Before the Storm (53 page)

But politically, the technical merits of the case were moot. Taking on the Defense Department was another impolitic dinner-party habit Goldwater failed to break. In airing the missile charge, Goldwater publicly took a side in the complex behind-the-scenes Kulturkampf roiling the Pentagon. McNamara had been plucked to serve in the Kennedy Administration after rising to the presidency of Ford as one of the Harvard-bred “whiz kids” who won back market supremacy from GM through the method of “statistical control”—counting everything that could be counted, comparing everything that could be compared, and devising coldly rational solutions to the problems thus revealed. Senior officers who had been loyal to the military through the lean years of the 1920s and the 1930s, when it was small, insular, and unpopular, now found their beloved institution overrun with “computer types,” as Strategic Air Command chief Thomas Power put it, who “didn't know their ass from a hole in the
ground”—who demanded that Defense Department staff race hither and yon to collect statistics to justify policies and programs that had existed since Adam.

When Kennedy had cruelly scapegoated his Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the distrust had become almost total. The following fall, when Kennedy called in the Joint Chiefs to tell them of the deal that settled the Cuban Missile Crisis and to congratulate them for their assistance, Navy chief George W. Anderson shouted, “We have been had!” and Air Force chief Curtis LeMay—who was inordinately proud of commanding an operation that rained down more destruction on Tokyo in one day than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined—thought the American naval blockade was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” He pounded the table, bemoaning “the greatest defeat in our history.” Anderson was kicked upstairs to the Portugese embassy. LeMay was given a sort of one-year probation.

The missile/bomber debate was but an emblem of the trouble. McNamara had committed the country to a “triad” standard of deterrence: enough each of bombers, land-based missiles, and submarine missiles to survive attack and still be able to independently obliterate the Soviet Union. Since the United States already had more than enough bombers to do that, the result of McNamara's policies was massive new commitments to computer-guided missiles—the apotheosis of the technowar mentality these seat-of-the-pants old-timers distrusted. Since its founding in 1947, the Air Force had suffered from a looming low-level paranoia that the rest of the military considered its untested core doctrine of strategic bombing illegitimate and useless. Now McNamara's new “whiz kids” wanted to base American strategy on the even more untested “deterrence” theory—which held that old-fashioned saberrattling via fleets of B-52s had been rendered obsolete by the weapons they now carried on their wings. At the 1963 military appropriations hearings Tommy Power said, “This is the first time in our history that much or even most of the nation's striking power is to be entrusted to weapons that have never been fully tested operationally.” He didn't mention that with missiles went the romance of the air, the manly daring sacralized in a dozen World War II pictures, renewed for the nuclear era in Jimmy Stewart's
Strategic Air Command
(1955).

When McNamara sought to kill development of two new high-speed, high-altitude bombers, code names B-70 and RS-70, Congress ordered an extension instead; there were, after all, 24,000 jobs depending on the project. It wasn't the jobs that moved Barry Goldwater. He cited the strategic vision of the brass—whom he identified with entirely. He had won his dream berth on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and its top secret intelligence and preparedness subcommittees, in 1962. His closest Washington friends were the military men who testified before him; their words were his own. “I say fear the
civilians,” Goldwater told a convention of the Military Order of the World Wars in October of 1963. “They're taking over.” During the test-ban hearings he boasted that America's missiles were accurate enough “to lob one into the men's room at the Kremlin” (if they could be counted on to get into the air first).

Now he was plunged neck-deep into a debate with McNamara on the “dependability gap.” But his opponent held all the cards. Once upon a time—in August of 1961, perhaps, when Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans supported going to war over Berlin shortly after Kennedy warned that such an engagement could mean “more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history”; when hardly an eyebrow was raised when President Kennedy told Stewart Alsop, “In some circumstances we must be prepared to use the nuclear weapon at the start, come what may”—Goldwater might have gotten away with it. Not after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not after the test-ban treaty. Now, raising terrifying doubts about the entire nuclear program, alone, on the fly, with no more cover than vague promises of “classified information,” was enough to make it sound like Goldwater was courting either political or planetary suicide. Goldwater's friends could only defend him by revealing classified information or by defying their civilian leader, McNamara. So McNamara simply denied the charges, isolating Goldwater as an extremist.

ABC Reports
ran the obligatory shot of old coots talking politics around a rural New Hampshire cracker barrel. Began one:

To add to Goldwater's troubles, complaints were filtering into his office about his language. “What the hell's that?” he asked of a boom lurking overhead, while he was on the air, and he said during another broadcast that he would be fine as soon as he was “rid of this damned cane.” It was a time when political candidates skipped campaigning on Sundays for fear of seeming impious. New Hampshire was shocked.

At headquarters, meanwhile, his people were poring over the results of a canvass they had made in the little town of Pittsfield during Goldwater's first
day in the state—twelve hours before he had a chance to embarrass himself at his first press conference: 130 Pittsfieldians were for him, 50 against; 300 were undecided. The rosy predictions that New Hampshire was Barry Goldwater's state were coming a cropper.

The tour ended with a whimper. The temperature began dropping as Goldwater spoke at an American Legion Hall that was so crowded he could touch the audience surrounding him on all sides. When it was time to leave for a kaffeeklatsch at the home of a pair of widows in Exeter, icy conditions were setting in at the airport. He stood the old ladies up.

Rockefeller workers braved the chill. They were papering Exeter and every other town with flyers: “GOLDWATER SETS GOALS: END SOCIAL SECURITY, HIT CASTRO.”

 

Goldwater might have dropped the missile charge and cut his losses. Instead, at the annual Republican National Committee conclave in Washington that weekend, he asked for a congressional probe. When the assembled Republicans saw him surrounded everywhere by his obscure Arizona cronies and learned that this was his campaign team (and that Clif White had been relegated to a subsidiary role, and that Pete O'Donnell had been purged entirely), the response was incredulity. Except among liberals, who responded with glee. They had come to Washington to find someone to knock Goldwater out. And to knock out Rockefeller, too—who arrived with his pregnant wife on his arm chirping, “I want to be with my husband as much as possible in the campaign.” Others came in the hope of being anointed. George Romney spoke at the National Press Club. Afterward he was asked the question he was waiting for: was he running? A grin spread across his jutting jaw: “I was afraid that question would not be asked,” he said, in Roosevelt-like deadpan. “I am not an active candidate seeking the nomination, but if it should come to me, I'd have a duty to accept it.”

It wouldn't come. George Romney was finished. The new man of the hour was “the first of the Kennedy Republicans”: William Warren Scranton of Pennsylvania. A week before the assassination, a meeting of Establishment giants straight out of a conspiracy theorist's dream took place in the offices of Thomas McCabe, the septuagenarian chairman of Scott Paper and the former head of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve. Among those present were publishers Walter Annenberg and Walter Thayer, CBS's William S. Paley, Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola, Pierre Du Pont, former Eisenhower defense secretary and financier Thomas Gates, and Eisenhower attorney general Herb Brownell. Scranton was the guest of honor. The official agenda was to congratulate him on his “effective and far-reaching program of industrial
development” in Pennsylvania. It was more like he was a Yalie being tapped for Skull and Bones. They wanted him to run for President. He seemed perfect; he answered every need. He didn't have enemies. He was a man of the center (the AFL-CIO gave him a 50 rating, Americans for Constitutional Action 58, Americans for Democratic Action 40). He had
breeding.

Scrantons were to the Keystone State as Goldwaters were to Arizona. Puritans who first came to these shores in the 1630s, they migrated to the central Pennsylvania county of Lackawanna in the 1830s, and by 1866 their town honored the family that had bestowed on them an industrial empire—and had helped found the Republican Party—by taking its name. Commissions from Abraham Lincoln hung over the mantle of the family manse where Bill Scranton grew up—tokens of a family history that perfectly described the arc of the Republican Party's Northeastern wing. The forefather was a robber baron who organized an armed posse to shoot down workers in cold blood during the great rail strike of 1877. The son made amends through great philanthropies. And by the middle of the twentieth century, the grandchildren embraced business-tinged liberalism as the governing philosophy for a nation.

Bill Scranton was born in 1917—like Nelson Rockefeller, in the family vacation cottage. He grew up under the shaping influence of his mother, Marion Margery Warren Scranton (of the Mayflower Warrens), whose favorite things were orchids, diamonds, flamboyant hats, and politics. She began picketing for women's suffrage at the age of sixteen. Her son was gathering precinct returns by telephone on election night at age nine. The next year he joined his mother at the 1928 Republican Convention. At Yale he wrote a column in the Daily News that ran alongside McGeorge Bundy's. Only wartime service delayed Scranton's matriculation at Yale Law School. His fraternity pledge class there was nicknamed “Destiny's Men”; it included future Supreme Court Justices Byron “Whizzer” White and Potter Stewart, Cyrus Vance, Sargent Shriver, and Gerald Ford (and, owing to some occult Ivy League formula that would have a conservative minted for each dozen moderates or liberals, future Colorado senator and Goldwater booster Peter Dominick).

There was an organic reason that Bill Scranton became a liberal. It was the exact opposite of why Barry Goldwater became a conservative. A Pennsylvania squire who said that the free market brought only blessings would be run out of town on a rail. Scranton, the city, had been the anthracite coal capital of the world before the market for the fuel collapsed in mid-century, the nation's industrial center began sliding southwest, and radical new automation techniques began sluicing off some 40,000 industrial jobs a month nationwide. In Pennsylvania, unemployment was 50 percent above the national average and
fifty-six of fifty-seven counties were federally designated as depressed areas; in the same years that Phoenix grew from 50,000 residents to 500,000, Scranton shrunk. It was a quiet, underlying dread in the 1960s that these economic forces, as Rhode Island's liberal Republican governor John Chafee put it, would “dump the unskilled and the semi-skilled worker into the human slag heap”—perhaps to evolve into some social Armageddon led by residents of industrial ghost towns like Scranton who couldn't move because all of their assets were tied up in now worthless houses.

Only activist government, it was thought, could stave off that awful day. Bill Scranton's father was the architect of a new kind of centrist liberalism: combining private and public resources to spur industrial redevelopment. He helped lure fifty industries and twenty thousand jobs back to Lackawanna County. Upon his father's death in 1955, Bill took over the “Scranton Plan,” which was already internationally celebrated, and led his city to win a
Look
All-American City award. By the time he was plucked to become a State Department briefing officer in 1959 (he was so trusted by the secretary of state that the press called him John Foster Dulles's “private leak”), the chamber of commerce's executive secretary described him as “the best-informed man in the United States on how to bring jobs back to depressed areas.” He burned with one of the core convictions of managerial liberalism: In a complex modern economy, only “labor market coordination” by centralized government could save the free market from bringing about waste, inefficiency, and ruin as a side effect of prosperity.

It was no coincidence that the best-informed expert on industrial job creation in the country was a stalwart civil rights man. As Martin Luther King had taken to pointing out, automation's social costs were borne by the last hired and first fired: the Negroes who had streamed north by the millions after World War II just as factory gates were slamming shut. Detroit, for example, lost half its manufacturing base in the 1950s—during which time 75 percent of job listings were reserved specifically for whites. In Philadelphia 70 percent of young black men were unemployed. Federal social legislation required racial covenants to win Southern support (Kennedy got his 1961 minimum wage hike by barring laundry, hotel, and food service workers—mostly black—from coverage). It was a far cry from the agriculture depression of the 1920s and 1930s, to which Washington responded by subsidizing farm incomes and pegging commodity prices to pre-Depression levels. No such response was forthcoming when industry in the urban North began to decay. In places like Newburgh, the problem was addressed by other means.