And there it was. The most responsible man in the world would remove the albatross of nuclear irresponsibility from the Republican candidate’s weary shoulders by vigorous application of the word “tommyrot.”
They set up the shot with the two men leaning over a white picket fence, thick microphone cables protruding from their coat jackets like tails. The cameras rolled. Goldwater said something; Ike’s eyes wandered. Ike began a sentence, then got lost in one of his famous syntactical thickets, never to return (we must, he said at one point, “preserve the outbreak of war”). Ike looked like he wanted to be somewhere else; Goldwater looked like a high school boy trying to engage the fickle attentions of the captain of the cheerleading squad. Goldwater started every sentence with “Well ...” Roll, cut, roll, cut; it was a disaster.
Mercifully, the noontime break came. Goldwater awaited the invitation to join Ike back at the little white farmhouse to take lunch with Mamie. Instead Eisenhower left Goldwater standing there. The candidate swallowed his pride, sat calmly with the crew, cadged from their box lunches (they hadn’t brought one along for him), and regaled them with a few dirty jokes. Behind the mask he was surely contemplating the dustbin to which General Eisenhower had just consigned him. Everyone knew Richard Nixon’s famous complaint about not once having been invited inside that house in his eight years as vice president.
It took a frantic overnight editing session to pull something usable out of the morass; Kitchel was convinced Eisenhower had sabotaged the thing on purpose. But at least the ad would open nicely. An aerial camera tracked over the General’s prize heard of Angus cattle. Lilting strings entered: Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. A narrator intoned in a soothing voice, “Autumn has come to the rolling hills of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The fragrant smell of apples ripe and ready for harvest fills the air. The leaves have just started to turn, and these are beautiful days.”
If you turned the TV off then and there, you might have had a reasonably satisfying viewing experience.
It seemed like Eisenhower and Goldwater were in different rooms. More than one of Ike’s remarks that aired slyly disparaged his interlocutor. (“Self-restraint is absolutely necessary to anyone who aspires to leadership of a great nation,” he said. Goldwater nodded vigorously in agreement.) They repaired to the barbecue area (where, lest anyone dash the public’s stereotype of the Republicans as the party of the rich, a hired hand grilled away obsequiously in the background). Goldwater lurched into the grand finale: “There’s just one thing I might ask in leaving.... Because we constantly stress the need for a strong America, our opponents are referring to us as warmongers. And I’d like to know your opinion on that.” The breeze lifted a tuft of white hair from the side of Eisenhower’s head. He hit his mark and delivered his line: “Well, Barry, in this mind, this is actual tommyrot.”
Then came the part where he was to sum things up with an endorsement. It turned out to be hardly an endorsement at all. It was more like an exercise in a Logic 101 class. “Now, you know about war. You’ve been through one,” Ike said. “Any man who knows anything about war is not going to be reckless about this.” Barry Goldwater knows about war. Anyone who knows about war would not be a reckless President. Q.E.D. Barry Goldwater would not be a reckless President: at that, viewers who were veterans could flatter themselves that Dwight D. Eisenhower thought they would make good Presidents, too.
The closing shot had the two men walking into the sunset. They exited the frame; the camera trained in on the five-star flag of the Supreme Commander of NATO on the General’s putting green. Appalachian Spring sounded in the background. A sheep bleated in the foreground. This, too, was a nice shot, although by that point very few people were still watching. Of the TV sets in operation, 27.4 percent were tuned to Petticoat Junction; 25 percent watched Peyton Place (“television’s first situation orgy,” Jack Paar called it); and—President Johnson gleefully learned the next day—8.6 percent watched Conversation at Gettysburg. “I didn’t have much experience with TV,” Lichenstein excused himself later. He didn’t mean he didn’t have much experience with TV production. He meant he didn’t watch TV.
Goldwater continued demanding debates. Johnson ignored him. And Goldwater began exhibiting the unlovely mien of a bitter man: “He will not face the issues, he will not face me—he will not face you,” he yelped across the upper Midwest. “Can my opponent talk? What does my opponent have to say?” He besmirched the nation’s highest offices: Hubert Humphrey was a “socialistic radical”; LBJ was “Light Bulb Johnson” for his scheme to save money by turning off lights in the White House (“Why doesn’t he turn them on for once!”), “the interim president,” who “knows only one thing—how to acquire fortune and power.” Goldwater’s supporters crowded the speaking stand and cheered him on. Much of the audience hung back in disgust.
Everyone associated with the campaign was getting bitter. Local branches began compiling affidavits on vandalism on their offices; on highways across the fruited plain, billboards admonishing “IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT” were subverted to read “IN YOUR GUTS YOU KNOW HE’S NUTS” (later reclaimed by conservatives with signs reading “PLEASE EXCUSE THE JOHNSON EXTREMISTS”). Stodgy Time printed crude jokes: “Goldwater’s first major address as President: ‘Ten ... nine ... eight ... seven ...’ ”; “What would a Goldwater presidency be like? Brief.” In Tulsa, blacks crashed the hall where Goldwater was speaking and wouldn’t stop singing “We Shall Overcome” for fifteen minutes straight. In Winston-Salem, civil rights activists and conservatives were booked for assaulting one another. Each had begun chanting their opposing stories about freedom, slavery, and justice at the other; things escalated from there. (Teddy White liked to ask civil rights demonstrators and Goldwater partisans what they meant by “freedom.” Each camp would denounce him for even asking such a patronizing question. “It is quite possible that these two groups may kill each other in cold blood,” he wrote, “both wearing banners bearing the same word.”)
American campaigns had been like this before, perhaps more often than not; Lord Bryce wrote in wonderment that the presidential election of 1884 seemed to be being decided between the “copulative habits” imputed to one candidate and the “prevaricative habits” of the other. But eighty years later, the Philadelphia Inquirer could insist: “Presidential elections have been waged without untoward incident until this year.” Historians forgot their history. “The peaceful arts of negotiation and persuasion,” “our sagacity and our passion for the peaceful enjoyment of our national life”: these, Columbia’s Richard Hofstadter assured readers that October, were the hallmarks of political decision making in America. It was a foregone conclusion: when Goldwaterism was vanquished once and for all on November 3, civility would return, the two parties would return to their time-honored moderating role, and the nation would be restored to a healing consensus once again.
Johnson’s first actual campaign trip—tarmac speeches, motorcades, rallies, the works—was a twenty-four-hour sweep through every New England state on September 28. It happened against a backdrop of extraordinary events.
On September 26, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its report on the New York City riots. There was a kind of rhetorical protocol that usually held sway when judgment was handed down on moments when the fabric of American civility had been rent. J. Edgar Hoover’s report on the students who disrupted the HUAC hearings in San Francisco in 1960, “Communist Target—Youth,” was a paradigm case: it blamed the Communists, who had made students their unwitting dupes. And Nelson Rockefeller’s Bastille Day proclamation: it concluded that the 1963 Young Republican convention had been upended by “vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements boring within.” The story they told was: America was a good nation, a unified nation, peaceful, safe, a land of persuasion and compromise; when violence came, some exogenous toxin was always to blame.
That story was immediately and instinctually told when Harlem went up in flames in the summer of 1964. Accu
sations for planning and executing the disturbance were hurled at Harlem’s tiny number of self-proclaimed Maoists, at its scattered bands of black nationalists, at hirelings of H. L. Hunt (LBJ’s favorite theory), or (as Goldwater himself feared) at agents of the Goldwater campaign. Special attention was paid to the mysterious youths that were seen lurking at key street corners with walkie-talkies and matching berets; it was discovered that they were actually helping authorities identify the most egregious acts of looting and arson. There was no conspiracy to be found in this latest FBI report. In its place were ordinary people—“ ‘school dropouts,’ ‘young punks,’ ‘common hoodlums,’ and ‘drunken kids’ ” making “senseless attack on all constituted authority without purpose or objective.” J. Edgar Hoover went looking for conspiracy; he always did. He just couldn’t find one. It wasn’t even the Communists’ fault.
Then, two days later, there was the Warren Report. In later days it would be the locus for theorists propounding baroque triangulations of every imaginable group that might gain from having the President dead; its very meaning became conspiracy. But it was digested at breakfast tables on September 28, 1964—a time when three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, trusted the government to do the right thing—differently. A conspiracy would have been far more comforting. Instead most Americans read the news at face value, and learned that all it took to rock their society to its foundations was a single man with a grievance and a gun. They had learned that all it took to fire up a riot was a bunch of rock-throwing kids—and that even a majestic Civil Rights Act would not deter them. The idea that the nation could be shielded from danger by its unique genius for conciliation and consensus was becoming a far less tenable thing.
Oswald, a magazine pointed out, “was a product of Texas (and of New York City), of the American lower-middle class, of the U.S. Marines.... All of those places and associations are as American as baseball.... There is violence in the American character, probably more than in any other national character.” As if to give this new American story an exclamation point, on September 29, after four bombings in eight days in the town of McComb, Mississippi, three Klansmen were arrested off the street. They admitted that they chose bombing victims weekly out of a hat. They were released on suspended sentences. The judge ruled that they had been “unduly provoked” by “unhygienic” outsiders of “low morality.” And, that same day, thirteen civil rights workers were arrested for the crime of Southern hospitality—“serving food without a license,” the charge read.
And then, that same week, came Berkeley.
An unheard-of 42 percent of high school graduates sought higher education in 1964, as if reserving a spot in the knowledge-driven Great Society to come. In California 68 percent of high school graduates went to college, most of them taking advantage of the state’s glittering free university system—the best of them to her crown jewel, the Berkeley campus. The system’s leader, Clark Kerr, was managerial liberalism’s uncrowned king. His book The Uses of the University was its bible.
In it he wrote that the modern “multiversity”—he also dubbed it the “knowledge factory”—was both catalyst and mirror for a society in which the objectives of myriad plural interests could be harmonized with the help of neutral, efficient, nonideological administration, delivering ever more peace and well-being to all. He also described the disasters that would befall such a system if people became too interested in their interests. To the best of his ability, the individual should seek “to lend his energies to many organizations and give himself completely to none.” The only alternative was the conviction that some interests were irreconcilable, some principles beyond compromise. If too many people were to hold such beliefs, the outcome, in a complex, integrated social system, would be “all-out war.”
Thus Clark Kerr’s perennial challenge. Universities were made up of young people, and young people tended to unruly passions. Such passions led to irreconcilable interests, and they had to be reined in. Berkeley students did not always fancy these theories—a campus radical named David Horowitz had answered them in 1962 in a book called Student by writing “A man is not a product, nor is he an IBM record card”—and these days, the students seemed to fancy the theories less than ever. The traditional off-campus center for student politicking, a little bricked-over esplanade at the corner of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue called the Bancroft Strip, had been characterized by a cacophony since July—when the Republican Convention, Mississippi Freedom Summer, Prop 14 (in the wake of Berkeley’s own open-housing law campaign the year before), Johnson vs. Goldwater for President and Pierre Salinger vs. George Murphy for Senate all converged. Every side in these contests was represented in the burbling confluence of irreconcilables at Bancroft and Telegraph—sometimes two, even three factions jostling on each: lefties, liberal to Trotskyite to Maoist to Castroist; righties from Republican to anarchist. The myriad conservative groups—YAF, Young Republicans, Conservatives at Large (CAL), Cal Students for Goldwater, and the University Society of Individualists—were well stocked with hellions: a University Society of Individualists member sporting an “I AM A RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST” pin became the Rosa Parks of the San Francisco streetcars when she flamboyantly defied the unwritten rule against women standing on the running boards and caused such a disturbance that she ended up getting arrested. Berkeley political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset thought he understood what made youngsters so prone to an inappropriate overabundance of political commitment: a “relative lack of experience with the conflicting pressures derivative from varying value obligations or role demand.” They would grow out of it.
But Clark Kerr didn’t have time to wait. A vital construction-bond issue would be on state ballots in November. Bad publicity could kill it. Berkeley had already attracted a powerful foe who was editorializing against the “Little Red Schoolhouse” ever more frequently: William Knowland of the Oakland Tribune, enraged when Scrantonites used Berkeley as an organizing base, even madder now that Berkeley CORE was picketing his paper (where only 17 of 1,500 employees were black) every week. Berkeley was developing a reputation. Evans and Novak wrote after a reporting trip to San Francisco in March, “Here as elsewhere, the Negro is in danger of losing control over the civil rights movement to thugs and Communists.” The thugs and Communists they referred to were Kerr’s own students.
As the 1964-65 school year approached, an especially prickly administrator, suffering from the bongo drumming that drifted up from Bancroft and Telegraph to his second-floor office, began taking steps to pacify the Strip. Meanwhile one of Knowland’s lackeys discovered at the county assessor’s office that the Bancroft Strip was actually inside campus property—meaning that the presence of demonstrators was in violation of the university’s mandate to keep partisan politics off campus. Subtle threats were issued through channels.
These factors converged when the university administration announced that as of the first day of school, September 21, the Bancroft Strip would be off-limits to politics “because of interference with the flow of traffic.” To Clark Kerr’s shock, students, deploying organizing skills acquired in those long months of agitating for civil rights and for Barry Goldwater, struck back—forming a United Front of nineteen political organizations, from right to left, to demand negotiations with the administration. The administration, as was its wont, compromised: students could continue to distribute informational leaflets, as long as they did not encourage “action”—the university, as a state institution, was duty bound, after all, to discourage “advocacy of action without thought.”
But students had thought, and deeply—and, in rounds of negotiations, they cut their masters to ribbons. Didn’t the administration, by changing its story from “clogged traffic” to “advocacy of action without thought,” demonstrate bad faith—or capitulation to outside influence, in the form of no less a partisan than William Knowland? If a campus was contaminated by the introduction of outside politics, wherefore Nelson Rockefeller’s invitation to speak on
campus back in March? Why had Kerr put his own administration to work politicking among voting-age students to vote for the bond-issue proposition? Why wasn’t the $12 million the university received from the Atomic Energy Commission each year political? Its contributions to the American presence in Vietnam? Could it be that deciding what was neutral and what was political was itself political—that enforcing “neutrality” was just another way for the administration to wield its power?
So they acted. On the twenty-first, students kept an all-night vigil on the steps of the administration building, Sproul Hall. A week later, pickets flooded the school’s ceremonial convocation. Tables were carted 100 yards inside campus borders, a leader announcing, “We won’t stop now until we’ve made the entire campus a bastion of free speech.” Administrators warned the eight students manning the tables that they were about to be expelled. The eight were summoned to the dean’s office on September 30 for expulsion—and brought hundreds of their closest friends along with them to stage a sit-down demonstration in Sproul Hall to demand negotiations. And suddenly the administration building was playing host to a festival of free speech—one student following the other, Socratic-style, reasoning over the true meaning of the university, of free speech, of freedom itself.
It was near midnight when the intense, wild-maned Italian kid from New York, back from registering voters in McComb, Mississippi, stood up to speak. Mario Savio had a bad stutter that faded only when he was stirred. He wasn’t stuttering now. “President Kerr has referred to the University as a factory,” he said. “And just like any factory, in any industry—again, his words—you have a certain product.... They go in one side, as kind of rough-cut adolescents, and they come out the other side pretty smooth.... And never, at any point, is provision made for their taking their places as free men!” The sentiment was something with which the department store owner from Phoenix could agree (his enemy, he wrote in one of his first columns, was “a stereotyped, carbon copy society”), or William F. Buckley (“Middle-of-the-Road, qua Middle-of-the-Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant,” the prospectus of his magazine announced in 1954). Commitments—not “interests”—were the building blocks, not the stumbling blocks, of politics. Some commitments were sacred, could not be bargained away. Sometimes the proper arena for politics was a boxing ring.
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