Before the Storm (36 page)

 

The next morning, back in Alabama, John Grenier answered his phone to find Arthur Edson of the Associated Press on the other end. Edson asked Grenier why he had just been to Chicago (for a Bears game, he said). Edson asked if Grenier had been at the Clif White meeting (silence). And where was he going to raise $25,000?

There had been a liberal Republican spy at the meeting, and no one ever discovered who it was.

The story went out over the AP wires that afternoon:

Walter Cronkite rushed down to Chicago to do a stand-up in front of the meeting room at the Essex. His report was accompanied by a near-perfect reproduction of White's electoral map. Front-page headlines blared: “SECRET MEET TO PUSH GOLDWATER IN 1964”; ”GOLDWATER '64 BOOM: MOVE TO BLOCK ROCKY.” The
Herald Tribune
editorial bemoaned the group's strategy as “bad timing, narrow motives, and poor politics.” Columnist Joe Alsop, describing the effort as an attempt to turn the Republican Party over to the segregationists, just called it immoral.

White was able to get through to Goldwater before the reporters did, but the spy got there first—and did his best to convince Goldwater that White was a opportunist paying himself a lavish salary out of funds raised using Goldwater's name. In his marathon of telephone calls to important Republicans begging forgiveness for disrupting the party, White kept hearing pledges of support from ones he hadn't considered conservative.

And the annual Republican National Committee meeting threatened to become an ugly forty-eight-hour disputation into what was now being called Clif White's “Southern strategy.”

In a session closed to the press, in front of a transparency of a montage of sensational newspaper headlines reporting on White's Southern strategy, RNC chair Bill Miller declared, “Our successes in the South need no apology.” The fur was not long in flying. Northeasterners like Jake Javits called the White strategy a threat to “the very existence of the Republican party” and a conspiracy against liberal Republicans who needed black voters to stay in office. Conservatives shot back that they were making an effort to become the only truly
national
party—one that left special appeals to minorities to the Democrats.

Another session was even uglier. That was when the finance committee gave its report that the RNC was limping along on a $100,000 emergency loan from the New York GOP, and that the budget for 1963 had been slashed. The party's ideological wounds had been reexposed; now committeemen learned that it was also broke.

 

Goldwater appeared cool to the Southern strategy. “I think you have summed up the problem of any conservative for the Republican nomination in 1964,” he wrote a South Dakota friend, Kenneth Kellard, the day of the RNC meeting. “No one from the larger states who might be delegates or who would head delegations
have shown any interest in that type of philosophy.” Though perhaps he was bluffing. His problem with the strategy might really have been that it would push him into presidential contention.

At the Phoenix Country Club, amidst the Christmas decorations, he and his cronies evaluated the “Chicago secret meeting” and the many other draft efforts that were competing for Goldwater's attention. They agreed that it was within the realm of possibility that he could win the nomination, but that Kennedy was unbeatable in the general election. Since Goldwater had chased around the country in 1960 accusing Lyndon Johnson of the blackest perfidy for running for vice president and the U.S. Senate at the same time, he could not very well credibly run for both the presidency and the U.S. Senate in 1964. And if he ran for President and lost, he wouldn't have
any
influence in moving his party to the right.

On January 14 White traveled to Capitol Hill to try to set things right. The suggestion that White was profiting off Goldwater lingered. Besides, Goldwater's notions about how nominations came about were entirely conventional: senators, key congressmen, newspaper publishers—these were the people who controlled convention delegations. White had no such names on his rolls. There was also the matter of temperament. White had a tendency to display forced familiarity among people he was intimidated by; Goldwater was slow to trust, especially with Easterners like White: in the same room, they jostled.

Goldwater was late for the meeting, and when he arrived he was furious. In Birmingham, Alabama, that day, a new governor, George Wallace, had delivered his inaugural address. It was a pure distillation of Deep South id: “We will tolerate their boot in our face no longer.... Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a young, handsome, moderate blue-blood named William Warren Scranton was inaugurated governor and was immediately dubbed by
The New
Republic (which preferred to identify the senator from Arizona as “Barry Sundust”) as “the first of the Kennedy Republicans” and pegged as a presidential dark horse. Perhaps the contrast between Republicans who would compete with Wallace and those who could be compared to Kennedy contributed to the mood in the room of Republican senators who had voted Barry Goldwater off the caucus's policy committee that morning.

Goldwater ushered White into his inner office, and White briefed him on why his group was so eager for Goldwater to become a presidential candidate. He was stopped cold after five minutes.

“Clif, I'm not a candidate. And I'm not going to be. I have no intention of running for the presidency.”

White plowed on. “Well, we thought we would have to draft you.”

“Draft, nothin'! I told you I'm not going to run. And I'm telling you now, don't paint me into a corner. It's my political neck and I intend to have something to say about what happens to it.”

White mustered his best Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington voice. “Senator,” he said, “I'm not painting you into a comer. You painted yourself there by opening your mouth for the last eight years. You're the leader of the conservative cause in the United States of America, and thousands—millions—of people want you to be their nominee for President. I can't do anything about that and neither can you.”

“Well, I'm just not going to run,” Goldwater said finally. “My wife loves me, but she'd leave me if I ran for this thing.”

White trudged down Capitol Hill considering another line of work. Rusher wrote Goldwater imploring him not to pull the rug out from under an unprecedented nationwide organization of dedicated rank-and-file conservatives, built up painstakingly over fifteen months. Goldwater wrote back that he felt double-crossed, used: no one had ever told him these “old friends” were a Goldwater for President group, or that White was on salary full-time, or that the group was raising money in the hundreds of thousands of dollars on his behalf. He said that since he was running for Senate, charges of presidential campaigning could irreparably hurt his reputation. That didn't stop Rusher from writing an even more pleading letter the next day. Frank Meyer, one of
National Review's
stable of apocalyptic ex-Communists, chimed in with a letter to Goldwater that “providence” had picked him to save the United States from “the verge of disaster.”

Rusher's “Crossroads for the GOP” article came out. Offered as a pamphlet, it became the most popular reprint the magazine had ever sold. Conservatives were sending Goldwater copies in the dozens. Rumors had it that he had read it—and was impressed with its reasoning. Perhaps that was true; not long ago, after all, Goldwater had given a speech to Georgia Republican activists proclaiming he “would bend every muscle to see that the South has a voice in everything that affects the life of the South,” and that since the GOP was never going to win back the Negro vote, the party “ought to go hunting where the ducks are”—that is, among white “states' rights” audiences like the one he was presently addressing.

But when White made his way again to the Old Senate Office Building on February 5, Charlie Barr in tow for backup, Goldwater cut him short once again.

This time it was level-headed old Charlie Barr who piped up: “It's a free country,” he said, leveling a glance at Goldwater. “We're free to draft a candidate if we choose and there isn't much you or anyone else can do about it.”

The senator smiled archly and said that they might discover what he could do if they kept pushing.

Half a dozen Suite 3505 leaders gathered in Chicago once more, wearied at their increasingly hopeless efforts to keep their recruits in the fold as word got out that Goldwater was absolutely refusing to run. It was as glum a conclave as any of them had ever attended. It certainly
felt
like a last meeting. They turned their dilemma over and over—Goldwater was the only possible candidate; Goldwater was determined to shun them—until, finally, a single brash voice rang out among the disconsolate. It was the normally colorless Indiana state treasurer, Bob Hughes. “There's only one thing we can do. Let's draft the son of a bitch.”

He was answered by a voice of reason: “What if he won't let us draft him?”

Hughes: “Then let's draft him
anyway.”

The room sparked to life. That was exactly what they would do. They decided they needed a front man of sufficient stature to impress Goldwater that they were serious. They settled as first choice on the new senator from Colorado, Peter Dominick, and as alternate, one of the men in the room: Peter O‘Donnell, the brash new Texas GOP chair who was a legend in the party for winning Dallas for Nixon with a massive house-to-house canvass and for managing John Tower's Senate campaign. O'Donnell was a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, a young millionaire: how could Goldwater refuse him? A waiter arrived at their suite with the plate of sandwiches they had ordered, just in time to celebrate what they decided was a breakthrough.

 

In fact Goldwater had exaggerated his reluctance. He always returned White's calls within a few hours; he was willing to keep his options open. He just wanted to retain stewardship of his own political neck. In March he brought Denison Kitchel out to Washington and installed him in an office across the street from his, claiming that Kitchel was there to manage his 1964 Senate race. His friend and secret adviser, Jay Hall, the GM executive, prepared a confidential survey of Goldwater's presidential prospects in all fifty states.

Publicly—and even privately, because even Kitchel did not know about the secret survey—nothing had changed. On March 22 Goldwater appeared on
The Jack Paar Show.
Paar asked if Goldwater was running for President. “Well, I have said hundreds of times that I am not,” he responded. “I'm running for the United States Senate. I would hate to think the Republican Party has gotten so hard up for candidates they would only talk about two.” He certainly didn't act like a presidential candidate. He told self-effacing little stories about getting arrested in Mexico in a barroom brawl; then he put the audience to
sleep with an endless disquisition on a pet subject: military hardware (“The RS-70 has been abandoned. Skybolt has been dropped, manned bombers are being phased out, Nike-Zeus is being delayed, the Dyna-Soar is being re-examined for possible junking ...”).

Goldwater was still breakfasting with Governor Rockefeller, who was still harvesting newspaper clippings anointing him heir apparent to the Republican presidential nomination—and also harvesting grassroots Republican disgust. If it hadn't been for Goldwater's interposition, the biggest political testimonial dinner in Nebraska political history, for Senator Roman Hruska, would have been the biggest humiliation in Nebraska political history; when Nelson Rockefeller was put on the program, conservatives began planning a boycott that would have left the room half empty—until one phone call from Goldwater shut the protest down.

Kitchel shuttled between Phoenix and Washington, but spent precious little time on Arizona affairs. Robert Snowden, a Manion confederate from Arkansas who had fielded an independent elector scheme in 1960, paid court with a promise to raise $3 million for a Goldwater presidential campaign. (“A great guy and a fine gentleman [who] talks a little more than he produces,” Goldwater remarked about Snowden to Kitchel, laughing off the news.) Piles of mail were forwarded from Goldwater's office to Kitchel's from groups like the National Association of Americans for Goldwater (Tennessee), Americans for Goldwater (Phoenix), Grassroots for Goldwater, Inc. (Missouri), Citizens for Goldwater (Pennsylvania), the National Committee to Draft Goldwater (New York), the Goldwater Association (New Jersey)—and, from California alone, the Advisory Committee for Goldwater, the Goldwater Leadership Conference, and Californians for Goldwater, whose newsletter, The
Goldrush,
proclaimed, “Since Mississippi is visibly considered a far worse enemy of the federal government than Tito's Yugoslavia, couldn't we follow the usual pattern, and send Governor Barnett a few million in foreign aid?” White could have at least taken heart that Barry opened his stuff before sending it on to Kitchel.

 

The cherry blossoms popped in Washington, and no one took much notice of one more press conference in the city's endless cavalcade. Since Senator Dominick had excused himself from chairing the group (“I don't think freshmen senators ought to be making Presidents”), it was Peter O'Donnell standing up in front of one of the Mayflower's smaller meeting rooms, fiddling with the podium, alongside co-chair Mrs. Ione Harrington of Indiana, a sweet-natured matron except when the subject was conservative politics. White flitted about anxiously making sure everything was in order, briefed the speakers one more
time, then retreated behind the scenes as usual. It was April 8, 1963. Suite 3505, in existence for a year and a half to the day, was about to go public as the National Draft Goldwater Committee, P.O. Box 1964, Washington, D.C.—frippery, because the group had no Washington office.