Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  The next morning, a CORE member named Jack Weinberg set up a table (a propped-up old door, actually) at the foot of the Sproul Hall steps. Police arrested him for criminal trespass. Or at least they tried to. Weinberg went limp, civil disobedience-style (while finishing a stirring peroration about how thought, talk, and discussion were vacuous “unless we then act on the principle that we think, talk and discuss about”). Rather than break their backs carrying him to headquarters, the Berkeley campus cops rolled in a squad car and dumped him into the back—then found their way blocked by a hundred students who had gathered for a planned noon rally. The engine revved; the students raised a chorus of “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

  It was then that Mario Savio removed his shoes. Boston Harbor, Harpers Ferry, Omaha Beach: this time the stand for freedom would be made atop a dented squad car roof. “Be careful of the antenna! Be careful of the antenna!” the cops pleaded. Savio promised he would.

  The chancellor “must agree to meet with the political organizations,” Savio began. “And there must be no disciplinary action against anyone before the meeting! And, I’m publicly serving notice that we’re going to continue direct action until they accede.”

  No one could have guessed what would happen next. Others wished to speak, so a sign-up sheet went around. One after the other, students took to the roof; more and more students straggled into the plaza—thousands, once word got around campus that something extraordinary was taking place. The speaking continued, interrupted only by singing, for another day and a half.

  Jackie Goldberg, the students’ lead negotiator (because she was a well-dressed sorority girl), wondered how the university could believe that the student’s United Front threatened the institution’s neutrality when its different groups were “at the same time supporting Goldwater and trying to defeat him.” The crowd rollicked with laughter. Weinberg received the reluctant dispensation of the police to get out of, then onto, the car, where he explained that if they hung together they could never hang separately (“Fill the jails,” as the SNCC motto went). A Young Republican took the floor, or roof, and joked wanly, “I am up here as an example of tokenism” (there was no question by now that events were dominated by the left wing of the United Front; conservatives drifted away as soon as laws began to be broken), and proclaimed the conservatives’ solidarity “so you know that this is not protest by the same people who were washed down the steps at San Francisco.” A woman, a freshman, with a squeaky voice and a nervous manner, popped onto the car; she spoke, and she seemed less a freshman and less squeaky by the minute.

  By 2:30 in the afternoon hundreds of the hardest core forced their way into Sproul Hall for another sit-in. By dusk a combined 500-man police force from the cities of Oakland and Berkeley, Alameda County, and the California Highway Patrol (spluttering in on motorcycles) began mustering. Students who had worked in the South instructed those who hadn’t about the Gandhian method of submitting to arrest.

  There were, it turned out, no arrests—just more talk. History majors cited Founding Fathers, folkies led sing-alongs, aspiring comedians ridiculed administrative doublespeak. The occasional administrator dared take a turn. Professor Lipset lectured the crowd on how their mob tactics violated procedural democracy, rendering them cousins to the Ku Klux Klan.

  It was one “second-and-a-half-year graduate dropout” who named the stakes. It was interesting, he said, that all the speakers were gravitating toward the issue of the relationship of democracy and free speech. “They’re almost so much the same thing,” he piped up, “that there ain’t no relationship! Aristotle said if you are not a citizen you are either a beast or a god.

  “Now I ask you a simple question—” (peals of laughter; his timing was impeccable).

  He continued: “Johnson and Goldwater get up in front of the American people and say, ‘Let’s keep Vietnam out of politics,’ ‘Let’s keep civil rights out of politics,’ and ‘Let’s keep universal military training out of politics.’ ” He proclaimed, in disgust: “These are three of the most intimately political issues you can think of!”

  Darkness fell. An administrator—the one who felt imperiled by the bongo drums—summoned a cordon of fraternity men to preserve the principle of institutional civility; they did so by pelting activists with lit cigarettes and rotten vegetables. (Savio implored them to get up on the car and present their complaints civilly, to no avail.)

  Around 2:30 a.m. a near-riot was quelled by the car-top intervention of a respected campus minister. Truce negotiations stepped up inside Sproul, to the accompaniment, through the night, of speaking, chanting, and dueling renditions of “We Shall Overcome” and (from the frat boys) the Mickey Mouse Club theme, through the next morning, the next afternoon, and the dinner hour—when the members of the United Front finally declared that their terms had been met. The prisoner was released, the crowd of 7,000 broke up, the battered car rolled forth. And observers wasted no time identifying the conspiracies behind the event.

  “It is regrettable that a relatively small number of students, together with certain off-campus agitators, should have precipitated so unfortunate an incident,” the chair of the Regents droned. The San Francisco Examiner headlined its report “REDS ON CAMPUS.” A columnist in the (liberal) San Francisco Chronicle grumbled that the instigators should be hung, then shot with arrows. A crowd photograph in Knowland’s Oakland Tribune was artfully doctored with another picture to illustrate the caption “A textbook on Marxism was among the crowd.” The article charged that the ones who started the trouble were “Cuba-trained” instigators. Clark Kerr, for his part, disagreed. He claimed that “the university was contending with a hard core of Castro-Mao Tse-tung-line Communists.” The theorist of pluralism could not confront the fact that he was dealing with an ideological plurality. Or that the leaders of the United Front were just as startled as everyone else by the Squad Car Revolution.

  What had happened was less conspiracy than some kind of magic: a core of a few hundred activists told a story about the hypocrisies of consensus liberalism, and it rang true for the thousands of new allies who had never given the matter any thought before. They contemplated The Story—that America was fundamentally decent, its citizens content, their differences resolved through reconciliation and persuasion and compromise—and they refused it.

  And so a strange, cosmic unity bodied forth that week in American political history, as Lyndon Johnson came off his first campaign tour: the FBI and the Warren Commission asserting that all it took was one man to tear a social fabric asunder; Mississippians bombing their way past illusions about the American way of reconciling conflict; Berkeley students saying no to “neutrality”; a third of the nation still stubbornly insisting on backing Barry Goldwater—all of them, at the same time, making the idea of an American consensus seem little more than a stubborn, fanciful mythology.

  There were “no basic disagreements between intellectuals, bankers, trade unionists, artists, big businessmen, beatniks, professional people, and politicians, to name a few, or between the economic classes” in America today. “There are no real critics, no new ideas, no fundamental differences of opinion.” Thus observed Richard Schlatter, provost of Rutgers University, in his contribution to “Some Comments on Senator Goldwater,” a forum in the fall issue of the quarterly Partisan Review, for decades a leading arbiter of American intellectual taste. He concluded that the striking thing about Barry Goldwater’s imminent failure “is that it has demonstrated that we are all part of the American Establishment.” Richard Hofstadter wrote in the October 8 New York Review of Books: “It is no simple thing to account for the development and prominence of a mind so out of key with the basic tonalities of our political life.... When in our history has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?” He concluded worriedly that Goldwater was “within a hair’s breadth of ruining one of our great and long-standing institutions”—the Republican Party. Partisan
Review contributors thought Goldwater was within a hair’sbreadth of something else. “The ingredients of Goldwaterism could of course be put together in such a way as to form a fascist totality,” explained one (adding, with relief, that Goldwater’s followers, “no better organized than is his own mind,” were not up to the work involved). Wrote another, “The danger is that he might well see to it that this year’s election is our last free election.” His movement, with its “childish intolerance of tension,” represented “a recrudescence on American soil of precisely those super-nationalistic and right-wing trends that were finally defeated in Europe at the cost of a great war, untold misery, and many millions dead.”

  Less empyrean publications put aside such idle speculation of what would happen in the event of a Goldwater victory to tick off the reasons that such a thing was unimaginable in the first place. “To meet the needs of the people,” Atlantic Monthly editors explained, “the federal government must contribute to the solution of the manifold problems of modern urban life—housing, education, welfare, mass transportation, health, and civil rights.” That President Johnson made these points “in language that can be easily understood” was why he was the best politician Americans were likely to see in their lifetimes. Partisan Review’s editor agreed, after his fashion. He warned that although one should remain “uneasy about the neanderthalism lurking in the so-called average man,” we were stuck with this dreary “centrist Utopia” for the imaginable future.

  To which a massed choir of the nation’s editorialists could only respond: Amen. Then they reviewed the reports from Lyndon Johnson’s New England travels and patted themselves on the back for their perspicacity.

  Johnson started in Providence, Rhode Island, which suited his purposes well. It was Kennedy country, its soul divided between the martyr’s two most loyal constituencies: a proud Irish-Catholic proletariat and the eggheads at Brown University. Stewart Alsop reported that Oliver Quayle, whose polls the President now carried in his pocket like a lucky rabbit’s foot, found that Kennedy’s “fading but much-revered memory” was LBJ’s “second-greatest asset” in the campaign. (The first was “the nervous and uneasy feeling Senator Goldwater imparts to a great many voters.”) Johnson was determined to show that there was so much more to his popularity than that—to show that he was loved. Although he was not exactly sure that he was.

  Providence provided. The ground was marbled by frost as the President’s plane made its early-morning approach. He landed; and before him at the airport was a crowd that was bigger than he had dared dream, some three thousand people. He was jumping out of his skin as he made his way down the steps. “If you want to see crowd reaction,” he called giddily out to his press corps, “follow me!”

  It wasn’t easy. The streets of Providence were so thick with well-wishers it was like parting a sea of molasses, and just as sweet; there were more spectators on the streets, some were claiming, than the population of Providence itself. People called to him, leaned toward him, grasped at him—and, a dozen or more at a time, Johnson just pulled them onto his limousine. (He had been frightening and aggravating his Secret Service protectors with such inexcusable security risks all year.) Other times he would stretch his tall frame over the crowd and bark consensus chestnuts through a bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things, and we’re against mighty few!” Armor plating had been added to the sides of the presidential limousine since the assassination, and stronger shock absorbers and brakes were installed to allow for the increased stress. But no car was sturdy enough for this. Inching up one steep incline, flames suddenly gushed from beneath the hood of the accompanying press car. Startled Secret Service agents dove for the President’s calves to pull him down below window level. Much to his annoyance: “Any dumb son of a bitch would know enough to turn off the ignition when the engine temperature gets to four hundred and fifty degrees!” he complained.

  He pulled a CBS cameraman into his car during the next motorcade, through Hartford. The cameraman was motioned to lie on his back on the floorboards and shoot up through the closed bubble top—and Walter Cronkite that evening got to introduce stunning shots of the masses crawling over their President like a thousand insects. Like an addict, Johnson had had microphones attached discreetly on the exterior so that when the top was closed he could continue taking in the roar. His speech, delivered regally from the portico of the Hartford Times building, was a blur that bore no resemblance to the carefully calibrated remarks distributed to reporters. He spoke in a hush of the worker who “hopes someday he can have a little hospital care, he can have a little pension, he can have a little Social Security, he can have a place to take Molly and the babies when he retires.... His boys go to war; they fight to preserve this system. He likes his boss and respects him. He believes in free enterprise, and he does not hate the man who makes a reasonable return.” He cut to the chase: “I want to talk to you today about what I know is on your minds and what I believe is in your hearts. And that is irresponsibility.”

  By the time he traveled the traditional Republican strongholds of Vermont and Maine (where the GOP governor rode in his car) he had shaken so many hands his cracked fingers oozed blood. By the time he arrived three hours late at the last stop, Manchester, New Hampshire, after a neurotic ramble to the crowd (“If you came out to hear me speak like I had a martyr complex and nobody loves me, you are going to be disappointed, because I think that we have the greatest system of government in the world”) he confidently mentioned his opponent for the first time by name, instead of his customary reference to “these people.” The context was Vietnam. “As far as I’m concerned, I want to be very cautious and careful and use it only as a last resort when I start dropping bombs around that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700 million Chinese,” he began, and since he would never dare flatter the Scylla of his Vietnam policy without paying court to Charybdis, he told a folksy story about the definition of a Texas Ranger: “A Ranger is one that when you plug him, when you hit him, he just keeps coming.... We must let the rest of the world know that we ... have the will and the determination, and if they ever hit us it is not going to stop us—we just keep on comin’ !”

  It was a triumph. At one point he dragged the AP’s Frank Cormier beside him as the people’s thousand tentacles reached out for the healing touch of their chief executive: “Write that in your story,” he said, “so the whole country can know!” Johnson was convinced, for now: when these crowds sighed, they sighed only for Lyndon Baines Johnson. Though the President’s greatest rival, Bobby Kennedy, campaigning hard in a close race for Ken Keating’s Senate seat, labored under a different assumption. He had stepped off a plane in Albany one night and beheld thousands before him—then thousands waiting streetside in their pajamas on the strength of only a rumor, waiting to pay their respects as he drove by on his way to somewhere else. His aides exulted. Bobby, still mourning, saw nothing to celebrate. “They’re for him,” he muttered softly. “They’re for him.”

  Goldwater’s next trip was a Heartland whistle-stop tour—a sentimental tradition whose origins harkened back to those pre-TV days when candidates needed to cover as many miles as humanly possible and couldn’t be bothered to take the time to walk to the town’s auditorium. He kicked off defiantly at Union Station, the same day Johnson left for New England. “Living in Washington, and reading newspapers that are solidly against our campaign,” he said, “you might well wonder what’s happening out in the real world.”

  Roger Mudd of CBS sent him off by calling the whistle-stop a “rendezvous with nostalgia” and a “throwback.” Stewart Alsop, in that week’s Saturday Evening Post, observed, “Goldwater’s ‘choice’ is not really a coherent, rational alternative at all—it is hardly more than an angry cry of protest against things as they are.” News cameras lingered over picket signs massed at the fringes of Goldwater’s crowds: “DON’T STOP HERE, WE’RE POOR ENOUGH”; “DOWN THE DRAIN, GOLDWATER”; “FASCIST LIP IN THE WEST”; “C5H4N4O3 ON
AUH2O”—translated roughly from the chemical as “Piss on Goldwater” (a Texas conservative later retaliated with “LBJ DON’T PEON US”). Partisans competed in ever greater displays of devotion; in one town a kid paraded around with a sign reading “I JUST HITCHHIKED 50 MILES TO SHAKE HANDS WITH GOLDWATER.” In another town blacks stood in line for the privilege of snubbing him by not shaking his hand. At every stop photographers and cameramen were taxed trying to keep the ubiquitous “YAF BACKS BARRY” banners out of their shots; in Lima, Ohio, they couldn’t avoid shooting the three-story “LBJ-USA” banner Democrats unfurled over a building directly behind the rostrum. As Goldwater motorcaded through Sioux Falls, the Goldwater side dropped a parachuter from the sky; someone from the opposition dropped an egg from a rooftop that splattered the candidate’s mohair suit. Everywhere Goldwater went, some Republican or another refused an invitation to share his platform; everywhere he left, he seemed to leave townspeople at each others’ throats. “Crowds were more violent than anything a Presidential candidate has had to face in the last generation,” James Reston columnized. “Supporters of Mr. Goldwater declared they could not discuss the campaign with Democrats on a rational basis,” his paper’s news pages reported. “Democrats said the Goldwaterites were too rabid for reason.”