Before the Storm (72 page)

Across town, at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets, a new kind of bohemia was taking shape, although many of its most flamboyant representatives were occupied with a cross-country trip on a bus called “Further,” whose riotous exterior decoration included a sign reading “A VOTE FOR BARRY is A VOTE FOR FUN!” A stop along the way was the commune of former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, whose
The Psychedelic Experience
had come out that year. These were Ken Kesey's “Merry Pranksters,” later to be immortalized as the first hippies in a book by
New York Herald Tribune
writer Tom Wolfe. The delegates, mostly gray old factory owners and club women—the butt of cabbies' jokes that San Francisco banks were running out of nickels and dimes—would have been altogether disgusted by the goings-on at the Haight, were they aware of them; but the folks who would fill the Cow's spectator galleries—the YAFers and Young Republicans—might have been amused. They were packing North Beach nightclubs dancing the swim (some might have taken in the country's first topless dancing act), snapping up comic books lampooning such trendy dances by inventing new ones like the “Eisenhower sway” (“sway back and forth. But end up in the dead center. Do not speak while performing this exercise”), and heckling lefty comedian Dick Gregory at the hungry i when they weren't laughing at his cracks at the expense of Scranton (“He reminds you of the guy who runs to John Wayne for help”). They
did
think a vote for Barry was a vote for fun. They exulted in each other, rejoiced, felt an electricity they would not experience again in their lives: it was their Wood-stock.

They were a key component of Bill Scranton's strategy. The governor had not just come to win some delegates and save a bit of face. He was determined to save his beloved party from suicide—and was convinced that the way to do it was to provoke Barry Goldwater and his followers to such reckless outbursts as to make Goldwater's nomination unfathomable. And so Scranton launched his first salvo. The vehicle was an article in the magazine Der
Spiegel.
Goldwater had given an interview to the German newsmagazine at the end of June.
It came out, and was translated, on the second day of the platform hearings. By the next morning Scranton was arguing that Goldwater's answer as to whether he could win against Johnson in November—“I don't think any Republican can, as of now”—should disqualify him as a candidate (Goldwater, Scranton said, had “now decided to defoliate the Republican Party”). Scranton left it to his press office to point up the truly impolitic statements in the
Der Spiegel
article: Goldwater's contention that Germany would have won both world wars if she weren't subject to the command of men “who didn't understand war”; and that in Vietnam, “I would turn to my Joint Chiefs of Staff and say, ‘Fellows, we made the decision to win, now it's your problem.' ” Scranton hoped Goldwater's first press conference when he arrived in San Francisco the next day would be a panicked defense that he wasn't a bomb-throwing Nazi. Then the other shoe would drop, and his supporters would realize just how unworthy their man truly was.

In that intention Scranton failed miserably. For forty-five minutes aides briefed Goldwater on what phrases to avoid in the press conference. He sat impassively, oblivious to what it was he was supposed to be ashamed of. Then he went downstairs to the media room and, glasses skewed charmingly to the left, as they would be through the entire convention, said exactly what it was he wasn't supposed to say, calmly, without a hint of agitation. To his delegates, it only made him seem more heroic.

 

Within the day a startling development would rocket the momentum further in his favor. There were two big delegations still committed to favorite sons, Wisconsin and Ohio. Wisconsin was shortly expected to release its delegation to Goldwater (“Vote our wishes in San Francisco or continue westward,” the Young Republicans had warned the Wisconsin delegates back home). It was assumed that Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio—the coordinator of the “stop Goldwater” efforts at the Cleveland governors' conference—would hold his favorite-son delegates only through as many ballots as it took to deny Goldwater a majority. Instead he released them for Goldwater. Rumors swirled: Rhodes had been offered the second spot on the ticket, or had been blackmailed. The truth, as Rhodes revealed it to an incredulous Bill Scranton in a blunt hotel-room chat, was entirely more portentous: Rhodes was so impressed by the strength of backlash sentiment in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Youngstown that he thought Goldwater might deliver a Truman-beats-Dewey-style upset.

The idea was catching. “The November outcome, if he becomes the candidate, may rest entirely with those millions of white Americans who are becoming increasingly apprehensive about the impact of civil-rights legislation in
their lives,” one of Martin Luther King's brain trusters advised. “If they vote on this basis, all bets are off.” A California Goldwater leader put it to a reporter more plainly: “The nigger issue will put him in the White House.” A Goldwater win, pronounced New York senator Jacob Javits, would “wrench the social order out of its sockets.” Though Goldwater himself spent the week expressing his fervent hope that civil rights wouldn't become an issue in the campaign at all, and explaining that if he thought he could not enforce the Civil Rights Act—the law of the land—“I would withdraw from the race.”

Scranton made the rounds with a secret list of 110 delegates pledged to Goldwater but said, according to Rockefeller's staff, to be “less than 100 percent.” He discovered they were 99.9 percent. He began arguing that the traditional convention roll call would have to be replaced by a secret ballot to keep Goldwater operatives from bludgeoning delegates into obedience, that Goldwater's platform draft intentionally snubbed Ike, that Goldwater planned to start a new, conservative third party. The press ate it up. When Scranton managed to peel off a single Florida vote, they reported that he was on the verge of 11 more and treated it as the biggest story of the day—that, and Senator Ken Keating's announcement that he would run his tough reelection fight against Bobby Kennedy independently of the Republican Party if Goldwater were nominated. Reporters began calling the Goldwater camp apathetic for never rising to Scranton's bait. It wasn't apathy; it was discipline. They already held all the cards. They only needed to lie down, let the noise play itself out, and hold their lead.

Scranton's proxies—Milton Eisenhower, Romney, Lodge—went before the platform committee to make their stands. “Markets don't just
happen,”
Romney declared with exasperation to the committee's laissez-faire majority. Declaimed Lodge: “No one in his right mind would today argue that there is no place for the federal government in the reawakening of America. Indeed, we need another Republican-sponsored Marshall Plan for our cities and schools.” They received standing ovations from thirty members—and stony silence from the other seventy. Sixteen years earlier Henry Cabot Lodge had chaired this committee. Now he was being treated like an alien. He returned to the Mark Hopkins, made his way through the gilded, mirrored—and, this week, mobbed—lobby to the elevator, and found himself accosted by a raving Goldwaterite: “I voted for you in 1960, but never again. You're terrible!” Lodge shot back, “You're terrible, too.” He repaired to his suite, leafed through the roll of delegates, and cried, “What in God's name has happened to the Republican Party! I hardly know any of these people!”

Scranton's operatives put motion after motion before the committee, sound
and fury signifying nothing. As the desperation mounted, the press conferences became surreal: “Governor, Governor, could you give the name of any delegate who has moved over from Goldwater to join you?” “No, we are not prepared to say at this time.” “Are there any?” (Titters.) “Certainly.” In the back rooms his floor manager, Hugh Scott, made a deal with Thruston Morton, the convention chairman: Scranton forces would be allowed to put three sweet, sensible platform amendments—to strengthen the civil rights plank, to reiterate presidential control of nuclear weapons, and to denounce extremism—to a vote of the full convention on Tuesday. (George Romney, maverick as ever, struck a deal to offer two of his own.) Goldwater allowed the concession because it would only broadcast his dominance when 70 percent of the convention voted them down. Scranton's team was willing to take the risk to show the world the face of Goldwaterism in all its naked ignominy.

Scranton soon would receive an assist. Saturday evening, two days before the opening gavel, Walter Cronkite introduced a report from CBS's correspondent in Munich, Daniel Schorr: “Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination, he is going places,” Cronkite said, “the first place being Germany.” Schorr picked up the cue and started in: “It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, the center of Germany's right wing.” He went on to report that Goldwater had accepted an invitation from his friend Lieutenant General William Quinn to visit him for a vacation at Berchtesgaden—“once Hitler's stamping ground, but now an American Army recreational center.” He concluded, “It is now becoming clear that Senator Goldwater's interview with the newsmagazine
Der Spiegel
was an appeal to right-wing elements.” Cronkite segued into the next piece, on the latest burning of a Negro church in Mississippi, and the Germany story hit San Francisco like a freight train.

It was false; the trip
was
a vacation. CBS president William Paley, enraged and afraid he would be outed as a Scranton supporter, ordered Schorr to correct himself on the air. Goldwater's grudge against the Tiffany Network went back to a 1962 documentary on conservatism that made him want to throw something at the screen. It flared up again in 1963 after CBS News edited a tape of a July 4 interview with him that he thought would be broadcast live; it was inflamed enormously when Cronkite misquoted him to make him appear callous after the Kennedy assassination. “I just don't trust CBS News,” is what he said after the November 22 gaffe. Now he went berserk. “I don't think those people should be allowed to broadcast,” he said, refusing them access to any part of his campaign organization. But the damage was done. Scranton—and the Democratic National Committee—had already distributed reams of Xeroxed
transcripts of the Schorr stand-up. “You can say what you want about Goldwater's conservatism and right-wing views,” columnist Herb Caen wrote, “but personally, I find him as American as apple strudel.”

“I've avoided discussing the arithmetic, because, very frankly, I haven't liked the figures,” Scranton now announced. “I'm beginning to like them.” He had likely convinced himself he was telling the truth—even though Texas's national committeewoman, who had given $5,000 to Scranton's campaign, had become so disgusted with his tactics that she had just switched her vote to Goldwater.

 

That same Saturday afternoon Jim Martin, the Alabaman who had narrowly lost a Senate race against Lister Hill in 1962, was busy mowing his lawn in suburban Gadsen when his wife called him in for a phone call from his governor. George Wallace instructed Martin to drive to the Gadsen airport, where a plane was waiting to fly him to Montgomery. And in Alabama, you followed your governor's instructions.

Goldwater had been publicly flattering Wallace all week to get him to drop his threat to run an independent race for President. Wallace had already gathered 78,000 signatures in a fortnight in North Carolina, eight times the number necessary to get on the ballot, and he was working on a dozen more. Wallace misheard Goldwater's flattery as an invitation. From the Montgomery airport, Martin was shuttled to the governor's suite at the Jefferson Davis Hotel, where he heard Wallace tell him, “It must be apparent to a one-eyed nigguh who can't see good outta his other eye that me and Goldwater would be a winning ticket.” Martin was then ordered to head to San Francisco—immediately—to put the offer to Goldwater. Martin pointed out that he was still wearing his yard-work clothes. Wallace nodded to an aide, who counted a thousand dollars cash into Martin's palm. He left that night.

Convention eve, Sunday, broke unusually hot, ladies sweltering in wool suits brought to San Francisco on the unfortunate advice of the National Federation of Republican Women's newsletter
The Clubwoman.
As delegates contemplated pictures in the Sunday papers of an American truck blown off the road by a Vietcong mine, a profile of the purported love child of Warren G. Harding, and a full-page ad from the Jackson Citizens Council arguing that Abraham Lincoln was a segregationist, Jim Martin was contemplating the heat waves rising off the gleaming pyramid atop the Mark Hopkins roof. “Mr. Wallace has suggested that he would like to be a candidate with you as your vice-presidential nominee on the Republican ticket,” Martin timidly informed his hero. Goldwater winced; he thought Wallace was a racist thug, and he didn't
even consider considering the offer, even though he knew this meant Wallace might run for President and draw votes from him. Martin briefed Wallace; Wallace, two days later, asked whom he preferred for President, replied, “I prefer Governor George Wallace of Alabama.” He added that he would change his mind only if one of the parties adopted a segregationist platform.

Goldwater and Scranton had both been invited to appear on
Meet the Press
that Sunday morning. Goldwater exercised the front-runner's strategy of avoiding debates like the plague, and didn't show. Scranton took the opportunity to demand that Goldwater debate him on the floor of the convention instead. When he returned to the Mark, Scranton ordered his zealous young aide Bill Keisling to draft an open letter of challenge, and then he dashed off for his next exhausting round of meetings with “wavering” delegates. Keisling's letter was approved by higher-ups and was submitted to Scranton's personal secretary, who was authorized to forge her boss's signature. A courier was sent one flight up to deliver it. Scranton never saw the letter. It was 6:47. And by 7 p.m. Goldwater and his brain trust were pacing around the seventeenth floor ready to tear up the furniture.