Before the Storm (10 page)

When a columnist for the Hearst papers reported that Faubus was receiving “thousands and thousands” of letters urging him to run for President, Manion moved. He arranged to meet Dorn in Washington. He circulated to his inner circle a thirteen-page report written by his Arkansas friend Jim Johnson: “Orval Faubus can be elected president of these United States,” it began—and then went on to spell out the strategy that would make George Wallace a presidential contender in years to come. “For every action there is a reaction,” Johnson wrote. “Recent actions by the Federal judiciary which have tended to hasten at a frightening speed the Federal grab for power at the expense of the people and the States have placed the Federal judiciary squarely in the middle of the controversy.... States' Rights have become household words in Ohio as much as in Arkansas or Mississippi.... How well would Orval Faubus do in the North, the Midwest, and the West Coast states? There is only one way to answer that question: by encouraging him to enter presidential primaries in those states.”

“This is the first step in our Committee strategy,” Manion wrote his comrades.

 

There was still the matter of the second half of the plan.

Tentatively—three weeks after he penned it—Manion sent his feeler out to General Wood about backing Goldwater for President. “I think it would not be advisable,” Wood wrote back on April 20, “because I think Nixon has the support of the whole organization.” That was discouraging; so was the fact that Goldwater was by no means the obvious man for the job. He was a generation younger than them, and not exactly a perfect ideological fit. He had gone to the 1952 convention as an Eisenhower delegate, had voted for a higher minimum wage and to extend Social Security, and had voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills. And when one of Manion's friends dined with the Goldwaters in Washington in February of 1959 and said that Barry should run for President, the senator expressed horror at the very idea.

But when the Eighty-sixth Congress was seated in January, Goldwater was practically the Republicans' only star. As the McClellan hearings wound down into a debate on labor law reform, he was gaining national fame as the conservative tail wagging the centrist dog. Democrats Sam Ervin and John F. Kennedy put forward a bill narrowly tailored to stymie the schemes of a Hoffa or a Beck and gave management the sweetener of a ban on unions picketing where they had already lost elections; to labor it offered to allow replacement strikers to vote in union recognition elections. Goldwater thought it was anemic, and threatened to submit his own bill—a contingency that would likely result in no labor reform being passed at all—if the Democrats' bill were not
challenged by a tougher Administration package. Kennedy's bill passed the Labor Committee and went to the Senate floor for debate in the middle of April. Goldwater proposed three poison-pill amendments and promised more. The vote on one was 46 to 46 (Vice President Nixon broke the tie for the Goldwater side); another passed without debate. Everyone assumed a compromise had been struck; Kennedy-Ervin was shaping up as that rare legislative sausage that actually pleased everyone. On April 25, 1959, just after Manion's return from Guatemala, the upper chamber assembled for the vote. Ninety senators voted
aye.
A single senator voted nay-Barry Goldwater. He called the bill “a flea bite to a bull elephant.” The Manionites loved it. He was now their Republican.

Manion brought in Frank Cullen Brophy, an Arizona banker on For America's advisory board and a mover in the short-lived 1955 Campaign for the 48 States, a movement for constitutional amendments to cap the income tax and limit federal spending. Brophy, one of Phoenix's biggest landowners, had sold Goldwater the magnificent hilltop lot where his dream house now stood. They shared a curious passion of Arizona's elite: playing Indian. (On the heel of his left hand, Barry Goldwater wore a tattooed four-dot glyph signifying his initiation into the Smoki Clan, a Prescott “tribe” complete with its own creation myth—cobbled together from the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology—and an annual dance pageant; Brophy led a similar outfit called the St. John's Mission Indian Dancers.) Manion was friends with Brophy. Brophy was friends with Goldwater. Maybe together they had a chance of convincing him.

One Monday in May, Brophy wrote Goldwater: When they got together later in the month, did he mind meeting with “several people whose opinion both you and I respect” to discuss a political project? Brophy hinted that General Wedemeyer might show up.

The audience was May 15, in Washington. First Manion met with Representative Dorn, who agreed that Goldwater was a good choice for the Republican half of their scheme. Then Manion joined his friends in imploring Barry to run—or at least let them form Goldwater Clubs to drum up support for him. They wanted to know if Goldwater would, even if he chose not to actively cooperate with them, at least stay out of their way—and whether he would yield gracefully to a draft if the boom they expected took shape. Goldwater gave a response he would echo many more times in the years to follow as supplicants paraded before him with arguments much the same: He was a loyal Republican, he said, and he would do nothing to harm the party. He supported Nixon. But it was his duty not to stand in the way of the wishes of the party's rank and file, were they made sufficiently clear. Though it seemed to him that someone with a Jewish name couldn't be an effective candidate.

Manion left for Indiana in a mood of cautious optimism. And Goldwater left for a speaking engagement in Greenville, South Carolina.

 

Goldwater traveled some ten thousand miles a month that year for the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, always giving the same speech to any local audience that would have him: “Balance our budgets ... stop this utterly ridiculous agriculture program... get the federal government out of business—every business”; sell the Tennessee Valley Authority “if we can only get a dollar for it”; stop “the unbridled power of union bosses.” He spoke in a dehydrated, movie-cowboy tenor, slipping his heavy black spectacles on and off to match his awkward rhythms, now and again raising his voice in anger, sometimes stammering awkwardly. And to the right audience he could barely get his words out for the applause.

The question was whether this was that audience. Goldwater didn't often visit the states of the Old Confederacy, since there were practically no Republican Senate candidates below the Mason-Dixon line. In the land where Faulkner said the past isn't even past, the word “Republican” still signified the political wing of the marauding Union Army. By the time Republican carpetbaggers were routed in the 1870s, the South was codifying a system of racial segregation to cow the potentially insurrectionary black population in its midst. And the ruling Bourbons had indoctrinated the people that if a second party were to grow up in the South, it would only have to court Negroes as its allies in order to take over—evoking visions of Negro domination and rape on the order of D. W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation.

State Republican organizations survived as shells, “post office parties” that existed only to deliver their “black-and-tan” delegations at Republican conventions in exchange for federal patronage if the GOP won the White House. They had a vested interest in remaining as meager and insular as possible—“rotten boroughs,” in political parlance. Since convention delegations were apportioned by voting population, not by Republican population, the black-and-tans were unaccountable to any grass roots. The delegates were tractable black citizens proud to represent the Party of Lincoln even if only as puppets of Democratic bosses. In the South, went the joke, Republicans were all rank and damned little file. Mississippi's black Republican chair for thirty-six years didn't even live in Mississippi. In South Carolina it could be impossible to vote for a Republican even if you wanted to, lest the local sheriff come knocking on your door; the secret ballot had only been instituted there in 1950.

But the South, like Arizona, was changing. During and after World War II the South had also filled up with fortune-seeking outsiders unschooled in the curious political folkways of their new home. The newcomers formed a potential
Republican base. And to the rest of the South's (white) citizenry, the Democratic Party was looking worse all the time. It started at the 1936 convention when the party first seated black delegates (a black minister gave the convocation; South Carolina senator “Cotton Ed” Smith walked out: “This mongrel meeting ain't no place for a white man!”). That convention also suspended a rule that candidates needed two-thirds of the delegates to win the nomination—and with it the South's veto power. In 1947 Truman tentatively welcomed the conclusions of his Committee on Civil Rights, whose report To Secure These Rights defined the legislative agenda for the modern civil rights movement. At the 1948 convention Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey declared it was “time for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk in the sunshine of human rights,” and he maneuvered a robust civil rights plank into the platform. South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond led a walkout to form a third party.

Southern Democrats claimed the gestures toward civil rights were only demagogic and expedient attempts to hustle the votes of urban blacks in the North so the party could turn its back on the South. But where else could Southerners go? Until about 1958, Republicans were more liberal on race than the Democrats were (although it wasn't hard to take a liberal stand on race so long as it was seen as a Southern problem, and the Republicans didn't have any white Southerners to placate). Many chose to vote for General Eisenhower as their protest against the civil rightsters taking over the national Democratic Party, some for quite idealistic reasons: a second party would light a fire under lazy Democratic courthouse hacks. Ike won a majority of the region's electoral votes in 1956. Those gains were lost after he federalized the National Guard at Little Rock Central High in 1957—reluctantly, to be sure; a frequent visitor to the South, Eisenhower was rather fond of its folkways, truth be told. But the GOP was not ready to give up the fight: also in 1957, Republican National Committee chair Meade Alcorn put one of his best men, the affable Virginian I. Lee Potter, to building a rank and file in the South in a project called “Operation Dixie.”

Its biggest success had been in South Carolina. The first state to bolt the Union had always been the surliest in the Democratic coalition. Its senior senator, Olin Johnston, already chaired the Post Office and Civil Service Committees, so South Carolinians didn't want for patronage. Strom Thurmond, now the junior senator, was hardly a Democratic loyalist after his 1948 Dixiecrat presidential run, and after threatening to bolt the party once again in 1956. Meanwhile, the state was eager to lure more right-to-work Republican industrialists. In 1956 Herb Kohler, in the heat of the strike, built a $12 million ceramics factory in South Carolina; in 1958 six new factories were built in the town
of Spartanburg alone. In 1959, after Gerber chose to build a $3 million baby-food plant in a nearby town whose blue laws didn't prevent the company from running shifts on Sundays, Spartanburg voted to repeal its blue laws altogether.

Two men were instrumental in bringing the modern South Carolina Republican Party into the world. Gregory D. Shorey was a poster child for the latest New South. A Massachusetts native, he had settled in Greenville in 1950, founded a water-sports equipment company, and led the state's Eisenhower campaign in 1952. But it is unlikely that the Republican Party in South Carolina would have got so far so fast through the 1950s without the cover given potential recruits by Roger Milliken, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the state. Milliken came from a Northeastern textile family who had been Republican since the 186os, and who began building mills in South Carolina in 1884. Shy and brilliant, a virtuoso in industrial modernization (his company would register almost fifteen hundred patents), Milliken took over the family's booming business in 1947 after graduating from Yale. He was a conservative's conservative: in 1956, when workers at his Darlington factory organized to form a union, Milliken shut it down permanently rather than negotiate.

Together, Shorey and Milliken had scared up enough genuine rank-and-file Republicans to hold a respectable convention in 1959, in Greenville. Goldwater's speech, on May 16, was broadcast live on statewide television. For saying that
Brown v. Board of Education
should “not be enforced by arms” because it was “not based on law,” he became a sensation—the Republican Yankee who preached the states' rights gospel.

Shortly afterward, Manion received what should have been encouraging news from Arkansas—a letter, coded for security, from one of Faubus's administrative assistants announcing that the governor was considering the conservative group's offer. But by then the point was moot. When Dorn sent Manion the newspaper accounts of Goldwater's hero's welcome in Greenville, Manion realized that to go forward courting Faubus was entirely unnecessary. Goldwater would do for the South
and
the North. That was Wednesday. On Thursday Manion began sending out invitations and working the phones to assemble a Goldwater for President committee from among his most trusted friends and biggest donors. By the next week he had fired up the Robotype machine and had gone down his mailing list.

And so on the first day of June 1959, a phalanx of proprietors of small, family-owned manufacturing companies—men born in the waning years of the nineteenth century, who had fought the U.S. entry into World War II; who had their hearts broken once, then twice, then three times, when Robert Alonzo Taft was spurned by their party; who feared Communism only slightly more than
they feared Walter Reuther and an unsound dollar if they didn't just believe they all amounted to the same thing—received a letter marked “CONFIDENTIAL” from Dean Clarence Manion of South Bend, Indiana.