Before the Storm (4 page)

Manion worked quietly as chair of the Intergovernmental Relations Committee through 1953, dutifully ferreting out unconstitutional federal programs that should be killed, even as the Administration brought yet more to life. Eisenhower got around to firing him in February. Or, as the Taftite
Fort Wayne Sentinel
put it: “President Eisenhower finally yielded to the insistent clamor of a vicious internationalist cabal, spearheaded by the
New York Times
and the Henry Luce
Time-Life
smear brigade,
Washington Post
and New Deal columnists.”

Manion was interviewed on TV the next night. “Some of the left-wing Communists, who have had an unfortunate effectiveness in this administration,” he said, “served notice on me that I would be fired because of my advocacy of the Bricker Amendment.” As usual, the strands of hair were arranged carefully over his bald dome. (His forehead seemed to get bigger each year, as if to make room for yet one more set of facts and figures on the Communist conspiracy, forcing the droopy ears, doughy cheeks, protruding lower lip, and picket-fence teeth to crowd ever more tightly at the bottom of his face.) His eyelids were raccooned, as ever, from too much work and too little sleep. But his eyes sparkled. He looked almost beatific. He was free. Now he could work to break the Wall Street boys' hammerlock on the Democrats and the Republicans once and for all.

 

 

The pledge was several notches shy of quixotic. Taft's Senate heir apparent, the unlovable California senator William Knowland, was fast being eclipsed in party councils by the Senate's “new nationalists”—conservatives like Richard Nixon and the former isolationist Arthur Vandenberg who rejected Taft's foreign-policy legacy outright and gladly joined the majority in appropriating $3.5 billion more for mutual security in Europe. Manion went down the same month the Bricker Amendment was defeated in the Senate by a single vote. On the domestic front, the right fared worse. On May 17, 1954—“Black Monday” —Manion was crushed by the Supreme Court's decision in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
A month later, the Army-McCarthy hearings (then the awful, humiliating censure vote against McCarthy in December) rung down the curtain on the political viability of the one other fit standard-bearer for Manion's crusade.

Manion's people did what conservatives always did when the going got tough: they started a new group. “For America” was co-chaired by Manion and General Wood. Its manifesto promised to fight for an “enlightened
nationalism” to replace “our costly, imperialistic foreign policy of tragic superinterventionism and policing this world single-handed with American blood and treasure.” When their first public appeal brought in five thousand telegrams and a like number of phone calls, they were convinced they had the internationalists on the run. They sent an emissary to Washington to meet with Senators Knowland, McCarran, Byrd, Bricker, Goldwater (“who is an outstanding, courageous young Senator”), even Vice President Nixon (perhaps he could yet be saved, they reasoned). Many of them sounded receptive. “Maybe it's time to call a conclave of 25 to 50 leading Republicans and Democrats to discuss the whole idea of realignment off the record,” McCarran, a right-wing Democrat, remarked, although he also said that it would be nearly impossible to win over the public without an attractive leader like General Eisenhower.

From his office in the St. Joseph's Bank Building in downtown South Bend, Manion was laying the groundwork to open his own front in the war: a weekly radio broadcast. He decided he would reject commercial sponsorship so he could keep his independence. Instead, he bought a Robotype machine—a clattering behemoth that could spew forth hundreds of identical copies of a form letter, each with an individual address and salutation that the machine read off a punched tape, player piano-style. He dunned friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and, mostly, family-owned manufacturers: “The Leftwing, please remember,” ran his pitch, “is strong, well-organized and well-financed. Many gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution, have fallen under the direction of Internationalists, One-Worlders, Socialists and Communists. Much of this vast horde of money is being used to ‘socialize' the United States.”

The Manion Forum of Opinion
went on the air in October in a prime Sunday night slot just in time to announce the success liberal Democrats enjoyed in the off-year elections and the McCarthy censure vote in December. Listener-ship was sparse for these weekly preachments that the sky was falling; most Americans were looking out the window and seeing the glorious sunshine of postwar prosperity. Manion and Wood's little group For America looked to be little heard from, the Manion Forum to be little noted. And so, as the next few years wore on, it turned out to be.

In 1956 For America was almost single-handedly responsible for the presidential candidacy of T. Coleman Andrews, a former Eisenhower commissioner of public revenue who now called for abolishing the income tax. They were sure the time was ripe for a platform of bringing the Washington Leviathan to heel. The Supreme Court had delivered its “Brown II” decision, mandating that school integration go forward with “all deliberate speed,” and a new political culture of “massive resistance” blossomed in Dixie almost
overnight. Nearly every Southern congressman signed a manifesto pledging to defy the Court by “all lawful means.” In Alabama a bus boycott organized by a charismatic young minister named Martin Luther King was under way, even as rioting broke out over the court-ordered integration of the state university in Tuscaloosa. In Coleman Andrews's home state of Virginia, senator and former Klansman Harry Flood Byrd's minions pushed through the state assembly an order to close any school under federal court order to integrate, and the
Richmond News Leader's
editorial page spun out arguments not unlike the ones used one hundred years earlier to justify secession. In this context, Coleman's stump speech wasn't just an argument about the IRS. “When the states ratified the Sixteenth Amendment,” he would cry, “the practical effect of their acquiescence was to have signed away the powers that were reserved to them by the Constitution as a safeguard against degeneration of the union of states into an
all-powerful central government!”

Manion's Robotype clacked around the clock, printing missive after missive to raise funds and staff the petition drives that got Andrews on the ballot in fifteen states. Manion visited all of them. He was confident that if only he had succeeded in getting Andrews on the ballot in all fifty, a grassroots groundswell would throw the election into the House of Representatives—an exigency that had last occurred in 1824—where Southern and Northern conservative congressmen would provide a majority to a major-party candidate only at the price of concession to their agendas. Some even thought Andrews could win. “Don't waste precious time, energy, and money seeking to change left-wingers,” declared the conservative newsletter
Human Events.
“In the first place, it's too late for that. In the second place, conservatives are already in the majority—in your state, in almost every state.” But even in his best state, Virginia, Andrews got only 6.1 percent of the vote.

Conservative fortunes hadn't bottomed out yet. In Manhattan a new weekly,
National Review,
struggled just to keep its head above water, went fortnightly, then begged readers outright for donations above and beyond the subscription price. The 1958 off-year elections were a slaughter: in the House of Representatives, 282 Democrats now lay poised to swamp 153 Republicans; in the Senate there were now almost twice as many Democrats as Republicans, the worst defeat ever for a party occupying the White House. The Democratic Party, that tensile combine of urban machine hacks and their immigrant constituencies, Southern grandees and their anti-immigrant constituencies, and egghead do-gooders—“gangs of natural enemies in a precarious state of symbiosis,” H. L. Mencken once said—now pulled unmistakably in the direction of the eggheads and the do-gooders: left. Twenty-five out of the thirty-two senatorial candidates supported by the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education
won. The Republicans who pulled off victories in 1958—among them Senator Kenneth B. Keating and Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller in New York—were mostly liberals. Everyone still liked Ike—even though in 1956 Eisenhower had been the first successful presidential candidate in 108 years not to carry either house of Congress, then had the temerity to declare this reelection a victory for liberal “Modern Republicanism” and posit that “gradually expanding federal government” was “the price of rapidly expanding national growth.”

Ten days after this awful new Eighty-sixth Congress was seated, Manion's forces convened once more in Chicago to curse the darkness and plot their next move. With the Republicans and Democrats in hock to an Eastern Establishment that kept them from nominating a conservative, and with the majority of Americans being conservative—what was there to do but name a committee to explore organizing a third party?

They sent a young, energetic red-haired Yalie from Omaha named L. Brent Bozell around the country to raise funds for the effort. He had cowritten a book-length defense of Senator McCarthy in 1953 with his Yale classmate William F. Buckley Jr., then went on to write speeches for the Wisconsin senator and help edit Buckley's
National Review.
In 1958 Bozell ran for Maryland's House of Delegates and became one of the victims of the Democratic landslide. He saw the Republicans' defeat differently from the leaders of For America, who simply assumed a bedrock majority of Americans thought just like them. “A conservative electorate has to be created,” Bozell countered in an article published after the election in
National Review,
“out of that vast uncommitted middle—the great majority of the American people who, though today they vote for Democratic or Modern Republican candidates, are not ideologically wedded to their programs or, for that matter, to any program. The problem is to reach them and to organize them.”

It was a hard sell. His take was $I ,667—all from a single donor. Others were more sophisticated—such as General Robert E. Wood, from whose purse had always flowed the right's most generous bequests and from whose bequests had always flowed those of myriad others. Wood had known at least since 1951—when Republican senators Karl Mundt, Albert Hawkes, and Owen Brewster joined to sponsor a “National Committee for Political Realignment” —that the recipe for a new conservative party was plain: one part Midwestern Taft Republican, one part Southern states' rights Democrat. Mundt, Hawkes, and Brewster's group had failed because it had not lured Southerners into its camp. Before General Wood opened his checkbook for Bozell, he needed to know: What inroads had For America's Northern leadership made in the Deep South?

They had made none. Southerners—for whom, falling heir to a deep and abiding tradition of military honor, isolationism was inscrutable—had never had much truck with Taftites like Manion. Their anti-Washington mood was a late development, in response to
Brown.
Whatever the ideological convergences of conservatives North and South now, there were too few abiding friendships, too few of those intimate bonds that make men willing to take risks together. And without risks from Southerners willing to bolt the Democrats, why should Wood risk bolting the Republicans? He closed his checkbook, and the committee made plans to dissolve. Manion was disconsolate.

 

He soon found hope in his mailbox in the form of a long missive on the letterhead of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Jim Johnson was a young lawyer who made a name for himself after
Brown
as the head of the Arkansas branch of the Citizens Council movement—the respectable segregationist outfits popularly known as the “uptown Klan”—traveling up and down the state proclaiming, “Don't you know that the Communist plan for more than fifty years has been to destroy Southern civilization, one of the last patriotic and Christian strongholds, by mongrelization, and our Negroes are being exploited by them to effect their purposes?” He decided to challenge Orval Faubus because the incumbent governor—a native of the poor hill country in the northern part of the state where blacks were as rare as millionaires, and the son of a backcountry socialist who gave him the middle name Eugene, as in Debs—was a goddamned liberal who had proudly integrated the state Democratic Party. It seemed Johnson didn't stand a chance—before, that is, the Massive Resistance movement spread so thick and fast over the region in the summer of 1956 that politics even in a moderate state like Arkansas had turned from day to darkest night. Now, by calling Faubus “a traitor to the Southern way of life,” Johnson had a chance to win. Manion, no fan of integration, had met Johnson while stumping in the state for Coleman Andrews and had gladly given some speeches to help him out. But Faubus's instincts for political preservation proved much deeper than his liberalism. He added a line to his standard speech: “No school district will be forced to mix the races as long as I am governor of Arkansas.” By co-opting Johnson's bigotry and dressing it up in uptown language, Faubus won the primary hands down. He never looked back. A segregationist leader was born.

In the general election that year, Johnson both ran for a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court and led a ballot initiative to give the state legislature the right to nullify any federal law it wished—“damned near a declaration of war against the United States,” he later called it. The initiative passed with 56 percent of the vote, and Johnson won his Supreme Court seat. The next year,
Orval Faubus made the history books when he forced Eisenhower to send the Army to back up a federal court order to integrate Little Rock Central High. Faubus received 250,000 telegrams and letters of support for courageously standing up to Washington. A Gallup poll that spring listed the Arkansas governor as one of the ten most admired men in the world. Johnson slyly maneuvered himself into Faubus's inner circle to become his liaison with the conservative forces around the country who were clamoring for the governor to seek higher office. And Johnson hadn't forgotten his friend Clarence Manion.