Before the Storm (44 page)

The only thing that kept an exhausted Len Nadasdy going was the knowledge that the gavel would pass to Hutar if he faded. Fatigued, he would issue a mistaken ruling, recognize the error, then lavish attention on the next—making it look like he was playing favorites. The loudest protests came from Gaston's Califomians—steeled against the wiles of left-wing subversion by their Orange County study sessions, ready to see it anywhere, making common cause against the infidels. A squad from Milwaukee located the cable that connected the organ to the loudspeakers and sliced through it—sliced through Nadasdy's strongest line of resistance.

At long last, with dark descending, the roll was called to elect the Federation chairman.

Nadasdy ordered the sergeant at arms to clear the floor of all but the delegates. A YR vice chair, a Nadasdy floor manager, immediately sicced a cluster of rent-a-cops on a Lukens floor manager—who was only kept out of handcuffs when someone managed to produce a printed list to prove that he was a delegate. The first roll call ended with a McDevitt plurality, but not the majority needed to elect. Someone cut the cable to the electronic scoreboard. Nadasdy, confused, declared McDevitt the winner. A bedlam of complaint broke out. Nadasdy numbly declined to start a second ballot. The Syndicate grabbed big black felt-tipped markers and scrawled Lukens's vote totals on the back of Goldwater signs and paraded them around the hall. Nadasdy cried “Illegal demonstration!” A group attempted to rush the platform and seize the gavel. Police arrived. “This is incredible,” Nadasdy mumbled. He agreed to a second ballot; at wit's end, he also agreed to a Syndicate motion that a running count
be called by the secretary, who was a Syndicate loyalist. During a rare lazy interval, someone began passing out free samples of instant mashed potatoes. During another, Syndicate negotiators prevailed upon Bob Gaston, to release his votes for Lukens, in exchange for a patronage job for Gaston's wife.

By the time Wyoming voted, Lukens seemed to have the chairmanship clinched. It was close to dawn. The secretary began a sentence: “And the final totals are ...” What followed was the sort of event the truth of which eyewitnesses continue to debate for decades afterward. Some saw Nadasdy, believing that the secretary had outstripped her authority by announcing the total rather than merely keeping track of it, shoving her off the platform; others saw Nadasdy merely taking the microphone and accidentally knocking the secretary over. Still others thought she took an intentional pratfall.

Either way, the secretary fell off the dais with a thud.

Nadasdy himself wasn't sure what happened after that. Police rimmed the room. Chairs were scrambled everywhere. Coats and ties lay distended upon the carpeting, the sour reek of cigarette smoke and sweat hanging thick in the air. History would record that Nadasdy had declared Lukens the winner by two votes. The convention adjourned at 5:15 a.m. Two-thirds of the agenda was still left to go.

The fiasco made the news around the country. The delegates were described as “well-dressed beatniks” and “well-scrubbed monsters”—and, usually, as Birchers, even though Syndicate delegations forced their members to swear affidavits that they didn't belong to the Society. “We thought we knew exactly what it meant to be conservative until we saw these people,” a leader of the South Dakota delegation told a reporter. “We found ourselves—mostly pro-Goldwater—becoming ‘middle-of-the-roaders' in comparison to the extremists.” Minnesota's Democratic lieutenant governor called the convention “a basic threat to the free workings of our governmental institutions as set forth by the Constitution.” The
Herald Tribune
said that if the Republicans embraced Lukens's advocacy of the Southern strategy, it would be “as immoral a political act as any by a major party in American history.”

Clif White had a lot of Republican conventions to win in 1964 if he wanted his man to win the nomination. And to Len Nadasdy, San Francisco looked like exactly what Clif White intended it to be: a dress rehearsal. “We'll see this radical right running a slate of delegate candidates for Senator Barry Goldwater for President,” Nadasdy promised the
St. Paul Pioneer Press.
He wrote Goldwater, advising him to disown these radicals before it was too late: “Why not do it now—openly and clearly—rather than waiting until Rockefeller or, even worse, Kennedy forces you to do it in the heat of the campaign?”

The National Draft Goldwater Committee workers hardly worried about the atrocious publicity. They had an armory to fill, and they didn't have Goldwater as a draw. O'Donnell was so awed by the size of the D.C. Armory (it had been filled only for the Eisenhower and Kennedy inaugural balls and a Billy Graham crusade) and its stifling temperature (even Graham wasn't confident enough to schedule the space for the middle of summer) that he begged White to cancel. Shortly before curtain time the committee peered onto the floor from a dining room in the building's upper reaches. A band was playing patriotic songs; the spots danced on platform guests—Governor Paul Fannin, grade-B stars Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Chill Wills; there were enough buntings and banners for two national conventions. But only one-third of the seats were filled. Prayers were mumbled.

They needn't have fretted. When Clif White stepped outside later, he had to blink: chartered buses from as far away as Texas stretched practically to the horizon. By the time the spectacular reached its peak—some thought it was White's slide presentation of “The Republican Opportunity to Win”; others Zimbalist's speech, in which he told the story of Goldwater's life, pausing expertly before declaring, “He didn't go to Harvard,” bringing down the house—they had a fire hazard on their hands. The Washington press corps left awed by the crowd's zeal—and, incidentally, by the fact that there were as many Confederate flags in the hall as American flags. The
Washington Star
ran two front-page stories, one by Mary McGrory and another by David Broder, who wrote: “The entire evening—from the first bit of oratory to the last button on the costumes of the Goldwater Girls—showed a professionalism surprising in a group that opened its headquarters less than a month ago.” It was reported that moderate Charlie Percy, in his bid for the Illinois gubernatorial nomination in 1964, was frantically tacking to the right as a result of the rally.
New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock found anti-Goldwater forces in the party suddenly “less visible” now.

The National Draft Goldwater Committee could not lose. Goldwater's support among independents had tripled since November of 1962. Goldwater was running twenty points ahead in early primary polling in California. Half the Republican county chairs in patronage-heavy Pennsylvania favored him over their own governor Bill Scranton.

Nobody seemed to worry over the fact that Goldwater's momentum rose the more the peace was disturbed. On Independence Day in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley, who had proudly hosted Martin Luther King on his triumphant post-Birmingham tour, was booed off the stage at the Grant Park Bandshell because he had recently stated that there were no ghettos in Chicago. (Later in the year, two black college students tested the mayor's contention by renting a
bungalow a block and a half from the Daley family home. The Eleventh Ward Regular Democratic Organization broke in, spirited the kids' possessions to a nearby police station, and invited locals to have their way with the place. After the real estate agent was forced to sign over the lease to two young local white men—real estate licenses were controlled by the Daley machine—neighbors pitched in to clean up the excrement they themselves had smeared on the walls.) “The Polish-American community,” a director of the city's Polish National Alliance told Ted Humes, “quite generally imputes racial stirring to the Kennedys and are moving out of Chicago as fast as they can.” Kennedy's ambassador to the Dominican Republic, John Bartlow Martin, on a trip home to the Chicago suburbs, was amazed at the rancor his well-off neighbors were expressing at the Administration.

In Oxford, Mississippi, three hundred troops remained to safeguard James Meredith's life. At the Commerce Committee hearings on the Kennedy civil rights bill, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett (whose state maintained a surveillance apparatus within its “Sovereignty Commission” with no analog closer than that of the East German Stasi) reminded senators that Communists were “championing the cause of the Negroes in America as an important part of their drive to mobilize both colored and white for the overthrow of our government.” George Wallace showed a photograph of Martin Luther King at the Highlander Folk School, a camp that instructed activists in nonviolent methods. He declared Highlander a “communist training school” (King had the bad fortune to be sitting next to a member of the Communist Party in the photograph). President Kennedy was worried enough that Wallace was right, and terrified enough of the political consequences, that he spent the rest of the morning investigating. If he had known that Wallace borrowed the gambit from billboards put up by the John Birch Society, he mightn't have taken it so seriously.

 

Nelson Rockefeller preferred to launch his bombshells on weekends. This one came on Sunday, July 14, Bastille Day. It was said that his staff at the townhouse on 55th Street could knock out a statement or a speech on any subject in thirty minutes. The Bastille Day declaration they belabored over. They were searching for a way to use the events at the Young Republican convention in San Francisco to fan the dying embers of Rockefeller's presidential hopes.

An investigation had appeared in
Look,
a magazine with a circulation of seven million. “The Rampant Right Invades the GOP” depicted a California Republican Assembly chapter meeting in which a hostess expecting fifteen members was set upon by a roving band of eighty-seven Birchers, who voted
out the previous officers, installed their own, absconded with the club records and checkbook, and left behind cigarette burns in the carpeting and an unplugged refrigerator, dashing off to do it all over again somewhere else. A tuxedoed William F. Buckley was shown addressing a staid Manhattan banquet; below that, an Indiana YAF chapter (“led by an adult counselor”) was shown feeding a raging bonfire with wicker baskets because they had been manufactured in Yugoslavia. The placement of the two photographs conveyed an argument: behind the conservative movement's respectable façade lay jeering fascist mobs.

Rockefeller's July 14 statement placed the responsibility at Barry Goldwater's feet. The Republican Party, it began, “is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority.” They were “wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principle.” They “have no program for the Republican party or the American people except distrust, disunity, and the ultimate destruction of the confidence of the people in themselves. They are purveyors of hate and distrust in a time when, as never before, the need of the world is for love and understanding.” The conservatives “have no concern with and offer no solution to the problems of chronic unemployment, of education and training, of housing, of racial injustice and strife.” Instead they would destroy the Republican Party with a chimerical strategy to write off the Northeast and black Americans everywhere.

The Bastille Day declaration backfired. It was incoherent. On the one hand, it said that the conservatives' sin was sponsoring a grand conspiracy under cover of night (evidence never ranged beyond what the statement termed the “totalitarianism” in the Sheraton-Palace ballroom) because conservatives couldn't win any other way. On the other, Rockefeller said that the conservatives' sin was to win masses through a demagogic appeal to racism. This was a contradiction—one sharpened by the fact that the statement also called Republicans who had not spoken out against the conservatives' demagoguery “opportunists.” By
arguing that “the path to victory is in seeking out the people in the areas where they live” and in “accepting the responsibilities of leadership in the solution of their problems,” the statement embraced the very approach Nelson Rockefeller had
rejected
in 1962 while
courting
conservatives. And the larger message was politically foolish: the millions of ordinary, honest Americans who agreed with conservative positions were now being equated with “vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements.”

Rockefeller was the real opportunist. The immediate goal appeared to be winning Senator Tom Kuchel to head his delegate slate in the California primary by joining Kuchel's battle against the far right. It didn't help. The accuser—who only months before had been proud of his role as healer between the right and left wings of the GOP—was judged more extreme than the accused. “Our party is in no position to incite political mayhem by ruthless intramural attacks,” said Mark Hatfield. Even New York senator Ken Keating moved away from an alliance with his governor, saying he didn't consider Goldwater in league with the far right at all. The main effect of the speech was to unify conservatives even more virulently against Rockefeller. The Bastille Day declaration, said
Newsweek,
was “an act of desperation that failed.”

 

The leaders of the proverbial Eastern Establishment had already cut themselves loose from the Rockefeller presidential bid in the wake of his remarriage. Nonetheless his Bastille Day declaration bespoke their deepest fears. Stewart Alsop quoted one of them on the prospect of a Goldwater candidacy. The source nearly choked on his tongue: “My God, we'd be the
apartheid
party!” Jackie Robinson, a loyal Republican, published an article in the
Saturday Evening Post
pointing out a “striking parallel” between the Black Muslims and the Goldwaterites: Both “want to detour from the highway to racial integration. Both groups feel they can reach their goals by traveling the road of racial separation.” One party blue-blood told the
San Francisco Chronicle:
“Barry doesn't know any more about the world than my 8-year-old grandson.”