Before the Storm (75 page)

At 3:10 p.m., Dirksen's voice as smooth as his face was rumpled, he intoned, “I am proud to nominate my colleague from Arizona to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.”

The heavens opened.

Thousands of tiny squares of golden foil descended in a downpour, mingled with hundreds of golden balloons on their way up, both bathed in spots that made the air shimmer. A banner fluttered down from the rafters, so big that the legend “GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT—655” could be read amidst its billows; from one end of the floor to the other, innumerable phosphorus yellow and orange placards (“MAN OF COURAGE”) flickered like candles, and banners and flags unfurled like flowering buds (in defiance of the fire marshal's orders, which permitted neither). Californians, as the host delegation right up in front and closest to the cameras, and as the second biggest delegation, taking up a
tenth of the floor space, gyrated in fluorescent vests of the sort worn by road crews at night, their faces painted gold. The air became a stew of bass drums and bugles and tubas, air horns and whistles and cowbells, the rip-roaring of a Dixieland band, the pealing of an organ, none distinguishable from the other in the thickness of the din.

Twenty minutes passed—the agreed-upon time limit for candidate demonstrations. Thruston Morton rapped his desultory plinks, which were ignored by throngs marching about with state standards and homemade signs reading “LA LOUISIANA DIT ALLONS AVEC L'EAU D'OR,” or “INDIANA'S FAVORITE SON-IN-LAW,” or “WOJEICHOWICZ AND ALL OF BROOKLYN ARE FOR BARRY,” or a cutout of the state of Virginia wearing thick black Goldwater glasses. Indians paraded in full regalia, Nevadans in red silk, Texans wearing longhorns. Outside, a minister, wearing a donkey costume, pleaded with a sergeant at arms for admittance: on cue, he was supposed to be pelted with fake snowballs. But he had been locked out. So everyone just pelted one another. Morton hollered that “real friends of Barry Goldwater” would let him “get nominated this week.” The crowd would not be stilled. They continued to carry on for another twenty minutes. They still had plenty of energy left to cheer seconding speeches from the likes of Bill Knowland (“He, as every delegate in this convention, knows that the road to appeasement ... is only surrender on the installment plan”) and Clare Boothe Luce (“Do you believe these pollsters?” “
No!!!
”).

The demonstration process was repeated six more times for other official candidates. Rockefeller, Margaret Chase Smith, Scranton: only Scranton was able to stretch it to a full thirty-five minutes, marred, though, by Goldwaterites who popped a ten-foot “Scranton” helium balloon just as it was released; and by incidents like the one in which two teenage girls were intercepted on their way to the floor with the admonition “Get the hell out of here, you little sons of bitches” and the one in which a CORE member was led away by the police for attempting a lie-down in front of the rostrum; and by Scranton posters featuring a faded black-and-white picture on a plain white background that could hardly be seen on TV. Then followed the favorite sons, Romney, Judd, and Lodge. (Senator Hiram Fong, the first Asian-American to be nominated for President, forwent a demonstration because the only reason for his nomination was to boost his reelection fight back home in Hawaii.) Lodge, so disgusted with events he had booked a morning flight out of town, was not present to receive the honor.

The hoopla lasted seven hours before it came time for delegates to cast their votes. The roll of states was called. Alabama: all 20 for Goldwater. Alaska: 6 votes for Scranton (“for progressive Republicanism to carry on the great tradition of our great President, Dwight D. Eisenhower”), 2 for Smith, I
for Judd, I for Fong. Arizona: 16 for Goldwater. Arkansas: 9 for Goldwater, 2 for Scranton, I for Rockefeller. California: 86 for Goldwater. Colorado: 15 for Goldwater and 3 for Scranton. It only took to the S's to put him over 655—with South Carolina, the place where a speech five years earlier had ignited the whole Draft Goldwater hoopla in the first place, casting the deciding vote.

Scranton and his wife made their way down the ramp, and the crowd
oohed
as if acknowledging the courage of a daredevil. Scranton made the traditional gesture: moving to make his opponent's nomination unanimous. Goldwater was back in his hotel room, following the tradition for putative nominees. He was shown Gallup poll results that Lyndon Johnson was favored by 80 percent of the public. “Christ,” he said, “we ought to be writing a speech telling them to go to hell and turn it down.” Rockefeller called to concede the nomination. Goldwater refused the phone. “Hell, I don't want to talk to that son-of-a-bitch.”

 

The last session of the convention would include Goldwater's acceptance speech and the nominating of a VP. The choice was congressman and RNC chair William E. Miller of New York. That Miller was Catholic and an Easterner suggested he was there to balance the ticket—but for the fact that, his boom having had been organized by a coalition of Draft Goldwater vets, the New York Conservative Party, and YAF officers, he was unlikely to impress any but already conservative voters in any event. His obscurity—he was better known for snipes at President Kennedy than for anything else, especially for citing guests dancing the twist in the ballroom as an example of immorality in the White House—inspired a ditty: “Here's a riddle, it's a killer / Who the hell is William Miller?” But Goldwater liked him because he was a party man, toiling loyally as Republican Congressional Campaign Committee chair before taking over the RNC, and he was a gut fighter. He said he chose Miller “because he drives Johnson nuts.” (Johnson, for his part, was barely aware of Miller's existence.)

Miller was duly anointed by 1,305 votes to 3, and a turn by Art Linkletter at the podium was enjoyed by all.
Olés
followed Vivas, followed by Thruston Morton's plinks. Goldwater's introducer stepped up to the microphone. Dick Nixon had originally been on the schedule to speak on Tuesday. He swapped it for this chance to style himself party healer. Clearly he was positioning himself for the nomination in 1968. All agreed it was a joke. “Do you think he could make it?” a reporter asked an old Nixon hand. “Hell, no!” came the answer. “I never knew what they meant when they used to say those things about Nixon. Now, I know.” Teddy White called it a moment for nostalgia.

The fallen idol gave the crowd over to the man whose candidacy he had
only a month earlier labeled a “tragedy.” Now he called Goldwater “Mr. Republican”: “And here is the man who, after the greatest campaign in history, will be Mr. President—Barry Goldwater.” Then he sat back with the rest and waited for Goldwater to usher the year's rolling waters magnanimously beneath the bridge. He would be disappointed.

Goldwater, Baroody, Hess, and the rest of the brain trust had first met to discuss the acceptance speech the previous Saturday at Goldwater's personal quarters—the seventeenth floor, which was closed to mere political operatives. Hess brought in a draft that did exactly what an acceptance speech after a divisive primary season was supposed to do: proceed as if there had never been any divisions in the first place. But it was precisely their contempt for such bromides that united these men; that was why they were the ones whom Goldwater had working on the speech. The members of the brain trust declared the draft dead on arrival. Neither Bill Scranton nor Nelson Rockefeller deserved conciliation.

Goldwater gave the task of composing a new draft to Harry Jaffa. He was impressed with Jaffa's quick thinking in invoking Lincoln during the flap over the Scranton letter and by a memorandum Jaffa had written for the platform committee on the subject of political extremism. He had argued that extremism was a nonissue—a synonym, if anything, for “principle.” “Extremism”: Goldwater was sick of the word.

The brain trust fiddled over things for the next few days in Bill Baroody's room, Goldwater testing out each new phrase on his tongue, occasionally adding lines from his own pen. (One began “Yesterday it was Korea. Tonight it is Vietnam.”) Another line came from Gene Pulliam, on “the growing menace of public safety, to life, limb and property, in homes, churches, playgrounds and places of business, particularly in our great cities.” Goldwater had just then read in the papers of a girl in New York who had apparently been detained for using a knife against a rapist. He was sick of this sort of thing. He thought Pulliam's contribution was splendid.

There was a major row among his deputies over one line. Jaffa had lifted it directly from his memo; Goldwater had singled it out as his favorite. But half the group thought it was way too incendiary and would be utterly misunderstood. Then Goldwater put the argument to a stop by ordering the offending passage underlined twice. And that was that.

The final text, approved before dawn on Thursday as celebrant drunks straggled up and down Nob Hill, was guarded with the sort of care usually reserved for crown jewels. Two typists simultaneously prepared clean copies of the various sections. The copies were delivered upon completion to another set
of workers, locked in a room cleared of telephones and sworn to silence for good measure, who set the TelePrompTer text. Reporters begged for an advance copy. Their requests were denied. Bill Miller, Clif White, and Dean Burch didn't get to see one either. The brain trusters knew that if those three read it, they would raise hell. For this wasn't a political speech. It was a cultural call to arms.

After Nixon's introduction Goldwater strode down the ramp with his family and shook Nixon's hand. The band struck up “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Red, white, and blue balloons fell, rat-tat-tatting jarringly as they were popped with cigarettes. Young Scrantonites bore a “STAY IN THE MAINSTREAM” banner across the floor. The gavel banged. Goldwater gripped the podium. Deliberately, confidently, he began.

“Our people have followed false prophets,” he said in a harsh, compressed tone. “We must and we shall return to proven ways—not because they are old, but because they are true.” Republicans must become “freedom's missionaries in a doubting world.” For there was “violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders, and there is a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives.”

Words like “honesty,” “destiny,” and “vision” were repeated, “free,” “freedom,” and “liberty” some forty times. Every paragraph, sometimes every sentence, brought roars from the faithful—none more than when Goldwater declared that the nation had been founded upon the “acceptance of God as the author of freedom.”

The air thickened with expectation; he was drawing to a climax. Now texts were finally distributed to reporters. “And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels,” he said, concentrating his face. “Those who do not care for our cause we do not expect to enter our ranks in any case.”

Then came the passage he had ordered double-underscored on his reading copy and the copies for the press.
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty—is—no—vice!
”

He had to wait forty-one seconds before he could continue. He pursed his lips, glanced solemnly down at the text:

The roar from the galleries could be heard inside the Goldwater trailer—where White was so disgusted with what he could see only as a political disaster that he switched off his television monitor in rage. Ken Keating bolted from
the convention hall. (His later claim that he only wanted to beat the traffic was belied by the fact that he chose to exit straight up the center aisle.) Scranton glowered. A standing ovation began. Richard Nixon, making a snap political judgment, reached over to keep wife Pat in her seat. He was sick to his stomach. Frenzied delegates took hold of the struts holding up ABC's broadcast booth and shook them furiously. For five minutes Howard K. Smith endured an earthquake, floorboards creaking, objects sliding across his desk. Wirt Yerger walked up to George Romney and said, “Governor, I hope we can all unite behind Goldwater and everything.” He got back nothing but a bitter stare.

What Goldwater had said hardly differed in tone from President Kennedy's vaunted inaugural address: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Time and circumstance had shifted the mood. Now such words seemed a provocation to insurrection. “If a party so committed were to gain public office in this country,” declared the Washington Post, “there would be nothing left for us to do but pray.” “To extol extremism—whether ‘in defense of liberty' or in ‘pursuit of justice'—is dangerous, irresponsible, and frightening,” read a statement released by Rockefeller. “Any sanction of lawlessness, of the vigilantes, and the unruly mob can only be deplored. The extremism of the Communists, of the Ku Klux Klan, and of the John Birch Society—like that of most terrorists—has always been claimed by such groups to be in the defense of liberty.... Coming as it did from the new leader of a great American political party in his first public utterance, it raises the gravest of questions in the minds and hearts and souls of Republicans in every corner of our party.” Eisenhower labeled the speech an offense to “the whole American system”—although Eisenhower himself was not spared a drubbing:
Time
charged him with minting the “switchblade issue” for political expediency, because his lines on crime made sense “only if considered in conjunction with the ‘white backlash.' ” With all the support Goldwater “could gain from latent white resentment of militant Negro claims,” worried another newspaper, who was to say that he wouldn't foment “Goldwater riots” himself?