Before the Storm (83 page)

Then he went further than they were willing to go.

Kennedy, he announced sternly, had calibrated the timing of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis to help Democrats in the midterm elections that November. He added: “Americans must be prepared under such an Administration to be faced by a ‘crisis' of some sort just before the election.” He thanked Boeing for how well its planes had performed in wartime—and promised that under his Administration, the planes “will be doing so again.” He meant he would distribute defense contracts to the most qualified bidder, not according to political considerations as Lyndon Johnson supposedly did. What it sounded like would soon be revealed when Lou Harris found that 64 percent of women and 45 percent of men believed that if elected President, Goldwater would take the United States to war; and when researchers at the University of Michigan found that there was one comment on Johnson's belligerency for every hundred about Goldwater's (people being hardly aware that in the White House, on September 8, it was decided that U.S. bombing of North Vietnam would begin just as soon as the election was out of the way).

For his next stop, Minneapolis, the second floor's Midwest experts worked up a detailed report on the mounting aggravation of wheat farmers with the federal acreage allotment system. The issue was ignored. Instead Goldwater exclaimed, “We know that it is lack of leadership that has turned our streets into jungles.... If it is entirely proper for government to take from some to give to others, then won't some be led to believe that they can rightfully take from anyone who has more than they?” The speech was televised across the state. The denizens of Minnesota's crime-ridden wheat farms proved nonplused. The Washington
Post's
editorial board reacted considerably more excitedly: “Like a man looking at the world while standing on his head, he has arrived at a conclusion that the cause of crime is to be found in the excessive benevolence of the community to its unfortunate,” they wrote. “This is much like asserting that the vaccination is the cause of smallpox.” It was, they concluded, “hard to believe that anyone living in the 20th Century would utter it.”

The next night, in Chicago, professors—those, at least, who hadn't joined a boycott called by an agitated University of Chicago don—filed into a banquet hall to hear Goldwater give the plenary address at the American Political Science Association convention. The speech was written by Harry Jaffa and Bill Rehnquist. “According to some of your learned works,” Goldwater began, “a
great many people make up their minds about candidates even before the convention opens.” That, he continued, was why he was so glad to accept their invitation to speak at this convention. “Finding an open-minded audience to hear a discussion of fundamental issues poses a real problem.”

Then he set to baiting them. He said it disgusted him that liberals admired this “power-wielding, arm-twisting President” just because he “gets his program through Congress.” This, he said, was “a totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means.” Then he turned to his main subject—what he liked to call, in less formal settings, the “jackassian” nature of recent Supreme Court decisions. “I suppose, since I am not a lawyer, that I should leave the analysis of the merits of the court's decision in these cases to the constitutional lawyers—”

Hecklers shouted their agreement. He pressed on.

“Yet, just as it has been observed that war is too important to leave to the generals...” (sarcastic jeers; considering what the audience members had read in their newspapers that morning of the fright Goldwater had given Seattle listeners the night before, this metaphor, which some might also have remembered as the opinion of General Jack D. Ripper in
Dr. Strangelove,
was the most injudicious imaginable). He went on to accuse the Warren Court of exercising “raw and naked power.” Historically minded commentators drew attention to those words' similarity to the 1956 congressional “Southern Manifesto.” Others interpreted the statement as an attack on the institution of the Supreme Court itself, perhaps even an endorsement of the Birch Society's “Impeach Warren” campaign.

By coincidence, that very same day the conservative justice John Marshall Harlan released a statement grandly explaining why he had been issuing angry dissent after angry dissent in cases that year—decrying decisions expanding the rights of criminal suspects, protecting naughty books, and broadening the public-accommodations purview of the Civil Rights Act. He railed that the federal judiciary was captive to the notion “that every major social ill in this country can find its cure in some constitutional principle.” The political workers on the second floor couldn't believe their good fortune. This was cover: their man couldn't very well be accused of taking on the Supreme Court himself if he had a Supreme Court justice in his corner. They began making preparations to exploit the statement. Kitchel vetoed their efforts. He didn't think they had anything to apologize for—calling the Chicago speech “the most exciting thing we've done in the campaign so far.” That Goldwater alienated audiences was taken by his inner circle as evidence he was doing something right—telling them things they needed, but didn't want, to hear. What frustrated the people
on the second floor was that they believed these were things the American people did want to hear, if only the messages were communicated more skillfully. To them, it seemed more and more that their third-floor rivals weren't interested in winning the election at all.

 

It wasn't all that long ago that even liberal organs spoke of Goldwater as “an absolutely honest politician” (Harper's), of the “stoutness and general decency of his character” (The Progressive). Gone were the days. Publications were beginning to put out endorsements, and Goldwater was being pummeled. In presidential elections between 1940 and 1960, the nation's top one hundred newspapers endorsed the Republican 77 percent of the time. In 1964 only 45 percent would.
The Saturday Evening
Post was one of several organs to deliver its first Democratic endorsement in its history. Norman Rockwell it wasn't: “For the good of the Republican Party, which his candidacy disgraces, we hope that Goldwater is crushingly defeated,” the editorial ran. He was “a wild man, a stray, an unprincipled and ruthless political jujitsu artist.” (The language was ironic: “master of political jujitsu” had been the phrase the same magazine used back in January to praise their hero William Warren Scranton's political gifts.) Other newcomers to the Democratic column included the publications of Henry Luce (“Let me introduce myself. I am your boss,” Luce once retorted to staffers who begged him to endorse Adlai Stevenson) and the Hearst Corporation (where in 1935 the boss ordered papers to substitute the phrase “Raw Deal” for the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's program in their news coverage). Bill Miller's little hometown paper went for Johnson; a nearby one tipped its hat to a Democrat for the first time since 1822. The unkindest cut of all came in Phoenix. You could find any number of ads for Goldwater's Department Store in Gene Pulliam's Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette. You just couldn't find a kind word on behalf of Barry Goldwater. “I'll be darned,” the President exhaled quietly, humbly, when he heard the news that the man who had ushered Barry Goldwater into public life was now cutting him adrift.

Clergymen and religious institutions inaugurated a new genre: the apologia for wading into presidential politics. “Readers of The
Churchman”—
a monthly of Goldwater's own Episcopal faith—“are doubtless aware that it has not been the custom of this journal to support party candidates. But they should also be certain that it could not only ever support but must strongly oppose a candidate who violates so completely the slogan which it carries on its mast-head—‘ For the promotion of goodwill and better understanding among all peoples.' ” At the Episcopalians' triennial convention, in St. Louis, delegates in the hundreds—even a bishop—signed a statement decrying Goldwater's
“transparent exploitation of racism.” The president of the American Jewish Congress said, “A Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide.” New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman acceded to Goldwater's request for a meeting because he didn't know how he could duck it, but he apologized to the White House for doing so, and he wouldn't let himself be photographed. A Methodist magazine devoted an entire issue to the scourge of Goldwaterism, explaining, “This journal was founded as a response to the threat of Hitlerism.” Paul Tillich, with Reinhold Niebuhr one of the towering giants among U.S. theologians, pronounced: “Religion must sometimes take a side.... I feel as a theologian justified in calling for the defeat of the Republican candidate for the Presidency.” Martin Luther King said he felt compelled to act because if Goldwater won, what would follow would be “violence and riots the like of which we have never seen before.”

It didn't happen entirely spontaneously. “We have an opportunity to arouse many religious groups to oppose Goldwater,” Bill Moyers advised the boss in July. The White House featured The
Churchman's
editorial in a press release nearly before the issue was in subscribers' hands; an anti-Goldwater article in a little journal published by Niebuhr was distributed by the Johnson campaign in the thousands. (“President says he thinks they ought to put this guy on TV,” White House special assistant Jack Valenti noted after the Tillich statement.) An “America's Leaders Speak” letterhead was created by the DNC to trumpet newfound fans in just about every profession. Leonard Marks, the Johnson family lawyer, worked on such matters full-time, setting up a liaison with every newspaper that made the smallest peep in opposition to the Republican candidate.

There were no Leonard Markses on Goldwater's side. They had all been thrown overboard. Thirty-one-year-old Lee Edwards had been designated director of public relations—apparently; with Kitchel ever by Goldwater's side on the campaign plane, such was the chaos that no one was certain whether the PR director's job hadn't been given to Republican ad man Lou Guylay instead. The dust settled with Guylay in charge—in charge, that is, of the staff of young, bright-eyed incompetents with which Edwards had packed the payroll, who disgorged so many press releases reporters had no idea what to write about.

The greatest flack outfit in the world would have had its hands full just dealing with the people who did endorse Goldwater. Robert DePugh proudly announced that his Minutemen militias would be sabotaging Democratic campaign offices on the campaign's behalf; the National Conservative Council pledged to aid Goldwater in his effort to “buy back the Federal Reserve System from the Rockefellers”; the Courtneys' anti-Johnson booklet ran a photograph of the President applauding an African drummer, captioned “Please, Massa
Lyndon, give us some of dat nice foreign aid. I need to buy two more wives.” Gerald L. K. Smith, after agonizing for months over Goldwater's Jewish ancestry, crawled out from under his rock to declare that patriotic Americans had “no time to lose” in joining the cause—and Georgia and Alabama KKK leaders made their unqualified endorsements known far and wide. “We're not in the business of discouraging votes,” came Dean Burch's response; Lyndon Johnson pounced on the opportunity. “You get on some TV up there where the wires will quote that,” he told Roy Wilkins.

And so it went. Grenier was so obsessed with control that he ordered the entire staff not to speak to the press, on or off the record. Edwards had been Napoleonic enough to demand that nothing be mimeographed without his express consent. More memos, an early September memo complained, were being circulated about how to circulate memos than about all other subjects taken together. Only 5 percent of the Goldwater campaign's insanely ambitious vote-quota scheme for every precinct in the nation had been fulfilled. Their vaunted electronic communications system only speeded the pace at which mistakes compounded: local leaders arrived at the office every morning to find a pile of reading material on their desks, but no inkling of what they were supposed to do with it. Rome burned; and the emperors fiddled high above the clouds, floating to the next campaign stop with blissful indifference.

G
oldwater's next swing was through the Democrats' former Solid South. And when reporters described the crowds' receptions, words like “volcanic” and “Beatles” appeared over and over again. In Winston-Salem, the “We Want Barry” drone forced the introductions of local dignitaries to be canceled. In Charlotte, where ten thousand supporters had to be turned away, the
Observer
reported teenagers “near emotional collapse” when Goldwater walked past. “Sobbing, tears running down their faces, several girls moaned, ‘Barry, Barry.' ” His motorcade down Peachtree Street was showered with so much confetti that it felt like Atlanta had suffered its first blizzard. In Memphis the
Commercial Appeal
predicted a crowd between 3,000 and 7,000. “Thank God he's safe,” the Memphis Chief of Police could only sigh after Goldwater escaped mauling from a throng of nearly 100,000. In Greenville, South Carolina, forty-five people required medical attention after crowds broke through the police cordon.

In contrast, Goldwater's speeches earned descriptions like “low-keyed,” “listless,” “monotone,” and “stumbling”—as if, someone wrote, the candidate were saying, “Train 28 now leaving on Track 1.” The speeches themselves were so inappropriate to their occasions that
The New Yorker's
Richard Rovere was rubbing his eyes: “There were some times, traveling with Goldwater,” he wrote, “when one wondered whether the candidate really thinks of himself as a man seeking the Presidency of the United States.” Once more the second-floor units labored mightily preparing reports to help Goldwater's speechwriters: foregrounding the votes Goldwater had made to strengthen Social Security; an explanation of how TVA would be improved if it were run by the more efficient private sector; demonstration (prepared in consultation with the National Cotton Council) of how easing cotton supports would boost sales abroad. All were deposited in
Yia Bi Ken's
circular file. The South was ground zero for
American political demagoguery—the best place, Goldwater had decided, to prove he wasn't a demagogue.