Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  It had begun the week after the convention, with a call to the farmhouse in Gettysburg. Nixon convinced Eisenhower to meet with Goldwater, to get to know him better, to see if he couldn’t find it in his heart to see honor in the man. Nixon prepared the way by initiating a legalistic little open exchange of letters: “Since our convention, I have received several inquiries as to the intended meaning of two sentences in your acceptance speech,” he began; Goldwater responded, “If I were to paraphrase the two sentences in question in the context in which I uttered them I would do it by saying that whole-hearted devotion to liberty is unassailable and that half-hearted devotion to justice is indefensible.” Eisenhower was satisfied, Nixon was satisfied. So Nixon arranged a grand parley of Republicans at the Hershey Hotel in Pennsylvania for the middle of August—Goldwater and Miller, Rockefeller and Scranton, Thruston Morton and Richard Nixon, Dean Burch and Charles Percy, governor upon congressman upon senator, all histrionically declaiming on the unshakable unity of their Grand Old Party, then emerging for a press conference in which all wounds were declared healed. It was Nixon’s little test. Goldwater passed. Now Nixon knew he could back him and survive.

  Let Scranton and Rockefeller make their token gestures at the ticket; let Romney and Rhodes snub it altogether. Nixon had been as nauseated by the convention—literally, he would claim in his memoirs—as any of them. Only he had swallowed his bile—and swallowed the rubber chicken, the back-room whiskey, and the church-basement juice, sitting in airports, sleeping in airplanes (or not sleeping, if it was a prop plane that rattled like the end of the world), gripping and grinning just as he had for his party every two years since 1946. Once more he would pack the bags, kiss the girls goodbye, and set out to collect the chits. It was habit, strategy, a way of life.

  The sophisticates would laugh and poke fun at “Tricky Dick” chasing around the country once more. They always did. But didn’t Nixon always get the last laugh? While the Romneys and the Rockefellers sat on their hands, he would be the one to court the conservative foot soldiers who now owned the precincts, grateful that at least someone in the Establishment hadn’t sold them out. He would get chits from moderates glad to see someone out there holding the line against the conservatives; and chits from county chairs in places like Enid, Oklahoma, that were saved from having to cancel half-subscribed fund-raising dinners because no other Republican of marquee stature was out there touring; chits from the local candidates who flooded his office in New York with requests for the privilege of walking the tarmac with him to the pulse of a thousand flashbulbs: conservative candidates, moderate candidates, liberal candidates. “He’s one of us,” they would say—again. Like that roomful of Orange County businessmen looking for a congressional candidate for 1946, when he presented himself in his Navy uniform because he didn’t own a civilian suit and said that the men he talked to in the foxholes “will not be satisfied with a dole or a government handout”; like the civil rights people after “NIXON SAYS RIGHTS PLANK MUST BE MADE STRONGER” at the 1960 convention.

  This year was the hardest. Day after day, candidates implored him not to associate them with their own party’s presidential candidate; Nixon always managed to find some way to praise each independently of the other, an operation akin in delicacy to separating an egg yolk from the white. Liberal Republicans called him a traitor for undermining the unwritten pact to starve out the conservative wing and move in for the kill after November. Conservatives called him a traitor for evenhandedly offering his service to any candidate who asked. The scheduling office on Eye Street disdained to deal with him; but the press identified him as a loyal member of the Goldwater team nonetheless—as attested by the lowballed crowd estimates and the news cameras lingering on the empty seats or the fattest, ugliest blue-haired old lady they could find.

  Nixon plowed on manfully. Goldwater would tumble into his grave on November 3. Rockefeller, Romney, Rhodes, Scranton, and the rest would stumble into theirs just as soon as the realization dawned that it wasn’t Walter Lippmann and the Alsop brothers who nominated Republican presidential candidates, or television cameras, or Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Chits did. Chits knew no ideology. And, as the campaign dragged ignobly into its final weekend and he watched his own jowly face on the TV screen boring yet one more lackadaisical audience, Richard Nixon could comfort himself that he had bagged them all. Chits lasted a long time—four years at least.

  Halloween weekend, and both sides were racing for the sewer. The man whom Johnson beat in his first congressional election went on statewide TV on behalf of “Texas Doctors for Goldwater” and compared his old opponent with “Hitler and his crew of very curious people,” stating that the Civil Rights Act gave the President “all the power Adolf Hitler ever had.” A rumor spread that Goldwater’s 9999th Air Reserve Squadron was really a cabal working for military takeover of the government, Seven Days in May-style. In states where black votes might provide the margin of victory, Republicans made sure that 1.4 million leaflets appeared in the ghettos urging write-in votes for Martin Luther King, the newly announced Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Bill Miller’s daughter was the victim of a bomb scare. Volunteers handing out Goldwater pamphlets to passersby saw them smacked away with enough force that they feared their wrists would be broken. “Teenagers are the hard core of the trouble-makers,” a shocked Philadelphia Inquirer political columnist wrote. “Screaming girls and yelping boys try to dominate meetings and the police seem powerless to quell the disturbances caused by these young people.”

  Johnson supporters wore “Goldwater for Halloween” buttons—a cryptic legend understood perfectly by the many for whom Barry Goldwater personified everything frightening and evil. For trick-or-treaters, Goldwater partisans kept by the door a store of the tiny anti-UN pamphlets the Birch Society published to be slipped into children’s little UNICEF tins, or big bowls of “Barry Goldwater Taffy,” and displayed huge Goldwater signs on their lawns—and teenage liberals running in packs and howling like demons made Goldwater’s face an awful goulash of rotten eggs and jack-o’-lantern fragments as Goldwater teens prowled after midnight prying Johnson bumper stickers from cars with razor blades.

  The candidates set the example. The President sat up all night on October 30 reading noted Republicans’ FBI files, the next day burbling excitedly to Bobby Kennedy about which tidbits he planned to leak to the press. The White House was crediting a rumor that the Goldwater campaign was on the verge of springing some scandalous last-minute announcement about one of Johnson’s cabinet members. The campaign team in the West Wing had a retaliatory strike planned—a statement questioning the competence of a commanding officer of an Air Reserve squadron who could give “excellent” ratings to a security risk like Walter Jenkins. Air Force One was careening around the country on whims, like a pinball. Why not Pittsburgh and Houston in one day? Salt Lake City, unscheduled and unadvanced, then Philadelphia? (Finding the 47-by-47¼-inch podiums in each city that he demanded “so it hits mah belly button” drove Johnson’s road crew to distraction.) His rhetoric devolved to the level of nonsense. “I’m depending on you young folks who are going to have to fight our wars, and who are going to have to defend this country, and who are going to get blown up if we have a nuclear holocaust-I am depending on you to have enough interest in your future and what is ahead of you to get up and prod Mama and Papa and make them get up early and go vote,” he pronounced at a stop in Delaware (where he was devoting enormous resources to unseating Senator John Williams, instigator of the Bobby Baker investigation). In San Diego he ranted about a sexually deviant appointment secretary in Eisenhower’s Administration, bragging that back then “we Democrats didn’t capitalize on a man’s misfortune.” (There had been no such appointment secretary, prompting an impromptu ethics seminar in the press quarters on whether it was allowable to misquote the President of the United States in order to save the real secretaries’ honor.)

  Goldwater’s speeches were now sheer extrusions of rage. “He tells the Americ
an people in the most flagrant insult to our intelligence I’ve ever heard from a politician, that the only—the only issue!—is getting people up early in the morning to vote for him!” That was in Wyoming on October 30, the same day the New York Daily News all but withdrew its previous endorsement of Goldwater because “the Senator has made so many unfortunate remarks in public that one wonders how capable a President he would be.” The next day, resting in Phoenix, Goldwater came unhinged. There was awful news from Vietnam: a mortar barrage by the Vietcong had killed four American servicemen and destroyed half a dozen B-57 bombers. Goldwater made dark hints about LBJ’s complicity. “I won’t make any comment about it happening just before the election,” he said, “but if you will recall about three months ago I said something would happen just before the election either in Cuba or South Vietnam of this nature, and it’s happened in South Vietnam.” He had traveled 74,000 miles since September 3. Yia Bi Ken was pinballing, too: California to New York to Tennessee to Iowa to Pennsylvania, then back to California, showing up in places so irrelevant to the outcome of the election that it was as if the plane were flying itself. The strain was wearing on the candidate, and his audiences absorbed the blame. “Does this make any sense to you at all?” he would howl after outlining the perfidies of Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes. “Or have you already forgotten about them?”

  He went on existential rambles. “I can’t help but wondering, sometimes, if you’ve asked yourselves why my campaign is the way it is.” Think of the Romans, he said. “They traded their votes for ‘bread and circuses.’ They traded away their Senate for an emperor.” It was the only way he himself could understand this great national salivation over an opponent he now despised. He now viewed his job as just smacking people back to their senses.

  Just think about it for a moment. Do you want my opponent to “let us continue”? We simply can’t continue!—unless we want to commit national suicide! ...

  Do you want a President who will twist arms, manipulate power, and take more and more control over your lives? ...

  Do you want a President who will promise anything and everything, just to buy the job? Promise even to free you from all your responsibilities! ...

  You want no worries? He’ll worry for you. Relax and don’t worry. The great leader and his curious crew will do for you all those things you find unpleasant to do for yourselves. And all he asks is that you give him more and more power over your lives. More and more without end.... Put all the power in his hands, and he will give you true freedom—which we used to call slavery!

  The old restraints fell away. Sunday evening he gave his civil rights speech, the one he once reserved for a carefully selected Chicago audience and edited and reedited for any hint of racist taint—but now gave in Columbia, South Carolina, with a covey of segregationists sitting next to him. The extravaganza was beamed live to eighty-seven TV stations across the South.

  Few people saw it, thanks to Ronald Reagan.

  In Goldwater circles a cult was quickly forming. The checks, those grubby paper bags stuffed with cash, the envelopes full of children’s spare change—they came and came and came after the October 27 Reagan speech, more money, even, than could be counted. Thanks to Reagan’s old boss Cordiner, who was barely speaking with Burch after the RNC pleaded with him to allow expenditures outside the organization’s stingy budget, they didn’t have any outstanding bills. That meant they could now buy time for a last-minute blitz of spots. But they were too late. The networks no longer had any time left to sell. And the RNC ended up with a surplus of $500,000.

  But one Goldwater campaign film was on the air constantly—Reagan’s A Time for Choosing. Dozens of local committees had spontaneously begun raising cash to run it over and over again in their towns, some half a dozen times or more. In northern California a couple took out a second mortgage on their house to help get it on the air. A kid in Kentucky watched wide-eyed with his father, a janitor. The boy pointed at the screen, and said, “That man is going to be President. And I’m gonna work for him in the White House.” People called their crazy fascist Goldwaterite friends on the phone: Now I get it, they said. Conservatives were no less stricken; they had never heard as gripping and pithy a statement of what they believed. The Goldwater offices, down to the most ragged and irregular, were being irrigated by Reagan cash; whenever the show ran, people just sent money to whatever Goldwater outfit they could find. The Arizona Mafia fielded humiliating letters. A friend wrote Kitchel: “In my 30 years in politics I have never heard such glowing tributes as the accolades for Ronald Reagan’s speech.” Another dropped Kitchel a note of congratulations on how he had handled the campaign. “Incidentally,” he added, “Ronald Reagan was terrific.” It was one of the few times in his life that Goldwater was jealous. He never did thank Ronald Reagan, a wounded Nancy Reagan later noted.

  Wirt Yerger, blunt as ever, called up one of the media chiefs in Washington and asked what it would cost to underwrite another network broadcast of the thing. It turned out that the Mississippi GOP had $120,000 left over from its own campaign fund-raising. (Mississippi’s finance chair had pioneered yet another fund-raising innovation: automatically deducting a bank draft from the donor’s account at set intervals.) Frantically, someone on Eye Street managed to cadge another half hour from the networks. So frantically, in fact, that no one realized that the Columbia, South Carolina, rally was running throughout the South at exactly the same time on another network.

  On Monday, Goldwater traveled to San Francisco to deliver an exact reprise of his acceptance speech. (“IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW IT’S A LOT OF TRIPE, SO GO TO THE POLLS AND DO WHAT YOU THINK IS RIGHT,” read a theater marquee his motorcade passed on the way to the hall, under what was supposed to be a blizzard of ticker tape, but turned out to be gently falling flurries.) Goldwater’s men made a last-ditch attempt to reclaim him as a member of the human race: a newspaper advertisement reprinted a beautiful and wise letter he wrote to his little girl, Joanne, back in 1948. It began:Dearest Joanne:

  Those beautiful quaking aspens you have seen in the forests as we have driven along have one purpose in life. I want to tell you about them because they remind me a lot of Mommy and me and you kids. Those aspens are born and grow just to protect the spruce tree when it is born. As the spruce grows bigger and bigger, the aspens gradually grow old and tired and even die after a while, but the spruce which has had its tender self protected in its childhood grows into one of the forest’s most wonderful trees. Now think about Mommy and me as aspens standing there quaking our selfs in the winds that blow, catching the cold snows of life, bearing the hot rays of the sun, all to protect you from those things until you are strong enough and wise enough to do them yourself....

  Johnson ran get-out-the-vote spots: footage of an electrical storm, gale-force winds carrying umbrellas down the street, the narrator pronouncing, “If it rains on November 3, get wet.... The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” Another showed a voter entering the booth as the announcer told him to remember as he pulled the lever that the United States was at peace.

  Behind White House doors, the commitments had been made two months earlier: American pilots would gear up for bombing raids in North Vietnam as soon as the election was won. The only question now was the dates.

  On Election Day, the officials waved the Goldwater family right in at their modest local polling station in Phoenix; they insisted on waiting in line. The candidate playfully borrowed a felt-tip and penned a tic-tac-toe board on his wife’s neck. The cameras wedged in for prime real estate as Goldwater entered the booth. The curtain opened; Goldwater emerged, flashbulbs popped. The pictures recorded a man who looked like he would rather be somewhere else.

  Across the nation, millions of ordinary Americans did exactly the same thing at exactly the same time in exactly the same way, the glory of democracy. At a carefully marked-off legal distance from the polls, union members passed out palm cards reading “From the Hip ... Or From the Head?” and “PRESID
ENT JOHNSON ... Soldier of Peace,” and paraphrasing the President’s Gulf of Tonkin speech: “We still seek no wider war.” Presuming as a matter of course that Lyndon Johnson would cheat, conservatives—over one per voting booth in Chicago and Cleveland—carried out what the RNC called “Operation Eagle Eye.” Poll watchers were instructed to hover over the precinct books from the opening until the closing of the polls to check that each signature corresponded to the one on record, and to tick off the names on their duplicate precinct books (the evening before, they had driven through the neighborhoods to make sure none of the addresses in the book corresponded to vacant lots or abandoned buildings). Hubert Humphrey, mindful that under the supervision of Bill Rehnquist and Dick Kleindienst in 1962, Arizona Republican Party workers attired in policelike uniforms had stalled voters in Negro and Mexican districts by forcing them to read the Constitution of the United States, called the effort “Operation Evil Eye.” Employees of the three television networks swelled the crowds at some polling stations even further. It was the new ritual: viewers were glued to the big charts slowly filling up behind the anchormen all afternoon, until, four hours and twelve minutes before the close of the California polls, NBC became the first to crunch the exit-poll data and call a winner. (Afterward the networks received postcards: “You bastards! Election night used to be fun. You spoiled it with your goddamned gimmicks.”)

  It wasn’t a hard election to call. No amount of cheating could run up a landslide like this. At Goldwater’s D.C. election-night headquarters at the Shoreham, reporters were swarming around Ronald Reagan, and Lee Edwards, drunker by the hour, finally wove his way to the lectern at ten or eleven after final word flashed that Goldwater had lost Illinois, that great Taftite redoubt where Edwards’s father, the Chicago Tribune’s Washington correspondent, had been publishing articles all month with headlines like “JOHNSON’S EGO MASKS UNDERLYING CONCERN OVER ELECTION OUTCOME.” He slurred something about how Goldwater would release a statement later after he’d analyzed the vote. Goldwater was back home in Arizona, where he’d been in bed for three hours, leaving Kitchel, Hess, and Paul Fannin (who won his old Senate seat) weeping in front of the TV, Goldwater never having graced either the Phoenix or Washington headquarters with his presence.