Four years earlier the Republicans might have been able to do something about it. Not now. The FCC in 1964 had begun implementing a Goldwaterite idea: turning over much of its mandate to police the broadcasting industry to the industry itself. The National Association of Broadcasters censured its members on the basis of a thirty-page “Code of Ethics” whose sole stricture against TV violence—to take one example—noted that it should be used “only as required by plot development or character delineation.” (When NAB’s president had proposed amending the Code to limit cigarette advertising after the Surgeon General’s report, he was summarily fired.) The penalty for breaking the rules was loss of the right to display the NAB “Seal of Good Practice,” which nobody noticed when it was there and nobody noticed when it was gone. “In light of this commercial,” Ev Dirksen wrote their executive director, “I would hope you would read again the Code of Ethics and ask yourself whether you agree that this is unfit for children to see.” He was spitting in the wind. NAB wasn’t even a paper tiger. There was nothing the Goldwater campaign could do but scream.
Or so it seemed. Tony Schwartz thought that a gifted Goldwater publicist could have flipped the ad’s power against itself. The spot did not make any actual reference to Goldwater. It just told people to be afraid of nuclear war and leveraged the force of a message the media was already repeating over and over like a hit Beatles song: “Kenneth Kassel, a lean young corn and livestock farmer, paused near a hog shoot in Ayshire, Iowa, to explain why he expect to switch his vote to President Johnson this fall. ‘If the Republicans had somebody a little more level-headed, I’d vote for him,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid of Goldwater.’ ”The “warmonger” tag seemed as unchangeable as the atmosphere. But Tony Schwartz later suggested, “Goldwater could have defused Daisy by saying, ‘I think the danger of total nuclear war should be the theme of the campaign this year, and I’d like to pay half the cost of running the commercial.’ If he had, the commercial would not have been perceived as being against him. He would have changed the feelings and assumptions stored within us.” Perhaps it might have worked, perhaps not. But then, there were no gifted publicists in the Goldwater organization who thought to try.
Barry Goldwater was taking the unusual step of running his campaign out of Republican National Committee headquarters on Eye Street (Washingtonese for “I Street”), which already had a built-in staff, instead of from a freestanding temporary organization. But Goldwater was too busy fulfilling previous commitments—and, for the five days preceding his Prescott debut, lolling unshaven on General Wedemeyer’s yacht off the Orange County coast—to supervise the changeover. Denison Kitchel, in turn, delegated the task to Dean Burch and his assistant, John Grenier. RNC mandarins feared for their positions, but Burch and Grenier insisted that their aim was “neither to reward nor to purge.”
Then, they purged. The RNC’s longtime executive director and half his executive committee were cut adrift; then the RNC’s longtime research director, “a computer on legs,” as some described him, was let go (in his stead Goldwater’s research team sent form letters to the political science chairs at big state universities begging “any recent pamphlets or books... concerning the political situation in [your state here]”). The PR director was fired, and the finance chair left for a trip home to Ohio after the convention without a thought that he might be expendable and returned to discover someone else in his chair. The scheduling department, at least, was run by a veteran—of the first Eisenhower campaign. There were many among the new RNC staff who had not participated in as much as a campaign for class president. Kitchel, quipped a staffer afterward, “could not tell a leak from a leek”—although that staffer had little more experience himself.
Kitchel had taken the advice of Raymond Moley to gut the office’s structure top to bottom. In Franklin Roosevelt’s campaigns, Moley explained, the political and the policy-planning departments were strictly segregated, with a single person—that would be Kitchel—straddling the two, so the candidate’s message could be disciplined against the temptations of the day-to-day electoral horse race. It was an idea Goldwater’s inner circle—the Arizonans and Baroody’s people—beheld with delight: that meant they could stick the grubby politicos on the second floor of the building and separate themselves on the third—ostensibly as the “Research Division,” unofficially dubbed the “Think Tank,” but more accurately described as the headquarters within the headquarters—and preserve the empyrean isolation they had so enjoyed while writing Goldwater’s acceptance speech on the seventeenth floor of the Mark Hopkins.
What that meant practically speaking was that the month after the convention most of the work at Eye Street was being done by electricians, furniture movers, and telephone installers. Scattered around the country were the crackerjack local Goldwater outfits Clif White had put together for the primary campaigns and state conventions. Left inactive, they were now straining at the leash to get to work for the general election. Their phone calls went unanswered at headquarters; their letters piled up unopened amidst the sawdust and exposed wiring. The marketplace was being flooded with campaign kitsch-Barry Goldwater greeting cards (outside: “You made me what I am today”; inside: “A Democrat”), Barry comic books, plastic Barry dashboard dolls (splendid craftsmanship, right down to the rightward crook in his glasses), Barry soap (“4-Year Protection!”), a pamphlet in the old-timey patent medicine style: “Cures for What Ails America: Dr. B. M. Goldwater’s All-Purpose Defoliation Tonic, the Non-Taxic, Magic Cold War Remedy, a Balm for Boils, Burns, Bruises, Bigots, Birchers & Buckleys.” There were bumper stickers in every imaginable language and level of taste—and buttons, buttons, buttons: “METS ROOTERS! EDSEL OWNERS! BACK A REAL LOSER! GOLDWATER!”; “GOLDWATER OR SOCIALISM”; “DOCTOR STRANGEWATER FOR PRESIDENT”; “IF I WERE 21 I’D VOTE FOR GOLDWATER.” None of it came from Goldwater headquarters. Even once they had the resources to do the job, his people were paralyzed. When the Arizona Mafia took title to the Republican National Committee, they realized they had a problem on their hands. Selling such kitsch to local organizations had been their profit center during the nomination fight. But federal campaign law, it turned out, prohibited political parties from charging for the stuff. The lawyers searched for a loophole. The presses sat dormant.
Once the carpenters got finished with it, the second-floor political command center was a handsome sight. There was a map room to rival the Joint Chiefs‘, charts detailing sophisticated chains of command, a latticework of graphs sitting ready to mark the progress of their campaign’s voter-canvass effort (they hoped to reach 75 percent of American voters in their homes). A staff of seven hundred had been assembled: tour committees, finance committees, speakers bureaus, a radio-television division, a transport department run by a former airline chief, copywriters, telephone girls. Some of Draft Goldwater’s most seasoned operatives had been brought back on board (though not Clif White) to run the regional divisions. In one corner a buzzing hive was gathering and collating twenty-three different variables for each of the country’s 185,000 precincts (“support of senior citizens,” “vote-pulling aid from religious influences,” “expected honest vote count,” and so forth; the code book for Ohio alone ran to 133 pages), producing vote quotas for each, a Herculean effort; in another corner, state-of-the-art TWX and DATA teletypes were ready to clack 1,050 words per minute to offices around the country, even to the campaign plane. They had newfangled WATS long-distance lines and auto-dial phones. The communications system had awesome potential: it could relay shifting political conditions on the ground to the Washington command center and to the traveling team within minutes.
To coordinate it all there were to be meetings every Sunday with the second-floor leadership, the third-floor leadership, and Goldwater and his traveling team. This strategy board would be briefed every two weeks by the campaign’s Princeton-based polling firm. And the preliminary numbers made the second floor thrum with excitement. They were counterintuitive. Only 9 percent of the sam
ple rated Johnson “excellent”; 38 percent rated him “fair to poor.” Almost three-quarters of independent voters expressed admiration for Goldwater’s forthrightness; less than a quarter were worried that he “acts without thinking” —and 61 percent questioned Johnson’s good judgment. Six percent thought that the President was “superficial, shallow.” Forty-one percent called themselves “conservative” compared to 31 percent who called themselves “liberal” ; half the sample “knew very little” about Goldwater—giving his campaign team an enormous, unexpected opportunity to shape his image in the public mind. And since the popularity trend was in Goldwater’s favor—Gallup’s if-the-election-were-held-today numbers gave Goldwater 19 percent in June and 34 percent in September—there came a revelation: Goldwater could ride these numbers to a historic upset and not compromise on a single conservative position—by saying the right things in the right places at the right times, lining up the right people to carry the water, and communicating in clear, attractive ways that the public could understand.
Kennedy’s Irish Mafia could hardly have been better prepared.
And Goldwater’s Arizona Mafia couldn’t have cared less.
The people who were really running the campaign were upstairs. They were what Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called “a group of little-known academicians and publicists loosely allied with an obscure tax-exempt educational foundation in Washington, D.C., called the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.” And to them, the findings of the lastest poll were beneath notice. Bill Baroody was on paid leave working eighteen-hour days running the third floor like a fiefdom. His liege men had been by his side in San Francisco: Warren Nutter, chairman of the University of Virgina’s economics department; Dick Ware, who dispensed the largesse of a deceased motor oil manufacturer from Michigan as director of the Earhart-Relm Foundation; trusty Ed McCabe and his second, Chuck Lichenstein; Baroody’s old AEI partner, W. Glenn Campbell, now running the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Baroody’s aristocracy were ad hoc consultants, conservative intellectuals like Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Bill Rehnquist, and Robert Strausz-Hupé. They found the very idea of consulting polls contemptible.
Kitchel, Baroody, and Goldwater didn’t bother to attend the Sunday strategy meetings. They made strategy at 33,000 feet. The campaign plane (“YIA BI KEN” [House in the Sky], read the legend above the lightning stripe running down its side) was their playhouse: Kitchel, Karl Hess, and the candidate conversed in Navajo (Hess was studying up), swapped ribald jokes, told hunting stories, yapped on the airborne ham radio. Another favorite pastime was refusing to receive top donors on board for a chance to ride along with the candidate. Occasionally, they prepared for the next stop, although that didn’t take much time: Goldwater never acknowledged the locale he landed in anyway. Meanwhile the leaders on the second floor would explode once more after learning from the morning newspapers that their hard-won intelligence, relayed so assiduously by all those expensive contraptions, had been ignored while their underlings floundered, directionless, bickering, confused, because the man charged with directing them, Kitchel, was otherwise disposed.
On a wall in the Think Tank was affixed a Peanuts comic strip. Linus declares from a speaker’s stand, “On Hallowe’en night the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch, and brings toys to all the good little children.” His audience laughs at him. Later, Linus confides to Snoopy, “So I told them about the Great Pumpkin and they all laughed! Am I the first person ever to sacrifice political office because of belief? Of course not! I simply spoke what I felt was the truth.” Snoopy walks off, muttering, “I’ve never pretended to understand politics, but I do know one thing. If you’re going to hope to get elected, don’t mention the Great Pumpkin.”
LBJ’s opening speech was on Labor Day in Detroit’s Cadillac Square. It was Democratic tradition to ring in each presidential campaign to the roars of loyal workingmen grateful for bigger paychecks, better job security, stronger unions, and the political party that made it all possible. This year, though, the fear was that bigger paychecks and better job security would not be enough to keep the audience from Lyndon Johnson’s throat.
It was a fine month for backlash. New York came close to further rioting after a grand jury refused to indict the officer whose bullet set off the July disturbance ; that same week, white parents pulled their children out of New York schools to protest what the Republican platform called “federally sponsored ‘inverse discrimination’ ... the abandonment of neighborhood schools, for reasons of race.” Blunter, one protester carried a sign reading “YOU’LL TURN INTO A NIGGER.” (The seething issue had by then earned a journalistic shorthand: “busing,” sometimes spelled “bussing.”) Another court ordered union locals to dismantle father-son apprenticeship programs that “automatically excluded” Negroes. One of Johnson’s advance men filed a report on the comments of a New York cabbie: “He exploded—traffic terrible, Negroes pushing, city in snarl, politicians ruining country, everything a mess. Pent-up fury.” He found similar sentiments among four of the seven hacks he met. The AFL-CIO budgeted $12 million for education efforts to counter the myth that the Civil Rights Act demanded hiring quotas based on race. It didn’t work; polls taken at factory gates in South Chicago and Gary, Indiana, favored Goldwater 53 to 47. (It would be some time before a backlash could build up against another new civil rights program, inaugurated for the 1964-65 school year at Cornell University: intentionally increasing the representation of entering black students to 8 in a class of 2,300, from a previous high of 4.) In California, the Senate campaign between former JFK and LBJ press secretary Pierre Salinger and George Murphy was playing out as a moratorium on Proposition 14. Salinger proudly declared himself against the proposed amendment (that is, in favor of open housing). Murphy refused to take a position. Salinger, it transpired, was about as popular as the prospect of open housing—which is to say that on his whistle-stop through southern California he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes.
Johnson comforted himself with talk of the “frontlash”—the infelicitous phrase he coined to describe all the disillusioned Republicans moving over to support him. Members of the Establishment media comforted themselves by wishing all of it away. “In pre-campaign figuring,” Time reported of Goldwater, “it was generally assumed that he would also gain in the North from the ‘backlash’ of white resentment against the excess of the Negro revolution. But if there were any such backlash, it would surely have shown itself last week in a Democratic primary in Michigan’s Sixteenth Congressional District and it failed to materialize.” That was a slim reed: the Sixteenth did, in fact, vote out a sluggish incumbent who voted against the Civil Rights Act. But it was also an area where racial boundaries were policed as violently as in Alabama. Time might just as well have chosen Massachusetts as its bellwether, where incumbent governor Endicott Peabody, an unbending civil rights supporter, was swept from office in a primary. Or Detroit itself, where a politician named Thomas Poindexter, after a decade of electoral disappointments as an economic populist, had finally won a seat on the Common Council as the “Home-owners’ Champion”—first by testifying against the civil rights bill on behalf of the “99 percent of Detroit’s white residents” who feared the “general lowering of moral standards” that would follow its ratification; then by becoming the all-but-official voice of a primary-ballot initiative that thumped the city’s open housing laws from the books.
Fear of backlash made for no little tension in the little jet Johnson had packed with Democratic pols and AFL-CIO officials for the trip to the Motor City from the capital. They exchanged pleasantries—and thought to themselves, Would Lyndon Johnson suffer Endicott Peabody’s fate?
Here was their answer. He stood side by side, hands held aloft, with Walter Reuther and—both men’s fathers spinning in their graves—Henry Ford II, then wrapped up in difficult negotiations over the next UAW contract. In the crowd, 100,000 union members cheered themselves hoarse. Labor and management,
allies not adversaries, reasoning together for their common good: this was Lyndon Johnson’s dream.
He spoke, with a tremor in his voice, about responsibility. “I am not the first President to speak here in Cadillac Square, and I do not intend to be the last. Make no mistake, there is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon.... I believe the final responsibility for all decisions on nuclear weapons must rest with the civilian head of this government, the President of the United States, and I think and reiterate that I believe that this is the way the American people want it.” These sturdy proletarians took in the words like a comforting balm. Property values, seniority systems, busing: after facing their planet’s mortality, these things seemed like chickenshit indeed.
There was at least one person who blanched at this kind of talk: National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. He thought national security would be better served by telling the truth. Johnson’s constant claim that the President was solely responsible for firing nuclear weapons was open to charges of deception, Bundy gingerly advised his boss. Bundy laid out four separate scenarios in which military commanders could authorize a nuclear strike without presidential approval, and he implored the President for the sake of the Atlantic alliance to “make a statement in which you make clear that there are indeed very specialized contingencies for which certain presidential instructions already exist.” His entreaties were ignored.
Goldwater broke ground for Bill Baroody’s conservative utopia on the first stop of his first tour, Los Angeles, with the help of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. “Every individual endeavors to employ his capital so that its produce may be of greatest value,” Adam Smith famously wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which has no part of his intentions. By pursuing his own interests he frequently promotes that of society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it.” At Chicago, the revolutionary economics department was applying the gleaming instruments of mathematical proof to remove the qualifying “frequently” from that formulation, taking on every Keynesian orthodoxy their profession had come to hold dear. Professor Friedman, the Brooklyn-born son of an immigrant sweatshop worker, was their most fervent evangelist. By the 1950s this compact, muscular bulldog of a man was splitting his time between making pathbreaking contributions to his field (distinguished by a single-minded relentlessness in taking first principles to their logical conclusion, no matter how counterintuitive that conclusion might seem) and speaking to popular audiences around the nation (though so uncompromising was his devotion to individual liberty that when he traveled to private schools he refused to speak at compulsory chapel services).
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