Before the Storm (27 page)

After the New Year, the GOP's most liberal senator, blunt, intense Jacob Javits of New York, organized an effort to try to dump Goldwater as chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. It gained momentum within the caucus, then sputtered when senators were swamped with protests from conservatives. On January II Goldwater took to the floor to deliver “A Statement of Proposed Republican Principles, Programs, and Objectives”—a stem-to-stern Republican legislative agenda for the 1960s, perhaps what the Republican presidential campaign would have looked like with Barry Goldwater at the helm. In the address, later dubbed the “Forgotten American” speech, Goldwater argued that in a political scene jammed with minority and pressure groups, the only population left unorganized were those Americans “who quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving.” The GOP, he said, must become the party of these “silent Americans.” This language would become influential in Republican presidential campaigning—seven years hence. In 1961 Goldwater made no attempt to build a coalition around these ideas or shepherd the statement's clauses into bills; soon he dropped them.

He spent more energy that winter organizing a congressional wing of the Air National Guard, the 9999th Air Reserve Squadron. He was never one for legislating. His business was casting “no” votes: against an emergency increase in price supports for grain; against restricting federal aid to states making progress on segregation; against the foreign aid package; against aid to depressed areas to relieve chronic unemployment in places like New York's Orange County; against a wilderness preservation bill years in the making (it passed 78 to 8); against the Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (93 percent of Republicans voted in favor); against an authorization of money to irrigate Navajo lands in New Mexico (although he introduced a bill to authorize funds for the dam-building Central Arizona Project). In a monumental statement, he said Kennedy's school assistance bill was a farce, designed to address a teacher shortage that did not in fact exist. Then, naturally, he voted against it.

The word “no,” apparently, was all it took to get him on the cover of Time.

“Salesman for a Cause,” the cover line read. It went on to call Goldwater the “hottest political figure this side of Jack Kennedy.” A fawning feature in the March 25
Business Week
reported that “the most sought-after man on Capitol Hill for speaking engagements around the country used to be a glamorous, liberal senator named John F. Kennedy. Today he is a glamorous, conservative senator named Barry Goldwater.”
Conscience of a Conservative
had sold three-quarters of a million copies.
Newsweek
put Goldwater on the cover on April 10—“a handsome jet aircraft pilot with curly gray hair, dazzling white teeth, and a tan on his desert-cured face,” who began his day by swinging “out of his bed as though he hadn't partied until the small hours the night before.” Even the country's most liberal major daily, the
New York Post,
fawned: “Like Kennedy, he has a devastating impact on the ladies; he also projects an aura of rugged masculine competence with which men like to identify.” The number of newspapers featuring Goldwater's opinion column climbed from 26 in April to 104 by summer. His suite in the Old Senate Office Building, besieged by eight hundred pieces of mail each day, was mobbed every morning by well-wishing families on summer vacations craving a scrawled autograph, eye contact, a handclasp—anything. (“If you'd like to see the Vice President, he's right over there,” a reporter overheard a guide say. She was answered by a chorus: “Where's Senator Goldwater?”) “GOLDWATER IN 1964” bumper stickers began appearing (”GOLDWATER IN 1864” stickers soon followed). A negative profile in Life by the novelist Gore Vidal, who called Goldwater a fascist, came off making Vidal look like the crank, the intended victim an altogether affable fellow.

Kennedy, meanwhile, was floundering politically in his first year in office. His only real legislative victory had come in the second week of his term, when the House voted to enlarge the size of the Rules Committee to dilute the power its reactionary majority of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats had used to bog down enough social legislation to render the liberal Democratic triumph in 1958 moot. But he won the victory by only a single vote, through the severest arm-twisting by House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Kennedy's only big foreign policy move was the shameful loss at the Bay of Pigs. His Rules Committee coup availed him nothing: the school bill died a slow death; his depressed areas bill was only able to pass at half strength after Southern obstructionists were bought off with far more patronage than they deserved; the minimum wage was increased slightly, but thanks to business lobbying, the number of workers it covered decreased. A sweeping federal housing bill and one providing medical care to the aged through Social Security appeared ready to meet the same fate.

There was no mistaking it, though: the large majority of Americans adored their dashing young President. He enjoyed a 79 percent approval rating at the
beginning of April, 83 percent after the Bay of Pigs. All the same, it was strange: even as the slice of America that disdained Kennedy grew slimmer, it was growing more distinct, better organized, more articulate. This constituency was on the move. It had a hero. Barry Goldwater gave 225 speeches on the road in 1961. He was becoming, in the words of an astute young
Fortune
reporter, “the favorite son of a state of mind.” And by the end of the summer, events would see to it that this state of mind would spread impressively.

I
n the midst of one of those myriad foreign policy crises of his Administration when a wrong decision might doom the entire earth, the bedraggled President looked up at aide Walt Whitman Rostow and muttered, “Sometimes, I'm afraid that the good Lord put me on earth to start a nuclear war.”

Leading the free world in 1961 was enough to haunt any man. In the Southeast Asian nation of Laos, a pro-American regime was defending itself against a guerrilla band backed by Communist North Vietnam. In Berlin the problem was more immediate. The two Germanys were in a kind of bureaucratic limbo, still officially “occupation zones.” That made Berlin, divided by postwar agreement but deep within the Soviet zone, the one place in the world where the forces of the West (12,000 troops) and the East (500,000 troops) mingled at the distance of a shouted insult or a tossed grenade. For the Soviets, Berlin was an open wound through which East Germany's most gifted citizens bled. For the NATO countries, the tumbledown misery of the Soviet district was a splendid everyday rebuke to propaganda that Communism could build a paradise on earth. Militarily, the city carried incredible strategic value. It was, said Khrushchev in November of 1958 before demanding that the U.S. accede to placing Berlin under Soviet control, “the testicles of the West,” which he need only squeeze to make Presidents scream.

The 1958 crisis dissolved with Eisenhower's invitation to Khrushchev to visit the United States. In 1961 Berlin heated up again because of a chain of events taking place half a world away. On April I Khrushchev agreed to meet with Kennedy in Vienna in June over Laos. Two weeks later, the Bay of Pigs shattered the young, untested President's bargaining position. Kennedy well remembered the only other time he had met the Soviet premier: when he paid court to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his September 1959 visit, Khrushchev said that Kennedy looked awfully young to be a senator. In anticipation of the April meeting with the premier, Kennedy frantically backfilled
to broadcast his toughness and resolve by calling up twelve thousand new Marines.

It was harder to control events at home. An inconvenience of making foreign policy during the high tide of the American Century was that since the nation was possessed of a simple faith in its omnipotence, any presidential compromise looked like failure, even unto treason—thereby minting new right-wing critics continually. Kennedy was trying to bargain with Castro to free the prisoners from the Bay of Pigs in exchange for a shipment of American tractors. In Rockford, Illinois, Barry Goldwater held an audience spellbound bemoaning “the disgusting, sickening spectacle of four Americans groveling before a cheap, dirty dictator” (the audience, and Goldwater, didn't know about the $50 million budget for CIA efforts to overthrow Castro). The appearance of national disunity would hurt Kennedy in Vienna. So would the latest outbreak of civil rights disturbances in the South: young activists from the Congress of Racial Equality testing the Supreme Court ban on segregation in interstate bus facilities on a dramatic “Freedom Ride” through the region. In Birmingham they were beaten, in Anniston their bus was torched, in Montgomery they hid from a mob in a church like cornered rats.

In Vienna, just as Kennedy feared, Khrushchev came after him like a playground bully, brazenly repeating his 1958 ultimatum: NATO must remove its troops from Berlin or the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany making it an “independent” nation with sole rights to the city. “And if that means war,” the premier fulminated, “the Soviet Union will accept the challenge.” The next day he went on Moscow TV to say that the treaty would be signed within the year. If America tried to stop them, he boomed, “it would mean war, and a thermonuclear war at that.”

It might come to World War III over Berlin:
Kennedy spent the summer thinking of little else. Again and again he worked through the military scenarios with his advisers. They all boiled down to one of two options: surrender or nuclear war. They differed only in the number of steps it took to get there. A nuclear first strike was considered, then the pulverization of a Hiroshima-sized Russian city at the first sign of a Soviet move. Dean Acheson told Kennedy that America should be put on immediate footing for total war, including wage and price controls. Finally, at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport, an initial course of action was decided upon. The gambit would be a speech, delivered on television on July 25. It was the most terrifying of the Cold War. Later Barry Goldwater would say the same kinds of things during the 1964 presidential campaign, and people would call him a madman.

Kennedy spoke in front of a flag emblazoned with the presidential seal, draped in such a way that, intentionally or not, the only part visible was the
clutch of arrows in the eagle's right talon, not the olive branch in its left. “An attack on that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all ... we cannot separate its safety from our own.” Berlin was “the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments stretching back over the years since 1945, and Soviet ambitions, now meet in basic confrontation.” Our only course there was to find a path between “humiliation” and “all-out nuclear action.” The Soviets had made the “mistake of assuming that the West was too selfish and too soft and too divided to resist invasions of freedom in other lands.” They were wrong. He explained that he would ask Congress for $3.2 billion in new military appropriations, triple draft calls, order reserve and National Guard units to active duty, and put long-range bombers on fifteen minutes' alert. In previous wars, he said, “serious misjudgments were made on both sides of the intentions of others, which brought about great devastation. Now, in the thermonuclear age, misjudgment on either side about the intentions of the other could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history.” Americans must begin preparing for that eventuality immediately: “In the event of an attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast can still be saved-if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available.”

In the space of an evening the end of the world became routine business. The bomb shelter—only recently the province of neighborhood eccentrics—was now presidential mandate. Thomas J. Watson of IBM gave his employees $1,000 loans to build them; the Rabbinical Council of America recommended construction of bomb shelters beneath all new synagogues. New companies sprang up: Acme Bomb and Fallout Shelter Company, Peace-O-Mind Shelter Company, Nuclear Survival Company. Specialized products appeared on shelves: “Foam-Ettes—the Toothpaste Tablet You Can Use ANYTIME, ANYWHERE—WHEREVER YOU ARE, even in a family fallout shelter.”

The grim trade illuminated dark corners of the American psyche. An article called “Gun Thy Neighbor” in Time reported on a suburban Chicagoan who planned to mount a machine gun on the hatch of his shelter, and described a civil defense coordinator for Riverside County in southern California who recommended that families stock survival kits with pistols to ward off Angelenos who might head for the sticks. The article appeared in Time's religion section. Its main point was that religious leaders were sanctioning this kind of thing. “If you allow a tramp to take the place of your children in your shelter, you are in error,” said the dean of a Baptist seminary. “A Christian has the obligation to ensure the safety of those who depend on him.” Jesuit father L. C. McHugh branded as “misguided charity” the refusal to repel invaders by “whatever means to effectively deter their assault.” Rod Serling rushed into production an
episode of The Twilight Zone to run September 29—if the world made it that far. It depicted a neighborhood birthday party for the beloved town doctor, interrupted by a radio announcement of imminent alien attack. The doctor takes his wife and son to the family shelter and battens down the hatches. Just as the shelterless mob pounds their way in, the radio informs them it was a false alarm. The people face each other in shame, their trust in one another forever shattered.

The situation in Europe escalated. On August 12, East German soldiers began sealing off the Soviet sector with barbed wire; within days there was a concrete wall, interrupted only by watchtowers. West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt sent Kennedy an open letter demanding “not merely words but political action” to preserve his city. Berlin students sent the President a Neville Chamberlain—style umbrella—a sucker punch to the man whose father was famous, while serving as ambassador to Great Britain, for having a soft spot for Hitler. Kennedy sent Lyndon Johnson to Berlin to pledge “our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor” to Berlin's defense. Then he sent a fifteen-hundred-man battle group along the 110-mile single roadway that linked the West to Berlin—a game of chicken that so whitened his knuckles that talking to him, according to an aide, was like talking to a statue. The Soviets announced that they would resume atmospheric nuclear tests. Then they exploded a bomb bigger than all the tonnage in World War II put together. The White House scuttled ongoing disarmament talks.