Before the Storm (9 page)

Goldwater was not deterred. “I would rather have Hoffa stealing my money,” he declared, “than Reuther stealing my freedom.” Extravagant rumors of a Kennedy-Reuther conspiracy developed; Senator Carl Curtis told Bobby he understood that all of the committee's incoming mail was being examined by AFL-CIO officers. Kennedy was enraged. He told Curtis that before the hearings he was indifferent to Walter Reuther, but that the Republicans were fast forcing him into Reuther's camp. Coming into a January 8 executive session, the McClellan Committee was on the verge of breaking up altogether over the issue of whether to schedule Kohler hearings. Then Jack Kennedy called the Republicans' bluff. He said he agreed with them. Kohler should have its day in court as soon as possible. Goldwater blanched; the Republican strategy was to drag out the affair, and drag the Kennedy brothers through the mud, for as long as possible. Wouldn't it be better to wait a few months? Bobby said no, it wouldn't be; Republican investigators had told him they would be ready to present their evidence in February. At which the Republicans were resigned: hearings would begin in February.

The Goldwater-Reuther feud escalated. Every year the Republicans celebrated
Lincoln Day by putting on fund-raising dinners in a score of different cities linked by closed-circuit TV. Goldwater spoke at the one at Detroit's Masonic Temple.
Time
—which ran a picture of Goldwater in a Brando-esque T-shirt hefting a load of lumber, his squared-off, rugged face turned to the camera—reported that Goldwater elicited “whoops and hollers” with his speech:

He called Reuther “more dangerous than Soviet Russia and all the Sputniks.”

The provocation couldn't have been more deliberate. The UAW was to take up residence at the same venue the following week for its convention to debate Reuther's bold “Share the Profits” plan—a demand that one-quarter of all corporate profits automatically go to workers. In Reuther's keynote address, though, the intricacies of bargaining gave way to red-faced diatribe. “Goldwater is a stooge for Republican politicians and big business,” he cried, “undertaking a campaign of slander and smear to weaken democratic unions everywhere!” The Arizona senator was “mentally unbalanced and needs a psychiatrist.” He was America's “number one political fanatic, peddler of class hatred, and union hater.”

By March 27, the great Senate hearing room had rung for weeks with flat Germanic Midwestern accents declaiming with such acrimony on the events in Kohler that Counsel Kennedy could only compare the scene to what he had witnessed between Arabs and Jews in Israel. Now, finally, Reuther was going to testify. At last the two rivals would meet face to face. As the hour approached, the shadowboxing stepped up. Reuther told newsmen that Goldwater was “a political hypocrite and a moral coward”; Goldwater, schoolyard-style, rebounded that Reuther should “look into the mirror and see who is the coward.” Their meeting promised to be the hottest ticket in town.

Once the hearings began, neither was long in drawing blood. Goldwater backed Reuther into an apology for the role union goons had played in Kohler. Reuther came back with an old quote from Goldwater that Kohler had a “right not to have a union if he can win a strike.” But federal law—Reuther pointed out—said no company had the right to close down a union.

Reuther pressed: “I would like to know whether you think under the Taft-Hartley
law a company can decide not to have a union and destroy that union? I maintain they can't.”

Goldwater was backed into a comer. “I will tell you what, someday you and I are going to get together and lock horns,” he drawled.

Reuther: “We are together right now and I would like to ask you right now—”

Goldwater: “Wait a minute, Mr. Reuther. You are not asking the questions. I am asking the questions.”

And so it went, until an exasperated entreaty issued from the chair: “Can you folks not get off somewhere and talk this out?”

As Reuther finished up his testimony, Goldwater leaned over to Bobby Kennedy to admit that Republican committee members had no case. “You were right,” he said. “We never should have gotten into this matter.” But Goldwater's feud with Walter Reuther was about more than the legal merits of the case. He had a reelection fight coming up. His crusade against Reuther would win it for him. It would also bring him more than what he had bargained for.

 

It was March 1958, and Goldwater feared for his reelection. Ernest McFarland was now the governor, and he was so eager to win his Senate seat back that he was descending upon every ribbon cutting and church picnic in the state. Goldwater wrote Shadegg worriedly about all the credit McFarland was getting for things he hadn't done. Shadegg gently chided his issues-minded boss: “People have short memories in politics.” He might have added that many of the voters had no memory at all. Arizona's population had increased by a third since Goldwater had first won office. In Phoenix, streets like Rural Road became misnomers overnight. Roadrunners scurried for the hills just ahead of the bulldozers. But Shadegg wasn't taking any chances. In December, he had bought up every single billboard along the state's endless asphalt ribbons (YOUNG *COURAGEOUS*DEDICATED, they read, above a photo of Goldwater chosen by Shadegg that had been taken perhaps ten years earlier). Then he began setting up the cells.

The campaign manager, Shadegg explained in
How to Win an Election,
should follow Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a village,” the dictator wrote, “and I will take the village.” Shadegg's version of the technique was to pool the names of everyone in the state with whom he and his staff could claim personal association. Researchers uncovered each name's banking, church, business, lodge, media, and family connections to create a massive card file. People on the list got a “personal” letter from the senator about some piece of legislation that was threatening to them. When recipients replied, they
were added to the names on the bulk mailing list that received various campaign letters “personally” addressed from their new friend. This produced over three thousand people loyally working in concert for the campaign, none aware of any other's efforts—spreading the right rumors, sending bits of intelligence to the office, setting up events and selling to their friends. Forty years later, labeled “one-to-one marketing” and aided by artificial intelligence technology, this approach would be advertising's cutting edge. Back in the late 1950s such practices were unheard of.

For fifteen months Shadegg had been sending out forms simply reading “Good Government Survey” that invited respondents to give a ten-word description of the senator, list their policy concerns, and the like. He discovered that water rights was an area of prime concern; he also discovered that no one perceived any difference on the issue between Goldwater and McFarland. So much for water rights. (McFarland wasted thousands of dollars on the issue.) He also learned that voters valued Goldwater as a kind of walking embodiment of Arizonans' independent streak. Then the United Auto Workers at their annual meeting in Miami announced that their number one political objective for the year was beating Barry Goldwater. And Shadegg had his campaign: Eastern labor bosses telling Arizonans who their representatives should be.

In May the AFL-CIO sent a staffer from its Committee on Political Education (COPE), Al Green, to move to a Tucson hotel and work on canvassing the labor vote. Painstakingly, all through the summer, Stadegg's private investigators sought to dig up dirt on Green. Mug shots were discovered and procured in California from two past arrests. Then Shadegg arranged with Eugene Pulliam for an expose to be published in the
Republic
on Sunday, October 19—two and a half weeks before the election, a thin enough slice of time that there was little chance McFarland would be able to fight back.

The banner was an inch and a quarter high: “COPE AGENT ‘MUSCLES IN': ARIZONA DEMOCRATS RESENT INVASION.” Mug shots were splayed across the front page—with his eyes beady, hair slicked, face fleshy, and teeth bared, Green looked like he had come straight from the witness table of the McClellan Committee. The caption read: “This is the man sent to Arizona by Reuther and Hoffa to beat Goldwater ... and get control of Arizona State Legislature.” Articles claimed that Green was giving orders to state Democrats and that he had unlimited funds at his disposal, that the “Committee to Cancel Out People's Equality” was as powerful as “all other groups and individuals combined.” The package took up two broadsheet pages. The heat kept up for weeks in both Pulliam papers. (It helped that readers had been softened up for the
message by Kitchel's “Voice of Free Enterprise” column.) If “Big Labor can tear apart Goldwater,” said the
Gazette,
“it can frighten all lesser figures into bondage.”

A thirty-minute television commercial opened up with Goldwater's voice and a shot of a twelve-foot-high blowup of a labor newspaper bearing a derogatory headline about the candidate. “For six years newspapers such as this one have been telling you that Barry Goldwater hates the union men,” the voice said, “and for six years I have been trying to get through this union curtain of thought control”—then the camera focused in as Goldwater burst through the scrim to explain his iron-clad support for the principle of collective bargaining.

It was all very impressive. It was also mostly nonsense. There was no Hoffa/Reuther cartel; Jimmy Hoffa, who liked Goldwater, had just been kicked out of the AFL-CIO by Walter Reuther. The Republic reported that COPE was spending $450,000 on state races in 1958. The actual amount was $14,000. Goldwater was, if anything, more guilty of dealings with non-Arizonans than McFarland was; most of his campaign contributions came from wealthy out-of-state conservatives, much of it from the mysterious Dallas oil tycoon H. L. Hunt and Massachusetts candy manufacturer Robert Welch. And in compiling his scoop, Pulliam was accessory to offenses arguably as damning as the fifteen-year-old ones that had earned Al Green his mug shots: the Dallas outfit of former FBI agents Shadegg hired as his dicks plied their law enforcement contacts to obtain the mug shots illegally. They also tracked Green's long-distance calls and photographed the license plates and faces of everyone who entered the state AFL-CIO's offices.

Election Day came. The Republicans, hoping to piggyback on anti-union sentiment from the McClellan hearings, had sponsored right-to-work initiatives in seven states. The strategy, and the election, was a disaster. Six of the initiatives were crushed, along with the candidates who supported them: gone were conservative stalwarts like Malone of California, Bricker of Ohio, and Jenner of Indiana, thirty-six years of seniority in the Senate among them. In California the party collapsed after Senator William Knowland decided to run for governor and the governor chose to run for Knowland's Senate seat, and both were defeated. COPE had a banner year: 25 of its chosen 32 Senate candidates won, 183 of 294 in the House. Democrats gained five new governorships and 700 new seats in state legislatures. Vice President Richard Nixon, the presumptive presidential nominee, tallied thousands of miles of travel for the party's candidates. Now he would go into 1960 with a bruised reputation.

Only in Arizona was 1958 a Republican year. Paul Fannin, a political neophyte whom Goldwater called the worst speaker he had ever heard, became
one of two new Republican governors (Nelson Rockefeller of New York was the other). Johnny Rhodes once more won reelection to Congress. And Goldwater scored a come-from-behind upset, carrying eleven of fourteen counties and 56 percent of the vote.

He certainly dazzled the Eastern press. A September
Time
article on the race only mentioned the Democrat to note that he was the favorite—then gave over the rest to “the tall, bronzed, lean-jawed, silver-haired man of 49” whose grandfather “packed in behind a mule to found the mercantile business which now does $6,ooo,ooo a year in five department stores, spawned a robustious breed whose reputation for high-jinks Barry did his best to uphold.” The
Saturday Evening
Post, which was outgrowing its Norman Rockwell days to become perhaps the most sophisticated of the weekly slicks, gave over five pages to “The Glittering Mr. Goldwater.”

C
larence Manion returned from Guatemala with his family in April of 1959 and took the measure of his plan to build movements behind both a Republican and a Southern Democrat running on conservative platforms, watch as both were turned back at the respective party conventions, then merge the two organizations to form a new party to back one of the candidates, who, combining the votes of Dixiecrats and Taft Republicans, could finally block the major-party candidates from their electoral college majority. He was still unsure about Goldwater. And General Bonner Fellers, a full-time lobbyist against foreign aid and Manion's eyes and ears in Washington, noted that several claques of Southerners were scrambling to swing Faubus to their own various schemes to throw the election into the House of Representatives.

Manion decided definitely to go forward with the plan when a hero joined his movement. Four-star general Albert C. Wedemeyer had authored the Army War Plans Division's 1940 contingency document for America's joining the war. Its conclusions became a key piece of evidence for right-wingers who argued that Roosevelt had ignored evidence of Japan's plans to attack Pearl Harbor in order to draw America into the war. By 1944, Wedemeyer, a Chinese speaker, had risen to the command of the China-Burma-India theater. After V-J Day he was lent as chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek. There, he filed another report, this one on the operational capabilities of the Chinese Communists and the ability of the Nationalists to beat them. He said that the Nationalists could handily overwhelm Mao if only America would make the commitment to help—10,000 military advisers would be needed to start, he suggested. When his advice was ignored, its author demoted, and China fell to the Communists, the Republican right anointed Wedemeyer as a prophet. And his renown did not stop there; his new book
Wedemeyer
Reports! was a best-seller, and he was featured on the television program
This Is Your Life.
Wedemeyer was a name to organize with.