Before the Storm (66 page)

The crowd might be warmed up with a choir singing patriotic songs, by organized cheering or an elaborate flag presentation of parade-ground proportions. When they were whipped to a fever pitch the candidate would enter with family in tow (emphasizing the integrity of his own family was one of Goldwater's few concessions to competitive strategy—Rockefeller's wife was, after all, entering her eighth month of pregnancy) flanked by a retinue that kept jubilant crowds from mobbing him. Reporters wedged themselves in for a few seconds of chitchat (after the disasters in New Hampshire, press conferences were no longer scheduled); a minister offered an invocation. There were interminable addresses by local pols. The inevitable cry: “We Want Barry! We Want Barry!” Goldwater approached the stump, suffered the noise for a few minutes. Then came the raised hand, the growl: “If you'll shut up, you'll get him.”

Then he'd stick a hand in a pocket, slouch into the podium—and deliver overcooked broccoli to a crowd demanding raw meat.

Sometimes the rallies were broadcast on TV, now that there was more money coming in. The rich, well-connected, and clever Washington finance committee Clif White had put together—the one that was always calling for Denison Kitchel's head—was hitting its stride. The maximum any individual was allowed to donate to a single campaign committee being $5,000, they established ten separate paper committees—and brilliantly arranged for Goldwater's photograph book,
The Face of Arizona,
to be sold to businesses in bulk, 100 percent of the proceeds going to the campaign. California oilman Henry Salvatori had raised $1 million for the primary; the Goldwater committee in Montana, where victory was assured, turned over its treasury. Goldwater's finance crew was also knocked off guard by a new phenomenon. Small donations—the kind that in most campaigns proved mostly symbolic—were making up a considerable portion of the take. A thirteen-year-old sent $5 from his allowance, a twelve-year-old $15 earned cutting grass, a seven-year-old girl a card with three pennies taped on it and the message “I say a prayer for Senator Goldwater every night.” Two young steadies pledged to give up their Saturday
night movie and donated the money they saved. No one knew quite what to make of the development.

But Goldwater didn't play well on TV. Letters and numbers darkened his presentations: RS-70 and B-70 (bomber programs the Pentagon was scrapping); A-11 (a plane Lyndon Johnson claimed was a new fighter but Goldwater said was really just a reconnaissance plane); TFX (a fighter General Dynamics was building in Lyndon Johnson's Texas despite the brass's insistence it could be built better and more cheaply in California); 1970 (by which time a bomber gap would turn “the shield of the Republic into a Swiss cheese wall”). He attacked Johnson's poverty program, which, since Johnson had cleverly named it the War on Poverty, made it look like Goldwater was rooting for poverty to win. He did little better with another new theme: Vietnam. Johnson said American involvement was the same as it had been a decade before. Goldwater implored his listeners to acknowledge that America was in a war in Vietnam. U.S. News had printed letters from a flier killed in action, Captain Edward G. Shank Jr. of Winamac, Indiana: “The American people are being told that U.S. military forces are merely training South Vietnamese flyers and fighters,” he wrote his wife and children. “We are doing the fighting.” Goldwater angrily read from the dead flier's letters on the stump, and rained insults on his old enemy “Yo-Yo” McNamara (so nicknamed for his practice of jetting off to Southeast Asia every few months), who “has done more to tear down the morale of our military establishment than any secretary we've ever had.” But viewers were not finding the rhetoric compelling. There was no political advantage to be gained from bringing up Vietnam; Rockefeller spoke out on it just as often and more critically. Johnson was lying about Vietnam—Gold—water knew it. But how could someone accusing the President of the United States of lying be taken seriously? It just wasn't done.

 

He was ahead in the polls, although his Wilshire Boulevard headquarters, which was knotted through with so many plots and subplots it could have been a Victorian triple-decker novel, had little to do with the fact; it was all they could do to nail down next week's itinerary. The firebugs helped, though sometimes they hurt. What really seemed to be winning voters were Goldwater's gentle sallies on civil rights.

Property values had become religion amidst the sun-dappled lawns of suburban southern California. “The essence of freedom is the right to discriminate,” CRA's Nolan Frizzelle explained. “In socialist countries, they always take away this right in order to complete their takeover.” After the state legislature passed a bill prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, it hardly took the blink of an eye for the California Real Estate Association's new “Committee
for Home Protection” to collect 583,029 signatures—326,486 from L.A. County alone—to put on the November ballot Proposition 14, an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting for all time laws that impinged upon the right of individuals to sell or rent property to “any persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses”—segregationism in its politer, more patriotic form. The California Real Estate Association's billboards soon blanketed the state: “FREEDOM: RENT OR SELL TO WHOM YOU CHOOSE: VOTE YES ON 14.” (“DON'T LEGALIZE HATE,” read the enfeebled opposition's.) The
Los Angeles Times
—which had endorsed Nelson Rockefeller—agreed, more or less, with Nolan Frizzelle: “Housing equality cannot safely be achieved at the expense of still another basic right,” the “ancient right” of the property owner of “using and disposing of his private property in whatever manner he deems appropriate.” The argument couldn't withstand scrutiny; after all, no one complained that owners were constrained from disposing of their private property in whatever manner they deemed appropriate when they inked formal and (after the Supreme Court outlawed them in 1948) informal racial covenants. And not all support for Prop 14 was couched so patriotically: blacks “haven't made themselves acceptable” for white neighborhoods, a Young Republican leader declared. Polls showed that 58 percent of voters of both parties supported Prop 14. Goldwater held fast to the position that it wasn't his right as an Arizonan to come in and tell a Californian what to do about this thing. But it wasn't hard to infer which side he preferred. Nor, for that matter, Nelson Rockefeller—who had seen to it that New York became one of the first states with an open housing law.

Round about May 12, rioting ensued when George Wallace, contesting his third and final primary, spoke in the racially troubled shoreline community of Cambridge, Maryland. In a bourbon-soaked meeting in Hubert Humphrey's Senate chambers, Senator Dirksen was finally won over once and for all to the civil rights bill, and he immediately set off on the task of convincing 80 percent of his fellow Republicans to vote for cloture. And Barry Goldwater was affording his audience the warm assurance, “You cannot pass a law that will make me like you—or you like me. That is something that can only happen in our hearts.” Goldwater's audience was unlikely aware that this was a close paraphrase from the majority opinion in
Plessy
v.
Ferguson:
that “prejudice, if it exists, is not created by the law of the land and cannot be changed by the law.” They just gave Goldwater his biggest applause of the speech.

And since he was in Madison Square Garden, that was a lot of applause indeed. Goldwater's Manhattan rally on May 12 was perhaps the most elaborate television commercial ever filmed. The buttoned-down New York audience who, according to one observer, “put the accent on the old arena's middle name”; the raft of Republican congressmen on the dais; the Negro choral
group (one tenor had to sing the parts of a baritone who was boycotting the performance); the bunting, the banners, the red, white, and blue balloons—all were but props in a stage play designed to convince California moderates that Barry Goldwater was not the plaything of the kooks who dropped flyers in their mailboxes decrying the Council on Foreign Relations' plot to poison the water supply.

The effect may have been undermined when Representative John Ashbrook drew peals of laughter by referring to a certain prominent columnist as “Walter Looselippmann,” or when the crowd booed every time the President's name was mentioned. But something seemed to be working. Rockefeller had been gaining. Now he was fading. It likely wasn't the literature the Goldwater campaign had finally put out—
Senator Goldwater Speaks Out on the Issues,
a booklet of one-page position statements in room-temperature prose on subjects like “Defense Strategy for the Space Age” and “Labor-Management Relations.” And Goldwater certainly wasn't playing to his base. Sometimes he proclaimed an ideal that his more perfervid supporters would generally denounce as Lippmannite “one-worldism.” “The next logical step” after NATO, he told one interviewer, would be “a political alliance” that “united much of the world.” When asked accusingly on a radio call-in show whether he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he answered, “I don't know, frankly, if it even exists anymore.” Sometimes he spoke of his supporters as if they came from another planet. “I hope I'm as wrong as I could be,” he spluttered in an ABC interview, “but these—this is how hard these people are. They want a conservative; they've been thwarted at convention after convention, and this time I think they're in earnest.”

But he had no intention of
rejecting
the kooks. With 2.5 million registered Republicans to convince, he needed all the warm bodies and cold cash he could get. “The senator is too busy to run a security check,” a candid staffer told a reporter. “Anybody who wants to carry a leaflet can carry a leaflet. We'll take the money of anybody who isn't on the Attorney General's list. They're not going to stop each check and ask, ‘Does this guy think right?' All they're going to do is deposit the checks as fast as they can and hope to God they don't bounce.”

 

Then May 15, and apparent disaster. Immediately after Rockefeller won Oregon, he leapfrogged Goldwater in California polls by 11 points. The swing, his campaign leaders were thrilled to note, came just in time for every registered Republican in California to receive a Rockefeller mailing designed to finish Goldwater off once and for all.

The brochure's cover asked, “Whom do you want in the room with the
H-bomb button?” Goldwater was pictured with the caption “This Man Stands Outside—By Himself.” Rockefeller was pictured alongside Nixon, Romney, Lodge, and Scranton, with the caption “These Men Stand Together on the Party's Principles.” The tag line was
“Which Do You Want, a Leader? Or a Loner?,”
which was ironic: the purpose of the pamphlet was to hint that Rockefeller would
not
necessarily be the leader that stopped Goldwater—that by voting for Rockefeller's delegation, you were really voting for whichever person moderates anointed at the convention to stop Goldwater from his first-ballot victory.

The brochure blew up in Rockefeller's face. With greater and lesser degrees of dispatch, Scranton, Nixon, and Romney, who had never given their permission for the use of their names in this tacit endorsement, all disowned themselves from the ad in open letters. And whatever Rockefeller support there had been in the GOP's highest reaches commenced to unravel. Lodge had already officially bowed out of the race and donated his organization to Rockefeller—but only a third of the California volunteers Lodge's campaign had recruited agreed to switch their allegiance to the governor. Then Eisenhower told reporters, “I personally believe that Goldwater is not an extremist as some people have made him, but in any event we're all Republicans.” Goldwater responded in a triumphant press release: “Governor Rockefeller stands alone in his refusal to commit himself to support the party's choice.”

Two weeks before its primary day, Mississippi responded to an epidemic of church bombings by acquitting Byron de la Beckwith for the second time and increasing bail thirtyfold for misdemeanors such as disturbing the peace, and 43 percent of Maryland Democrats gave George Wallace their vote in the largest primary turnout in state history. They “went to the polls with big grins on their faces,” a local editor marveled. “I never saw anything like it.” Wallace's opponent Governor Brewster said the voters had been duped by a “pack of mindless thugs... stewed in the vile corruption of the same ruthless power that one finds at either end of the political spectrum, right or left.” Rockefeller switchboards began lighting up with callers spewing invective after his ugly “Leader or a Loner?” pamphlet—and to issue the occasional bomb, and even assassination, threat. Rockefeller changed the locks on all his campaign offices. He recited these outrages in every speech: “This is the kind of extremist tactics that have been evident throughout this campaign.” Given that he employed thousands for his campaign, Rockefeller found it hard to believe that all the nastiness being hurled his way could be the work of
volunteers
acting unbidden. Goldwater, more courtly, neither mentioned nor blamed Rockefeller for the Goldwater billboards that were mysteriously chainsawed at the base in the
middle of the night; the Rockefeller agents provocateurs in Goldwater buttons bellowing at TV cameras that Rocky was a nigger lover; or the black-suited security guards Goldwater's people hired to walk beside him, scan windows, and lie in wait sniper-style on rooftops as he rode his palomino in Phoenix's “Rodeo of Rodeos” parade in the face of a death threat. Since the Kennedy assassination, such threats had become relatively routine.

Many a political science professor was taking class time just then to sum up the semester's lesson on the unique genius of the American political system for quieting the voices of violence, discord, and extremism.