Before the Storm (93 page)

“Your letter to the President has been received,” Moyers wrote in a form letter sent to those who wrote asking why, if the charges in Haley's book were not true, the White House did not sue for libel. “I have not discussed A
Texan Looks at Lyndon
with the President, and I cannot speak for him,” he went on. He was almost certainly lying; books like Haley's were the West Wing's new obsession. “They are giving A
Texan Looks at Lyndon
away by the truckload all over the Southwest,” reported a field man. “The hate books are all over Georgia,” said another. A Kansas official declared, “We hear Haley's book quoted more than anything else in the campaign,” and proudly announced that he was distributing copies of Drew Pearson's expose of its errors to stanch the damage.

This response showed little more than the Administration's incomprehension of this strange new virus spreading in their midst: the people likely to be convinced by A
Texan
were the same people who looked upon Drew Pearson as a traitor. There was nothing more they could do to stem the tide than Goldwater's team could do about Daisy. They couldn't sue; none of the books fit within the Supreme Court's stiff new libel standard in
Sullivan
v.
New York
Times: to prove that the defendant had acted with malicious intent or reckless disregard for the truth. They were boxed in, and they knew exactly who to
blame: Goldwater “has fenced with personal attacks on the President,” the DNC's research chief wrote Moyers. Now, with these “slander” books, “an attempted softening up has been going on.” The “all-out assault by Goldwater himself has not yet occurred,” he noted. He predicted it would come in the next few weeks.

It wouldn't. Not only couldn't Eye Street intrigue its way out of a paper bag (a Xerox of what was supposed to be the single existing copy of one key strategy memo, sent from the second to the third floor and labeled with the imperative
“Destroy-After-Reading,”
was spied by its author the next day on a congressman's desk), they were too idealistic to try. They despised the books and ordered that official campaign literature should contain only Goldwater's own words—the somnolent
Where I Stand,
six brochures the RNC gave away that cut and pasted from speeches in the
Congressional Record,
booklets reprinting key campaign addresses. The rule only showed what a shambles the Goldwater campaign had become. In Dade County, Florida, the Republican Party passed out 172,000 copies of
None Dare Call It Treason
door-to-door. The only reason you couldn't get a copy of A
Texan
Looks
at Lyndon
at the supermarket-sized Republican headquarters in Harris County, Texas, was because the director of the state's Southern Baptist Sunday School Board had declared it a menace to the spiritual welfare of his flock. (But if you asked for a copy you would be directed to a volunteer who kept a stash hidden in her Buick.) “We have no way of controlling people out in the field,” Lee Edwards protested to the
New York Times.
And the situation in the field was rather complex.

 

When a bug-bitten conservative endeavored to volunteer for the crusade, she might find her way to any of four centers of Goldwater activity.

There were, first, the freelancers and the outlaws: the Birch Societies and National Gun Alliances of the world, from whose precincts those who wandered in wouldn't likely leave
without
one, two, or many copies of Schlafly et al.

Second, one might stroll into an official precinct, county, or district Republican headquarters. And there things got a bit more complicated. If you were in conservative territory, you might find a Goldwater hive. In New England, except for Connecticut, no Goldwater activity existed at all; the state parties had written off the entire business in disgust to concentrate their resources on local and state campaigns. Where candidates had pledged to run without the help of their party, the office might be virtually abandoned (perhaps you might find a skeleton crew guarding the files against repossession by right-wingers). But even if you found a willing Republican office, its workers' efforts were a
well-intentioned shambles, because they lacked guidance and funds from the harried home office in Washington—or, in a state like Kansas or Idaho, the offices were left in an organizational rubble after the liberal/conservative civil wars fought in the spring.

Forsaking the regular Republican office, you might locate the third center of Goldwater activity: the temporary offices parties rented for a couple of months every four years and dedicated to the presidential effort. You might look in vain. For example, when regular Republican and Goldwater leaders in New York State met at the Manhattan Harvard Club one evening in July, conservatives announced plans to set up an elaborate Goldwater network outside the party structure. Liberals—who refused to campaign for Goldwater but feared their offices would become beachheads for a wholesale conservative takeover of the Republican Party—shot back that it would happen over their dead bodies. Conservatives replied that they already controlled most of the county committees, and that any liberal who didn't cooperate with them would be crushed like a bug. They stopped just short of throwing cocktails at one another.

What that seemed to suggest was that a New Yorker wanting to volunteer for Goldwater would have a hard time of it unless the fledgling state Conservative Party (to complicate matters further) had a presence in his or her area. That didn't happen, for the fourth center of Goldwater activity arrived just in time to save the day and absorb the political orphans' energies. Its impresario was none other than the campaign's forgotten genius: long-limbed, bow-tied F. Clifton White.

 

When Clif White returned from his unhappy Hawaiian sojourn after finding himself shut out of the campaign's leadership at the convention, he came back to a job offer he might well have dismissed as an insult: director of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller. Citizens' groups were the traditional campaign vehicle to woo disaffected voters believed to be put off by party labels. Such groups tended to be barely tolerated by party regulars; in the GOP, conservatives considered them to be liberal Trojan horses. And Clif White knew this. But he also knew that in 1952 Citizens for Eisenhower had virtually taken over the Eisenhower campaign. Because he would only be assigned 12.1 percent of the campaign budget and given a staff of 88 compared to Eye Street's 700, such a top-down takeover would not be in the cards for him. He spied his opportunity elsewhere: at the grass roots. The precinct, county, district, and state Goldwater organizations he had built to win the nomination over the past three years were jamming Eye Street's bollixed switchboard and mailroom in vain to be named official auxiliaries of the Goldwater campaign. White realized that all
he had to do was ring up their—his—old leaders and offer them chairmanships of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller chapters, budget them a little cash, and let them get on with doing what they had always done. Then these people could take over from below every function Burch was screwing up from above—a shadow campaign, working with the natives in the countryside like some Third World guerrilla insurgency. The Arizona Mafia, who had fought against giving White any berth whatsoever in the campaign, would be too harried to notice who was saving them from the abyss.

By the end of the first week in August, the results were arriving: Marvin Liebman's New York Goldwater for President Committee, with all his organizing expertise and a mailing list of thousands, was now New York Citizens for Goldwater-Miller; members of the Lehigh County Citizens for Goldwater-Miller were signing up members at the county fair, to the chagrin of party regulars. “300 VOLUNTEERS READY TO WORK,” wired the newly christened Pomona Valley Citizens for Goldwater-Miller; “ALL WE ‘ORPHANS' NOW HAVE A GOOD HOME,” came word from Santa Barbara. “WE HAVE BEEN TREADING WATER WAITING FOR SOME WORD FROM OFFICIAL SOURCES”; “WE HAVE BEEN SITTING PRETTY MUCH ‘ON OUR HANDS' SINCE THE NOMINATION, AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS FROM WASHINGTON”; “WE HAVE CONTACTED OUR STATE HEADQUARTERS NEARLY WEEKLY AND THEY SEEM TO BE IN THE DARK AS MUCH AS WE”: the story was the same everywhere before White came along.

Where prenomination Goldwater organizations were strong and regular organizations were weak—as in Ohio, where the party was in a shambles over the perception that Governor Rhodes had sold the party Establishment out with his stunt of releasing the delegation for Goldwater—Citizens for Goldwater-Miller chapters practically were the campaign. The Ohio GOP didn't even inform the newspaper listings when Goldwater's half hours were on TV. So the Columbus Citizens chapter took out its precinct lists the night before a show and would call every undecided voter to urge him or her to watch. When the Goldwater whistle-stop chugged through the state, a Citizens volunteer flew a helicopter ahead of the train and dropped ten thousand “Follow Me to Barry Goldwater” leaflets; the state Citizens headquarters was almost evicted from its fourth-floor office until the landlord received assurances that the group would remove some of its eleven and a half tons of literature that were threatening the building's structural integrity. “TOUR PROVING TREMENDOUS SUCCESS DESPITE SHORTAGE OF ADVANCE TIMING,” Vandalia, Ohio, volunteers wired after
Yia Bi Ken
swooped down for a late-October western Ohio swing without benefit of any advance work. “LOCAL COMMITTEE MEMBERS GRATEFUL FOR SHOT IN ARM ... INJECTED BY OUR GROUP. GIVEN FULL RADIO AND TEN MINUTES TELEVISION TIME LAST NIGHT YOU COULD NOT BUY THE DEDICATED CRUSADE OF THESE
MEN AND WOMEN.” In one town, two women actually lived in the Citizens office six days a week. In some places, local rivalries between Republican and Citizens organizations could end up corroding Goldwater efforts more than improving them. But even there it hardly mattered. Clif White was spreading the virus—Bill Buckley's “seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future.”

 

Clif White would leave one more legacy to conservatism in that 1964 presidential campaign. If winning the presidential nomination and rescuing Goldwater volunteers from idleness were gifts to conservative true believers, this one would prove instrumental in the creation, one day, of a conservative governing majority. Although it would take future election years for other Republican candidates to reap the benefit, it was Clif White's shop that first refined the images and words that would tie the ravages of domestic disorder firmly to the Democratic Party's tail.

It began because of a legal loophole. When Grenier, Kitchel, and Burch discovered that it was illegal for political parties to
sell
campaign propaganda to local units, it took one of the few grizzled veterans on hand—adman Lou Guylay—to point the way out of the dilemma: a committee could be incorporated outside the party structure to front for the work—just as the Democrats had drummed up Professors for, Artists and Entertainers for, and District Attorneys for Johnson-Humphrey, and twenty-three other committees to do the same thing. They chose as their vehicle an organization they had already incorporated: Citizens for Goldwater-Miller. Then they off-loaded Rus Walton, who was on leave from running United Republicans of California, to head up the effort. And since they had enough worries just keeping their own house on Eye Street from collapsing, they hardly gave the matter another thought.

The man who ended up producing the Goldwater brochures that passed through millions of Americans' hands was an embodiment version of the third floor's nightmare. Rus Walton did not believe in the Great Pumpkin. Instead, he was possessed of an almost desperate need to burn conservative truths into an audience's heart via whatever means worked—high or low, fair or foul. In a decade spent as publicist for the National Association of Manufacturers he became ringmaster of a veritable three-ring propaganda circus: radio shows and traveling seminars, public service announcements and singing groups, full-page ads and legislative updates, itinerant debating teams and ostentatious philanthropies. When he served as Joe Shell's campaign manager, his candidate entered rallies to the angelic peal of a sixty-two-voice choir, cheered on by row after row of pom-pom-wielding “Shell's Belles.” And during the Kohler strike, Walton designed a NAM booklet for women's clubs warning against the
“uncontrolled power, wealth and political influence of unions and union bosses.” The cover was illustrated with a picture of a woman crouching in a corner as if cowering from a rapist. Walton had a malign brilliance for that sort of thing. Singing groups and massed choirs had their uses. But voters in 1964, he instinctively understood, were afraid. To reach them you had to exploit those fears. That was the technique by which Johnson was holding crowds in the palm of his hand: convincing them that he was the true conservative in the race—the calmer of fears, the bringer of order, the preserver of peace; the father tucking a vulnerable electorate in after banishing the monsters from under the bed with a bedtime story.

For all the high-mindedness, that was Goldwater's goal, too. His monsters included a government “that is master not servant of the people”; a President with a “penchant for buying and bludgeoning votes”; American prestige slipping “below the peril point”; Hubert Humphrey, “the most prominent left-wing Americans for Democratic Action radical in this country ... a heartbeat away from the Presidency,” ready to “drag our nation into the swampland of collectivism”; and “a regimented society with a number for every man, woman, and child.” But to conservatives' bafflement and dismay, the things that scared them didn't scare the average undecided voter. The candidate's exhortations just made him sound paranoid.

But Goldwater was also trying out another set of lines that were new to conservative campaigning—and these were catching fire. Lines such as “We want to make it safe to live
by
the law; enough has been done to make it safe to live life outside the law”; and “Our traditional values of individual responsibility ... have been slipping away at a quickened pace”; and “Why do we see a flood of obscene literature?” These statements got applause from people who found themselves surprised to find themselves applauding Barry Goldwater. Crime, lax judges, individual responsibility, pornography: rarely did he bunch them together as a unit. He saw civilizational decline everywhere, and these things were no more evidence than were the surging power of the executive branch, rotting weapons systems, Social Security numbers, the Administration's failures in faraway countries whose names people barely recognized, and all the rest. “The theme of our campaign is clear,” he would thunder in town after town: “Peace through strength. Progress through freedom. Purpose through constitutional order”—then damn the torpor, full speed ahead, he would plunge into his laundry list of things he thought Americans needed to hear whether they wanted to or not. When he did squish the “morality” themes together, his argument for why they had anything to do with why a person shouldn't vote for Lyndon Johnson was so dubious as to vitiate the power of the appeal. “Moral decay of a people begins at the top,” he would say, “from
the highest offices into all walks of life.” But the direct line from Lyndon Johnson to Kitty Genovese was rather hard to swallow.