Before the Storm (30 page)

The question was whether the broad conservative movement itself was strong enough to survive a faction fight. Publicly, conservatives hid their dirty laundry and closed ranks:
pas d‘ennemi du droite.
“Next to the Twist and barely knee-length skirts,” the YAF newsletter declared after Tom Hayden's
Michigan
Daily compared YAF to the Hitler Youth, “the most fashionable thing of the season is a rousing, vitriolic attack on the so-called ‘Extreme Right.' ” Privately, Buckley brooded. He pored over a report on the John Birch· Society in
Commentary
speculating that if Goldwater lost the 1964 nomination to Rockefeller, he might take up the assembled forces of the extreme right as
his
fascist army. “Result: An American Raskol'niki,” Buckley scribbled in the margin. He glimpsed the abyss. Buckley liked to say that
National Review's
purpose was “to articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.” If political surrealists like Welch ended up in control of the movement, all might be lost. But if
National Review
lost the Roger Millikens and Adolphe Menjous and couldn't continue to raise enough money to stay in business ...

He chose a stopgap: a signed editorial, worded with the delicacy of a hostage negotiation, that ran in the April 22 issue, in which Buckley availed himself of his Jesuitical temper to reduce Robert Welch's sin to a logical fallacy: “I hope the Society thrives,” the editorial concluded, “provided, of course, it resists such false assumptions as that a man's subjective motives can automatically be deduced from the objective consequences of his acts.”

National Review
already possessed an informal controlling interest in a membership organization—Young Americans for Freedom. But a feud was developing within its leadership that threatened to tear it apart. A mere six months after its founding, YAF president Caddy instituted a policy change to (he claimed) smooth the liaison procedures with local chapters. David Franke, his old partner, knew it was a power play, and lined up forces with the intention of purging Caddy. Caddy countered by organizing a faction within the twenty-five-member board—in which much of the group's executive authority was vested—to wrest YAF from the
National Review
orbit altogether.

The plotters were strange bedfellows. One, Harvard's Howard Phillips, was frustrated by the older conservatives' dominion over what was supposed to be a student organization. Another was said to harbor secret loyalties to Nelson Rockefeller. Others simply saw in the coup a way to advance their own ambitions. But one of the coup members, Scott Stanley of Kansas, was a Bircher—determined, the
National Review
editors decided, to place YAF under Robert Welch's discipline.

Meanwhile, two hundred YAFers descended on Madison for the fifteenth National Student Association Congress. Students for a Democratic Society hoped to use the meeting to establish a beachhead; YAF aimed to do the same. The conservative group's efforts dwarfed the exercises in Washington the previous spring. An advance guard arrived early to set up shop like a general staff in a military campaign. When the sessions began, walkie-talkies were used to coordinate attacks on every live microphone and roll-call vote; to recognize friend from foe at long distances, YAFers wore suspenders. Meanwhile, at headquarters at the expensive Madison Inn, a staff of secretaries knocked out press releases, speech typescripts, flyers, and meeting proceedings (transcribed from clandestine tape recordings) full-time. They lined up a dummy “middle-of-the-road
caucus” of enough unsuspecting dupes to keep the usual string of pro-civil rights and anti-anticommunist resolutions from even getting past committee. Spokesmen plied reporters with continual press conferences.

It was incredible. And it nearly didn't come off at all. Howard Phillips had raised thousands of dollars to finance the effort. Bill Rusher somehow got control of the escrow account that held the money. Phillips's general staff encamped in Madison and started running up bills. Rusher called and told Phillips that unless he promised to vote against severing ties with
National Review
at the upcoming YAF board meeting, Phillips would have to pay all the bills himself. Phillips was not so easily intimidated—he was a veteran of hardball Boston politics, having run the campaign of Tip O'Neill's Republican opponent at the ripe age of seventeen. He won back control of his money by threatening to expose the “middle-of-the-road caucus” as a sham.

 

In January, Jay Hall—a GM publicist and close Goldwater adviser—Russell Kirk, Steve Shadegg, Bill Buckley, and William J. Baroody Jr., head of American Enterprise Institute, joined Goldwater at the palatial Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach for a council of war. It was time to settle the Birch issue once and for all.

The attendees fell into two camps. Buckley and Kirk said they were ready to write the Birchers out of the conservative movement altogether. Goldwater and others counseled accommodation. He thought there were a lot of “nice guys” in the Society, not just kooks, and that it wasn't the time to precipitate breaks in the conservatives' fragile movement. They settled on a compromise:
National
Review would attack Robert Welch, not the John Birch Society. Goldwater would take the line that Robert Welch was a crazy extremist but that the Society itself was full of fine, upstanding citizens working hard and well for the cause of Americanism.

The White House was undertaking parallel machinations. A few weeks earlier the Reuther brothers had delivered their study on the radical right. Its forces, “bounded on the left by Senator Goldwater and on the right by Robert Welch,” were strong and well organized, they warned. “It is late in the day to start dealing with these problems.” Another White House report urged that organizations allied with
National Review
—YAF, the Committee of One Million, the New York Conservative Party—not the Birchers, were the true danger, because they were focused on “the winning of national elections” and “the re-education of the governing classes,” not on numskull crusades. “The real goal may be to replace the erratic Welch with a man whose thinking parallels that of
National Review”
—to “channel the frenzied emotional energy presently expended on futile projects to impeach Warren and repeal the Income Tax into
effective political action.” Meanwhile a group called Group Research Incorporated, bankrolled by the UAW, was about to open up shop in Washington. It was the mirror image of the political intelligence businesses that monitored left-wingers in the 1950s, identifying fellow-traveling organizations by counting the number of members and officers shared with purported Communist Party fronts. Group Research did the same thing, substituting the John Birch Society for the reds.

It was a moment dense with opportunity, fraught with peril. Bill Buckley was about to begin writing a syndicated column; Goldwater's column—the fastest-growing feature in Times-Mirror Syndicate history-appeared in over 150 papers. The Republican Party was weak—ripe for takeover. Maneuvers for the 1964 presidential nomination were beginning; the President was contemplating ways to turn his fire on the conservative movement. The stakes seemed inordinately high.

T
he Republican Party was going broke. The debt from the Nixon campaign approached a million dollars, which in itself was no great problem; the parties always borrowed in presidential election season and paid off the deficit in between. This time, though, money wasn't coming in. Every Friday night the Republicans' creaky old Senate and House leaders Everett Dirksen and Charlie Halleck went on TV to retail the tired argument that too much spending promised recession just around the comer (“Not
this
corner,
that
one. No, not
that
one,
that
one over
there,”
Bill Buckley japed); with economists predicting 10 percent economic growth in 1962 against 3.2 percent yearly during Eisenhower's terms, the counsel of doom just wouldn't take. The “Ev and Charlie Show” played so poorly against John F. Kennedy's sparkling weekly press conferences that in a poll of thirty GOP congressmen, only two admitted liking it: Ev and Charlie. A program to sell “sustaining memberships” in the Republican Party for $10 showed promise. If only the leadership could agree on what they were selling.

It was an embodiment of the parable of the blind men poking the elephant, each one describing a different beast: here was Jacob Javits claiming that “when a composite of our Party is taken, the thinking is Eisenhower (modern) thinking”; there Chicago Republicans were convening a banquet called “Real Republicanism versus Modern Republicanism.” Each was correct. Abraham Lincoln's party was formed in the 1850s to fight the spread of slavery, and also to fight for something: the ideal that would later be called liberal capitalism—every man making the best for himself through his own hard work, every farmhand aspiring to be a farmer, every factory hand aspiring to own a factory. On this much the Republican homesteaders of the West and the industrialists and artisans in the East could agree. America prospered under Republican rule through the Gilded Age. But the Republicans themselves split. The Easterners desired, and got, high tariff walls that protected their manufactures from foreign
competition. The Midwesterners—beholden to the Easterners for credit to buy machinery and finance mortgages, to their railroads to bring their goods to market—wanted free trade.

In later years the issues would change. The split endured. As Eastern entrepreneurs became an Eastern Establishment, they came to prefer a settled economic order to a wide-open one; as America became an equal partner with Europe, the Eastern business titans became free-trade internationalists. Their noblesse oblige gave way to a taste for liberal reform. Republicans in the heartland, meanwhile, were protectionist, isolationist, and laissez-faire. Each faction decried the other's monopoly in party councils. Here, too, both sides were right: Midwesterners sent a powerful obstructionist bloc of conservative congressmen to the Capitol; Wall Streeters got the presidential nominees by intimidating the Midwesterners at national conventions by threatening to call in loans or shut off credit. As long as a charismatic difference-splitter like Teddy Roosevelt held sway, the cracks could be papered over well enough. But that only delayed fixing the disrepair in the foundation.

After FDR won his second term with a record 61 percent of the vote with the slogan “If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic”—then a third and a fourth—party elites in the East began to take stock of realities: in some years registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by as much as three to two. The Eastern elites decided that the only way to win was to find candidates who appealed to Democrats and Independents. The prototype was Alf Landon. The apotheosis was Wendell Willkie—“the Republican quisling,” according to Colonel McCormick's
Tribune.
The gifted Wall Street lawyer from Indiana began his public career speechifying for American entrance into the European war—the very antithesis of Midwestern Republicanism. Willkie's presidential draft in 1940 was the earnest doing of low-level Manhattan professionals acting spontaneously. But since his star was picked up by the likes of Ogden Reid, publisher of the
New York Herald Tribune,
and Raymond Moley and Alfred P. Sloan—and Democrats like Al Smith—the Willkie boom smelled of conspiracy. His improbable nomination on the sixth ballot a week after France fell to Hitler heightened the suspicion; so many phony telegrams were sent to delegates that Alf Landon, returning home to Topeka, sent out eighteen sacks of notes acknowledging pro-Willkie missives—and received eighteen sacks in return marked “ADDRESS UNKNOWN.”

Meanwhile the Republicans kept losing. Liberals said it was because the congressional Old Guard scared the majority of voters, who liked the New Deal, and they quoted Al Smith: “No one shoots Santa Claus.” Conservatives, meanwhile, said that Republican presidential candidates lost because millions of disgusted heartlanders stayed home rather than vote for so unnatural a beast
as the “me-too Republican.” The distrust reached a peak at the 1952 Republican National Convention. On its eve, Taft controlled enough delegates to win. Tom Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Herbert Brownell—the “Wrecking Crew of '52” to conservatives—who had manufactured the candidacy of General Eisenhower (who entered the race out of fear that isolationism would gain sway in the country) rammed through a phony “fair play” resolution that let them uncredential a number of key Southern Taft delegations. Taft's loyal army entered the hall singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and left decrying the steal of the century.

With Ike's retirement and Nixon's razor-thin loss in 1960 just behind them, the old feuds festered worse than ever. “The Republican Party is just a little bit pregnant with New Dealism,” Senator Jenner told Indiana convention delegates in 1960, “and you ladies know you can't be just a little bit pregnant.”

It fell to the RNC chair, Kentucky senator Thruston Morton, to heal the wounds.
Winning
would be a start. There was a congressional election coming up. Census statistics showed that an unprecedented 70 percent of Americans were living in urban areas. Precinct data from 1960 suggested that Kennedy's margin of victory came from voters in the big cities. So Morton assigned Raymond Bliss, a high-strung, chain-smoking Ohio Republican leader who had dropped his Taft conservatism for a career as a nonideological political professional, the task of shaping up the party's urban precinct organizations. One dreary afternoon in the middle of the Republican National Committee's annual conclave, in Oklahoma City, fourteen months after the Nixon defeat, a committee Bliss chaired delivered their entirely technical solution on how to take the White House back.