Before the Storm (56 page)

She had begun her career by taking up the House seat of her husband when he died, in the days when congressional wives were expected to spend half the week calling on embassies, the homes of Supreme Court justices, and the White House—a thrilling exercise consisting of leaving callings cards on a silver tray at the East Gate. After she served out her husband's term she was reelected by greater margins than her husband ever was. In 1948 she became the first woman to win a Senate seat in her own right; in 1960 Democrats decided to no avail that their only chance to beat her was to nominate a woman. (It was the first time two women faced off for a Senate seat, and the last until 1986.) The “Conscience of the Senate” was a bracingly unpredictable voter, a foe of both COPE and HUAC; whenever a colleague asked for her vote on an issue, she automatically voted the other way. She answered all her mail by hand, never took a dime of campaign contributions, and once held up Jimmy Stewart's promotion to brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve because “there are others more deserving.”

Her style bore all the contradictions of a society coming upon a switching point. The Johnson White House would soon announce the appointments of ten women to high executive positions; the best-selling nonfiction book of 1964 would be
The Feminine Mystique;
the previous year Congress had passed an Equal Pay Act. But there Margaret Chase Smith was, before the
Women's
National Press Club—women being barred from the original National Press Club until 1971. Membership in the WNPC was largely confined to society reporters and “Inquiring Camera Girls”—attractive young women who trolled city streets for cute human interest stories (Jacqueline Bouvier was one when she met Jack Kennedy). When debate began on the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights bill at the end of January, Representative Howard Smith had thought it a clever tactic to derail it by adding “sex” as a protected category. There followed a bout of locker-room talk among the 424 representatives who were not women about henpecking wives and a “surplus of spinsters”; then Congress-woman Martha Griffiths of Michigan stood up and gravely spoke out for Judge Smith's motion as an idea whose time had come. The great chamber reverberated with shock.

Margaret Chase Smith's motto was “Women are people. A woman's place is everywhere.” All the same, she unironically embraced the most rigid feminine stereotypes. Interviewed in a new magazine for federal employees,
Government Girl
(filled, mostly, with ads for party dresses, dance lessons, and
dictation machines), she gave this advice: “We all want to be mothers and wives. Many of us can't be. Many who don't have a home go out into the world and follow some business or profession.... And one thing a girl should do is pay a great deal of attention to her clothes.” She said that was how she chose her secretaries. She herself wouldn't dream of appearing outdoors without the frilly, flowery bonnets and architectural studio hats every woman over the age of fifty was still sporting in 1964, and her trademark rose corsage.

Her foray into New Hampshire was serious—serious enough for her to prove herself by ostentatiously starting out the campaign up at the 45th parallel, halfway to the North Pole, where it was 28 degrees below zero, posing for a photograph with her press corps as the only one not wearing a hat. Then she drove her own sedan 1,000 miles, crisscrossing the state in six days—the same way she covered 8,000 miles in Maine for two months every summer. “You got a lot of zip to be up here this morning,” an amazed logger said. Out of earshot other men called her “a disgrace to the Republican Party.” It remained to be seen whether she would be taken seriously.

 

Everyone took Richard Nixon seriously. A Harris poll had already come out listing him as the most popular Republican in New Hampshire. He had a reputation as a sterling New Hampshire vote-getter ever since he had won 22,000 “spontaneous” write-in votes for vice president after Harold Stassen tried to dump him from the ticket in 1956. It had actually been a concerted campaign to make the votes
look
spontaneous. But this time the spontaneity was (almost) real. New Hampshire voters were craving familiarity. Nixon responded by stepping up his speaking schedule—appearing but rarely in primary states, and never in New Hampshire, which would destroy his above-the-fray image. His speeches were loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides. The day after the Harris poll he appeared on Arthur Godfrey's radio show with Jackie Gleason. Gleason and Godfrey started to gab, awkwardly, about how none of the three of them seemed ever to wear hats; Nixon chimed in, “I never wear a hat. So it must always be in the ring.” The joke certainly sounded like a setup.

Foreign policy brush fires abounded in those
Strangelove
-obsessed weeks. In Panama, anti-American students rioted and burned the flag; in Cuba, Castro shut off water to the Marine base at Guantanamo Bay; General de Gaulle was shopping neutralization deals for Southeast Asia and, with the United Kingdom, was selling durable goods to Cuba. Goldwater called for sending in the Marines to Cuba and Panama and said that de Gaulle wouldn't defy American policy if we would only give him more nuclear weapons. Johnson resolved the
first two crises through negotiation, without, apparently, getting anything in return, and seemed to be doing nothing about the third. This laid down a perfect middle road upon which Nixon, in his speeches, gladly cruised to an admiring response. At the White House, President Johnson began to prepare for the eventuality of running against Nixon by taking steps to meet with Khrushchev and ordering the Democratic National Committee to prepare a memo on every flip-flop Nixon had made in his eighteen-year career.

Nixon was about to make one on race. On February 12, two days after the House began debate on the civil rights bill, 450,000 of New York's one million public school students had boycotted class to protest de facto segregation—a disruption designed to artificially lower school populations during the week when the state gauged attendance to decide how much education money to dole out to municipalities. Evidence of discontent among blacks in the North still had the power and terror of revelation. It was partly because newspapers honored gentleman's agreements with local authorities not to report racial disturbances ; in Chicago, few outside Mayor Daley's high command knew, for example, that his Human Relations Commission had documented 260 such occurrences in July of 1961 alone. But you couldn't hide a school boycott. Bayard Rustin told reporters: “By running to the suburbs, the whites are leaving to the Negro the total burden of improving schools. Whites must learn to share this burden. We will force them to learn—and I say force.” The ploy sparked a movement. Cincinnati schools emptied in a boycott, too. And Nixon, as it happened, had a speech scheduled for Cincinnati the next day.

He used the occasion to condemn the “irresponsible tactics of some of the extreme civil rights leaders” who have “created an atmosphere of hate and distrust which, if it continues to grow, will make the new law a law in name only.” (He neglected to take note of the threat to the law posed by the jury that four days earlier had acquitted Byron de la Beckwith of shooting Medgar Evers, although the defendant's fingerprints were on the murder weapon; and the Alabama mayor who had just turned away six Negro students at an elementary school, because he said they would constitute a fire hazard; and the state troopers who, accompanied by a notorious local sheriff named Jim Clark, tortured a photographer with cattle prods for daring to cover the event.) For Nixon, the new civil rights militancy was a political opportunity.

He was not the only politician taking to the pulpit around Lincoln's birthday to preach moderation. In Springfield, Illinois, Adlai Stevenson declared: “Lawlessness, even verbal violence, that seeks to wound but fears to strike, destroys more than the image of America. They undermine its political foundations as well.” Texas representative Henry Gonzales dug up an old issue of the Minutemen newsletter
On Target
that listed the twenty congressmen who had
voted against extending HUAC's appropriation and that warned, “Traitors beware! Even now the cross hairs are on the back of your necks.” Papers were filled with stories about the University of Illinois classics professor Revilo Oliver, who had published an article in Robert Welch's
American Opinion,
entitled “Marxmanship in Dallas,” claiming that Kennedy had been slain for “becoming a political liability” to his Communist handlers. At the convention of the National Association for School Administrators, delegates commiserated over the Daughters of the American Revolution's campaign to ban a popular first-grade reader because of its “subtle way of undermining the American system of work and profit and replacing it with a collectivist welfare system.” CBS's
The Defenders
presented a harrowing episode, entitled “The Blacklist” and starring Jack Klugman, on an innocent man ruined by homegrown fascists;
Point of Order
continued to pack theaters. America was still worried about right-wing extremism.

Unsettling things didn't issue only from the fringe. On February 7 the Beatles landed at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York for their first American tour, which would not have seemed to pose much danger to anyone—except that within two weeks of the event a
Time
cover article lamented “the Second Sexual Revolution”; the
Washington Post's
entertainment columnist complained of “the virtual surrender of the motion picture industry to the adolescent” ; novelist (and
Strangelove
screenwriter) Terry Southern's outrageous sexual satire
Candy
was burning up the best-seller lists; the FCC renounced the right to censor “provocative” television shows; the Supreme Court narrowly overturned Florida's ban on Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer;
and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy announced he was prosecuting a brazen “art” periodical called
Eros
under the Comstock Act. America was worried about something else, something new: rapidly changing cultural mores.

These developments brought further consuming thirst for normalcy to New Hampshire's upstanding burghers. But as more and more candidates bid fair to quench it, none seemed able to distinguish him- or herself from any of the others. Until, finally, one began pulling away from the pack.

 

In Boston, “the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God”: of Henry Cabot Lodge's background, little more need be said. “Cabot,” as he was known to intimates, became a Republican hero by winning a Senate seat in the 1936 Roosevelt landslide and became a national hero by resigning it to command a World War II tank brigade. Defeated in his 1952 reelection bid by Jack Kennedy (Lodge was preoccupied with campaigning for the man he personally recruited into the Republican Party, General Eisenhower), he found
even greater celebrity as Eisenhower's United Nations ambassador—answering every outrage from the Soviet delegation with stinging rebukes that would invariably show up on the evening news as what a later generation would call a “sound bite.” He won the vice-presidential berth on the 1960 Nixon ticket; and, in the summer of 1963, he was given the ambassadorship to Vietnam. A walking embodiment of the bipartisan principle in foreign policy, a man of peace, a bulwark at the farthest outpost of American freedom, he was tall, charismatic, debonair, handsome, reassuring. In one poll, half the respondents had strong opinions on him, and 96 percent of those were positive.

And in New Hampshire his managers—although they were not quite that, given that they were never certain whether Lodge welcomed their activity at all—put on a political campaign unlike any seen in American history: a public relations campaign. Their leader, Paul Grindle, was a Harvard dropout who had married a circus performer, gone into public relations, then settled into making a comfortable living as an importer of scientific instruments, exploiting the booming Cold War science market by mastering the new technology of computerized direct mail. New to politics, he saw no reason a candidate should be marketed any differently. That the product he was promoting was half the globe away was, if anything, an added convenience. Grindle and his associates contacted Lodge through his son, George, who had lost the 1962 Senate race to Teddy Kennedy. The ambassador agreed not to interfere. He was in the catbird seat—realizing he could take up the mantle if his managers were successful and refuse it if they were not, with no risk to his stature in the meantime.

The first step, Grindle decided, was market research. After the December 8
Times
story naming Lodge General Eisenhower's choice for President caught them unprepared, Grindle adopted an invention of direct-marketing pioneer Lester Wunderman: the preaddressed postage-paid response card, usually bound alongside an ad in a magazine. Its simplicity was deceptive: for the first time Madison Avenue could calibrate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. Just before Christmas, Grindle had volunteers pass out 33,000 cards to passengers on New Haven line commuter trains. They could mark a preference for Nixon, Goldwater, Rockefeller, or Lodge. Four thousand returned the cards. Over half checked Lodge. The campaign was on.

The next step was convincing New Hampshire that writing in Henry Cabot Lodge was not a wasted vote. Grindle and his team turned to Washington publicist Robert Mullen, who had ginned up the Draft Eisenhower fervor in 1952. He was able to plant a (false) item in Roscoe Drummond's
Herald Tribune
column on Christmas Eve: “My information is that the unresolved question is not whether Mr. Lodge is going to resign his ambassadorship and become an open,
active, and campaigning candidate for the nomination—but when.” Mullen then announced a fifty-state campaign to get a million signatures advocating Lodge's nomination. It was a publicity stunt. There were no resources for doing anything of the kind.