Wrapped in the Flag (30 page)

There was one bright spot in the Goldwater campaign: “Its grassroots army of almost 4 million activists had mobilized. Campaign workers personally contacted more than 12 million households by mid-October, 4 million more than the Democrats.”
³²

A week before Election Day, Ronald Reagan, movie star, host of
General Electric Theater
, and new Republican convert, added his voice in support of Goldwater. His speech, “A Time for Choosing,” which Reagan had been giving in venues all over the country for several years, put Reagan’s velvet voice and speaking prowess on display for the entire country.
³³

“History will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening,” Reagan said. “I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.”
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He concluded, “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years
of darkness.”

Americans cheered Reagan. “A flood of telephone calls and contributions followed the telecast, testifying to Reagan’s appeal.”
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No matter, over 43 million Americans raced to the polls to vote for LBJ. Barry Goldwater got 38 percent of the popular vote, carried only six states, and received fifty-two Electoral College votes.
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It was a shellacking.

I sat through the election results in stunned silence. My guy had gone down in flames, and I didn’t even get to vote for him. Dejected University of Dallas students bemoaned the plight of conservatives.

“It’ll be a cold day in hell before another conservative is nominated,” one friend said.

“Never mind that,” I answered. “The whole right wing is kaput. My parents and the Birchers just became ancient history.”

Good grief. Were we ever wrong.

On November 4, 1964, Republicans across the country woke up with hangovers no amount of coffee or aspirin would cure. The worst electoral rout in thirty-plus years provoked reams of analysis. Much of it focused on the impact the Goldwater debacle would have on the GOP in general and the conservative movement in particular.

James Reston, writing in the
New York Times
, stated what appeared, at the time, to be obvious: “Barry Goldwater not only lost the Presidential election yesterday but the conservative cause as well. He has wrecked his party for a long time to come.”
³⁷
The
Dallas Morning News
had a similar take: “Democrats Rout GOP.”
Life
described Johnson’s win as “The Mighty Landslide,” and inside, Theodore White’s article spoke of “Republican Wreckage—Now What?”
³⁸
Time
magazine believed that “the conservative cause whose championship Goldwater assumed suffered a crippling setback” and “Barry Goldwater and his type of conservatism have had their moment in the sun.”
³⁹

For months, the pundits dissected and catalogued, opined and bloviated. One of the conclusions reached by almost everyone was simple: the GOP had to embrace moderation.
⁴⁰
“A defiant conservative,” as Reston of the
Times
described Goldwater, could not win a national election.

These political junkies gave passing thought to the five states Goldwater grabbed, states that really heralded the beginning of a major political reorganization. In Mississippi, he had won over 80 percent of the vote, followed closely by Alabama with 70 percent. He also won in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia. Folks noted these wins but didn’t understand the impact.
“Dixie’s defection to conservatism” was a “one-shot affair,” according to the
Washington Post
.
⁴¹

Looking at today’s solid-red South, it’s hard to ignore the inroads made by Goldwater, consolidated by Richard Nixon, and locked down by Ronald Reagan. These days, a Democratic win in the South is as improbable as a hurricane in North Dakota.

Barry Goldwater took some of the blame for the electoral disaster, saying he was “sorry I didn’t do better,” but he insisted that it was the GOP moderates who killed his chances.
⁴²
Those folks, he believed, “have no difference at all with Democratic concepts.” He summed up his analysis with this broadside, “I wasn’t
dishonest
enough in this campaign to win.”

In his biography of Barry Goldwater, Robert Alan Goldberg writes: “Those who fought the odds that year [1964] . . . wear specials badges of identity and honor. They stand apart as the founding generation that in defeat marked future victory.”
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Others have said that Goldwater really won the 1964 election but that it took until Reagan to count the votes. I don’t know if either of those statements is one hundred percent true, but I do know how Robert Welch and the John Birch Society looked at the election.

Welch believed that the Americans who voted for Goldwater were “desperate and almost dying to have, a crusade against the collectivist menace, or against the frightening moral decline . . . or against both.”
⁴⁴
The forty-two million who voted for LBJ, however, were “voting for the repeal of the Declaration of Independence” and “scrapping the United States Constitution entirely, as an absurd and useless antique; and for replacing it with whatever modernistic pieces of legislative furniture might appeal to the taste of the Supreme Court.”
⁴⁵

Welch berated the “good people who have voted for steps which . . . will wipe out the value of all of their savings, their life insurance policies, their bonds and mortgages, and will redistribute wealth from the industrious and frugal into the hands of the shiftless.”
⁴⁶

Over the course of eight pages of election analysis, Welch called Social Security a “gigantic embezzlement” and reminded his readers that “
while food, shelter and clothing are necessities for an individual in a civilized community, the guarantee that he will always have them is not
.”
⁴⁷
(Emphasis mine.)

He also described the views of the Democrats this way: “We protect ourselves from being murdered by committing suicide; or, more specifically, that we prevent the Kremlin’s agents from making us Communist slaves by beating
them to it.”
⁴⁸

Though Welch took to task the forty-two million Americans who voted for LBJ, many pundits laid the election debacle at the feet of the extremists, including the Birchers. Be that as it may, the society bragged that the Goldwater loss had generated big membership gains.

According to Welch, by December of 1964, the JBS had formed 274 new chapters.
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Across the country, a newly energized JBS ran a big ad campaign, “Now Will You Join the John Birch Society?” Apparently thousands of people were saying, “Yes.”

Robin Williams—irreverent, talented, crazy Robin Williams—once said, “If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there.”
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I laughed. I also had to admit that I missed a whole bunch of stuff that defined the 1960s as “the sixties.” I didn’t do Woodstock or experience a California love-in. I was nowhere near the riots in Watts or the shootings at Kent State. Love beads and muumuus were as close as I got to the hippies. I never smoked a joint, dropped acid, or snorted cocaine. As one of my friends said, “Your ‘hip’ gene is missing.”

While the cool cats were stoned and “Hell no, we won’t go” echoed on college campuses, I was safe in my little bubble, reading and studying. I was no genius, but before the decade ended, I thought it would be defined by three assassinations (two Kennedys and one King), racial strife, and the war in Vietnam.

Ronald Reagan, the GOP’s newest star, was gung-ho for the war. “We should declare war on North Vietnam,” he said in October of 1965.
²
“It is silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it, and still be home by Christmas.” The prowar folks, echoing Reagan, shouted, “Give Us Joy, Bomb Hanoi.”
³

Reagan never got his wish about the war declaration, but he got the war he wanted. The year 1966 dawned with 215,000 Americans serving in Vietnam. By December the number had climbed to 389,000. Eventually, 540,000 men would be serving in Southeast Asia.
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As the war escalated, boys my age explored every possible way to avoid the draft. The lucky ones landed critical-skills deferments. Others sought out doctors who would declare them unfit for duty. When all else failed, some fled to Canada. The draft dodgers had plenty of reasons to find ways out of military service. In 1968, 15,000 young Americans came home in body bags. Their average age was twenty.
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For young Americans like me, the Vietnam War was a disaster, a heart-breaking, gut-wrenching one. I believe we saw the truth of it long before the “grown-ups” did.

By early 1968, President Johnson woke up to reality: his presidency had
been shattered by the war. Despite landmark civil rights legislation and the Great Society social-safety-net policies, Vietnam was his Waterloo.
⁶
The Tet Offensive—considered by many historians to have marked the turning point in the Vietnam War—ended Johnson’s political career.
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On March 31, 1968, knowing he could not win reelection, Johnson announced, “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
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Four days later, Dr. Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper. Then, on June 5, Robert Kennedy, a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was gunned down in Los Angeles. To put it mildly, the country was in chaos.

When I think about those times, I believe Robin Williams took the easy way out. It really was easier to be stoned and forget than to be sober and remember.

The chaos of the ’60s played out in my personal life, too.