributed seventeen million copies of books by Phyllis Schlafly, John A. Stormer, and J. Evetts Haley, often for free.

  The 1964 presidential campaign came to be dominated by images of anxiety and insecurity in a fast-changingworld. This page: LyndonJohnson’s advertising agency, years ahead of its competitors in media sophistication, sought to frighten viewers with the famous “Daisy” commercial, which never mentioned Barry Goldwater by name. Opposite page: Lyndon Johnson was soon being heralded, just as he desired, as a healer of all division. Goldwater’s main campaignorganization produced timid (and racially neutral) commercials that attempted, unsuccessfully,to do the same thing for the Republicans. More successful were the pamphlets put out by a campaign satellite run by F. Clifton White of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, which exploitedfears of racial violence in a manner similar to the way the Johnson campaign utilized fears of nuclear war, and homemade yard signs of supporters.

  It was Ronald Reagan who inherited the energies left over from the campaign with a last-minute televised campaign speech for Goldwater that commentators called “the most successful nationalpolitical debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” Conservatives had finally found a leader who could take them to the White House.

  Hamer had emerged as a natural leader of the courageous band of civil rights activists who planned to travel to Atlantic City to issue a credentials challenge to the regular—Goldwaterite, segregationist—Mississippi delegation. Seat the MFDP and lose the South, seat the regular Democrats and lose loyalty in the North: the dilemma cut to Lyndon Johnson’s paranoid core—for surely if he showed any weakness in the face of the dilemma, that would be RFK’s chance to humiliate him. On July 31 Johnson instructed an aide to relay one of an endless gauntlet of sadistic tests of loyalty to his presumptive vice-presidential choice, Hubert Humphrey: “Put a stop to this hell-raising so we don’t throw out fifteen states.” Two weeks later the President reached Walter Reuther. He listed the governors who were abandoning him, a Shakespearean tragic hero reciting his own dénouement: “Now today Louisiana takes her name off the ballot. Now Arkansas is on his way down to New Orleans to meet with Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana, and they’ll wind up with some serious problems. And this thing is just like a prairie fire. It spreads, and spreads fast.”

  “This thing’s coming to pieces,” Johnson moaned. “We’re gonna have as much trouble as they had in San Francisco unless some of you can, can—”

  He paused and sized up Reuther. It was the quintessence of his method: pinpoint his interlocutor’s worst fear, then describe it coming true unless he did his President’s bidding. Reuther’s, Johnson realized, was the fear that his bitterestfoe—they had hated each other since 1955—would ride the backlash to become a blue-collar beau ideal. “They all frighten me half to death what they say he’s got in the UAW and the Steelworkers,” Johnson whispered conspiratorially (his reference was to what the Steelworkers’ David McDonald had told him at a recent White House dinner about a private poll of the membership showing Goldwater leading). His prey cornered, LBJ moved in for the kill. The MFDP’s strategist was Joe Rauh, a bow-tied, bespectacled liberal D.C. lawyer. He was also chief counsel to Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers. “Now, Joe’s been on television two or three times....”

  The President didn’t have to say the rest. The order was plain: Deliver an ultimatum to Rauh to cease and desist or lose his practice’s most lucrative client.

  Like every Democratic Convention since 1940, the 1964 event was choreographed by Atlanta broadcast executive Leonard Reinsch. Reinsch knew TV. The convention would field only one session a day, at 8:30 p.m.—typically little beyond three speakers, a half-hour film, and entertainment by the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary. (The Republican Convention had featured afternoon and evening sessions, endless parliamentary tedium, and upwards of a dozen speakers a day; at one point, an interminable stretch of airtime was taken up with calling Congressman Halleck to the podium—he was bending his elbow at a bar—so he could introduce General Eisenhower.) Reinsch was desperate to keep the Democratic Convention entertaining; he was desperate to keep tension off the air. Atlantic City had been picked over Miami in the summer of 1963 out of fear of the civil rights rumblings in the South. That was well before this new terror. Blacks had rioted within the past two weeks in nearby Elizabeth and Paterson—about 90 miles away, like Cuba. Civil rights leaders had promised pickets “so long and black that they would think it was midnight in midday”—enough “to block every entrance into the convention hall.”

  The FBI sent a complement of twenty-seven agents, commanded by Deke DeLoach, the Bureau’s second-in-command, answering to the President’s top two men, Walter Jenkins and Bill Moyers (the former seminarian’s code name was “Bishop”). But with six thousand media personnel on the prowl, and since the networks had invested millions to transport their elaborate temporary studios clear across the country to Atlantic City (CBS judging the stakes so high that the network replaced an incensed Walter Cronkite as commentator, since he had put people to sleep in San Francisco), it was unlikely that anything could keep tension off the air. The Beatles had just began the last leg of their American tour, at the Cow Palace. That was symbolic. Nineteen sixty-four was the year of the screaming crowd.

  The Republicans erected a gargantuan eighty-foot Goldwater billboard on the boardwalk directly across from Atlantic City’s Convention Hall. It featured the campaign’s new slogan—“In Yo
ur Heart You Know He’s Right.” (Soon a placard was placed above it, reading “YES, EXTREME RIGHT.” The sign painter had been hired by FCC chair Newton Minow, the scold best known for attempting to elevate the taste level of television by decrying it as “a vast wasteland.”) The words sounded an abiding Goldwater theme. After Goldwater had said back in January that the reason most people were on relief was because they were stupid or lazy, he had explained on the Today show that when he asked those who criticized him if they thought what he said was right, they invariably responded, “Oh, yes, you’re right, but you shouldn’t say it.” In the Der Spiegel interview, he said that if the civil rights vote had been taken in the Senate with the doors locked and the lights off, it wouldn’t have gotten even twenty-five senators’ support. The billboard seemed a sly reminder of the secretness of the secret ballot: behind that curtain, no one needed to know you thought the blacks were getting out of hand, too.

  The Sunday before the convention, the White House released the latest in a stream of Panglossian press releases: The President’s economy drive had eliminated 624 unnecessary government publications for a savings of $2.8 million annually; 11 percent of Americans had owned air conditioners in 1960 but now air conditioners were owned by 26 percent, and during the same period TV ownership had grown from 86 percent to 91 percent. It couldn’t camouflage the bad news. He had invited the thirty-four Democratic governors to the White House. Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama had stood him up. As the thirty met, Fannie Lou Hamer stepped up before the platform committee—and the television cameras—and slowly, calmly, told the story of the beatings she had suffered for trying to exercise the franchise a year before. There were two Negro prisoners in the cell with her, she was explaining eight minutes into her testimony. “The policeman ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack—”