Before the Storm (11 page)

And so he gathered the sons of Acme Steel of Chicago and of Wood River Oil & Refining Company of Wichita; of Uncle Johnny Mills of Houston and Lone Star Steel of Dallas; of Rockwell Manufacturing of Pittsburgh and Roberts Dairy of Omaha; of Kentucky Color and Chemical and Youngstown Sheet & Tube; of Lockport Felt and the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company; of United Specialties and Memphis Furniture Manufacturing and Avondale Mills and Henderson Mills and American Aggregates and Downing Coal and United Elastic, to go out to try to change the world.

 

To most of the country—to Brent Bozell's “vast uncommitted middle”—these maneuverings couldn't have been more obscure. A new decade dawned, and the Establishment had spoken: it was a time of enormous possibility—if only the greatest nation in the world weren't too much like a rich, portly old man to wake up and grab it. If it did, as Arthur Schlesinger wrote in a much discussed
piece in the January 1960 issue of
Esquire
called “The New Mood in Politics,” from the vantage point of the 196os, the 195os would appear as “a listless interlude, quickly forgotten, in which the American people collected itself for greater exertions and higher splendors in the future”—and “the central problem will be increasingly that of fighting for individual dignity, identity and fulfillment in an affluent society.”

Like sentiments crowded the magazines on the nation's coffee tables. There had never been a decade rung in with such heady self-consciousness of high purpose. John F. Kennedy was the new mood's self-proclaimed political prophet, kicking off his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination warning of a “trend in the direction of a slide downhill into dust, dullness, languor, and decay.” Such phrases—taunts, almost—would ring through his campaign speeches over the coming summer and fall: “If we stand still here at home, we stand still around the world.... If you are tired and don't want to move, then stay with the Republicans.... I promise you no sure solutions, no easy life.” Under his administration there would be “new frontiers for America to conquer in education, in science, in national purpose—not frontiers on a map, but frontiers of the mind, the will, the spirit of man.”

Kennedy was styled the very incarnation of action, of youth, of vigor, of everything conservatism was presumed not to be. “Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking,” Adlai Stevenson said, introducing the candidate in California, “the people said, ‘How well he spoke!,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, ‘Let us march'?” When Harris showed the “America is going soft” refrain as Kennedy's highest-scoring campaign theme by far, Richard Nixon added to his own speeches an amen chorus: “So I say, yes, there are new frontiers, new frontiers here in America, new frontiers all over the universe in which we live.... The United States needs more roads, more schools, more hospitals. This is what our opponent says. But we can do it better—because they want to send the job to Washington and do it by massive spending.”

The youth were stirring. The Student YMCA-YWCA drew thousands to a conference called “The Search for Authentic Experience”; the same year an editor of the student newspaper at Cornell led students in a rock-throwing riot against the doctrine of in loco parentis; at the University of California's massive Berkeley campus a coalition of self-professed radicals overturned the Greek machine for leadership of student government. Everywhere on campuses paperbacks of a certain description were avidly passed from hand to hand: William H. Whyte's
The Organization Man,
David Riesman's
The Lonely Crowd,
Paul Goodman's
Growing Up Absurd,
John Kenneth Galbraith's
The Affluent Society;
Sartre, Camus, Ayn Rand, Vance Packard,

C. Wright Mills; George Orwell's
1984
and Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World
—glorifications of stalwart, lone individuals who chose authenticity and autonomy and risk over conformity and prosperity and ease, a philosophy embodied by the four black college students who had almost on a whim done no more than order coffee at a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter in February and sparked a movement in seventy cities that winter in which well-scrubbed young black men and women put their bodies on the line to challenge the social order of an entire region.

The “new mood in politics” did not seem to bode well for Clarence Manion's cadres—rich, portly old men, in the main. They would have been as shocked as anyone else to find out that the man who ended up spearheading their crusade would express the zeitgeist as well as the handsome young senator from Massachusetts.

Recruitment had been slower than the dean had hoped through the summer of 1959
.
Some prospects were already committed to Nixon; others said Goldwater didn't have “a Chinaman's chance” (Gene Pulliam's words); some insisted any candidate be vetted for his position on a pet nostrum like repeal of the income tax or withdrawal from the United Nations. Some Southerners Manion called still held onto the fantastic notion that one of their own might sweep the Democratic nomination. Many told him they were just too old.

But by July, Manion had a hook. “We hope to publish a 100 page booklet on Americanism by Senator Goldwater,” he now wrote in his entreaties, “which can be purchased by corporations and distributed by the hundreds of thousands.”

The idea for the booklet had come in the middle of June. Through the ministrations of Frank Brophy, Manion had negotiated the grudging noninterference of Goldwater in their efforts to publish something under his name. In exchange for Manion keeping the Goldwater for President committee secret until the pamphlet was released, and going no further without the prospective candidate's permission, Goldwater promised to endorse no one for the 1960 nomination, thus keeping his own name open. He probably agreed to that much in the certain belief that nothing would come of it. “I doubt there's much money to be made by mass sale of a Goldwater manifesto,”
National Review
editor Bill Buckley told Manion, citing “the difficulties Taft had in 1952 peddling his foreign policy book.”

Recruitment picked up. Manion already had his friend J. Bracken Lee, recently voted out as governor of Utah after he refused to pay federal income tax, and whose Committee of
50
States was working on a constitutional amendment to dissolve the federal government when U.S. debt reached a specified amount. Now Herb Kohler signed on to the Manion committee, and his
fame drew dozens more prominent conservative names: movie stars and HUAC-friendly witnesses Joel McCrea and Adolphe Menjou; erstwhile FDR Naval Secretary and New Jersey governor Charles Edison, son of the inventor; Spruille Braden, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia and Chile; Robert Welch, a former candy executive, now convening mysterious two-day symposia across the country laying out a sweeping and gothic new vision for fighting the Communist conspiracy; the fire-breathing anticommunist lecturer from Alton, Illinois, Phyllis Schlafly. Now Manion had a movement. “Dear Clarence: Please pardon the informality of this salutation,” one committeeman began a letter. “If we are working together for the world, first names are now respectably in order.”

There was considerable doubt whether Manion was worthy of this man's confidence. He didn't have a publisher. He had hired Brent Bozell as ghostwriter, but then the ghostwriter promptly went missing for the next three weeks. (He was sojourning in Spain, where he had begun a romance with Catholic monarchism.) When Bozell resurfaced, Manion celebrated by announcing in mid-July that the booklet would “appear about the time our Committee is announced—not sooner than 60 days hence.”

That wasn't even in the ballpark. For, sixty-two days hence, Khrushchev would visit the United States, in a trip just announced, and presently all other political activity on the right ground to a halt. Bozell convened a Committee for the Freedom of All Peoples, Manion a National Committee of Mourning (to greet Khrushchev, he announced, with public prayers, the tolling of bells, and black arm bands). Robert Welch's Committee Against Summit Entanglements circulated petitions accusing Eisenhower of treason; Buckley's
National Review
held a melodramatic rally at Carnegie Hall, with Buckley promising in a press conference to dye the Hudson River red to greet the Butcher of Moscow. Milwaukee's Allen-Bradley Company bought a full page in the
Wall Street Journal:
“To Khrushchev, ‘Peace and Friendship' means the total enslavement of all nations, of all peoples, of all things, under the God-denying Communist conspiracy of which he is the current Czar.... Don't let it happen here!”

Khrushchev left; the republic stood; new headaches arose. Manion had secured a publisher—Publishers Printing Co., in tiny Shepherdsville, Kentucky, whose specialty was trade magazines (it was the only printer that didn't say it was impossible to publish and distribute a book in time for the Republican Convention in July). But now a rival group, We, The People!, hosted Goldwater at the group's fifth annual “Constitution Day Convention” in Chicago, where there was much backroom talk of drafting him for President. Manion let the leaders in on his plans, and they agreed to back off. No sooner had Manion
tamped down those flames than the wild-eyed New Orleansian Kent Courtney, the most scabrous pamphleteer on the right, and his wife, Phoebe, held an “Independent American Forum and New Party Rally” in Chicago. “I have been busy on the phone continuously trying to keep this group from going off half-cocked,” Manion wrote despairingly to Dorn. It took a trip to New Orleans, and negotiations until 2 a.m., to ward off the Courtneys. Manion, losing heart, had even considered joining Jim Johnson in an attempt to draft Governor Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina for an independent elector scheme, or perhaps dropping Goldwater in favor of General Wedemeyer. There was still no text for what was tentatively being called “What Americanism Means to Me.” On November 16, Manion penned a stiff note to Hub Russell:
“Keep after Bozell!
”

By then Brent Bozell was at home in Chevy Chase writing like a house afire, starting and finishing the Goldwater manuscript within six weeks. All he had needed was an incentive. Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller provided it. Rocky had begun approaching party activists around the country to back him in a run for President. And if Nixon and Rockefeller deadlocked at the convention—perhaps Goldwater's moment would come.

 

The second son of John Davison Rockefeller Jr. had been the first of his clan to broach the unseemly world of politics. It was a matter of family temperament. If the reserve, discipline, and Baptist discretion of the patriarch John D. Rockefeller Sr. was legendary, these traits were only bested by John D. Jr. His “never-ending preoccupation,” wrote one of the family's many chroniclers, was “with what being a Rockefeller
meant.”
It did not mean slapping boozy ward bosses on their overly broad backs.

There was also the matter of a certain realism. A spawn of the houses of Aldrich and Rockefeller could not exactly have been expected to inspire devotion among the unwashed masses: there had never been a more forthright defender of the prerogatives of Big Business than Nelson Aldrich, the industrial magnate that muckraker Lincoln Steffens labeled “the boss of the United States.” John D. Rockefeller Sr. did not exactly win his oil monopoly in a manner calculated to win his progeny the loyalty of 50 percent plus one of the voters. When the idea of running Nelson Rockefeller for New York governor was proposed in high Republican councils in 1954, the room erupted in laughter: “For the Republican Party to nominate a Rockefeller,” chortled one, “would be
suicidal
!
”

For Rockefellers there were better—quieter—ways to place one's stamp on the world. If some exquisitely principled soul sought to avoid the taint of the Rockefeller billions he would have a job on his hands. If he were the descendant
of slaves he might want to forgo a university education (Rockefeller funds kept the nation's Negro colleges in the black); if he were a New Yorker he should boycott milk (the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research had sanitized the city's supply); if he were Chinese he'd better stay healthy (the family's China Medical Board trained a generation of physicians); if he was of a wandering bent he would forgo the pleasures of Versailles (renovated with Rockefeller cash), Grand Teton National Park (Rockefeller land), the Agora in Greece (excavated thanks to the family's largesse), and Tokyo's Imperial University (rebuilt by the Rockefeller Foundation after the disastrous earthquake of 1923). And on and on—all welcome expense for the privilege of serving God and country without ever having to venture into the distasteful task of grubbing for votes.