Before the Storm (18 page)

Point nine would also, added Louisiana's flamboyant Tom Stagg, “kill the Republican Party in the South. Lyndon Johnson is going to come across the border and talk ‘magnolia' to them and they'll vote Democratic.”

 

Eisenhower, drafting his valedictory address for the Tuesday of the convention at his “summer White House” in Newport, was enraged by the Compact's defense points. They had sold out his legacy—the most valuable thing a former President had. The document spouted off on nuclear strategy, calling for “a nuclear retaliatory power capable of surviving surprise attack to inflict devastating punishment on any aggressor... a modern, flexible and balanced military establishment with forces capable of deterring or meeting any local aggression”—as if Rockefeller knew what he was talking about. Eisenhower, knowing what only a President and a few others could know, wondered whether an arms race wouldn't bankrupt us before it could save us; whether, in fact, the whole dismal business didn't deliver more insecurity than security. He called Nixon in Washington and shamed him. How could he assent to calling for weapons there was no money to pay for? Kennedy had already picked up Rockefeller's “missile gap” charge and gladly made it his own. How could Nixon run on a platform echoing the charges of the Democratic nominee? Ike called Thruston Morton, a loyal political friend, and told him to tell Rockefeller to get in line to testify before the platform committee like everyone else. Rockefeller had never given a single thought to any platform committee. He blithely assumed that Nixon could simply impose his will from on high.

Now, to save his coronation, Nixon had to compromise. He knew that if he didn't placate Rockefeller, the New York governor would do all he could to crush him. Nixon would also lose face, having already informed the world that the fourteen points were his idea. He had to compromise. The only possible compromise was to defend either the civil rights part (offending Goldwater's conservatives) or the foreign policy part (betraying Eisenhower), then try to sell the result as best he could to the full platform committee.

So would he sell out Ike, or would he sell out the conservatives?

You can imagine Nixon's brooding, in his mind, taking form in the typical style of his speeches: Richard Nixon debating Richard Nixon.
Now we come to the key question: what should the answer be? Some might say, why, give in to Rockefeller on foreign policy. Some would say that Rockefeller should have his way on domestic issues, of which the most pressing, of course, is the question of civil rights. But the former, of course, means relinquishing control of our party's position in the worldwide struggle for Freedom....

As in all his little rhetorical dialogues, victory for one side was foreordained. Nixon wanted to become President to command America in the Cold War. He was obsessed with the details of foreign affairs; domestic policy, he said famously a decade later, just takes care of itself. One of the aides Nixon brought with him to Chicago, a thoughtful young political science instructor named Chuck Lichenstein, had produced a campaign book,
The Challenges We Face,
from Nixon's speeches. When Nixon had thumbed through it and got to the section on agricultural price subsidies, he asked, “Have I really said all of these things?”

“Yes, every word,” replied Lichenstein.

“Well, that's interesting, because I can't tell.”

“But do you accept this as your views?” the nervous deputy asked.

“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” Nixon reassured him.

The internal dialogue continued:
I am not going to waste your time on a dispute over the details of domestic policy, for these things take care of themselves.

 

Sunday the twenty-fourth, Rockefeller was on Michigan Avenue—not at its luxurious hotels, but miles to the south on the stretch that would later be renamed after Martin Luther King Jr., the man who sat on the pulpit next to Rockefeller. It was King's more established colleague, however, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, who was the featured speaker, calling Nelson Rockefeller the man who “made a backbone plank out of a spaghetti plank.” The six thousand Negroes packing the pews of Liberty Baptist Church interrupted Rockefeller thirty-three times with applause. Though, of course, he had only proposed a strengthened platform plank on civil rights, not made one. That was the job of the platform committee, whose meeting, miles to the north, was now spiraling out of control.

At Eisenhower's behest, Thruston Morton had published each subcommittee's draft planks and distributed them to reporters along with Rockefeller's proposals, trying to keep Nixon from choking off deliberations and simply imposing the Compact's terms. Subcommittee chairmen, meanwhile, sought to
fool reporters into believing that the planks were already unished—thus making Rockefeller look even more like a spoiler. When the full platform committee finally settled down at the Blackstone after midnight to hash out a solution, members competed to demand most strenuously that not a single word of their subcommittee's draft planks be changed—even as Rockefeller's loyal New York delegates made what parliamentary maneuvers they could to bring up the planks for debate.

Blood was in the air. Mrs. A. Dabney Barnes of South Carolina won the floor to defend Tower's civil rights majority report. She pulled out a book and read a stirring defense of the go-slow approach to Negro rights. “Nixon could never agree with that,” liberals cried—then Mrs. Barnes revealed she was reading from Nixon's
The Challenges We Face.
Outside, conservatives, supplemented by ringers Caddy had bused in from the Chicago suburbs, chanted from behind hand-lettered placards (“NO ROCKS IN OUR HEADS, HOW ABOUT YOURS?”) in the still night air. Working like a convention floor manager, John Tower wrung enough votes hour by hour to get his subcommittee report through the platform committee. The meeting adjourned toward dawn. Still, this was just a preliminary step; the plank could be changed. Every precedent gave the putative nominee the prerogative to dictate the platform. The Southerners were determined to tell the putative nominee to go straight to hell.

The convention was a mess, and the opening gavel had not even been struck. Goldwater leaders observed the chaos and were delighted. Greg Shorey ran a Goldwater clearinghouse out of the South Carolina delegation's headquarters at the La Salle. He told the press that 120 nomination votes were in hand. Whenever his booster could get the great man's ear, they plied him with extravagant promises of 300 if he would only announce his candidacy. It just made Goldwater aggravated. “I've heard enough rumors to be elected king,” he complained. “I can still count only 61 votes.” That was generous; at that point, there were only South Carolina's and Arizona's delegations—40—who were willing to stand up on the convention floor for Goldwater and risk political and patronage exile if Nixon won the election. Goldwater told
Life
what to him seemed obvious: “We can't expect to come here and change 900 delegates in three days. But if we work hard for the next four years, maybe we can do it.”

He might be an ideologue. But he revered the “pros,” those value-neutral party mechanics whose behind-the-scenes work left him free to range over the fruited plain to deliver his grand ideological pronouncements. He didn't see any of
them
showing up at his doorstep. Sick and tired of the entreaties of amateurs, Goldwater finally snapped: “Get me three hundred names of delegates on paper. Show me.” Then, and only then, he'd begin to campaign. “It's my
political neck they are putting on this chopping block, and I don't know that I like it.”

 

Nixon arrived at O'Hare the morning of Monday the twenty-fifth for the convention's opening day, met by a friendly crowd of three thousand and a knot of photographers begging him for a display of affection for his little girls, Julie in ivory and Tricia in blue-and-white checks. (He obliged under duress: “I don't go for all this kissing in public.”) A brass band favored him on the tarmac with a rousing “California Here I Come”—a dispiriting selection for one to whom returning to California would be the worst possible outcome. At his Blackstone headquarters he was favored with a sidewalk demonstration organized by Robert Croll: Barry Goldwater's face on hundreds of identical placards, “GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT,” “GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT,” “GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT,” as if he were in a hall of mirrors.

Nixon crossed the street to the Hilton for a televised news conference. He answered the first question, on civil rights, as Rockefeller's ventriloquist: “I believe it is essential that the Republican convention adopt a strong civil rights platform, an honest one, which does deal specifically and not in generalities with the problems and with the goals we desire to reach in these fields.... The statement which Governor Rockefeller and I agreed upon provides that we support the objectives for which the sit-in demonstrators were working.” He denied that Nelson Rockefeller was his vice-presidential choice. Already the rumor mill had as his choice the Eastern Establishmentarian Henry Cabot Lodge—a key plotter, conservatives recalled, in the 1952 Eisenhower convention cabal against Taft. Nixon was selling them out.

Nixon got down to work on his compromise. He quickly sent word to the platform committee at the Blackstone to go ahead and approve the original—non-Rockefeller—foreign policy plank. Then, one at a time, he summoned into his Blackstone suite platform committee members who had voted with the South on civil rights, and began calling in chits.

As twilight approached, an exodus made its way southwest from Michigan Avenue to the cavernous International Amphitheater at 42nd and Halsted—nicknamed “The Stockyards” after its occasional and original purpose as show-room for the adjacent endless maze of cattle pens (a coincidence unimaginative wags never tired of remarking upon when political candidates began dishing out bovine fundament from the podium). Amidst the neat rows of folding chairs on the delegate floor, Nixon deputies—the ones who had thought their work complete—worked on platform committee members, over the steady drone of ceremonial greetings and parliamentary business going on at the podium. They pressed the tactical argument that by matching the Democrats'
pro-civil rights platform, the GOP could win as many votes from blacks as they would lose from Southern whites. And they called in chits.

Halfway through the opening session their job got harder. Herbert Hoover, eighty-five years old, gave an address to polite applause. Then Barry Goldwater, tapped to give the routine formal introduction of Republican Senate candidates, was presented. The din that followed his approach to the podium lasted a full eight minutes. Thruston Morton madly clopped his gavel for order. Goldwater gave his speech, on conservatism, the “heart and soul of our great historic Party.” And the frenzy was repeated.

Downtown other Nixon deputies were coordinating telephone negotiations with Newport, begging Ike to throw Rockefeller just a bone on the foreign policy plank to keep Rockefeller from starting a floor fight—adding the word “intensified” here, a mention of Polaris missiles there, and—a painful concession for a man planning a farewell address in which he would decry the new “military-industrial complex”—allowing Rockefeller's favorite phrase from the Compact to be slipped in: “There is no price ceiling on American security.”

The opening session closed with the keynote address, a McCarthyite stem-winder delivered by vice-presidential long shot Walter Judd:
“Was it the Republicans who, at Teheran, against the urgent advice of Mr. Churchill, agreed to give the Russians a free hand in the Balkans ? [”NO!!!“] ”Was it the Republicans who secretly divided Poland and gave half of it to the Soviet Union?” [“NO!!!”] It was television mummery, hiding smoke-filled bargains
struck in plain sight.

 

“NIXON SAYS RIGHTS PLANK MUST BE MADE STRONGER,” the New York Times headline announced Tuesday morning. The platform committee met in its last official session; Percy's gavel now passed to a more accomplished parliamentarian, Wisconsin congressman Melvin Laird. Nixon/Rockefeller's civil rights plank beat Tower's 56 delegates to 28. For those reluctant to allow chits to be cashed against their conservatism, Nixon's people allowed face-saving abstentions. Fence-sitters may have been won by the sounds of the angry chants wafting up from the streets below—the largest civil rights picket yet of the convention, during which Martin Luther King Jr. galvanized the crowd in a way no NAACP Old Guarder ever could. Rockefeller finally announced he was definitely, officially, not a candidate for President. Nixon breathed a final sigh of relief.

The garrotes had been tightened. The platform passed by voice vote, viewers on television unaware that there had been a scrap of discord. The coronation was on. The outgoing monarchs Mamie and the General (in retirement Ike demanded the honorific “General”) arrived to a ticker-tape parade.
Eisenhower's speech contained an unsubtle dig at Rockefeller, in the guise of a dig at Kennedy: “Just as the Biblical Job had his boils, we have a cult of professional pessimists, who ... continually mouth the allegations that America has become a second-rate military power.” He was proceeded at the podium by his black special assistant E. Frederic Morrow, who had flown in with the President on Air Force One. “One hundred years ago my grandfather was a slave,” radio and TV audiences heard. “Tonight I stand before you as a trusted assistant to the President of the United”—and then the networks cut away for fear of offending their Southern affiliates.