Before the Storm (68 page)

 

Goldwater was on national TV on May 29 as a guest of Steve Allen's. It was an ambush. Allen was a particularly smug liberal. He decided to get Goldwater's reaction to the weekly message from a far-right hotline, “Let Freedom Ring.” He dialed the number, and, with Barry Goldwater looking on in embarrassment, the nation heard a frantic voice say:

“Reports from reliable sources indicate that large-scale recruiting on college campuses is going to secure student participation in racial agitation this summer
[the reference was to the organizing for a massive, nonviolent “Freedom Summer” voter registration campaign in Mississippi]....
The pattern in this country is very closely following the events which took place during the internal takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1946.... Keep yourself well informed. Do not trust the newspapers, radio, TV, and newsmagazines for your information. These are the main weapons the enemy has to use against us.”

To peals of laughter from the audience, Allen asked Goldwater what he thought. Barry Goldwater regained his composure and proved that conservatism could potentially be a convincing populist message.

“Instead of just laughing these people off,” he said, “I recognize them as people who are concerned, people who recognize that some things in this government are not going the way they like.” The audience, who had come to the studio to laugh with Steve Allen and his celebrity guests, interrupted Goldwater with heartfelt applause. In his opinion, he said, there were no more actual
Communists in America than could fit in a hatband. But the lunatic right wasn't a problem, either. “I don't worry so much about these people, frankly, as I do those people, again acting under their constitutional privileges, who subscribe to the idea that we can have a centrally controlled economy run by the government or that we can deprive the states of their powers and centralize the power of government in Washington. These people are actively engaged in government; these people like the gentleman on the phone are merely expressing their frustration and their concern—you might say, like a man standing outside the tent throwing rocks while the other bunch are inside breaking up the furniture.”

The studio audience applauded louder. They were Goldwater's now.

Gallup's latest poll had him at 40 percent to Rockefeller's 49. Key Rockefeller staffers, confident they had it in the bag, boarded planes for New York. But Goldwater was gaining. For now Happy was abed at Manhattan's Lying-In Hospital, her husband shuttling back and forth between the coasts as if commuting from Westchester to Manhattan, wisecracking, as his aides cringed, “I have a show opening on both sides of the continent the same weekend”—which he chose to believe voters found quite witty.

On May 27 he had been scheduled to speak at L.A.'s Loyola University, and Dean Burch dispatched one of the Goldwater emergency team, a prominent lay Catholic trucking executive from Nebraska named Dick Herman, to remind Los Angeles's Francis Cardinal McIntyre, the most right-wing leader in the American Catholic hierarchy, of the Pope's recent comments on remarriage. The gamble paid off. Six hours before Rockefeller was to mount the podium, McIntyre announced that the Church could never host a candidate who took the sacrament of marriage so lightly. Loyola withdrew the invitation. Other venues began following suit. The next day sixteen Protestant ministers issued a statement suggesting Rockefeller should withdraw from the race.

It was agonizing. It had seemed like a clever idea a few weeks earlier to direct attention away from the issue of his wealth by cooling off his advertising campaign. His media people had shot a hair-raising little number called “The Extremist,” in which victims of right-wing zealotry around the state were interviewed by the Today show's Dave Garroway. They had canceled it as too incendiary. Now Rockefeller had no platform—on the radio or on TV, or literally—from which to speak. Goldwater was spending $1 million in the last week. He was on TV so often it seemed like he was the only candidate running. And he finally, reluctantly, had taken off the gloves: “I would think a long time,” he said, “as a Californian, before I would put a man, governor of one of the larger Eastern states, connected with some rather influential financial institutions, at the head of my government, who could, at the stroke of a pen, do what LBJ's done for Texas”—that is, pirate the best defense contracts. Eleven
of fifteen Republican state senators signed a statement: now the primary campaign had crossed “the narrow line between healthy controversy and destructive charges.”

It was Memorial Day afternoon—just the kind of patriotic boost Goldwater's volunteer army needed to fire themselves up to ring doorbells until they dropped. In New York, Nelson Rockefeller Jr., 7 pounds, 10 ounces, was entering the world. In Riverside, California, Barry Goldwater was proving once again that there was nothing like a homestretch to bring him to the rhetorical heights a more motivated politician would have occupied all along. Conservatives turned misty-eyed to the flag as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung (a group of young hotheads saw TV correspondent Robin MacNeil, a Canadian, sitting down, and had to be restrained from tearing him limb from limb). Goldwater's speech was transporting: “When you say to some bureaucrat in Washington, ‘You take care of the kids' education'; when they say to you, ‘Don't worry about Mom and Pop, don't lay aside any money, enjoy yourself, the Federal Government will take care ...'; this is the ultimate destruction of the American family. When this happens, Communism will have won.”

The campaign grand finale was that night at Knott's Berry Farm. On the dais sat conservative leading lights like General A. C. Wedemeyer; spread before them were 27,000 of the faithful. A million watched on live TV. John Wayne looked down from the platform, locked eyes with Howard K. Smith, and said in the throaty drawl he reserved for only the gnarliest desperadoes,
“Ah-aystarn lab'ral prasss!”
But that only made most home viewers flinch, for they did not view the handsome and authoritative men they saw on news programs as enemies. Then Ronald Reagan spoke. He was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at. It was hard to remember exactly what they were. Clearly they were the enemy of all decent men. Howard Smith turned to Teddy White, sitting next to him, and said that Reagan had missed his calling. He should have gone into politics.

Goldwater—ignoring (or perhaps drawing dudgeon from) FBI warnings of an assassination threat—was in full prophetic mode. Woodrow Wilson had campaigned on keeping the country out of war. Goldwater's appeal was different: “I charge that today this nation is following in the most disastrous foreign policy in its entire history.... We are at war and we should admit it!”

Twenty-seven thousand roared back like it was welcome news. By the time he began describing “the greatest day of all, the greatest day in our history,” when an American President would tell Nikita Khrushchev
“You are wrong!”
—they knew the punch line, and they roared right along with him:
“Our children will not live under socialism or communism! Your children will live under freedom!”

And for the folks watching at home, lazy, fat, and overcontent from too much Memorial Day bratwurst and beer, he seemed to have pricked some guilt.

 

Goldwater retreated to Phoenix to play with his ham radio. His volunteers prepared to swarm over southern California like ants. They had compiled lists of 300,000 likely Goldwater voters. On election Tuesday, 10,000 workers would make at least two checks of each voter to ensure that he or she went to the polls. Rockefeller had 2,000 precinct walkers—on the payroll, of course.

One of the Goldwater volunteers on that first canvass was none other than Hannah Milhous Nixon, Richard's sainted mother. When her son got word of it, he whisked her off for a lengthy New York vacation. He called Goldwater's headquarters. Told the candidate was on the road, he demanded he be reached by radiophone. The radio car got word that Nixon had an urgent message for the senator, and the entire caravan pulled over so Goldwater could call Nixon from a phone booth. Nixon's urgent message was that he was not now, nor had he ever been, nor would he ever be, involved in any “stop Goldwater” movement. (Then he RSVP'd to his invitation to Goldwater's daughter's wedding.) The day before the primary Nixon called again, just to make sure Goldwater understood he was serious the first time.

Elsenhower—rendered in an apposite
New York Times
typo as “Eisenhowever ”—gave a press conference insisting he never meant to confer favor or opprobrium on any candidate. (Privately, his fondest wish was to throw his weight behind some “stop Goldwater” possibility or another. But as he complained to an old friend who still wrote many of his speeches, Bryce Harlow, “You can't canter without a horse.”) James Reston once again assured his readers that there was no way the Republicans would nominate either Rockefeller or Goldwater. Rockefeller had the edge—55 percent, Lou Harris claimed in a last-minute poll. But Goldwater was still gaining. “Please keep in mind that the Rockefeller delegation is composed of moderate Republicans who like Mr. Lodge, Mr. Nixon, and Mr. Scranton and would be more inclined to support a moderate candidate during the convention,” Rockefeller's phone girls read off their scripts in their final call to voters.

The greatest tension on primary Tuesday was probably in the makeshift studio CBS News had fashioned at the Biltmore Hotel. Eight months since Walter Cronkite had debuted his half-hour broadcast, six months since the networks had consoled a nation in its weekend of despair, TV news was becoming big business. The networks' “vote war” itself had become news. In Oregon
each network stationed reporters at the polls in almost every precinct; CBS ran up $36,000 in phone bills, but NBC beat them to the call by a few minutes. Now, with nearly as many reporters covering the reporters as were covering the results, for the first time CBS News was using Lou Harris's new computer-sampling exit poll techniques to attempt to call the race
before
the polls closed at 7 p.m. local time—during, that is, prime time in the East.

With three hours to go, news chief Bill Leonard and Fred Friendly pored over printouts that showed Rockefeller with a small but significant lead. A few minutes later new numbers came in: Goldwater had pulled ahead with 51.6 percent. They started sweating: 51.6 was just barely on the safe side of their margin of error. A few more samples came in; the Goldwater trend was confirmed. It was 7:15 Pacific standard time.

Leonard turned to Lou Harris: “I want to be 100 percent sure.” Harris shot back confidently, “We're within our guidelines.”

Leonard called Cronkite in Washington—and, at 7:21 p.m., astonishment evident in his voice at both the news and speed with which he was able to deliver it, Cronkite told America that CBS News was projecting Barry Goldwater as the winner.

Several hours passed. No other network called the race. Friendly and Leonard's final samplings arrived: Goldwater, still—but this time
below
their margin of error. The actual precinct tabulations flooding in were distinctly favoring Rockefeller.

Fred Friendly had to get on a plane to make an important meeting in New York the next morning. He fell asleep and awoke to the pilot's voice: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We're just about to make our approach into the New York City area, and it's going to be a beautiful day.... And by the way, if you're interested, Governor Rockefeller has won the California primary.”

Walter Cronkite, it turned out, was not nearly as trusted a man as CBS had thought. The wire services, using their old-fashioned methods, had called the election for Rockefeller; so did the CBS local station in New York City, hours after Cronkite gave the race to the Arizonan senator on the national broadcast. It was only the counting of the absentee ballots that gave the race officially to Barry Goldwater, 1,120,403 votes to 1,052,053. The turnout was 72 percent. Rus Walton's polling suggested that Goldwater got 20 percent more votes in precincts where
A Choice Not an Echo
had been distributed. Scores of wobbling delegates in other states committed for Goldwater. It was now hard to imagine a scenario in which Barry Goldwater would not be nominated. He responded to the news by drinking so much he had to be helped onto the plane back to Washington. Rockefeller refused to quit the race, promising, “I'm going right down the line no matter what happens.”

Goldwater people celebrated as if they were witnessing the risen Lord. But hating Barry Goldwater was taking on transcendent overtones, too: in Mississippi, Freedom Summer organizers found sharecroppers who were terrified that a Goldwater victory would give locals license to shoot them in their homes. Everywhere cartoonists pictured Goldwater's base as “little old ladies in tennis shoes”—an image California attorney general Stanley Mosk used in his report on the John Birch Society in 1961 to portray conservatives as the kind of people taken in by aluminum-siding salesmen (and for which Mosk received angry packages filled with loafers, sandals, and pumps for weeks on end). The
Glasgow Herald
called Goldwater “stupid to a degree that is incredible”; the
London Times
keened over “a major party endorsing and promoting a man so blatantly out of touch with reality, so wild in his foreign policy, so backward in his domestic ideas, and so inconsistent in his thinking”; and the
Frankfurter Rundschau
called Goldwater “a confused and weak man who hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches”—no small thing coming from Germany, then witnessing a dramatic suicide epidemic among old men threatened by new “de-Nazification” trials.