Before the Storm (46 page)

White was traveling too, more than ever, working eighteen-hour days with a new partner, former RNC finance committee staffer Frank Kovac. “I have never been with Frank Kovac when he showed any compunction whatever about asking for a contribution,” he noted in amazement. At the new Washington Draft Goldwater office—which was accumulating enough half-filled coffee cups, full ashtrays, and envelope-licking housewives to resemble a party headquarters a month before Election Day—petitions were pouring in with checks attached, $1,000 a day.
Roll Call
reported that the Goldwater campaign organization had $7.5 million in the bank. It was really $125,000, although White hardly minded the publicity; it would only bring in more. He brought a full-time finance director aboard (Dan Gainey of Minnesota, retired CEO of class-ring
manufacturer Josten's, a former RNC treasurer who wintered in Arizona); on September 16, Carol Bauman (nee Dawson) began work full-time putting together a nationwide Goldwater youth organization.

The date was auspicious. That night, in California, where there were already some one hundred Goldwater youth groups in operation, Robert Gaston's organization, despite a concerted sabotage attempt by party regulars, filled Dodger Stadium for a Goldwater rally—on an odd-numbered year, on a Monday night when the pennant-chasing Dodgers were playing a crucial game on TV, for a man who wasn't even officially a presidential candidate. The crowd groaned when Goldwater said he had to fly back to Washington afterward to debate the test-ban treaty; they gave him a bone-crunching roar when he said that he was voting against it.

“Almost everybody in Washington has violent views about it pro or con,” wrote Scotty Reston of Goldwater's front-runner status for the nomination, “except Barry himself.” Mary McGrory followed Goldwater back to Washington as he ducked in at the Chevy Chase Women's Republican Club for an off-the-cuff Q&A; one of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was. “Senator Goldwater doesn't strain at all,” she marveled. “He is entirely himself.”

 

Kennedy certainly wouldn't have voted with only eighteen other senators against the Partial Test Ban Treaty, as Goldwater was about to do. The treaty marked a transforming moment in America's relationship with the atom. It began as a friendship. Within hours of the bombing of Hiroshima, the Washington Press Club had an “Atomic Cocktail” on offer; no one blanched at naming a sexy new bathing suit after an atoll that had been nearly wiped from the Earth in a hydrogen bomb test in 1952. That same year, in fact, an airborne nuclear test was broadcast on TV to Chet Huntley's thrilled commentary. Casinos scheduled outings to watch tests at the Atomic Energy Commission Proving Grounds northwest of Las Vegas. The AEC's propagandistic “Project Plowshare” produced glowing stories of the possibilities of using nuclear devices to carve a new canal in Central America and a new harbor in Alaska. The bomb was something to be proud of. It protected us. Its more imminent dangers were only discussed behind scientists' closed doors.

Atomic testing began showing a darker face in the mid-1950s, when physicist Ralph Lapp and chemist Linus Pauling began publishing widely on the
dangers of “nuclear fallout,” a mysterious toxin that “cannot be felt and possesses the terror of the unknown”—although it was known that it was released in the air in tests, was linked to cancer and genetic damage, and had a half-life of twenty-eight years. A full-blown fallout scare ensued in 1959 when high levels of strontium 90 were discovered in the bones of children under four. Anti-testing forces launched a brilliant scientific and public relations project, the “Baby Tooth Survey,” which collected teeth from 80,000 children and released findings in 1962 of a fourteenfold increase in strontium 90 levels in children born in 1957 compared to those born in 1949. It might have been an ad that ran in newspapers in April 1963 that clinched public opinion: “Dr. Spock Is Worried,” it read. “
Your
children's teeth contain strontium 90.”

Test-ban talks began in Moscow in June 1963, around the time of Kennedy's American University address arguing that peace that “does not require that each man love his neighbors—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance.” It was a message that, for the most part, only the kind of conservatives who went to Dodger Stadium rallies weren't thrilled to hear. Negotiations were completed in record time; the treaty was signed on July 25. (An informal part of the agreement was being carried out even as Martin Luther King delivered his stirring peroration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial: a “hotline” was installed connecting the White House and the Kremlin.) And the ratification vote was quickly set for early September—just in time for Goldwater to vote against it at the height of his boom. He saw the treaty as an inexcusable strategic compromise. “If it means political suicide to vote for my country and against this treaty,” he said on the Senate floor, “then I commit it gladly.”

It wasn't that Goldwater wasn't interested in running for President. In fact, he had been flabbergasted by his reception of Dodger Stadium and promptly appointed a twenty-three-member committee, chaired by former senator Bill Knowland, to advise him on entering the California primary. One early October morning, the customary bustle at Draft Goldwater headquarters was parted by the screech of the switchboard operator. “It's Barry Goldwater!” she cried. “He's on the line now!” White hadn't spoken to him for months. Goldwater had never set foot in their office. Now the man in the bow tie was summoned down to Capitol Hill and given the order to travel to San Francisco to begin preparations for the national convention. Goldwater had checked with the Arizona attorney general: it was legal to run for both President and senator.

 

As early as his 1922 book
Public Opinion,
Walter Lippmann had come to believe that the world was so complex that political decisions would best be left to a specialized class of experts. Three years later the Scopes “monkey
trial” confirmed his conviction that a public uninstructed by expert opinion would succumb to the tyranny of the majority—the very worst tyranny of all. Ideologically, the columnist vacillated from decade to decade, sometimes coming out liberal in foreign affairs and conservative in domestic, sometimes vice versa. But always, always, his thinking betrayed a constant: that he and his fellow pundits—Hindi for “wise men,” a title first given to him by an admiring Henry Luce—were the nation's best defense against the terror of the mob.

With World War II within the living memory of almost every adult in the early 1960s, that did not seem an idle fear. In 1961 Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem for genocide was a television staple. Highbrow readers absorbed Hannah Arendt's courtroom reports for
The New Yorker
with a terrible awe: she argued that what made Eichmann so frightening was not that he was a monster but that he was an ordinary man. Her articles were published as a book in 1963, and the ensuing ferment among intellectuals was so enveloping that
Look
assigned a reporter to do an article on the debate—the same month that the magazine ran a photo of Indiana YAFers hurling Communist-made wicker baskets into a raging fire. “The most essential criterion for judging the events of our time,” Arendt had written elsewhere, was “Will it lead to totalitarian rule or not?” What led to totalitarian rule, it seemed to most educated Americans, was when an extraordinary man, bound by the same limited moral horizon as everyone else, became swept up in the act of anointing himself a nation's redeemer.

That was the subject of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
All the King's Men
(1946): the story of a rootless man (named Burden) who heals his alienation by filling himself with devotion for a charismatic strongman modeled after Louisiana governor Huey Long, then frees himself over the course of the story from what he increasingly realizes is an existential horror. Warren had Burden exclaim, “There is nothing like the roar of a crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing which is in every man in the crowd but is not himself.” Teddy White, in
The Making of the President 1960
, used similar language in pondering a delirious moment at the 1960 Democratic Convention: “If demonstrations and noise alone can sway a national decision at a nerve center of national politics,” he wrote, “then American politics could be reduced to that naked violence that has so frequently and tragically swayed the history of France and Germany.” That the object of the crowd's roar was hardly führer material—quiet, cerebral Adlai Stevenson—hardly mattered. After Hitler, the crowd's roar was frightening enough in itself.

The American two-party system, it was thought, was a sublime bulwark against just such dangers. “Each party is like some huge bazaar,” wrote the sociologist Daniel Bell, “with hundreds of hucksters clamoring for attention.” To win party leadership, the successful huckster must be bargainer, splitting
most issues down the middle—and as long as that was the case, extremists like Huey Long could never be more than a single yelping voice among the teeming throng. So it was that Walter Lippmann wrote in August that Goldwater's candidacy “strikes at the heart of the American party system.” So it was that, faced with the spectacle of a stadium of youth chanting Barry Goldwater's name, Lippmann had but two choices: predict Goldwater's imminent movement to the ideological center, or brand him a fascist in the making.

He chose to retreat into the cocoon of theory rather than record the evidence of his senses: Goldwater, he reported, was becoming a moderate. “It is interesting to watch him, and comforting to think that the system is working so well.” Lemminglike, others rushed to confirm the master. Pay attention to “a fascinating political biological process,”
The New Republic's
columnist TRB instructed readers, “like watching a polliwog turn into a frog.”

These journalists didn't consider Goldwater's test-ban vote, or his recent correction of the
Congressional Record
to revise a passage giving the mistaken impression that he had denounced the radical right, or, indeed, the day after Lippmann's pronunciamento, a major speech Goldwater made on the Senate floor reaffirming his conviction that “profits are the surest sign of responsible behavior”—or that he was only becoming more popular in the event. “Barry Goldwater could give Kennedy a breathlessly close race,” the
Time
then on the newsstands reported.
Look
ran the banner “JFK COULD LOSE.” On the best-seller list sat
JFK: The Man and the Myth,
in which conservative journalist Victor Lasky, who had made his career attacking Alger Hiss, portrayed Kennedy as a pretty-boy empty suit. (It reduced dignified Republican outlets to spluttering. “Mr. Lasky,” lamented the Herald Tribune, “knows how to use the knee.” The
Wall Street Journal
deemed it “a hatchet job.”) Like Lippmann, many liberals simply denied facts that seemed too unlikely to countenance. At a party celebrating the opening of a press liaison office in D.C., the AP's top political analyst, James Marley, sniffed disdainfully over his cocktail that the polls showing Goldwater's overwhelming popularity over Rockefeller simply couldn't be true.

John F. Kennedy was not a theoretical man. He read the polls—and had a brother-in-law open discussions with an ad agency for 1964. The “conservation trip” he embarked on at the end of September was suspiciously sudden. He started in Scranton's Pennsylvania and moved to Barry Goldwater's West, where he spoke on campuses, joining Goldwater in the battle for young hearts. He preached about the accelerated public works program he had passed the previous year, which had produced a million man-months of new employment. At the University of North Dakota he spoke of the 97 percent of farms that had
gone without electricity in the state before the Democrats instituted the Rural Electrification Administration; at the University of Wyoming he bragged about the government's massive subsidies for petroleum research. (No one shoots Santa Claus.) He also made a rare assertion that nuclear war could mean the deaths of 100 million people in a day. It was a week of parrying and feinting with Barry Goldwater.

Then, at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, the sturdiest redoubt of the Republican right in America, Kennedy went on the attack—going for the flank that had been softened by Nelson Rockefeller in July. It was testament to the novelty of paying serious attention to conservatism that Kennedy's speechwriters' blows shot past Barry Goldwater and landed on Robert Alonzo Taft. “It is little wonder that there is a desire in the country to go back to the time when our nation lived alone,” Kennedy said, patronizing the members of a church renowned for the sweep of its foreign missions.

Not one of these positions could Goldwater fairly be said to hold. The President was not yet in any kind of shape to face the conservative senator from Arizona on ideological turf.

Kennedy would get plenty of training; trips were scheduled to Florida, Texas, and California before the year was out. The Democratic National Committee had filled two filing cabinets with Goldwater intelligence. At the Western States Democratic Meeting, Frank Church devoted his keynote to a new wedge issue. Goldwater had stated that America should consider nuclear retaliation against any Soviet territorial encroachment, Church noted. “Any American president,” he answered, who “tampers cavalierly with the delicate balance of terror upon which the peace presently depends, might well be the last American president.” At the Midwestern States Democratic Meeting, DNC chair John Bailey said that the GOP was “infiltrated by right-wing fanatics and fear mongers who think former President Eisenhower is a Communist dupe.” Only Nebraska's loudmouth governor Frank Morrison spoke a certain fear aloud—predicting that Goldwater would carry every state west of the Mississippi but
one. Sargent Shriver began mixing political errands with his Peace Corps travels. Martin Luther King began worrying that Goldwater had won an important victory already—Kennedy, King said, was moving appreciably to the right.