Before the Storm (49 page)

As Senate majority leader in the 1950s, he concentrated his prodigious energy into dissolving any visible signs of discord—and, some said, of deliberation—in the world's greatest deliberative body. Exploiting party leaders' sovereign power to “motion up” bills for consideration, Johnson kept the number of contested roll calls in the Eighty-fourth Congress under a dozen. Real conflict was taken care of behind the scenes: substituting this favor for that, disbursing from the majority leader's overflowing store of liberalities,
compromising.
A secret to Johnson's success was known around the Capitol as “The Treatment”: he planted his gunboat-feet straight in front of your toes, grabbed at your lapel, breathed down on you with hot Texas breath the message that your one vote was what stood between hell everlasting and paradise on earth (or at least between your biggest donor and a federal paving contract). Wheeling and dealing, for him, was nearly the sum of politics. Ideologues baffled him. Under Johnson, the Senate was a machine for getting things done and bringing people together, not for making lots of partisan noise. So, Lyndon Johnson was determined, would be his presidency.

John F. Kennedy's complicated legacy—soaring liberal rhetoric competing
with stalled legislative initiatives, stirring preachments of peace with apocalyptic Cold War bellicosity—was dissolving in a warm bath of nostalgia. Jacqueline Kennedy gave her first post-assassination interview to Teddy White, whose
The Making of the President 1960
had clearly preferred JFK to Nixon. She regaled him with tales of how she and Jack used to play their favorite song on an old record player:

And so the next article Teddy White filed for
Life,
after his dark speculation that racial holocaust was around the corner, retroactively crowned a king who was supposed to have presided over a golden age. Within the month, the JFK fifty-cent coin was approved, New York's Idlewild Field was renamed for him, and three or four Kennedy books were on the best-seller list. Lyndon Johnson was too practical a politician not to spot an opportunity.

“All that I have I would have gladly given not to be standing here today,” he began his televised speech to a joint session of Congress two days after the funeral. “On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‘in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.
But,'
he said,
‘let us begin.'
” The President leaned forward, sticking out his neck for emphasis, as was his wont, as if pecking the audience like a chicken, his Southern drawl smoothed for the occasion. “Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans,
let us continue!”

Decisive legislative action would redeem the martyr. Johnson called for expeditious passage of the historic civil rights bill, the education bill, bills for employing youth, developing impoverished areas—passage “with the utmost thrift and frugality.”

“This does not mean that we will not meet our unfilled needs or that we will not honor our commitments,” he said.
“We will do both.”

Both:
it was shaping up as the one-word motto of the new Administration. The hottest political book of 1963—President Kennedy studied it—had been James MacGregor Burns's
The Deadlock of Democracy.
It decried the impossibility of passing substantive new laws because of built-in structural impasses between the legislative and executive branches. Under Johnson the supposed deadlock promptly yielded. He played Congress like a 535-stop church organ.
He was the first President to come from the inner circle of the Senate, the first Southerner since Zachary Taylor, a drinking buddy of the Dixiecrats who controlled Congress through their committee chairmanships. Shortly before his death, Kennedy had sought to cement goodwill from the test-ban treaty by letting the Soviet Union buy U.S. wheat on credit. There was no issue more controversial than foreign aid to Communists. Calling the House into emergency session on Christmas Eve—breaking his own call for a one-month political moratorium—Johnson made controversy melt: House members, dozens returning from home districts to make the vote, answered their President's call to honor the memory of John F. Kennedy by approving the sale. In turn Johnson gave conservatives a relatively frugal $97 billion budget (until they got it below a hundred, he had warned his economic advisers, they “wouldn't pee a drop”)—and began with a symbolic effort to cut costs in the White House, most conspicuously by turning off lights in empty rooms. LBJ, Barry Goldwater joked cuttingly, now stood for “Light Bulb Johnson.”

Another thing was evident those first few weeks of the Johnson presidency. Two great humiliations had scarred this vain man, this nurser of grievances. The first had come in 1948, when he “won” his Senate seat by 87 votes—the difference coming in a Spanish-speaking rotten borough controlled by a friendly boss. It earned him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” The second came in 1961. It was, simply, his demotion from his job as the second most powerful man in the United States to the vice presidency, a job he found so depressing—almost clinically so—that he sometimes had to be prodded out of bed in the morning. Now Johnson was President—with Kennedy's advisers, Kennedy's program, and Kennedy's cabinet (including, as attorney general, Kennedy's brother, whom Johnson detested). Johnson had not honestly won a contested election since 1937. He was haunted by feelings of illegitimacy. Before that black November evening in 1963 was over, he realized when he might redeem them both: a November day in 1964. His first calls for guidance were to General Eisenhower and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg. The next was to a man of considerably less stature: the DNC's chief fund-raiser, Richard Maguire. “You be giving some thought to what needs to be done,” the President told him, “and we'll get together in the next day or two.”

 

In Republican circles that fancied themselves polite, the conclusion was drawn quietly. The press, less courtly, didn't let a decent interval pass: Lee Harvey Oswald had cut down Barry Goldwater's chances as surely as he had John Kennedy's life. Dixie would never reject one of their own for President in the voting booth. And without a member of the Eastern Establishment as his opponent,
it was thought, Goldwater lost much of his appeal. No, said the
Herald Tribune's
Robert Novak, the new front-runner would have to be “a proper Republican candidate”—a moderate who could win the Big Six. Gallup confirmed the trend: Goldwater's approval rating since the assassination was down sixteen points. And so, one by one, proper—moderate—Republicans began floating to the fore.

On December 8, President Johnson's first morning waking up in the White House, the
New York Times's
lead story claimed—no sources, no quotes—that Dwight Eisenhower, after satisfying himself that he bore no responsibility in the Diem assassination, endorsed Henry Cabot Lodge, America's ambassador to Vietnam, for President. No matter that Lodge was reported farther down the column to have rejected the idea outright—or that farther down still, an AP dispatch had Eisenhower denying from his favorite golf course in Georgia that he had spoken to Lodge about the presidency in the first place. The idea had been planted.

It wasn't a few days before the papers had Richard Nixon hustling down to Gettysburg to call on the General. Insiders saw it coming. Shortly before the assassination, Nixon, deciding he was out of the running, was on the verge of signing a contract to publish a chronicle of the 1964 election. After the assassination, he broke the deal and began campaigning for party elder statesman: setting up magazine articles, speaking tours, and trips abroad on “official” duties for his law firm. Rumors were he wanted to swoop down to dutifully accept the prize after maneuvering for a convention deadlock. In Gallup's first December sounding of which candidate Republicans preferred for the nomination, Nixon scored highest, with 29 percent. (Before, it had been Goldwater, with well over half.) The
Washington Post's
Herblock, long a Nixon bête noire, drew Goldwater and Rockefeller unsuspectingly striding forth as Nixon waited for them to stumble into twin graves he had dug in their path.

Goldwater was digging his own grave. “I'm still wishing something would happen to get me out of all this,” he told
Time
in an interview that ran in the issue dated November 22, 1963. The assassination, and a bone injury in his right heel that left him in searing pain, had sent him into a tailspin of depression, to which he was prone; within days he told Denny Kitchel to spread the word that he would not run. He wrote people like the editor of
Human Events
to implore them to stop watering the grass roots. Goldwater had relished the idea of running against JFK, whom he found an honorable man. He hated the idea of running against LBJ—whom he considered a ruthless opportunist. When their names had begun to show up together as convenient, charismatic bookends for lazy reporters seeking to frame the political scene, Goldwater and
Kennedy had started taking pleasure in displaying their mutual affection in public, and had talked idly about sharing a campaign plane and debating at every campaign stop, Lincoln-and-Douglas-style. (Goldwater seemed not to notice that Kennedy was ruthless, too; Goldwater always had trouble thinking anything but the best of his friends.)

He liked his freedom: flying himself to speeches, maybe dropping in at an Air Force base somewhere and begging a turn at the controls of the latest model, overflying Navajo country, poking around on his ham rig, listening to Dixieland jazz records full blast and then fussing with his trombone, or cranking up the air-conditioning full blast, building a roaring fire in his library, and settling in with a good Western or
Indian Art of the Americas.
He liked rocketing around Washington in his two-seat Thunderbird, the dashboard built to look like a jet cockpit, or ducking down to the Capitol's basement machine shop to pull some gadget apart and put it back together. Twice a year he liked flying to Michigan to buy the new Heathkit electric hobby kits the day they came off the line.

And he was scared. He had a favorite Western maxim: A good man knows the length of his rope. “Doggone it,” he told the
Chicago Tribune,
“I'm not even sure that I've got the brains to be President of the United States.” He worried whether he had the courage to do what he said he wanted to do in the White House. And what if lightning struck and he won? What would he be then but master of the world's most Byzantine bureaucracy?

Any day now, Clif White feared, Goldwater might file that dreaded Sherman statement: he would not run if nominated, would not serve if elected. And White had to decide whether to continue.

 

The answer came with the mail. In the seven days following the assassination, Draft Goldwater pulled in the same $25,000 in donations they did just about every week. They decided to do what they always did: act like it didn't matter what Barry Goldwater did or didn't say. Telegrams urging Goldwater to run were pouring in from young conservatives who were unaware that the office had no official connection to the senator; now Carol Bauman and Lee Edwards began to tap YAF's mailing lists to coordinate a deluge. The next week White was off to New Mexico, to continue his lonely tour of party district conventions: wandering the ballroom, working the phones, making sure his deputy's hand-picked candidates had the votes they needed and knew their orders to the letter. He would do just what his President counseled: he would continue.

He had to pretend it didn't matter that the previous fall, Denison Kitchel had moved to Washington—into Goldwater's building—to take over contingency plans for the possible presidential bid. White was singularly unimpressed
by this short, introverted man whose manner was as bristly as his flat-top haircut. It was said that no one was better at beating a union organizing drive. Could anyone be worse at organizing a political campaign? When Kitchel asked him how national conventions worked, White had to pitch the explanation at a kindergarten level.

At first there was just Kitchel and a secretary. Then Dick Kleindienst began working in the field. Then came an administrative assistant, Dean Burch, a Tucson lawyer and former Goldwater Senate staffer. None had a day's experience in national elections. The rumor around Washington was that Burch had never crossed the Mississippi before he went to work for Goldwater at the age of twenty-eight. “A bunch of cowboys,” they called themselves; proud, almost, of what they didn't know. They were dubbed the “Arizona Mafia.” They socialized mostly with the senator—cursing like sailors in Navajo, sharing inscrutable Southwestern maxims about breaking one's pick and the length of one's rope—and they seemed uncomfortable around anyone else. Burch wore dark suits and black ties and was perennially asked if he was heading to a funeral. “I always wear black ties,” he would reply serenely. “I like them.”

White had even more reason to fear because the previous fall dark, stout, suave William J. Baroody, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute “think tank,” had begun offloading the cream of his associates to Kitchel's staff: Edward McCabe, Eisenhower's old congressional liaison, became director of research; Karl Hess, AEI's director of special projects, a Buddha-like man whom an admiring Goldwater called “Shakespeare,” wrote speeches; Austrian émigré Robert Strausz-Hupé, a hard-line Cold War theorist, became foreign policy consultant; Chuck Lichenstein, a Yale teacher and ex-Nixon staffer, became a factotum. Baroody was exploiting the vacuum of political experience in Goldwater's new inner circle to become its brain.