Before the Storm (71 page)

It was the end of the road. He had managed to peel off a grand total of two delegates in his last five meetings. Goldwater, busy riding his palomino in the Prescott Rodeo Days parade and buying drinks for the house at the Elks Club bar, would go to San Francisco with about three-quarters of the delegates, and the nomination, apparently, in his hip pocket.

It was more than some people could accept. “I doubt he's got it completely locked up,” Hubert Humphrey told Lyndon Johnson. “The big money in the East there, you know, will move in, as they've done before.”

“I seen 'em do it,” LBJ agreed, mentioning a friend who had gone to the 1952 convention strong for Taft. “The next morning, when steel got through with him, he turned the flip.”

The Eastern Establishment had no clothes. But to many it was still garbed in the cloak of limitless power.

 

On this, at least, the Goldwater for President Committee agreed with their President. “The 1952 tricks will be used again,” Bill Middendorf warned Dean Burch: “planted ‘bum dope' stories”; “whispering campaigns”; “threats and cajolery”; “shanghaiing and spiriting of delegates and alternates to distant points”; “political Mata Haris” (“Be on the lookout for any unexpectedly easy companionship from new-found female friends”).

What Clif White knew told him Middendorf was paranoid. But White acted as if he were paranoid, too. He had been ensconced full-time at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, whose fifteenth and seventeenth floors Goldwater had reserved, since June. He joined an assistant, Jim Day, who had been there since April. White had an agenda over and above mere victory: when Scranton entered the race, White became determined to roll up the biggest delegate total of any contested nomination fight in history. It would be the capstone of his career. It
would pave the way to his goal: to leave San Francisco as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Though there was also a lingering worry: What if the Establishment really
could
bully its way to victory?

So White created a command-and-control apparatus that put the legendary Kennedy organization in Los Angeles in 1960—his model—to shame. The platform had been drafted by Wisconsin Republican Melvin Laird to ventriloquize Goldwater's views. When the platform came up for debate the week before the opening gavel, Scrantonites could be expected to introduce sugary, “harmless” amendments in the hopes that the Goldwaterites would let them save a bit of face by granting them one or two concessions. The door thus opened a crack, a bigger amendment might follow, then another. Scranton operatives would try to discredit the chair during debate, whisper in conservative ears about business deals and called-in loans. Then they would take the platform fight. White briefed his platform committee members: This was war. If Scranton came out for motherhood and apple pie, apple pie and motherhood would just have to be voted down.

His delegates were ready to submit—they had chosen to submit—to military discipline. As they were named through the spring, White had his state chairs assign each delegate a buddy, whom they were to contact at least once a week to develop a bond—and the buddies were to travel together at all times in San Francisco lest either be led into temptation. The airport was a vulnerable flank. When they arrived at San Francisco International, delegates were to report immediately to the Goldwater hospitality room, where staffers would contact headquarters at the Mark, where the delegates' arrival was noted in the pages of big black cross-indexed loose-leaf binders which contained intelligence on each one of them (“Can be influenced and expect economic pressures can be important when the chips are down. He also is actively and economically involved in real estate in Arizona, has made several trips there in the last few years”). Neither were they to trust the transportation the RNC was providing. They would be spirited to their delegation's hotel—there were twenty-eight hotels, inconveniently scattered throughout the sprawling city—by radio-equipped cars. The routes had been timed, so if a delegate was tardy, an APB could be put out. “We can't predict the accidents,” said White, “but we must be prepared for the incidents.”

The key was communication. In the days before direct-dial hotel phones, whoever tied up a hotel switchboard had a distinct advantage over the competition. (White bore painful memories from the 1948 conclave in Philly, when, as a factotum for Dewey, he was assigned to feed a pay phone just off the floor with nickels at regular intervals to keep open a line to the governor's suite at the Bellevue-Stratford as angry reporters waiting outside the booth to call in
their stories threatened him with castration and worse.) White wired enough new custom phone lines across San Francisco to service a small town. At each delegation's headquarters, an extra room was reserved to accommodate a phone—connected for just these two weeks—wired directly between the hotel and the campaign's mammoth switchboard in a room on the fifteenth floor of the Mark. Six regional command centers (the Southerners called theirs “Fort Sumter”) were wired still more elaborately.

Telephones had been chosen over walkie-talkies because radio frequencies were easier to intercept than phone lines were to tap. (Scranton chose walkie-talkies; the Goldwater side had already cut into their frequencies.) But should the phone system be compromised, Goldwater's people had VHF walkie-talkies. Should the VHF ones fail, they had backup UHFs. They also devised a secret code for when they had to use the walkie-talkies on the convention floor, and installed a jam-resistant antenna in the rafters of the Cow Palace more powerful than the ones the networks had, to prevent interference from the iron beams. They did it in secret; nobody outside the Goldwater camp knew this setup existed.

Unwilling to trust the media, the Goldwater campaign workers had created their own. In one suite on the fifteenth floor of the hotel they built broadcast facilities. The campaign had purchased time on a local radio station every half hour, to which Goldwater delegates were to tune for general news. They tried whenever possible to interview Goldwater luminaries upon arrival, then offer them as exclusives to local TV stations, lest their words be twisted by biased reporters. They aired their televised roundup on purchased time thrice daily. Another room had a huge board on which all staffers marked their entrance and egress, even to duck out to get a pack of cigarettes; a closed-circuit television camera was trained on that board at all times, the image shown on monitors in Burch‘s, Kitchel's, Kleindienst's, and White's rooms. One of the original Draft Goldwater group had committed nearly to heart the arcane rules of procedure of the House of Representatives under which the convention would be governed and was on call at all times in his room, where he had a library of law books at the ready.

The seventeenth-floor Presidential Suite was reserved for the candidate and his brain trust, led by Bill Baroody. By coincidence, Scranton's headquarters (an operation of perhaps a third the size of Goldwater's, created originally for Nelson Rockefeller) was sandwiched in between, on the sixteenth. Goldwater's team barricaded the elevator exits on the fifteenth floor; all personnel had to enter on the fourteenth—then show their privilege to pass the armed Pinkertons guarding the staircase in between through an elaborate system of stickpins and ribbons. It was the most heavily guarded piece of San Francisco
hotel real estate since Molotov's Soviet delegation took over a floor of the St. Francis for the founding conference of the UN. Reporters were virtually banned. One time the guards wouldn't let Mary Scranton through the stairwell on her way to her husband's offices. When not on duty, the Pinkertons slept off their shifts in a room full of cots.

When it came time to move the delegates out to the convention site, the Cow Palace, an overgrown Quonset hut set amidst the scrub hills of the nondescript San Mateo County working-class hamlet of Daly City, there would be a fleet of buses. But the only route from downtown San Francisco to the Cow Palace, the Bayshore Freeway (seeded with Goldwater billboards donated by National Airlines chairman L. B. “Bud” Maytag), might be congested. So in case of emergency, Jim Day had rented a railroad train to keep on reserve. White's piece de resistance was perched on concrete blocks in a back corner of the Cow Palace parking lot: a green-and-white command trailer that reproduced the whole setup at the Mark in miniature—so precious it was secured not by Pinkertons but by lawyers armed with tape recorders and Polaroids, ready to file affidavits in case of enemy sabotage. Phalanxes of volunteers across the country were held in reserve if a telegram barrage was needed. A pool of eager Youth for Goldwater volunteers, shipped in from every corner of the country via chartered trains and planes, were on call for odd jobs. At the outskirts of town, warehouses bulged with mountains of Western hats, boxes of buttons, and like ephemera for the greatest demonstration an American convention had ever seen.

Clif White surveyed what he had created, and he saw that it was good. A Goldwater delegate who twitched his nose in Scranton's direction could be set upon by a swarm of friends in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. A parliamentary double cross could be plowed under even more quickly. The Republican National Convention at last belonged to
them.

 

Or so Clif White thought. To see how mistaken he was, all one needed to do was look up at the Cow Palace's tier of glass broadcast booths, swept up off the floor by spindly struts like the legs of some giant metallic spider, hoisting each superstar anchor above the firmament as if king of all he surveyed. These booths were new, a function of the cramped floor space at the Cow—and a testament to just how highly the three networks judged the stakes of winning news dominance for themselves. It made news at the 1960 Democratic Convention when there were nearly as many reporters of all kinds as there were delegates. In 1964, the number of radio and TV people alone was double that number. Their priorities had become the party's. The pageant would be broadcast almost continually (and, via the new Telstar satellite, internationally), but the
RNC scheduled key sessions for prime time—and considered calling delegates to their seats with pom-pom girls instead of a pounding gavel. General Eisenhower would be there—under contract as a commentator to ABC. Thirty-foot camera scaffolding blocked the gallery's view; meandering cameramen weighed down by fifty-pound loads of equipment threatened to knock over delegates like bowling pins. Beneath the bleachers, the networks built villages—control rooms, reception rooms, maintenance shops, copy rooms—lavishly furnished, catered around the clock, and built as if to last, in Sheetrock, not plywood. The great alabaster towers of the brand-new multibuilding Hilton downtown, convention press headquarters, were girded around by so many miles of television cable that a hotel executive joked that the building might collapse if it was removed. A correspondent marveled on camera that politicians could walk the streets unmolested, while “us television types” drew swarms.

It was one thing that Clif White had hardly given a thought: what a blitzkrieg looked like broadcast live on TV. And when the dust lifted with the Goldwater side celebrating an overwhelming victory, “pyrrhic” was hardly an adequate word to describe it.

A
s convention day approached, San Francisco teemed like a college town the morning of the big game. The RNC first estimated that 20,000 Republicans would set upon the city. Now the guess was 35,000 and rising; even the fourth-rate motels were booked, and an emergency housing center was set up to arrange accommodations for the throngs still streaming in without reservations. All hoped to get inside an arena that seated 14,500.

The Friday before the Monday convention opening, church and labor groups sponsored a 40,000-strong civil rights march to City Hall Plaza. “DEFOLIATE MISSISSIPPI”; “GOLDWATER FOR FÜHRER”; “GOLDWATER ‘64, BREAD AND WATER '65, HOT WATER '66,” read signs. A casket labeled “FREEDOM IS DEAD” was borne through the crowd. One contingent marched behind the banner “PARENTS OF THE MISSISSIPPI SUMMER PROJECT”—where an FBI office had just been opened to search full-time for the three missing civil rights workers (who had, it would turn out, been shot like dogs by the Ku Klux Klan after the Neshoba police generously notified the Klan of the trio's release from their jail). Keating, Javits, Lodge, and Rockefeller made surprise appearances at the speaker's stand. It immediately became clear that in this court of opinion at least, the Republican Party was Goldwater's and Goldwater's alone. For when the speakers reminded the audience of the GOP's glorious history of advancing civil rights, they were answered by laughs and boos.

From billboards Nelson Rockefeller had rented eight months before, the smiling face of Bill Scranton looked out on a city that belonged to Barry Goldwater. From the Powell Street cable car turntable at the bottom to the jewel of San Francisco hostelries, the Mark Hopkins, at the top, Nob Hill was so bollixed up that trolleys and taxis sometimes had to wait half an hour for police to clear the path. Though a knot of burly partisans screaming “We are the Goldwater
armeeeee
of liberation!” had no trouble cleaving the crowd; nor did
Phyllis Schlafly, who was treated like a prophet everywhere she went. Youngsters followed Ronald Reagan's every step; the editor of
National Review
was met upon his arrival at the airport by hundreds of YAFers detonating confetti bombs and singing “Won't You Come Home Bill Buckley.” (They also met Dwight D. Eisenhower as he arrived at the Santa Fe terminal after a ceremonial cross-country trek on the “Caucus Special”—a show of strength to hint what the former president would be up against should he endeavor to throw his weight behind Scranton.) Goldwater, lips pursed in annoyance, was constantly tailed by mobs chanting “We Want Barry!” So, in fact, was Scranton, by mobs chanting the very same thing.