Before the Storm (81 page)

The ad ran Monday, September 7—Labor Day, for peak viewing—on NBC, a few days after Goldwater's opening speech in Prescott and a few hours after Johnson's in Detroit. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Little girls went to bed in tears. Bill Moyers, working late in his office—as was most often the case in Lyndon Johnson's White House—was summoned by the boss. “Holy shit!” the President cried. “What in the hell do you mean putting on that
ad? I've been swamped with calls!” But he was chuckling. “I guess it did what we goddamned set out to do, didn't it?” He chuckled some more.

The spot ran only once as a paid commercial. But CBS and ABC ran reports on the phenomenon on their news programs—and thus, free of charge, they aired the ad itself. Dean Burch complained to the Fair Campaign Practices Commission. “This horror-type commercial,” he said, “implies that Senator Goldwater is a reckless man and Lyndon Johnson is a careful man.” Moyers was thrilled. “That's exactly what we wanted to imply,” he wrote the President.
“And we also hoped someone around Goldwater would say it, not us.”
Local campaign leaders told Johnson's field chief, Larry O'Brien, that they hated the ad, that voters were turning off to LBJ. The White House was unfazed. They were thinking like Marshall McLuhan, like Bill Bernbach: the message people reported having gleaned from the ad bore no necessary relation to how it affected them where it counted—in the place consciousness didn't touch.

Four years earlier the Republicans might have been able to do something about it. Not now. The FCC in 1964 had begun implementing a Goldwaterite idea: turning over much of its mandate to police the broadcasting industry to the industry itself. The National Association of Broadcasters censured its members on the basis of a thirty-page “Code of Ethics” whose sole stricture against TV violence—to take one example—noted that it should be used “only as required by plot development or character delineation.” (When NAB's president had proposed amending the Code to limit cigarette advertising after the Surgeon General's report, he was summarily fired.) The penalty for breaking the rules was loss of the right to display the NAB “Seal of Good Practice,” which nobody noticed when it was there and nobody noticed when it was gone. “In light of this commercial,” Ev Dirksen wrote their executive director, “I would hope you would read again the Code of Ethics and ask yourself whether you agree that this is unfit for children to see.” He was spitting in the wind. NAB wasn't even a paper tiger. There was nothing the Goldwater campaign could do but scream.

Or so it seemed. Tony Schwartz thought that a gifted Goldwater publicist could have flipped the ad's power against itself. The spot did not make any actual reference to Goldwater. It just told people to be afraid of nuclear war and leveraged the force of a message the media was already repeating over and over like a hit Beatles song:
“Kenneth Kassel, a lean young corn and livestock farmer, paused near a hog shoot in Ayshire, Iowa, to explain why he expect to switch his vote to President Johnson this fall. ‘If the Republicans had somebody a little more level-headed, I'd vote for him,' he said. ‘I'm afraid of Goldwater.'
”The “warmonger” tag seemed as unchangeable as the atmosphere. But
Tony Schwartz later suggested, “Goldwater could have defused Daisy by saying, ‘I think the danger of total nuclear war should be the theme of the campaign this year, and I'd like to pay half the cost of running the commercial.' If he had, the commercial would not have been perceived as being against him. He would have changed the feelings and assumptions stored within us.” Perhaps it might have worked, perhaps not. But then, there were no gifted publicists in the Goldwater organization who thought to try.

 

Barry Goldwater was taking the unusual step of running his campaign out of Republican National Committee headquarters on Eye Street (Washingtonese for “I Street”), which already had a built-in staff, instead of from a freestanding temporary organization. But Goldwater was too busy fulfilling previous commitments—and, for the five days preceding his Prescott debut, lolling unshaven on General Wedemeyer's yacht off the Orange County coast—to supervise the changeover. Denison Kitchel, in turn, delegated the task to Dean Burch and his assistant, John Grenier. RNC mandarins feared for their positions, but Burch and Grenier insisted that their aim was “neither to reward nor to purge.”

Then, they purged. The RNC's longtime executive director and half his executive committee were cut adrift; then the RNC's longtime research director, “a computer on legs,” as some described him, was let go (in his stead Goldwater's research team sent form letters to the political science chairs at big state universities begging “any recent pamphlets or books... concerning the political situation in [your state here]”). The PR director was fired, and the finance chair left for a trip home to Ohio after the convention without a thought that he might be expendable and returned to discover someone else in his chair. The scheduling department, at least, was run by a veteran—of the first Eisenhower campaign. There were many among the new RNC staff who had not participated in as much as a campaign for class president. Kitchel, quipped a staffer afterward, “could not tell a leak from a leek”—although that staffer had little more experience himself.

Kitchel had taken the advice of Raymond Moley to gut the office's structure top to bottom. In Franklin Roosevelt's campaigns, Moley explained, the political and the policy-planning departments were strictly segregated, with a single person—that would be Kitchel—straddling the two, so the candidate's message could be disciplined against the temptations of the day-to-day electoral horse race. It was an idea Goldwater's inner circle—the Arizonans and Baroody's people—beheld with delight: that meant they could stick the grubby politicos on the second floor of the building and separate themselves on the
third—ostensibly as the “Research Division,” unofficially dubbed the “Think Tank,” but more accurately described as the headquarters within the headquarters—and preserve the empyrean isolation they had so enjoyed while writing Goldwater's acceptance speech on the seventeenth floor of the Mark Hopkins.

What that meant practically speaking was that the month after the convention most of the work at Eye Street was being done by electricians, furniture movers, and telephone installers. Scattered around the country were the crackerjack local Goldwater outfits Clif White had put together for the primary campaigns and state conventions. Left inactive, they were now straining at the leash to get to work for the general election. Their phone calls went unanswered at headquarters; their letters piled up unopened amidst the sawdust and exposed wiring. The marketplace was being flooded with campaign kitsch-Barry Goldwater greeting cards (outside: “You made me what I am today”; inside: “A Democrat”), Barry comic books, plastic Barry dashboard dolls (splendid craftsmanship, right down to the rightward crook in his glasses), Barry soap (“4-Year Protection!”), a pamphlet in the old-timey patent medicine style: “Cures for What Ails America: Dr. B. M. Goldwater's All-Purpose Defoliation Tonic, the Non-Taxic, Magic Cold War Remedy, a Balm for Boils, Burns, Bruises, Bigots, Birchers & Buckleys.” There were bumper stickers in every imaginable language and level of taste—and buttons, buttons, buttons: “METS ROOTERS! EDSEL OWNERS! BACK A REAL LOSER! GOLDWATER!”; “GOLDWATER OR SOCIALISM”; “DOCTOR STRANGEWATER FOR PRESIDENT”; “IF I WERE 21 I'D VOTE FOR GOLDWATER.” None of it came from Goldwater headquarters. Even once they had the resources to do the job, his people were paralyzed. When the Arizona Mafia took title to the Republican National Committee, they realized they had a problem on their hands. Selling such kitsch to local organizations had been their profit center during the nomination fight. But federal campaign law, it turned out, prohibited political parties from charging for the stuff. The lawyers searched for a loophole. The presses sat dormant.

Once the carpenters got finished with it, the second-floor political command center was a handsome sight. There was a map room to rival the Joint Chiefs‘, charts detailing sophisticated chains of command, a latticework of graphs sitting ready to mark the progress of their campaign's voter-canvass effort (they hoped to reach 75 percent of American voters in their homes). A staff of seven hundred had been assembled: tour committees, finance committees, speakers bureaus, a radio-television division, a transport department run by a former airline chief, copywriters, telephone girls. Some of Draft Goldwater's most seasoned operatives had been brought back on board (though not Clif White) to run the regional divisions. In one corner a buzzing hive was gathering and collating twenty-three different variables for each of the country's
185,000 precincts (“support of senior citizens,” “vote-pulling aid from religious influences,” “expected honest vote count,” and so forth; the code book for Ohio alone ran to 133 pages), producing vote quotas for each, a Herculean effort; in another corner, state-of-the-art TWX and DATA teletypes were ready to clack 1,050 words per minute to offices around the country, even to the campaign plane. They had newfangled WATS long-distance lines and auto-dial phones. The communications system had awesome potential: it could relay shifting political conditions on the ground to the Washington command center and to the traveling team within minutes.

To coordinate it all there were to be meetings every Sunday with the second-floor leadership, the third-floor leadership, and Goldwater and his traveling team. This strategy board would be briefed every two weeks by the campaign's Princeton-based polling firm. And the preliminary numbers made the second floor thrum with excitement. They were counterintuitive. Only 9 percent of the sample rated Johnson “excellent”; 38 percent rated him “fair to poor.” Almost three-quarters of independent voters expressed admiration for Goldwater's forthrightness; less than a quarter were worried that he “acts without thinking” —and 61 percent questioned Johnson's good judgment. Six percent thought that the President was “superficial, shallow.” Forty-one percent called themselves “conservative” compared to 31 percent who called themselves “liberal” ; half the sample “knew very little” about Goldwater—giving his campaign team an enormous, unexpected opportunity to shape his image in the public mind. And since the popularity trend was in Goldwater's favor—Gallup's if-the-election-were-held-today numbers gave Goldwater 19 percent in June and 34 percent in September—there came a revelation: Goldwater could ride these numbers to a historic upset and not compromise on a single conservative position—by saying the right things in the right places at the right times, lining up the right people to carry the water, and communicating in clear, attractive ways that the public could understand.

Kennedy's Irish Mafia could hardly have been better prepared.

And Goldwater's Arizona Mafia couldn't have cared less.

The people who were really running the campaign were upstairs. They were what Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called “a group of little-known academicians and publicists loosely allied with an obscure tax-exempt educational foundation in Washington, D.C., called the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.” And to them, the findings of the lastest poll were beneath notice. Bill Baroody was on paid leave working eighteen-hour days running the third floor like a fiefdom. His liege men had been by his side in San Francisco: Warren Nutter, chairman of the University of Virgina's economics department; Dick Ware, who dispensed the largesse of a deceased
motor oil manufacturer from Michigan as director of the Earhart-Relm Foundation; trusty Ed McCabe and his second, Chuck Lichenstein; Baroody's old AEI partner, W. Glenn Campbell, now running the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Baroody's aristocracy were ad hoc consultants, conservative intellectuals like Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Bill Rehnquist, and Robert Strausz-Hupé. They found the very idea of consulting polls contemptible.

Kitchel, Baroody, and Goldwater didn't bother to attend the Sunday strategy meetings. They made strategy at 33,000 feet. The campaign plane (“YIA BI KEN” [House in the Sky], read the legend above the lightning stripe running down its side) was their playhouse: Kitchel, Karl Hess, and the candidate conversed in Navajo (Hess was studying up), swapped ribald jokes, told hunting stories, yapped on the airborne ham radio. Another favorite pastime was refusing to receive top donors on board for a chance to ride along with the candidate. Occasionally, they prepared for the next stop, although that didn't take much time: Goldwater never acknowledged the locale he landed in anyway. Meanwhile the leaders on the second floor would explode once more after learning from the morning newspapers that their hard-won intelligence, relayed so assiduously by all those expensive contraptions, had been ignored while their underlings floundered, directionless, bickering, confused, because the man charged with directing them, Kitchel, was otherwise disposed.

On a wall in the Think Tank was affixed a Peanuts comic strip. Linus declares from a speaker's stand, “On Hallowe'en night the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch, and brings toys to all the good little children.” His audience laughs at him. Later, Linus confides to Snoopy, “So I told them about the Great Pumpkin and they all laughed! Am I the first person ever to sacrifice political office because of belief? Of course not! I simply spoke what I felt was the truth.” Snoopy walks off, muttering, “I've never pretended to understand politics, but I do know one thing. If you're going to hope to get elected, don't mention the Great Pumpkin.”