Before the Storm (13 page)

A historian once wrote of the Chandler family and their
Times,
“it would take in the East a combination of the Rockefellers
and
the Sulzbergers to match their power and influence.” Much of it stemmed from that moment in 1890 when a printer's strike shut down the plants of Los Angeles's four newspapers and only the
Times's
patriarch, General Harrison Gray Otis, Norman Chandler's grandfather, kept his machines running. For this—and his attendant crusade to make southern California the most union-free region in America—thugs in 1910 blew up the printing plant (and Otis began tooling around town in an armored car with machine guns mounted on the hood). The
Times,
its news columns as much as its editorial pages—its news columns sometimes
more
than its editorial pages—had been a blaring, smearing voice for conservatism ever since. But in 1958 Chandler named a new managing editor with the mandate to make the paper professional and fair. From that point forward, the editorializing would go on the editorial page. Which meant that the newspaper needed more people to do the editorializing. The editorial board offered Goldwater a thrice-weekly column. After securing Steve Shadegg as his ghostwriter, Barry agreed to a January 1960 debut.

Meanwhile Rockefeller traveled to California, Oregon, Missouri, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida. Occasionally he would be received warmly; more often his appearances were debacles. Nixon loyalists would arrange for only one hundred tickets to be sold at a two-hundred-seat hall so the press would report that Nelson had spoken to a half-filled house. In New Hampshire Nixon's people infiltrated a press conference to needle Rockefeller
with embarrassing questions. At Chicago no one met him at the airport. “The more I campaign,” he lamented, “the more I drive the party to the right.” He didn't understand why. Nelson Rockefeller could never understand why.

You could almost imagine him, traveling across the nation in his private jet, entourage in tow, bestirring in Republicans long-buried folk memories: the ghost of John D. Rockefeller Sr., the brilliant and ruthless young oil man, rumbling across Ohio wantonly buying up every refinery in his path through means fair and foul but mostly foul, neatly folding enterprises built up through the sweat of generations into the Standard Oil juggernaut and rendering once-proud independent men mere nodes within a great and impersonal bureaucracy. His grandson grew up to make it his career to spend money he hadn't earned—his grandfather's first, then, as governor, that of millions of ordinary, hard-working New Yorkers.
“Many gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution, have fallen under the direction of Internationalists, One-Worlders, Socialists and Communists,”
the old Manion fund-raising appeal ran.
“Much of this vast horde of money is being used to ‘socialize' the United States.”
Rockefeller spoke once at the Advertising Club in Chicago. He was introduced as Nelson Roosevelt—“another Republican who wants to betray his class and go to Washington and wreck the economy.”

He returned home from the disastrous tour and, the day after Christmas, released a statement announcing that his presidential explorations had come to a “definite and final” close.

O
ver the holidays Goldwater skimmed Bozell's manuscript and pronounced it fine. On January 23, 1960, his column, “How Do You Stand, Sir?,” debuted in the
Los Angeles Times.
And twenty-nine members of Manion's Goldwater for President committee finally met in person. It was the same locale as his For America third-party meeting almost a year earlier, the posh Union League Club in downtown Chicago. They were getting more politically savvy. W. W. Wannamaker Jr., the new Republican chair from South Carolina, said that his organization was ready to commit its thirteen convention delegates to Goldwater—though, should it be judged bad publicity to launch the cause in Dixie, his people would publicly back Nixon for the time being.

Manion explained the plans for the book. “Victor Publishing,” the dummy imprint he had set up and licensed as a Kentucky-based not-for-profit, would publish 50,000 copies in March. Friendly businesses would be approached to make bulk purchases, which would be tax deductible as a business expense. (Since his radio show had gone on the air in 1954 as a “Non-Profit Educational Trusteeship, Politically Non-Partisan,” Manion had been packaging transcripts of his programs just this way: 175,000 copies of a fusillade against the Tennessee Valley Authority—characterized as “wholesale fraud”—for power companies to distribute to customers with their bills; a like number of blasts at Social Security—“wholesale humbug”—for life insurance company stockholders.) The members of Americans for Goldwater—as the committee, which had never quite got up to one hundred, was now called—would buy the copies at $I each and resell them for $3, keeping a dollar vig for themselves and remitting the rest to the organization.

Now Clarence Manion was in the book business. Throughout February, pages were sent in batches to the printer in Kentucky and Shadegg in Arizona

(who was vetting them for the senator) almost as they rolled off Bozell's typewriter. Manion had sent an announcement to all the names on his Robotype punched tapes. Now he was taking orders. Brent Bozell dropped in on a board meeting of Robert Welch's new John Birch Society to announce that the book was almost ready for shipping; the Birchers watched, amazed, as Fred Koch, a Wichita oil refiner, ordered 2,500 copies, then turned to his friend Bob Love, a county Republican chair who owned a box factory, and ordered him: “You send it out.” The 2,500 were dutifully earmarked for Mr. Love's warehouse, to be circulated to every library, newspaper, and VIP in Kansas. The publication date was set for April 15. Manion promised Roger Milliken that he would move heaven and earth to deliver 500 hand-sewn copies for Goldwater's triumphant return to the South Carolina Republican convention on March 26. Soon 10,000 copies were committed.

But Publishers Printing Company would not recoup its investment unless 50,000 copies were sold. To do that Manion would need to get the thing into bookstores. So they sent out review copies and took out newspaper ads. Before long booksellers were dutifully contacting one Victor Publishing Company in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, with orders. That was a problem. The Shepherdsville operator had not yet been apprised of the existence of a Victor Publishing Company. That crisis resolved, the first boxes were shipped to stores on April 7. April 8, the president of Publishers Printing, Frank Simon, began answering his private line “Victor Publishing.”

Manion and Simon were offering bookstores what seemed to them a fair deal: books were shipped upon receipt of a dollar per unit, and the booksellers could keep $2 profit on each book sold. They were unaware that in retail book-selling inventory is shipped to stores on credit, and unsold copies are returned to the publisher, so the risk of trading in an unsaleable book belongs to the publisher, not the bookseller (Simon soon found this out from booksellers who called to fulminate over his private line). Meanwhile Manion fielded angry telegrams from his people that the book was unavailable in their hometown bookstores. But the angriest telegram came from Senator Goldwater. He had not yet received his two hundred author's copies. The next day Manion and Simon tracked Barry's cartons to a warehouse in D.C., where they had sat for three days with the labels stripped off. They suspected union sabotage; Goldwater agreed and contacted the FBI. It was the most interest he had taken in the project to date.

A slim hardback called
Conscience of a Conservative,
127 pages, red, white, and blue on the front, a picture of Goldwater on the back, eventually did find its way into the stores that spring. A month later
Barron's
published an
article on its front page about a phenomenon. The book debuted at number ten on
Time
magazine's best-seller list on June 6, and number fourteen on the New
York Times's
list on June 26—alongside books by authors like James Michener, Leon Uris, and Allen Drury. By the time voters went to the polls in November to choose between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, there were half a million copies in print. Shepherdsville, Kentucky, was, for a brief, shining moment, a mover and shaker in the publishing world. The book was selling fastest in college bookstores—typically scooped up, the
Wall Street Journal
reported, alongside the perennial adolescent best-seller
The Catcher in the Rye.

 

Why, a year and a half after the electorate had turned nearly every last conservative out of Congress, was America buying
Conscience of a Conservative?

Think of a college bookstore, perhaps at one of the new universities in California, its sprawling, bland, concrete campus as big as a medium-sized town. Imagine a pimply college freshman wandering in. He is wearied from his first soul-crushing run-in with Big Bureaucracy, after complying with the procedures for securing his place in next semester's classes. After purchasing the closely printed required texts for the major he had just been compelled to declare, his eyes alight upon the red, white, and blue cover of
Conscience of a Conservative.
He picks it up, weighs it in his hand—127 pages, large type, space between each little paragraph. He turns it over and sees a handsome, serious, welcoming face; the shoulders of a sharp, well-cut suit are visible, the tie reed-slender in the current style. He opens the book and, standing, reads fourteen short pages inviting him to join an idealistic struggle to defend the individual against the encroachments of the mass.

Liberal demagogues had produced “a Leviathan, a vast national authority out of touch with the people, and out of control.” Conservatives believed in a politics
that ministered to the “whole man.” And nothing could change, he read—in italics—until
“we entrust the conduct of our affairs to men who understand that their first duty as public officials is to divest themselves of the power they have been given.”

The student buys the book. Freedom, autonomy, authenticity: he has rarely read a writer who speaks so clearly about the things he worries about, who was so cavalier about authority, so
idealistic.

It was a brilliant rhetorical performance. Only after this introduction did Bozell—or, as far as the public knew, Goldwater—mention specific policy prescriptions that might turn off the prejudiced reader. Or, more accurately, the book discussed policy
proscriptions:

The ideas that followed—in chapters like “Freedom for the Farmer,” “Freedom for Labor,” “Taxes and Spending,” “The Welfare State,” “Some Notes on Education,” and “The Soviet Menace”—were radical.
Conscience of a Conservative
domesticated them—as surely as nineteenth-century European socialist movements domesticated such radical ideas as the progressive income tax and universal education. Federal grants-in-aid to states providing matching funds for specified ends, it argued, were “a mixture of blackmail and bribery.” Segregation was abhorrent. But if Congress and the Supreme Court did not leave to the states what was not specifically reserved for the federal government, what was to stop them from dictating
anything
to the states? He called, in italics, for
“prompt and final termination of the farm subsidy program.”
The graduated income tax defied the principle of equality under the law:
“government has a right to claim an equal percentage of each man's wealth, and no more.”
As for the federal budget itself, he recommended “a staged withdrawal ... 10% spending reduction each year in all of the fields in which federal participation is undesirable,” because economic growth could only be achieved “not by government harnessing the nation's economic forces, but by”—a powerful word—“emancipating them.”

Few, perhaps, among the millions of people who read
Conscience of a Conservative
came to adopt its positions as their own who didn't already have
conservative instincts, who didn't already agree with lines like “The ancient and tested truths that guided our Republic through its early days will do equally well for us” and “The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline.” Many likely didn't get past the assertion “I am ... not impressed by the claim that the Supreme Court's decision on school integration is the law of the land.” Others fell in love with the political ideals of autonomy and liberty through
Conscience of a Conservative,
only to later come to believe that the welfare state (or even later in the decade, Marxist revolution) was their most worthy guarantor.

That wasn't the point.
Conscience
had stolen conservatism from the sole possession of the old men. Time noted how the book “thoroughly belies the U.S. Liberals' caricature-belief that an Old Guardist is a deep dyed isolationist endowed with nothing but penny-pinching inhumanity and slavish devotion to Big Business.” “Its success,” agreed
Barron's,
“springs in part from the author's ability to give humanitarian reasons for following policies which usually have been associated with a lust for gain.”