Before the Storm (65 page)

Goldwater's official campaign headquarters was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. To run it, the Arizona Mafia decided they needed a big name. The particular name they chose, alas, belonged to the stony, charmless man many California Republicans believed had crushed their party in 1958 when he selfishly abandoned his Senate seat for his unsuccessful run for governor. William Knowland, now retired to the the family business, the conservative
Oakland Tribune,
was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: “Taken your vacation yet?” he would ask when they entered; the answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office. (Once he experimented. “Don't I know you from somewhere?” he asked a photographer. “Yes, Senator,” came the answer. “I've worked for you for thirty years.” Knowland then went back to the routine.) Now it was Knowland's job to coordinate multitudes—and he couldn't even get the staffers who had supported Nixon in 1962 in the same room together with the ones who had been for Shell. On Wilshire Boulevard Knowland held court as a figurehead. The flesh of the Goldwater campaign in California was hung on the skeleton of the conservative volunteer groups like the one the candidate was addressing now.

The audience in Bakersfield was battle-tested. Conservatives had suffered razor-thin defeat for control of the party's premier volunteer group, the California Republican Assembly, at the convention in March of 1963—a convention, conservatives were convinced, that San Francisco union leader and Rockefeller stalwart William Nelligan had stolen from them. Redeeming that loss became the focus of conservative energies for the rest of the year. The efforts developed along three fronts. One, led by Newport Beach optometrist Nolan Frizzelle and S&L magnate Joe Crail, worked to take back the CRA. “It was like facing a howling mob,” a liberal said of the one hundred conservatives who set upon the Oakland chapter's convention in December—and, after Nelligan declared the the conservatives' victory in Oakland null and void, did it again in January. The scene was repeated across the liberal northern tier of the state. And at the 1964 convention, Frizzelle won the presidency of the CRA near dawn with 363 out of 600 votes. (There were only 569 registered delegates.) The next day, portly right-wingers held sit-ins in front of the mikes. Liberals stalked out in a rage. That left the conservatives all alone to endorse Goldwater without a fight. “Fanatics of the Birch variety have fastened their fangs on the Republican Party's flanks,” Nelligan told reporters, “and are hanging on like grim death.”

Securing the second front, at the Young Republicans convention in February, was but perfunctory. Young Republicans had already turned back a proposed resolution denouncing “accusations, charges, and actions which tend to divide rather than unite the Republican Party.” Nelson Rockefeller, one of their leaders noted, was an “international socialist.” Why would they want to unite with
that?
A resolution the Young Republicans did end up passing declared liberals “regressive reactionaries” who “seek to drag the American republic into the Dark Ages.” A speech by Ronald Reagan—“We can't justify foreign aid funds which went to the purchase of extra wives for some tribal chiefs in Kenya”—was received with delirium. It was the prelude to a vote of 256 to 33 to boycott the Republican presidential campaign if Barry Goldwater wasn't the nominee (which was tantamount to mutiny; the bylaws of the Young Republican National Federation outlawed participation in primaries in the first place). Regarding the thirty-three who were in the minority, a woman cried, “Everyone says they're for Goldwater—let's find out who the finks are!”

United Republicans of California was the third front. The group was masterminded by Rus Walton, the man behind Joe Shell's shockingly close gubernatorial challenge against Richard Nixon in 1962, as a sort of CRA insurance policy—an organization chartered of, for, and by conservatives, under the assumption that liberals kept the California Republican Party from the control of a conservative majority only through conspiracy. The group's paranoia was soon confirmed: the state's Republican Party chair, Caspar Weinberger, responded to the founding of UROC by invoking a party rule banning groups with the word “Republican” in their name from raising funds without approval from the California Republican Central Committee. So UROC organized to take over the Central Committee. This party governing body's membership was appointed, per state law, by a caucus of all Republican candidates running for state office. Veterans of Shell's campaign revived a dormant fund, United for California, first established in 1938 to combat the far-left Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair, and used it to quietly file Republican candidates for every office in the state. Since most of the incumbents were entrenched Democrats, many far-right Republicans ran in primaries unopposed. The far right would have taken over the party—if Republican and Democratic state legislators hadn't conspired in mid-June to amend the election code after the fact.

Goldwater zealots, said a harried staffer, now “ran through the woods like a collection of firebugs, and I just keep running after them, like Smokey Bear, putting out fires.” Or, sometimes, helping them build fires. Outgoing California Young Republican chair Bob Gaston independently mustered eight thousand of these people to circulate petitions to put Goldwater on the primary ballot.
The first candidate to file 13,702 signatures would be listed at the top of the rolls—an automatic boon in votes that in some elections made for the margin of victory. By noon on March 4, the first day signature-gathering was allowed, Goldwater had 36,000. Learning that Rockefeller (who took weeks to get enough signatures) was paying fifty cents per name, Gaston immediately mobilized to get 7,000 Rockefeller signatures—turning the money over to Goldwater. Teddy White, whom Gaston had befriended after everyone else in the office, labeling White the enemy, refused to speak with him, had never seen anything like it. Gaston, for his part, was amazed at how easy it was; the work had already been done in the previous year. He just called a loyalist from his campaign for state YR chair in every precinct—and the job took care of itself.

And now, May 3, with the fight of their lives on their hands, over two thousand firebugs met in convention in Bakersfield. Their chairman kicked things off, from a podium draped with both the American flag and the Confederate flag, by calling Nelson Rockefeller's campaign chairman, Tom Kuchel, a “leftwing extremist.” When Goldwater spoke, he begged to differ. As he did in his every California address, he urged party loyalty: “I am not interested in defeating
any
Republicans in 1964,” he said. “Let me say it again: I am not afraid of what
any
Republican would do to this country.” The firebugs thought entirely otherwise. But they screamed themselves hoarse for their hero nonetheless.

 

Nelson Rockefeller's big California push could be said to have kicked off two months earlier, on his
Face the Nation
appearance of March 8. Having ordered up enough polls to practically reproduce the state in a test tube, what Rockefeller learned was that California Republicans were terrified of increased federal spending, of Fidel Castro, and of the specter of Communist subversion of the United States from within—all issues on which Barry Goldwater enjoyed a monopoly. But Graham T. T. Molitor reminded Rockefeller of an elementary political fact: negative attacks were more effective than pushing issues anyway. Their advertising man, Nixon's Gene Wyckoff, chipped in that they needed to construct “a first-class villain to make a first-class hero.” His PR man, Stu Spencer, thought they had to “destroy Barry Goldwater as a member of the human race.” If all voters could think about how terrifying a Goldwater presidency would be, who would worry about something so trivial as a remarriage?

Molitor combed his Goldwater transcriptions until he found the perfect quote to begin the assault. Goldwater had argued for the development of “small, clean nuclear weapons” for battlefield use as far back as
Conscience of a Conservative.
Since then he had become enamored of a portable nuclear mortar called the “Davy Crockett”—whose relatively small punch (about as much as a sortie by a World War II bomber wing) he believed made it a marvelous
bulwark against Soviet aggression precisely because it was tame enough to be used without fear of setting off a nuclear escalation nigh to apocalypse. Secretary McNamara—and the physicists at Lawrence Livermore who designed the portable weapon—entirely disagreed; they thought it would incinerate civilians no matter where in Europe it was fired. No one really knew; it was a question of which experts you asked. So it was, one October day in 1963, that when he was asked what he thought of a recent suggestion to cut NATO's ground force, Goldwater opined that troops could be cut “at least by a third” simply by clarifying the power NATO commanders had to use the Crockett—which he called “just another weapon”—in the event of a Soviet advance.

Or at least “commanders” was how it was quoted by the
Washington Post,
which subheaded its report “Would Give NATO Commanders Power to Use A-Weapons”—apparently placing that authority in the hands of dozens of officers, perhaps among them some real-life General Jack D. Ripper. Goldwater would later insist that the word he had used was “commander”; he may have in fact said “commanders” but meant the plural in the chronological sense—the current commander, General Lyman Lemnitzer; then the one who came on after he retired; and so forth. Be that as it may. Nelson Rockefeller launched his California campaign strategy two days before the New Hampshire balloting by casually dropping the matter into a conversation with the panel on
Face the Nation.
He was all for a strong defense, he said. But calling nuclear arms “just another weapon,” as Goldwater had—that was “appalling,” a tempting of “world suicide.”

The audacity of Rockefeller's remark was rather breathtaking. “The distinction between nuclear warfare and conventional warfare, which is paramount in the public mind, leads to unrealistic policy decisions”: that was the point argued in the very Rockefeller brothers report upon which he had based his campaign strategy in 1960. He hadn't disclaimed it since; in New Hampshire, in fact, he had accepted a warm endorsement from the author of these words, nuclear scientist Edward Teller. Eisenhower had said the identical thing about battlefield nukes—that they could be used like “a bullet or any other weapon”—in 1955, when Rockefeller was Ike's special assistant for psychological warfare.

But it was Goldwater who had blundered into the role of scapegoat for all America's nuclear fears. It was an opportunity too ripe to be missed. “Responsible Republicanism rejects this irresponsible approach to the conduct of American foreign policy!” Rockefeller would cry in his speeches. Then he would make a plea to honor “the brotherhood of man, the fatherhood of God.” Reporters began referring to the refrain as BOMFOG. At the White House, Lyndon Johnson was taking notes.

But it wasn't enough to make California fall in love with Nelson Rockefeller. Through back-breaking effort, Spencer-Roberts was able to drum up capacity crowds for Rockefeller's rallies, but mostly by relying on non-Republican audiences, especially blacks (whom Rockefeller urged to change their registration to Republican to stop Goldwater “and his John Birch supporters”). But if publicists could lead the masses to Rockefeller, they could not make them drink. At Berkeley, Rocky was swamped by some five thousand students outside the university's symbolic portal, Sather Gate; he then addressed a crowd that spilled into an auditorium lobby and stood outside listening to loudspeakers. They interrupted him with applause exactly once—when he praised “this great educational institution.”

Molitor was desperate to raise the stakes. He had found another bombshell: Goldwater had suffered two psychological episodes in the 1930s. But higher-ups said that exploiting the fact was stepping over the line. Molitor kept on pushing the idea; the image of a mentally unstable man with his finger on the nuclear trigger would be absolutely devastating. He pointed to the Goldwater pamphlets collecting at headquarters in an ever-mounting pile accusing Rockefeller of every sin short of congress with domestic animals.
Anything
was justified, Molitor said, against a man who produced this swill. (Of course, Goldwater wasn't producing it at all: the firebugs were too numerous for the candidate to control even if he wanted to.) Then the May issue of
Good Housekeeping
hit supermarket shelves. It featured an interview with Peggy Goldwater. She described how, when working eighteen-hour days opening a new store in Prescott in 1937, her husband's “nerves broke completely.” The problem abated, she said, then resurfaced two years later, never to come back again. It was the interviewer, a journalist named Alvin Toffler, who chose to describe these incidents with the fateful words “nervous breakdown.” Muckraking liberal columnist and radio commentator Drew Pearson picked up the story and started the drumbeat: Goldwater wasn't mentally fit to be Commander in Chief.

If Nelson Rockefeller had been a candidate of more ordinary means, he might have begun to question the expense of maintaining an elaborate opposition research operation to impugn a campaign so skilled at delivering knockout blows against itself.

 

Barry Goldwater would have had to have been revealed as Beelzebub himself for his partisans to abandon him. His appearances in California were festivals. In the parking lots, where cars were decked out in “ARRIBA CON BARRY” bumper stickers and “AuH2O + GOP + 1964 = VICTORY!” license plates, a group of YAFers calling themselves The Goldwaters (whose banjo player, Dana Rohrabacher, organized a 120-member Goldwater club at his high school) sang
selections from their LP, “Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals.” Vendors hawked gold-plated jewelry, pins of every size and description, Goldwater trading stamps, Goldwater crayons, Goldwater cologne and aftershave. Then the throng would stream into sweltering halls, stuffing the “Barrels for Barry” at the entrances to bursting with small bills. Lissome young things in cowboy hats and sashes—“Goldwater Girls”—guided traffic, cooling themselves with ice-cold Gold Water (the guy from Atlanta followed the campaign in his truck) or cardboard paddles with “GOLDWATER FAN CLUB” printed on one side and a winking elephant crushing a donkey to death on the reverse.