Before the Storm (95 page)

Then, at four that afternoon, they gave Lyndon Johnson the news. Those who were present were quite amazed. After the initial shock, the President
snapped out of his stupor, his voice now betraying not an ounce of emotion. He was doing politics. He had sprung back to life.

“You don't foresee that you can keep a lid on this, can you?” he asked Fortas. (No way.) Fortas was ordered to remove “certain confidential material” from Jenkins's office. (Perhaps it included the results of an investigation Jenkins had made on his boss's behalf of the sexual peccadilloes of their accuser in the Baker case.) And so, as two thousand well-heeled Democrats dressed for dinner (many in front of the TV, cheering the Yanks' Joe Pepitone as he blasted the grand slam that brought the Series even at three games apiece), the waiting game began. It ended at 8:02. The RNC had gotten hold of the story and released a statement: “The White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security.” At that, United Press ran with what it knew.

Within the hour another window of vulnerability would open up—a bay window. At 9 p.m., the diners far below eagerly awaited the evening's final speaker; that speaker, meanwhile, was in his suite, fretting that the diners would greet him as a laughingstock and the Catholic hierarchs at the head table as auxiliaries to wickedness, when another story came over the wire: Jenkins had been arrested for the same crime in 1959. At this, Johnson finally lost his cool. “Why didn't Walter tell you about it this morning?” he snapped at Fortas. This new revelation could do more damage as than the previous one.

It was a complex of the times. “The sexual pervert's ... lack of emotional stability,” as a government report put it, “and weakness of moral fiber make him susceptible to the blandishments of foreign agents.” In 1953 Eisenhower signed an executive order demanding homosexuals be fired not just from all federal jobs but from all companies with federal contractors—one-fifth of the U.S. workforce. Thus the meaning of the 1959 arrest. Already official Washington was in the process of writing off the Jenkins news as a kind of temporary insanity, a product of nervous exhaustion. “I just know that he must have been a very tired—had to have been very tired—a very tired man,” muttered one White House official. The beloved Kansas columnist William White called the incident “a case of combat fatigue as surely as any man ever suffered it in battle”—almost to be expected, went the implication, when the enemy is one so savage as Barry Goldwater. Two arrests changed the equation. Perhaps there had been three, or a dozen, and perhaps there had been dozens of other sordid assignations that had escaped the notice of the D.C. constabulary. Perhaps this wasn't a nervous breakdown but full-fledged mental illness. Had Lyndon Johnson knowingly brought a security risk into the White House, into cabinet meetings, into gatherings of the National Security Council? Had Lyndon Johnson done so
un
knowingly? So who knew how many perverts and Communists the
executive mansion might be crawling with? “They're going to play this security angle big,” Johnson railed at Fortas. “They're going to say, ‘Here's a man that sat in the highest councils. Who else might he have something to do with? What secrets might he give away?' ”

A conventional man in such matters, Lyndon Johnson must have wondered the same thing himself. He had no idea about this character-rotting failing of a man who scurried to and fro with Johnson's secrets close to his breast. He liked to repeat J. Edgar Hoover's boast: “You can spot one by the way they walk.” Johnson had walked beside this one for twenty-five years. The humiliation must have been crushing.

Which made his political presence of mind within moments of learning the latest news all the more astonishing. He rang up Deke DeLoach. First—small talk—he propounded his theory that the waiters at the party Jenkins attended before the arrest must have been Republican agents who put some kind of mind-control drug in his drink. “I only wish it were true,” DeLoach replied. (Perhaps he had known; he and Jenkins were close friends.) Then the President got down to business: ordering an immediate, full FBI investigation. It was a brilliant way of reminding J. Edgar Hoover that he was right there on the hook with the President. Security investigations were routine for top government officials; Jenkins had been the subject of scrutiny in 1957 upon taking an administrative job on the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. The FBI missed his secret then. And since they didn't even
check
White House staff, who knew how many perverts and Communists the executive mansion might have been crawling with—Johnson's White House, Kennedy‘s, Eisenhower's, Truman's ... ? J. Edgar Hoover had to acquit himself. He couldn't do it without exonerating Johnson in the process. Johnson didn't even have to tell DeLoach that the report had to come forth well before November 3.

The President covered one last angle: the Pentagon was contacted, and it was learned that Jenkins's service records during his years in the Capitol Hill Air Reserve Squadron bore no blemish. Johnson gloated: wasn't his commanding officer, Lieutenant General Barry M. Goldwater, on the hook with him as well?

With matters reasonably well in hand, he went downstairs. “
And if Lincoln abolished slavery, let us abolish poverty.”
(The crowd went wild.) Close to midnight, he paid a prescheduled courtesy call to Jackie Kennedy at her apartment uptown. Then he went back to work. He checked on the television reports (they had been gentle). He called Ollie Quayle down to the Waldorf from his suburban home and ordered poll numbers on the incident to be on his desk by the next afternoon. Fortas telephoned Johnson, near-whispering, “I have that material in boxes at my home.” Then—for the first time—the President
inquired after the well-being of his associate of a quarter century, although an instant later his thoughts were elsewhere: could the man with whom he was arrested have “gotten any secrets off him”? Fortas said the man was a bum who lived in an Army retirement home. Johnson ordered Mac Bundy to check nonetheless. Hubert Humphrey called to say he planned to tell the press about Jenkins's strong faith and big Catholic family. Johnson shot back with a start that the only thing the public needed to know about Walter Jenkins was that he was but one public servant out of three million.

A little less worried, the President got some sleep. But the next day came more bad news: a nasty Vietcong strike on an American air base outside Saigon. On the plane back to Washington, the President released to his press corps his first public statement on the Jenkins affair (based on Quayle's report that a gesture of sympathy would be advantageous to him). Then he dug into a steak sandwich. He arrived at an unmanageable clot of gristle. As his press corps looked on, he spit it into his hand and flung it clear across the cabin. It landed in a bowl of potato chips set out before Lady Bird and Mary McGrory of the
Washington Star.

 

The bad news for Johnson came at just the right time for Goldwater: his people were eating their own. In California, Walter Knott's TV Committee finally became so disgusted with the drivel they were underwriting that they consulted their lawyers on how they could spend the take from P.O. Box 80 as they saw fit. The second-floor higher-ups were steadfastly plotting direct appeals to the candidate. Ralph Cordiner rode along on the plane with the plan of winning Goldwater's ear for fifteen minutes to urge him to bring back Steve Shadegg, whose black arts had brought Goldwater back from deficits almost as yawning as the one they were in now. He didn't get fifteen seconds; Kitchel and Baroody kept Cordiner out of the candidate's compartment like bodyguards. Northern California field director Bob Mardian's hijacking three days later was more successful. As Mardian slipped noiselessly into the seat next to him, Goldwater, half friendly, half accusingly, said, “You've been a very busy boy, Robert.”

“I've been doing nothing more than trying to help you win this election, Senator.”

“Well, whatever it is you say you're doing,” Goldwater shot back with an edge, “I want you to stop it. It's too late. You go back and tell your crowd that I'm going to lose this election. I'm probably going to lose it real big. But I'm going to lose it my way.”

Mardian's jaw dropped to near his belt buckle.

Then the newspapers with the blessed, sordid headlines landed on Eye
Street desks. They were an elixir. Dispirited field offices sprung back to life. Freelance printers worked overtime getting bumper stickers and buttons out the door: “LBJ—LYNDON, BAKER, JENKINS: THE FAMILY THAT PLAYS TOGETHER STAYS TOGETHER”; “LBJ—LIGHT BULB JENKINS: NO WONDER HE TURNED THE LIGHTS OUT”; “ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ, BUT DON'T GO NEAR THE YMCA”; “EITHER WAY WITH LBJ.” Goldwater's snide references to the “curious crew who would run your country” were stepped up: “... companions like Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, Matt McCloskey”—the crowd would cry in anticipation: “And? And? And?”—“and other
interesting
men.” The Baroody group was even letting go of its romance with the nobility of failure—convinced that if some second Jenkins were found in the President's employ, lightning might strike. It had for Dewey in '48. It had, two times before in Arizona, for Goldwater.

The cause for optimism lasted until the newspapers landed on their desks the next day.

In the previous twenty-four hours, China had detonated its first nuclear weapon; Harold Wilson was ousted as British prime minister; and Khrushchev was removed as Soviet premier, with no heir immediately apparent. Suddenly, with the Kremlin in turmoil, warnings of imminent danger from Russia just sounded paranoid. And paradoxically, with China more dangerous than ever, the terror rubbed off on whomever should dare mention the forbidden subject of the bomb—which, of course, Goldwater continued to do. His momentum bogged down. Politics was on hold. Suddenly, the nation was interested in little more than having a steady hand on the tiller.

Johnson had canceled a campaign trip for an extended stay at the White House to parley with his foreign policy team before addressing the nation on October 18. At first the DNC bought the time. Then Johnson demanded it be given free, by all three networks—so he could speak, as Section 315 allowed, upon a nonpolitical matter of “national significance.” Thus did 63 million Americans get to hear a more somber, technical version of his stump speech. (“We will demonstrate anew that the strong can be just in the use of strength,” he said, smartly echoing and reversing Goldwater's convention address, “and the just can be strong in the defense of justice.”) Dean Burch promptly demanded equal time to reply. All three networks refused. The FCC held that the networks were within their rights. So did the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. Burch asked the Supreme Court to take jurisdiction in the decision. The Court refused. Johnson's break from campaigning to take up his role as President of the United States was shaping up as his most successful campaign leg yet.

Finally NBC relented. Burch himself, not the candidate, was given fifteen minutes free for October 19. It was a rant: “This Administration repeatedly
tried to manipulate the news,” he said, laying out the sordid details of how Johnson had commandeered all three networks the night before. Goldwater, meanwhile, taped a talk the same day, in CBS's studios in Washington. (Johnson got his revenge by kicking Goldwater out of the studio to tape another free message, on the death of ninety-year-old former president Herbert Hoover.) Burch concluded his address by announcing that Goldwater's speech would be broadcast if $125,000 was raised in time to secure the half hour. The appeal brought in $500,000. It was amazing that the finance people were able to count it all in time—140,000 donors, an average of three and a half bucks apiece. And at this, the Goldwater campaign's flagging spirit perked up once again.

That week the Goldwater campaign owned the airwaves: Burch had spoken on Monday, October 19; the next night they planned to re-air the Mormon Tabernacle address to pound Johnson's weakened “morality” flank; on Wednesday Goldwater would deliver his response to the President, a fearsome tirade on the unity of the Communist bloc and the folly and fantasy of making friends with the Soviets in the false hope that they were moving away from the harder-line Chinese. On October 22, a half-hour film on the morality question, Choice, produced by Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, would be broadcast during soap-opera hours to reach housewives. The assault would conclude Friday with “Brunch with Barry,” another play for the female vote bringing together Goldwater and an extremely gracious Margaret Chase Smith into an intense round-table with a Queens antibusing activist, a retiree, two housewives, and the widow of Captain Edward G. Shank Jr.—the downed flier whose letters home, published in U.S. News, gave lie to the fiction that America was sending only “advisers” to Vietnam.

Things looked good. So it could hardly be long before another fiasco beset them.

 

Clif White and Rus Walton were raring to force the lightning. In early October White had written Goldwater a memo outlining their plans. Goldwater, perhaps feeling a bit guilty at having dismissed White so rashly, wrote back: “Agree completely with you on morality issue. Believe it is the most effective we have come up with. Also agree with your program. Please get it launched immediately.” He didn't realize he had just become Truman giving MacArthur what the general thought was a green light to cross the Yalu.

In Los Angeles, a film printer was fulfilling a rush order for two hundred prints of
Choice
to be sent to Citizens chapters and conservative groups around the country. A press release explained that the film had been “conceived by” a group called Mothers for a Moral America, led by thirty “prominent American mothers,” with 250,000 women nationwide “taking part.” That was deceit;
Mothers for a Moral America was a front. Millions of one of Walton's hairiest brochures (“YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE AFRAID”) with a neat MMA logo slapped on (a stylized flame that looked a little like a dove) were circulated from a post office in Ann Arbor. That was to soften the ground for
Choice
's national broadcast. Then, after it had been shown on NBC, volunteers would move out with saturation showings at school auditoriums and women's clubs, and on local TV. That was what the two hundred prints were for. The idea was to crystallize another volunteer army—a real, flesh-and-blood Mothers for a Moral America, which would carry out nationwide “Mothers' Marches” shortly before the election, approaching homes with their porch lights left on for safety's sake to sell the occupants on Barry Goldwater's law-and-order message. Walton had been slaving over the editing machine with producer Robert Raisbeck for weeks, the images, sound, and music synched to the nanosecond, the emotional register as carefully orchestrated as grand opera. The film-clip research alone was monumental. (It wasn't easy to find footage of a kid giving a cop the finger in 1964.) It would be the apotheosis of Rus Walton's signature method. Which turned out to be the trouble.