Before the Storm (60 page)

 

None of this dented the popularity of Camelot's self-anointed redeemer. Johnson enjoyed a 74 percent approval rating—among Republicans. His press rivaled Albert Schweitzer's: “Johnson Pledges Fight on Mental Retardation; Vows to Press Kennedy's Campaign to Aid Children, Battle Poverty, ‘Every Other Foe.' ” This would have relaxed any politician—except Lyndon Johnson. He had begun campaigning for reelection long ago. His first target was the
Republican business leaders whose checks and phone calls and subtle threats usually vouchsafed an acceptable GOP presidential candidate every four years. On December 7 he squeezed eighty-nine of them into the Cabinet Room, ostensibly to win their support for his tax bill. “Call me Lyndon,” he said. “I'd like to get on a first-name basis with you.” The conclaves became a regular event. He slathered his guests in flattery, calling them the nation's life-givers, “the symbols of the free enterprise system.” Slowly he chipped away the residue of thirty years of Democratic business bashing—Franklin Roosevelt's resounding attacks on the nation's “economic royalists.” It worked. “That was most impressive,” said one after a meeting at the White House. “Is there a citizen's group for Johnson you can join?”

November lurked behind every policy decision: whipping the tax bill into passage in time for an autumn impact; complaining of a list of useless military bases that might be closed, “They're all in such sensitive states.” White House staffers learned to schedule joint sessions of Congress to honor visiting Italian leaders, to endure rants against caviling columnists, to inform the President of poll numbers even as they rolled off the presses (right down to sub-ethnic groups like “English Scotch”). Paranoid about imagined Kennedy restoration plots, he ordered his people not to talk to Teddy White—one of the “agents of the people who want to destroy me.” Speeches became occasions to take on the Republican of the moment. (In his February appearance in Miami—the target was Goldwater—he described the presidency as “the one place where a petty temper and narrow view cannot reside.”) He defeated every setback west of the Mekong River Delta—even the Bobby Baker affair.

Baker was a bright country boy from South Carolina who came to Washington in 1944 as a page and indefatigably worked his way up to a position as majority secretary in the Senate by the age of twenty-six in 1955. The young man they called “Little Lyndon” reinvented that formerly ceremonial role as surely as his mentor did the majority leadership. Johnson was heard to say that if he could have a son, he'd choose Bobby Baker. Baker was also the go-to guy for senators seeking a bit of sport with the ladies, the man who knew where every senator stood and how each could be won; he was a favorite courier for lobbyists bearing fat envelopes. He always skimmed a bit off the top; what were they going to do, report him? He set up a little consultantship on the side; his customers were the kind of businesses willing to do whatever it took to win precious government contracts. By the summer of 1963 people began wondering how a man with a salary of $20,000 had become a millionaire, and the walls came tumbling down. Hearings began, but not before the
Des Moines Register
spied a scoop among the thicket: a possible kickback to Lyndon Johnson laundered through the television station his wife owned, involving a complex
deal to secure life insurance after his 1955 heart attack. The allegations and evidence were thin enough that it would seem that the President had little to fear. But just to remind the public of the fortune the Johnson family made off KTBC, the only channel in fast-growing Austin (Goldwater's favorite opening line there was “I didn't have any trouble finding Austin, I just looked for a great big city with only one TV antenna”), threatened Johnson's appearance of propriety as much as had a Senate race won by 87 votes.

In late January, when Republicans tried to get Walter Jenkins, Johnson's most intimate aide, to testify before a Senate subcommittee investigation, Johnson put in the fix. Two psychiatrists appeared to testify that an appearance would—literally—kill him. Carl Curtis moved to call Jenkins to the stand anyway. He lost 6 to 3 in a party-line vote. That was a good thing for Johnson: “I've got considerably more detail on Reynolds's love life,” Jenkins told the President about the man who linked him to Bobby Baker. “Well, get it all typed up for me,” Johnson replied—not the kind of shady behavior Jenkins wanted to be asked about under oath. Curtis lost again when he moved to make the record of their session public. The investigation closed without a single Administration witness being called. A
Minneapolis Tribune
poll found that of the 80 percent of those surveyed who had heard of the Baker case, only 4 percent said it made a difference in the way they viewed the President.

He couldn't lose. A private utility executive would take to the White House lobby to announce a $1 billion expansion in Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, proclaiming that the “favorable business climate” caused by the tax cut was responsible for his decision. They were supposed to be enemies: Johnson was a foremost advocate of public power plants; Goldwater was the spokesman for private ones. But this President didn't seem to have any enemies. On March 23 the
Wall Street Journal
ran an expose estimating Johnson's fortune at $20 million.
Time
ran a piece depicting Johnson careening around his ranch at eighty miles an hour in a Cadillac full of terrified reporters, craning his neck around to bark off-color stories to the backseat, sipping Pearl beer all the while. All was forgotten after he settled a tense and violent Florida railroad strike in marathon sessions with the two parties in the White House. Shortly afterward he even won over the conservative United States Chamber of Commerce (“We haven't done anything for business this week, but please remember, this is only just Monday morning,” he apologized in a speech interrupted for laughter, applause, or both sixty times). Walter Lippmann called Johnson “a healing man” whose country was “far more united and at peace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights, than it has been for a long time.” Scotty Reston praised the President's “total absence of ideology, the passionate insistence on the general welfare, the willingness to talk
endlessly through the night if necessary, the vivid earthy American language and optimistic faith that problems can be solved.” The public agreed: two weeks past the traditional one-hundred-day honeymoon new Presidents were supposed to enjoy, his approval rating stood at 77 percent. It was 75 percent even in the South.

It was a martyr-besotted electorate that the Republicans would have to entice in seven months. They needed a hero, the theory went, a man of the center, an antipartisan, in order to do it—a man like Henry Cabot Lodge, a selfless symbol of the principle that politics ended at the water's edge, of America's resolve to prevail over Communism at the frontier of freedom. Polls now showed Lodge to be the hands-down favorite for the Republican nomination.

 

The next big show was Oregon. Lodge was entered, as was almost everyone else, which was why Oregon was a big show: its election laws required Oregon secretary of state Howell Appling to place on the May 15 ballot all candidates “generally advocated and recognized” as contenders if they had not filed the functional equivalent of a Sherman statement by March 9 at 5 p.m. Dutifully he declared there were six: Goldwater, Rockefeller, Scranton, Nixon, Romney, and Lodge. He missed Mrs. Smith; it took a 1,000-name petition to get Appling to put her on the ballot. She was not being taken seriously.

Only Romney had filed a Sherman statement. When the deadline passed, the day before New Hampshire primary balloting, and Lodge had not filed one either, the sigh of relief from his backers could be heard all the way to Portland, Oregon—where, in a barnlike structure embellished with enormous photographs of their candidate ministering to wounded GIs in Vietnam, Lodge's campaign team began to set up the entire operation all over again. This time they didn't take chances. Under no circumstances, they explained, would “the commander-in-chief of American forces in the hot spot of the world, South Vietnam” come home to campaign.

Scranton was the sorcerer's apprentice: the more he tried to undo his candidacy, the more pundits suspected he was a candidate. “Intimate contact with Gov. William Scranton of Pennsylvania leads to only one conclusion,” wrote Richard Wilson of the
Los Angeles Times.
“He is, in his own low-key way, an active candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination.” Connecticut backers sent Scranton brochures to every fifth name in state telephone books.
Meet the Press
entertained the Pennsylvania governor on February 16; Walter Lippmann all but endorsed him on the nineteenth. Ohio governor James Rhodes was trying to whip up a Scranton delegate bloc in the Midwest. When Scranton presented an unemployment reform plan that angered union leaders, Joe Alsop called it a secret scheme to steal the hearts of conservatives—granting
Scranton such extravagant conspiratorial powers that the columnist sounded like a Bircher.
Reader's Digest
reincarnated him as John F. Kennedy—telling readers that “he keeps superbly fit with vigorous tennis, skiing and other outdoor sports” and that “his manner is one of easy assurance and sophistication.”

After a Scranton friend told
Time
he had just raised $25,000 for the presidential effort, the governor decided he had had enough. After he returned from a Florida vacation on April 19 (he read seventeen books), a stunning 1,200 people turned up at a press conference to hear him read a statement. This, they were sure, was the big one. It wasn't. Many “evidently believe that deep in my heart I do desire the nomination and I am only waiting until the right moment to make my move,” he said. “This is not true. But it seems to be part of our American folklore to believe that every politician wants to be president.” He had tears in his eyes. It is a powerful thing to have the world tell you you should be President of the United States. But he didn't
exactly
deliver a Sherman statement. His attorney general and closest political confidant warned that doing so would dishonor his pledge that he would accept an honest draft. And William Warren Scranton was an honorable man.

Nixon had come close to filing one. In early March, he convened H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichmann, General Mills vice president Nate Crabtree, and Crabtree's public relations chief, the wide-eyed young Len Nadasdy, to chew on the Oregon problem. Was it fertile soil for a “surprise” Nixon upset, or for a humiliating loss that would spoil his reputation for good? Nadasdy, who knew Republicans in every county from his YR work, was dispatched to the state to make discreet inquiries about Nixon's chances. He returned within the week to report that not a single candidate for delegate was likely to pledge to Nixon—and that the plurality of Oregon county chairs thought that the convention would deadlock and Nixon would end up with the nomination anyway. There was nothing to gain by orchestrating a fake grassroots groundswell as Nixon had in New Hampshire in 1956: if such a tactic were exposed, it would scotch the “elder statesman” strategy; if successful, it would likely help Goldwater by further splitting the moderate vote. And if he didn't risk such an effort but
did
win a genuinely spontaneous upsurge, so much the better. What Nadasdy proposed was that Nixon give a press conference in Portland before departing for Asia to explain that although he could not in good conscience remove his name from the ballot, Oregon voters should cast their votes for someone else. Nixon left for Asia. No such press conference was given. Nixon decided to make a stealth campaign in Oregon whatever the risks. Nadasdy reflected with wonder that so careful and shrewd a politician could also relish harebrained cloak-and-dagger schemes that could easily blow up in his face.

Rockefeller was counting on his strength in Oregon to save him. The Oregon
governor, rising GOP star Mark Hatfield, had almost backed Rockefeller against Nixon in 1960; the New York governor was ahead of Goldwater in January polls; the chair of the state university's board of regents had resigned just to manage his campaign. Huge crowds fêted Nelson and Happy at every stop on a February tour of the state (it opened, per Oregon tradition, with the candidate slicing through a gargantuan log with a chain saw). College volunteers crowded his Portland campaign office. And he had a unique advantage: Oregon could be reached by commercial flight only by way of San Francisco. Rockefeller was borrowing his brother Winthrop's brand-new Sabre-Liner, which could make the direct trip from Albany in six and a half hours. Goldwater, saddled with a less impressive bird, missed one big appearance after being held up in San Francisco by mechanical difficulties.

Rockefeller pounced. His half-hour campaign film began showing two months before the May 15 balloting. A late-March tour covered 350 mountainous miles a day. He also flew in Jackie Robinson, the baseball star, now a restaurant company executive, to play bad cop: “If we have a bigot running for the presidency of the United States,” Robinson said, “it will set back the course of the country.”

All his ducks were in a row. Though it all seemed rather moot. National political reporters paid little attention. The polls showed Henry Cabot Lodge scoring three times higher than anyone else.

C
lif White had to laugh. The New Hampshire and Oregon scrambling, this obsession with Mr. GaIIup—it didn't matter if
98 percent
of Republicans loved Lodge if none among their number were convention delegates. The battle for the nomination was fought in hotel ballrooms. Only greenhorns and TV anchormen thought it was fought at the ballot box.

After Goldwater's defeat in New Hampshire, White exuded the confidence of a man on top of the world: “Gentleman, off the record, don't worry—we're still going to win,” he told reporters. By the day they lost New Hampshire's fourteen delegates, they had already won four times that many in North Carolina, Georgia, and the marvelous Palmetto State, from whose convention Roger Milliken had telegrammed, “SOUTH CAROLINA WILL CAST ITS 16 VOTES FOR BARRY GOLDWATER FOREVER.” Let the press cite polls saying that 90 percent of the Republican rank and file wanted someone else. Besides Henry Cabot Lodge's New Hampshire delegates and Rocky's three from the Virgin Islands (where his family had extensive holdings), all the ones decided so far belonged to Goldwater. He had scores more ready to fall in during the weeks to come.