Before the Storm (73 page)

“Will the convention choose the candidate overwhelmingly favored by the Republican voters, or will it choose you?” the letter asked. It continued, with emphasis: “With open contempt for the dignity, integrity, and common sense of the convention, your managers say in effect the delegates
are little more than a flock of chickens whose necks will be wrung at will.”
It called Clif White's roll-call estimates a fraud. “Our count differs from that of your managers because we have calculated an important element which they are incapable of comprehending. That is the element of respect for the men and women who make up the delegations to this convention”—who, the Scrantonites claimed, were deserting Goldwater in droves: because he had “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world ... allowed the radical extremists to use you... stood for irresponsibility in the serious question of racial holocaust ... read Taft and Eisenhower and Lincoln out of the Republican Party....
In short, Goldwaterism has come to stand for a whole crazy-quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions that would be soundly repudiated by the American people in November.”
There followed the call to debate with Scranton, on Wednesday, before the balloting for the nomination began: “You must decide whether the Goldwater philosophy can stand public examination—before the convention and before the nation.”

Goldwater reacted with hell's own fury. He and Scranton used to be friends; he had considered tapping Bill Scranton as his running mate. Scranton was a pilot, had served in Goldwater's National Guard unit, sat with him for
long bull sessions on tours of duty abroad. Goldwater had endured his abuse all week with equanimity. But this was the last straw.

Someone pointed out that Scranton would probably release the letter to the press soon, and that their side should beat him to the punch. They cobbled together a statement, which began: “Governor Scranton's letter has been read here with amazement. It has been returned to him.” Ohio State political science professor Harry Jaffa, a Lincoln expert brought to San Francisco by Baroody to spread the argument that were the Great Emancipator alive today, he would call himself a conservative, remembered a stinging rebuke Lincoln had written to Horace Greeley after a similar insult, and that was appended to the statement. Four thousand copies of Scranton's letter and Goldwater's response were run off. Clif White sparked his phone lines to life, quickly tracked down his six regional directors, and ordered them to see that the package was slipped under the door of every delegate, alternate, and Republican official within the next 120 minutes.

As minions spread out over the city like gremlins to carry out the task, Goldwater ostentatiously boycotted that night's $500-a-plate Republican Campaign Committee dinner-dance. With his absence it became, perforce, a Scranton event—which is to say, a wake. The delegates and alternates read the documents beneath their doors before turning in with nearly as much amazement as Goldwater's inner circle had. The governor had boomeranged his best issue back on himself: now he seemed the reckless one. Many of Scranton's delegates switched sides. And Goldwater's delegates, which the letter so graciously dubbed “a flock of chickens whose necks will be wrung at will,” now inaugurated Scranton into the circle of contempt formerly reserved for Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Reuther, and Russia.

 

The Monday papers brought news of the South Vietnamese army's worst defeat yet; of two black reserve officers shot at random while driving home from Fort Benning, Georgia; and of a Lou Harris poll showing that voters disagreed with Goldwater on eight out of ten issues. At the Mark, the forty-five-minute wait for one of the three tiny elevators (the campaigns used a service elevator accessed through the hotel kitchen) was now giving zealots two chances a day at least to menace
Ah-aystarn lab'ral prasss
mainstays like Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “You know, these nighttime news shows sound to me like they're being broadcast from Moscow,” muttered one to another on the way down, loud enough so the dastardly duo could listen in. “Why can't we find Americans to do the television news?” mumbled the other. The staff at the Hilton began issuing a bottle of aspirin with every press badge. Brinkley
forbade his young son to show his NBC insignia except when absolutely necessary.

In the Cow Palace parking lot, in the shadow of a giant Goldwater sign pasted on the back of a screen belonging to the Geneva Drive-In next door (the owner was a partisan), thousands of CORE activists kept vigil with apocalyptic placards: “HITLER WAS SINCERE, TOO; DEFOLIATE GOLDWATER.” A security force drawn from eighteen separate police departments was there to keep them in line; 150 sergeants at arms were posted at the entrances to keep them out. A timorous black press had tried to keep the protesters from the site altogether,
Jet
accusing them of trying to “trigger a racial incident,” the
Chicago Defender
complaining that only by honoring the moratorium on demonstrations recently agreed to with the White House by mainline civil rights groups could their race “escape the diabolical enslavement that the triumph of Goldwaterism would ensure for us.” Down the coast in Long Beach, the NAACP's Roy Wilkins would soon address the Newspaper Guild: “We must not forget that a man from Munich rallied the rightist forces in the early 1930s.” The demonstrations were still going strong as the twilight stream of automobiles trickled out of the parking lot after the closing session Thursday night.

Inside the cavernous hall the opening gavel had hardly quieted the small scattering of delegates before Scranton forces mounted their first desperate charge. For as long as anyone could remember, proud, aging Southern black men with patriotic names like George Washington Lee and Henry Lincoln Johnson had dotted the floor at these conventions—handy aids to rationalizations that the Republicans were still the party of civil rights long after blacks began deserting en masse to the Democratic Party during the New Deal. But this year, after Clif White's juggernaut had rolled over the old black-and-tans in the South, the portions of the floor reserved for Southern states were bond-paper white. G. W. Lee, a Memphis man with a trademark wide plantation hat, had been a fixture as Shelby County delegate since the 1930s and had offered a stirring second of Robert Taft's nomination in 1952. But this year, Memphis's two-hundred-member all-black Republican organization, the “Lincoln League,” was deprived of its quadrennial tradition of electing Lee to represent them because John Grenier had arranged for the county convention to be held across town in a neighborhood where blacks were—to put it politely—unwelcome. A white conservative, Robert B. James, was chosen in Lee's stead. And this, Scrantonites decided, was just the outrage they needed. They would force Goldwater to explain Lee's exclusion in open session, on camera, before the eyes of the world. When the usually perfunctory opening motion was made to resolve that “this Convention be governed by the rules adopted by the National
Convention of 1960,” Scranton's Maryland campaign manager, Milton Steers, popped up and moved for an amendment that no delegate be seated if “this Convention shall determine there were rules, practices, or procedures ... which had the purpose or effect of discriminating in such selection on grounds of race, color, creed, or national origin.”

The apparent nobility of the cause was misleading. The fact was, black Republican delegates often won their seats in processes less democratic than anything Clif White could dream up. Lee, for his part, was a longtime marionette of the late E. H. “Boss” Crump, who had set up the Lincoln League as a wholly owned subsidiary of his Memphis Democratic machine. The subtlety was lost on the TV cameras, which merely recorded the roar when segregation was maintained by a thunderous voice vote. It was a symbolic victory. Unfortunately, those were the only kind Scranton would win.

Mark Hatfield gave the evening's keynote speech. He attacked “bigots in this Nation who spew forth their venom of hate ... like the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society.” His intended audience was not there to hear it. By order of White, Goldwater delegates skipped the speech. They were all up on top of Nob Hill at the city's WPA-style Masonic Temple screaming their heads off when Michael Goldwater explained how his father had taught his children to “be wary of any man who tries to take our land away from us or our God away from us,” and that Johnson's self-professed Great Society “can only result in dictatorship.”

 

On Tuesday—headlines: “U.S. SENDING 600 TROOPS TO SAIGON”; “2D MUTILATED BODY FOUND IN MISSISSIPPI RIVER” (tentatively identified as one of the three missing civil rights workers, but apparently the victim of another, yet unreported Klan hit)—Richard Nixon arrived by helicopter at Fisherman's Wharf, where he was met by the black D.C. lawyer William S. “Turk” Thompson. He then traveled to the Hilton for a press conference and offered the contradictory statement that he was both satisfied with the platform as drafted and that “my views are exactly today as they were in Cleveland.” (CBS's Paul Niven explained to viewers that Nixon was now all but irrelevant in Republican councils, and they needn't pay much heed to him anyway.) In Scranton's next press conference—to which he shuttled after a failed attempt to win Maine from favorite daughter Margaret Chase Smith—Scranton offered, jawdroppingly, that he agreed with Goldwater on most issues. At the St. Francis Hotel off Union Square, the Credentials Committee voted 69 to 19 against John Lindsay's motion to change the rules to prohibit racial discrimination in the choosing of delegates, and 66 to 19 that there had been no irregularities in the selection of the delegate from Shelby County, Tennessee. At the Mark Hopkins,
Goldwater snuck out a secret tunnel on his way to buzz the Cow Palace in a rented airplane. The whole business bored him. Once he invited Clif White up to the Presidential Suite to “go over this delegate business.” White strode in proudly with an armful of loose-leaf notebooks and began with Alabama. He was barely to the second half of the alphabet before Goldwater drifted off altogether. “From the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco, California,” he said into his ham microphone, “the handle is Barry—Baker Able Robert Robert Yankee....”

Inside the Cow Palace his delegates were detaining warm-up speakers for minutes at a time with applause whenever his name was mentioned. The man they were warming up was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was to deliver an appeal for party unity; it was to be the first major event of the convention schedule. It had been scheduled before the platform fight later in the afternoon for the express purpose of soothing factional passions. And, for three-fourths of his address, the former President accomplished this plodding task admirably. (“My friends, we are Republicans. If there is any finer word in the entire field of partisan politics, I have not yet heard it”; there was polite applause.) Then he went off, inadvisably, on a digression that he had worked up at the last minute. It was intended as a throwaway line: “So let us particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators—”

He could barely finish the sentence. The conservatives leapt to their feet. Many, then most, spun around and waved their fists at the broadcast booths; one group stumbled through the forest of folding chairs and made as if to storm the glass aeries themselves. Someone said Ike looked like a lion tamer who had lost his chair and whip. The outpouring only stilled when Clif White, in his magnificent green-and-white trailer, pressed his special “all-call” button that rang all his delegation chairmen's phones on the floor at once and ordered them to shut their people up.

A few paragraphs later, Ike went off on another of his digressions. It might have been annoyance at the Supreme Court's ruling three weeks ago declaring that suspects had an “absolute right to remain silent” that led him to say: “And let us not be guilty of maudlin sympathy for the criminal who, roaming the streets with switchblade knife and illegal firearm, seeking a helpless prey, suddenly becomes, upon apprehension, a poor, underprivileged person who counts upon the compassion of our society”; and to go on to deplore “the laxness or weaknesses of too many courts to forgive this offense.” The floodgates opened once again. Only this time it was even louder. Eisenhower looked like he'd seen a ghost.

Now that nobody in the hall was soothed, it was time for platform debate.

Scranton managers had made the brilliant tactical move of arranging the debate for prime time to showcase the Goldwaterites' ugly displays to the greatest possible effect. Mel Laird had made the brilliant countermove of arranging to have the entire platform as it then stood read aloud. Hours passed as a team of readers traded off pages; blood did not cool in the interim. Goldwaterites had been amusing themselves all the while with a ritual that had begun in Texas Republican circles: one side of a hall would raise the ear-splitting cry “
Viva!
” The other side, challenged to scream louder, pronounced:
“Olé!”
In a rented gymnasium in Houston it sounded impressive. Over the yawning expanse of the Cow Palace, it was overwhelming—energizing to those privy to the rite, harrowing to those who were not. Norman Mailer, covering the convention for
Esquire,
heard in it “a mystical communion in the sound even as Sieg Heil used to offer its mystical communion.”

The debate had been moved squarely out of prime time. But what followed assured it would be repeated in future prime times over and over again.

Bored delegates were milling about. The crush in the aisles became so severe that local police moved onto the floor. John Chancellor of NBC—far outpacing the other broadcasters in the ratings thanks to flashy quick-cutting while the other networks had their anchors droning on endlessly in the booth—was interviewing Alaska delegates. Strongly liberal, they had suspiciously been denied passes to the gallery for their friends. One of White's sergeants at arms told Chancellor to move along. The TV journalist pointed to his floor pass and refused. Police moved in. NBC producers ordered the scene put on the air.