Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Each new day provided new occasions for screwups. One day a publicist convinced the candidate by painful effort to pose wearing an engineer’s cap. “Senator,” he said nervously, “if you’ll just put this on now ...” And so Goldwater did, glaring coldly in the cameras for a few seconds. The next day the picture didn’t even show up in newspapers; the publicist had the photographers shoot directly into the sun. In Hammond, Indiana, some wag had the band play “Bye, Bye Blackbird” as parting music to humiliate the three black Republicans the organization had persuaded to sit on the platform. Goldwater’s speech at the Cincinnati Gardens on the September 29 was a scorcher that won a standing ovation (“Does he hope that he can wait until after the election to confront the American public with the fact of total defeat or total war in Asia?”). The speech was supposed to be nationally televised, but thanks to Ralph Cordiner the campaign couldn’t afford a network spot in time. In Frankfort, Indiana, the public address system couldn’t project Goldwater’s voice thirty yards past the platform.

  Goldwater put forward new policy proposals. But his speeches mostly demonstrated the inability or indifference of his team to communicate unfamiliar ideas. Like his previous proposals—the draft ban, the tax cut, replacing federal programmatic grants with block grants—there was no follow-through, little repetition in future speeches, so the proposals floated around in the public’s consciousness for a day or so before popping like soap bubbles. At the University of Toledo field house he proposed federal refunds based on the share of local property taxes allocated to schools—a complex form of unconditional grants to education—with little explanation, the essence of the proposal buried in pages of angry, cryptic hectoring: “What would you do if I told you you had to line up at six in the morning tomorrow and get a number?” What, people asked, was he talking about?

  In Moline, where the chairman of the board of John Deere had just announced that he was a Johnson man even though he was the secretary-treasurer for Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Percy (a Goldwater supporter) and local school authorities announced that they would let kids out of school for the President’s visit the following week, Goldwater finally addressed Social Security. A reauthorization bill that would have increased benefits had died in conference, he said, because the President held it hostage to his insistence that it include authorization for a Medicare program. Goldwater used the opening to point out that he had voted for expanding benefits every chance he got since 1954. “Now you know who the friends of Social Security are,” he said, “and you know why. Now you know who the enemies of Social Security are—and you know why.” To no effect. When staffers sounded out the crowd, people could not be shaken from the conviction that they had seen Goldwater himself tear up a Social Security card on TV. In Hammond, Indiana, the candidate demonstrated his gift for terrifying people while attempting to soothe them: “We must always maintain such superiority of strength, such devastating strike-back power, such a strong network of allies that the Communists would be committing suicide for themselves and their society if they push the button,” he said, and then: “In all likelihood, the President ... would not be around at all to push the button. It would be too late for button-pushing.”

  The next day the Herald Tribune editorial page dropped a bombshell. Walter Thayer and Jock Whitney had been agonizing over the decision for months. The task of writing the endorsement fell to the Trib’s new editorial page chief, Ray Price. He had to down a stiff double-belt of Scotch before he could type the words:For the Presidency: Lyndon Johnson.

  Travail and torment go into those simple words, breaching as they do the political traditions of a long newspaper lifetime. But we find ourselves, as Americans, even as Republicans, with no other acceptable course.

  Senator Goldwater says he is offering the nation a choice. So far as the two candidates are concerned, our inescapable choice—as a newspaper that was Republican before there was a Republican party, has been Republican ever since and will remain Republican—is Lyndon B. Johnson.

  The piece went on to abuse the Republican nominee for thirty more column-inches. For decade upon decade the Trib could be counted on to take the business side on any issue. But the business side was changing. The day after the endorsement an economist wrote Walter Heller, “At a lunch of 11 higher echelon business executives, one hesitantly ‘confessed’ that he was voting for Johnson.” They eventually discovered that only one of them was for Goldwater—and even he hedged his bets: following the widespread assumption that stock prices would dive in proportion to Goldwater’s chances of winning, that businessman was moving funds into short-term bills. The Republicans’ new fetish for balanced budgets was now judged by these sorts of men to be a formula for ruin: to cut programs that met the needs of a complex urban society would disintegrate the baseline conditions for national well-being and deteriorate that bulkhead of government fiscal intervention that was America’s best defense against recession. Wall Street had joined the Democrats.

  Indeed, when Milton Friedman published an article in the next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on “The Goldwater View of Economics,” he had to protest, “No one seems to realize that Goldwater does have a philosophy and not merely views on particular economic problems.” He proceeded to give readers of the Newspaper of Record a kindergarten primer on economic libertarianism: that providing for the common defense was a precondition for economic freedom, so that it wasn’t contradictory for Goldwater to call for increased military spending; that only the free market, not the government, could produce prosperity; that governmental interventions often created baleful unintended consequences. The public clearly had a long way to go to attain even an elementary understanding of Goldwater’s core ideas.

  That was something the sachems atop RNC headquarters, where the chaos had stabilized at the Keystone Kops level, hardly even considered. Goldwater’s old friend Dean Burch neglected functions of a party chair as basic as keeping in touch with senators up for reelection; some of them waited all the way until November without receiving so much as a single phone call. An important state leader reached John Grenier after two weeks of trying; the voice on his receiver snapped: “This is Grenier. I’ve got just two minutes for you over the phone.” Morale was atrocious: leaks dribbled constantly, fingers pointed in every direction, and the comfort level was not helped by those mysterious clicking noises people heard on their telephones. (Regional directors began making their important calls at a pay phone outside.) Resources were squandered on expensive projects like a daily teletyped newsletter, conveying such vital information as (the best news of the day, apparently) Goldwater’s endorsement by TV Prevue, circulating in northwest Oregon.

  An advertising insert, “Senator Goldwater Speaks Out on the Issues,” went out to Reader’s Digest’s millions of subscribers with typographical errors. For the nap-inducing campaign book Where I Stand, instead of self-publishing à la Clarence Manion and Phyllis Schlafly, the Goldwater campaign negotiated a contract with McGraw-Hill, which printed more than 100,000 copies, didn’t ship them to bookstores until late in September, and sold only 5,000. The rest of the copies were remaindered to the campaign to give away at a straight loss. (The DNC, meanwhile, sold 50,000 copies of a preexisting quickie, Barry Goldwater: Extremist of the Right, on commission, and made a killing.) Kitchel developed a consuming obsession with purging extremists. Beneath the obsession was dread: he himself had been a member in good standing of the John Birch Society until June 1960. The press, blessedly, never found out; campaign staffers did, and they raged at the unpardonable risk Goldwater was taking in having appointed Kitchel in the first place. But effective purges took administrative acumen. Soon the press discovered a bona fide 1930s American fascist, Allen Zoll, on the payroll—in a speaker’s bureau, no less.

  The next TV show, during which Goldwater answered ordinary citizens’ questions, was so artless that a group of Dallas Republican leaders began an investigation “to discover who are the inside saboteurs who are mis-directi
ng the campaign.” The one after that was worse. Milwaukee Republicans moved heaven and earth to fill the city’s Auditorium for a speech by Dick Nixon that they were told would be broadcast nationwide. Brooding over the fascism charges, Kitchel feared the Milwaukee rally looked a little too rousing. Instead of putting the event on TV, he put Clare Boothe Luce on the air, speaking from a studio. And Luce seemed drunk. “The calls, telegrams, letters, and stopped payments on checks have been fantastic,” the RNC’s Midwest regional chair raged. “Many people in Wisconsin feel it is absolutely necessary that Kitchel ... resign.” In Los Angeles the stewards of P.O. Box 80 on the TV for Goldwater-Miller committee were near to mutiny. “Republicans I talked to were not interested in listening to truck drivers, farmers, and watching cows,” one wrote headquarters, referring to the man-on-the-street show and Conversation at Gettysburg. “Let’s stop this waste of our hard-won money.”

  Mutinies came two a day—each expeditiously followed up by a friendly phone call from the White House (some provoked by a friendly phone call from the White House: “The college presidents are coming along nicely!” gushed one internal memo). Over eighty Eisenhower-era officials, seven of them cabinet secretaries, signed a stinging attack on their party’s candidate; Republican senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky contacted Johnson with tips on how to win his key toss-up state. One fine afternoon Governor George Romney was scheduled to introduce Goldwater at the annual ox roast at the Midland County Fair. The carcasses arrived on schedule, Goldwater graciously carving off slices, dressed in an ox costume; the governor, fearing for his reelection, never arrived. (To add insult to injury, a black chef refused Goldwater’s request for his recipe for barbecue sauce.) Ohio’s Jim Rhodes, after melodramatically releasing his convention delegation, neglected to release an endorsement until late October. In years to come, political memorabilia collectors would notice an unusual phenomenon. Among their prized items were the “coattail” buttons that hundreds of candidates had printed up for themselves each presidential year, like “STEVENSON/PROXMIRE ’52.” They would search high and low for examples of the phenomenon from 1964 and find only ten. Loyal New York Republicans wearing Goldwater buttons who showed up to volunteer for Ken Keating’s Senate campaign were just sent home.

  The loyalists were sometimes worse than the traitors. When Scranton joined Goldwater on a swing through Pennsylvania, journalists were provided with a compendium of quotes from Scranton’s nomination campaign, courtesy of the White House, called “What Scranton Really Thinks of Goldwater.” But what Scranton really thought of Goldwater was plain enough to see from his half-dozen speech interjections beginning, “While I disagree with Goldwater on ...” (Another time a reporter recorded him speculating that a Republican victory would mean recession.) Rocky and Happy joined Goldwater for a rally on the steps of the New York State Office Building, Rocky’s expression thin-lipped all the while. He pocketed Goldwater buttons when they were offered.

  One October day, the wives of Barry Goldwater and Bill Miller sat for a press conference in Chicago. They were asked how their families could possibly take all the abuse. Beneath a severe dome of hair, in a plain shift, forcing a smile, worried, as always, that her poor hearing would embarrass her, Peggy Goldwater gamely replied, “I think my skin’s thicker than it used to be.” Then she retreated back into a flat, distracted, is-it-over-yet look, perhaps thinking of the way she’d spent her twentieth anniversary a few weeks back, in Longview, Texas, dodging the piles released by a nearby elephant. Mrs. Miller, on the other hand, in a tailored suit and with elegantly plucked eyebrows, approached political tasks with the grace of a debutante. But even she couldn’t contain the wounds. The words were polite—“It’s unfortunate that people have to be the victims of unsubstantiated smears.” The anger was written on her face.

  Barry Goldwater, on the plane to Chicago from Missouri (where he had ripped the knee of his best mohair suit), felt hardly more at ease. He would write about the whole business later, in a 1970 memoir, his words edged with the sting of four years of enforced political idleness—because after winning the Republican nomination, he could no longer run for Senate in 1964. “Very early in the last decade,” he wrote, “I found myself becoming a political fulcrum of the vast and growing tide of American disenchantment with the public policies of liberalism.” There it was: controlled by events, following others’ call, a horse to be ridden. Nothing had changed since those meetings with Clarence Manion and his people in 1959—back when Goldwater had all but turned them down flat. “It is true enough that I sensed it early and sympathized with it publicly, but I did not originate it.... I was caught up in and swept along by this tide of disenchantment.” It is harder to imagine a sharper expression of political alienation.

  But he was periodically swept up by enthusiasm, too. He had some things he needed to tell the country. It kept him going. Goldwater, Miller, and their wives were in Chicago for Goldwater’s first major statement on civil rights, to be broadcast on TV on October 16. The project had brought the third floor to grief: no one had been able to write a civil rights speech that could satisfy Goldwater. His order to purge any taint of racism from the remarks became all the more urgent because of events in the daily news: in nearby Gary, Indiana, an alderman who had cast the tie-breaking vote for an open-housing law was now under twenty-four-hour police guard, as was a sociology professor who had filed a report on residential segregation in Chicago. (Before, such protection had been reserved for blacks who moved into the city’s white neighborhoods.) There had been 71 racially motivated bombings in 1964 in the Chicago metropolitan area, Mayor Daley told the President. In deep denial, the mayor said that the city didn’t have a backlash problem, although a different conclusion was suggested by the man-on-the-street quotes Johnson operatives had collected in the area: “Those kids from the slums have syphilis, gonorrhea, everything”; “Eighty-five percent of the Negroes in this town are too pushy”; “If you want a Negro in the next plot, vote Democratic”; “Every night there’s a purse-snatching”; “It takes a lifetime to build a home, then the riffraff come in.” The silences were even more pregnant: blue-collar bars where political arguments used to percolate were quiet, because no one knew how to discharge the bile rising up in them—where was the concern for their rights?—without sounding like a racist pig or starting a fight.

  Harry Jaffa and Bill Rehnquist finally came up with an acceptable draft for Goldwater’s speech. It was called “Civil Rights and the Common Good,” and it was polished all the way up to the last minute. The venue was selected for its respectability, to prevent any throaty hollers of assent: a $100-a-plate fund-raiser in the International Ballroom of the Conrad Hilton. Goldwater didn’t want anything to distract him from his message: When it came to race, Americans didn’t have the words to say the truth they knew in their hearts to be right, in a manner proper to the kind of men they wanted to see when they looked in the mirror each morning. Goldwater was determined to give them the words. It was a patriotic duty.

  “It has been well said that the Constitution is color-blind,” he began, as the glasses clinked. “And so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation....

  “Our aim, as I understand it, is neither to establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated society. It is to preserve afree society.”

  That line was Bill Rehnquist’s mantra. Once it had been far to the right of Goldwater’s customary position that his aim was to establish an integrated society, just not through federal coercion. That summer, Goldwater backed a local antidiscrimination ordinance in Phoenix that Rehnquist testified against. But now Goldwater debuted Rehnquist’s favorite line as his mantra. And, evening gowns, tuxedoes, and TV cameras notwithstanding, Chicago’s well-heeled conservatives responded by letting loose a hail of wolf whistles and throaty cries that raised the roof.

  He continued:And so I endorse the position of the Republican Platform of
1964 on the busing of school children. I say with the Platform that it is wrong to take school children out of their normal neighborhood schools for the sake of achieving “racial balance,” or some other hypothetical goal of perfect equality imagined by the theorists of the so-called “Great Society.” [Applause] It is wrong—morally wrong—because, ladies and gentlemen, it re-introduces through the back door the very principle of allocation by race that makes compulsory segregation morally wrong and offensive to freedom....

  It is often said that only the freedom of a member of a minority is violated when some barrier keeps him from associating with others in his society. But this is wrong! Freedom of association is a double freedom or it is nothing at all. It applies to both parties who want to associate with each other.... We must never forget that the freedom to associate means the same thing as the freedom not to associate.

  He concluded to acclaim: “We have come, literally and figuratively, from the very ends of the earth to make this great nation. From many races, nations, and creeds we have made, as we shall ever more perfectly make, under God, one people.”

  The speech was a popular sensation. That wasn’t the only reason to celebrate. Goldwater was now doing surprisingly unterribly. His numbers were trending upward. The New York Times reported that he led in ten states, with another eight neck and neck—and that by winning just this ten he would be more successful than most losing candidates. He was hovering near 50 percent in crucial swing states: Virginia, Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas—and vital Texas, where he had 53 percent. The Deep South was a lock. On October 12 the Washington Post’s headline read “PRIVATE POLL GIVES GOLDWATER 40% OF THE VOTE.” The Republican Congressional Committee newsletter promptly cited a Post headline from October 17, 1948: “GALLUP POLL SHOWS TRUMAN WITH 40 PERCENT OF VOTE.” (It was noted in hushed tones, if at all, that since Goldwater had jumped 5 points and Johnson had slipped 3 after the Harlem riots, one more conflagration could nicely slim the gap.) Once again, seasoned politicos on the second floor smelled opportunity: play the electoral college right, shift energies to just the right places, track the themes that work and dump the ones that don’t—and Barry Morris Goldwater could find himself the next President of the United States.