Before the Storm (62 page)

Wallace didn't need much convincing. That a majority of Northerners had the same ideas about civil rights as Southerners but were chicken to say so had been a commonplace of Dixie political folklore at least since Strom Thurmond
ventured to New York to scrounge up support for his Dixiecrat campaign in 1948. Thurmond's debating tricks anticipated Wallace's: “If you people in New York want no segregation, then abolish it and do away with your Harlem. Personally, I think it would be a mistake.... And by the same reasoning, no federal law should attempt to force the South to abandon segregation where we have it.” Then, ten years later, there was Jim Johnson, writing Clarence Manion : “States' Rights have become household words in Ohio as much as in Arkansas or Mississippi. How well would Orval Faubus do in the North, the Midwest, and the West Coast states?”

A week before the filing deadline, Governor Reynolds made a mistake: he ventured a joke about Wallace's presidential ambitions at a press conference. The free publicity brought enough unsolicited calls to the Herbstreiths to round out their delegate slate. Wallace flew to Madison in his official jet (the Stars and Bars on the nose replaced by the Stars and Stripes; his motto, “Stand Up for Alabama,” with “Stand Up for America”), met the couple for the first time, then formally applied for his spot on the ballot. He opened his campaign in Appleton, McCarthy's hometown, and stumbled nervously over lines the Herbstreiths scripted for him about the sellout at Yalta. The papers hardly noticed. Polls gave him 5 percent.

Senate debate on the civil rights bill began on March 8. It was as if the opening gun had been sounded for a fortnight of race skirmishes. The next day Seattle voters, juiced by a Wallace visit in January, repealed the city's open housing law. Two days later Malcolm X said that black “rifle clubs” were preferable to civil rights bills, and CORE's ultramilitant New York chapters, gathered in protest against some vague enemy they called “the System,” massed at the ramps leading to the Triborough Bridge, armed with bag after bag of garbage, in an attempt to strangle traffic around the city. A second school boycott the next week roused police commissioner Michael Murphy to riot preparations against blacks seeking, he said, to “turn New York City into a battleground.”

Cleveland already was a battleground. Militants who had been beaten by white vigilantes for the sin of marching with “SEPARATE IS NOT EQUAL” signs in front of an all-white school responded by sitting in at a school construction site. A bulldozer driver chose to stay the course rather than yield to the Presbyterian minister in his path, and crushed the man to death. In San Francisco, two thousand civil rights activists, most from Berkeley's hardy contingent, emboldened by a successful February action at the Lucky supermarket chain—filling their carts with groceries, they abandoned them at the checkout counter with the refrain “I'm so sorry, but I seem to have forgotten my purse until you hire some Negroes in public positions”—grubbed up the lobby of the Sheraton-Palace
with the demand for a racial hiring agreement. Columnists Evans and Novak, recalling perhaps that at least the Young Republicans had worn suits when they had terrorized the same hotel the previous June, wrote, “Here as elsewhere the Negro is in danger of losing control over the civil rights movement to thugs and Communists.” In Washington, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama hurled a pipe bomb into the Democratic coalition during his turn to filibuster by announcing that the civil rights bill would gut labor unions' seniority and apprentice systems. Segregationist Florida officials announced they would boycott Johnson's Democratic National Convention. Brooklyn congressman Emmanuel Cellers, the civil rights bill's floor manager, warned that his beloved movement was falling into the slough of “nihilism.”

Suddenly it looked like the Negro revolt might rewrite every political rule. A new word was on all lips: “backlash.” Governor Reynolds publicly goosed his estimate of how many votes Wallace would get—100,000 (his actual guess was 50,000)—to spur his volunteers, who now seemed worryingly unenergetic ; Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant clergy united to condemn “a threat to the moral quality of our nation”; a letter from the AFL-CIO to four hundred Wisconsin affiliates denounced “one of the strongest anti-labor spokesmen in America”; COPE's brochures said that Wallace's real goal was stealing Wisconsin jobs. And Wallace surged ahead all the while.

He had an answer for every heckle:
“How many of you have read the civil rights bill? ... I am an Alabama segregationist, not a Wisconsin segregationist. If Wisconsin believes in integration, that is Wisconsin's business, not mine.... You might spend a little less time worrying about Negroes in Alabama and a little more worrying about the Indians in Wisconsin and the conditions they live
in on the reservations.
” He bragged about how many more Negro college presidents there were in Alabama than in Wisconsin, told workers at the American Motors Corporation plant in Racine that under the civil rights bill a Japanese person could take their job by merely walking in and claiming that there weren't enough of his kind on the payroll. Horrors would ensue if well-meaning senators legislated with their hearts, not their heads, and passed this monster bill that would subject state governments, corporations, and labor unions to federal takeover, install police-state kangaroo courts, and make “government master and god over man” for all time.

It almost sounded reasonable, except when it didn't. Milwaukee's sizable Serbian community, which had raised the roof for Kennedy in 1960, hosted Wallace at their weathered, low-ceilinged meeting hall on 57th and Oklahoma. Wallace took to the podium and scanned the seven hundred bodies packed in front of him like sardines and despaired of finding any common ground on which to reach them. The band struck up the national anthem; two
or three blacks in the audience refused to rise. The MC, Bronco Gruber, a burly ex-Marine and popular tavern owner, ordered them out. The shrieks and dagger-eyed glances convinced the blacks it was wise to comply. Gruber began introducing Wallace. A black minister in clerical garb cried, “Get your dogs out!”

The veins popped on Bronco Gruber's forehead. “I'll tell you something about your dogs, Padre! I live on Walnut Street and three weeks ago tonight a friend of mine was assaulted by three of your countrymen or whatever you want to call them—” (the rest of the sentence was obscured by applause). “They beat up old ladies eighty-three years old, rape our womenfolk. They mug people. They won't work. They are on relief. How long can we tolerate this?
Did I go to Guadalcanal to come back to something like this!?”

It took a rousing chorus of “Dixie” to calm things down enough for Wallace to speak. It didn't take much to bring audience members to their feet again: “A vote for this little governor will let people in Washington know that we want them to leave our houses, schools, jobs, businesses, and farms alone—and let us run them without any help from Washington!” It took Wallace an hour to make his way out of the building for the mobbing admirers.

Lyndon Johnson was shaken. He ordered his postmaster general, John Gronouski, a local boy, to speak at a televised rally on election eve; their
President,
he told viewers, was counting on Wisconsin to turn back George Wallace. Governor Reynolds now leaked another inflated estimate, that Wallace would win 175,000 votes. And when the returns came in, Wallace parted the crowded ballroom with a war dance performed in full Indian regalia, a gift from the grateful Consolidated Tribes of Wisconsin. “We won without winning!” he cried of his 265,000 votes, a quarter of the total cast. Reynolds lost his home district. Wallace won 30 percent in rock-solid-Democratic Milwaukee. He received a startling 47 percent from the brand-new Ninth Congressional District, carved out of Milwaukee's wealthiest, best-educated suburbs.

It felt like an earthquake. But media outlets did their best to argue it meant nothing at all. “An anachronistic Southern demagogue,” sniffed the New York
Times
—a strange choice of words to describe a man who seemed now to occupy politics' cutting edge.

 

Clif White faced the same dilemma debated in
National Review's
editorial offices in 1961: the very anger that fed the right's fires threatened to engulf its fortunes. In the Illinois primary, Margaret Chase Smith supporters had their cars egged inside and out. In California, kids snuck in and spiked the punch and stomped on the sandwiches before a huge Rockefeller reception. Another gang of zealots began stamping “GOLDWATER IN '64” on every greenback that came
through their hands. “Printing or impressing any notice or advertisement” on money was punishable by a fine of $500 per bill. The first place the Secret Service agents began looking for culprits was inside the official Goldwater campaign.

Other such mischief threatened to unweave the campaign organization itself. Back when reporters began surveying the ruins of the Young Republican convention in San Francisco in 1963 to discern whether the GOP was being overrun by its Birchite flank, they should have been paying attention to the sixth annual
Human Events
Political Action Conference two weekends later and three thousand miles away at D.C.'s Statler-Hilton. It was a huge event. Forty-one congressmen, including Goldwater, appeared. Each delegate received a thirty-page guide on how to be sure his or her state sent a conservative delegation to the Republican Convention. Most of the tips were practical, such as winning six delegates over a majority in district delegate elections, in case the Establishment stole the five at-large delegate slots.

But attendees were also warned gravely that their enemies would “attempt to split the vote for legitimate conservative delegate candidates by entering ‘Trojan horse' conservatives.” Word of such danger spread across the rightward fringe. And the result was splitting headaches for Clif White and Dick Kleindienst: now, no matter the state, they could be sure that at any Republican convention they would face wackos certain that White and Kleindienst were Trojan horses. At the Wyoming state convention Kleindienst was asked why, if he was
really
a conservative, he was fighting a resolution to replace the Supreme Court with a tribunal of the fifty individual state chief justices. Because, Kleindienst replied, Barry told him to. To which the militants, who preferred the expediency of assuming Goldwater's views accorded exactly with their own, were only more convinced: this Kleindienst must be an impostor.

White and Kleindienst fought sabotage attempts with preemptive strikes, asking volunteers outright if they were members of the John Birch Society. That strategy only redoubled the fringe's paranoia. Sometimes the co-field directors tried co-opting what they called the “nuts.” When a Goldwater committee backed by Evan Mecham and rife with Birchers began chartering its own local Americans for Goldwater chapters around the country that, since the group was based in Phoenix, recruits assumed must be “official,” White decided he couldn't afford to lose this organization—they had a membership in the thousands and rising, including a fantastic representation in vital California, sorted on IBM cards by all kinds of useful demographic categories—and he implored Mecham's group to dump the Birchers from the payroll and merge its effort into his own. They agreed, and White retreated. But that didn't work either: Americans for Goldwater brought back the Birchers and kept on establishing
their maverick clubs, siphoning off volunteers and money wherever they alighted.

The biggest headache of all was in Westchester County. Rockefeller had scheduled the New York primary for June 2 to coincide with California's in the hope of sweeping 178 delegates, over a quarter of the total needed to nominate, in one hellzapoppin' day. For Goldwater to shave off just a few delegates in New York would be a public relations coup. And to win the Twenty-sixth Congressional District delegate race—the Westchester district containing the Rockefeller estate—was a holy grail. The district also happened to contain Clif White's own suburban home. He was expected to deliver it. Earlier, Birchers had taken over the county YAF chapter. Their newsletter claimed that the Soviets outlined a plan in 1931 promising to lull America, beginning in the 1960s, with “the most spectacular peace movement on record,” then “smash them with our clenched fist!”—and speculated about which traitors in the government were responsible for abetting the Soviets' plan by pushing such “peace” initiatives as the visits of the Moscow Circus and the Bolshoi Ballet. Now members faced trial for infiltrating a Yonkers department store, opening packages of lingerie they claimed had been manufactured in some Iron Curtain country and inserting cards reading, “Don't patronize Klein's. Klein's is Communist.” Then they reconstituted as Volunteers for Goldwater, filed a delegate slate for the New York primary—and were running a successful campaign to brand Clif White's delegate slate Rockefeller stalking-horses.

White's deputy Vince Leibell entered a credentials challenge in state court. The Birchers won. White sighed, swallowed his pride, and did the only thing he could to shut these people up. “I VERY MUCH APPRECIATE YOUR INTEREST AND SUPPORT OF MY CANDIDACY,” began the telegram headed “Barry M. Goldwater, U.S. Senate, Washington.” “I KNOW THAT YOU WANT THIS TO BE THE MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN POSSIBLE, THEREFORE, IT MUST BE A WELL COORDINATED PART OF OUR NATIONAL STRATEGY. TO INSURE THAT THIS WILL HAPPEN, I ASK THAT YOU COORDINATE ALL YOUR ACTIVITIES, INCLUDING DELEGATE SELECTION, UNDER THE DIRECTION OF MR. VINCENT L. LEIBELL, JR., WHO IS HANDLING MY CAMPAIGN IN THE DOWNSTATE NEW YORK AREA.”

It was humiliating. Bringing in the Big Gun was the last thing White wanted to do. More setbacks like this and Goldwater might decide White was an unworthy candidate for the RNC chairmanship. So he worked harder. It was the only thing he could do.