Before the Storm (32 page)

Young Republicans nationwide had a reputation for being innocent spoils-seeking toadies—energetic but harmless, like their mascot, the cute little boxing elephant “Punchy.” Nixon, the returned veteran made good, had once been their hero. But the Los Angeles County Young Republicans brought Nixon his first shock of the gubernatorial primary season. The “difference between a ‘liberal'
Republican and a ‘liberal' Democrat,” wrote the organization's new president, a pale, silver-haired, mercurial fellow named Bob Gaston, “is the difference between creeping socialism and galloping socialism.” The movement that swept Gaston into office was experienced by the old regulars as if it were an alien invasion. Two thousand attended meetings where once there had been two hundred; the two hundred were branded “country club Republicans” and red-baited. In return, they Birch-baited the newcomers. Nixon's first move in the campaign seemed obvious: denounce the group that was causing all the trouble, the John Birch Society. The LACYR responded by censuring Nixon for attacking “patriotic organizations”; then they endorsed Shell.

Going into the annual California Republican Assembly convention, Nixon could write off all this business as the impetuousness of youth. Nixon's strong right hand, Murray Chotiner, was a former CRA president. The CRA was Earl Warren's creation—like Warren himself, leaning toward the progressive wing of the party. Nixon and California's popular senator Thomas Kuchel, the minority whip, who was up for reelection, brought a resolution to the convention condemning the “dictatorial and totalitarian” John Birch Society. But the CRA, too, now included a swarm of right-wingers. A Newport Beach optometrist named Nolan Frizzelle had spearheaded an effort to charter dozens of new CRA chapters, and for conservatives to flood existing ones. They had turned the CRA inside out. “I don't consider the John Birch Society extremists,” Frizzelle said. “Except maybe extremely American.”

Nixon left the CRA convention with an embarrassingly close endorsement vote and a humiliating compromise on his resolution, condemning Robert Welch but professing neutrality on the group that was constitutionally an extension of Robert Welch's will. Shell called the result “a major move in breaking the old Establishment machine in California.” Kuchel was enraged. Two right-wing nuts were scratching each other's eyes out to replace the senator in the primary. Loyd Wright, a divorce lawyer whose campaign was chaired by Ronald Reagan (after Reagan turned down entreaties to run himself), advocated an offensive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Howard Jarvis was a loud, angry man who proclaimed himself “to the right of Barry Goldwater.” (His campaign was led, Nixon was aghast to learn, by Murray Chotiner.)

This was Shell's army. It was lubricated by some of Nixon's wealthiest supporters from 1960: Walter Knott; Union Oil's Cy Rubel; Western Geophysical's Henry Salvatori; dog-food king D. B. Lewis; Joe Crail of Coast Federal S&L; Patrick Frawley, maestro of Paper Mate, Schick Safety Razor, and Technicolor. Shell campaigned with veiled threats. At a May 23 rally, aided by the benisons of a sixty-two-voice choir and pom-pom-waving “Shell's Belles,” he hinted to the fifteen thousand assembled at the L.A. Sports Arena that “a large
number of Republicans would not vote for Richard Nixon” in a general election. “A sizable part would not get out and work for him.” And thanks to powerhouse organizing by Shell's campaign manager, Rus Walton, a brilliant, driven former corporate publicist and National Association of Manufacturers administrator who had somehow managed to pull together the chaos of southern California's multitude of conservative groups into an integrated strike force, Shell had the power to make good on the threat.

Nixon hadn't even expected to have to campaign. Now he found himself once more bumping along forlorn highways in the most remote corners of this enormous state, just as he'd done back in 1950 when he ran for the Senate. The highways were less bumpy now, but they were also dotted with billboards with Earl Warren's face: “WANTED FOR IMPEACHMENT FOR GIVING AID AND COMFORT TO THE COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY,” “THE MORTAL ENEMY OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.” While Shell addressed rallies, Nixon was spending an interminable 100-degree afternoon shaking hands in the desert in the southeast of the state. Pat Brown had pulled ahead of Nixon in the polls for the first time. Day after day, fanatics pressed into his hand yet another copy of that damned little blue pamphlet with the United Nations insignia on the cover, Department of State Publication 7277, which they claimed was proof that the government was about to sign over America's armed forces to a Soviet colonel. (Actually it was a woolly UN report setting a course for atomic disarmament over something like a century “through the progressive strengthening of international institutions under the United Nations and by creating a United Nations Peace Force to enforce the peace as the disarmament process proceeds.” One of the assistant secretary-generals of the UN was a Russian colonel. Q.E.D.) It could have been just then that Richard Nixon cemented his title as the Job of American politics.

Shell won 35 percent of the ballots in the June 5 primary. In return for delivering his supporters in the fall, he demanded control of one-third of the state's delegation to the 1964 GOP Convention, and that Nixon pledge to slash the state budget. Nixon refused the deal. Shell said Nixon would be sorry.

 

The RNC chair who replaced Thruston Morton in 1962, Bill Miller, a brash conservative from upstate New York, poured resources into Operation Dixie, the party's Southern organizing drive. It had paid off handsomely. Time enshrined the young Republican operatives as “The New Breed”: “furrowbrowed, button-down, college-trained amateurs who, one by one, took control of the state parties from apathetic and aging professionals.” Alabama's John Grenier had registered as a Republican after reading the Democrats' liberal 1960 convention platform. At twenty-nine he became the chairman of Birmingham's
twelve-member Young Republicans chapter. Now, as part of Operation Dixie, he traveled the state five nights a week on the RNC's dime—conducting forty-four meetings in one forty-day stretch, sometimes in a town's general store. In South Carolina, colleague J. Drake Edens Jr. used the AFL-CIO manual
How to Win
to organize precincts. His rule was that a precinct had to have six members. He wouldn't give up until a county had three precincts. For some counties it took a dozen trips. “We've got a product and a sales force, just like a business,” Grenier told
Time.
“The product is conservatism.”

Regulars in other regions were cooking up schemes just to keep the party from shrinking. Conservative Wisconsin congressman Melvin Laird led an ecumenical committee of conservatives and moderates that produced a boiler-plate “Declaration of Republican Principle and Policy.” General Eisenhower convened an “All-Republican Conference” at the Gettysburg farm to which he had retired to charter a “National Citizens Committee”—to attract the great quantities of Americans he assumed were sympathetic to Republican values but blanched at the Republican Party. Goldwater smelled a liberal power grab, but kept his criticisms from the General out of respect. Not so his new Dixie acolytes. “The fact that you were politically naive has been obvious for quite some time,” thirty-two-year-old Mississippi chair and insurance executive Wirt Yerger wrote the man who had faced down Adolf Hitler. “I don't blame all the troubles of the Republican Party on you, but I do think that you will have to take responsibility for a great many.” He then laid plans to convene a meeting of Republican state chairmen in Dallas after the November 1962 elections to force a reckoning with a new balance of power in the party.

In South Carolina, Drake Edens managed the campaign of William D. Workman Jr. for Senate. The campaign perfectly crystallized what the Republican Party was up to in the South—and the incredible progress it would make in 1962.

Workman was a popular columnist and TV commentator, and his 1960 book The
Case for the South
was a masterpiece of courtly segregationism: the Southerner, he wrote, merely demanded “the right to administer his own domestic affairs, and he demands for himself the right to rear his children in the school atmosphere most conducive to their learning.” His campaign was based on the argument that although his opponent, the legendary sixty-six-year-old three-termer Olin D. Johnston, was a fine segregationist himself, any Democrat was necessarily in hock to the national party leadership. And since the “Kennedy Klan” had staked the party's future on cynical civil rights demagoguery, Johnston would be helpless to preserve the Southern way of life.

It was tough sledding. Workman tried to tie Johnston to the dreaded Kennedy Klan's tail by reminding voters that he had been a leader in the fight
for Kennedy's Medicare plan and a point man for the Administration's farm support legislation. But most South Carolinians liked farm supports and the idea of medical insurance for the aged. And they still instinctually recoiled at the idea of joining the party of the carpetbaggers. Whenever Edens received a letter of support, he answered it by asking the correspondent to join or start a GOP precinct organization. Few had the courage to do so. They feared they would become local pariahs.

Then the campaign received a boost: South Carolina, like the rest of Dixie, would soon come to hate Washington more than ever. In late September federal marshals began massing to protect the matriculation of the first Negro student at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Thousands of Oxfordians massed behind Confederate battle flags and prepared for a vigilante war. (Such flags were everywhere in 1962, a year of centennial observances of the War Between the States. The South Carolina legislature even decided to fly a Confederate flag temporarily above the statehouse.) General Walker came to lend moral support, announcing that he had been on the “wrong side” in Little Rock. On September 30, President Kennedy announced that the White House was committed to seeing James Meredith enter Ole Miss. There immediately followed an attempt to breach the building holding the federal marshals, the oldest and most venerated on campus—hrst with bullets, then with a bulldozer, then with an armada of cars. The violence escalated to furious rioting. By the end of the week two were dead, and 23,000 federal troops were stationed in Oxford, Mississippi. The South called it another invasion, same as the one a hundred years earlier.

Goldwater immediately criticized the Kennedy Administration's actions. “We haven't turned over to the federal government the power to run the schools.... I don't like segregation. But I don't like the Constitution kicked around, either.” He also said that the Administration was now the “best tool the Republican Party has.” And South Carolina's Workman, at least, was proving Goldwater right. Now the candidate for the Senate spoke with Confederate flags behind him and cried that the Oxford invasion “takes on the earmarks of a cold-blooded, premeditated effort to crush the sovereign state of Mississippi into submission.” He readily compared Kennedy to Hitler. “When South Carolina's turn comes, she'll defend her rights,” he promised. A high school band struck up “Dixie”; he shouted, “I just hope that song could be heard all the way from Oxford, Mississippi, to Washington, D.C.” There was little for Senator Johnston to do. He agreed with Workman. It was all he could say to implore voters not to abandon “the sacred party of their fathers.” And on Election Day, the Republican Workman won 44 percent of the vote. Anywhere else that would have been considered a landslide victory for his opponent. But in South
Carolina—where a more typical general election vote was “W. J. Bryan Dorn, Democrat, 65,920; write-ins, 47”—44 percent of the vote for a Republican was a revolution.

In Alabama, thirty-seven-year congressional veteran Lister Hill was challenged for the first time in a general election. His Republican opponent, Gadsen oil distributor James Martin, lost by nine-tenths of a percent. In the race for the congressional seat representing Tennessee's Ninth District, Memphis—which hadn't seen a GOP
candidate
since 1936—the Republican came even closer. GOP congressional candidates across the South polled over two million votes in 1962. They had received 606,000 in the last off-year election. The Republicans, for an ever increasing number of Southerners, were carpetbaggers no more.

The pundits declared the off-year elections nationwide a draw. In Republican races moderates prevailed statistically over conservatives; among the gubernatorial winners were such pitch-perfect Republican moderates as Chafee in Rhode Island, Romney in Michigan, Love in Colorado, and Rhodes in Ohio. Forty-two percent of Americans thought Kennedy was pushing integration too fast. That kept Democratic totals down, although the Democrats still kept both houses of Congress. Though the Republicans likely would have done better if the world hadn't nearly ended.

On October 22, President Kennedy went on television to announce a quarantine of Soviet ships that had been fortifying a nuclear battery in Cuba capable of striking two-thirds of the territory of the United States. Then he went eyeball-to-eyeball with the Russians to demand the missiles' removal. A dull shock fell over the nation: the Armageddon that had been merely possible during the Berlin crisis was suddenly probable. The other guy blinked. The nation closed ranks around its President.

T
he pundits who declared the off-year elections yet one more endorsement of the responsible center had not read between the lines. To conservatives, the 1962 elections were a historic triumph.

Politics is not, except on the most elementary level, a game of raw numbers. It is one of margins. In a Senate party-line vote, 51 votes is as good as 91; in presidential nominations, the received wisdom on which states are “Republican” and which “Democratic,” once upset, forever shifts calculations about which kind of candidate is a sure thing and which a hopeless case. Any game of margins is one of portents—where a trend, once rumored, can become the gust that blows the straw that settles on the proverbial camel's back. That is why the “Big Six” states and their black swing vote were so doted upon in conventional political speculations. More imaginative prognosticators, however, were beginning to argue that the next tipping point might be found somewhere else.