Almost President (31 page)

Kennedy, of course, had the power of incumbency, and he was certainly growing in the job, but he acknowledged in the fall of 1963 that he faced a tough fight for re-election the following year. In the South, Kennedy's approval rating had dropped from 64 percent in 1962 to 35 percent in 1963. Robert Kennedy, his brother's chief political advisor, conceded that Kennedy might lose every Southern state in 1964—including Texas, even with Johnson on the ticket. Kennedy's prospects in the Plains and Mountain states were equally dim.

The media thought he was vulnerable, too. Nationally syndicated columnist Marquis Childs had taken a tour of the South and Southwest and told Kennedy he was “startled” by the level of “hatred” he found for the president—as great as had been experienced by FDR, Childs told a rattled Kennedy. A Georgia theater had advertised the movie
PT-109
with a marquee that read, “See How the Japs Almost Get Kennedy.”
Look
magazine ran a banner headline that said, “
jfk could lose
,” while
Time
magazine did a state-by-state survey, backed up by several reputable national polls, that concluded Goldwater could give Kennedy “a breathlessly close race.”

Goldwater was further heartened by a growing and exceedingly well-financed movement on the right that included the notorious John Birch Society, whose founder, Massachusetts candy maker Robert Welch, had accused Eisenhower of being a “conscious agent” of the Communist conspiracy. Goldwater told Welch he should drop that nonsense but otherwise welcomed the support of the Birchers and their allies, despite urgings from some supporters to repudiate them. “I am impressed by the type of people in it,” Goldwater said of the Birchers. “They are the kind of people we need in politics,” adding that “the finest people in my community” were members.

Then, on November 22, 1963, while on a trip to mend an intra-party feud in Texas between liberal and conservative Democrats, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Vice President Johnson ascended to the presidency. Even though Kennedy's murderer was a deeply troubled pseudo-Marxist, many blamed the far right for creating “a conspiratorial atmosphere of violence” that led to the assassination. All forms of extremism, especially conservative extremism, were now suspect, and Johnson's strategy would be to ensure that America considered Goldwater an extremist—a strategy with which Goldwater obligingly cooperated.

Goldwater, meanwhile, was deeply saddened by Kennedy's murder. He had looked forward to campaigning against Kennedy, not just because he thought he had tactical advantages in such a race, but also because he and Kennedy genuinely liked each other. Goldwater said they had even talked about barnstorming across the country, engaging in Lincoln-Douglas–style debates in which they would offer a stark contrast in philosophy and provide voters with a clear choice.

With Kennedy dead, Goldwater considered ending his presidential bid, knowing that the assassination would ensure a Johnson victory in 1964 as a memorial to the dead president. But Goldwater realized that he remained the great hope of conservatives and stayed in the race, now less to win the presidency than to capture the soul of the Republican Party.

Republican moderates tried to stop Goldwater, but competing egos prevented them from rallying around a single candidate. Rockefeller had one last chance to derail the Goldwater movement by winning the California primary, but a week before the election his new wife gave birth to their first child, reminding voters of “Rocky's” indiscretions. Goldwater partisans gleefully held up signs that asked, “Do You Want a Leader or a Lover” in the White House? Rockefeller had carried fifty-four of California's fifty-eight counties, but Goldwater's support was so strong in Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego Counties that he won the primary with 51 percent of the vote. The conservative movement was not derailed, and the nomination was his.

With little hope of winning the general election against Johnson, Goldwater felt no need or desire to conciliate with the moderate and liberal wings of the party. Unlike 1960, the party platform did not have a strong civil rights plank, nor did the platform address any of the interests of the party's liberal wing. “The spirit of compromise and accommodation was wholly alien” to the Goldwater forces, journalist Richard Rovere wrote. “They came for a total ideological victory and the total destruction of their critics.”

When it came time to pick a running mate, Goldwater felt no need to balance the ticket ideologically and chose his congressional partner Miller, largely, he said, because he knew Miller drove Johnson “nuts.” Nor would Goldwater even offer words of conciliation to party members. At the Republican convention in San Francisco, when the word “extremist” was, in the wake of Kennedy's murder, an anathema, Goldwater defiantly declared, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” A reporter present blurted out, “My God, he's going to run as Barry Goldwater!”

A campaign aide later explained, “We were talking about the good extremists, not the idiots.” It was a distinction lost on many voters. Goldwater did not help his own cause, uttering impolitic, even outrageous, things. He suggested that Social Security be made voluntary and that the federal government sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority, a position that greatly eroded his support in large parts of the South. He wanted to end crop subsidies and the income tax, and he spoke of using nuclear weapons with a casualness that was reckless, such as his suggestion that perhaps the United States ought to “lob one [nuclear missile] into the men's room at the Kremlin.”

Such remarks led his opponents to suggest that Goldwater might be more than an extremist. Goldwater's slogan, “In your heart, you know he's right,” was cunningly countered with, “In your guts, you know he's nuts.” Publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who had served eight months on an obscenity conviction before turning from pornography to political commentary, enterprisingly sent surveys to twelve thousand psychiatrists, asking their opinion as to whether Goldwater was psychologically fit to be president. Remarkably, eighteen hundred psychiatrists returned the survey, concluding by a two-to-one margin, based on no clinical evidence or personal observation, that Goldwater was indeed crazy—and “uneasy about his masculinity” and anti-Semitic, too, because he denied his Jewish ancestry. The stunt made Goldwater angry enough that he later sued Ginzburg, winning one dollar in compensatory damages and seventy-five thousand dollars in punitive damages in a landmark case that proved public officials can be libeled if “actual malice” can be proven.

But the efforts to unravel Goldwater's psyche were not limited to partisans and pornographers. The historian Richard Hofstadter authored an article in 1964 for
Harper's Magazine
based on an earlier lecture in which Hofstadter suggested that Goldwater and other ultra-conservatives practiced a “paranoid style” of politics. Unlike Ginzburg's psychiatrists, Hofstadter said he was not making a clinical diagnosis but said he used the word “paranoid” because “no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”
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The lowest blow was a television commercial developed by the Johnson campaign, in which the image of a young girl pulling petals from a flower is obliterated by the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast. The commercial ran only once and Goldwater was not mentioned by name, but he didn't have to be. The point was clear: Goldwater was crazy enough to start a nuclear war.

Given Johnson's commanding lead (he would win a record 61 percent of the popular vote to Goldwater's 39 percent), the commercial seemed like overkill. But Johnson remained wary, for there was one issue that—if it could not defeat him—could still dramatically reduce his vote totals and the mandate to govern that Johnson was grasping for: That issue was race.

Even when African Americans had used only the tactics of nonviolence to advance their cause, there had been a growing “white backlash.” A national Harris poll from July 1964 found 58 percent of white Americans concerned that blacks might “take over” their jobs, while significant pluralities worried blacks would want to move into their neighborhoods or attend their children's schools. Now, just a few weeks after the Civil Rights Act became law, blacks began rioting in Harlem, and over the next several weeks rioting spread to other cities in New York and New Jersey, as well as Philadelphia. Johnson campaign aides glumly called the riots “Goldwater rallies,” and a campaign analysis concluded, “There is considerable evidence to show that every time there is violence by Negroes, Goldwater gains supporters.” Pollster Sam Lubell added, “The racial issue is the only one that can elect Goldwater.”

Goldwater was tempted to use the riots to his advantage. He said the rioting proved his point that laws were ineffective in addressing a problem like prejudice. No state had tougher civil rights legislation than New York, and yet it was in that supposedly tolerant Northern city, not the South, where rioting was occurring—a fact that baffled Johnson and other civil rights advocates.

But then Goldwater, despite having a rare tactical advantage at his command, again displayed his ambivalence about racial issues. He asked for a private meeting with Johnson to discuss whether they could mutually agree to take both race and the Vietnam War off the table for discussion. Johnson, suspicious of nearly everyone, was skeptical of Goldwater's motives: “He wants to encourage the backlash, that's where his future is; it's not in peace and harmony.” Johnson, engaging in his own paranoid style of politics, even had the FBI investigate whether it could prove Goldwater supporters were helping to incite the riots for political gain.

Goldwater, however, was genuinely troubled by the bloodshed. He believed the nation's big cities were “just tinderboxes,” and said in later years that he had thought, “I'll be darned if I will have my grandchildren accuse their grandfather of setting fire to it [sic].” Johnson, fully realizing his two greatest weaknesses in the campaign were racial unrest and growing American military involvement in Southeast Asia, readily agreed to Goldwater's astonishing suggestion.

Goldwater now suggested the nation give the civil rights legislation that he had opposed “a real chance to work.” Goldwater even cancelled his campaign's plan to release a film called
Choice,
which linked black rioting to what he called the nation's general moral decay. Images of rioting blacks were interspersed with women in topless bathing suits, teenage gangs, and striptease shows. Goldwater thought the film appealed to racist sentiment, which had been the point.

Bound by his own suggestion not to talk about race explicitly, yet knowing it was the only issue that could help Republicans avoid a total debacle in November, Goldwater focused on the themes of law and order, personal safety, and dependency on the dole—legitimate issues, certainly, but issues in which race was a clear subtext never addressed directly. And while he cancelled his campaign film, Goldwater still talked about the riots as another manifestation of moral decay. “Why do we see riot and disorder in our cities?” Goldwater asked, answering his own question by claiming, “The moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay.” He did not interpret the riots as the result of a frustrated underclass, yearning for economic, political, and social equality.

Instead, he talked about the new prevalence of “the sick joke, the slick slogan, the off-color drama, and the pornographic book.” And he decried the Supreme Court's ruling that banned mandatory prayer in the public schools, while saying of the Democrats: “You will search in vain for
any
reference to God or religion in the Democratic platform.” Goldwater was pioneering the use of “social issues,” a tactic that would evolve into the “culture wars” twenty years later, though by then, Goldwater would be on the other side of the war to the dismay of his fellow conservatives. Such issues would lead to GOP victories in later decades but not in 1964 when Johnson trounced Goldwater by the largest percentage in history.

Goldwater was only fifty-five years old in 1964 and still cut a dashing figure, but no one considered Goldwater a potential presidential contender in 1968. Conservatives had transferred their affections to another: movie star Ronald Reagan. One of the most important developments of the 1964 Goldwater campaign was making Reagan a national political figure. Reagan and Goldwater were longtime acquaintances through Reagan's second wife, Nancy Davis, whose parents lived in Phoenix. Goldwater recalled that when he first met Reagan, the actor-turned-politician was still an orthodox New Deal liberal, and he got into such heated arguments with Goldwater that he once called the Arizonan “a black fascist bastard.” Under the Davis family's tutelage, Reagan moved politically to the right and, his movie career in decline, became primarily known as a television host and a favorite speaker at corporate events.

Late in the 1964 campaign, it was suggested that Reagan be featured in a thirty-minute Goldwater campaign commercial, giving a speech on conservative values that had been garnering Reagan high praise on the speaking circuit. Later known simply as “The Speech,” Reagan's address generated more than six hundred thousand dollars in contributions to a campaign badly in need of cash. Goldwater never thanked Reagan for his efforts. Those who knew him said Goldwater was likely jealous to see the mantle of conservative leadership passed on to someone else. By January 1965, many of the same men who had drafted Goldwater to run for president now approached Reagan and started plotting his new political career, which began with Reagan's election as governor of California in 1966.

Elected president in 1980, Reagan completed what Goldwater had started by greatly broadening the appeal of conservatism, most particularly in the South where, by the end of his term in office, 45 percent of white Southerners identified themselves as Republican and just 34 percent still called themselves Democrats. Reagan's appeal transcended Goldwater's. Where Goldwater's manner was strident and frightening to nonbelievers, Reagan was sunny, optimistic, and soothing. Or as one conservative admirer put it, Reagan was “Goldwater mutton, dressed up as lamb.” Goldwater neither appreciated the comparison or Reagan's political gifts. Asked to participate in a commemorative film near the end of Reagan's presidency, Goldwater repeatedly muttered, “He's just an actor.”