Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

There were no Leonard Markses on Goldwater’s side. They had all been thrown overboard. Thirty-one-year-old Lee Edwards had been designated director of public relations—apparently; with Kitchel ever by Goldwater’s side on the campaign plane, such was the chaos that no one was certain whether the PR director’s job hadn’t been given to Republican ad man Lou Guylay instead. The dust settled with Guylay in charge—in charge, that is, of the staff of young, bright-eyed incompetents with which Edwards had packed the payroll, who disgorged so many press releases reporters had no idea what to write about.

  The greatest flack outfit in the world would have had its hands full just dealing with the people who did endorse Goldwater. Robert DePugh proudly announced that his Minutemen militias would be sabotaging Democratic campaign offices on the campaign’s behalf; the National Conservative Council pledged to aid Goldwater in his effort to “buy back the Federal Reserve System from the Rockefellers”; the Courtneys’ anti-Johnson booklet ran a photograph of the President applauding an African drummer, captioned “Please, Massa Lyndon, give us some of dat nice foreign aid. I need to buy two more wives.” Gerald L. K. Smith, after agonizing for months over Goldwater’s Jewish ancestry, crawled out from under his rock to declare that patriotic Americans had “no time to lose” in joining the cause—and Georgia and Alabama KKK leaders made their unqualified endorsements known far and wide. “We’re not in the business of discouraging votes,” came Dean Burch’s response; Lyndon Johnson pounced on the opportunity. “You get on some TV up there where the wires will quote that,” he told Roy Wilkins.

  And so it went. Grenier was so obsessed with control that he ordered the entire staff not to speak to the press, on or off the record. Edwards had been Napoleonic enough to demand that nothing be mimeographed without his express consent. More memos, an early September memo complained, were being circulated about how to circulate memos than about all other subjects taken together. Only 5 percent of the Goldwater campaign’s insanely ambitious vote-quota scheme for every precinct in the nation had been fulfilled. Their vaunted electronic communications system only speeded the pace at which mistakes compounded: local leaders arrived at the office every morning to find a pile of reading material on their desks, but no inkling of what they were supposed to do with it. Rome burned; and the emperors fiddled high above the clouds, floating to the next campaign stop with blissful indifference.

  20

  CAMPAIGN TRAILS

  Goldwater’s next swing was through the Democrats’ former Solid South. And when reporters described the crowds’ receptions, words like “volcanic” and “Beatles” appeared over and over again. In Winston-Salem, the “We Want Barry” drone forced the introductions of local dignitaries to be canceled. In Charlotte, where ten thousand supporters had to be turned away, the Observer reported teenagers “near emotional collapse” when Goldwater walked past. “Sobbing, tears running down their faces, several girls moaned, ‘Barry, Barry.’ ” His motorcade down Peachtree Street was showered with so much confetti that it felt like Atlanta had suffered its first blizzard. In Memphis the Commercial Appeal predicted a crowd between 3,000 and 7,000. “Thank God he’s safe,” the Memphis Chief of Police could only sigh after Goldwater escaped mauling from a throng of nearly 100,000. In Greenville, South Carolina, forty-five people required medical attention after crowds broke through the police cordon.

  In contrast, Goldwater’s speeches earned descriptions like “low-keyed,” “listless,” “monotone,” and “stumbling”—as if, someone wrote, the candidate were saying, “Train 28 now leaving on Track 1.” The speeches themselves were so inappropriate to their occasions that The New Yorker’s Richard Rovere was rubbing his eyes: “There were some times, traveling with Goldwater,” he wrote, “when one wondered whether the candidate really thinks of himself as a man seeking the Presidency of the United States.” Once more the second-floor units labored mightily preparing reports to help Goldwater’s speechwriters: foregrounding the votes Goldwater had made to strengthen Social Security; an explanation of how TVA would be improved if it were run by the more efficient private sector; demonstration (prepared in consultation with the National Cotton Council) of how easing cotton supports would boost sales abroad. All were deposited in Yia Bi Ken’s circular file. The South was ground zero for American political demagoguery—the best place, Goldwater had decided, to prove he wasn’t a demagogue.

  In Charlotte he gave an academic monologue on the great American system of constitutional checks and balances—before angrily denouncing the silent crowd for their indifference to their own liberty: “There have been wealthy slaves!” he lectured in exasperation. “You can find justice in a prison. We can find peace any time we say to the Communists, ‘All right. We quit. We’ll lie down.’ ” (The leader of the local Goldwater office, in the face of the alienated crowd, called Washington in sobs after seeing all their hard organizational work wasted.) In Atlanta, where business students paraded around with their arms in slings carrying signs reading “WE’D GIVE OUR RIGHT ARMS FOR BARRY,” the day’s lecture was on the evils of the Supreme Court’s reapportionment decision. Off came the props; the speech was like a slap in the face to Atlantans who were counting on reapportionment to give the city a second, likely Republican, congressman. In St. Petersburg, a city proud of its low crime rate and where a quarter of the citizens received Social Security, Goldwater gave a speech on how American city streets were turning into jungles. (The Republican mayor immediately contacted the White House to let them know he was now for Johnson.) In Memphis and Raleigh Goldwater chastised farmers for even thinking they liked cotton subsidies, and he met the concerns of peanut farmers by noting, “I’m probably the most violent advocate of peanut butter in history. On a dare from one of my sons, I actually shaved with peanut butter and it wasn’t bad, but it smells.” On a rainy day in Montgomery (where, in the kind of goof that had reporters wondering whether his organizers “did graduate work at college on the arts of ineptitude,” the 565 Southern belles who performed in the pageant of welcome were forced to sit on the muddy ground in their party dresses) he revealed his program for block grants to states—which might have been a good issue, if Johnson hadn’t already put forward a similar proposal much earlier. In Knoxville, bumper stickers were printed up in the wake of Goldwater’s visit: “SELL TVA? I’D RATHER SELL ARIZONA!” In Fort Worth, he criticized his least favorite military aircraft project, the TFX, which he believed LBJ had given to an inferior bidder, General Dynamics, a defense contractor based in—Fort Worth. In West Virginia, he called the War on Poverty “plainly and simply a war on your pocketbooks,” a fraud because only “the vast resources of private business” could produce the wealth to truly slay penury. If he had been speaking in the boomtowns of southern California, Arizona, or Texas, he would have won the day. In the land of the tar-paper shack, the gap-toothed smile, and the open sewer—where the “vast resources of private business” were represented in the person of the coal barons who gave men black lung, then sent them off to die without pensions—the message just sounded perverse. As he left, lines of workmen jeered him.

  Goldwater’s hero’s welcomes and the campaign’s incompetence weren’t the only stories from the tour. There was also the matter of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

  Strom Thurmond was perhaps the most conservative legislator in the Capitol. He was also Barry Goldwater’s friend; when Thurmond broke the filibuster record during the 1957 civil rights debate, Goldwater was the only senator who spelled him for bathroom breaks. Like most of the South’s politically alert demagogues, by 1964 Thurmond had stopped shy of directing scorn at blacks themselves; he proclaimed himself a constitutionalist, pure and simple. Goldwater had no compunctions about asking for Thurmond’s endorsement. It was freely offered. Goldwater then dared Thurmond to go one better and become a Republican. That would make history: the only Republican senator from any state in the old Confederacy was John Tower.

  Thurmond asked his cronies about the idea. They told him he
was crazy. He polled South Carolina voters. They told him he wasn’t crazy. A third voice tipped the decision: Roger Milliken, Thurmond’s biggest benefactor. And so, in a statewide TV address on September 16, in front of a “Goldwater for President” poster bigger than he was, Senator Thurmond acted as if he had hardly given the decision a second thought. If Lyndon Johnson’s Democrats prevailed, he said, “Freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed.”

  “My fellow extremists!” he would drawl from the podium thereafter at Goldwater’s Southern stops, “I did not leave the Democratic Party. It left me!” Thurmond’s example was a powerful catalyst for those lesser mortals in the crowds wondering whether to make the switch for themselves—if not at the registration table, at least in the voting booth.

  George Wallace had come within days of making the same decision. He was sowing seeds for the 1968 presidential election by then, and had already received several attractive offers to turn Republican. The agent in the negotiations was none other than Roger Milliken. Then came Thurmond’s announcement. Wallace felt that Milliken had betrayed him; he had no interest in sharing Strom Thurmond’s thunder. He stayed a Democrat.

  And what if Wallace had gone Republican? Could Goldwater have proudly shared his dais with a man he despised as a racist? Back when he had met with Jim Martin up on top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, the answer would have been simple. Not now. Slowly, Goldwater seemed to be shedding his discomfort with the Southland’s peculiar institutions. Another guest at his podiums at those rallies was a man named Leander Perez. Dictator of Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish since 1919, Judge Perez referred to “his” Negroes as “animals right out of the jungle,” called civil rights activists “Zionist Jews,” and reacted to their their arrival in his territory by outfitting a former Confederate fort into something akin to a medieval dungeon. For these sins he had been excommunicated from the Catholic church.

  Perhaps Goldwater didn’t know all this about Perez; perhaps he chose to ignore what he knew. Whatever he was up to, it was working. “It’s been a long time since Southerners have had a presidential candidate they could support with pride and enthusiasm,” the Charleston News and Courier gushed.

  The idea on the third floor was that the President of the United States was too proud a man not to rise up in anger at Goldwater’s shots. He didn’t. “I’m not here to make a political speech,” he would say with a smile in his occasional forays out of Washington. He was just in town “to speak to a group of workingmen who invited me.”

  His spots spoke for him. One showed a young girl intently licking an ice-cream cone as a maternal voice-over cooed, “Know what people used to do? They used to explode bombs in the air. You know, children should have lots of vitamin A and calcium. But they shouldn’t have strontium 90 or cesium 137.... Now there’s a man who wants to be President of the United States.... His name is Barry Goldwater. If he’s elected, they might start testing all over again.” The last words were nearly drowned out by Geigercounter clicks.

  Another, a five-minute piece that DDB had feared would not hold its audience, depicted alternating countdowns in Russian and English, each followed by a nuclear explosion, the whole cycle repeating faster and faster, converging, converging—until the unremitting tension was relieved by John Kennedy’s voice announcing completion of test-ban negotiations. It held its audience.

  Then there was the one that made people think the phone in their house was ringing; that got their attention. The camera panned over the phone to reveal that it had no dial; there was a flashing red light in the lower-right-hand corner, and the words WHITE HOUSE where the phone number should be. Voice-over: “This particular phone only rings in a serious crisis. Leave it in the hands of a man who has proven himself responsible.”

  A final spot, following a pregnant woman as she walked with her daughter through the woods as the narrator discussed nuclear fallout, was pulled. There was no evidence that fallout harmed fetuses; Moyers and the DDB people assured themselves that they didn’t want to resort to scare tactics.

  Johnson himself was never depicted in the ads lest he be too firmly associated with their terrible themes. Only his voice was heard—stern, comforting, fatherly. He never deigned to mention his opponent, who, when referred to at all, was never bestowed with the honorific “Senator.” Nor was the Democratic Party mentioned, which was revolutionary: previous Democratic candidates’ ads had tried to exploit the party’s edge in registration by mentioning the party incessantly. Hubert Humphrey was ignored entirely. “We just don’t feel that people vote for Vice-Presidential candidates,” an account executive brazenly told the New York Times. “We’re selling the President of the United States.”

  Whenever possible, the Republican Party was turned against itself. One spot panned over discarded posters on a floor littered with confetti: “Back in July in San Francisco the Republicans held a convention,” the narrator said, the camera moving in on one of the posters. “Remember him? He was there. Governor Rockefeller. Before the convention, he said, ‘Barry Goldwater’s positions can,’ and I quote, ‘spell disaster for the party and the country.’ Or him? Governor Scranton. The day before the convention, he called Goldwaterism a ‘crazy quilt collection of absurd and dangerous propositions.’ ”

  A five-minute spot deployed DDB’s most towering contribution to the art of advertising: “Confessions of a Republican” implied that all ads were lies, except this one. A sincere, well-dressed young man spoke directly into the camera: “I don’t know just why they wanted to call this a confession. I certainly don’t feel guilty about being a Republican. I’ve always been a Republican.” He twitched nervously. “But when we come to Senator Goldwater, now it seems to me we’re up against a very different kind of man.... Those people who got a hold of that convention—who are they?” Another ad, in which the screen was filled with fiery crosses as a KKK leader was quoted—“I like Barry Goldwater; he needs our help”—was pulled at the last minute, because Goldwater had by then renounced the Klan’s support—but that didn’t keep the Confessing Republican from intoning worriedly, “I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan with all those weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party, either they’re not Republicans or I’m not.”

  One borrowed a line that Graham Molitor’s indefatigable staff had unearthed that Goldwater had uttered in the 1930s upon learning he needed a New York bank account to do business in New York: that the country would be better off if the entire Eastern Seaboard were sawed off. (A graphic illustrated the very thing.)

  But the ad that showed up most frequently focused on two hands taking a Social Security card from a wallet and tearing it clean in two. “On at least seven occasions,” said the voice-over, “Senator Barry Goldwater said that he would change the present Social Security system. But even his running mate, William Miller, admits that Senator Goldwater’s voluntary plan would destroy the Social Security system. President Johnson is working on strengthening Social Security.” There was, of course, no such “voluntary plan”; the subject had barely crossed Goldwater’s lips since the primary in New Hampshire.

  Beyond Madison Avenue, back at the White House, the campaign operated on the same wavelength as Rockefeller’s in California: the enemy was brutal, Machiavellian, justifying any savagery lest he be the first to visit the same methods on you. LBJ wanted to make JFK’s victory “look like a pathetic peep.” Manufacturing that landslide became a full-time cottage industry—the cottage being the West Wing of the White House.

  The operation was as messy as a Texas barbecue. Any policy expert, wise man, labor leader, or cabinet secretary within shouting range of the Oval Office could expect some strange campaign assignment or another: economics hand Paul Southwick tried his hand at pamphlet design (the mushroom cloud he sketched behind the words “suburban scene” better resembled a suburban tree); Walter Heller went to work persuading Walter Lippmann and the Washington Post to attack the Goldwater tax plan and prepared detailed reports on each place Johnson w
as to speak (there would be a $1,450 loss in income to every farm in North Carolina from Goldwater’s agricultural ideas, a $140 million statewide gain from Johnson’s tax cut). John Bartlow Martin, an investigative journalist famed for the encyclopedic detail and geographic reach of his work, produced fifteen-page single-spaced memos on the politics of each locale so that speeches could be adjusted, presumably, according to such data as the number of “Physicians, including Osteopaths” per 10,000. Mac Bundy was assigned the task of increasing their support among Southern women. Old Johnson friends did yeoman’s duty as spies: when the doyenne of New York labor activists, Anna Rosenberg, saw a TWA pilot handing out anti-Johnson literature published by Human Events, she immediately forwarded the relevant details—Flight 4, L.A. to New York, Captain Addick—to the White House. The boss’s appetite for numbers was satisfied all the way down to a poll of the Lapeer, Michigan, Optimist Club. (They preferred him 3 to 1.) A Goldwater interview in Time in which the candidate admitted only intermittent church attendance was sent to lists of clergymen; a transcript of liberal Republican New Jersey senator Cliff Case’s savaging of his partyman on the Sunday chat show Opinion in the Capital was sent to Jersey newspapers.

  Lyndon Johnson was his own campaign manager. He organized his shop as he did all his endeavors: in overlapping, informal, task-oriented circles including only those advisers who knew to give him only advice he wanted to hear. Washington superlawyers Jim Rowe, Clark Clifford, and Abe Fortas combed their bulging Rolodexes for names of people to convince to become figureheads to chair twenty-six Johnson-Humphrey citizens committees (Rural Americans for Johnson-Humphrey, Women for Johnson-Humphrey, Senior Citizens, Lawyers, College Students, Union Women, Southerners, Criminologists, Republicans for Johnson and Humphrey; every imaginable ethnic group for Johnson-Humphrey ...) set up in order to circumvent the law restricting the circulation of literature by political parties. No opportunity for advantage was missed. When Goldwater appeared in Memphis, reams of TVA brochures flooded the crowd (“If It’s Socialism in the Tennessee Valley ... How About Arizona?” they asked about the $1 billion Central Arizona Project). Outside one of Goldwater’s South Carolina appearances, the pamphlets read, “He has a perfect record of having voted AGAINST every single measure that meant more bread and butter for the people of South Carolina.” While Goldwater zipped through Mason City, Iowa, a press release went out over the signature of Meredith Willson, of Music Man fame: “The big parade comes to Mason City today, led by a political conman who makes Prof. Harold Hill look like a piker.” “We ought to treat Goldwater not as an equal, who has credentials to be president,” Jack Valenti wrote. “We must depict Miller as some April Fool’s gag.... Practically all our answers ought to mantle in ridicule.” He proposed hiring Hollywood joke writers to help. They contacted Bob Hope’s people.