Before the Storm (86 page)

“TV for Goldwater-Miller” was a front, incorporated in California with Walter Knott as chair to get around campaign law's spending limitations for
any one “committee.” No campaign had tried raising funds on television before. Baroody and Kitchel fought the idea tooth and nail as undignified. For once they were overruled, which was a good thing. So much money flowed in from that ad that the show paid for itself.

Thanks to Kitchel's incompetence, the campaign needed to save all the money it could. When Goldwater's campaign leaders purged the RNC's finance chair, the job was offered to Goldwater's friend Ralph Cordiner, the former CEO of General Electric. This was a bad enough move: Cordiner, a stony man who was widely unpopular among the very plutocrats the campaign counted on for support, was associated in the public's mind with G.E.'s recent conviction for price fixing. Even worse, Cordiner had set a condition for taking the job: that the campaign run on a balanced budget. That sounded fine to Kitchel; conservatives didn't like deficit spending when Congress did it, so why should they accept it in their campaign? It was a greenhorn mistake. Much of what a campaign needs to operate—printers, producers, pollsters, TV time—has to be hired and paid for long before the money begins rolling in. A campaign has to be financed on credit. But the first thing Cordiner did, congratulating himself on his rectitude, was to cancel TV time the RNC had painstakingly negotiated with the networks in advance for spots in the closing weeks of the campaign.

At least they still had their half hours. The next one was to be their Hail Mary pass—their version of John F. Kennedy's masterpiece before an audience of Protestant ministers that convinced much of the nation to vote for Kennedy to prove they weren't anti-Catholic bigots. It would feature Goldwater and General Eisenhower in informal conversation at Ike's Gettysburg farm—Americans' anxieties about Goldwater's finger on the nuclear trigger melting away while they watched Goldwater receive the blessing of the kindly man who had saved Western civilization. Even were that grand goal not achieved, at least the campaign would rake in plenty of cash from Ray Massey's appeal. Everybody, after all, liked Ike.

It was there that the problems began. Denison Kitchel put his foot down: no appeal for filthy lucre would despoil the dignity of the thirty-fourth President of the United States. The $12.166 million campaign budget was dutifully slashed by $175,000, the amount they had expected the half-hour Massey appeal would raise. Things went downhill from there.

They filmed at Eisenhower's home in Gettysburg the day before the show was to air. He would give them only a few hours, reluctantly at that. The crew moved in what seemed a ton of gear, wired the farm with yards of cable; the thirty-fourth President of the United States frowned in annoyance. Chuck Lichenstein, the producer, briefed Eisenhower on the format, a sort of directed
improvisation: they would film at three different locations, and Eisenhower and Goldwater would be given rough guidelines on the topics they should cover during each scene. The climax, Lichenstein explained, would be a debunking of the charge that Goldwater was ready to release the nuclear codes to every last warrant officer in the Seventh Army.

“Oh, you know I'd say that's a lot of bullshit,” Eisenhower offered. “But I can't say that on TV, can I?”

“Um ... that wouldn't be consistent with your image, General,” Lichenstein replied. He suggested “balderdash” instead. Ike said he never used the word. Then he lit up. “How about ‘tommyrot' ?”

And there it was. The most responsible man in the world would remove the albatross of nuclear irresponsibility from the Republican candidate's weary shoulders by vigorous application of the word “tommyrot.”

They set up the shot with the two men leaning over a white picket fence, thick microphone cables protruding from their coat jackets like tails. The cameras rolled. Goldwater said something; Ike's eyes wandered. Ike began a sentence, then got lost in one of his famous syntactical thickets, never to return (we must, he said at one point, “preserve the outbreak of war”). Ike looked like he wanted to be somewhere else; Goldwater looked like a high school boy trying to engage the fickle attentions of the captain of the cheerleading squad. Goldwater started every sentence with “Well ...” Roll, cut, roll, cut; it was a disaster.

Mercifully, the noontime break came. Goldwater awaited the invitation to join Ike back at the little white farmhouse to take lunch with Mamie. Instead Eisenhower left Goldwater standing there. The candidate swallowed his pride, sat calmly with the crew, cadged from their box lunches (they hadn't brought one along for him), and regaled them with a few dirty jokes. Behind the mask he was surely contemplating the dustbin to which General Eisenhower had just consigned him. Everyone knew Richard Nixon's famous complaint about not once having been invited inside that house in his eight years as vice president.

It took a frantic overnight editing session to pull something usable out of the morass; Kitchel was convinced Eisenhower had sabotaged the thing on purpose. But at least the ad would open nicely. An aerial camera tracked over the General's prize heard of Angus cattle. Lilting strings entered: Aaron Copland's
Appalachian Spring.
A narrator intoned in a soothing voice, “Autumn has come to the rolling hills of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The fragrant smell of apples ripe and ready for harvest fills the air. The leaves have just started to turn, and these are beautiful days.”

If you turned the TV off then and there, you might have had a reasonably satisfying viewing experience.

It seemed like Eisenhower and Goldwater were in different rooms. More than one of Ike's remarks that aired slyly disparaged his interlocutor. (“Self-restraint is absolutely necessary to anyone who aspires to leadership of a great nation,” he said. Goldwater nodded vigorously in agreement.) They repaired to the barbecue area (where, lest anyone dash the public's stereotype of the Republicans as the party of the rich, a hired hand grilled away obsequiously in the background). Goldwater lurched into the grand finale: “There's just one thing I might ask in leaving.... Because we constantly stress the need for a strong America, our opponents are referring to us as warmongers. And I'd like to know your opinion on that.” The breeze lifted a tuft of white hair from the side of Eisenhower's head. He hit his mark and delivered his line: “Well, Barry, in this mind, this is actual tommyrot.”

Then came the part where he was to sum things up with an endorsement. It turned out to be hardly an endorsement at all. It was more like an exercise in a Logic 101 class. “Now, you know about war. You've been through one,” Ike said. “Any man who knows anything about war is not going to be reckless about this.”
Barry Goldwater knows about war. Anyone who knows about war would not be a reckless President. Q.E.D. Barry Goldwater would not be a
reckless
President:
at that, viewers who were veterans could flatter themselves that Dwight D. Eisenhower thought
they
would make good Presidents, too.

The closing shot had the two men walking into the sunset. They exited the frame; the camera trained in on the five-star flag of the Supreme Commander of NATO on the General's putting green.
Appalachian Spring
sounded in the background. A sheep bleated in the foreground. This, too, was a nice shot, although by that point very few people were still watching. Of the TV sets in operation, 27.4 percent were tuned to
Petticoat Junction;
25 percent watched
Peyton Place
(“television's first situation orgy,” Jack Paar called it); and—President Johnson gleefully learned the next day—8.6 percent watched Conversation
at Gettysburg.
“I didn't have much experience with TV,” Lichenstein excused himself later. He didn't mean he didn't have much experience with TV production. He meant he didn't
watch
TV.

 

Goldwater continued demanding debates. Johnson ignored him. And Goldwater began exhibiting the unlovely mien of a bitter man: “He will not face the issues, he will not face me—he will not face
you,”
he yelped across the upper Midwest. “Can my opponent talk? What does my opponent have to say?” He besmirched the nation's highest offices: Hubert Humphrey was a “socialistic
radical”; LBJ was “Light Bulb Johnson” for his scheme to save money by turning off lights in the White House (“Why doesn't he turn them on for once!”), “the interim president,” who “knows only one thing—how to acquire fortune and power.” Goldwater's supporters crowded the speaking stand and cheered him on. Much of the audience hung back in disgust.

Everyone associated with the campaign was getting bitter. Local branches began compiling affidavits on vandalism on their offices; on highways across the fruited plain, billboards admonishing “IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE'S RIGHT” were subverted to read “IN YOUR GUTS YOU KNOW HE'S NUTS” (later reclaimed by conservatives with signs reading “PLEASE EXCUSE THE JOHNSON EXTREMISTS”). Stodgy
Time
printed crude jokes: “Goldwater's first major address as President: ‘Ten ... nine ... eight ... seven ...' ”; “What would a Goldwater presidency be like? Brief.” In Tulsa, blacks crashed the hall where Goldwater was speaking and wouldn't stop singing “We Shall Overcome” for fifteen minutes straight. In Winston-Salem, civil rights activists and conservatives were booked for assaulting one another. Each had begun chanting their opposing stories about freedom, slavery, and justice at the other; things escalated from there. (Teddy White liked to ask civil rights demonstrators and Goldwater partisans what they meant by “freedom.” Each camp would denounce him for even asking such a patronizing question. “It is quite possible that these two groups may kill each other in cold blood,” he wrote, “both wearing banners bearing the same word.”)

American campaigns had been like this before, perhaps more often than not; Lord Bryce wrote in wonderment that the presidential election of 1884 seemed to be being decided between the “copulative habits” imputed to one candidate and the “prevaricative habits” of the other. But eighty years later, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
could insist: “Presidential elections have been waged without untoward incident until this year.” Historians forgot their history. “The peaceful arts of negotiation and persuasion,” “our sagacity and our passion for the peaceful enjoyment of our national life”: these, Columbia's Richard Hofstadter assured readers that October, were the hallmarks of political decision making in America. It was a foregone conclusion: when Goldwaterism was vanquished once and for all on November 3, civility would return, the two parties would return to their time-honored moderating role, and the nation would be restored to a healing consensus once again.

 

Johnson's first actual campaign trip—tarmac speeches, motorcades, rallies, the works—was a twenty-four-hour sweep through every New England state on September 28. It happened against a backdrop of extraordinary events.

On September 26, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its report on the New York City riots. There was a kind of rhetorical protocol that usually held sway when judgment was handed down on moments when the fabric of American civility had been rent. J. Edgar Hoover's report on the students who disrupted the HUAC hearings in San Francisco in 1960, “Communist Target—Youth,” was a paradigm case: it blamed the Communists, who had made students their unwitting dupes. And Nelson Rockefeller's Bastille Day proclamation: it concluded that the 1963 Young Republican convention had been upended by “vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements boring within.” The story they told was: America was a good nation, a unified nation, peaceful, safe, a land of persuasion and compromise; when violence came, some exogenous toxin was always to blame.

That story was immediately and instinctually told when Harlem went up in flames in the summer of 1964. Accusations for planning and executing the disturbance were hurled at Harlem's tiny number of self-proclaimed Maoists, at its scattered bands of black nationalists, at hirelings of H. L. Hunt (LBJ's favorite theory), or (as Goldwater himself feared) at agents of the Goldwater campaign. Special attention was paid to the mysterious youths that were seen lurking at key street corners with walkie-talkies and matching berets; it was discovered that they were actually helping authorities identify the most egregious acts of looting and arson. There was no conspiracy to be found in this latest FBI report. In its place were ordinary people—“ ‘school dropouts,' ‘young punks,' ‘common hoodlums,' and ‘drunken kids' ” making “senseless attack on all constituted authority without purpose or objective.” J. Edgar Hoover went looking for conspiracy; he always did. He just couldn't find one. It wasn't even the Communists' fault.

Then, two days later, there was the Warren Report. In later days it would be the locus for theorists propounding baroque triangulations of every imaginable group that might gain from having the President dead; its very meaning became conspiracy. But it was digested at breakfast tables on September 28, 1964—a time when three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, trusted the government to do the right thing—differently. A conspiracy would have been far more comforting. Instead most Americans read the news at face value, and learned that all it took to rock their society to its foundations was a single man with a grievance and a gun. They had learned that all it took to fire up a riot was a bunch of rock-throwing kids—and that even a majestic Civil Rights Act would not deter them. The idea that the nation could be shielded from danger by its unique genius for conciliation and consensus was becoming a far less tenable thing.

Oswald, a magazine pointed out, “was a product of Texas (and of New York City), of the American lower-middle class, of the U.S. Marines.... All of those places and associations are as American as baseball.... There is violence in the American character, probably more than in any other national character.” As if to give this new American story an exclamation point, on September 29, after four bombings in eight days in the town of McComb, Mississippi, three Klansmen were arrested off the street. They admitted that they chose bombing victims weekly out of a hat. They were released on suspended sentences. The judge ruled that they had been “unduly provoked” by “unhygienic” outsiders of “low morality.” And, that same day, thirteen civil rights workers were arrested for the crime of Southern hospitality—“serving food without a license,” the charge read.