Before the Storm (76 page)

The race to calumniate Barry Goldwater was on. To the
New York Times's
editorialists, Goldwater had reduced “a once great party to the status of an ugly, angry, frustrated faction.” Columnist C. L. Sulzberger said that if Goldwater were elected “there may not be a day after tomorrow.” Governor Edmund Brown of California said, “The stench of fascism is in the air.” Asked how he would run his local campaigns with Goldwater heading up the ticket, a Chicago Republican leader replied, “I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it.” Senator William Fulbright stung his colleague on the Senate floor in a series of
speeches calling Goldwaterism “the closest thing in American politics to an equivalent of Russian Stalinism.”

NATO countries hastened to assure Americans that they regarded Goldwater's solicitude toward them with nothing but dismay. The Tory Daily
Telegraph
spied “dark eddies in American life,” and Austria's
Neues Österreich
observed “shivers” sent “down the back of humanity.”
Time
interviewed a Munich banker who said, “If we give you four or five years, you'll start putting on brown shirts.” Goldwater's only foreign support came from South Africans, Spanish monarchists, and German neofascists—which only made sense, according to a
Washington Star
editorial perfectly encapsulating the mood: “The greatest danger may be that this reactionary takeover of the Republican machinery will induce a radical new alignment of the parties, splitting them once and for all into organizations of the right and the left.” American parties traditionally united “a broad national foundation because their positions overlap widely.” Were they to realign, America's “stability, which is truly one of the wonders of the political world,” would crumble. For

Republicans decamped from San Francisco; the city's Democratic headquarters reported a shortage of LBJ buttons. It appeared Scrantonites were grabbing them on their way out of town.

 

The morning after the apotheosis of his career, Clif White tied on his bow tie at 8:15, although he had poured victory libations down his throat until dawn. He had work to do. There was a presidential campaign to organize. “White's reward if Goldwater is nominated will be the chairmanship of the GOP National Committee,”
Time
had reported, only repeating what had become by then a commonplace.

Later that day, a member of the Republican finance committee buttonholed White with a tactical question: “Is this thing on Dean Burch a secret or can we let it out?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Burch is the senator's choice for national chairman.”

White went numb. It was inconceivable. Dean Burch—the Arizonan who wore the black ties—was only thirty-six. His expertise was in liability law. Indeed, when his name had been brought up at an earlier meeting to discuss the issue, his fellow Arizona Mafioso Dick Kleindienst said that Burch, though “one of my dearest and closest friends,” just didn't have the national stature for the job. His name had not come up in press speculation. White wondered if the finance committee member had been misinformed.

White saw from the afternoon papers that the man had not. Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends. Goldwater had never got over his lingering distrust of Clif White—he hadn't even learned to spell his name—and hadn't even made the time to kick White out of the campaign in person. For White it was 1951 again; he was watching the new Young Republican chairman harvest accolades on television, uttering not a word of recognition for the man who had manufactured his victory. He had rented the Fairmont Hotel's stunning Crystal Room for a victory celebration with the boys who had started it all—his original Draft Goldwater group. Goldwater had summarily dismissed the finance committee White had built, which raised the $3.5 million that had brought the senator to this pass. Its members were given a parting gift—wristwatches. Only one of White's seven regional directors received an invitation to stay on. The other six didn't even get watches. The party at the Fairmont went on, somberly; the victory tasted like ashes.

White had booked a Hawaiian vacation for after the convention, as a present to his long-suffering wife, Bunny, who had stood patiently behind him on the promise that great things were to come. But he was so depressed he couldn't even pack his suitcase. He could barely drag himself to the plane. Eighteen years in politics: it hardly seemed worth it anymore.

 

That very day the long hot summer began.

It started on East 76th Street in Manhattan, outside a high school that was holding voluntary summer remedial classes. The neighborhood was white. Most of the students were black. As they did every morning before school, they loitered on the steps of a building across the street, to the annoyance of its Irish superintendent, who sprayed them with a garden hose, saying, “I'll wash the black out of you.” The kids pelted him with rocks and bottles. One of them, Jimmy Powell, followed the superintendent into the building's vestibule. A police lieutenant, off duty and in street clothes, was in a television shop next door. Accounts differed as to whether Jimmy Powell pulled a switchblade when the cop advanced to apprehend him. The cop fired three shots; Jimmy
Powell died where he stood. A crowd of angry students gathered. Police arrived. A girl cried, “Come on, shoot another nigger!” A policeman was knocked down by a flying bottle. Seventy-five steel-helmeted reinforcements arrived.

Over the next two days CORE picketed the site, then marched to a nearby station house. A story was crystallizing, and it bore little of the ambiguity that marked the eyewitness accounts. “We got a civil rights bill and along with the bill we got Barry Goldwater and a dead black boy,” cried one of the soapboxers. “This shooting of James Powell was a murder.”

By the time the story filtered fifty blocks north, no ambiguity was left. It was 92 degrees outside, closer to 100 inside Harlem's heat-soaked brick tenements. A crowd gathered at the Twenty-eighth Precinct, chanting about police brutality. A car bearing a white couple drove up Lenox Avenue; its headlight was smashed. Tenement roofs began raining bricks—then Molotov cocktails—at the massing police officers. White reporters arriving on the scene were socked with what one of them called “the pet Negro obscenity, an accusation of incest which turns middle-class stomachs.” Fire alarms were pulled, trash cans set aflame. Store owners began pulling down the metal grates that guarded their windows at night. Looting began, and arson (one grocer put out a fire in his store with his stock of grapefruit juice). Soon a riot was raging at a scale unseen anywhere in the country since the 1940s. And in the 1940s, riots weren't televised.

Police were ordered to fire into the air. The locals presumed the police were firing at them. A black witness called the
Herald Tribune:
“That Goldwater stuff has started! They're shooting at people up here in Harlem!” Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader who organized the March on Washington a year earlier, was shown on television imploring his neighbors about how little there was to gain by burning up their own neighborhood. The cameras also captured the mass surrounding him screaming that Rustin was an Uncle Tom.

The rioting continued a second night. On the third night it spread to Brooklyn—then, through August, to three cities in New Jersey, to the Chicago suburb of Dixmoor (where armed blacks battled state troopers in the streets), to Philadelphia and Rochester (where 5 rioters died and 750 were arrested). These demonstrations were like ellipses, trailing off to mark the impending end of managerial liberalism's core vision: roll up your sleeves, dare to dream, pass a law, solve a problem. (Almost too poetically, another grand vision came a cropper in those same weeks: “Climate control is a dream that, misapplied, could lead to disaster,” wrote the Reclamation Bureau project manager in closing out the government's massive, confident research efforts to master the very heavens themselves.)

Goldwater's name affixed itself to events. In an op-ed piece that ran in the
Herald Tribune
while the fires were still burning, black psychologist and civil rights leader Kenneth Clark quoted Goldwater's acceptance speech—Pulliam's line about “the growing menace of public safety, to life, limb and property ... in our great cities”—and concluded, “This type of cynical political opportunism can only add to the explosiveness of an already difficult and complex social problem. It will incite the passions and hatreds of already unstable and prejudiced citizens and police officers.” Another leader, A. Philip Randolph, implored blacks to honor the White House-brokered moratorium on demonstrations, lest militancy “elect Senator Goldwater ... the greatest disaster to befall Negroes since slavery.” In the middle of it all the
New York Times Book
Review ran a piece by a member of the editorial board on Steve Shadegg's How
to Win an Election,
quoting Shadegg on Mao Tse-tung's “valuable book on the tactics of infiltration.” Here was a man at the center of Goldwater's political rise, exhibiting “sublime indifference to all considerations of justice and fair play.” Who knew what else Goldwater was capable of? A Chicago Sun Times columnist wrote: “There is considerable evidence to show that every time there is violence by Negroes, Goldwater gains supporters.”

The accusation worried Barry Goldwater most of all. Rumors, from sources that Karl Hess found reliable enough to credit, said Goldwater operatives were musing over how they might stoke further conflagrations to swing the election. The senator himself, still enamored of the idea that he could win black voters' loyalty because of his efforts against discrimination in Arizona, was unhinged by the very thought. He met privately with reporters and said that if anyone sowed racial violence on his behalf he would withdraw from the race—even if it was the day before the election.

The President was now drowning in a flood of wires such as “I'm afraid to leave my house. I fear the Negro revolution will reach Queens.”
The New Republic's
TRB columnist had called white resentment 1964's political “X-Factor.” Walter Lippmann had coined the term “Goldwater Democrats.” Backlash had become Lyndon Johnson's new obsession. When Ollie Quayle prepared a fifty-five-page technical report on the blue-collar Wallace vote in Wisconsin and Indiana, Johnson devoured it in one night. When Wallace withdrew his candidacy on July 19—because, he said, the Republicans had passed a segregationist platform—Goldwater was genuinely surprised. Johnson assumed a deal had been struck: withdrawal in exchange for a weak civil rights plank. The President sought out a loyal Southern senator “to stand on his hind legs” and make the charge publicly.

In a press conference during a refueling stop on Goldwater's way back to Washington, with Harlem still smoldering, a reporter asked the candidate if he
would consider a joint appeal with Johnson to ease the tensions. He said he would, and right then and there he proposed a meeting. When word of the proposed joint appeal reached the White House, Johnson's aides smelled a hustle. It was a cover, explained one strategist—Goldwater's “attempt to make a public display of his disassociation from violence for which his candidacy and supporters have, in part, been responsible.”

The White House began plotting countermoves. Johnson told George Reedy to “assure everybody that we're not going to do anything to incite anybody,” but “give the impression that he is, without saying so.” Johnson was worried that just by meeting with Goldwater he would be dignifying him, giving him protection against charges of extremism. RFK, practically stammering, said, “Civil rights is something around our neck.”

But the invitation had been public. Johnson couldn't refuse to see Goldwater. The White House went forward on eggshells. Fearing that Goldwater would ambush them by insisting on a conclave that very day, on a battleground of his choosing, they quickly set a date, July 24, and a place, the Oval Office. A voluminous intelligence file was prepared. The President was drilled on it over and over, schooled in the questions Goldwater would use to trap him into statements to exploit on the campaign trail. Johnson would launch a preemptive strike at the presidential press conference before the meeting by inviting the senator to join him in “rebuffing and rebuking bigots.”

The day arrived. An exquisitely labored statement of the President's position sat on his desk for reference. Johnson ushered his guest into the Oval Office. There followed an awkward interval. The President was waiting for Goldwater to start, because Goldwater had called the meeting. When he didn't, Johnson uttered some banalities about how he would do nothing in the months to come that might contribute to violence in the streets. Goldwater said that was fine. Johnson lurched deskward and read his statement aloud. Goldwater thought that was fine, too, and asked for a copy. Another pause. Goldwater's face lit up like a child discussing a toy, and he said he would love to take a crack at flying the new A-II that was in development. Johnson (hiding his incredulity) said it wouldn't be ready for a year—at which time, he joked, Goldwater might be the one issuing the orders. Chuckles were exchanged. Backs were slapped. Sixteen minutes had elapsed. The two emerged together to release a bland joint statement. Johnson's staff was stunned. “What a confrontation,” someone said. “Wish we could have one like that with de Gaulle!”