Before the Storm (61 page)

It worked like this. Prior to a state convention, White collected a goal from his chairman of how many delegates his team could harvest. He or an associate—Kleindienst, usually, although as Goldwater's designated “director of field operations,” he was technically White's superior—worked the precinct committeemen and county chairs in person to line up their do-or-die support; two or three weeks before the event, White showed up again to case the ballroom for tactical purposes, parley with his local deputies, study the makeup of the committees that decided credentials and rules, and made sure arrangements had been made to bring the Goldwater delegates to San Francisco, the national convention site, in the same plane, train, or bus—as a disciplined
unit.
He would pore over the relevant rules, ponder the back-room gossip, figure out whether his people could ram through a resolution pledging the delegation to
Goldwater come hell or high water. When the day came, if the convention was contested—often it wasn't—White, Kleindienst, or both, and one of their seven regional directors, would show up to plot strategy, drum up a pep rally, seed the site with propaganda—and, if need be, engage in the black arts of convention trickery of which there was no greater master than F. Clifton White. His model was the Kennedy campaign that began in 1957; surprise was their best weapon. Springing Draft Goldwater on an unsuspecting political establishment in April of 1963 had made Goldwater look more popular than he actually was—without,
Life
was fooled into reporting, “a Kennedy-style campaign.” The
Washington Post
had reported on February 8 the “flaking off” of Goldwater delegate support in Washington, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, and Ohio. It was the kind of coverage White craved. It would only make the victory more impressive when he swept them.

But White kept on thinking of quitting. No other candidate's organization came close to the one he had built. Yet Denison Kitchel was oblivious. After the New Hampshire defeat, Joseph Alsop (“All-sop,” Dean Manion said his name should be spelled) had written, “No serious Republican politician, even of the most Neanderthal type, any longer takes Goldwater seriously.” Denison Kitchel chose to ignore White's briefings and believe Alsop instead. Kitchel spent the week after the New Hampshire defeat practically catatonic with grief. Perhaps he had never heard White in the first place; after all, he had that habit of switching off his hearing aid during discussions he considered tedious.

Clif White looked at the shape of Kitchel's Goldwater for President Committee offices in D.C., and he grieved, too. Goldwater had never seen White's carefully prepared advance memos for New Hampshire, he learned; the Arizona Mafia kept the candidate from “outside” advice. The campaign's fund-raising had ground to a halt, stuck at a point little beyond the $500,000 White had called in from the $1 petition pledges (Marvin Liebman, charged with setting up a branch office in New York, had to do it on his American Express card). As late as February the D.C. office hadn't produced a single brochure. Disillusionment was infecting the grass roots. “For a publicity splash that should have been in preparation for three years,” a friend wrote Rusher, Goldwater “has generated no excitement, no flair, no purpose, no program.” The Goldwater for President finance committee demanded, and by the ukase of Barry Goldwater was refused, Kitchel's resignation.

The research, for all the team's computerized razzle-dazzle, was awful. (Couldn't someone just nail down whether the United Nations was violating either thirty-seven or forty of its covenants so Goldwater didn't have to fumble with a number every time?) The speechwriting was worse. Karl Hess had been put on the job full-time. For Goldwater, it was the beginning of a wonderful
friendship; Hess was his kind of maverick. He had left home to become a journalist at age fifteen, was a former professional gunsmith (“It would not be America really if it did not produce men who suddenly tire of palaver and reach for the rifle on the wall,” he once wrote), had run contraband to rebels in Cuba. On fire with ideological fervor, he had a bottomless contempt for political operatives. And he was loyal to the point of nearly elevating his boss to the status of a god. He and Goldwater fantasized about barnstorming the nation, just the two of them, the candidate dropping from the sky like a bronze god just as he used to with Shadegg in 1952 and 1958. Together they wrote speeches that were like billboards on the road to Damascus. “If we in this hour of world crisis are content to amuse ourselves with the material luxuries freedom has produced,” Goldwater proclaimed in a statewide TV address in Oregon, “we stand guilty of trading the future of all mankind for a brief moment of uncertain safety for our generation.” At which some few voters who entered the hall seeking just enough info to pull one lever in a booth instead of another were converted in a blinding flash. Many more just left spooked.

The trouble was rooted in a culture clash. Hess and the Arizonans' conservatism was rooted in contempt for fast-talking Easterners and their wily ways; to their mind Goldwater's choice of a bunch of hip-shooting cowboys to run his campaign was practically the message of the campaign. That couldn't have been further from what made Clifton White and his boys tick. To them, the thrill of politics was operating in the midst of the Establishmentarians, drinking with them, joking with them—then stealing their party out from under their noses. To the Arizonans, Clif White looked like just one more
operative,
feathering his own nest, hogging the headlines, hedging his bets with Goldwater until a better opportunity came his way, ready to heap scorn on a guy like Kleindienst just because he didn't belong to the Century Club, even though he had finished third in his class at Harvard. White did what he considered his solemn duty (“When you get a phone call,” he kept on hectoring Kitchel, “look in the book so you know who the heck you're talking to. It's important!”); the Arizona Mafia could only see a grasping, condescending ass; they kept talking about “Eastern lawyers” as if they were an occupying army.

When Goldwater and his Mafia came to Chicago for a confidence-building meeting with their state chairmen just after New Hampshire, White gathered his original Draft Goldwater group to confront Goldwater directly about his mistakes. But when the drafters finally got the draftee to meet with them, they lost their nerve: the candidate was so overwrought he looked like he was ready to snap. Charlie Barr pinioned Karl Hess instead, imploring him to seed Goldwater's speeches with local concerns and pocketbook issues. Hess looked him in the eye and saw the enemy: an operative, a species whose craft he once dismissed
as “whomping up spontaneous demonstrations, buying and distributing buttons and bunting; wagging their cigars and talking tough to one another as they parceled out committee assignments and head table seats.” He said Goldwater could never pander to the electorate like that. “You goddamn Boy Scouts are going to ruin everything!” Barr bellowed back.

But they were grown men. The two sides needed each other. On March 18 White put aside his reservations, chose to stick out the campaign to the end, and sent a memo proposing a truce. A few days later Dick Kleindienst burst into White's office. “Get your hat. We're off to Barry's apartment.” That was a surprise; White had never been there before.

The senator was aglow from his successful first tour of California. Icy Kitchel sat in a stiff, straight-backed chair, though he looked perfectly at home. White, sinking into a supple couch, looked like he was in the midst of strangers. He grew more comfortable as the meeting began. An agreement fell into place: White would run the convention, Kleindienst and White would divide up the remaining states between them as co-directors of field operations, access to the candidate's ear would be relaxed. On White's way out, Goldwater gave him a grapefruit. White was given to understand that it was an Arizona grapefruit. He wondered whether he hadn't been handed some ritual talisman of acceptance. Buoyed, he began a quiet second campaign: lobbying for his dream job. If Goldwater was nominated, White decided, he deserved to become chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The two directors of field operations settled into a working comity: White would handle most of the conventions and a few primaries; Kleindienst would cover most of the primaries and a few conventions. Both would help in pivotal California. Kleindienst, who was subject to constant entreaties from the experts to resign his post and hand it over to White (which Goldwater explicitly forbade), welcomed White's expertise; White respected Kleindienst as the most independent-minded of the Arizonans. (Kleindienst had recently been banned from strategy sessions after questioning one of Baroody's ideas in front of two outsiders. Not for nothing was this called a “Mafia.”) The D.C. office was reorganized, which strengthened it: Karl Hess as full-time speechwriter, Chuck Lichenstein as advertising coordinator, and Lee Edwards as acting director of information.

The candidate, however, stayed the same. When Edwards called on the senator to propose exploiting his glamorous hobbies, Goldwater listened politely, then replied, “Lee, we're not going to have that kind of crap in this campaign. This is going to be a campaign of principles, not of personalities. I don't want that kind of Madison Avenue stuff, and if you try it, I will kick your ass out of this office.”

“Well, Senator,” young Edwards replied, “I guess you've made that very clear.”

 

It had been a busy winter for George Wallace. There was Alabama to keep segregated, for one thing. There was his ego to attend to, for another. In November the governor had undertaken a weeklong tour of Ivy League colleges. Then he took the show national. First he honed the act, blue-penciling his speechwriters' racist turns of phrase, having his aide Bill Jones pepper him with every hostile question they could think of. Audiences, expecting a monster, were charmed by talk of how “property rights are human rights, too”—so sweet it almost sounded sensible, yet so incendiary that he led the evening news everywhere he spoke.

Wallace's people booked eight days in the West in January. At each stop Jones set up news conferences, speeches to civic groups, and three TV and radio interviews a day. Each time Wallace appeared on the air he outflanked smug liberals by mentioning the uprisings they were ignoring in their own backyards—the defeat of open housing in Berkeley (“they voted just like the people in Alabama”), the “sleep-in” in the office of liberal Republican Colorado governor John Love. Wallace said he disagreed with Abraham Lincoln when the great man said that Negroes should not vote, serve on juries, or hold public office—although he agreed with Lincoln that equality for Negroes could come only through education, uplift, and time. “Perplexed convulsions,” was how one newspaper described it when half an audience exploded in laughter at one of his jokes, half the chucklers worrying whether this made them sympathizers with the Ku Klux Klan. At the University of Oregon field house the Alabama governor outdrew Goldwater by 1,500 (he got a bit carried away and shouted, “The Confederate flag will fly again!”). Vague hints were dropped about a presidential run—trial balloons ignored as too fanciful for print.

Shortly after the House passed the civil rights bill, Wallace did ten days in the heartland (on Alabama's dime; he claimed he was there to attract industry to the state). After his success in the West, politicians couldn't ignore him. Ohio senator Steve Young called him “a buffoon” who had “tarnished the image of our country throughout the world.” Wallace took this remark as evidence that he was getting somewhere.

He was. Speaking in Cincinnati just before CORE's school boycott, he noted the protesters outside and said, “There are more good people like you in this country today than there are these little pinkos running around outside. But we must band together. When you and I start marching and demonstrating and carrying signs, we will close every highway in this country.” Audience members leapt to their feet. Dozens made for the exits to advance on the pickets.
Richard Nixon, who knew a political opportunity when he saw one, happened to be speaking in the same city the very next day. He gave a kinder, gentler version of the same speech.

On Irv Kupcinet's TV show in Chicago, Wallace collected gubernatorial candidate Charlie Percy's scalp. “Martin Luther King said that Chicago was the most segregated city in the nation,” Wallace pointed out. Percy, the blood draining from his face, was forced to grant the point. Wallace cracked his most winsome grin. At a news conference he said he might run in some primaries. “If I ran outside the South and got 10 percent, it would be a victory. It would shake their eyeteeth in Washington.”

In Madison, Wisconsin, where professed socialists practically outnumbered conservatives, he awoke to the words “FUCK WALLACE” inscribed in blood-red Kool-Aid on frozen Lake Mendota outside his guesthouse room. It was February 20, a snowy day, but the weather had not kept an Oshkosh couple from making the hundred-mile drive over two-lane roads to hear him. Lloyd Herbstreith and his homemaker wife Delores wouldn't have missed the opportunity for a hurricane. The Herbstreiths had just chaired a massive, failed grassroots campaign to make Wisconsin the fifth state to ratify the Liberty Amendment. Since Wisconsin's primary on April 7 was “open”—Republicans and Democrats could vote for either party's candidates—the outcome was politically meaningless. Every Republican chose to pass it up. Conservative political junkies like the Herbstreiths were deathly bored.

Accounts vary over just when the Herbstreiths put aside their reservations about a man who, except for civil rights, had never met a government program he didn't like, and decided to approach his camp with the proposal to run a Wallace presidential primary campaign from their Oshkosh kitchen. All it took to enter, Delores explained to intrigued aides, was to file sixty delegate and alternate candidates by March 6, no signatures required, a task she could take care of with one hand tied behind her back. She laid out the odds like a seasoned Washington operative. Governor John Reynolds, President Johnson's favorite-son proxy, was unpopular among Milwaukee's hundreds of thousands of Catholic white ethnics because of his unsuccessful drive for an open housing law, and he was reviled in the rural Republican precincts that had once revered Joe McCarthy. By turning over their Liberty Amendment organization (and turning their three children over to a housekeeper), they could donate to Wallace a veritable statewide machine. Herbstreith confidently predicted a third of the vote.