Before the Storm (90 page)

He continued:

He concluded to acclaim: “We have come, literally and figuratively, from the very ends of the earth to make this great nation. From many races, nations, and creeds we have made, as we shall ever more perfectly make, under God, one people.”

The speech was a popular sensation. That wasn't the only reason to celebrate. Goldwater was now doing surprisingly unterribly. His numbers were trending upward. The New York Times reported that he led in ten states, with another eight neck and neck—and that by winning just this ten he would be more successful than most losing candidates. He was hovering near 50 percent in crucial swing states: Virginia, Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas—and vital Texas, where he had 53 percent. The Deep South was a lock. On October 12 the Washington
Post's
headline read “PRIVATE POLL GIVES GOLDWATER 40% OF THE VOTE.” The Republican Congressional Committee newsletter promptly cited a Post headline from October 17, 1948: “GALLUP POLL SHOWS TRUMAN WITH 40 PERCENT OF VOTE.” (It was noted in hushed tones, if at all, that since Goldwater had jumped 5 points and Johnson had slipped 3 after the Harlem riots, one more conflagration could nicely slim the gap.) Once again, seasoned politicos on the second floor smelled opportunity: play the electoral college right, shift energies to just the right places, track the themes that work and dump the ones that don't—and Barry Morris Goldwater could find himself the next President of the United States.

Once again they were denied the chance. The generals were content to cruise. “Having been on the campaign trail with Barry ever since he started this activity,” Kitchel wrote a friend back in Arizona, “I can assure you that the campaign is going very well and that, contrary to the indications in the polls, we have something really going which is going to produce a victory on November 3rd.” On one occasion Burch decamped from riding shotgun on the campaign plane so intoxicated by the enthusiasm of Barry's supporters that he
declared, “I know we're on the verge of victory.” He was thinking of the crowds in the stands at the evening rallies, packed with conservatives; he ignored the fact that the general public was leaving bare patches at the sides of streets through which Goldwater motorcaded to the venues. Burch, for his part, decided that the traveling intelligence team's reports were negative and misleading and banned their circulation. He also fired the pollsters.

 

Lyndon Johnson, who knew how to hunt where the ducks were, was ready to write off the Deep South altogether. His wife decided that was unacceptable.

The former Claudia Alta Taylor was born a Southern belle, and she felt the Southland's glories in her bones—things like “keeping up with your kinfolk,” as she put it, “long Sunday dinners after church ... a special brand of courtesy.” She was also a woman without illusions. She understood that her beloved land was not just a paradise of courtesy with a crust of sin on top, that the cult of politeness served also as a daily reminder to blacks to keep to their place—a sinister cultural matrix structured by images of the virgin on her pedestal, keeping up with kinfolk, cooking big Sunday dinners, and the savage black rapist against whom she needed constant protection. The legend
Dieu et les Dames
painted on the ceiling of the Mississippi capitol told the story at its most benign; the segregated bathroom signs—“WHITE LADIES” and “COLORED WOMEN”—at its most casually inhumane. Lady Bird understood, as other liberals—Yankees—did not, Southern fears that in sweeping away its ingrained racial hierarchies, the
South
would be swept away, too: no more family bonds thick as kudzu, no more delicacies soaked through with the fat of a freshly butchered pig, no more ladies, no more gentlemen—just assimilation into the desiccated, instrumentalist,
thin
Yankee civilization Southerners had despised since the beginning of the nineteenth century. To unvex the mind of the South, Lady Bird knew, would take the delicate, agonizing work of decades. And she felt the work as a calling.

It took physical courage for Lady Bird to do what she did—arrange a campaign tour for herself through eight Southern states. The original idea was to co-host a reception in the rotunda of each statehouse. The Secret Service nixed that proposal: closed circular spaces were a sniper's heaven. Hers would surely be the first whistle-stop in history to travel with its own minesweeper: a second train engine, traveling fifteen minutes ahead of the first, to detonate any bombs placed in its path.

The planning had been painful. Lady Bird spent eleven-hour days in September working the phones asking politicians for their participation. For the most part, only those not up for reelection offered hospitality. The Democratic
nominee for North Carolina's governorship didn't return her calls. A Virginia senator scheduled a convenient hunting trip. Senator Byrd had been “jovial and courteous and darling,” she reported to her husband—until she mentioned the purpose of her call, whereupon “an invisible silken curtain fell across his voice.” Louisiana's governor John McKeithan embarrassedly explained that he “was working for the Democrats, you understand”—just after his own fashion. Strom Thurmond mumbled that “a really basic decision within the next two weeks” precluded his participation. As for George Wallace, she thought it would be rude even to bother.

She was unfazed. No candidate's wife had taken such a tour without her husband before. But she knew her people needed to hear some hard truths. Her husband could not do the job if he wanted to: the assassination threat was too great. But Southerners, she knew, would never shoot a lady off her pedestal.

She weighed anchor on Columbus Day, October 6. Federal employees were given time off to swell the crowd. She wouldn't stop until she'd covered 1,628 miles and made 47 stops in four days. At each depot fifteen hostesses—wives of senators and congressmen, decked out in blue shirtwaists with “LBJ” embroidered on the front—led what willing local pols they could into a Pullman car set up as a traditional Southern sitting room, where photographs would be taken and gifts exchanged. The dining car was opened for feasting upon local delicacies: shrimp Creole, biscuits and burgoo, deer-meat sausage, Mrs. Eugene Talmadge's famous Coca-Cola-marinated ham. The networks loved it. This time no one said anything about whistle-stops being nostalgic throwbacks.

The speaker's platform—the caboose—would be taken up first by Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana for a round of courthouse-style introductions. “How many of you-all know what red-eye gravy is?” he would say. “Well, so do I, and so does Lyndon Johnson.” And then—forty times that first day—the nation's Southern Belle-in-Chief mounted her pedestal, cleared her throat, looked out at the picket signs (“FLY AWAY LADY BIRD, HERE IN RICHMOND BARRY IS THE CAT'S MEOW”; “LYNDON, WE WILL BARRY YOU”; “BRINKMANSHIP IS BETTER THAN CHICKENSHIP,” a phrase Goldwater, Kitchel, and Hess happened to have pasted on a bulkhead of the Republican campaign plane), took in a few moments of “We Want Barry!” chants—and thrust her secret weapon into the air: a single, white-gloved hand. That usually was enough. If it wasn't, she would drawl, “This is a campaign trip, and I would like to ask for your vote for
both
Johnsons”—so they knew they were
insulting
both Johnsons, not just the husband. She was a lady; one continued heckling on pain of one's manhood.

She told her audience that “to this Democratic candidate and his wife, the South is a respected, valued, and beloved part of this country.” She reeled off a
list of what the Democrats had done for Culpeper—the roads, the factories, the navy yards, the dams—and raised the specter of Republican soup lines. And she was never too shy to remind them how proud Democrats should be of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—leavening the remark with a joke: “You might not like all I am saying, but at least you understand the way ah'm sayin' it.”

It was in South Carolina where white gloves and sugared words finally failed Lady Bird Johnson. South Carolina air was now being paved over by Strom Thurmond's radio ads—“A vote for Barry Goldwater is a vote to end judicial tyranny”—and the evangelism of true believers like the minister Bob Jones Jr., whose college refused to bow to any “agnostic or materialist accrediting association,” and who had adopted for his independent campaign for Barry Goldwater the apparently defeatist slogan “Turn Back America, Turn Back—Only a Divine Miracle Can Save America Now.” Thanks to four years of softening by the RNC's Operation Dixie, GOP organizations were going strong in 42 of 46 South Carolina counties.

In Columbia only a maternal bark brought peace from the hecklers: “This is a country of many viewpoints. I respect your right to express your own. Now it is my turn to express mine. Thank you.” The next stop, Charleston, had been chosen by Lady Bird because it had given 57 percent to the Republicans in 1960. And as her train approached, the tough old port was taking on a menacing aspect that recalled Dallas in November of 1963. Whispers shuddered through town: a band was ready to strike up a “hot beat” to incite Negroes to riot as Lady Bird arrived. The local paper pleaded with its readers for “courtesy towards the First Lady,” as Nixon had pleaded with Texans for a “courteous reception” for Kennedy in Dallas papers on November 22. Twenty-four merchants failed to receive an emergency injunction to stop a rally at their shopping mall. She entered at dusk. The space in front of the platform at the mall was monopolized by the massed forces of the local John Birch Society chapters—and their children, who bore signs reading “BLACK BIRD GO HOME”; “JOHNSON IS A COMMUNIST”; “JOHNSON IS A NIGGER-LOVER.”

“
Jobs and a
better
community ... prosperity for Charleston.... Polaris missile base ... shipyard”
—the words could be heard only intermittently for the wall of boos. Hale Boggs took the microphone and cried out in anguish: “This is reminiscent of Hitler! This is a Democratic gathering, not a Nazi gathering!”

Lady Bird and her entourage pressed on, shaken. In courtly Savannah, it was Johnson's seventeen-year-old daughter who was booed. That night the FBI made a yard-by-yard sweep of a seven-mile-long bridge that would convey the First Lady across a marshy expanse in north Florida.

The President would meet the train at its final stop in New Orleans. He was halfway through a trip of his own. Gone was the plan to campaign from his rocking chair on the White House porch; he hit fifteen states in the two weeks after touring New England. He needed the crowd. The crowd needed him.

A tour apparatus was hustled up from the West Wing. Advance reports (“Young—
young
men on the assembly line at Warner Gear in Muncie are pro-Goldwater.... White workers called the local union president ‘the nigger president' ”) and speech drafts blizzarded through Bill Moyers's office. “Lay low on civil rights,” the strategy memos advised, suggesting instead the themes “Economic Bill of Rights for All Americans”; “Patriotism and Prosperity”; “The wrecker can wreck in a day what it takes years for the builder to build”; and “The Year 2000.” The latter was the President's new favorite subject: “Think of how wonderful the year 2000 will be,” he would gush. “And it is already so exciting to me that I am just hoping that my heart and stroke and cancer committee can come up with some good results that will insure that all of us can live beyond a hundred so we can participate in that glorious day when all the fruits of our labors and our imaginations today are a reality! ... I just hope the doctors hurry up and get busy and let me live that long.”

Occasionally he gave the speeches that were written for him. More often he spoke off the top of his head. Sometimes he sounded strange. In Cleveland he burbled to the $100-a-plate diners at the Convention Center: “You don't get peace by rattling your rockets. You don't get peace by threatening to drop your bombs ... you must always have your hand out and be willing to go anywhere, talk to anybody, listen to anything they have to say, do anything that is honorable, in order to avoid pulling that trigger”—he twitched a thumb like an epileptic—“or mashing that button that will blow up the world.” (This was an irony. Goldwater's obsession with manned bombers over missiles rested largely on the fact that he believed push-button warfare was hazardous and irresponsible; bombers, at least, could be called back at the last minute. And little that Goldwater said in 1964 surpassed the apocalypticism of Kennedy utterances such as “The enemy is the Communist system itself—implacable, insatiable, unceasing in its drive for world domination.”) In Louisville (where, two weeks earlier, Goldwater had let loose on Vietnam: “Has there ever been a more mishandled conflict in U.S. history?”), standing at a dais bedecked with former Kentucky governors, Johnson said: