In 1961 his schedule included a well-publicized debating victory over Pennsylvania’s liberal senator Joseph Clark, who was reduced to spluttering that his opponent was a “neo-anarchist” who would make “a fine candidate for the next President of the John Birch Society.” The next year Friedman published a popular treatise, Capitalism and Freedom. It was so iconoclastic—and so lucid in its iconoclasm—that some Keynesians successfully lobbied to have it purged from their universities’ libraries. Among its off-the-deep-end arguments were that corporations should not make charitable donations (lest stockholders be defrauded by this economic irrationality); that the Post Office should be sold off; that licensing procedures for professionals like doctors should be banned (the market would take care of the problem of quackery on its own)—and that the government should disburse educational “vouchers” to force public schools to compete in the marketplace.
It seemed only a matter of time before Friedman and Goldwater should meet. Friedman first wrote Goldwater with a policy suggestion in late 1960, but he received only a perfunctory acknowledgment in return. After the professor bludgeoned Goldwater’s Senate adversary Joe Clark, however, Goldwater proposed a meeting. They first got together at one of the salons Bill Baroody held at his home (Friedman served on AEI’s Academic Advisory Board). Soon Goldwater took Friedman on as an informal economic adviser. Though Friedman surely never expected to see his ideas boomed over the public address system of Dodger Stadium.
Goldwater had played Dodger Stadium almost a year earlier, and then as now the event was a sellout (both times it was a rare political rally that charged admission; in southern California, people were willing to pay to see Barry Goldwater). Youngsters poured from buses wearing “Goldwater à Go-Go” sweat-shirts. (“These niggers are trying to make me a second-class citizen,” one told Stewart Alsop. “I guess a man has to be for Goldwater or be a Communist.”) Mexican-American supporters hung a huge “ARRIBA CON BARRY” banner from the upper left-field tier. Cesar Romero, Walter Brennan, Raymond Massey, and Ronald Reagan spoke, and as usual Reagan stole the show. (Another Hollywood star, Charlton Heston, would convert to Goldwaterism a few weeks later. Looking up at an “IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT” billboard at a Sacramento intersection, road-to-Damascus-style, on the way to a movie shoot, he thought to himself, “Son of a bitch, he is right.”)
At Dodger Stadium, Goldwater was introduced by World War II bombing ace General James Doolittle: “I give you the leader of the modern American revolution!” The revolutionary emerged from the shadows in a blue convertible. He circled the warning track for fifteen minutes of extended cheering. It pealed on for another seven minutes as the candidate stood in front of the microphone. This was far more pleasant than his morning stop in San Diego, where hecklers pulled a fire alarm and a steel fire escape crashed right through the center of a frightened crowd.
Finally, the stadium was stilled. And Goldwater hit the ground running:Never in my memory have we seen an Administration running in so many ways at once.... This is an entire circus of politics, with the Administration ring-master trying to come up with an act to please everyone in the audience every other minute! ... Their leader wants to forget how many friends we’ve lost while we have tried to cultivate our enemies.... We can’t forget that a time when morals in general have been slipping, causing all of us concern, there has been no light in the White House.... While the President of the United States speaks of the Great Society, our cities and suburbs are turning into the lawless society.
The scoreboard flashed “CHARGE!” at the applause lines. The Washington Post described the response as a “religious revivalistic fervor.”
Then Goldwater switched gears. “I will, as one of my first actions in the White House, ask the Congress to enact a regular and considered program of tax reduction,” he said. “I will also ask that Congress stop the wild spending spree begun by this Administration.” More applause.
“The legislation for which I will ask would provide an across-the-board reduction of 5 percent per year in all income taxes—both individual and corporate. The initial request will provide for such regular, prudent reductions in taxes in each of the next five years,” he plodded. “At the end of the first year you would calculate the tax you owed under the present law. Then you would reduce it by 5 percent. At the end of the second year you would reduce the payment by 10 percent. Each year you would take off the 5 percent so that by the fifth year the total reduction would be 25 percent ...”
The audience began drifting off.
“All along, of course, the amount of money that the government takes from you every payday, in withholding taxes, would be reduced at the same rate—5 percent the first year, 10 percent the next and so on until the 25 percent mark...”
He went on. And on.
Economic theory predicted that Dodger Stadium should have rejoiced: the marginal utility of paying 95 percent of your tax bill instead of 100 percent was unmistakable. And one of Friedman’s most treasured insights was that the unpredictability of government fiscal policy was an impediment to private investment, so knowing tax rates five years in advance would free up capital to boost economic growth.
Instead, the speech landed with a thud. Five percent, 10 percent, 25 percent, first year, fifth year, initial request, withholding taxes: it went by in a gust of confusion. Did a 5 percent tax reduction mean the 15 percent tax bracket would become 10 percent? Or that a $570 tax bill—the bite of the typical American family—would become $541.50? The answer was the latter. Those quick enough to do the back-of-the-envelope calculations couldn’t have been too impressed—since that typical tax bill had just been reduced from $750 by the Johnson tax cut. Listeners were supposed to appreciate that Johnson’s tax cut was designed to create a deficit, while Goldwater’s would close the deficit. But why it would close the deficit—by forcing the government to cut spending because of reduced revenue—new by in half a garbled sentence. Many conservatives for whom fiscal irresponsibility was the gravest sin could only agree with Treasury Secretary Dillon’s assessment: “No one with the slightest understanding of fiscal affairs,” he said, “could countenance the prospect of blindly binding us to annual tax cuts for many years ahead regardless of the state of the economy.”
In his speech the next day Goldwater proved he could bomb just as well when he was being crystal clear. Seattle’s Coliseum was full to bursting with 15,000 patrons, at $I a pop, with a 3,000-person overflow milling outside. The speech was a screed against the doctrine of “coexistence” in the Cold War. Goldwater revived the old Republican cry that America’s wars began under Democrats, scored Kennedy and Johnson for failures at the Bay of Pigs, in the Congo, Zanzibar, Panama—“Our flag, torn down, spat upon”—and warned that Vietnam was “as close as Kansas or New York or Seattle” in “the mileage of peace and freedom.” The audience, packed with men who riveted Boeing warplanes together, was his. A big helium balloon trailing a “JOHNSON ’64” bedsheet was stealthily released, bopped its way along the rafters, and met its end colliding with a floodlight; after it flumphed to the floor the audience ripped it to shreds like mad dogs. Goldwater said that that was what he was going to do with the Johnson Administration. His audience roared.
Then he went further than they were willing to go.
Kennedy, he announced sternly, had calibrated the timing of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis to help Democrats in the midterm elections that November. He added: “Americans must be prepared under such an Administration to be faced by a ‘crisis’ of some sort just before the election.” He thanked Boeing for how well its planes had performed in wartime—and promised that under his Administration, the planes “will be doing so again.” He meant he would distribute defense contracts to the most qualified bidder, not according to political considerations as Lyndon Johnson supposedly did. What it sounded like would soon be revealed when Lou Harris found that 64 percent of women and 45 percent of men believed that if elected President, Goldwater would take the
United States to war; and when researchers at the University of Michigan found that there was one comment on Johnson’s belligerency for every hundred about Goldwater’s (people being hardly aware that in the White House, on September 8, it was decided that U.S. bombing of North Vietnam would begin just as soon as the election was out of the way).
For his next stop, Minneapolis, the second floor’s Midwest experts worked up a detailed report on the mounting aggravation of wheat farmers with the federal acreage allotment system. The issue was ignored. Instead Goldwater exclaimed, “We know that it is lack of leadership that has turned our streets into jungles.... If it is entirely proper for government to take from some to give to others, then won’t some be led to believe that they can rightfully take from anyone who has more than they?” The speech was televised across the state. The denizens of Minnesota’s crime-ridden wheat farms proved nonplused. The Washington Post’s editorial board reacted considerably more excitedly: “Like a man looking at the world while standing on his head, he has arrived at a conclusion that the cause of crime is to be found in the excessive benevolence of the community to its unfortunate,” they wrote. “This is much like asserting that the vaccination is the cause of smallpox.” It was, they concluded, “hard to believe that anyone living in the 20th Century would utter it.”
The next night, in Chicago, professors—those, at least, who hadn’t joined a boycott called by an agitated University of Chicago don—filed into a banquet hall to hear Goldwater give the plenary address at the American Political Science Association convention. The speech was written by Harry Jaffa and Bill Rehnquist. “According to some of your learned works,” Goldwater began, “a great many people make up their minds about candidates even before the convention opens.” That, he continued, was why he was so glad to accept their invitation to speak at this convention. “Finding an open-minded audience to hear a discussion of fundamental issues poses a real problem.”
Then he set to baiting them. He said it disgusted him that liberals admired this “power-wielding, arm-twisting President” just because he “gets his program through Congress.” This, he said, was “a totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means.” Then he turned to his main subject—what he liked to call, in less formal settings, the “jackassian” nature of recent Supreme Court decisions. “I suppose, since I am not a lawyer, that I should leave the analysis of the merits of the court’s decision in these cases to the constitutional lawyers—”
Hecklers shouted their agreement. He pressed on.
“Yet, just as it has been observed that war is too important to leave to the generals...” (sarcastic jeers; considering what the audience members had read in their newspapers that morning of the fright Goldwater had given Seattle listeners the night before, this metaphor, which some might also have remembered as the opinion of General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, was the most injudicious imaginable). He went on to accuse the Warren Court of exercising “raw and naked power.” Historically minded commentators drew attention to those words’ similarity to the 1956 congressional “Southern Manifesto.” Others interpreted the statement as an attack on the institution of the Supreme Court itself, perhaps even an endorsement of the Birch Society’s “Impeach Warren” campaign.
By coincidence, that very same day the conservative justice John Marshall Harlan released a statement grandly explaining why he had been issuing angry dissent after angry dissent in cases that year—decrying decisions expanding the rights of criminal suspects, protecting naughty books, and broadening the public-accommodations purview of the Civil Rights Act. He railed that the federal judiciary was captive to the notion “that every major social ill in this country can find its cure in some constitutional principle.” The political workers on the second floor couldn’t believe their good fortune. This was cover: their man couldn’t very well be accused of taking on the Supreme Court himself if he had a Supreme Court justice in his corner. They began making preparations to exploit the statement. Kitchel vetoed their efforts. He didn’t think they had anything to apologize for—calling the Chicago speech “the most exciting thing we’ve done in the campaign so far.” That Goldwater alienated audiences was taken by his inner circle as evidence he was doing something right—telling them things they needed, but didn’t want, to hear. What frustrated the people on the second floor was that they believed these were things the American people did want to hear, if only the messages were communicated more skillfully. To them, it seemed more and more that their third-floor rivals weren’t interested in winning the election at all.
It wasn’t all that long ago that even liberal organs spoke of Goldwater as “an absolutely honest politician” (Harper’s), of the “stoutness and general decency of his character” (The Progressive). Gone were the days. Publications were beginning to put out endorsements, and Goldwater was being pummeled. In presidential elections between 1940 and 1960, the nation’s top one hundred newspapers endorsed the Republican 77 percent of the time. In 1964 only 45 percent would. The Saturday Evening Post was one of several organs to deliver its first Democratic endorsement in its history. Norman Rockwell it wasn’t: “For the good of the Republican Party, which his candidacy disgraces, we hope that Goldwater is crushingly defeated,” the editorial ran. He was “a wild man, a stray, an unprincipled and ruthless political jujitsu artist.” (The language was ironic: “master of political jujitsu” had been the phrase the same magazine used back in January to praise their hero William Warren Scranton’s political gifts.) Other newcomers to the Democratic column included the publications of Henry Luce (“Let me introduce myself. I am your boss,” Luce once retorted to staffers who begged him to endorse Adlai Stevenson) and the Hearst Corporation (where in 1935 the boss ordered papers to substitute the phrase “Raw Deal” for the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s program in their news coverage). Bill Miller’s little hometown paper went for Johnson; a nearby one tipped its hat to a Democrat for the first time since 1822. The unkindest cut of all came in Phoenix. You could find any number of ads for Goldwater’s Department Store in Gene Pulliam’s Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette. You just couldn’t find a kind word on behalf of Barry Goldwater. “I’ll be darned,” the President exhaled quietly, humbly, when he heard the news that the man who had ushered Barry Goldwater into public life was now cutting him adrift.
Clergymen and religious institutions inaugurated a new genre: the apologia for wading into presidential politics. “Readers of The Churchman”—a monthly of Goldwater’s own Episcopal faith—“are doubtless aware that it has not been the custom of this journal to support party candidates. But they should also be certain that it could not only ever support but must strongly oppose a candidate who violates so completely the slogan which it carries on its mast-head—‘ For the promotion of goodwill and better understanding among all peoples.’ ” At the Episcopalians’ triennial convention, in St. Louis, delegates in the hundreds—even a bishop—signed a statement decrying Goldwater’s “transparent exploitation of racism.” The president of the American Jewish Congress said, “A Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide.” New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman acceded to Goldwater’s request for a meeting because he didn’t know how he could duck it, but he apologized to the White House for doing so, and he wouldn’t let himself be photographed. A Methodist magazine devoted an entire issue to the scourge of Goldwaterism, explaining, “This journal was founded as a response to the threat of Hitlerism.” Paul Tillich, with Reinhold Niebuhr one of the towering giants among U.S. theologians, pronounced: “Religion must sometimes take a side.... I feel as a theologian justified in calling for the defeat of the Republican candidate for the Presidency.” Martin Luther King said he felt compelled to act because if Goldwater won, what would follow would be “violence and riots the like of which we have never seen before.”
It didn’t happen entirely spontaneously. “We have an opportunity to arouse many religious groups to oppose Goldwater,” Bill Moyers advised the boss in
July. The White House featured The Churchman’s editorial in a press release nearly before the issue was in subscribers’ hands; an anti-Goldwater article in a little journal published by Niebuhr was distributed by the Johnson campaign in the thousands. (“President says he thinks they ought to put this guy on TV,” White House special assistant Jack Valenti noted after the Tillich statement.) An “America’s Leaders Speak” letterhead was created by the DNC to trumpet newfound fans in just about every profession. Leonard Marks, the Johnson family lawyer, worked on such matters full-time, setting up a liaison with every newspaper that made the smallest peep in opposition to the Republican candidate.
Before the Storm Page 61