Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  “I am not going to let them build up the hate and try to buy my people by appealing to their prejudice,” he said, leaning in to tell “you folks” a story. An old senator—“whose name ah won’t call”—was on his deathbed, and Old Sam—House Speaker Sam Rayburn—was there beside him. His people were going hungry, the sick man said. The hospitals, the schools, the roads were deteriorating. “Sammy,” he said, “I wish I felt a little better.... I would like to go back down there and make one more Democratic speech. I feel like I have one in me! My poor old state, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in thirty years. All they ever hear at election time is: ‘Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!’ ”

  Dryly, a Goldwater intelligence man wrote that “Johnson probably put the finishing touches on his chances of taking Louisiana with his civil rights speech in New Orleans.” Johnson didn’t care. The South—his South—was where his visions of the wonders that awaited a Great Society in the year 2000 ran aground. Let Goldwater talk all he wanted to about how the South’s Republicans were idealistic devotees of free-market capitalism. Johnson never heard Leander Perez or George Wallace complain about what the federal government’s TVA and Rural Electrification Administration had done to bring their people out of darkness and into hydro-powered electric light, or about the hospitals, schools, and roads that Washington had helped them build.

  And what had Barry Goldwater done for Culpeper? He had voted against the Civil Rights Act; nothing else. For that Southerners seemed willing to turn back the clock on every social gain of the past thirty years—just for the chance to vote nigger-nigger-nigger. It made Lyndon Johnson heartsick. He wanted his four more years. He wanted a mandate. He wanted to do some healing.

  21

  CITIZENS

  The keynote speaker for the fourth annual national convention of Young Americans for Freedom at New York’s plush Commodore Hotel was the group’s thirty-nine-year-old patriarch: William F. Buckley. It was YAFers’ New Year’s Eve and their Fourth of July. They were now a force to be reckoned with. They marched at the head of a presidential crusade.

  YAFers, Young Republicans, clubs organized through the RNC’s Youth for Goldwater-Miller: they worked from dawn to dusk, licking envelopes, phoning phone trees, planting yard signs, thumbing files, penciling precinct notecards, passing out literature at factory gates before the dew was off the grass. It was indescribable, the exhilaration they felt those long days, exhausting themselves for the highest cause they could imagine. It remade you; it made everything else seem small. They had no words to describe it. They could have borrowed some from the civil rights kids, who called it a “freedom high.” The Commodore rang with stories of freedom highs that weekend. What there wasn’t was doubt. They were young, idealistic; triumph was inevitable, for they were battling for the Lord. They couldn’t but assume that their hero felt exactly the same way.

  He did not. Bill Buckley had been skeptical about Goldwater presidential maneuvers since Clarence Manion invited him to join his endeavor in 1959. “I am especially anxious not to dissipate unnecessarily any conservative resources,” he wrote Manion then, “and don’t want to be identified with a total political failure.” His position had hardly changed since, and not just because Baroody and Kitchel had humiliated him in the pages of the New York Times the previous September by planting a story that he was trying to take over the campaign. Buckley’s approach to practical politics bore the heavy imprint of his friend the late Whittaker Chambers. In brooding, brilliant letters he used to post to Buckley from his upstate retreat in the dark days of the Eisenhower Administration, Chambers spun an argument redolent of his Marxist past: social change was borne on tides of historical inevitability. If conservatism overreached before its time, it risked a setback of decades. Then there was the problem of Goldwater himself. Buckley had had a conversation recently with Richard Clurman, Time’s chief of correspondents, who had gone from an editors’ lunch with Goldwater to a dinner party with Buckley—where Clurman wondered aloud just what was Barry Goldwater’s appeal to this brilliant, urbane man he respected. “Barry Goldwater is a man of tremendously decent instincts, and with a basic banal but important understanding of the Constitution and what it means in American life,” Buckley explained.

  “But what would happen if he were elected President of the United States?” Clurman asked.

  “That,” Buckley quipped, “might be a serious problem.”

  He was making truer believers fume. “You are displaying a compulsion to proclaim, on every possible occasion, that Goldwater will be resoundingly defeated in November,” Rusher implored after Buckley began seeding his columns with the Chambers argument that spring. “What you say about Goldwater’s chances in November can have a measurable effect.” But that was Buckley’s story, and he was sticking to it. Not that his brow didn’t bead with sweat, however, that September night at the YAF convention, as he took his place behind the podium at the Commodore and looked out at faces that burned with the pure blue flame of faith.

  “We do not believe in the Platonic affirmation of our own little purities,” he began his speech. (Immanentizing the eschaton: That was for the liberals.)

  “To no one’s surprise more than our own,” he continued, “we labor under the visitation of a freedom-minded candidate for the President of the United States.... A great rainfall has deluged a thirsty earth, but before we had time to properly prepare for it.

  “I speak, of course, about the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater.”

  His heresy sucked the air out of the room. The silence was broken by the sound of a single woman sobbing.

  He tried to explain:Our morale is high, and we are marching.... But it is wrong to assume that we shall overcome [Martin Luther King’s language, archly ironized] and therefore it is right to reason to the necessity of guarding against the utter disarray that sometimes follows a stunning defeat ... any election of Barry Goldwater would presuppose a sea change in American public opinion; presuppose that the fiery little body of dissenters, of which you are a shining meteor, suddenly spun off no less than a majority of all the American people, who suddenly overcome a generation’s entrenched lassitude, suddenly penetrated to the true meaning of freedom in society where the truth is occluded by the verbose mystification of thousands of scholars, tens of thousands of books, a million miles of newsprint; who suddenly, prisoners of all those years, succeeded in passing blithely through the walls of Alcatraz and tripping lightly over the shark-infested waters and treacherous currents, to safety on the shore.

  The point, he said in conclusion, was now to win recruits. “Not only for November the third, but for future Novembers: to infuse the conservative spirit in enough people to entitle us to look about us ... not at the ashes of defeat, but at the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future”—ending, with a nice apocalyptic touch: “if there is a future.”

  There wasn’t even a smattering of applause. There was trauma. This was not what this fiery little body of dissenters wanted to hear.

  Even if their patriarch was correct. They were not spinning off a majority of all the American people. But the seeds were being planted.

  When the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the nation’s most respected liberal dailies, sent out a team of reporters after the election for a multipart series to investigate “Who were these people who took over the Republican Party?” the reporters wrote as if describing Earth after a surprise Martian attack. The “right-wing still controls much of the party machinery and will be extremely difficult to dislodge,” they reported in amazement. “Many other Americans, including some of the top figures in both parties, have yet to understand what happened.” In articles with headings like “MIDWEST WAS FERTILE GROUND FOR EXTREMIST INFILTRATION; RADICAL GOLDWATERITES USED MONEY POWER TO CRUSH RIVALS,” the paper uncovered a rogues’ gallery of conspirators—from the fascist Allen Zoll to Buzz Lukens, to Clarence Manion, to Clif White, to Robert Welch—who had labored together “to impose its w
ill on one of the nation’s two great parties.” You could have read it and presumed this gang had met somewhere in 1960 to parcel out the assignments in advance.

  It could have been 27 million zombies who voted for Barry Goldwater, as far as these journalists were concerned. And as for the record 3.9 million Americans who actively worked for the Goldwater campaign in some capacity (Johnson had half as many, from a voter pool half again as large)—they might as well have retreated back to the planet from whence they came. In space-ships. Yet that didn’t explain the fact that, by report of Johnson field men, automobile bumpers supporting Goldwater continued to outnumber those backing LBJ on American highways by ratios of 10 to 1. Perhaps it is understandable that reporters missed the story. There had never been anything like it in their lifetimes.

  Years earlier, Fortune had called Barry Goldwater the “favorite son of a state of mind.” Gene Pulliam had recently termed the candidate’s swarms a “federation of the fed-up.” But a more appropriate metaphor was that of a virus. There was the original exposure. It might have come long ago: if you were a manufacturing baron, while fighting a grasping union boss or filling out your one-thousandth federal compliance form. But most people weren’t factory barons. More likely it came after writing an ungodly sum on the bottom line of an income tax return. Or from watching your ancestral party, the party of Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun, crawl into bed with the civil rights carpetbaggers. Or after your Northern suburb became gripped by rumors of Negro families moving into your neighborhood, Negro children busing into your children’s schools, Negro men taking your place at work to fulfill some egghead’s idea of justice. Or from newspaper columnists asking you to “coexist” with the slavemasters of your relatives in Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Hungary. Or you caught the bug just watching the evening news, seeing citizens of countries that were perfectly happy to take our foreign aid spitting on our flag; you had not fought for that flag to put up with that. You felt helpless to do anything about it. You were looking for an army to march in. You saw one forming around the junior senator from Arizona. And—four years ago, three years ago, last year, last week—you took that first, fateful step.

  You licked an envelope, phoned a phone tree, planted a yard sign, thumbed a file, put a bumper sticker on your car reading “GALLUP NEVER ASKED ME!” You saw others doing more. So you did more. And then some more—and the more energy you invested, the more passionate you became that your investment not go down the drain. You tried to infect friends and family (though some had been inoculated by large doses of liberal media). Others infected others. The contagion spread, and before long there were millions of you. And then there was an army—an army of true believers. And true believers work harder than any paid professional staff.

  It was a culture spread via a vast literature of training manuals. (Americans for Constitutional Action’s devoted fourteen pages alone on how to do a mailing, right down to the most efficient way to fold a letter.) Its rituals were passed along by word of mouth. When the campaign enlisted the theme song from Hello, Dolly! (the first show tune to top the pop charts in nearly a decade), the producer of the show got a court to issue a cease-and-desist order. Thereafter the tune took on an underground life: Hello, Barry, well hello, Barry,

  It’s so nice to have you here with us today....

  The donkey brayed us into chaos

  From the Bay of Pigs to Laos,

  Said the Berlin Wall helped make the people free....

  Goldwater fans circulated elaborate accounts of a “Kennedy-Lincoln Coincidence” portending inevitable Goldwater victory: Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by Johnson, who lost for reelection; Kennedy was assassinated and replaced by Johnson, who ...

  Even if Goldwater supporters could not afford it, they gave money. The Post-Dispatch missed that story, too. Just as in the wake of the election the nation’s voting booths knew only two numbers—Johnson’s 61.2 percent to Goldwater’s 38.8—newspapers tended to stop at two as well: the $17 million raised by Lyndon Johnson, versus the $12 million raised by Goldwater. What that ignored was that in 1960, 22,000 people donated to JFK’s campaign and 44,000 to Nixon’s. Over a million gave to Barry Goldwater. And that made all the difference.

  For once, the Goldwater command on Eye Street had a hand in spreading the infection: ironically, thanks to Ralph Cordiner, the campaign needed a small, steady diet of new cash every day just to function. When Raymond Massey’s pitch began hitting the jackpot, the finance people began looking longingly at the three-year-old RNC program selling $10 “sustaining memberships” in the party—which had reeled in $559,000 in the first quarter of 1964 alone, at the same time that traditional methods yielded but $34,000. The sustaining members were now hit up with special appeals to sustain the presidential campaign. The money proved forthcoming. Then someone had the bright idea of buying mailing lists from the brokers who sold them to catalogs and magazines. Those solicitations brought a deluge. (The campaign received thousands of gifts from customers of the Kozak Drywash Cloth Company alone, which was extraordinary, considering that the product the company made was designed for people too cheap to patronize car washes.) And the marginal utility of one hundred $10 gifts was far greater than one gift of $1,000. Political campaigning is an extraordinarily labor-intensive activity. The former signified one hundred potential laborers, whereas the latter meant only one.

  Goldwater’s fund-raisers were hardly averse to $1,000 checks. Or the two $1 million gifts the campaign received, one from a rogue member of the Rockefeller clan—or the $100,000 Taiwan gave to each party in those days. But the tiny gifts were talismans: small change sealed up in an envelope addressed in a childish hand; a shaky note proclaiming, “God bless you, Senator, here is my Social Security check”; a grubby paper bag filled with dollar bills, delivered to a Goldwater office on a factory hand’s lunch break—these legends circulated. And like all reports of miracles, they served to further infect many more thousands of acolytes.

  The spiritual army had rogue militias, hundreds of them, tiny bands for whom Goldwater was the answer to every question and every conspiracy—sometimes on topics he never addressed. These groups came in flavors like the “National Gun Alliance,” whose address was a post office box in Arkansas. “WILL YOUR GUN COLLECTION BE CONFISCATED AND DESTROYED?” their pamphlet asked, promising a vote for Goldwater as a bulwark against the implementation of “State Department Publication 7277 detailing the American plan to disarm all nations.” Or the “Goldwater Campaign Fund,” based in Minneapolis, which published baroque handbills covering four legal-sized pages of eight-point type, underlined, boldfaced, and uppercased (“READING TIME 7 MINUTES”), wondering how Communism, considering Moscow’s penury and America’s plenty, could survive “WITHOUT A GREAT DEAL OF HELP!” “A Fed Up Citizen” (no address listed) announced in his flyer, “If I were the devil and wanted to run America into a communist hell, I think I would do something like this...” (the devil bore a striking resemblance to Lyndon Baines Johnson). A massive yard sign in a Boston suburb being considered for urban renewal declared “WE SHALL DEFEND OUR HOMES WITH OUR LIVES”—next to one reading “BARRY GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT: BECAUSE HE IS A STAUNCH DEFENDER OF PROPERTY RIGHTS.”

  The media ridiculed this stuff if they noticed it at all—as they did the preachments of far-right radio programs (and, sometimes, TV programs) which had once been heard mostly in rural pockets but were now more and more frequently marinating the entire country. Carl T. Mclntire’s 20th Century Reformation Hour—which taught that the National Council of Churches, an umbrella organization for thirty-one separate Protestant denominations, was “the strongest ally of Russia and the radical labor movement in the U.S.”—was heard on 605 stations. Clarence Manion was now heard Sunday nights on over 1,100. The “Christian Crusade” of Billy James Hargis—who preached the old Mississippi-Freedom-Summer-as-Communist-plot-to-spur-race-war gospel—reached forty-six states every evening from a superpowered radio transmitter in Mexico. Hargis, a h
ell-fired (and tax-exempted) fund-raiser, had just raked in $38,870 in a live evening “prayer-auction” at his Tulsa headquarters to purchase twenty-five minutes a week on the Mutual Radio Network, the nation’s largest, where he would join on its airwaves R. K. Scott, who proclaimed himself the counterpoint to newsmen “knowingly or otherwise singing the praises of the welfare state, planned economy, and other forms of socialism”; and the American Security Council Report of the Air, produced by a Chicago outfit that sold corporate access to files encompassing over two million (purported) subversive Americans—more files, they claimed, than the FBI.

  This kind of right-wing cultural entrepreneurship might never have been reckoned with at all had reports not begun filtering out in late September that self-published books by three conservative authors had sold enough copies to supply one out of every ten men, women, and children in the country. The head of the Fair Campaign Practices Commission called them the “dirty books”: John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason; J. Evetts Haley’s A Texan Looks at Lyndon; Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo, now in a third edition, and another book she had somehow managed to squeeze out in October, The Gravediggers, a numbingly conspiricist indictment of the “card-carrying liberals” whose appeasement policies, not Goldwater’s militarism, were “really risking nuclear war.” Sometimes the 20 million copies of the broadside LBJ: A Political Biography—printed by Willis Carto, an erstwhile Birch staffer fired for his anti-Semitism—were included in the category as well. That jacked the total to one “hate book” for every four Americans. When the New York Times reported, “Never before have paperback books of any category been printed and distributed in such volume in such a short time,” ordinary publishers began wondering what they were doing wrong. What they were doing wrong was not hiring distributors who thought of their products as billboards on the road to Damascus.