Before the Storm (97 page)

Walter Knott called back with a threat that Bob Mardian, Ralph Cordiner, and Wirt Yerger did not have at their disposal: the power of the purse. Baroody could run another show if he wanted to, but the RNC would have to pay for it themselves. They wouldn't get a penny from TV for Goldwater-Miller.

Baroody chose the same course Clif White had when faced with fanatics questioning his authority: he pulled out the big gun. Two days before the commercial was scheduled to show, Goldwater was persuaded to ring up Reagan. They were “uneasy” and “uncomfortable” with the bit about Social Security, he said; “some advisors” wanted to show
Conversation at Gettysburg
instead, and what did he think? Reagan could see Goldwater's heart wasn't behind his words. He pulled out a big gun of his own: his charm. “Barry,” he said, “I've been making the speech all over the state for quite a while and I have to tell you, it's been very well received, including whatever remarks I've made about Social Security.” Had he seen the film? Goldwater acknowledged that he hadn't. “They've got a tape here, so I'll run it and call you back,” Goldwater promised. Reagan promised that his people would abide by Goldwater's decision.

Goldwater retreated to listen to Reagan's words on audiotape. “What the hell's wrong with that?” he asked Kitchel bluntly. He called Reagan back with the go-ahead. Eye Street had finally been hijacked.

A day passed. The afternoon of the broadcast, with the listings already in the papers (many of them spelling this middlingly famous figure's name “Regan”), Baroody pleaded with Knott one more time. Knott politely, firmly, said that the Californians' minds were made up. And that was that.

And so, the Tuesday before Election Day, at 8:30 p.m., this was what America saw: A nondescript title card, “TV for Goldwater-Miller.” A voice-over: “Ladies and gentlemen, we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan.” There was a convention-style dais draped with red, white, and blue bunting; Goldwater posters on the walls of a hall at USC converted into a soundstage; an expectant crowd sitting in neat rows, seeded, as props, with the kind of hastily lettered signs you'd see at a “real” campaign rally; Goldwater Girls in white cowboy hats (partisans, recruited as extras). Track had been laid down for a dolly camera—one of several cameras. The extras received their instructions; action was called. Ronald Reagan hit his mark. And it was clear within five seconds that this was like no other Goldwater TV show before. Those had lost nothing in effect when they were simulcast on radio. Not so this. As Reagan began to speak, the camera dolly swooped dramatically overhead, slowly fixing on the man with the sturdy torso and the gleaming hair at the dais, eyes locked on yours like some smiling, gentler version of the prophet Jeremiah.It was hard not to pay attention.

It was harder still when Ronald Reagan started in on The Speech. He delivered lines like punches: “Thirty-seven cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share”; “We haven't balanced our budget in twenty-eight out of the last thirty-four years”; “Our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts in the world”; “The dollar in 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.”

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly used an
example.
He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan
showed
you. How the government was cheating you: the foreign aid money that bought Haile Selassie a yacht, Greek undertakers dress suits, Kenyan government officials extra wives, and “a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity”; about the Kansas county the Area Redevelopment Agency declared a depressed area even though it boasted “two hundred oil wells.” (“When the government tells you you are depressed,” he deadpanned, “lie down and be depressed!” That was it with Goldwater: no jokes.) How federal agents could “invade a man's property without a warrant” and “impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial”—even, he said, auctioning off the farm of a Chico County, Arkansas, man who overplanted his federal rice allotment.

The stories went by faster than thought, like a seduction: “Now we are told
that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year.... We are spending $45 billion on welfare ... do a little arithmetic and you will find that if we divided $45 billion equally among those 9 million poor families we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year.” (In fact, of that $45 billion, only a small fraction went to the poor; the rest went to pay for programs such as Social Security and veterans' hospitals.) The camera dollied back over the crowd as they nodded, spellbound, their hand-lettered Goldwater signs resting uselessly in their laps as if they had forgotten about them altogether. Then the focus moved in on his torso, tightening so you could read the indignation on his face when he spoke of the three-year-old $1.5 million building that had been demolished in Cleveland “to make way for what government officials call a ‘more compatible use of land.' ” Then back to the torso as he stretched himself toward you, his passion reaching a peak: “Shouldn't we expect the government to read the score to us once in a while?!” The images danced with the words: straight-on shots intercut with profiles, then widening to take in the applauding crowd, then closing in on the radiant, intent faces as the pace of his examples quickened; then back to a close-up of Reagan so you could read the warmth in his face as he defended the honor of his friend Barry Goldwater, who—did you know?—had taken time out to sit with a dying friend in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Reagan's statements on Social Security were patient, measured, confident. Goldwater's were fragmented and defensive when he dared broach the subject again at all, let alone utter the dread word “voluntary.” The liberals want you to “confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves,” Reagan said. But France's Medicare program was now flat bankrupt—“They've come to the end of the road.” He made you understand how Social Security taxes didn't
really
go into Social Security benefits, but into the general budget instead, and that if a fellow invested his Social Security contribution in the open market he could retire ten years earlier. And suddenly Barry Goldwater didn't seem so irresponsible after all. The language had the sweep of poetry: “I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down: Up to man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order; or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.” He said, “We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.” You might think that that sounded fine if it weren't for the fact that, as Lyndon Johnson noted, the nation was at a peace that could only be maintained by meeting the Communists halfway. Then you began reconsidering. “I wonder who among us would like to
approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in Vietnam,” Reagan said, “and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely.” Goldwater never talked about wives and mothers; mostly he stuck to military hardware and deprecations of “Yo-Yo” McNamara, or Eisenhower's successful use of brinkmanship in Lebanon and the Formosa Strait—hardly victories to stir the blood.

Most of General Electric's employees were Democrats, just as most of the country was. They weren't even, necessarily, newspaper readers. Communicating with them had become Ronald Reagan's passion and his craft. He constructed a bond between “you and I” in every speech, as in: “Any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals.” (Everyone had questioned a scheme of the do-gooders at one point or another. And who wanted to be accused of being against humanitarianism?) And there was a “them” in every speech: condescending do-gooders; numskull bureaucrats; people like the woman whose husband made $250 a month but who asked for a divorce when she discovered she could make $330 on Aid to Dependent Children.

These were rhetorical techniques Reagan had learned from his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sitting by the radio as a young adult. In his 1936 convention acceptance speech, one of Reagan's favorites, Roosevelt attacked a “them” he labeled “economic royalists”: a “small group [who] had concentrated into their own hands almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives.” “Against economic tyranny such as this,” he went on, “the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government.” ... “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference,” FDR said, before launching into his final lyrical flight: “This is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected.
This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
”

Twenty-eight years later, speaking over the nation's airwaves himself, Ronald Reagan remembered those words. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” he intoned in the closing peroration of the show, which was called
A Time for Choosing:

The cheers went up and the standards were raised to the sky. But since only the backs of the audience members could be seen, an entranced mind could slip:
perhaps those signs weren't really for Barry Goldwater at all.
It was, David Broder and Steve Hess would write, “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the ‘Cross of Gold' speech.”

 

On the coffee table of the kind of sophisticate who had no interest in tuning into the rantings of yet one more irrelevant right-wing crank that night, there might have sat the November issues of
Playboy
and
Esquire. Playboy
had an interview with George Wallace, who, asked if his campaign would soon be forgotten, replied, “That may be the case as far as I'm concerned. But the attitude of millions of people toward the trends in the country will not be forgotten.”
Esquire,
meanwhile, had two articles on the Republicans: Norman Mailer on Barry Goldwater and the July convention (“The iron power of the iron people who had pushed him forth—as echoed in the iron of the Pinkertons on the 14th and 15th Floor—now pushed forth over the nation an iron regime with totalitarianism seizing the TV in every frozen dinner”), and Rowland Evans and Robert Novak on the journey that had brought Richard Nixon to the pitiable irrelevancy in which he now found himself. “Each of his carefully calculated moves in 1964,” they wrote, “was followed only by his own further political destruction.” The piece was illustrated by a drawing of a smiling, unsuspecting Nixon being taken down by a wrecking ball. The epigram was from the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “Look in my face: my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-More, Too-late, Farewell.” Evans and Novak were the savviest judges of political horseflesh in Washington. They were also glorified gossips, perforce only as good as their sources, and they didn't burn bridges lightly. When they delivered a body blow like this, you could be sure the horse they were flogging was as good as dead.

In that case Richard Nixon was one mighty busy corpse.

The RNC put Nixon on TV live from Cincinnati the day after the Reagan speech. No jump cuts, no dolly shots, no Cross of Gold: just that familiar rumble, the plodding, algebraic exposition of points A, B, and C; lots on the glories ushered in by eight years of Republican rule from 1953 to 1960; much more on those embarrassments Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey—and, in the
last paragraph, a passing mention of the man on whose behalf he spoke. Two nights earlier, before 18,000 screaming conservatives at Madison Square Garden, Nixon had taken a full six minutes and thirty-two seconds to introduce Goldwater. Two days before that he had spoken for Goldwater in Watertown, South Dakota, and Fargo, North Dakota. The day before that it had been Houston and Roswell, New Mexico. October 22, 21, 20, and 19 had brought him to Tulsa, Denver, and Casper; Lincoln, Nebraska, and Pratt, Kansas; Enid, Oklahoma, and Augusta and Presque Isle, Maine; and Manchester, Hartford, Syracuse, and Stamford. He was on his way to deliver 156 speeches for the ticket in thirty-six states. It was his new master plan.

It had begun the week after the convention, with a call to the farmhouse in Gettysburg. Nixon convinced Eisenhower to meet with Goldwater, to get to know him better, to see if he couldn't find it in his heart to see honor in the man. Nixon prepared the way by initiating a legalistic little open exchange of letters: “Since our convention, I have received several inquiries as to the intended meaning of two sentences in your acceptance speech,” he began; Goldwater responded, “If I were to paraphrase the two sentences in question in the context in which I uttered them I would do it by saying that whole-hearted devotion to liberty is unassailable and that half-hearted devotion to justice is indefensible.” Eisenhower was satisfied, Nixon was satisfied. So Nixon arranged a grand parley of Republicans at the Hershey Hotel in Pennsylvania for the middle of August—Goldwater and Miller, Rockefeller and Scranton, Thruston Morton and Richard Nixon, Dean Burch and Charles Percy, governor upon congressman upon senator, all histrionically declaiming on the unshakable unity of their Grand Old Party, then emerging for a press conference in which all wounds were declared healed. It was Nixon's little test. Goldwater passed. Now Nixon knew he could back him and survive.