Before the Storm (50 page)

First, after buttering up Kitchel with intellectual flattery (the Arizonan studied constitutional law in his spare time), Baroody humbly offered himself up to Kitchel as a guide to Washington's curious ways. Then he moved to eliminate a possible rival. Goldwater's association with
National Review,
Baroody told Kitchel, would play into the hands of enemies who wished to isolate Goldwater on the right-wing fringe. Bill Buckley had approached Jay Hall with some ideas for the campaign. Hall lured him to a dinner with Kitchel and Baroody to discuss them. Then Baroody leaked news of the meeting to one of his contacts at the
New York Times
—who dutifully ventriloquized Baroody's story that “the Goldwater for President ship just repelled a boarding party” that had “cornered some Goldwater aides” for a “share of the Goldwater command.” No more William F. Buckley.

That was in character. Baroody was cagey, Machiavellian, hungry—a conservative
empire builder. A devout Maronite Christian, like his father, who was an immigrant Lebanese stonecutter from Manchester, New Hampshire, he also did not know how to compromise when it came to principle.

His American Enterprise Institute began in 1943 as the American Enterprise Association, a little business lobby against wartime price controls. By 1953 it was little more than a luncheon club for visiting executives. The outfit was on the verge of shutting down when Baroody, then a chamber of commerce staffer, was brought in to see if he could resuscitate it. His partner, W. Glenn Campbell, a Harvard-trained economist, assembled a top-notch stable of scholars; Baroody worked tirelessly to make them indispensable to the city's workings. Washington was complex, and AEA made its name by making it simpler—providing legislators with a steady stream of issue guides that meticulously and fairly spelled out both sides of a pending bill, amendment, or policy question. Every word was vetted by an advisory council of professors.

In 1962 Baroody changed AEA's name to the American Enterprise Institute—trade groups in Washington were called “Associations,” and he was selling a research center. He took in enormous sums of money; Howard J. Pew gave $100,000 that year alone. AEI began producing scholarship—monograph after monograph, with dozens of tables and graphs, promising things like “essential cost data, much of it never before assembled, on which any rational policy of public education must be based” (any rational policy of public education, it turned out, reserved no role for the federal government). Ideas once enforced at union-busting manufacturies by goon squad and court injunction now received scientific demonstration by economists with Austrian names. At his home, Bill Baroody convened grand salons where he sketched dreams of a conservative counterestablishment. To reporters he blandly proclaimed, “I really can't say whether I am a liberal or a conservative.” He called himself a social, not political, friend of Goldwater's. He kept pictures of himself with people like Hubert Humphrey on his office walls. That was for the feds: AEI had a tax exemption to preserve. Admirers called this style intellectual entrepreneurship.

White was unmoved. The first project of Kitchel's eggheads was contracting for a “Recordak”—a computer programmed to file everything Goldwater ever said on any subject on punched cards for handy cross-referencing. White found the $10,000 expense about as relevant to the task at hand—lining up delegates—as, well, hiring a foreign policy consultant. White collected stories of Denison Kitchel's incompetence. “Who's Arthur Summerfield?” Kitchel asked when advised to consult the former RNC chair; “What line of work are you in?” he queried an uncommitted Republican senator. (It was then that White
prepared a detailed notebook outlining the peculiarities, loyalties, and peccadilloes of every important name in the Republican Party for Kitchel to consult whenever one should happen to call.) When White learned Kitchel was hard of hearing—in a field where the most important work was done in whispers!—that clinched it: it was only a matter of time before Goldwater recognized the web spun out from Suite 3505 for the rare and marvelous thing that it was and relegated Kitchel to the background.

If he ever decided to seek the nomination.

 

The day the
New York Times
revealed Eisenhower's fondness for Henry Cabot Lodge, both White's and Kitchel's top men—along with Republican Johnny Rhodes, former senator Bill Knowland, and current senators Carl Curtis and Norris Cotton—teamed up to confront Barry Goldwater in his Washington apartment. They spoke in terms he understood best: duty. “Barry,” began Carl Curtis, who had been the first politician to openly identify himself as a Goldwater delegate way back in May of 1963, “the time has come to either fish or cut bait.”

The moral authority in the room belonged to Norris Cotton. He was a moderate—perhaps, by the flinty standards of New Hampshire, a liberal. He had gone far out on a limb for Goldwater the previous fall by becoming the first GOP leader in New Hampshire to back him, and Goldwater's refusal to back him up in return with an announcement of his candidacy had created a political hardship. So Cotton spoke last. He compared Goldwater to de Gaulle holding out against the Nazis; he brought much of the room to tears. It wasn't enough. Goldwater interrupted the waterworks to politely inform them that he wasn't yet ready to make a decision. It was excruciatingly awkward. Goldwater felt trapped. He had felt trapped ever since Clarence Manion had shoved him forward as a potential nominee in 1960. And he also felt obligated. Conservatism was his life's cause.

The crowd dispersed, leaving behind only two old friends, two glasses of Old Crow, and a plenitude of silence. “Barry,” Denison Kitchel finally said, “I don't think you can back down.” He reminded Goldwater of the thousands upon thousands of lesser Norris Cottons who had staked so much on him. There was no opinion Barry Goldwater respected more than Denison Kitchel's. Goldwater told him to inform his two Senate colleagues, in confidence, that he would run. Publicly, he kept his counsel for another agonizing three weeks.

 

Draft Goldwater met on December II. A new strategy of entering as many primaries as possible to prove Goldwater's popularity was discussed. The committee
turned over the idea of recruiting Len Hall, the party's top operative, as campaign manager. The finance committee reported that fund-raising was ahead of schedule.

They were going through the motions. The meeting had been called by White to inform them that their organization was being absorbed into the new Goldwater for President Committee, overseen by Denison Kitchel. When White had learned that Goldwater would announce his candidacy after the New Year at his home in Phoenix, he prepared for Kitchel a list of National Draft Goldwater Committee volunteers who deserved recognition in Goldwater's speech. White booked hotel rooms and a banquet hall in Phoenix to celebrate with his comrades. Then he was told that Barry wanted only his Arizonan political team present. And White canceled his reservations.

Soon afterward Len Hall rebuffed a plea to run Rockefeller's campaign. It was rumored he wanted to go to work for Goldwater. Kitchel met him for lunch. Washington protocol demanded that newcomer Kitchel address old hand Hall as supplicant. Instead Kitchel blustered: “I want you to understand, Mr. Hall, that we're not
asking
you to work for us.” The Republicans' most competent operative, trusted by all factions, glad to oblige, never set foot inside the Goldwater nominating campaign. Clif White, an old friend, probably could have won Hall in a heartbeat.

 

New Year's Eve: Governor Rockefeller announced the expected arrival of a child in early June (the
Washington Post
also reported that Rockefeller would make a nationwide TV and radio broadcast to plea for “tolerance and understanding” on the issue of remarriage, but apparently someone talked him out of it). Lyndon Johnson had just signed a $4.4 billion public works bill; six liberal Republican senators announced a measure to guarantee medical care for the elderly, financed, as JFK wished, out of Social Security. In Pasadena, General Eisenhower grand-marshaled the Rose Bowl Parade (he told the Kiwanis Club Kickoff Luncheon that football helped mold the American character and that “every game means something to the United States”). Among those crowded streetside was Richard G. Kleindienst. He was heading back home on January 3 when he was greeted by a highway patrolman at the Arizona Border Inspection Station: “Dick Kleindienst? You are to proceed directly to Senator Goldwater's home in Phoenix.”

“Why, is there anything wrong?” (He hadn't been told that his friend had decided to run.)

“Don't ask me—that's all that I know.”

He drove faster than he should have. He snaked up the steep, winding road just outside the city limits to the base of Goldwater's still-steeper, windier
driveway and was waved through by the Young Republican girls tending the electric gate with its Navajo-style crest. Local press had begun arriving at 7 a.m. Goldwater, who had recently announced that his daughter was to wed in June, ambled out in jeans and bedroom slippers and joked to the familiar faces that he had called them out to his home to announce that his daughter had been knocked up and they were having the wedding next week.

Kleindienst marveled at the scene. He glimpsed Peg, looking entirely too listless, herding Maricopa County sheriffs in tight brown slacks and ten-gallon hats to their appointed positions. Her mother had just died; her brother was ailing. The cops were there because of a bomb threat. She couldn't be pleased at turning over her garage to Western Union and the telephone company, or at the TV crews trampling her yellow roses, marigolds, bougainvillea, and desert blooms (may they back into an organ-pipe cactus!), or at catering tuna-fish sandwiches for the strangers who had banged and clanked their way through the night in her backyard. Peggy was part deaf, and abhorred publicity. She had given up dreams of becoming an artist to be a politician's wife. She and Barry had a good marriage, taking Caribbean cruises one year for her and outdoor adventures the next for him. Barry never asked her to appear on television with him except late on the last day of a campaign. But he had first informed Kitchel of his intentions—and only then his wife. She was a creature of her generation. She said, “If that's what you want to do, go ahead and do it. I don't particularly want you to run, but I'm not going to stand in your way.”

Kleindienst handed over his keys to the Young Republican men parking cars, feeling a bit conspicuous in his casual dress, and was led across Bia-Nun-I-Kin's shining green floor (slate mined from Navajo country), past tables inlaid with silver-and-turquoise Indian designs, to the master bedroom in the back, where Kitchel, Burch, and Goldwater—the crutches from his recent bone surgery by his side—awaited him. He wondered where Steve Shadegg was.

The answer was: in the doghouse. In 1962, to ensure passage of crucial water legislation, Arizona Republican leaders had planned to let eighty-five-year-old Carl Hayden run unopposed. Then a hotheaded Pontiac dealer, Evan Mecham, a Bircher who considered Goldwater's bunch an unaccountable establishment, decided to run for the Republican nomination. Shadegg entered the primary to block him—against Goldwater's wishes. Goldwater was a stickler for loyalty. Shadegg was never close to him after that—although one wonders whether the resentment hadn't been building up for some time before. Shadegg had run Goldwater's Senate campaigns all the way down to what he wore and what he said. Now Goldwater was caught up in this whole business again, this time with Clif White's grasping hotheads trying to call the
shots. That, in fact, was why these men were here. Goldwater had decided this campaign would be different. He would run it his way. Kitchel learned he was going to be campaign manager. Burch would be his assistant. And Kleindienst would be director of field operations.

“And what am I supposed to do as—what did you call it?—director of field operations?” Kleindienst asked, more irritated than amused.

What he was supposed to do was ensure Goldwater the 655 delegates he needed to be nominated—although Kleindienst had never worked on a primary before, and had barely attended a political convention outside of Arizona. Kleindienst told his dear friend he was crazy.

“Listen, and get this straight,” Goldwater growled in response. “I'm not going to turn my life over to people I don't know and trust if I'm going to go through with this. Either the three of you agree to go through this with me or I'm not going to do it!”

It was a Friday—as President Johnson observed that night after cutting short a tour for reporters of the Texas hill country to watch a tape of the announcement on the
Huntley-Brinkley Report.
Johnson wondered why Goldwater didn't announce on a Sunday: “He'd get more space in the Monday morning papers.” Goldwater's advisers had said the same thing. They also insisted he would get more coverage announcing from Washington. But Barry was determined to do this his way or not at all.

Goldwater stepped out from the bedroom to the living room, where thirty Arizona Republican leaders were gathered around the coffee table supported by a fifteen-hundred-pound ironwood log. Outside, a radio broadcaster said, “Any comment on his intentions would be premature at this time.” (Somewhere in New York, Rockefeller's men transcribed the broadcast.) Inside, a cheer went up. The drapes opened. Camera shutters exploded. Goldwater prepared to hobble out onto his patio and into a typically beautiful Arizona day. He had a great photo of himself on that patio, on one knee, a shotgun resting on the other, in jeans, rawhide jacket, and a cowboy hat, a saguaro by his side and Camelback Mountain (and, dimly visible, slightly spoiling the effect, a set of pool furniture) in the background. Now, dressed in a dark blue suit, microphone draped around his neck, he looked uncomfortable. He paused. “Come on in, Barry, the water's fine,” an Arizona reporter quipped to scattered laughs.