Before the Storm (92 page)

 

When the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
one of the nation's most respected liberal dailies, sent out a team of reporters after the election for a multipart series to investigate “Who were these people who took over the Republican Party?” the reporters wrote as if describing Earth after a surprise Martian attack. The “right-wing still controls much of the party machinery and will be extremely difficult to dislodge,” they reported in amazement. “Many other Americans, including some of the top figures in both parties, have yet to understand what happened.” In articles with headings like “MIDWEST WAS FERTILE GROUND FOR EXTREMIST INFILTRATION; RADICAL GOLDWATERITES USED MONEY POWER TO CRUSH RIVALS,” the paper uncovered a rogues' gallery of conspirators—from the fascist Allen Zoll to Buzz Lukens, to Clarence Manion, to Clif White, to Robert Welch—who had labored together “to impose its will on one of the nation's two great parties.” You could have read it and presumed this gang had met somewhere in 1960 to parcel out the assignments in advance.

It could have been 27 million zombies who voted for Barry Goldwater, as far as these journalists were concerned. And as for the record 3.9 million Americans who actively
worked
for the Goldwater campaign in some capacity (Johnson had half as many, from a voter pool half again as large)—they might as well have retreated back to the planet from whence they came. In space-ships. Yet that didn't explain the fact that, by report of Johnson field men, automobile bumpers supporting Goldwater continued to outnumber those backing
LBJ on American highways by ratios of 10 to 1. Perhaps it is understandable that reporters missed the story. There had never been anything like it in their lifetimes.

Years earlier,
Fortune
had called Barry Goldwater the “favorite son of a state of mind.” Gene Pulliam had recently termed the candidate's swarms a “federation of the fed-up.” But a more appropriate metaphor was that of a virus. There was the original exposure. It might have come long ago: if you were a manufacturing baron, while fighting a grasping union boss or filling out your one-thousandth federal compliance form. But most people weren't factory barons. More likely it came after writing an ungodly sum on the bottom line of an income tax return. Or from watching your ancestral party, the party of Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun, crawl into bed with the civil rights carpetbaggers. Or after your Northern suburb became gripped by rumors of Negro families moving into your neighborhood, Negro children busing into your children's schools, Negro men taking your place at work to fulfill some egghead's idea of justice. Or from newspaper columnists asking you to “coexist” with the slavemasters of your relatives in Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Hungary. Or you caught the bug just watching the evening news, seeing citizens of countries that were perfectly happy to take our foreign aid spitting on our flag; you had not fought for that flag to put up with that. You felt helpless to do anything about it. You were looking for an army to march in. You saw one forming around the junior senator from Arizona. And—four years ago, three years ago, last year, last week—you took that first, fateful step.

You licked an envelope, phoned a phone tree, planted a yard sign, thumbed a file, put a bumper sticker on your car reading “GALLUP NEVER ASKED ME!” You saw others doing more. So you did more. And then some more—and the more energy you invested, the more passionate you became that your investment not go down the drain. You tried to infect friends and family (though some had been inoculated by large doses of liberal media). Others infected others. The contagion spread, and before long there were millions of you. And then there was an army—an army of true believers. And true believers work harder than any paid professional staff.

It was a culture spread via a vast literature of training manuals. (Americans for Constitutional Action's devoted fourteen pages alone on how to do a mailing, right down to the most efficient way to fold a letter.) Its rituals were passed along by word of mouth. When the campaign enlisted the theme song from
Hello, Dolly!
(the first show tune to top the pop charts in nearly a decade), the producer of the show got a court to issue a cease-and-desist order. Thereafter the tune took on an underground life:

Goldwater fans circulated elaborate accounts of a “Kennedy-Lincoln Coincidence” portending inevitable Goldwater victory:
Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by Johnson, who lost for reelection; Kennedy was assassinated and replaced by Johnson, who
...

Even if Goldwater supporters could not afford it, they gave money. The
Post-Dispatch
missed that story, too. Just as in the wake of the election the nation's voting booths knew only two numbers—Johnson's 61.2 percent to Goldwater's 38.8—newspapers tended to stop at two as well: the $17 million raised by Lyndon Johnson, versus the $12 million raised by Goldwater. What that ignored was that in 1960, 22,000 people donated to JFK's campaign and 44,000 to Nixon's. Over a million gave to Barry Goldwater. And that made all the difference.

For once, the Goldwater command on Eye Street had a hand in spreading the infection: ironically, thanks to Ralph Cordiner, the campaign needed a small, steady diet of new cash every day just to function. When Raymond Massey's pitch began hitting the jackpot, the finance people began looking longingly at the three-year-old RNC program selling $10 “sustaining memberships” in the party—which had reeled in $559,000 in the first quarter of 1964 alone, at the same time that traditional methods yielded but $34,000. The sustaining members were now hit up with special appeals to sustain the presidential campaign. The money proved forthcoming. Then someone had the bright idea of buying mailing lists from the brokers who sold them to catalogs and magazines. Those solicitations brought a deluge. (The campaign received thousands of gifts from customers of the Kozak Drywash Cloth Company alone, which was extraordinary, considering that the product the company made was designed for people too cheap to patronize car washes.) And the marginal utility of one hundred $10 gifts was far greater than one gift of $1,000. Political campaigning is an extraordinarily labor-intensive activity. The former signified one hundred potential laborers, whereas the latter meant only one.

Goldwater's fund-raisers were hardly averse to $1,000 checks. Or the two $1 million gifts the campaign received, one from a rogue member of the Rockefeller clan—or the $100,000 Taiwan gave to each party in those days. But the tiny gifts were talismans: small change sealed up in an envelope
addressed in a childish hand; a shaky note proclaiming, “God bless you, Senator, here is my Social Security check”; a grubby paper bag filled with dollar bills, delivered to a Goldwater office on a factory hand's lunch break—these legends circulated. And like all reports of miracles, they served to further infect many more thousands of acolytes.

 

The spiritual army had rogue militias, hundreds of them, tiny bands for whom Goldwater was the answer to every question and every conspiracy—sometimes on topics he never addressed. These groups came in flavors like the “National Gun Alliance,” whose address was a post office box in Arkansas. “
WILL YOUR GUN COLLECTION BE CONFISCATED AND DESTROYED?”
their pamphlet asked, promising a vote for Goldwater as a bulwark against the implementation of “State Department Publication 7277 detailing the
American
plan to disarm all nations.” Or the “Goldwater Campaign Fund,” based in Minneapolis, which published baroque handbills covering four legal-sized pages of eight-point type, underlined, boldfaced, and uppercased (“READING TIME 7 MINUTES”), wondering how Communism, considering Moscow's penury and America's plenty, could survive “WITHOUT A GREAT DEAL OF HELP!” “A Fed Up Citizen” (no address listed) announced in his flyer, “If
I were the devil and wanted to run America into a communist hell, I think I would do something like this...”
(the devil bore a striking resemblance to Lyndon Baines Johnson). A massive yard sign in a Boston suburb being considered for urban renewal declared “WE SHALL DEFEND OUR HOMES WITH OUR LIVES”—next to one reading “BARRY GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT: BECAUSE HE IS A STAUNCH DEFENDER OF PROPERTY RIGHTS.”

The media ridiculed this stuff if they noticed it at all—as they did the preachments of far-right radio programs (and, sometimes, TV programs) which had once been heard mostly in rural pockets but were now more and more frequently marinating the entire country. Carl T. Mclntire's
20th Century Reformation Hour—
which taught that the National Council of Churches, an umbrella organization for thirty-one separate Protestant denominations, was “the strongest ally of Russia and the radical labor movement in the U.S.”—was heard on 605 stations. Clarence Manion was now heard Sunday nights on over 1,100. The “Christian Crusade” of Billy James Hargis—who preached the old Mississippi-Freedom-Summer-as-Communist-plot-to-spur-race-war gospel—reached forty-six states every evening from a superpowered radio transmitter in Mexico. Hargis, a hell-fired (and tax-exempted) fund-raiser, had just raked in $38,870 in a live evening “prayer-auction” at his Tulsa headquarters to purchase twenty-five minutes a week on the Mutual Radio Network, the nation's largest, where he would join on its airwaves R. K. Scott, who proclaimed himself
the counterpoint to newsmen “knowingly or otherwise singing the praises of the welfare state, planned economy, and other forms of socialism”; and the American Security Council Report of the Air, produced by a Chicago outfit that sold corporate access to files encompassing over two million (purported) subversive Americans—more files, they claimed, than the FBI.

This kind of right-wing cultural entrepreneurship might never have been reckoned with at all had reports not begun filtering out in late September that self-published books by three conservative authors had sold enough copies to supply one out of every ten men, women, and children in the country. The head of the Fair Campaign Practices Commission called them the “dirty books”: John Stormer's
None Dare Call It Treason;
J. Evetts Haley's
A Texan Looks at Lyndon;
Phyllis Schlafly's
A Choice Not an Echo,
now in a third edition, and another book she had somehow managed to squeeze out in October, The Gravediggers, a numbingly conspiricist indictment of the “card-carrying liberals” whose appeasement policies, not Goldwater's militarism, were “
really
risking nuclear war.” Sometimes the 20 million copies of the broadside
LBJ:
A
Political Biography
—printed by Willis Carto, an erstwhile Birch staffer fired for his anti-Semitism—were included in the category as well. That jacked the total to one “hate book” for every four Americans. When the New York Times reported, “Never before have paperback books of any category been printed and distributed in such volume in such a short time,” ordinary publishers began wondering what they were doing wrong. What they were doing wrong was not hiring distributors who thought of their products as billboards on the road to Damascus.

None Dare Call
It Treason was written by a thirty-six-year-old former Missouri Young Republican leader who had quit his job editing an electronics trade magazine to work on the book and run its publishing company, Liberty Bell Press, which had relocated sometime in the summer of 1964 from his suburban ranch house to a building he shared with a beauty parlor down the street. The Texan behind A
Texan Looks at Lyndon
was the man who gained renown on the right in the 1950s with his lawsuit to invalidate the federal agriculture program, and in 1961 with his call to hang Earl Warren. His book was published (its pages several degrees off plumb) by Palo Dural Press, an annex to the author's 11,000-acre Panhandle ranch.
None Dare Call It Treason
was a
tour d'horizon
of Communist Trojan horses: the Revised Standard Edition of the Bible, progressive education, the Council on Foreign Relations, tax-exempt foundations; it accused the left-wing advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action, as Goldwater did, of sneaking “Fabian socialism” into the White House. Its calling card was its 818 footnotes.
A Texan Looks at Lyndon
relied on the author's unusually graceful prose style, and phases like “reported to have,” “it was rumored,” and “many persons believe,” to argue that if law
enforcement had done its job over the course of Lyndon Johnson's thirty-year political career, he would now be in the big house, not the White House.

But it was not their contents that truly made these works popular. They contained price schedules that aped the grassroots distribution methods Clarence Manion pioneered in distributing broadcasts of his radio transcripts back in the 1950s, and Conscience of
a
Conservative in 1960: “1 copy: $.75 ... 10 copies: $5 ... 100 copies: $30 ... 1,000 or more copies $.10 each.” The fruits of this kind of incentivizing were revealed on Stormer's copyright page: “First Printing, February, 1964—100,000”; ”Second Printing, April, 1964—100,000”; “Third Printing, April, 1964—100,000”—and so on, until 6.8 million copies were accounted for by October. Haley was pumping out 50,000 copies of his book a day by November. Demand for the books, simply, was equal to the production capacity of the nation's two biggest paperback printing plants, which were manufacturing all of them. There always was another Birchite millionaire willing to spring for a lot of a few thousand more to sprinkle around like so many Gideon Bibles. At rallies they were handed out like party favors; in Arizona they were translated into Spanish; in California readings were recorded on LPs. In some areas copies disappeared from bookstore shelves as fast as murder mysteries (although to get the books stocked there, the grassroots distributors sometimes resorted to unusual means, like wondering aloud whether a vacillating bookstore proprietor wasn't “Communist”). The Haley book was reportedly the number one best-seller in Virginia.