Before the Storm (85 page)

The liberal Republicans would have to be given “some useful and healing roles to play,” a strategy memo suggested, “while they are driving the kooks over the skyline.” Thus Johnson unveiled Bob Anderson's National Independent Committee for Johnson and Humphrey in a White House ceremony carefully scripted for the television cameras to steal Goldwater's fire in Prescott on September 3. It was a forty-five-name honor roll of Eastern Republican Establishmentarians: CEOs from companies diverse enough to fill the most conservative investment portfolio; a couple of Boston Cabots, as well as the Lodge campaign's finance chair, John Loeb; a Goldman Sachs senior partner who had raised $3 million for Eisenhower in 1952; Henry Ford II—and one future treasury secretary, one former treasury secretary, and one man who had been
offered the job of treasury secretary but had turned it down. Many still bore scars from the Scranton campaign. LBJ was gracious enough to let them show their gratitude by paying the $1,000 that earned them a picture with the President and a bill-signing pen; or by signing the five-figure checks that reportedly bought a naked dip in the White House pool.

 

The bulwark in the maelstrom was William Moyers—as he was in most matters in Lyndon Johnson's White House. LBJ reserved his greatest affection for brilliant young climbers from the provinces who looked up to him as a father figure—as he had himself with a series of mentors culminating in House Speaker Sam Rayburn. (It betokened his insecurities; he still couldn't quite believe these geniuses were willing to yoke their fortune to him.) Moyers was the most brilliant and loyal climber of all. After college, divinity school, and three rural pastorates, the twenty-five-year-old former Johnson summer intern (he was hired after writing his senator in 1954 with advice on how to win the youth vote) was preparing for a job teaching Christian ethics at Baylor University when he received the call from LBJ to become his personal assistant in 1959. By 1960 Bill Moyers was running a vice-presidential campaign. Then he left for another ministry: the associate directorship of the Peace Corps. He returned, upon Johnson's accession to the presidency, as his most trusted special assistant. Convincing Bill Moyers of something, Washington soon learned, was nearly as good as convincing the President himself.

So when some aides began worrying about the “overkill effect” of all the negative sallies—“I'm wary about throwing more bombs around,” wrote one—it was to Moyers that they turned. Their entreaties came to grief. The would-be professor of Christian ethics liked to play rough. “We have a few more Goldwater ads,” Moyers promised the President shortly after the “Daisy” spot ran, “and then we go to the pro-Johnson, pro-Peace, Prosperity, Preparedness spots.” But they never really got to them.
Anti
worked too well. “Right now, the biggest asset we have is Goldwater's alleged instability in re atom and hydrogen bombs,” as Jack Valenti put it. “We
must
not let this slip away.”

Moyers was instrumental in pioneering an innovation in presidential campaigning: the full-time espionage, sabotage, and mudslinging unit. The Johnson “Anti-Campaign” was an all-star Democratic team, including Daniel P. Moynihan of Labor; White House counsel Myer Feldman; the assistant postmaster; the assistant secretary of agriculture; labor lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder; a claque of top D.C. lawyers; the Pentagon's Adam Yarmolinsky (one of the Administration's strongest liberal voices); even Clifton Cooper, the CIA
liaison to the White House. The group met in a conference room directly above the Oval Office, because Johnson wanted to monitor their work closely. This project was his favorite.

Some successes were catalogued in one of the few memos the Anti-Campaign left behind. “This accounting statement does not imply any obligation or commitment on your part. Copies of this are going to other major stockholders,” Clifton Cooper wrote, the code humorously suggesting the CIA's internal nickname—the Company. “Our acquisition, reproduction, and dissemination of advance Goldwater texts is now flowing smoothly. In some cases we ... have prepared a rebuttal before a speech has actually been delivered. Bob Greene is now working on an article suitable for
Life, Look,
or the
Saturday Evening Post.
It ... will be available for someone like an Ed Murrow or other well-known, highly respected, above-the-battle figure to sign.”

The operation collected off-the-record quotes from Goldwater's press corps and retained the CIA's domestic covert-actions chief, E. Howard Hunt, to place spies in the RNC (they delivered daily reports to a dummy office in the National Press Building called “Continental Press”). Democratic (or Republicans for Johnson) speakers were booked immediately before and after Goldwater appearances; letters columns of local papers were seeded to give an impression of feverish anti-Goldwater activity; sometimes the Anti-Campaign even managed to schedule “Confessions of a Republican” at the tail end of half-hour Goldwater TV spots. They considered using the Social Security list for campaign mailings (they backed off when they learned that doing so would not merely be unethical, but also illegal).

They were too good for their own good. One Friday in early October, Goldwater's inner circle kicked around the idea of promising that were Goldwater elected he would send Eisenhower to Vietnam, an echo of Eisenhower's famous 1952 campaign promise that if he were elected he would personally go to Korea. The intelligence duly found its way to the Oval Office. Johnson called up the General at Gettysburg and told him, “You don't have to wait for Senator Goldwater to get elected in order to go to Vietnam. I've got a Boeing 707 all warmed up and waiting at Andrews Air Force Base and I'll send a helicopter after you any time you care to go.” The old man had no idea what Johnson was talking about. Johnson had beaten Goldwater to the call.

The Anti-Campaign's most effective agent was the Commander in Chief. Constantly, Goldwater agitated for a television showdown with Johnson. But there would be no televised debate in this election. Johnson had put in the fix—
twisting arms to kill the bill that would waive the legal requirement, under the Federal Communications Act's Section 315, of inviting every declared presidential candidate all the way down to Lar Daly, he of the Uncle Sam suit. Goldwater could still push for debate—if he was willing to share the stage with half a dozen minor-party candidates. Republicans' hopes soared on September 10 when the Senate voted 75 to 3 to reopen the investigation of the ties between Johnson and Bobby Baker, owing to the existence of new evidence. They crashed on October 12—when Johnson was able to get the investigation mysteriously postponed until after November 3. And more than one well-heeled Goldwater supporter reported answering the phone to a Texas drawl: “I have several years' worth of your tax returns in front of me, and they make most interesting reading ...”

 

Meanwhile, Goldwater's critics were crossing the threshold of slander and entering the realm of the fantastic.

In 1961 a Greenwich Village huckster named Ralph Ginzburg had launched an arty semipornographic quarterly called Eros. His massive promotional mailing, however, backfired: it found its way into so many unsuspecting households that the postmaster general received a record number of complaints. The chair of the Post Office Operations Subcommittee denounced Ginzburg on the House floor; Attorney General Robert Kennedy revived the Comstock Act—which would mean bringing criminal, not civil charges—to try to put Ginzburg in jail. Ginzburg was convicted. There were appeals. And in 1964, in between trials, Ginzburg, casting around for something to do, decided to start a muckraking magazine. He wanted the first issue to make a big splash, and the “Eureka!” came when he read a poll showing that Goldwater was popular among medical doctors—except psychiatrists, 90 percent of whom despised him. Ginzburg rented the mailing list of the American Psychoanalytic Association and sent out a single-question poll: “Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?” The returns, printed one after the other in a massive article in
Fact
magazine's first and only issue, made for one hell of a litany.

“I do not think his having two nervous breakdowns in the past should be held against him. The sickness of his character structure
now present
is his real psychological deficit,” wrote one doctor. “Basically, I feel he has a narcissistic character disorder with not too latent paranoid elements.” Another called the Republican candidate a “compensated schizophrenic” like Hitler, Castro, and Stalin. A colleague demurred: “Though compensated at present,” he would “become more irrational and paranoid when under political attack
during the campaign.” A Dr. Berlin singled out Goldwater's “frustrated and malcontented” followers, who “reflect his own paranoid and omnipotent tendencies ... as was characteristic of dictators in the ‘30s and '40s,” because Goldwater “appeals to the unconscious sadism and hostility in the average human being.” A Dr. Stillman, a bit deluded about the line between fantasy and reality himself, recognized in the candidate “a type accurately depicted by another Air Force general in the movie
Dr
.
Strangelove.”
Another doctor, paranoid, advised, “Strategy against the paranoid fringe must be very carefully worked out. A frontal attack on paranoids causes them to band together and become more efficient.” And one from New York decried Goldwater's “tremendous following from among ... destructive elements of the South and West.”

This went on for dozens of pages. Since only 20 percent of the doctors ever returned the survey, no statistician would ever credit its validity. It was more like a Rorschach test of what a number of educated, sophisticated professionals tended to see when the image of Barry Goldwater was put before them for comment. The fifty reporters bumping along in triple seats in the hindquarters of
Yia
Bi Ken were educated, sophisticated professionals. And they didn't think all that differently about Goldwater than the psychiatrists.

The reporters liked Barry Goldwater personally (“How could such a nice guy think that way?” one asked). Two traveling publicists ministered efficiently to their every need. That was far less than enough to make the experience a pleasant one. They had missed the story of how Goldwater won the nomination, which was humiliating to their professional pride; it also meant twice as much work for reporters, because none of the people in the campaign were in their little black books. Some never did learn to spell Clif White's name right. For many, memories of indignities suffered at the Cow Palace still stung; Goldwater's visits to their compartment, meanwhile, grew rarer than the Great Pumpkin's. The booing directed at them at every stop became increasingly hard to take. Once a Goldwater mob hurled stones at their bus. Their objectivity began failing them. In Montana, 10,000 stood in the freezing rain to welcome Goldwater, and the number the press somehow settled on was 2,500—an “unenthusiastic” 2,500 at that. In Atlanta—then Memphis—Jack Steel of the Scripps-Howard chain so lowballed the turnouts that Karl Hess strolled into the press quarters with a token of appreciation: a carving of a hand with the middle finger extended. Steel reported the incident in his copy—a testament to the inner circle's sublime indifference to public relations.

Lyndon Johnson's relationship with his traveling press corps was altogether
different: they protected him. The President's tongue was if anything more undisciplined than his opponent's. At one point he would say that the American people wanted nuclear control “vested in a civilian. They do not expect to abandon this duty to military men in the field, and I don't think that they have ever considered that since the Founding Fathers drafted our Constitution” —though surely the control of nuclear weapons never made the Founding Fathers' agenda. “If it hadn't been for Goldwater,” Johnson aide Kenny O'Donnell recalled afterward, the press would have “just murdered him.” The man with his finger on the nuclear button sometimes weaved off his campaign plane stinking drunk; he made mistakes on the stump; he contradicted himself in interviews. On his way to opening day in Detroit, in order to squeeze as many VIPs into his plane as possible, he booted onto an accompanying plane the military aide who kept the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist that contained the codes to launch a nuclear strike. That plane nearly ended up crashing. Reporters looked the other way. “Thank God for Lyndon Johnson,” a scribe from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
thought to himself, as the President lit into Goldwater once more as a “ranting, raving demagogue who wants to tear down society.”

 

The RNC had reserved a series of half-hour blocks on CBS Friday evenings—preempting, with relish,
That Was the Week That Was,
a fiendishly witty live musical revue that sent up each week's news with a decided leftward lean. And so, in place of barbs at Barry Goldwater's expense, on Friday evening, September 18, there was Barry Goldwater, getting straight to the business at hand with hardly a “good evening”—the business being explaining why “the Republican Party is the party of peace”: “because we understand the
enemy....
He's the schoolyard bully.... Let him push you around and eventually you'll have to fight. Just stand up to him, though ... and he'll back down and there will be no fight.” The speech didn't sound very pacific. It concluded with an endless quote from Churchill—a quote that was virtually meaningless unless you knew that October 16, 1938, was when Chamberlain had promised “peace with honor” with Hitler. Even Goldwater fans judged the show a calamity.

The saving grace was a sixty-second appeal for funds tacked to the end of the half hour featuring the actor Raymond Massey, fresh from playing Abraham Lincoln in the film
How the West Was Won
and a heroic surgeon on TV's
Dr. Kildare.
The ad displayed a post-office-box address at the bottom of the screen: “TV for Goldwater-Miller, Box 80, Los Angeles 51, California.”