Before the Storm (45 page)

It was time, someone in some leather-lined boardroom deep within some marble-columned Wall Street edifice seemed to have intoned, to put the nonsense to a stop. And all at once, a cabal seemed to have spoken. The Harris poll had reported that only 19 percent of Americans recognized Pennsylvania governor William Warren Scranton's name. Yet there it was: suddenly, every newspaper editorial page in the country seemed to be haughtily presuming that he would be the Republican nominee in 1964.

An insider explained the mystery to
Life
magazine: “People fail to realize there's a difference in kinds of money. There's old money and there's new money. Old money has political power but new money has only purchasing
power. Sure, everyone knows that when you get to a convention, you don't buy delegates. But you do put the pressure on people who control the delegates—the people who owe the old money for their stake.” The first sign that Old Money had spoken came from Time magazine in its June 14 cover story on Goldwater. It had included a sidebar article: “Bill?” Those in the know understood: Pennsylvania governor William Warren Scranton's brother-in-law James Linen was president of Time Incorporated.
Time
was the Establishment's newsmagazine. The word had passed: Scranton was Old Money's man.
Newsweek
soon ran a lead story “The Block-Goldwater Movement in the GOP.” The last word was given to White House sources predicting that Scranton would be the one to do the blocking.

New Money's man seemed to be doing everything he could to block himself. “You know, I think we ought to sell the TVA,” Barry Goldwater told Stewart Alsop in a major interview for the
Saturday Evening Post.
Alsop was so incredulous he asked the question a second time—and Goldwater repeated the conviction. Republican Richard Fulton of Tennessee wrote Goldwater: You don't really mean to
sell
the dams that had brought great swaths of the American Southeast electricity for the first time? Goldwater—speaking in a time before the more sonorous designation “privatization” had been coined—released the letter and his response to the press: He meant it. Pete O‘Donnell shot off a memo warning about “shooting from the hip”: “your entire position should be spelled out at one time, rather than spread out over a period of days and weeks as the original statement is clarified, amended, or supplemented.... TVA puts your supporters in an important area on the defensive.” (And so it did. Telegrams flooded his office: “I HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO YOUR CAMPAIGN AND HELPED ORGANIZE THE GOLDWATER CLUB HERE ... I AM TAKING OFF MY GOLDWATER STICKERS.” A Dixie GOP committeeman announced that Goldwater would have to choose between his TVA position and his support.) “Keep your ammunition fresh,” O'Donnell advised. “If you spell out your position on all issues at this time, you will have fewer new things to say come next October. Also you will be presenting a nice, fat target to some group or other every time you take a stand.” Goldwater ignored the advice.
Who the hell was Pete O'Donnell to tell him what to do?

This was not how successful presidential candidates were supposed to behave. Pundits took note of the TVA affair and began numbering Barry Goldwater's days. Few noticed what Clif White was doing in the hinterlands. He had 200,000 one-dollar petition signatures. He was sucking in cash through a state-of-the-art program of direct mailings to subscribers of conservative magazines and the like. Many who might have deplored the YR tactics in San Francisco nodded appreciatively at Goldwater when he called the Kennedy civil
rights bill a threat to their property rights. A Capitol Hill insider told Stew Alsop, “A few race riots in the North and Barry might make it.”

 

Riot fears, just then, centered on the civil rights movement's massive “March for Jobs and Freedom” scheduled for August 28 in Washington, D.C. Later generations would remember it as an apogee of democratic idealism. As it loomed, however, public opinion was divided, broadly, in three parts. A small minority (around 20 percent, according to Gallup) considered the demonstration a welcome expression of black aspirations for overdue justice. Most, though, thought that the protest was insolent and ungrateful considering Kennedy's recent gestures, and that there was a dangerous potential for violence. Another minority wondered whether the event wouldn't spark a race war. “I'd kill,” a white South Dakota housewife told
Newsweek
in an interview for a special issue, “What the White Man Thinks of the Negro Revolt,” when asked what she would do if she suffered the same indignities as a Negro. “And I'm not a violent person.”

It was hard for white America to see anything benign in a mass gathering of Negroes. The fears were primal, subliminal. “I don't like to touch them. It just makes me squeamish,” one Northerner told
Newsweek.
Another said, “It's the idea of rubbing up against them. It won't rub off, but it don't feel right either.” The magazine's polling showed that 55 percent of whites would object to living next door to a black person—and 90 percent would object if their teenage daughter dated one. Over half thought that “Negroes laugh a lot,” “tend to have less ambition,” and “smell different.” “It is an oft-repeated statement among humans that the color of the hair and the pigment of the skin produce certain recognizable characteristics,” observed the latest edition of
Training You to Train Your Dog
by Blanche Saunders (preface by Walter Lippmann)—the “excitable nature” of those with dark skin, for example. “If this be true, there is no reason why color of coat and pigmentation should not affect dogs as well.” In an article that year,
Harper's
editor John Fischer congratulated himself for his courage in pointing out that much antiblack prejudice “is not altogether baseless”: “Take the case of five Negro drivers who worked for a taxi company in Williamsburg, Virginia. On the first day of the fishing season, not one of them showed up for work.” Even among the right-thinking and the respectable, seeing Negroes as civic equals was sometimes a stretch.

Washington emptied as the day of the march approached. On
Meet the Press,
Martin Luther King and NAACP head Roger Wilkins were asked whether “it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possible rioting.” President Kennedy worried discreetly about the specter of marchers rushing the aisles of Congress.
The Pentagon readied 4,000 troops in the suburbs; hospitals set aside beds. A contest between the Minnesota Twins and the Washington Senators at Griffith Stadium four miles away was canceled on account of what
National Review
called the “mob deployment.”

The event itself proved transcendent. Martin Luther King's remarkable speech was shown live on all three networks: “I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.”

But the situation it left behind could only be called peaceful in the sense that Soviet-U.S. relations were peaceful: even if tensions were relaxing, that didn't mean that the world might not blow up. The sum total of the dread among the 50 percent of Americans who thought Kennedy was pushing civil rights “too fast” was hardly diminished. Civil rights supporter the Reverend Billy Graham, for one, was pessimistic: “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”

 

The dialectic sharpened as summer became autumn: America became more frightening, Goldwater's stature grew; that made the world appear to the Establishment all the scarier—and Goldwater's stature among those who distrusted the Establishment grew all the more in the shadow of the Establishment's denunciations.

On August 29, the President had secretly passed the point of no return in Vietnam, maneuvered by zealous aides into approving a plan to overthrow the inconveniently corrupt Saigon government. On September 2 Walter Cronkite debuted his groundbreaking half-hour evening news format (all the other networks ran 15 minutes of news), instituted to establish CBS's news dominance in time to reap an advertising bounty during full coverage of the 1964 conventions. On that evening the entire show consisted of an interview with President Kennedy. “In the final analysis, it's their war,” he told Walter Cronkite of the exotic land where forty-seven Americans had already met their end.

It must have felt good for Kennedy to feel he could covertly shape events in a jungle thousands of miles away, given the mess he faced back home. Gallup had the President getting trounced in Dixie. Even in Lyndon Johnson's Texas, Kennedy's approval rating was only 38 percent. The press did not report the savagery that lay behind the numbers. A theater in Georgia showed the JFK-glorifying film
PT 109,
the marquee reading “SEE THE JAPS ALMOST GET KENNEDY!” (as Pete O'Donnell reported with delight in a September report to Draft Goldwater activists). It was a challenge for enterprising reporters to get a
quote on the record from one of the 40 percent of Southerners that polls said supported their President; the least angry statement a
Newsweek
reporter could find was “He's stirred up all the colored people to get their vote.” Billboards across Alabama reading “KAYO THE KENNEDYS!” competed for attention with ones labeling Martin Luther King a Communist and bumper stickers reading “KENNEDY FOR KING—GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT.”

Polls suggested that as much as 5 percent of the American public could be said to hew to Birch-like views. The President had just been given a report by his White House counsel on twenty-six conservative organizations that together raised between $15 and $25 million annually—“successful, politically ... all the way down to the various state capitals, to county seats, and to local communities at the grass-roots.” Since many of these groups were tax-exempt, the attorney general ordered IRS commissioner Mortimer Caplin to start in on aggressive audits.

In Northern cities, activists met the new school year with a bold new remedy for de facto segregation. The President was asked about it at his September 12, 1963, press conference: “As a parent, do you think it is right to wrench children away from their neighborhood-family area and cart them off to strange, faraway schools to force racial balance?” He began his answer optimistically—“Passage of the civil rights bill in the Senate ... would surely improve the atmosphere”—then fell back into realism: “The country will by lucky to get by without a summer of violence that could have incalculable effect on the election next fall.”

The country would have been lucky to get through the week. Governor Wallace was now standing in the doors of his state's elementary and high schools. If integration went ahead, he said, he didn't want any bloodshed—although if it happened, he said, civil rights agitators would be held responsible. Klansmen in Birmingham took the hint. The explosion inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15 was heard for two miles. Four little girls died in their Sunday school dresses. King wired Kennedy during the tensions that ensued: only the President's intercession could prevent the “worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen.” Ten days later another incendiary device exploded on Dynamite Hill, then a second, a shrapnel bomb intended to wound police if they investigated the first. The Klansmen who were responsible copped pleas for misdemeanor possession of dynamite.

Cronkite's next half-hour interview was given to Goldwater. The New York Times reported that he had already reserved the entire fifteenth floor of San Francisco's Mark Hopkins Hotel for the convention (the hotel, coincidentally, that Khrushchev had decided during his 1959 visit to someday make the headquarters for the International Communist Conspiracy, according to Dr. Fred
Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade). Kitchel's new field deputy, Phoenix attorney and recent past Arizona party chair Richard Kleindienst, reported that party rank-and-filers were telling him that if Goldwater wasn't nominated, there wouldn't be a rank and file. In Massachusetts, Establishmentarians like Senator Leverett Saltonstall were cowering under Clif White's back-room threats that his people would organize their way past the Massachusetts party leaders' traditional prerogative to name the state's delegates-at-large. No one had thought to challenge that prerogative before.

Goldwater was traveling: a ten-state tour, including New Hampshire, throngs of cheering young conservatives following him like iron filings to a magnet. It felt like a campaign, but for the fact that he refused the basic technique of having a few aides tag along to build a card file of the names behind the hands he shook. “You leave me alone,” he told the aide who suggested it. “I'm doing all right just pooping around.”

Rockefeller, who traveled with an entire research staff, corralled a major chunk of the Washington press onto his Convair jet for a visit to the humble Ogle Country Fair in central Illinois. All the candidates in the three-way Republican gubernatorial primary had already declined the chance to appear with him. The reporters watched as the crowd at the fair ignored Rockefeller and his wife as if they had the mange. (Yet the
New York Times
reported, incredibly, that “Rockefeller's surprisingly successful visit to this Goldwater bastion yesterday was evidence that the Governor could command conservative support in a race for the presidency.”) The week after, the three Illinois gubernatorial candidates virtually pawed the clothes off Goldwater when he visited Chicago for the National Federation of Republican Women convention. He had to give his speech twice to accommodate all his fans. Behind the scenes at the meeting—Draft Goldwater operatives worked behind the scenes at every Republican meeting—Pat Hutar set in motion a purge of delegates who had voted against Goldwater in a straw poll.