Before the Storm (43 page)

It was also time to scout out first-in-the-nation New Hampshire. White met with New Hampshire YAF leaders, who bragged that they were ready to begin organizing for the primary. “Fine,” White responded. “Show me a card file of every voter in a township indicating whether each one is pro-Goldwater, anti-Goldwater, or for some other candidate.” Seeing them stunned to silence (of course they had no such thing), White continued: “When you have something close to that for every town and city in New Hampshire, let me know, and
then
we could announce a state Draft Goldwater committee.”

The same week he hit the RNC meeting in Denver—a conclave ringing, Joe Alsop wrote, “with sanguine discussion of the Republican party's chance of victory as a ‘white man's party' ” (which strategy, the
Herald Tribune
said, amounted to a plot “to scrap the Republican Party”). Goldwater kitsch was everywhere. Nelson Rockefeller's empty hospitality suite in Denver looked so forlorn that just seeing it sent White into a sympathetic funk. At the podium, Wirt Yerger accused the Kennedy Administration of fomenting the spring's racial uprisings to help his ticket in 1964. Senator Gordon Allot of Colorado, previously a robust civil rights backer, did a credible imitation of John C. Calhoun. And Evans and Novak told their readers that what was unfolding at the meeting added up to a “quiet revolt”: “The aggressive post-war club of conservative young Republicans from the small states of the West and South are seizing power, displacing the Eastern party chiefs who have dictated Republican policy and candidates for a generation.” These same chiefs raised the old cry about the disaster of writing off black voters and losing the Big Six. “This isn't South Africa,” responded a conservative. “The white man outnumbers the Negro 9 to 1 in this country.”

 

The next week, as the rest of the nation contemplated reports of a madhouse, White checked off another success for the old hardball style.

Len Nadasdy had spent 1962 soldiering on in his smiling quest for a better, stronger, fairer Young Republican National Federation—convening civil rights conferences that showcased the party's black leadership, expanding participation in the YR's leadership schools, producing films like
The Case for a Republican Congress,
printing wallet-sized cards of the Young Republican National
Federation credo. Hutar and Harff, meanwhile, seeking to further their backroom plans to take back the Federation, spent the year circulating furtive communiques with instructions for recipients to destroy the message after reading. They made Nadasdy a creature of their imagination, automatically assuming that he was seeding Rockefeller cash all around the country. Actually, when Bruce Chapman of
Advance
had sat down with Rockefeller's deputy George Hinman, showed him proof that Goldwaterite Young Republicans had locked up twelve states, and asked him outright for $50,000 to forestall a conservative takeover, Hinman couldn't give him the cold shoulder fast enough. Rocky was busy
courting
conservatives. Nadasdy began sending confidential organizational memos to his backers, too. First they came weekly. Then monthly. Then less often than that. Mostly, they wondered about things like where Pat Hutar was getting all that money she was spending.

The Young Republican national convention began on Tuesday evening, June 25, at San Francisco's grand old Sheraton-Palace Hotel. Bill Middendorf remitted thousands from the Draft Goldwater treasury for the fight. But by no means did Clif White's team have a lock. No sooner had they chosen their candidate, D.C. Young Republican chair, Air Force reservist, and congressional staffer Donald “Buz” Lukens, by the usual method—he appeared attractive and tractable—than they began regretting their decision. He was a bull in the china shop. His first move as the designated candidate was to insinuate himself into the nasty fight for California YR chair. One contender was Bob Gaston, backed by John Rousselot—now the John Birch Society's West Coast director. Gaston's opponent, Ron Garver, was an actual Society member. Lukens plumped for Garver. Gaston won. Somehow the White faction had to find a way to placate Gaston to win the gargantuan delegation he controlled. They failed. The media had covered the California YR race closely and labeled both candidates Birchers. To foreclose a public relations nightmare, White's people did what they could to shut out the Californians from leadership positions at the convention. Gaston retaliated by putting himself up as a candidate for national chair.

Now there were three candidates. All, including Nadasdy's candidate, Chuck McDevitt, who was a member of the Idaho state legislature, were conservatives who supported the “Liberty Amendment” to outlaw the income tax. McDevitt's conservatism didn't help him. White's goal was not to elect a conservative; it was to produce a YR chair who would answer directly to him. McDevitt pledged to honor Federation rules not to endorse any presidential candidate. So he had to go.

The plan White developed was this: Delegates to the convention preferred Goldwater to Rockefeller by a ratio of 8 to 1. McDevitt held a 100-vote advantage
on the eve of the convention. White's faction would destroy that lead by painting McDevitt as a Rockefeller stalking horse. They would work on Gaston to get him to throw his 40 California votes to Lukens. Meanwhile, Draft Goldwater would exploit his Californians' wild-eyed zealotry to foment a useful chaos. As outgoing chair, Nadasdy would be wielding the sessions' gavel, a potentially enormous parliamentary boon. But if it looked like he couldn't control the convention, he would be badly discredited. It would give Draft Goldwater time and breathing room to line up a majority. The wizard behind the curtain, White, told reporters he didn't even know Buz Lukens.

One need only have surveyed the scene in the Sheraton-Palace lobby on Tuesday, the opening day of the convention, to see the wisdom of the plan of exploiting loyalty to Barry Goldwater. Bellhops trundled in fifteen hundred pounds of Goldwater paraphernalia (a pound's worth for each delegate) from the Texas delegation alone. During the keynote address Wednesday night by Mark Hatfield the hall was half-empty because Draft Goldwater had organized a boycott to humiliate Nadasdy. But when Bill Knowland, speaking next, ticked off the possible presidential candidates in alphabetical order, he was held up by a fifty-second demonstration when he got to the one starting with
G.
Back at the formerly elegant corridors of the Sheraton-Palace, the Texas kids, who were mostly college students, were using pictures of Bobby and Jack, California governor Pat Brown, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, and Walter Lippmann for dart practice.

The first order of business Thursday was the selection of the Young Republican college chairman. Twenty of the eighty delegates were contested for eligibility to vote. California arrived with two separate, warring delegations. The key to power in this contest was to control the credentialing process. Nadasdy insisted he had the power to name the credentials committee. Harff said he did. Harff called a voice vote on which credentials committee to credential; Nadasdy questioned Harff's credentials to do so. Harff pressed on; the
ayes
equaled the
nays;
and Harff ruled for the
ayes.
The conclave descended into bedlam. Nadasdy dissolved the proceedings, opened up a sliding partition in the middle of the room, and reconvened the meeting on the other side. Forty-one delegates followed him; under his chairmanship, they elected the anti-Syndicate candidate. Pat Hutar, diaphanous in a stunning white dress, arrived to preside over a rump convention of thirty-nine; they elected the Syndicate's man. It did not bode well for peace in the days to come.

The senior convention opened the morning after the college convention with formalities that were usually crushingly boring. Usually. Now Clif White's Syndicate forces ceaselessly appealed rulings from the chair and made endless
demands for roll-call votes. Nadasdy supporters screamed bloody murder. Delegates who had never attended a big convention before (that is, most delegates) thought they were witnessing spontaneous chaos. It was, of course, chaos choreographed with the precision of a Busby Berkeley picture. The Syndicate could start a pro-Lukens demonstration within the space of thirty seconds—and the man in front with the gavel, Nadasdy, who had not been able to organize his way out of a paper bag, could not do a thing about it. If he tried to reveal the Syndicate's game he would just look paranoid to most of the assembly. By the end of the afternoon he was panicking.

The night's featured attraction was a speech by Goldwater. He arrived at the airport to such an ecstatic reception that Nadasdy became convinced that Goldwater was the only hope to calm the mob. He buttonholed the senator for a meeting. Goldwater smiled warmly—he liked Nadasdy—and asked how the convention was going. Nadasdy related the madness that was unfolding on the senator's behalf. Lukens's people, he explained, were claiming that Lukens was the
official
Goldwater candidate, and Goldwater need only issue a statement that
either
McDevitt or Lukens was acceptable to him to let the air out of that balloon.

Goldwater found Nadasdy's counsel hard to credit, because the Syndicate had already told him that
McDevitt
had claimed Goldwater's endorsement. He thought Lukens and McDevitt were both fine candidates, and he didn't want to play favorites. But he couldn't say so without also saying that Gaston, whom he thought a disaster, was acceptable—or else he
would
be playing favorites. “A spirited convention is a good thing,” he finally said. “Get the biggest gavel you can get hold of and the rule book and beat down the people trying to operate outside the rules.” He promised to do what he could to stress party unity in his speech. That wasn't hard; he always stressed party unity in his speeches. But then, he always stressed conservatism in his speeches, too.

The convention had rented out the three-thousand-seat Longshoreman's Hall, the stomping ground of America's most militant trade unionist, Harry Bridges, then as always under suspicion for membership in the Communist Party. It was Bridges who had brought solidarity to the waterfront by ending the cruel “shape up” system in which longshoremen scratched each others' eyes out every morning for the attention of the dock bosses in order to get work. Solidarity was supposed to be a left-wing ideal—feeling the power of thousands of voices joining as one to blot out an encroaching, malign power that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. Now the solidarity belonged to Harry Bridges's enemies: thousands of young businessmen and professionals and segregationists and union-busters were crying themselves hoarse to the tune of Barry Goldwater:

Then came the seven-minute ovation. Nadasdy sighed. Barry had only inflamed the conventiongoers' passions further.

The next morning the delegates arrived at the hotel ballroom to find pamphlets attacking Nelson Rockefeller on their seats (most, of course, relished them). The parliamentary session that followed lasted for twenty-two hours. Clif White's old Communist Party enemies from the 1940s could have learned a thing or two.

Nadasdy gaveled open the proceedings; Lukens's campaign manager, Iowa's Ed Failor, immediately leapt up with a motion challenging the New Jersey delegation. Nadasdy ruled the motion out of order. Failor appealed. Syndicate operatives spread out in the old diamond formation to argue “spontaneously” that Nadasdy was being unfair; argument became shouting; and Nadasdy, in control of the mixing board for the microphones scattered throughout the hall, strategically switched off the ones the Syndicate domineered. The debate was soon a shouting match.

It was sometime during the keening that ensued that the organ was fired up.

I. Lee Potter, an RNC official who had been dispatched to observe the proceedings, was an amateur musician. An electric organ had been set up in the ballroom for festivities scheduled for later in the evening. He sat down, turned up the volume full blast, and launched into a spirited rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was like a scene out of the Marx Brothers: patriotic Americans, veterans, couldn't but stand up at the sound of their national anthem, put their hands over their hearts, and sing. The chaos was stilled.

The New Jersey fight ground on. The Syndicate lost the first roll call by 30 votes. They challenged more credentials; the rumble started up all over again. As Potter took to the keyboard (an unmercifully shrill Syndicate soprano was piping, “Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!”), White's floor workers went to work targeting wavering delegates. Each worked his or her own special arts of persuasion: Bill Middendorf, the stentorian Wall Street tycoon; Stan Evans, the
master debater; sexy Pat Hutar; even two United States congressmen, expertly exploiting the majesty of their office. Texas, heavy for Nadasdy's side, was assigned a college student, a Louisianan named Mort Blackwell. “Isn't this outrageous? Are you proud of this?” he said as Nadasdy clomped his gavel one more time to try to shut off the drone. One Texan, convinced, switched to the Syndicate's side.

“What they're doing is clearly unfair,” whispered Blackwell. Another switched vote.

With each roll call Nadasdy's side slipped a little more. Hours passed, other credentials fights were waged, waves of shouting and organ-playing arose at intervals. Shoving broke out in front of the microphones. Fistfights broke out—the worst in the solidly liberal New York delegation, which was now divided into Nadasdy and anti-Nadasdy factions. The New Yorkers began throwing chairs at each other. Dave Broder turned to a colleague from South Dakota and told him he'd never seen anything like it—and he'd seen a lot.