Before the Storm (91 page)

Sometimes he said that the nuclear holocaust would kill 100 million people; other times, like Joe McCarthy with his famous list of subversives in the State Department, the number was revised to 300 million. Then he would say, “I want to conclude by reminding you that you still have three more days to register.”

The aide responsible for gauging crowd reaction noted “an unusual, even sometimes awe-inspiring, intensity from the audiences when he even gets close to the general theme of peace in the world.” Johnson did so about as often as he drew breath. (His case was bolstered by a new picture out in theaters, Fail-Safe-another horrifying, helpless depiction of the nuclear Armageddon that would ensue from even the smallest error in judgment, the most minuscule breakdown in communication.) So frequently did he praise the good, decent Republicans who stood up to Goldwater—“the Republican party today,” he would say, “is in temporary receivership; responsible Republicans can't do anything about it”—it was as if Dwight D. Eisenhower were the Democratic running mate. And peace. Peace was everything. “Vote for peace in the United States between labor and business and government ... vote for peace among all people.”

The President held crowds to a hush as he dramatically related the tale of sitting beside Kennedy (he hadn't) in October of 1962, as Khrushchev and Kennedy came “eyeball to eyeball, and their thumbs started getting closer to mash that nuclear button, the knife was in each other's ribs, almost literally speaking, and neither of them were flinching or quivering”—“until Mr. Khrushchev picked up his missiles and put them on his ships and took them back home.” He told, in other words, bedtime stories: the child's deepest fears are aroused, to be safely assuaged when the scary monster under the bed is vanquished and everything turns out right at the end.

“Elmo Roper, polling privately for Luce,” John Bartlow Martin scrawled to Moyers, “says LBJ is farther ahead than FDR in 1936. Can't believe it, is worried, but there it is.” Johnson behaved as if he hadn't received the word. He constantly ordered up new billboards and ads and polls; get-out-the-vote ads ran in newspapers as early as October 1 (“No matter how good the prospect for victory on Election Day ... a huge landslide vote will really show where our nation stands on the great issues of modern times which so deeply affect all our
people and all mankind ... a chance to eradicate the fanatical right-wing influence in our political life”). He returned to Detroit and, of course, the crowds went wild again; it wasn't enough to satisfy him. The next morning Johnson breathed fire into the phone of Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins: “Didn't I tell you I wanted every worker to have a button or an LBJ hat or sticker?” he roared. “Do you want me to lose the labor vote? I ask for things, and I expect to see them done.”

Jenkins had begun working for Johnson in 1939, and had seen twenty-five years of fifteen-hour days. He was used to the abuse. He had never had another boss. If Moyers was the President's spare brain, Jenkins was his walking IBM computer. He had adopted Johnson's ambitions and made them his own—even naming his son Lyndon. Johnson reciprocated by entrusting Jenkins with about as much as a man could be entrusted with: Congressman Johnson's income taxes (Jenkins had power of signature), treasurership of Senator Johnson's holding company, presence at National Security Council meetings. “They're trying to make Walter Jenkins a criminal,” Johnson complained to Bob Anderson in January as Republicans were trying to bring the aide before their tribunal on the Baker case, “and he's the best man that ever lived.” Jenkins told people he was put on this earth to help make this great man's life easier. Even if that meant he was so frazzled that office wags liked to bark “Walter!” when he napped to see how high he would jump.

 

People's response to seeing Johnson in the flesh was primal. Sometimes security men used their fists to keep crowds from smothering the President; sometimes they had to reach for their guns when rope lines snapped. Everywhere it was the same: people packed shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye could see. The President stood on his limousine seat and seemed to float above the crowd. Photos looked like laboratory demonstrations—a million iron filings massing around an electric charge, bodies falling inward, arms outstretched, as if the President was the center of the world and his magnetism could give them life.

In the spectacle liberal intellectuals spied Newtonian perfection: the pull toward consensus, the push away from extremism, a system regressing toward a safe, steady equilibrium. The architecture of their thoughts allowing little place for such things, they missed the more mystical aspects of the transaction—the feelings sweeping these throngs that Americans, because America was not a monarchy, were not supposed to feel: their young ruler had died, and they reached out to the new one with raw, naked need, to fill an empty place, as if with his touch he could, just as he had promised,
let us continue,
as if the bad things hadn't happened at all.

And since the South was but a soon-to-be vestigial aberration from the main story of American life, the propagandists of consensus did not consider the bumpers of Southern truckers in their investigations. Their most popular new gag license plate pictured a black woman monstrous with child, admitting, “I went all de way wif LBJ.”

When Lady Bird's train was about to arrive in New Orleans, the President took a dramatic half-mile walk down the track to meet it. A crowd of blacks followed alongside, doing the leaning, the reaching, the crying out. Beyond them a white crowd recoiled in disgust.

Lay low on civil rights. Especially in New Orleans.
Imperatively
in New Orleans: that had been the advice. Johnson ignored it. There was nothing about the year 2000 in the evening's speech, broadcast live throughout Louisiana and Mississippi from the Jung Hotel banquet hall. Nor was there any rambling on the rattling of rockets, or on responsible Republicans, or on Molly and the babies. An old shame rose up in the candidate, and he spoke to that instead. He glanced over at Senator Long and poured it on thick, singing songs of praise for his father, Huey, that made the old senator blush. He talked about the North—and how much Southerners should resent it. “All these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities and dividing us.” Then he twisted the knife.

“I am not going to let them build up the hate and try to buy my people by appealing to their prejudice,” he said, leaning in to tell “you folks” a story. An old senator—“whose name ah won't call”—was on his deathbed, and Old Sam—House Speaker Sam Rayburn—was there beside him. His people were going hungry, the sick man said. The hospitals, the schools, the roads were deteriorating. “Sammy,” he said, “I wish I felt a little better.... I would like to go back down there and make one more Democratic speech. I feel like I have one in me! My poor old state, they haven't heard a Democratic speech in thirty years. All they ever hear at election time is: ‘Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!' ”

Dryly, a Goldwater intelligence man wrote that “Johnson probably put the finishing touches on his chances of taking Louisiana with his civil rights speech in New Orleans.” Johnson didn't care. The South—his South—was where his visions of the wonders that awaited a Great Society in the year 2000 ran aground. Let Goldwater talk all he wanted to about how the South's Republicans were idealistic devotees of free-market capitalism. Johnson never heard Leander Perez or George Wallace complain about what the federal government's TVA and Rural Electrification Administration had done to bring their people out of darkness and into hydro-powered electric light, or about the hospitals, schools, and roads that Washington had helped them build.

And what had Barry Goldwater done for Culpeper? He had voted against the Civil Rights Act; nothing else. For that Southerners seemed willing to turn back the clock on every social gain of the past thirty years—just for the chance to vote
nigger-nigger-nigger.
It made Lyndon Johnson heartsick. He wanted his four more years. He wanted a mandate. He wanted to do some healing.

T
he keynote speaker for the fourth annual national convention of Young Americans for Freedom at New York's plush Commodore Hotel was the group's thirty-nine-year-old patriarch: William F. Buckley. It was YAFers' New Year's Eve and their Fourth of July. They were now a force to be reckoned with. They marched at the head of a presidential crusade.

YAFers, Young Republicans, clubs organized through the RNC's Youth for Goldwater-Miller: they worked from dawn to dusk, licking envelopes, phoning phone trees, planting yard signs, thumbing files, penciling precinct notecards, passing out literature at factory gates before the dew was off the grass. It was indescribable, the exhilaration they felt those long days, exhausting themselves for the highest cause they could imagine. It remade you; it made everything else seem small. They had no words to describe it. They could have borrowed some from the civil rights kids, who called it a “freedom high.” The Commodore rang with stories of freedom highs that weekend. What there wasn't was doubt. They were young, idealistic; triumph was inevitable, for they were battling for the Lord. They couldn't but assume that their hero felt exactly the same way.

He did not. Bill Buckley had been skeptical about Goldwater presidential maneuvers since Clarence Manion invited him to join his endeavor in 1959. “I am especially anxious not to dissipate unnecessarily any conservative resources,” he wrote Manion then, “and don't want to be identified with a total political failure.” His position had hardly changed since, and not just because Baroody and Kitchel had humiliated him in the pages of the New York Times the previous September by planting a story that he was trying to take over the campaign. Buckley's approach to practical politics bore the heavy imprint of his friend the late Whittaker Chambers. In brooding, brilliant letters he used to post to Buckley from his upstate retreat in the dark days of the Eisenhower Administration, Chambers spun an argument redolent of his Marxist past:
social change was borne on tides of historical inevitability. If conservatism overreached before its time, it risked a setback of decades. Then there was the problem of Goldwater himself. Buckley had had a conversation recently with Richard Clurman, Time's chief of correspondents, who had gone from an editors' lunch with Goldwater to a dinner party with Buckley—where Clurman wondered aloud just what was Barry Goldwater's appeal to this brilliant, urbane man he respected. “Barry Goldwater is a man of tremendously decent instincts, and with a basic banal but important understanding of the Constitution and what it means in American life,” Buckley explained.

“But what would happen if he were elected President of the United States?” Clurman asked.

“That,” Buckley quipped, “might be a serious problem.”

He was making truer believers fume. “You are displaying a compulsion to proclaim, on every possible occasion, that Goldwater will be resoundingly defeated in November,” Rusher implored after Buckley began seeding his columns with the Chambers argument that spring. “What you say about Goldwater's chances in November can have a measurable effect.” But that was Buckley's story, and he was sticking to it. Not that his brow didn't bead with sweat, however, that September night at the YAF convention, as he took his place behind the podium at the Commodore and looked out at faces that burned with the pure blue flame of faith.

“We do not believe in the Platonic affirmation of our own little purities,” he began his speech. (
Immanentizing the eschaton:
That was for the liberals.)

“To no one's surprise more than our own,” he continued, “we labor under the visitation of a freedom-minded candidate for the President of the United States.... A great rainfall has deluged a thirsty earth, but before we had time to properly prepare for it.

“I speak, of course, about the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater.”

His heresy sucked the air out of the room. The silence was broken by the sound of a single woman sobbing.

He tried to explain:

The point, he said in conclusion, was now to win recruits. “Not only for November the third, but for future Novembers: to infuse the conservative spirit in enough people to entitle us to look about us ... not at the ashes of defeat, but at the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future”—ending, with a nice apocalyptic touch: “if there is a future.”

There wasn't even a smattering of applause. There was trauma. This was not what this fiery little body of dissenters wanted to hear.

Even if their patriarch was correct. They were not spinning off a majority of all the American people. But the seeds were being planted.