Before the Storm (94 page)

Only once did he devote an entire speech to how “the moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay.” It was broadcast on TV from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. It was the highest-rated nonpresidential political address in the history of television—a fact, of course, that the candidate likely ignored as a point of pride. But “morality” was political gold. It was the only Goldwater theme that the White House felt compelled to react to. But Johnson's people weren't exactly sure how. Memos flew back and forth: Enlist “a group of friendly criminologists”? “Judicious use of the candidate's family,” “inclusion of prominent women”? Public appearances with Billy Graham and Cardinal Spellman?

They were floundering. No other presidential candidate had tried staking a political claim for these issues before Goldwater. They had never been
at
issue before.

It was a watershed year in American mores. The Supreme Court declared school prayer a menace to the Constitution; the Boston Strangler, Kitty Genovese, and other dramatic murders were forever removing America's dominant image of crime from the benign realm of the 1950s-vintage “juvenile delinquent.” Adlai Stevenson told Colby College students, “In the great struggle to advance human rights even a jail sentence is no longer a dishonor but a proud achievement.” It all seemed to fit together somehow. Do-gooders uprooting neighborhoods and school districts; a smut magazine like Playboy running interviews with politicians like some kind of cultural arbiter; marijuana smokers; what J. Edgar Hoover called “one of the most disturbing trends I have witnessed in my years in law enforcement—an overzealous pity for the criminal, and an equivalent disregard for his victim.” Privileged college students in California whining like victims and holding their own university hostage; the Beatles and their long hair; topless bathing suits; climbing divorce rates; this Warhol displaying Brillo boxes as “art”; that outrageous professional atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair—the list went on. Suddenly, it all seemed
political
—something people wanted to take a side on. Since it was a presidential year, they looked for a presidential candidate who was on their side, too.

It was hardly foreordained that it would be Goldwater. The salty high-desert rebel and nightclub habitué certainly hadn't complained when Goldwater Girls in bikinis passed the collection plate at one of his rallies in Beverly Hills back in May. One faction of conservatives, in fact, “libertarians”—exemplified by the YAFers who put their founding convention at loggerheads by
decrying the Sharon Statement's reference to God and the Berkeley co-ed who was the Rosa Parks of the trolley-car running boards—
defined
their political identity by their live-and-let-live attitude on moral questions. Republicans were the party of Middle American piety. But America was a pious country. God talk on the stump wasn't so much political as pro forma; at the governors' conference in Cleveland there was hardly a peep of opposition to a resolution in favor of a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. It was a liberal Democrat who denounced Ralph Ginzburg on the House floor (the notorious sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, on the other hand, was a confirmed Republican). It was Bobby Kennedy who, besides J. Edgar Hoover, was the man most likely to be thought “tough on crime.” The politician best known for crusading against smutty rock and roll was Governor Matthew Welsh of Indiana—otherwise liberal enough to earn George Wallace's full wrath in the Indiana presidential primary that spring. There was little the eminently liberal Teddy White scorned more than the Berkeley radicals at the Cow Palace: “girls with dank blond hair, parading in dirty blue jeans, college boys in sweat shirts and Beatle haircuts; shaggy and unkempt intellectuals,” their rhetoric inspiring Northern Negroes to riot as “revenge for Mississippi and Alabama.” And the response to Rockefeller's remarriage had been, of course, bipartisan and ecumenical.

Goldwater raised these issues as they came to concern him, on the fly, almost as a quirk. “The origin of this commendable but somewhat novel resolve is not clear,”
The New Yorker
's Richard Rovere wrote when the candidate started his morality talk at the convention. “Goldwater exegetes say that it has never been a theme in his earlier writings and speeches.” (There were hints of it in the home stretch of New Hampshire, although when Walton looked for a Goldwater speech devoted to religious piety he had to go back to early 1962 to find one.) Now the candidate raised such issues constantly. All those folks who were angry at domestic disorder, at immorality, at crime—most of whom would never consider calling themselves conservatives; some of whom had long called themselves
liberals
—now had a side to join: Goldwater's. And Walton knew that for millions of undecideds and lukewarm Johnson supporters, this appeal might close the gap.

The RNC's publicity division realized it, too—and once more it badly squandered the opportunity. About half of the campaign's TV spots attacked the new morality theme, but they were sixty- and thirty-second primers on how to make even your most diehard supporters cringe with embarrassment. The most elaborate began with exclamations in jagged letters leaping out at the viewer,
Batman
-style: “GRAFT!” (Cut to a caricature of Bobby Baker, who actually looked like a rather pleasant fellow in this shot, dipping his hand into
a domed building so poorly drawn it was barely recognizable as the Capitol.) “SWINDLES!” (Pictured were a barn and a silo and a photo of Billie Sol Estes, a dimly remembered grifter who had sold the Agriculture Department nonexistent fertilizer storage tanks years earlier and had once been an associate of Lyndon Johnson's.) “CRIME!” (Goofy file footage of kids “rampaging” in the streets that looked like a downmarket
Blackboard Jungle,
cops swatting nightsticks in the air as if chasing curveballs, the kids missing their dummy punches by half a foot, riotous only in the comic sense of the word.) Then the hero is shown at his desk to save the day: “The leadership of this nation has a clear and immediate challenge to go to work effectively and go to work immediately,” Goldwater intones, “to restore law and order in the land.” Only it looks like the hero is reading these heartfelt words off cue cards.

Walton's work was everything this was not. He gave his staff a motto: “No pale pastels.” The RNC, leery of charges of racism, used white actors in those “riot” shots. Walton's rioters were not white. They were not actors. They were Harlemites caught in the act of bashing windows and attacking policemen by news photographers during the uprising in July. Bill Bernbach might have the bomb, but Rus Walton had the backlash. The brochures pressed into hands at the entrance to Goldwater rallies were propaganda masterpieces: “Lyndon Johnson's Administration Is Too Busy Protecting Itself to Protect You,” one began. It showed a grocery store reduced to rubble, guarded by police in helmets. (Caption: “Johnson's Administration has whitewashed the Bobby Baker hearings. It has ordered security investigation records burned.”) The photo below showed two jet-black Negroes, blurred by action, obscured by night—the eye was immediately drawn to the dead center of the image, where a set of bared teeth leaped out in a composition as exquisitely arranged as a Botticelli. (The caption, “It has asked the rioters to wait until after the election,” referred misleadingly to the moratorium on demonstrations agreed to between the White House and the most timorous mainline civil rights groups.) Then the happy ending: the candidate, brow furrowed worriedly, hand on chin, glasses removed. “He will work with Federal, State, and Local authorities to restore law and order in the streets, protect your home, your family, your job—and bring moral leadership back to the White House.” A Goldwater quote subtly reminded readers what to blame—the Civil Rights Act signed two weeks before the riots began. “This is the time to attend to the liberties of all,” it read. “The general welfare must be considered now, not just the special appeals for special welfare.”

Another pictured Goldwater in worried repose beside the words “Are you safe on the streets? What about your wife? Your kids? Your property? What about after dark? Why should we have to be afraid? This is America!” The
composition suggested these were Goldwater's words. They weren't. They were things Walton and White would
want
him to say.

A poster asked: “Are you the Forgotten American?” (This evoked the brilliant appeal Goldwater had coined, then inexplicably dropped, in 1961.)

“Government officials make millions while in public service. They let crime run riot in the streets....

“They sell out Cuba and let your boys die in Vietnam.” (Kitchel and Baroody rejected every concept for TV commercials on Vietnam that the advertising agency offered.)

“And you—what happens to you? You pay for it: Your Sons. Your Money. Your Shame. Of course they remember you. At tax time. 30% of your income. Enough's enough!

“It's time for a new beginning.”

Rus Walton explained his modus operandi at a meeting the afternoon before
Conversation at Gettysburg
provided a lesson in how not to sell a presidential candidate. “We want to just make them mad, make their stomach turn,” he said, “take this latent anger and concern which now exists, build it up, and subtly turn and focus it”—focus it against the ruthless man in the White House from which all these evils had to be shown to flow.

But Johnson was more ruthless than Rus Walton knew. Unbeknownst to anyone, the meeting's shorthand reporter was an agent for the White House's Anti-Campaign. The transcript of the meeting passed to the press shortly afterward.

I
t was said that the presidential race only really got interesting after the World Series was out of the way. And so it was in 1964. On Thursday afternoon, October 15, the St. Louis Cardinals dispatched the New York Yankees in the seventh game. Things got plenty interesting after that.

Lyndon Johnson had just covered ten thousand miles in seven days. On October 11, a Sunday, it was Phoenix. (“I had to go to church somewhere,” he said, with a straight face, in the face of criticism for making a seven-hundred-mile detour from the LBJ Ranch to campaign on the Lord's day, “and Lady Bird heard they've got a mighty fine preacher at the First Presbyterian Church here”; the congregation also happened to include the Democratic contender for Goldwater's Senate seat.) The next day it was Reno, Helena, and Denver. On October 13 it was Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. Then, on October 14, New York. Each stop meant half a dozen speeches at least: there was the scheduled one, and then the impromptu ones when he ordered his motorcade to lurch to a halt—seven times on the way in from the Phoenix airport, ten times on the way out. “Get in your car and come on down to the speakin‘,” he would bark, just like he was running for Congress back in the Hill Country. “You don't have to dress. Just bring your children and dogs, anything you have with you! ... We're gonna have a hot time in the old town tonight! ... You take care of me in November, and I'll take care of you for the next four years! ... Vote to save your Social Security from going down the drain. Vote to keep a prudent hand which will not mash the nuclear button. I want you all to come to my inauguration next January!” Once at the speakin', he would ramble for upwards of an hour like a country preacher. The people went wild. The press went wild. “To describe this week's work ... as ‘effective campaigning' is like calling Hurricane Hilda ‘a bit of a blow,' ” David Broder of the Star wrote. “He is no longer John Kennedy's successor. He is a towering political figure, with a
constituency that is his, and his alone.” “Jackson in a jetliner,” concurred Scotty Reston of the
New York Times,
who had previously dismissed support for Johnson as the product of an electorate “not so much excited about Johnson as they are afraid of Goldwater.” This was a triumph.

But now, Jackson-in-a-jetliner was tired. He slumped in the Presidential Suite on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on the afternoon of October 14, wasted, summoning energy for an appearance at the Al Smith Dinner, the annual New York fund-raiser presided over by the senior prelate of the Catholic hierarchy. He told his handlers he was too hoarse to speak. They knew enough to ignore him. If you could bottle the miracles doing politics worked for Lyndon Johnson's constitution, you'd be an overnight millionaire.

The phone rang. It was Abe Fortas. What he told Johnson was about as shocking as hearing that his daughter was a KGB spy. Walter Jenkins had been arrested in a YMCA basement restroom on a “morals” charge. And the news might hit the wires at any minute.

 

It had happened exactly seven nights earlier. Jenkins and an old man were arrested by D.C. policemen after being spied in mid-assignation from an adjacent shower through a convenient peephole police had drilled to expedite the operation. Jenkins paid his $50 fine and went back to work. (“It was Mr. Jenkins' custom to work far into the night,” the subsequent FBI report would state, “as well as on weekends.”) He returned to the White House the next morning, listening dazedly as the President berated him from Detroit: “Didn't I tell you I wanted every worker to have a button or an LBJ hat or sticker?” No one noticed anything different. Walter Jenkins always looked harrowed.

A week passed quietly. Then, on the morning of the October 14, the assistant managing editor of the
Star
called Jenkins at the White House to confirm a story. Jenkins wasn't in yet. His startled secretary took the call. She called him at home, expecting soothing words:
“Of course it must be some big mistake, a confusion of identity
.” And as if in a dream, she heard just the opposite. She went weak in the knees. Jenkins dragged himself to Abe Fortas's doorstep, drunk and incoherent, babbling that he didn't want to go on living. Fortas checked him into a hospital; then he summoned Clark Clifford, and the two traveled all over town to beg editors to sit on the story—Stations of the Cross to save Lyndon Johnson's presidential campaign. Many editors learned about the story from them.