Before the Storm (69 page)

Graham Molitor, unwinding from the California bout at a religious retreat, confessed ashamedly to a divine that when he first came to Washington in the 1950s, Goldwater had been his hero. Now he had worked to destroy the man's very name. The priest replied that considering the gravity of the situation, Molitor had done no wrong.

A
ll spring, the thirteen of sixteen Republican governors who were moderates talked confidently about how Goldwater would be eliminated from the race just as soon as the party establishment got a mind to do it. Now, on the eve of the annual convention of the nation's fifty governors, the Republican moderates arrived at an uncomfortable thought: they were the party establishment.

It was said that Republican governors were moderates because governing a state was a moderating job. It was they who were responsible for mass transit and hospitals and housing and job training and all those other powers so generously reserved for the states by the Tenth Amendment; it was they who would have to clean up the mess if a conservative White House were able to turn off their federal funding spigot. And it was they who would have to call out the National Guard should the civil rights revolution come to blows. Such thoughts surely clouded their minds that week as Senator Robert Byrd began unspooling the longest speech of the civil rights filibuster; Martin Luther King's latest marches in St. Augustine, Florida, were met by violent mobs; the state of Mississippi was preparing to counter “Freedom Summer” with all the terror at her disposal; and Harlem militants began regularly raining debris on police from rooftops. New coinages were joining the old familiar “backlash”: “Goldwater riots” (the surmise being that if Goldwater were nominated, racial violence might just rocket him to upset victory in November) and “long hot summer” (the phrase the more militant civil rights leaders used to scare recalcitrant politicians). Traditionally an untaxing weekend alternating panel discussions with golf rounds in some delightful locale like San Juan, as if in omen this year's governors' convention landed in a backlash epicenter, Cleveland. It was there that the moderate Republicans conspired to finally put a stop to the Goldwater threat.

Fifteen Republican governors were breakfasting on June 7 at the Cleveland Sheraton. A sixteenth, William Warren Scranton, shambled in dejectedly. Politicians who had been jealously reading all year about his ruddy charm looked up from their pancakes to see someone whose face was as ashen as a hunger striker's. Earlier, Eisenhower had all but insisted to Scranton that he explicitly offer himself for a draft that afternoon on
Face the Nation.
Bill Keisling, who wore a gold-plated Scranton lapel pin, said, grinning, “I only wear this when I've got a candidate. Believe me. I've got a candidate now.” But Eisenhower had just been persuaded by a friend to change his mind. The fact that it was the twentieth anniversary of D-Day did nothing to stiffen the former Allied commander's backbone. Scranton's plan had been to charge into the governors' meeting and draw first blood against Goldwater. But he had just got off the phone with Dwight Eisenhower, who had pulled the rug out from under him after seven months of encouragement. He felt dizzy, weightless.

Presently George Romney (breaking his rule against doing politics on a Sunday) piped up with a demand that the governors summon Senator Goldwater and force him to clarify his positions on a list of issues—a curious request to make of a man whose views had long appeared on the record twice a week in hundreds of newspapers; as curious as the conviction, echoing through the halls all weekend, that the Republican Party had ever been the downtrodden's last, best hope. The idea of Barry Goldwater holding their party's standard fogged moderates' brains.

The response to Romney's salvo was barely civil. Oregon's Mark Hatfield snapped, “George, you're six months too late. If you can't add, I'll add it for you.” Scranton rose to speak for Romney's idea. Hatfield testily replied, “Rockefeller has been working his head off day and night for the past six months, while both of you have remained gloriously silent. Any ‘stop Goldwater' movement now by you eleventh-hour warriors is an exercise in futility.”

Scranton was driven to the local affiliate to face the nation. His candidacy announcement remaining folded in his lap, he blathered that the GOP must “keep to a sound footing that it had in the past under Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower.”
Does that mean you're against Goldwater?
he was asked. “No, I am not saying that. And I think you are putting words into my mouth, sir.” His comments got more confusing after that.

At the Sheraton, very politic people began saying very impolitic things. “Where are his
principles?”
Romney shouted at the TV set within hearing of reporters. A reporter cornered Rockefeller: Would he consider giving Scranton his delegates if he asked? “Did
you see
him on television?” he shot back. A new nickname for Scranton spread: the Hamlet of Harrisburg.

The next morning Hamlet appeared on the
Today
show. He claimed there
was still time to bring Goldwater around to a moderate platform. “Well, Governor,” asked Sander Vanocur, “aren't you suggesting the greatest conversion since biblical times?” Every trace of poise deserting him, Scranton dumbly replied, “Well, I don't think it has much to do with religion, Sander, but the—but I—I have said over and over again, and I think you'll find this to be true, that in our political—with persons generally, it is much more difficult to characterize them than some people think.”

This was the sound of a party slipping away.

Goldwater made a guest appearance at a reception in Cleveland that evening. He took Romney at his word. He wanted clarification; the candidate's advisers circled around the room handing out copies of
Senator Goldwater Speaks Out on the Issues.
Then he left to head back to Washington to vote against cloture.

Richard Nixon showed up shortly after midnight. His pledge to Goldwater notwithstanding, he came with a “stop Goldwater” plan: he sat up until 3 a.m. trying to convince
Romney
to enter the race. Rocky dragged Romney and Scranton to his suite; together they tried to puzzle out a statement for Romney to make that would simultaneously honor his pledge to his constituents not to actively run for President and signal his willingness to be drafted. Governors and their staff members rushed in and out of Ohio governor Jim Rhodes's suite, which he had established as a virtual “stop Goldwater” clearinghouse, bearing proposals, counterproposals, and counter-counterproposals; reporters crowding the hall outside Rhodes's suite retreated to file stories pregnant with the phrase “accounts diverged,” then returned to the phones an hour later to cancel the last dispatch and send a new one. Come daylight, Nixon called a press conference and announced, “Looking to the future of the party, it would be a tragedy if Senator Goldwater's views as previously stated were not challenged—and repudiated.”

The governors refueled at a private breakfast after their all-nighters. Nixon asked for the floor. He announced he had no prepared remarks and would entertain questions. Moments passed; it suddenly dawned on the men in the room that Nixon was waiting for them to ask him to run for President. Mark Hatfield mercifully broke the silence with an innocuous query about their chances of beating the Democrats in November.

It would have been a perfect week to unite for the effort. Half the Democrats were ready to fight to the death for civil rights; the other half were fighting against it. The
Washington Star
had run the most damning expose of Johnson's business dealings yet. Two reconnaissance jets had been shot down over Vietnam. Walt Rostow of the State Department had handed the Republicans a perfect opportunity to neutralize the nuclear issue when he explained in
the
New York Times
that American security depended on readiness for any eventuality, “up to and including all-out nuclear war.” But this crowd of Republicans couldn't have united on what day it was. Nixon, meanwhile, left the breakfast and told reporters he detected a “very lively interest” in a “stop Goldwater” option. In Washington, Goldwater said that Nixon was “looking more like Harold Stassen every day.”

Cloture passed without Goldwater's vote, 71 to 20 (Scranton said Goldwater's position made him “sick”). Commentators predicted the imminent demise of the congressional conservative coalition that had held up progressive legislation for decades. LBJ pondered a memo from RFK that terrorism in Mississippi was being actively abetted by local sheriffs. In St. Augustine a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staffer informed the FBI of death threats against Dr. King (they hardly needed the intelligence; J. Edgar Hoover had long been bugging any room the man he called a “burr-headed nigger” graced). The staffer was told that a request for protection should be referred to the local sheriff—the same sheriff who had been detaining marchers in the 90-degree heat in an unshaded pen outside the county jail with a shallow hole in the ground for a toilet. In Cleveland, the governors dressed for the closing “Parade of the States” ball. And now that Goldwater's nomination was all but inevitable, William Warren Scranton wondered whether it wasn't time to throw his hat into the ring.

 

Scranton had mulled it over on the flight back home Wednesday, and he had his aides arrange a dinner buffet meeting with his closest associates at the governor's mansion the following night. He brooded around the executive mansion all morning Thursday as if it were Elsinore. It was three hours into the buffet before Scranton interrupted an entreaty from Senator Hugh Scott—who had just released a statement predicting that if Goldwater was nominated he would bring down thirty Republicans with him in November—in mid-sentence, stood up, and announced, “All right, we've got a lot of work to do. I'm going to run.” The convention in San Francisco was a month away. Malcolm Moos, Eisenhower's former top speechwriter, and Senator Scott drove to Gettysburg to tell Eisenhower the news. He greeted them with the incredible exclamation, “At last someone has done what I have urged.”

The announcement would come the next day at the Maryland state convention—where the gung ho state chairman had already formed a campaign-organization-in-waiting for Scranton. Jock Whitney, owner of the
New York Herald Tribune,
loaned his plane. And in a garish ballroom in the Lord Baltimore Hotel, Scranton spoke stirringly of the Whigs: “Today the nation—and indeed the world—waits to see if another proud political banner will falter,
grow limp, and collapse in the dust.” He continued, “Lincoln would cry out in pain if we sold out our principles, but he would laugh out with scorn if we threw away an election.” His dramatic words brought half the crowd to a delighted frenzy—and half, conservatives, to resounding boos.

It infuriated Goldwater. “I hope you decide to run,” Scranton had written him in December. Now, seven months later, Scranton was accusing him of wrecking the party to which he had devoted his adult life. Goldwater threw his scruples about party unity to the wind and told the
New York Times,
“The Republican establishment is desperate to defeat me. They can't stand having someone they can't control.” When the
Washington Star
asked Goldwater what he thought of Nixon's comment on the “tragedy” that would befall their party if his views were not repudiated—the first he had heard of it—he turned a shade of pink. “I guess he doesn't know my views. I got most of them from him.”

And suddenly Bill Scranton was on the road running for President. “This is not the hour for us to join those extreme reactionaries, who are anything but conservatives, those radicals of the right who would launch a system of dime-store feudalism,” he would cry; or he would say that Goldwater “has given every evidence of being a man who is seeking not to lead the Republican Party, but to start a new political party of his own,” was “wreaking chaos and uproar,” “talking off the top of his head,” had “a cruel misunderstanding of how the American economy works.” “Because of the havoc that has been spread across the national landscape by the present front-runner, the Republican Party wonders how it will make clear to the American people that it does not oppose Social Security, the United Nations, human rights, and a sane nuclear policy.” “Send to the White House a man who thinks deeply, who is not impulsive,” he would cry with what gusto he could muster, although it sounded like a death rattle.

When not speaking ill of Goldwater, which was rarely, Scranton spoke of curing the ravages of automation through the federal establishment of “a coordinated labor market to match available workers with available jobs.” And hardly a speech went by in which he didn't indulge in a favorite new pastime among liberals: the veneration of the late, great senator Robert Taft, a legislative consensus builder whose conservatism occasionally embraced such exceptions as public housing, federal support of health and education, and public works projects. He was “the greatest conservative of all time,” Scranton would say, “a conservative in the truest sense of the word. He sought to conserve all of the human values that have been carried down to us on the long stream of American history. He saw history as the foundation on which a better future might be built, not a Technicolor fantasy behind which the problems of the present might be concealed.” Taft became more symbol than man; Walter Lippmann,
Time,
and Richard Rovere of
The New Yorker
were but a few of
those who sounded a mighty
amen
to Scranton's necrophilia for the late Ohioan—although back when Taft was alive, Lippmann compared him to Neville Chamberlain,
Time
to a “tortoise” who “piled one ineptitude upon another,” and Rovere to “a grapefruit with eyeglasses.”