Before the Storm (67 page)

 

A television blitz for “the responsible Republican governor of New York” made it difficult to find anything else on TV in the Golden State, and Rockefeller's 1,200 paid phone solicitors made it hard to sit peacefully through dinner (though Clif White shut down the entire operation for some time by situating hundreds of volunteers at pay phones to jam the lines). Spencer-Roberts had subcontracted separate public relations agencies to court raisin growers and wine makers, Spanish speakers, blacks, and more; among their other coups was to compile the names and addresses of all graduates of Negro colleges now living in California, who were importuned once more to change their registration from Democrat to Republican. A Rockefeller “truth squad” of California assemblymen now followed Goldwater wherever he spoke (“If they will step up and say I am a liar to my face,” Goldwater told reporters on his campaign plane, “they'll get the reaction of a Westerner to that kind of treatment”). Rockefeller's media men followed TV producers in Los Angeles with offers of an expense-account lunch. One day Rocky was scheduled to make six stops, and just before he headed out, his schedulers added twelve more. He sunk to (not entirely unfair) accusations that Goldwater was working to divert precious Colorado River water from California to Arizona.

It was a Rockefeller juggernaut that Dean Burch beheld when he traveled the state for an inspection tour in the middle of the month. That, and the fact that in many areas of the state an official Goldwater campaign did not exist at all. Radio and television time had been bought, but no spots had been produced; not a single ad, not even for newspapers, had been produced. Knowland's strategy appeared to be to travel around the country repeating, like a broken record, that Goldwater would win by half a million votes; the firebugs had given the campaign such a bad reputation that once-reliable conservative businessmen refused to let their names be used in ads for fear of economic backlash. Some wouldn't even contribute money lest their names be on record. Goldwater confronted Knowland at a hotel by the airport and unceremoniously
dumped him. A team from the Washington office was on its way west to rescue the campaign, as if it were starting over from the very beginning.

They worked in a rented suite rumored to have once belonged to Greta Garbo. It was like something out of the movies—Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland throwing up a show in the old barn. Chuck Lichenstein journeyed to Los Angeles with only a toothbrush, a change of underwear, and a satchel filled with $15,000 in cash, expecting to fly back the next morning; he ended up returning to Washington two weeks later, exhausted, with an entire new wardrobe. One day, after plating a brochure responding to Rocky's “Leader or a Loner?” salvo, he called a printer, introduced himself, and said, “You don't know me and you've never heard of me. We need to print a million pamphlets. The problem is, I need them tomorrow.” The printer demanded $35,000 up front. Lichenstein spent the day at the plant, signing over checks as they arrived to cover each new run of a few cartons more.

The pamphlet itself was weak: hemmed in by the diktat not to attack any Republican, it consisted of a dreary wall of quotes from worthies like Nixon, Scranton, Romney, and Eisenhower, counterpoised by Goldwater's almost identical ones, to demonstrate that it was Goldwater, not Rockefeller, who was in the Republican mainstream (“If he is, it must be a meandering stream,” Rockefeller now joked superciliously in speeches). The Goldwater campaign's TV spots were little better. One opened with a shot of Goldwater upside down as a voice-over reeled off misconceptions about his positions, and the image slowly turned right side up as the record was set straight; another featured Goldwater ad-libbing rambling responses to the same points, answering questions asked by men on the street—terrible politics, letting the opponent seize the agenda by repeating his charges; the effect was mainly to remind viewers of them.

Back in Washington there was a mass mailing to supporters urging them to scour their address books for “relatives, school chums, business associates, old army buddies, and Christmas card lists for persons you know that are living in California.” In the finance office, George Humphrey, Arthur Summerfield, and other very rich, prestigious, conservative Republicans availed themselves of their own Christmas-card lists to raise $500,000 in two days to pay for the homestretch push. The Greta Garbo crew hardly slept. Some even missed the candidate's appearance on Sunday morning, May 24, on Howard K. Smith's political chat show
Issues and Answers.

Smith addressed a question of the moment. McNamara had returned from his latest trip to Vietnam (where he had almost been assassinated by a Vietcong demolition team) proclaiming, “We'll stay for as long as it takes.” The situation was now clearly deteriorating; “ERROR UPON ERROR,” read a recent
Wall
Street Journal
editorial headline. The Administration had just asked Congress for $125 million in new aid to the beleaguered Khanh government. And all the while, resupply and reinforcements continued to pour in for the Vietcong from the North over the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail; if anything, they increased. How, Smith asked, did Goldwater think it could be stopped?

“It's not as easy as it sounds because these are not trails that are out in the open,” Goldwater allowed, removing the glasses for emphasis, revealing uncharacteristic bags under his eyes. “There have been several suggestions made. I don't think we would use any of them. But defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done. When you remove the foliage, you remove the cover.” It could be done, he added, “in a way that would not endanger life.”

Wouldn't that risk a fight with China? Smith asked. “You might have to,” Goldwater responded. “Either that, or we have a war dragged out and dragged out. A defensive war is never won.”

Months earlier Goldwater had gone even further in an interview—
insisting
that atomic weapons should be used—and no one had paid any attention. But after
Dr. Strangelove,
a threshold had been crossed. Now merely mentioning the Bomb as a bad idea that had been proposed was enough to seal the conclusion for much of the voting public: Barry Goldwater was a maniac.

“GOLDWATER'S PLAN TO USE VIET A-BOMB,” blared the
San Francisco Examiner
(subhead: “I'd Risk a War”). Bobby Kennedy joked that Goldwater had come up with “a solution for crime in Central Park. He would use conventional nuclear weapons and defoliate it.” The
Herald Tribune
tendentiously, maliciously observed, “Goldwater wasn't asked, nor did he comment on, the point that U.S. use of weapons in Southeast Asia producing fallout would violate the U.S.-British-Russian pact of 1963 banning both nuclear testing and explosions except underground.” The article went on to note that Goldwater had also prepared for the homestretch in California by changing “his view that it is improper for the federal government to intervene to integrate local school systems”—even though he had abandoned that view years, not days, earlier. And then, in the same issue, the
Tribune
dropped yet another bomb. Walter Thayer had prevailed upon his friend Dwight Eisenhower to write an essay setting down his views on the Republican nomination. The former President said he preferred a candidate representing “responsible, forward-looking Republicanism.” The word “responsible” was unmistakable: Rockefeller repeated it so often to describe himself that it was almost a chant. In case anyone missed the message, the paper helpfully ran Roscoe Drummond's column right below Eisenhower's, in a box. It began: “If former President Eisenhower can have his way, the Republican Party will not choose Sen. Barry Goldwater as its 1964
Presidential nominee.” The
Herald Tribune
waived its copyright—so Eisenhower's piece also ran on the front page of the
Los Angeles Times.
Reporters swarmed around the former President to ask if he meant to disavow Goldwater. He replied, in a trademark garbled Ike-ism, “Try to fit that shoe on that foot.”

The
New York Times
said Eisenhower's words “may well be the decisive factor” in the primary. But there was nothing decisive about the California Republican electorate. Pollster Sam Lubell noted that seven of ten people agreed with Goldwater that government spending was out of control, but he'd never seen an electorate so confused as to whom to vote for. “He's just too, too—
too much,”
said one housewife; another commented, “With all the men in the country, isn't it terrible that we must choose from just those two men?” A friend rang up one of those confused California Republicans, eighty-nine-year-old Herbert Hoover. “You can't pin it down,” the friend said, “but the feeling is that he might get us into war.” Hoover found it hard to disagree.

 

In Honolulu, the Pacific Command's map room was now being prepared for a conference of Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy team to discuss a long memo by Mac Bundy, “Basic Recommendations and Projected Course of Action on Southeast Asia,” commissioned by a President who was now having trouble sleeping at night. “If you start doing it, they're gonna be hollerin', ‘You're a warmonger,' ” he told McNamara, tacitly imploring his defense secretary to find some honorable way out.

He tacitly implored Dick Russell to stiffen his backbone in case a way out was not to be found: “They'd impeach a President, though, that would run out, wouldn't they?”

He rehearsed rationalizations with his staff: “If you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you into your own kitchen,” he told Bundy.

“Yeah, that's the trouble,” said Bundy. “If this thing comes apart with us—that's the dilemma. That's exactly the dilemma.”

“It's damn easy to get into a war,” said the President, “but it's gonna be awfully hard to extricate yourself if you get in.”

 

Firebugs ginned up their own precinct organizations. They quit school and job to work full-time; marriages were put in jeopardy. Some Goldwater freelancers were more sophisticated than others. “You've got to warn the senator right away!” one cried to a Goldwater staffer at a rally in Glendora. “There are men out there taking down every word he says!”—gesturing in the direction of the press corps.

One piece of homemade campaign literature that was circulating in California
like chewing gum,
A Choice Not an Echo,
came from one of the sophisticated ones. Phyllis Schlafly claimed to be a housewife from Alton, Illinois, and in that she was busy raising five children, in a sense she was. But this housewife had worked her way through college as a test gunner in an ordnance plant, had a master's degree from Harvard, and devoted forty-plus hours a week to right-wing agitation—from chairing the Illinois Federation of Republican Women to running the Cardinal Mindzenty Society, a right-wing volunteer group, with her husband, a lawyer who operated the right's answer to the ACLU (a typical client was a farmer who refused to follow government quotas), and hosting her own radio show,
America, Wake Up!
The Schlaflys had been among the few nonbusinessmen on the Clarence Manion committee that published
Conscience of a Conservative
in 1960. Which in 1964 gave Phyllis Schlafly, home pregnant with her sixth child, an inspiration: to publish a slim little book on how “a few secret kingmakers based in New York” conspired to steal Republican conventions, “perpetuating the Red empire in order to perpetrate the high level of Federal spending and control.”

She lined up the second biggest paperback printer in the country, in Cleveland, put up $3,000, invented the name of a publishing company to print on the spine—“Pere Marquette Press”—sent a flyer to the people on her extensive personal political mailing list, and set up a little order-taking office in town. Twenty-five thousand copies were delivered to the doorstep of her house in late April. A friend called April 30 and asked her to ship 5,000 copies to the UROC convention opening in two days. Within the week, UROCers were using the book to work the precincts.

Schlafly was easy on the eye—and savvy enough to put a picture of herself on the cover that intimated plunging décolletage just out of the frame. The prose was short and sharp: “Each fall 66 million American women don't spontaneously decide their dresses should be an inch or two shorter, or longer, than last year,” she began. “Like sheep, they bow to the wishes of a select clique of couturiers whom they have never seen, and whose names they may not even know”—just like Republican presidential voters. She never placed an ad; she never contacted a single bookstore—and 600,000 copies were in circulation around the country by June. Most were purchased in lots greater than 100. One businessman bought 30,000. One man told her, “Your book is the first book I ever read. I couldn't even get through
Tom Sawyer.”
Another, at a family Memorial Day picnic, refused to give anyone a beer (decidedly not Pearl, the President's favorite brand) unless they took a copy of
A Choice Not an Echo.
By the time of the Republican Convention in the middle of July, some delegates had received upwards of five dozen unsolicited copies in the mail.

Phyllis Schlafly was not the only political star from Illinois being minted in California that spring. Another was Ronald Reagan. A number of more famous pro-Goldwater celebrities worked the homestretch hustings for Goldwater. But it was Reagan, not John Wayne (a sometime Bircher) or Rock Hudson, who was chosen to narrate a half hour of testimonials from Goldwater's (especially black and Hispanic) friends on statewide television on May 29. As a regular MC for Goldwater's rallies, Reagan usually stole the show. “And good evening to all you irresponsible Republicans,” he would begin, and the crowd would be won; then he would hand them off to Goldwater, and the crowd would be lost. Sometimes, when the evening's program was completed, Reagan would greedily mount the rostrum for
another
speech that brought them to their feet one last time. At a San Francisco fund-raiser a startled waitress asked Rus Walton, “I'm confused. Which one was the candidate?”