Before the Storm (31 page)

It was very much in the spirit of an age that was turning anti-ideological pragmatism into a fetish. Critics who scored the “far right” always accompanied their criticism with a token jab at the “far left.” At this prosperous moment in American history, President Kennedy insisted, we just didn't need “the sort of great passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.” Just what counted as pragmatism, however, and what as ideology, was not always immediately apparent. L. Judson Morhouse, the New York GOP chairman and Nelson Rockefeller's political right-hand man, explained to the press that the most pragmatic strategy for the Republicans to win the cities was to do what the Democrats did, only better: identify the people's problems, then find government programs—urban renewal, health insurance, relief, and so forth—to solve them. It was the kind of plan only a Nelson Rockefeller could love.

But Nelson Rockefeller hated it. His
other
top political deputy, suave,
charming George Hinman, had been spending 1961 unobtrusively sucking up to conservatives around the country. His boss was willing to do whatever it took to win the Republican nomination in 1964. That meant placating the conservatives who had stonewalled him in 1960.

Rockefeller quickly, angrily, disassociated himself from Morhouse's ideas. Lincoln Day was coming up, the evening when Republicans across the country united in stolid bacchanals to pay tribute, literally and figuratively, to their party. There would be the usual fund-raisers linked by closed-circuit TV; Rocky would be speaking live from Des Moines. The crowd that watched him on TV at the Mayflower in D.C. was loaded with conservatives. When he began to speak, instinct kicked in: they booed. Then they stopped. They couldn't believe their ears. The face on the screen talking about Kennedy's Department of Urban Affairs proposal looked like Nelson Rockefeller. But he sounded a hell of a lot like Kent Courtney. The new department, Rocky said, “might well be used, in the form proposed, as a subterfuge to bypass the Constitutional sovereignty of the states and to gain direct political control over the nation's cities.... What is this but political fakery?”

It might have had something to do with the secret breakfasts. It was Thruston Morton who had proposed informal peace conferences between Rocky and Barry Goldwater on how to join the party's warring wings. Rocky hadn't cared anything about party unity back at the Chicago convention. Times change; now “unifier” was a title he coveted. Goldwater, who always worried about Republican unity, agreed to go along. It turned out they enjoyed each other's company—they absorbed each other's brashness—and found plenty they shared in common: a mutual antipathy for Richard Nixon, a disaffection with Eisenhower, an annoyance with overenthusiastic, out-of-control party volunteers. Goldwater also welcomed the chance to advocate conservatism with the person all the pros were saying would be the 1964 nominee. He was sick of people asking when he would begin running for President. Once he had toyed with the idea; no more. “I have no plans for it,” he told
Time.
“I have no staff for it, no program for it, and no ambition for it.”

Steve Shadegg, who was serving as Arizona Republican chair, had corralled Goldwater to a meeting the previous November, ostensibly to talk about party unity—and soon Roger Milliken and Senator Norris Cotton and others were all but begging him to run. Goldwater told reporters that all the draft organizations popping up without his permission caused him “deep embarrassment.” By the time the Senate adjourned in September of 1961, Goldwater was so fed up he booked a cruise to Europe—on a cargo ship. He drafted his next book, on foreign policy, which would be entitled
Why Not Victory?
Just
because he didn't want to be President didn't mean he didn't want to advocate hard for a conservative political agenda.

The breakfasts began upon his return. It wasn't a moment too soon for Nelson Rockefeller. He was about to get a divorce. The people who nominated Republican presidential candidates, even if they had no problem with the minimum wage or negotiations with the Soviets, could be a puritanical bunch. There had been a divorced presidential candidate before. That candidate had been Adlai Stevenson. But no one knew how, exactly, Republicans would react to the same news about one of
their
presidential contenders.

Goldwater, a live-and-let-live kind of guy, certainly did not look down his nose at his new breakfast partner for the fact that his marriage was breaking up. Soon he was doing favors for Rocky: making personal phone calls to Republican leaders urging a warm reception for a friend about to speak in their city. “He's not really such a bad fellow,” Goldwater would say. “He's more conservative than you would imagine. You ought to talk to him someday.” Goldwater, in turn, received the satisfaction of hearing Rocky mouthing conservative positions—although in private Rockefeller compared Goldwater's supporters to “cattle that aren't going anywhere. They're scared and they'll fly off in any direction.” Rockefeller shot past Goldwater in the polls at the beginning of 1962. Everyone who was anyone put short odds on him for the nomination.

 

Everyone-who-was-anyone did not include febrile college kids, southern California right-wingers, or Southern segregationists. And these groups had different ideas.

Young Americans for Freedom had weathered its rocky patch. Rusher and Liebman had consolidated their purge of Caddy's faction by taking out an ad in the back of
National Review
for an executive director. It was read by a young lawyer from Houston, Richard Viguerie—one of those devout Catholics with Democratic parents. He had spent all his time in the office of the Harris County Republican Party, fell in love with the nuts-and-bolts side of political organizing, was desperate to go out East to work in the conservative movement, and got an interview on the strength of testimonials from his Texas friend David Franke. When Viguerie came to New York, Liebman showed him his mail room: thousands and thousands of three-by-five cards, a Robotype machine, the accoutrements of a veritable propaganda factory. Seeing Viguerie's eyes widen, Liebman knew he had their man. When Viguerie reported to begin the job, the first thing Liebman told him was that YAF was $20,000 in debt, with only 2,000 paid members, although the organization claimed a membership of 25,000: “It's important that membership be perceived at 25,000,” Liebman
explained. He gave him a list of 1,200 conservative donors and showed him the phone. Viguerie's first three calls brought in $4,500.

Young Americans for Freedom reserved Madison Square Garden on March 7 for the group's second rally, and it spooked them to the bone. JFK's popularity rating was approaching 80 percent. Where would YAF find 18,000 conservatives in New York City? Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, a former FBI agent and the Democrats' most assiduous red-hunter, was lined up to speak at the rally—but when he returned from a trip to Africa and learned that the honorees included General Walker, he withdrew his name. Walker's participation was also too much for publicity-savvy Liebman—who made his living crafting massive bipartisan anticommunist coalitions for his groaning letterheads backing some beleaguered pro-West government or other. He promptly resigned from his consulting position with YAF. A month before the rally, Dodd released a statement attacking the “extremist coloration of the gathering” —at which
Goldwater
briefly refused to appear. YAF finally cut Walker loose. The contretemps was reported widely in the press.

The Tshombe affair brought more bad publicity. When the southern African state of Katanga seceded from the Republic of the Congo, it took half of the country's mineral wealth with it. The new state's leader was a pro-West, virulently anticommunist Methodist named Moise Tshombe (“Uncle Tshombe,” to the American black press). Lumumba had accepted Soviet aid to put down the rebellion. The White House chose to publicly back UN forces supporting Lumumba, which put the United States on the record in an apparently Soviet-sponsored enterprise (at the same time, the CIA soon saw to Lumumba's assassination). Mineral companies began a massive PR campaign for their friend Tshombe's claim on Katanga. The publicists found an active partner in conservatives eager to preserve a “Christian West” bulwark in Central Africa. Tshombe was scheduled for a U.S. tour that would include an appearance at the YAF rally—which had the potential to pose enormous complications for Kennedy's Africa policy. So, as the date for Tshombe's junket approached, the State Department denied Tshombe a visa.

But this time the silver lining trumped the cloud: by March, everyone in New York knew about Young Americans for Freedom and their rally. Even though a vicious storm whipped the entire Atlantic Coast for the occasion, thousands had to be turned away at the doors. They were forced to yell at the counterdemonstration instead.

At first it seemed that the left-out conservatives might have gotten the better part of the bargain: outside, lefties, having earlier almost broken up on the shoals of a disagreement between the Americans for Democratic Action kids
and Students for a Democratic Society over what to print on the leaflets, were now advancing to fisticuffs. Inside, the program was a bore. Platform guests invited to say a few words droned on and on. Bob Schuchman couldn't begin the awards presentation because of the noisy claque chanting “We Want Walker! We Want Walker!” Brent Bozell, flown in from Spain, was supposed to be warming up the crowd for Goldwater. But he began sententiously lecturing the crowd on something called the “Gnostic Heresy.” The rafters were buzzing with paper airplanes fashioned from the glossy special edition of New Guard when Bozell finally changed his rhetorical tack. And suddenly the grand old auditorium came to life as he ripped into the peroration:

“To the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
Prepare an immediate landing in Havana!

“To the Commander in Berlin:
Tear down the wall!

“To our chief of mission in the Congo:
Change sides!”

The crowd leapt to their feet.

It was almost 11 p.m. when John Tower, who had won Vice President Johnson's Senate seat (thanks, in part, to the help of Stephen Shadegg), and who was the first Republican senator from the Old Confederacy since Reconstruction, took the stage to give the penultimate speech. Now the place was pulsing with energy. It was something special; something to remember your whole life.

Barry Goldwater was unimpressed. The thought of addressing a rally that was designed to look like a nominating convention—
his
nominating convention—made him nauseous. The hours of speeches had tested his patience. And backstage he let loose a stream of profanity—against Bozell, against YAF, against all these damned amateurs who were so eager to decide his political future—that would have done a sailor proud.

Goldwater's impatience made his introduction, by a kid named William Schulz, the shortest speech of the evening: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the conservatives' choice for president, Barry Goldwater!” It was also the best received: five minutes of applause broke over Goldwater in waves, as he stood at the podium in plain annoyance. Streamers and balloons fell from the ceiling. Banners waved. The crowd began chanting “We Want Barry! We Want Barry!” When he finally got an opening, he snarled, “Well, if you'll shut up, you'll get him.”

The next morning the
New York Times
gave over three columns on its front page to a dramatic photograph taken from the stage, a sea of faces, balloons, placards, and American flags. YAF took home $80,000. Leaders laid plans to fill Yankee Stadium the next year. They were so carried away that few noticed that Goldwater's speech, streamers still dribbling down from the rafters, was more appropriate to the rubber-chicken circuit than to a rally. Supposedly entitled
“To Win the Cold War,” it turned out to be a dry examination of the Republicans' electoral chances in New York City in 1962. The
New York Times
gave half its space to sympathetic coverage of the counterdemonstration.

 

Three thousand miles to the west, Richard Nixon was suffering.

The pressure for him to run for governor had begun shortly after he had moved into his little apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in February of 1961. The California GOP, decimated from 1958, needed a strong figure to bring it back to health. The incumbent Pat Brown's popularity was at an all-time low. The idea of running was tempting. Boredom was driving Nixon out of his mind. Perhaps he really believed that summer that he was still undecided. But anybody who advised him not to run, state Republican chair Caspar Weinberger recalled, “he barely spoke to again.” Nixon felt no great desire to be governor of California. The plan was to cruise to an easy victory; then he would have an excuse not to run for President in 1964. He had had enough of running against the Kennedys. They fought dirty. He would wait and reach for the brass ring in 1968 with a unified California Republican Party as his base.

Little did he know that the political rules had been rewritten in California: the Orange County style was taking over the Republican Party. Nixon had never considered that another announced Republican candidate, a far-out conservative state assembly minority leader from Orange County and erstwhile University of Southern California football star, Joe Shell, would stay in the race. Shell had 2 percent in the polls. He would be running against a former U.S. vice president and Republican presidential nominee. But Shell had no interest in withdrawing. Doing so would mean making an accommodation with the liberal Republicans, which in Orange County Republican circles was but a few steps removed from accommodation with Communists.

California's unusually weak party system, created by early-century progressives who viewed the two parties as mere instrumentalities by which the railroads expedited graft, profoundly amplified the power of extra-party volunteer organizations such as the Young Republicans and the California Republican Assembly. Nixon assumed he would own such groups, given the tacit accord that had long obtained in California Republican circles: conservatives supported moderate candidates in exchange for back-room influence in party and policy decisions. That, he learned, was then.