Before the Storm (19 page)

When Goldwater arrived back at the Blackstone that night he was besieged once again by his would-be drafters as they straggled back from the Stockyards. He delivered an ultimatum: “All right. You go out and get those delegates you say are willing to vote for me. I'll sit in this room all night. You bring them in. I want them to sign a paper saying they'll vote for me.”

He sat up all night, perhaps sipping his favorite drink, Old Crow whiskey on the rocks, to calm his nerves. Not a single delegate came. It was Nixon's show now. Wednesday morning Goldwater sent word to the Arizona delegation that he did not want his name to be placed in nomination. Then he went to the South Carolina delegation to tell them the same thing. Roger Milliken stood up. “We were instructed by our state convention to vote this delegation for Senator Goldwater,” he said, “and that's what we intend to do.” He said that his delegates would claim the floor to put his name in nomination whether he liked it or not.

Goldwater retreated to confer with friends. “You aren't going to let these country bumpkins push you into this, are you?” Steve Shadegg asked him. That's just what Goldwater wanted to do—for he had an idea. Arizona would nominate Goldwater, and the requisite seconding speeches would be given. Then Goldwater would give a speech withdrawing his name from contention. He would give everyone a piece of his mind—on national TV.

As an aide got to work drafting the speech, Goldwater repaired to the Youth for Goldwater for Vice President office at the Pick-Congress Hotel to pay his respects. They seemed to him one of the only bright spots in an exceptionally annoying convention—a hell of a lot more practical in their sensible vice-presidential talk than the South Carolinians. “Turn your group into a permanent organization of young conservatives,” he advised. “The man is not important. The principles you espouse are. Do this, and I shall support you in any way I can.”

 

Nixon's acceptance speech Thursday night made Manion cringe: promising “plenty and hope to the unfortunates of the earth,” explaining, “it may be just
as essential to the national interest to build a dam in India as in California.” The dean didn't want the federal government building dams in India or in California. For conservatives, the convention had ended the night before, when pointy-eared Paul Fannin had stepped up to the podium to place Goldwater's name in nomination for President of the United States.

There had followed a demonstration—the traditional ostentatious ritual display of emotion that followed the nomination of every candidate at a political convention. The Goldwater ranks had swelled far beyond what troops Croll, Caddy, Shorey, and Manion had come to Chicago with: now his supporters included disgruntled platform drafters, most of the Southern delegations, old Taftites who thought they had come to Chicago to rubber-stamp decisions made from on high—perhaps even stragglers who joined the cause after devouring
Conscience of a Conservative
up in their hotel rooms. It was their last chance to assure they would not be ignored, to show them all—Goldwater's enemies as much as Goldwater—that they were ready for war.

The intensity even amazed themselves.

Nixon's demonstration later in the evening would include exploding rockets, a sing-along, costumed brigades. Goldwater's, planned on a few hours' notice (and, in some parts of the convention hall—like the Illinois delegation, where Phyllis Schlafly simply barked to the burly guy next to her to hoist their state's standard and fall in—not planned at all) just had guts. For three minutes they marched around the hall, accompanied by the strains of “Dixie” played by the convention orchestra. The college kids—who had battled security to convince the guards that their fake credentials were real—were the loudest. In the family box, Goldwater's wife and daughters wept. It began to look like an insurgency. At the podium, movie star George Murphy, Nixon's stage manager, leaned into Goldwater's ear: “We're running overtime. This must be stopped.” Ushers herded the marchers out the door—into the parking lot. Still the noise did not stop. It swelled. It continued for eleven minutes. Goldwater raised his hands for silence. Nothing happened. He couldn't control them.

Finally the cheers died down. Conservatives were shaking with anticipation : perhaps Goldwater would stampede the convention. From the spectator gallery a lone voice yelled, “God bless you, Barry.” The cheering reignited.

“Thank you,” he began. The cheering spluttered.

“Mr. Chairman, delegates to the convention, and fellow Republicans: I respectfully ask the chairman to withdraw my name from nomination.”

The cry of
“No!!!”
that roared back was oceanic. Nixon deputies secretly rooting for Goldwater in their command trailer zoomed their closed-circuit TV camera in on his face: he was clearly moved.

“Please,” he implored.

“I release my delegation from their pledge to me, and while I am not a delegate, I would suggest that they give these votes to Richard Nixon.”

Now his voice was raised, the right corner of his mouth curled slightly above the left, his eyes narrowed; he was a stern father working over a recalcitrant child.

Goldwater was falling in behind the party establishment. It was all Brent Bozell could do to turn to the person next to him and mouth, “That son of a bitch.”

T
o much of the nation, January 20, 1961, felt like a rebirth. It certainly did to most of the nation's press corps. They would record how Washington, captured once again from the stolid stand-pat Republicans, crackled back to life at the arrival of John F. Kennedy's brash young band of brothers, the day breaking cold and clear, the man, coatless and hatless in the stinging wind, still aglow from the birth of his second child.

The joy of new life, of idealism, the promise of youth: this is how the day would be remembered. But another set of symbols could have been mined from these same events—omens of just how frightening the year 1961 would turn out to be.

The night before the inaugural a black-tied multitude fought its way through one of the biggest snowfalls in Washington history to an extravagant gala at the D.C. Armory, headlined by Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack. The Rat Pack, that is, minus Sammy Davis Jr. Since he was about to marry a statuesque blonde, he was politely but firmly disinvited at the last minute so as not to risk Kennedy's Southern support. Inaugural morning, after uniformed soldiers had swept the vicinity with flamethrowers to clear the snow, Richard Cardinal
Cushing of Boston began offering the invocation, then halted with a start: blue smoke, then flames, were issuing from his lectern from a short-circuit in the wiring. The nation's beloved old poet, Robert Frost, reading the first stanza of the inaugural poem he had just composed (“Summoning artists to participate / In the august occasions of the state / Seems something artists ought to celebrate”), stopped and looked away helplessly—blinded by the sun.

Three days earlier Americans had tuned in to their TVs for a bit of comforting sentimentality from their warm and wise national grandfather. They witnessed instead a jeremiad. President Eisenhower's boyish Midwestem-by-way-of-Southern voice darkened with gravity as he began his farewell address. He reminded his listeners of the century's great wars (“holocausts,” he called them), of the “indefinite duration” of the Cold War.

Then, with the obliqueness of a difficult truth struggling for expression, he spoke of the psychic consequence of this indefiniteness—“a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” He warned, “Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”

Then he broached another subject: “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” The admission was startling: “we annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.” He called it a “military-industrial complex,” and said it had “grave implications” for “the very structure of our society.... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” The consequences of permanent war was a wartime mentality. America “must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate.”

Must never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came eleven times. In contrast, Kennedy's rhetoric on January 20 was a cascade of permissions: the word “let” rang out fourteen times. It was as if, liberated from the daily tasks of administration, stepping back to survey the new America the Cold War had made, Eisenhower recognized an Icarus, a Tower of Babel, a fallible nation, angrier than it knew.

His speech was shrugged off as a puzzlement. Evidence supporting its wisdom piled up that week. But because America was seized by a wartime mentality, much of that evidence was secret. The Central Intelligence Agency was training Cuban exiles deep in the Guatemalan bush for an invasion to overthrow the Castro government; on January 17 the files were closed on a completed CIA mission in which rebels led by a military officer named Joseph Mobutu hunted down and killed the Republic of the Congo's Soviet-leaning prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, on the country's 203rd day of independence.
The next day Adlai Stevenson denounced the coup at the UN. And the Kremlin officially declared “the only way to bring imperialism to heel” was through the “sacred struggle of colonial peoples, wars of colonial liberation.” On January 19, the American nuclear program suffered its thirteenth “broken arrow” when a B-52 exploded in midair in Utah, luckily without any of the missiles armed; the fourteenth was ten days later when a B-52 flying a routine Strategic Air Command training mission out of Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base crashed near a North Carolina farm. The aircraft's two nuclear bombs jettisoned, and five of their six safety mechanisms were unlatched by the fall.

 

One day at an auditorium at Rutgers University in New Jersey a standing-room-only crowd of six hundred students back from Christmas break engaged in the kind of debate that had never taken place in the course of the presidential race that had just passed—sanguinary ideological combat, students facing off on radically opposed visions of what was moral and what was not, arguing politics as if their lives depended on it.