Before the Storm (54 page)

When Scranton took a seat in the House of Representatives in 1961, he was one of only twenty-one Republicans to vote with Kennedy on the Rules
Committee fight. He went on to vote with the Administration over half the time, and he introduced a depressed areas bill that was
stronger
than Kennedy's. In 1962 General Eisenhower prevailed upon Scranton to take back the Pennsylvania State House for the Republicans: “What it boils down to, Bill,” Eisenhower said, “is a four-letter word—duty.” Scranton won the governorship in a contest so brawling that it ensured him a reputation as a political comer. Then unemployment in Pennsylvania began dropping by percentage points. Liberal Republican leaders began paying court at the governor's mansion at Indiantown Gap. Scranton was, simply, the anti-Goldwater: he answered every fear that Goldwater only seemed to stoke. One by one they came, waited patiently in a vestibule graced by framed copies of ads he had commissioned to promote his state (“Governor Bill Scranton Says, ‘You'll Like the New Pennsylvania' ”; “The New Pennsylvania Means
Business”
), and begged him to run for President—and heard him, after his customary scintillating banter, once more repeat that his duty was to serve out his four-year term.

The week after Scranton had been summoned to the star chamber at the offices of Thomas McCabe, General Eisenhower docked his private Pullman car in Harrisburg and told Scranton it was now his duty to save the party of his grandfathers from capture by the radical right. Scranton emerged from that meeting seven hours later. He told the newsmen who had patiently staked out the rail yard, “I probably will give even deeper thought to this matter than I had expected”—nothing more. It was enough to yield reports that “Scranton appears to have opened a door for a build-up similar to that which won the GOP nomination in 1940” for Wendell Willkie. Walter Thayer's
Herald Tribune
ran an editorial titled “Calling Governor Scranton.” On the
Today
show's year-end political wrap-up Sander Vanocur predicted that Scranton would get the nomination. Scotty Reston predicted he would have it “forced on him.”
Life
assigned Teddy White, fresh off his historic “Camelot” scoop, to do a cover profile. “His unblemished record,”
Life's
seven million readers were told by the nation's most respected chronicler of presidential elections, was “an insurance policy against GOP disaster.”

At the January RNC conclave, party leaders were determined to cash in the insurance policy. Len Hall, Meade Alcorn, and party general counsel Fred Scribner, Three Musketeers of the GOP's Eastern wing (or, depending on your loyalties, Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse), were reportedly now Scrantonites; so were RNC head Bill Miller and his predecessor, Senator Thruston Morton. In Washington, as the convention was getting started, Scranton's energetic young aides Bill Keisling and Craig Truax begged Eisenhower to pledge as a Scranton delegate and claimed that Walter Thayer had already done so. The boys from
Advance,
the liberal Republican journal from Harvard, distributed
a 3,600-word manifesto announcing a new organization, the Ripon Society, calling for a presidential candidate with “those qualities of vision, intellectual force, humanness and courage that America saw and admired in John F. Kennedy, not in a specious effort to fall heir to his mantle, but because our times demand no lesser greatness.”

Meanwhile their candidate of choice was back in Harrisburg, forbidding his 1962 campaign manager from starting a write-in effort in New Hampshire and presiding over a year-end joint session of the state legislature where he urged all Pennsylvanians to spend the year seeking “greater charity, greater equality, in relationships between the races.”

Scranton eventually did make it to that Washington meeting. Coagulations of young admirers followed his every step. Bill Keisling, the twenty-seven-year-old political deputy who looked up to his boss as a puppy to a master, steered him into the paths of VIPs at dinners and receptions like a chess grand master moving a pawn. A reporter asked Tom McCabe why, if Scranton wasn't running for President, he was wearing a Scranton button on his lapel. “The governor doesn't know I'm wearing it,” he said. Meanwhile Rockefeller was in a corner, neglected, busying himself signing autographs for the porters and kitchen workers.

That evening, Keisling and another aide threw a press party for Scranton, although the governor himself was not invited. It was the hottest ticket in town—besides Scranton's press conference the next evening, which everyone agreed was the perfect opportunity for him to announce a presidential campaign. “Are we looking at our next President?” one state chairman asked another as Scranton parted the crowd to take to the podium—where, with great ease, assurance, and grace (the audience whispering comparisons to Kennedy), he announced that he was in D.C. to meet with his state's congressional delegation, nothing more. Reporters pounced. If he wasn't running, why the party on his behalf? “Why, 1 don't know anything about that,” he answered. He turned to his hotheaded young aide. “Is that right, Bill?” Keisling, sheepish, answered: “Yes, sir, governor.”

The boom was on, his wishes notwithstanding. The
New York Times Magazine
ran an article entitled “Portrait of a Not-So-Dark Horse”; the
Saturday Evening Post
did a profile packed with homey pictures of the Scranton brood, accompanied by a Stewart Alsop column headed “The Logical Candidate” explaining confidently that in Republican nominations “the candidate with the best chance to win has usually been chosen before the convention was called to order by a process of consensus among the party's Grand Panjandrums.” And, opined his columnist brother Joseph, Goldwater, “the great favorite of the early
winter books,” had “few remaining betters.”
Newsweek
put Scranton on the cover.

On January 17 there was another all-star luncheon in Tom McCabe's boardroom. The participants entered through an Eisenhower Administration revolving door: Jim Hagerty, press secretary, now an ABC executive; Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, head of Procter & Gamble; White House special counsel David Kendall, now at Chrysler. They were joined by Bill Miller, Len Hall, and Meade Alcorn. Scranton emerged with the same message: “Only if faced with a series of highly unlikely circumstances would I feel it my duty to become a candidate for the presidency.” Then again, when a supporter filed his name for candidacy in New Hampshire without his permission—a quirk New Hampshire election law allowed—Scranton didn't file to withdraw it. At the White House, President Johnson inquired anxiously of Walter Jenkins about a new poll; “What does it show Johnson-Scranton?” (He needn't have worried. The President still scored nearly 80 percent against all comers.) But then again Scranton refused to attend the Young Republicans' annual training seminar on the twenty-fourth despite Eisenhower's urging.

His fervent admirers still held out hope. There was, after all, GO-Day coming up.

“GO-Day” was the GOP's annual closed-circuit TV fund-raising extravaganza. It ended up doing little more than neatly showcasing all the weaknesses of a party split clean down the middle: Goldwater's Pittsburgh appearance was nearly sabotaged by liberals who put on sale only 500 tickets for a 2,000-seat room (Clif White's western Pennsylvania chairman Ben Chapple saved the day, deploying his Draft Goldwater organization to sell the room to capacity); in Los Angeles, brigades of Young Republicans picketed Rockefeller with Goldwater signs. The speeches were flat, duds—except in Indiana, where the room thrummed with anticipation that the speaker, Bill Scranton, would throw his hat in the ring.

He wouldn't. His wife had hated the trip to Indianapolis—the campaign-style flesh-pressing, the constant comparisons to Jackie Kennedy, the awful accommodations. First she forbade Keisling's attempt to put an opening witticism in the speech about “feeling a presidential draft.” Then she exercised the matrimonial veto: no more out-of-state political excursions. On February 3 Scranton removed his name from the New Hampshire primary rolls. It had been a whirlwind journey. But now it seemed over.

 

Heading out each morning in his respectable Republican cloth coat—a belted-back model out of style for years—chatting up the barbershops, banks, and
general stores, buying ice-cream cones for the kids as his grandfather used to hand out dimes, Rocky knocked them dead in New Hampshire. NBC's cameras caught him in conversation with a little boy. Why are you running for President? “So that a nice boy like you will have a real chance to grow up in a country where there's freedom and where there's opportunity. And you are a wonderful boy.” They caught Goldwater in an off-color quip: “I don't kiss babies because I lose track of their age too soon.” Rocky even babbled away in French to woo New Hampshire's 18 percent French-Canadian population.

But even in New Hampshire you can't shake everybody's hand. And if you are Nelson Rockefeller, when you shake a hand with a glowing and conspicuously swollen Happy by your side, you are as likely to lose a vote as to gain one. As one stem matron told a reporter, eyes flashing with Old Testament wrath: “What can we tell our young people about this man's immoral living? How many wives did God make Adam?” Goldwater was so solid with the state's rock-ribbed Republican activists that Rockefeller hadn't been able to hire a decent campaign team or delegate slate for love or money. Voters would choose twenty-eight names from scores of candidates for delegates and alternates, with only their candidate preferences to identify them. On the “bedsheet ballot,” familiarity bred success. And the Arizona Mafia had locked in the state's most familiar Republican names: Delores Bridges, widow of the late senator Styles Bridges; former governor Lane Dwinell; ex-Communist FBI double agent Herb Philbrick, whose autobiography was the inspiration for the TV show
I Led Three Lives.

Rockefeller might have compensated with his customary blitzkrieg approach to staffing. But his New Hampshire managers insisted that local tastes demanded a puritanical front, limiting him to only three traveling companions (and a state police captain who insisted since the Kennedy assassination on accompanying him everywhere he went). He rode in the press bus and hired freelance stenographers by the day. (The effort at folksiness was blunted when NBC happened to run a special showcasing the country's greatest private collections of art, his own most prominently.) One of his greatest political gifts had always been his ability to absorb facts and figures in complex briefing sessions. But now the men who fed him the facts and figures were languishing back at 22 West 55th, so he responded to reporters with mumbled generalities. He retailed his plan to save small business, played to Granite Staters' fabled fiscal reserve, and worried over the projected 20 million people who would be unemployed by 1970; mostly, though, he bashed Goldwater. “How can there be solvency when Senator Goldwater is against the graduated income tax? How can there be security when he wants to take the United States out of the United Nations? ... Americans will not and should not respond to a political
creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present.” A student at Keene Teacher's College said he agreed with Goldwater that relief rolls were packed with free-loaders and called Rockefeller “a Robin Hood in a gray flannel suit.” Rockefeller replied that it was no wonder Goldwater thought that way, being a “Southern leader.”

Other fronts were opened: a “Rockefeller Campaign Express” ersatz newspaper; a Manhattan campaign office; a D.C. headquarters—a ten-room suite on Connecticut Avenue across the street from the Goldwater for President Committee office, both campaign offices emblazoned with enormous likenesses of their candidates that looked out onto the White House a few blocks away. White learned from a banker close to David Rockefeller that Rocky was allegedly willing to spend $50 million to win the nomination. “All a public relations man has to do to get on the payroll is ask,” he said. The exertion seemed futile. Rockefeller's popularity was plummeting, his chances of reversal remote.

Goldwater had problems of his own throughout the winter. It was possible to find two Republicans in New Hampshire who got along with each other after the corrosive three-way gubernatorial primary back in 1962, but his local campaign managers, Senator Cotton and House Speaker Stuart Lamphrey, weren't them. Lamphrey insisted on a state-of-the-art campaign with computer voter identification, door-to-door canvassing, and blanket TV ads. Cotton said over his dead body, and set up the traditional killing New Hampshire schedule for Goldwater—a dozen or more coffees a day, some in rooms smaller than the candidate's Senate inner office—ignoring the fact that Goldwater's ankle injury still shot pain with every step. Goldwater's old right hand, Tony Smith, was down with an ulcer, replaced by the far-too-inexperienced YAFer Lee Edwards (Kitchel had been floundering unsuccessfully since the previous fall trying to line up an experienced campaign publicist). At each stop came the same annoying questions—Social Security (the candidate now stuck to the argument that the true enemy of Social Security was the inflation that was eating away at benefits), the UN, nuclear weapons—as if audience members were reading from a script. (And, thanks to Graham Molitor, some of them—Harvard law students hired as audience moles—were.) Then it was on to the next picturesque village hall, which often, thanks to poor planning, was halfway across the state, to talk at the people again. Then back on the road—in the pitch dark, if it was past 4:00 p.m.—perhaps to hear on the car radio news of a widely publicized speech by Dean Thaddeus Seymour of Dartmouth: “The voters of the Granite State will largely determine whether unsophistication bordering on the supernatural becomes the foreign policy platform of one of our
two major parties,” he had said. “Goldwater may be a joke to most of us, but he has a well-financed, well-organized, and fanatical following which will stop at nothing to make their hero president.”