Before the Storm (64 page)

National CORE, and the battalions of police and tow trucks lining the expressways, won the battle of wills. The “stall-in” was abandoned; a veritable fleet of automobiles streamed into Flushing to take in the opening-day festivities. Most protesters were hauled off in time for the parade featuring Miss America, Miss Universe, and Donna Reed and family. Other protesters managed to linger. The President elected to give his vaunted speech before a small invited indoor audience. He emerged to greet the throng and began to say a few words to the malcontents—“We do not try to mask our national problems”—and was met by heckling. He perorated about a “world in which all men are equal”; that was met by laughter.

It was around then that Walter Lippmann took note in his column of his long-held conviction that as a rule, the filibuster was generally a noble device for “delaying and preventing a passionate majority from overriding a defenseless minority.” Was the present filibuster against the civil rights bill principled? he asked himself rhetorically. “No more,” he answered, “than would [be] a filibuster in time of war.”

 

Goldwater wrote off Oregon, saying he needed to be in Washington for the civil rights debate. The real reason was that Lodge was polling 50 percent. At a battery of straw voting booths at the World's Fair, Lodge beat all comers combined. (“He
looks
like a President,” people said.) Newspapers referred casually to his “probable victory in Oregon May 15.”
Time
put “The Lodge Phenomenon” on the cover. Rumor was that if he won he would come home to campaign (a decision perhaps influenced by the Vietcong terrorist who had recently hurled a bomb in the ambassador's direction). “Anyone but” now had a name and a face. “Why go out and break your pick,” demanded Dean Burch, “against someone who isn't there?” Another reason for Goldwater to avoid Oregon was to further snub Steve Shadegg, who had been named the Goldwater for President Committee's Northwest region director. Radio testimonials from five Republican congressmen, a half-hour TV film,
Meet Barry Goldwater
(pointing
up the candidate's adventurous hobbies, his wishes notwithstanding), and billboards (“YOU KNOW WHERE HE STANDS,” beside an ugly photo that D.C. headquarters stubbornly refused to replace, to Shadegg's professional disgust) campaigned in his stead. But so did Kent Courtney, who visited Oregon from New Orleans to distribute two of his most scabrous pamphlets yet,
How Soft on Communism Is Henry Cabot Lodge?
and An
Exposé of the Record of Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Dick Kleindienst had to rush to Oregon to release a statement to once more put out a Birchite fire without burning any bridges in so doing: “Sen. Goldwater appreciates the enthusiastic support he is receiving from all Republicans—but Mr. Courtney is not authorized to speak on behalf of the Senator or on behalf of the Senator's Oregon Committee.”

Nelson Rockefeller had never let another politician's hammerlock on victory deter him before. Nor the hostility of his party: in an endorsement vote at the Wisconsin Young Republican convention he trailed “Nobody” 3 votes to zero. In New York his own hand-picked delegate slate decided to officially run “uncommitted.” Nor even the hostility of his old friend the Holy Father: On March 15 the two stars of
Cleopatra,
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, dumped their spouses and married each other; Pope Paul VI responded with an open letter in the Vatican newspaper condemning remarriage. Not long afterward senators began referring to “Mrs. Murphy's boarding house” as shorthand for discussing how small a business would have to be to be exempted from the civil rights law. Rockefeller begged friendly senators to
stop reminding people of his wife's maiden name.
He got nowhere. Like his campaign. World Press Syndicate had been retained to try to sell serialization of his latest campaign biography,
The Real Rockefeller,
to newspapers. Nearly every newspaper in the nation with a circulation above 25,000—1,089 in all—received the initial pitch, and 500 upper-tier papers got the hard sell. Not a single paper ordered the book. “We had assumed there would be a minimum I percent return just on the general law of averages,” WPS's executive editor lamented. Conservative editors called him back only to shout into the phone that it was “another damned Rockefeller trick.” The
Herald Tribune
didn't return his calls at all.

Rockefeller pressed harder in Oregon. After Goldwater canceled his campaign stops there, Rocky doubled his—sending out extra mailings addressed to each of Oregon's 350,000 Republicans to make sure they knew it. New York congressman John Lindsay toured the state for him. Gene Wyckoff, via the now-tried-and-true dramatic pan-over-photos method, produced a warm television biography (Rocky plays with children; patriotic medley segues into a nursery rhyme). In Grants Pass they made him an honorary Caveman; in the appropriately named town of Albany, Oregon, he became a Woodpecker. Scattered
newspapers made endorsements. A Chicago newsman interviewed the candidate on the jet out to Portland and marveled at his “desperate optimism”: I'll win, Rockefeller claimed, “when the convention settles down to analyzing the assets and liabilities of all the candidates.”

That was Nixon's plan, too. His trip to Asia had included a dinner with his 1960 running mate. He was startled at how half-baked he found American strategy in Vietnam. He was also startled to see how close Lodge was to throwing his hat in the ring. It would appear that rivalry clouded Nixon's judgment. Immediately upon his April 15 return Nixon sent old hands Bob Finch and Cliff Folger out to Portland to raise $50,000 for a phone bank operation. An aide insisted Nixon was crazy, that Goldwater was sailing toward a certain first-ballot victory. Nixon said that was impossible. “Believe me, Dick,” the exasperated deputy assured him.
“You've
been overseas, and
I've
been here.” Raising the money proved difficult; once reliable donors now questioned the former vice president's integrity after his false threat to retire from politics in 1962. He finally scraped up enough to pay for fifty telephone lines, which were installed deep within an obscure Portland office building. A few days after the May 4 opening an NBC camera crew tracked down the boiler room. Nixon's managers claimed the office was taking a poll for a new magazine. When his deception was revealed on national TV, it did not make Nixon look like an elder statesman.

Confusion reigned as to where this newest New Nixon stood ideologically. Shadegg thought he would take conservative votes away from Goldwater, and negotiated for Nixon to withdraw; White thought Nixon would take liberal votes away from Rockefeller and Lodge—and worked a hustle to get Nixon to stay in. White won. He delegated one of his oldest and most loyal Draft Goldwater deputies to run Nixon's secret campaign—and keep it running to the hilt. What this all meant to Goldwater's ultimate vote totals in Oregon is not known. What it meant to the long-term health of his candidacy for the presidency that his two cleverest operatives were working at cross-purposes behind each other's backs was more clear.

Rockefeller, with 15 points to make up against Lodge, campaigned in the homestretch as if the state were a New England town: a 7:30 breakfast each morning, three or four daytime stops, and an evening rally. The speeches were dignified—he was selling moderation, after all—until the shouted conclusion: “I'm the only man who cares enough about your votes to come to Oregon!” (He hadn't cared enough to come to states like Indiana where he had feared a Goldwater rout.) Representative Lindsay's top political man put together a last-minute TV tsunami (“He Cared Enough to Come”). Still, with ten days to go, the
Oregonian
gave him only 22 percent to Lodge's 36. (Nixon was at 15, and
Goldwater at 12.) On the eve of the primary ABC had Rockefeller behind Lodge 21 to 35.

May 15 broke warm and clear. Voters poured into polling stations. They brought state-published guides to navigate through the 122 names vying for 6 delegate and alternate spots. Candidates could take out ads in these guides. Craig Truax had bought a two-pager to trumpet William Warren Scranton. The Pennsylvania governor was fresh in voters' minds at any rate: a few weeks earlier NBC afforded him a TV special and
Time
had devoted an entire page to a speech he gave at Yale.

The balloting ended at eight that evening. By nine, it is safe to say that Mr. Gallup, Mr. Truax, and Mr. Harris were taking stiff belts of something strong. Scranton won 4,000 votes—1.4 percent. Margaret Chase Smith got 7,000, Richard Nixon 48,000. Goldwater won 50,000, Lodge 78,000. Nelson Rockefeller received 94,000.

The Lodge boom had been foiled at the last minute after Shadegg discovered that the Lodge team was about to flood the airwaves with its misleading “Meet Mr. Lodge” commercial. Shadegg, a very clever man, was able to send a telegram to Eisenhower in Palm Springs that inspired the former President to wire back, “If it suggests that I have given any public indication of a preference for any person over any other in the current contest, then it is a definite misrepresentation. ” Shadegg released the missive to the press; Lodge managers were forced to cancel their TV time.

Lodge's campaign manager Paul Grindle's first thoughts upon hearing the Oregon returns were of a moderates' united front. If Lodge's organization merged with Rockefeller's, perhaps to be inherited by some more acceptable moderate dark horse somewhere down the line, perhaps a Scranton ...

That was Lyndon Johnson's thought, too. Goldwater, “just as nutty as a fruitcake,”
couldn't
win, Johnson told his friend Texas governor John Connally. “Rockefeller's wife ain't gonna let him get off the ground. So I guess
Time
magazine and the big ones who are really doing this job, I guess they're gonna have to go with Scranton.” Robert Taft had gone into the convention in 1952 with more delegates than Dwight D. Eisenhower, after all. And look what happened to him.

C
alifornia had just surpassed New York as the most populous state in the union. Its primary was like all the other ones, only more so. Goldwater didn't have to win there to clinch enough delegates to put him over the top. He did have to win there if he wanted credibility as a man who could win elections, not just snatch conventions. Rockefeller had to win California or he would die. It was holy war—to decide, as one hot-headed Goldwater pamphleteer put it, “whether Constitutional government is to be restored or if our country is going to continue to go further to the Left towards a Communist-tainted Nazi-Fascist collectivism and chaos.” Rockefeller's staff would have had to edit only a few words to make that their own credo. “Even I have been shocked by the spending in this campaign. I've never seen anything like it in American politics,” Clif White told a reporter. “Why, Rockefeller”—and, he should have added, Goldwater too—“is making Kennedy look like a piker.”

 

Before turning to California in earnest, Goldwater had an errand to take care of. A crack threatened his solid South—Georgia, where his share of the at-large delegates was endangered by the only black-and-tan establishment that was strong enough not to fold under the Clif White onslaught.

The candidate landed, exhausted, to a Goldwater circus. Only after Kitchel screamed in his face, “Dammit, Barry, you're a national figure!” did Goldwater stride out to receive his adoration. A reporter poked a microphone in his snoot; Goldwater scowled. A pretty young thing tried to plop a big white cowboy hat on his head; he shoved her away. A guy was peddling a canned soft drink with the unfortunate name of “Gold Water” (“The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste”) from the tailgate of his truck. Goldwater was offered a sip. He spit it out. “This tastes like piss! I wouldn't drink it with gin!”

The Georgia convention was disappointing. The opposition—weakened, reporters hastened to point out, by a Negro boycott; they refused to be in the
same room as Goldwater—was tenacious. John Grenier, White's Southern field man, was weakened by the fact that the local Birch leader said his people wouldn't cooperate with Grenier no matter
what
Goldwater said. What Goldwater said from the podium disappointed most of all: he gave a dry, legalistic encomium to the coming of the two-party system to the South. When Goldwater talked about the dictator in Cuba he described as a “pygmy,” he shouted. When he talked about anything touching on civil rights, he droned. When he did so in the South, he droned even more quietly. He fretted over contributing to the nation's racial divide. He didn't think his states' rights message would contribute to those divisions; to him, by honoring the concerns of the South—the new South, the progressive South, the industrial South, states that just wanted the federal government to leave them alone to prosper—he was helping make the Republicans, as he put it in Atlanta, “a truly
national
party.”

By then he had honed his argument against the pending civil rights bill. He would vote for it, gladly, if Titles II and VII were struck; the Constitution just didn't allow the federal government to make private business decisions about whom to serve and whom to hire. If Washington “can tell you what to do with your property, they can take it away from you,” he would say; and, “I don't think it's my right as an Arizonan to come in and tell a Southerner what to do about this thing.” He would speak of good intentions gone awry: “I can see a police state coming out of that without any problem at all.” In Jeremiah mode, he might say how much it sickened him to see questions of law being settled in the streets and wonder why the Democrats would sink so low as to tacitly support such tactics: “It is not understanding America or Americans that goads a man to abandon civility in this matter,” he said the night after the World's Fair debacle (to an audience in Connecticut, only a commuter train ride away from the mob). He said again and again, “with the deepest possible sense of tragedy and regret,” that at bottom, this was a problem of moral suasion, not of laws. Federal force only compounded the problem. “Until we have an administration that will cool the fires and the tempers of violence we simply cannot solve the rest of the problem in any lasting sense.” Until then, he promised, “we are going to see more violence in our streets before we see less.” All spring, Northern college students had been training with military rigor for a nonviolent assault for voting rights in Mississippi—while that state was planning to counter them with all the terror at its disposal. Goldwater bespoke his frustration with Mississippi as the state “where there is the most talk about brotherhood and the very least opportunity for achieving it.” But the civil rights bill as written, he was convinced, would only make things worse. It was unconstitutional—and if Negroes didn't have a stake in the Constitution, then who did?
He plunged into the Golden State the day after leaving Georgia with a keynote address at the first annual convention of a new group, United Republicans of California, in Bakersfield.