Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Lyndon Johnson, in Austin, was more vigilant. He was on the phone with Bill Moyers constantly, gorging himself with good news. At 5:45 p.m. he asked about Kentucky (final total: LBJ, 64 to 36), Indiana (65 to 33), New Jersey (66 to 34), and Oklahoma (56 to 44). At 5:52 he learned, unsurprisingly, that Goldwater was winning South Carolina (final total: 59 to 41), but that the Democratic ticket was on a pace toward carrying Ohio, whose governor had offloaded his convention delegates to Goldwater certain that the backlash would carry the Republican to victory, by a million and a half votes. At 6:22 the President looked into Maryland (65 to 35), Connecticut (68 to 32), Vermont (66 to 34, Democratic for the first time ever), North Carolina (a border-state landslide for LBJ, 56 to 44), Minnesota (64 to 36), and Georgia (Goldwater, 55 to 44). The news wasn’t enough to cheer him. “I’m afraid of Vietnam,” he told Moyers in between returns. “We’re in trouble in Vietnam, serious trouble,” he repeated to Hubert Humphrey. Congratulating his former attorney general on his projected New York Senate victory, Johnson, sounding perhaps a bit more pleading than he had intended, asked: “If you get any solution on Vietnam just call me direct, will you?”

  Around nine, Johnson left for his Driskill Hotel headquarters to congratulate his thronging workers. From there he was driven to the Civic Center to make his victory statement. The radio was on. He heard the announcer say that President Johnson had just left the Driskill and was on his way to the Civic Center to make his victory statement. An assistant press secretary was the beneficiary of his hot Texas breath. “I didn’t authorize any statement about where I’m going, when, or why!” He took the platform with the rostrum that hit his belly button and gave his victory statement. “I doubt that there has ever been so many people seeing so many things alike on decision day,” he said.

  So many people seeing so many things alike on Election Day. Thus the final ritual: the commentaries were published that the pundits had begun writing in their heads in July, as soon as Barry Goldwater declared that extremism in defense of liberty was no vice.

  “Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election yesterday but the conservative cause as well,” the New York Times’s Scotty Reston wrote. “He has wrecked his party for a long time to come and is not even likely to control the wreckage.”

  In embracing conservatism, proclaimed his Times colleague Tom Wicker, the Republicans strayed from the simple reality that “they cannot win in this era of American history” except as a “me-too” party. “With tragic inevitability,” he wrote, they “cracked like a pane of glass.”

  “The Johnson majority,” Walter Lippmann pronounced—at over 61 percent the greatest popular mandate in history—“is indisputable proof that the voters are in the center.”

  If the Republicans become a conservative party, “advocating reactionary changes at home and adventures abroad that might lead to war,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Washington bureau chief, “they will remain a minority party indefinitely.”

  How could they conclude differently? The numbers were spectacular: 43,126,218 votes for Johnson to 27,174,898 for Goldwater, who won only six states—one of them, Arizona, by half a percent. William Miller lost his home district by a ratio of 2 to 1. Goldwater won only sixteen congressional districts outside the South. Republicans had devoted enormous energy to disassociating their candidacies from Dr. Strangewater’s. It didn’t work. People ticked the Democratic column down the line. Come January, Lyndon Johnson would enjoy a 295 to 140 majority in the House, and 68 to 32 in the Senate, with which to build his Great Society. Only one incumbent Democratic senator lost his seat. The Republicans lost 90 seats in upper chambers of state legislatures, 450 in the lower. Blacks voted upwards of 90 percent for Johnson. The truck-loads of money the Democrats spent to register a million new black voters proved a windfall investment, because in many states they provided the margin of victory—and kicked out many a Republican officeholder even though he was a far greater champion of civil rights than his Democratic opponent was. According to the Washington Post, Goldwater had only God to thank that so many Republicans had voted for him at all. The vast majority did so “out of habit ... despite grave fears of victory if it should come.” A study of exit-poll statistics by Louis Bean and Roscoe Drummond published in Look was cited over and over: it concluded that the “pure” Goldwater vote was less than three million, the rest just party loyalty.

  Goldwater’s success in the South was historic, to be sure. In Alabama he won 70 percent, and his coattails swept in practically an entire new House delegation, five of eight representatives, wiping out some eighty years of Democratic seniority. Less dramatic shakeups transpired in South Carolina (59 percent), Louisiana (57 percent), and Georgia (55 percent). In every Southern state he lost—Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, Florida (where he won 49 percent), Virginia, and Kentucky—Republicans were elected to statewide office in unprecedented numbers. In Mississippi he got 87 percent of the vote. He even won Hattiesburg, which was rather remarkable. On October 22, scientists had set off a nuclear device 2,700 feet beneath the ground a few miles southwest of Hattiesburg to study test-verification methods. The blast created a shock wave that rippled the ground ten inches high and knocked stock off warehouse shelves for miles around. (“The South shall rise again,” read a placard a sardonic technician placed next to the blast site.) The blast was detected as far away as Western Europe. Hattiesburg didn’t mind that Goldwater was the Senate’s premier advocate of unlimited testing. They went for him 89.2 percent.

  Many a Southern liberal looked upon this development with serene confidence: any step back from the big-D Democrats was a step forward for small-d democracy. A Republican institutional presence was being built that would finally force Dixiecrats to actually attend to their constituencies. Then Southern Republicans “will see that their only hope for increasing party membership and winning elections is to be ‘for something’ rather than to be consistently against Democratic programs which are now ingrained in the politics and life of the people of the region,” asserted Sam Ragan, executive editor of the Raleigh News and Observer. “Emotional issues may momentarily sway, but the pinched pocketbook nerve brings even quicker reaction.... The disadvantaged and the dispossessed will make themselves heard, and self-preservation will dictate to the politician that he must heed the cry.” Dixie’s defection to conservatism, editorialized the Washington Post, was but a “one-shot affair.” Enlightened Republicans, wrote the keeper of the Los Angeles Times’s Dixie beat, now recognize that the Negro vote “can be as contestable as the Chinese vote, the white Protestant vote, the Catholic vote, the Jewish vote, or the vote of the freckle-faced redheads and one-armed shortstops.”

  “WHITE BACKLASH DOESN’T DEVELOP”: so reported the New York Times. The blue-collar Slavs, Italians, and others who delivered Goldwater their majorities when polled at factory gates gave him numbers in the twenties in the only poll that mattered. Democratic loyalty held in the Boston neighborhoods where Louise Day Hicks reigned supreme, and in the Queens ones in which Parents and Taxpayers led antibusing school boycotts. Scores of formerly Republican suburbs known for guarding their neighborhood boundaries like medieval castles gave Johnson a clean sweep. For over a year, backlash had loomed in the public imagination like a pit bull straining at the leash. Now it was judged the mouse that roared. “Leaders of both parties are confident,” Sam Ragan wrote, “that elections will be decided on issues other than civil rights.” Like most pundits, he ignored evidence around the country that didn’t fit the comforting conclusion—like the fact that California decided against open housing by 2 to 1, even while going for Johnson by over a million votes. Or Goldwater’s overwhelming success in hamlets with large numbers of Evangelical Christians, like Jerry Falwell’s Lynchberg, Virginia.

  Every Republican who wasn’t a conservative—and many who were—immediately put his shoulder to the wheel to exorcise the Goldwater specter, lest Republicans be forced to run against Goldwater’s rugged ghost until 1984, jus
t as Herbert Hoover had haunted them for the twenty years until Dwight D. Eisenhower came to the rescue. “Our overriding, overwhelming distrust of big government as the Great Evil of Our Time must be abandoned,” the black Republican attorney general of Massachusetts, Ed Brooke, a rising star, put it starkly. New York’s Republican chair lamented the party’s having paid a “shattering price for the erratic deviation from our soundly moderate, twentieth-century course.” Iowa’s specified the price that had been paid in his state: “Bold, drastic steps,” he said, would have to be taken to keep the two-party system in Iowa. Even one of Goldwater’s top captains in San Francisco, Melvin Laird, allowed that it would be “suicidal”—the word popped up again and again—“to ignore the election results and try to resist any change in the party.” “The present party leadership must be replaced—all of it,” Hugh Scott declared at a press conference—a process akin to tracking down a stink that lingered mysteriously weeks after the housecleaning was done. “I don’t even know where the leadership lies in that morass down there,” he said. Eisenhower placed a contrite call to Scranton: “If the Lord spares me for 1968, I am going to come out for somebody at least eighteen months ahead of time. This year I tried to do what was decent.” (Nixon, virtually alone, demurred: the “strong conservative wing of the Republican Party,” he said at his press conference, “deserves a major voice in party councils.” Liberals like Rockefeller, he said, were not role models but spoilsports and dividers.)

  The winter wasn’t over before the RNC had dumped Dean Burch in favor of Ray Bliss, the phlegmatic old Ohio pro who had endeavored to shore up Republican machines in the big cities as the royal road back after the Nixon defeat in 1960. He pledged to do the same now. Lyndon Johnson always said it: A century ago 80 percent of America was rural. Now it was 70 percent urban. The new Supreme Court reapportionment decisions spelled the death knell of the decades-old “conservative coalition” of rural Republicans and Southern Democrats that had choked progress in Congress. “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres,” Earl Warren said in forcing states to redraw their districts in one-man-one-vote fashion. The power was in the cities now. The Republican Party couldn’t afford to court that population with nineteenth-century ideologies. As Teddy White stirringly put it in The Making of the President 1964: “History would have to record that the Republican Party had not submitted docilely to this new leadership, but had resisted it to the end—so that from this resistance and defeat, others, later, might take heart and resume the battle.”

  And so history did record. George H. Mayer concluded in a chapter added to the second edition of his The Republican Party, called “The Amateur Hour and After,” that without besting the Democrats in meeting “the burgeoning problems of the city, the GOP seems certain to occupy its current role as a minority party for the foreseeable future.” (As for Vietnam, “unless it spreads elsewhere it is no more likely to produce a lasting realignment than the Korean War.”) The nation’s leading students of American political behavior, Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, speculated that if the Republicans nominated a conservative again he would lose so badly “we can expect an end to a competitive two-party system.” Arthur Schlesinger put it most succinctly of all in volume 4 of his magisterial History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968: “The election results of 1964,” he reflected, “seemed to demonstrate Thomas Dewey’s prediction about what would happen if the parties were realigned on an ideological basis: ‘The Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election.’ ”

  At that there seemed nothing more to say. It was time to close the book.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AC: Author’s Collection

  AHF: Barry Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation, Tucson

  AHFAV : Barry Goldwater Audiovisual Collection, Arizona Historical Foundation

  AHFCP : 1964 Campaign Photo Album and accompanying text, Arizona Historical Foundation

  A R : Arizona Republic

  BMG: Barry Morris Goldwater

  C M : Clarence Manion Papers, Chicago Historical Society

  C T : Chicago Tribune

  DDE : Dwight David Eisenhower

  D K : Denison Kitchel Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

  FCW : F. Clifton White Papers, Cornell University Special Collections

  FL: Hillsdale College Freedom Library

  FSA : Free Society Association Papers, in Denison Kitchel Papers, Hoover Institution

  GP : George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971 (New York: Random House, 1972)

  GRR: Group Research Report newsletter

  HE : Human Events

  HI : Hoover Institution, Stanford University

  HR : Henry Regnery Papers, Hoover Institution

  JCJ : Jameson Campaigne Jr. Private Papers (unsorted)

  JFK : John F. Kennedy

  LBJL : Lyndon Johnson Papers, Lyndon Johnson Library, University of Texas at Austin

  LBJT: Recorded LBJ phone conversations, LBJ Library

  LBJWH: Johnson Papers, White House Central Files

  LBJWHA: White House Central Files, Aides’ Files

  LBJWHAM : Aides’ Files, Bill Moyers

  LBJWHAM53: Aides’ Files, Bill Moyers, Box 53, “Campaign, 1 of 2” and “Campaign, 2 of 2” folders

  LBJWH6 - 3: White House Central Files, EX: PL 6-3 file

  LBJWHN: White House Central Files, Name Files

  LBJWHNG: Name Files: Goldwater, Barry

  L N : Leonard Nadasdy Private Papers (unsorted)

  MCSL: Margaret Chase Smith Library, Skowhegan, Maine

  M L : Marvin Liebman Papers, Hoover Institution

  MTR: Museum of Television and Radio, New York, New York

  NAR: Nelson A. Rockefeller

  N R : National Review

  NYHT: New York Herald Tribune

  NYHTEN: New York Herald Tribune, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Inside Report” column

  NYP: New York Post

  NYRB: New York Review of Books

  NYT: New York Times

  NYTM: New York Times Magazine

  O H : Oral History

  PPP: Public Papers of the President (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office)

  RAC: Rockefeller Archive Center, New York Office, Series III 15 22, subseries 2, Sleepy Hollow, New York

  S E P: Saturday Evening Post

  SFC: San Francisco Chronicle

  SHBGS: Barry Goldwater Scrapbook, Sharlot Hall Historical Museum, Prescott, Arizona

  SLPD: St. Louis Post Dispatch

  TNR: The New Republic

  USN: U.S. News and World Report

  WAR: William A. Rusher Papers, Library of Congress

  WFBJ: William F. Buckley Jr. Papers, Yale University Special Collections

  WGN: WGN-TV news footage, Chicago Historical Society

  W P: Washington Post

  W S : Washington Star

  WSJ : Wall Street Journal

  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

  Noel Black

  Alan Brinkley

  William F. Buckley Jr.

  Jameson Campaigne Jr.

  W. Glen Campbell

  Elsie Carper

  Mel Cottone

  Jack Craddock

  Ron Crawford

  Carol Dawson

  Don Devine

  Richard Dudman

  M. Stanton Evans

  Rep. Barney Frank

  Milton Friedman

  Robert Gaston

  Henry Geier

  Patricia Geier

  Ryan Hayes

  Margot Henriksen

  Doug Henwood

  John Higham

  David Keene

  Richard Kleindienst

  Charles Lichenstein

  Robert Love

  Wes McCune

  John McManus

  Graham T. T. Molitor

  Judge Daniel Manion

  Steve Max

  Leonard
Nadasdy

  Gus Owen

  Tom Pauken

  Howard Phillips

  Lou Proyect

  Alfred Regnery

  Jonathan Rosenblum

  William A. Rusher

  Allan Ryskind

  John Savage

  Sara Jane Sayer

  Phyllis Schlafly

  William Schulz

  Scott Stanley

  Angie Stockwell

  Richard Viguerie

  Pamela Walton

  Eric Wunderman

  Wirt Yerger

  Herbert York

  ABOUT THE NOTES

  Paragraphing of the source citations follows the paragraphing in the text. Page numbers indicate the page on which each paragraph begins.

  Phrases in italics are passages taken from the text.

  LBJ conversations reviewed and transcribed by the author are indicated by the abbreviation LBJT and a citation number; ones transcribed by Michael Beschloss are cited from his book Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (Simon and Schuster, 1997).

  PREFACE

  ix “He has wrecked his party”: New York Times, November 5, 1964. “The election has finished the Goldwater school”: Lee Edwards, Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1995), 344. “By every test we have”: NYTM, June 28, 1964.

  ix “The Democrats would win every election”: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1798-1968, vol. 4 (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), 3021. “A recrudescence on American soil”: Philip Rahv, “Some Comments on Senator Goldwater,” Partisan Review (Fall 1964): 603.