Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  The President covered one last angle: the Pentagon was contacted, and it was learned that Jenkins’s service records during his years in the Capitol Hill Air Reserve Squadron bore no blemish. Johnson gloated: wasn’t his commanding officer, Lieutenant General Barry M. Goldwater, on the hook with him as well?

  With matters reasonably well in hand, he went downstairs. “And if Lincoln abolished slavery, let us abolish poverty.” (The crowd went wild.) Close to midnight, he paid a prescheduled courtesy call to Jackie Kennedy at her apartment uptown. Then he went back to work. He checked on the television reports (they had been gentle). He called Ollie Quayle down to the Waldorf from his suburban home and ordered poll numbers on the incident to be on his desk by the next afternoon. Fortas telephoned Johnson, near-whispering, “I have that material in boxes at my home.” Then—for the first time—the President inquired after the well-being of his associate of a quarter century, although an instant later his thoughts were elsewhere: could the man with whom he was arrested have “gotten any secrets off him”? Fortas said the man was a bum who lived in an Army retirement home. Johnson ordered Mac Bundy to check nonetheless. Hubert Humphrey called to say he planned to tell the press about Jenkins’s strong faith and big Catholic family. Johnson shot back with a start that the only thing the public needed to know about Walter Jenkins was that he was but one public servant out of three million.

  A little less worried, the President got some sleep. But the next day came more bad news: a nasty Vietcong strike on an American air base outside Saigon. On the plane back to Washington, the President released to his press corps his first public statement on the Jenkins affair (based on Quayle’s report that a gesture of sympathy would be advantageous to him). Then he dug into a steak sandwich. He arrived at an unmanageable clot of gristle. As his press corps looked on, he spit it into his hand and flung it clear across the cabin. It landed in a bowl of potato chips set out before Lady Bird and Mary McGrory of the Washington Star.

  The bad news for Johnson came at just the right time for Goldwater: his people were eating their own. In California, Walter Knott’s TV Committee finally became so disgusted with the drivel they were underwriting that they consulted their lawyers on how they could spend the take from P.O. Box 80 as they saw fit. The second-floor higher-ups were steadfastly plotting direct appeals to the candidate. Ralph Cordiner rode along on the plane with the plan of winning Goldwater’s ear for fifteen minutes to urge him to bring back Steve Shadegg, whose black arts had brought Goldwater back from deficits almost as yawning as the one they were in now. He didn’t get fifteen seconds; Kitchel and Baroody kept Cordiner out of the candidate’s compartment like bodyguards. Northern California field director Bob Mardian’s hijacking three days later was more successful. As Mardian slipped noiselessly into the seat next to him, Goldwater, half friendly, half accusingly, said, “You’ve been a very busy boy, Robert.”

  “I’ve been doing nothing more than trying to help you win this election, Senator.”

  “Well, whatever it is you say you’re doing,” Goldwater shot back with an edge, “I want you to stop it. It’s too late. You go back and tell your crowd that I’m going to lose this election. I’m probably going to lose it real big. But I’m going to lose it my way.”

  Mardian’s jaw dropped to near his belt buckle.

  Then the newspapers with the blessed, sordid headlines landed on Eye Street desks. They were an elixir. Dispirited field offices sprung back to life. Freelance printers worked overtime getting bumper stickers and buttons out the door: “LBJ—LYNDON, BAKER, JENKINS: THE FAMILY THAT PLAYS TOGETHER STAYS TOGETHER”; “LBJ—LIGHT BULB JENKINS: NO WONDER HE TURNED THE LIGHTS OUT”; “ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ, BUT DON’T GO NEAR THE YMCA”; “EITHER WAY WITH LBJ.” Goldwater’s snide references to the “curious crew who would run your country” were stepped up: “... companions like Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, Matt McCloskey”—the crowd would cry in anticipation: “And? And? And?”—“and other interesting men.” The Baroody group was even letting go of its romance with the nobility of failure—convinced that if some second Jenkins were found in the President’s employ, lightning might strike. It had for Dewey in ’48. It had, two times before in Arizona, for Goldwater.

  The cause for optimism lasted until the newspapers landed on their desks the next day.

  In the previous twenty-four hours, China had detonated its first nuclear weapon; Harold Wilson was ousted as British prime minister; and Khrushchev was removed as Soviet premier, with no heir immediately apparent. Suddenly, with the Kremlin in turmoil, warnings of imminent danger from Russia just sounded paranoid. And paradoxically, with China more dangerous than ever, the terror rubbed off on whomever should dare mention the forbidden subject of the bomb—which, of course, Goldwater continued to do. His momentum bogged down. Politics was on hold. Suddenly, the nation was interested in little more than having a steady hand on the tiller.

  Johnson had canceled a campaign trip for an extended stay at the White House to parley with his foreign policy team before addressing the nation on October 18. At first the DNC bought the time. Then Johnson demanded it be given free, by all three networks—so he could speak, as Section 315 allowed, upon a nonpolitical matter of “national significance.” Thus did 63 million Americans get to hear a more somber, technical version of his stump speech. (“We will demonstrate anew that the strong can be just in the use of strength,” he said, smartly echoing and reversing Goldwater’s convention address, “and the just can be strong in the defense of justice.”) Dean Burch promptly demanded equal time to reply. All three networks refused. The FCC held that the networks were within their rights. So did the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. Burch asked the Supreme Court to take jurisdiction in the decision. The Court refused. Johnson’s break from campaigning to take up his role as President of the United States was shaping up as his most successful campaign leg yet.

  Finally NBC relented. Burch himself, not the candidate, was given fifteen minutes free for October 19. It was a rant: “This Administration repeatedly tried to manipulate the news,” he said, laying out the sordid details of how Johnson had commandeered all three networks the night before. Goldwater, meanwhile, taped a talk the same day, in CBS’s studios in Washington. (Johnson got his revenge by kicking Goldwater out of the studio to tape another free message, on the death of ninety-year-old former president Herbert Hoover.) Burch concluded his address by announcing that Goldwater’s speech would be broadcast if $125,000 was raised in time to secure the half hour. The appeal brought in $500,000. It was amazing that the finance people were able to count it all in time—140,000 donors, an average of three and a half bucks apiece. And at this, the Goldwater campaign’s flagging spirit perked up once again.

  That week the Goldwater campaign owned the airwaves: Burch had spoken on Monday, October 19; the next night they planned to re-air the Mormon Tabernacle address to pound Johnson’s weakened “morality” flank; on Wednesday Goldwater would deliver his response to the President, a fearsome tirade on the unity of the Communist bloc and the folly and fantasy of making friends with the Soviets in the false hope that they were moving away from the harder-line Chinese. On October 22, a half-hour film on the morality question, Choice, produced by Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, would be broadcast during soap-opera hours to reach housewives. The assault would conclude Friday with “Brunch with Barry,” another play for the female vote bringing together Goldwater and an extremely gracious Margaret Chase Smith into an intense round-table with a Queens antibusing activist, a retiree, two housewives, and the widow of Captain Edward G. Shank Jr.—the downed flier whose letters home, published in U.S. News, gave lie to the fiction that America was sending only “advisers” to Vietnam.

  Things looked good. So it could hardly be long before another fiasco beset them.

  Clif White and Rus Walton were raring to force the lightning. In early October White had written Goldwater a memo outlining their plans. Goldwater, perhaps feeling a bit guilty at having
dismissed White so rashly, wrote back: “Agree completely with you on morality issue. Believe it is the most effective we have come up with. Also agree with your program. Please get it launched immediately.” He didn’t realize he had just become Truman giving MacArthur what the general thought was a green light to cross the Yalu.

  In Los Angeles, a film printer was fulfilling a rush order for two hundred prints of Choice to be sent to Citizens chapters and conservative groups around the country. A press release explained that the film had been “conceived by” a group called Mothers for a Moral America, led by thirty “prominent American mothers,” with 250,000 women nationwide “taking part.” That was deceit; Mothers for a Moral America was a front. Millions of one of Walton’s hairiest brochures (“YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE AFRAID”) with a neat MMA logo slapped on (a stylized flame that looked a little like a dove) were circulated from a post office in Ann Arbor. That was to soften the ground for Choice’s national broadcast. Then, after it had been shown on NBC, volunteers would move out with saturation showings at school auditoriums and women’s clubs, and on local TV. That was what the two hundred prints were for. The idea was to crystallize another volunteer army—a real, flesh-and-blood Mothers for a Moral America, which would carry out nationwide “Mothers’ Marches” shortly before the election, approaching homes with their porch lights left on for safety’s sake to sell the occupants on Barry Goldwater’s law-and-order message. Walton had been slaving over the editing machine with producer Robert Raisbeck for weeks, the images, sound, and music synched to the nanosecond, the emotional register as carefully orchestrated as grand opera. The film-clip research alone was monumental. (It wasn’t easy to find footage of a kid giving a cop the finger in 1964.) It would be the apotheosis of Rus Walton’s signature method. Which turned out to be the trouble.

  Choice told its story in the opening two minutes. Under the pulse of blaring jazzy trumpets and a jungle beat, a black Cadillac careened out of control on a country road, kicking up a cloud of dust that dissolved into a scene of garishly- gyrating revelers. Cut to a criminal resisting arrest. Back to the revel. Then the Cadillac; then a civil rights protest; then the revel; then the criminal; then a close-up of a shapely, twisting rump; then the Caddy spinning out of control; then a topless dancer and a chick in a poodle bikini; then the Caddy careening once more—and its owner, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was identified when an empty Pearl beer can popped out the side.

  Cue “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, pans over the Statue of Liberty and bucolic countryside and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Cue Raymond Massey: “Now there are two Americas. One is words like ‘allegiance’ and ‘Republic.’ ... The other America—the other America is no longer a dream but a nightmare.”

  It was that second America that worried NBC president Robert Kintner, to whom the delicate matter of censoring a political announcement fell. He said the show could run only if the exposed breasts and close-ups of covers of books the likes of Male for Sale, Sex and Hypnosis, and one depicting a semi-nude woman spanking another, were excised. (He let the kid giving the cop the finger stay.) Meanwhile, Walton and White made the mistake of releasing the incendiary product to the press, which obligingly reported on every shocking image. Two hundred prints being a lot to keep track of, one found its way into the hands of the Democratic National Committee, which called the film the “sickest political program to be conceived since television became a factor in American politics.” Conservatives jumped the gun with public showings (San Francisco headquarters projected theirs in its front window); Democrats directed people to these showings with sound trucks. The Wednesday re-airing of the Mormon Tabernacle morality speech hadn’t happened before the Republican Party was under suspicion for trafficking in dirty movies, at the very same time that Johnson’s “Confessions of a Republican” ad was drawing attention to just how perverse this new GOP was. The RNC was defenseless—for neither Goldwater nor Dean Burch had seen the thing.

  Smart politics would have been to keep it that way—isolating Choice as the work of rogues. Instead the campaign’s response was to let it be known that Goldwater had just reviewed the picture, found it “sick” and “racist,” and personally ordered all showings canceled and all prints recalled. To the broad public, it seemed that the Goldwater campaign had produced a disgusting film, then disowned it when the heat was on. Half of Goldwater’s diehards were flushed with shame and confusion at the idea of their hero commissioning such a thing; the other half were outraged at his weak-kneed backing away from exposing the Johnson Administration’s perfidy. “AS THE RESULT OF CANCELING TV NETWORK RELEASE OF CHOICE THE MORALE AND ENTHUSIASM OF OUR WORKERS HAVE HIT BOTTOM,” White’s Northern California leadership telegrammed him. Some Citizens chapters simply held on to their prints and broadcast them locally, topless dancers, Male for Sale, and all, although few home viewers likely watched the whole thing; TV production was not Rus Walton’s métier. Like grand opera, it was about twice too long. And the fat lady only sang—it was only identified as a Goldwater commercial—in the last five minutes, when John Wayne appeared, a rifle on the mantel behind him, to drawl, “You’ve got the strongest hand in the world ... the hand that marks the ballot. The hand that pulls a voting lever,” and clips were shown of Goldwater receiving the Republican nomination. Choice proved to be that unique thing: a lose-lose-lose proposition.

  The withdrawal of the film was the Post’s banner the next day. The New York Times went with the headline “NO EVIDENCE IS UNCOVERED THAT EXPRESIDEN-TIAL AIDE COMPROMISED NATION.” Johnson was thrilled. “That was a wonderful thing you did for me and Walter,” he told DeLoach, referring also to the Bureau’s—illegal, fruitless—file checks on sixteen Goldwater staffers.

  Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity. One day he joshed with the press: “I know I’m gonna beat Goldwater. What I’m trying to do with all this travelin’ is to help elect as many deserving Democrats as I can.... You-all know a good bit about the Republicans in Congress, and there must be at least a few of them that you think deserve to be defeated. Give me some names and either Hubert or I will try to get into their districts in the next few days and talk against ’em.” (His press corps was stunned into silence by the cynicism—until one reporter finally piped up that he couldn’t think of anyone who better deserved it than young Bob Dole of Kansas.) Another day, LBJ sent a Secret Service man to snarl at a hapless photographer for shooting the President’s right side instead of his left.

  He saw no reason to coast. The next race riot could break out any day. (“The crackpots must know by now Goldwater will lose,” John Bartlow Martin wrote Moyers. “Some are unbalanced. One might act.”) And above all Johnson lusted after that landslide that would legitimize him in the eyes of history. Press secretary George Reedy found himself increasingly disgusted with his boss’s and Bill Moyers’s continued boyish obsession with cloak-and-dagger schemes. “We passed out 10,000 of these outside Madison Square Garden during Goldwater’s rally,” an assistant wrote Moyers proudly a week before the election, referring to a flyer from an invented group they called “RAGE: Republicans Against Goldwater Extremism.” A pamphlet put out by the Republican Committee in the District of Columbia (voting in its first presidential election) bemoaning the weakness of Johnson’s civil rights record and the strength of Goldwater’s was reproduced and graciously distributed by Johnson state committees in the most racist districts in the South.

  “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” Johnson repeated in Akron on October 21—but this time he didn’t append his usual caveat about how America would always fight back when provoked. When John Kenneth Galbraith, three days after Gallup listed Johnson at 64 percent to Goldwater’s 29 percent, conveyed the message that Governor Brown of California hoped Johnson would say “a word or two in support of open housing when you are next in California,�
� Moyers nixed the idea: no use taking chances. (Open housing ended up losing two to one on Election Day, although Johnson won California with a cushion of well over a million votes.) Johnson even risked a dip into Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina (where feeble new local Democratic campaign offices were flailing about uselessly, because no Democratic presidential candidate ever bothered to campaign there before)—and was so enraged by anti-LBJ and pro-Goldwater pickets he ordered that they be removed by any means necessary, the means his traveling team chose being a pinch of itching powder sprinkled discreetly on the back of the offender’s neck. He even shamelessly commandeered one last opportunity for a free “nonpolitical” televised address on October 24—a lecture to school-children on American democracy. “A great strength of the two-party system,” he explained,

  is that basically we have been in general agreement on many things and neither party has been the party of extremes or radicals, but temporarily some extreme elements have come into one of the parties and have driven out or locked out or booed out or heckled out the moderates.

  I think an overwhelming defeat for them will be the best thing that could happen to the Republican Party in this country in the eyes of all the people. Because then you would restore moderation to that once great party of Abraham Lincoln and the leadership then could unite and present a solid front to the world.

  Maine had begun opening absentee ballots. It was found that a disconcerting number of voters were declining to vote for either presidential candidate.