Before the Storm (70 page)

Scranton's desperate strategy turned on picking up a lion's share of the 200 delegates to be chosen in ten remaining primaries and conventions, then turning around the others at the convention. He hoped for Rockefeller's 144. But although Rocky gladly turned over his now skeletal campaign organization, he held on to his votes—still hoping lightning might strike in San Francisco. Manfully, Scranton professed optimism: Florida's primary was in flux because of a feud between two rival slates (he neglected to mention that both were for Goldwater); Virginia had a strong moderate presence (though only one moderate ended up winning a spot on the delegation); Idaho had a strong liberal as governor (but Bob Smylie so feared the fate of John Anderson of Kansas that he sold out to White). Scranton pointed out that although Goldwater was presumed to have more than 655 loyal delegates, most weren't legally pledged to him. Of these he claimed that 200 were “moveable.” The unlucky 200 were deluged with calls, letters, telegrams, even a phonograph recording—sometimes several in a twenty-four-hour period. Scranton had what would appear to be a compelling argument: in a Gallup poll of the rank and file, he was preferred over Goldwater 55 to 34. These statistics hardly impressed conservatives. Phyllis Schlafly, for instance, claimed that Gallup asked “a lot of questions of a very few people” in order to “come up with answers that pleased the New York kingmakers.” Bill Buckley called them “crazy figures” that Gallup manipulated “to say, ‘Yes, Mr. President.' ”

The men who were told they were kingmakers set out to make a king. On June 23 Henry Cabot Lodge, saying Vietnam was “on the right track,” resigned his ambassadorship to campaign for Scranton. (He had made the decision, he claimed, when a GI told him it was his duty.) Milton Eisenhower, the most liberal of the Eisenhowers, president of Johns Hopkins University, took on the job of locking in his brother. Tom Gates of Morgan Guarantee Trust leaned on associates for funds; Tom Dewey, thrilled to be back in the game, carved the nation into districts and distributed phone lists to highly placed friends. Scranton toured with forty-two such heavy hitters in tow, who fanned out to importune delegates at every stop. (He also traveled with an impressive security detail; bomb threats, as they were for Goldwater, as they were for Rockefeller, as they were for Martin Luther King, were constant.)

The heavy hitters thought they knew what to expect of Republican convention delegates: hacks, in the main, often serving “uncommitted” at the sufferance of some boss whose support was up for sale. But Goldwater delegates
were freedom fighters, not mercenaries. They remembered when these same heavy hitters had rigged the “Fair Play” resolution at the 1952 governors' conference that let them stack the deck for Eisenhower. Schlafly added a new chapter on the Scranton drive to her book and put another million copies on the street, declaiming, “The chief propaganda organ of the secret kingmakers, the
New York Times”
and the “popular national magazines” were all “goose-stepping” to “prevent Republicans from selecting their obvious candidate.”

They were kingmakers no more. When Robert Alonzo Taft was routed in 1952, one-quarter of the nation's banking resources were controlled from Manhattan. By 1964 the proportion was one-eighth. And now bankers and Wall Street lawyers were not the only men who knew how to pull strings. At the American Medical Association conference in San Francisco that spring, dominated by panicked talk of the Johnson Administration's Medicare bill, four former AMA presidents formed Physicians for Goldwater and sent a $14,000 mailing to convention delegates, which brought back $500,000. Another half million dollars was raised by the AMA's political action committee to distribute to friendly congressmen.

The Scrantonites couldn't shoot straight. When Lodge flew to Harrisburg, they organized a reception for him at the airport—which Goldwater partisans managed to pack. One of them slapped a Goldwater bumper sticker on the back of the governor's limousine. Lodge was dispatched to Kansas, then Missouri, to meet with supposedly wavering delegates and found that both delegations had already left for San Francisco. Friendly newspapers tried to help: the
Washington
Post rejoiced that Scranton was “calling the GOP from the land of make-believe”; the
Los Angeles Times
devoted two full pages to reprinting his opening speech; the
New York Times
treated his campaign like the return of General MacArthur to the Philippines (for the publications of Time Inc., presided over by Scranton's brother-in-law, it was more like the Second Coming). Optimistic reports were filed that delegates had been peeled off in Iowa, that Goldwater had only nine firm votes in Illinois. But when pressed to name the names of delegates who had switched, Scranton demurred, because they didn't exist. White, meanwhile, could name dozens of new Goldwater delegates in states Scranton had just visited.

Time
obligingly reported that “the storied kingmakers who launched Ike into politics” had “attempted nothing of consequence in the 1964 campaign,” but that once Goldwater's delegates realized that only Scranton could beat Johnson “and carry hundreds of other Republicans into office with him, their loyalty to Barry almost certainly would waver and wane.” Goldwater delegates flooded their man with telegrams to assure him that that would never happen: “WILL VOTE FOR YOU IF MY VOTE ALONE IS THE ONLY VOTE YOU OBTAIN” ...

“I AM PREPARED TO STAND BY YOU AS RESOLUTELY AS DID GENERAL THOMAS FOR THE UNION AT CHICAMAUGA” ... “I HAVE BEEN, AND WILL BE, SUBJECTED TO PRESSURES OF TREMENDOUS FORCE. HOWEVER, I WILL BE ABLE TO STAND UP TO THIS AND COME OUT OF THE CONVENTION WITH A CLEAR CONSCIENCE TO FACE OUR GOD AND OUR PEOPLE.” “I'd give Barry my blood and the marrow from my bones,” one admirer remarked.

 

Finally Scranton spotted an opening. In Mississippi, vigilantes were setting upon black churches, tearing them apart for “weapons” they assumed were being stockpiled as a prelude to the Communist takeover, then burning them to the ground at a rate of one a week when no weapons could be found. Barry Goldwater seemed to be affording the vigilantes aid and comfort. Goldwater made a courtesy call to General Eisenhower in Gettysburg to confirm the rumors that he would vote the next day against final passage of the civil rights bill. Eisenhower, livid, suspected Goldwater was doing it for political advantage. That was the furthest thing from his intention. When Goldwater returned to his Senate office he was met by his Mississippi field man Wirt Yerger and Southern coordinator John Grenier. What they saw was a shaken man afraid he was signing his political death warrant, convinced that the Constitution offered him no other honorable choice.

In 1962, after Goldwater had proclaimed Kennedy's dispatch of troops to the University of Mississippi unconstitutional, Denison Kitchel had commissioned a brief on the subject from one of Phoenix's most prominent constitutional experts, an ally of theirs in the local party, William Rehnquist. The brief changed Goldwater's mind. (Kitchel also advised, “Make Barnett”—Governor Ross Barnett, who was holding firm for segregation—“their victim, not your hero”: sage, enduring political advice that meant that he could uphold both the
principle
of integration and the principle of states' rights.) When it came time to decide how to vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Goldwater turned to Rehnquist once again. Rehnquist had aggressively fought local antidiscrimination laws in Phoenix, where Goldwater had valiantly fought for them as appropriate and morally imperative. As a Supreme Court clerk, Rehnquist had even written a memo arguing that
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
should be upheld. And, not surprisingly, Rehnquist confirmed Goldwater's instincts that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unconstitutional. Goldwater approached Professor Robert Bork of Yale University for a second opinion. Bork was on the record already as arguing that the matter was “not whether racial prejudice or preference is a good thing but whether individual men ought to be free to deal and associate with whom they please for whatever reasons appeal to them.” He reiterated that opinion to Goldwater in a seventy-five-page brief.

Their counsel to steel him, Yerger and Grenier dismissed, Goldwater changed into his darkest blue suit, made his way to the Senate floor, and gave the most closely watched speech of his political career—rapidly, tonelessly, head down, as if reading into the record. “There have been few, if any, occasions when the searching of my conscience and the reexamination of my views of our constitutional system have played a greater part in the determination of my vote than they have on this occasion,” he said. He reviewed his own record fighting discrimination, his conviction that racism was fundamentally a problem of the heart and not the law. He described how Titles VII and II entailed “the loss of our God-given liberties” and would constitute a “special appeal for special welfare”; that to work, the bill would

Of the genuine police state in the nation's midst—Mississippi—he said nothing at all. Precinct day had come and gone in the Mississippi Democratic Party. Black activists dutifully showed up at the meetings at the appointed hour, found the doors locked, then retreated to form their own “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” following state election law to the letter. Another church burned, and three civil rights workers went to inspect the damage. They were arrested and locked up in the Neshoba County jail. They were released; then they disappeared. A few days later, Walter Cronkite announced that the search was “the focus of the whole country's concern.” The regular Mississippi Democratic Party chose its delegates to the convention, extralegally and in secret, then emerged to hint that they would endorse Barry Goldwater. “It is impossible to doubt that Senator Goldwater intends to make his candidacy the rallying point of white resistance,” Walter Lippmann wrote.

Everett Dirksen closed the civil rights debate on June 19 with a withering attack on Mississippi's new golden boy. Never mentioning him by name, Dirksen listed all the other reforms wrongheaded conservatives had once declared unconstitutional: child labor laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the minimum wage, Social Security. He thrust his arm in Goldwater's direction: “Utter all the
extreme opinions that you will, it will carry forward. You can go ahead and talk about conscience! It is
man's
conscience that speaks in every generation!”

The
New York Times
found it impossible not to conclude that Dirksen was fighting against Goldwater's nomination. Scranton seized the moment. He traveled to Washington to tell the minority leader he would make a fine favorite-son presidential candidate. But whatever the wishful thinking, Dirksen had not gotten that far in life without knowing how to count. When it was time to orate, he orated. When it was time for politics, he did politics. Goldwater had the nomination; there was nothing more to discuss. Dirksen dismissed his guest summarily, telling an aide, “What do they think I am, a rookie or a patsy?”

Scranton pressed on. “It looks good in North Carolina!” he proclaimed after a trip to Charlotte. (The delegation voted against Scranton 36 to o at the convention.) He whistle-stopped across the Illinois prairie: if he couldn't have Dirksen, perhaps he could win over some of the senator's fifty-eight-man delegation. In Springfield Scranton planned to speak from the hall in the old state capitol where Lincoln had made his great “house divided” speech. The sheriff wouldn't let him in. In Kankakee he was egged as his train pulled away. Then he went to the O'Hare Inn, where the delegation was holding its last caucus before the convention—and there Dirksen chose to bludgeon him. In exchange for a promise from Goldwater to include a plank supporting the civil rights bill in the platform, Dirksen emerged from the proverbial smoke-filled room to announce that he would nominate Barry Goldwater at the convention.

Scranton arrived and was met by two separate groups of pickets: conservatives, including a clutch of Goldwater Girls wearing phony bandages and carrying signs that parodied the commercials for Tareyton cigarettes (slogan: “I'd rather fight than switch”), and civil rights activists for whom his Republican identification was enough to brand him as the enemy. Scranton spoke to polite applause. Goldwater spoke; the room lit up. Dirksen delivered a peroration redolent, to all present, of his famous speech nominating Robert Taft in 1952: “We followed you before,” he had cried then, wagging his finger at Thomas E. Dewey, “and you took us down the road to defeat!” This time he pounded the podium and cried, “Too long have we ridden the gray ghost of me-tooism! When the roll is called, I shall cast my vote for Barry Goldwater!” The delegates were polled: 48 for Goldwater, 8 passes, 2 abstentions, no one for Scranton.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed on July 2, Johnson told his staff, “I think we just gave the South to the Republicans for your lifetime and mine” (some among them wondered whether signing the bill could conceivably lose Johnson the election altogether). Blacks seeking to exercise their new
rights at a Selma, Alabama, movie theater were assaulted by whites, and made a celebrity of an Atlanta restaurateur named Lester Maddox who chased them away with a pistol (the Los Angeles County Young Republicans unanimously passed a resolution commending Maddox and asserting that the federal government “has no legitimate business protecting civil-rights carpetbaggers in the South”). Scranton traveled to Utah and was received warmly by banner-wielding “Smith Girls for Scranton”—not exactly the Beehive State's most important voting bloc. In Seattle, he claimed there were still “literally hundreds of delegates who are still moveable”—and then his forces folded before a Clif White juggernaut that denied even the granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt a seat at the national convention. In Oregon Scranton was desperate enough to write the Civil War out of American history: fights over racial matters, he said, are “not in our tradition, not in our custom, not in our manner!”