Before the Storm (55 page)

It didn't help that the Birch Society had come roaring back into the news. In a small town in Washington State, a former state representative, John Goldmark, a Harvard Law School graduate and ACLU board member, was suing a weekly Birchite newspaper for libel. Goldmark's wife had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. When Goldmark had come up for reelection, the paper revived old saws from the McCarthy days: that the Communist Party never let anyone leave; that there was no such thing as a Communist wife and a noncommunist husband. “You know the Communists have forced marriage,” said the newspaper's defense counsel. “Why would he marry a gal as homely as Sally if he wasn't forced into it?” A cavalcade of witnesses, including Herbert Philbrick, the New Hampshire Goldwater delegate, unfurled baroque conspiracy theories to demonstrate the peril Mrs. Goldmark represented to free people everywhere; another cavalcade pronounced them ridiculous. The circus made the papers all the way to frosty New Hampshire—where Barry Goldwater presently made his way through a torchlight parade in a tiny cart pulled by a Shetland pony, following a drum and bugle corps in Indian bonnets playing “Blue Moon” led by a pudgy high school girl, knees blue from the cold, carrying, of all things, a United Nations flag. It was hard to tell if Goldwater was grinning or if he had something painful stuck in his teeth.

“Why the hell am I doing this?” he would ask Norris Cotton after such adventures.

“That's the way we campaign in New Hampshire,” Cotton would answer.

It wasn't helping. Kennedy had been right: Goldwater's loose lips were sinking the ship.
Newsweek
quoted a supporter: “I'm glad he has one foot in a cast or he'd have that in his mouth, too.” The AP's Walter Mears—who had to file stories every few hours—remarked that all they had to do was pepper Goldwater with a few questions and wait for him to slip, and they had their headlines. Then it was back to the nonstop frat party at the Manchester Sheraton.

 

New Hampshire's movie theaters campaigned diligently against Barry Goldwater. Some were featuring a documentary called
Point of Order,
consisting of footage from the epic showdown in the Senate Hearing Room between Senator Joseph McCarthy (whom Goldwater had supported to the end) and the United States Army in 1954, a film that was gripping enough to make it one of the few documentaries in the history of American cinema to receive nationwide theatrical distribution. Others were showing
Seven Days in May,
the film version
of the novel Fletcher Knebel began banging out when the strange case of General Walker was gripping the nation back in the autumn of 1961. Burt Lancaster played General William Maltoon Scott, a would-be führer who came within a hairsbreadth of leading a military takeover of the United States after the President signed a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Like Barry Goldwater, Scott gave speeches in stadiums in which the crowd chanted rhythmically, “We want Scott!” He was abetted by a militarist senator from the Southwest, like Barry Goldwater. His key accomplice was the sort of right-wing radio commentator who constantly sang the praises of Barry Goldwater. “For some men it's a Senator McCarthy,” the idealistic President stirringly intoned at the end. “For some it's a General Walker. Now it's a General Scott.” He might as well have been saying “It's a Barry Goldwater.”

Seven Days in May
was a soppy morality play whose power to move minds paled in comparison to a third film gracing the screens of the nation as the New Hampshire primary hit its stride.
Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
was a war picture. But the country that heard Jimmy Stewart, in
Strategic Air Command,
exclaim of his B-47, “She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life!” had never seen a war picture like this. It was a slapstick comedy, whose subject was the damaged psyche of an age.
The New Yorker's
movie critic Dwight Macdonald, reviewing the film before the theatrical release, was amazed that Columbia Pictures ever let the thing be made. He predicted picket lines. Instead there were lines of people around the block waiting to get in. It was a hit. It touched a nerve.

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, new Presidents—and, in the Soviet Union, new premiers—had received a briefing on the nuclear realities that no politician besides a President was allowed to know. There usually followed the spectacle of strong men reduced to jelly. When Johnson reported on his meeting with the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he told the Speaker of the House that the AEC chair had told him something only Kennedy had known. “And when he walked out, I wished I hadn't known it.” He spent the next day dazedly sprinkling the phrase “39 million” into nearly every conversation.

Presidents sometimes expressed this terrible awe in public. Mostly they did not. McNamara told Kennedy, then Johnson, to publicly affirm NATO policy that the United States would answer a Soviet attack of Europe with nuclear weapons—and to ignore it in practice as unthinkable. McNamara didn't think the attack would ever happen. The existence of our nuclear arsenal made it crazy for the Russians to try. That was the doctrine of “deterrence”—borne of a paradox unknown in the entire history of warfare: the superpowers were now
so powerful that they were helpless to use their power. They were, said J. Robert Oppenheimer, as “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

It was a concept even congressmen had a hard time grasping. “After years on this committee it strikes me that we have no plan to win,” spluttered Mississippi's Jamie L. Whitten to McNamara at the 1963 military appropriation hearings. The secretary of defense tied himself in knots to explain that stalemate—a “balance of terror”—and not superiority was a better goal, because an increase in our nuclear capability might be interpreted by Russia as enough to destroy their second-strike capability, perhaps to provoke a surprise preemptive strike out of fear America might do it first and leave the Soviets without the means to defend themselves. Though, spoken out loud, the idea sounded rather insane.

Dr. Strangelove's
director, Stanley Kubrick, paid very close attention to these sorts of things. For years his bedside reading had been treatises thick with the mathematical formulae of “game theory,” purporting to rationally explain the best strategies to deter a nuclear war—or, should it come to that, to win one. When he started working on a way to put these absurdities up on the screen, he was overwhelmed by the feeling that people would laugh at them. He decided that people should laugh. He would make a comedy.

The story begins in the office of the commander of Burpleson Air Force Base, one General Jack D. Ripper. (Grunting and growling, incessantly chomping his cigar, he looked suspiciously like the mad-bombing former Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay.) He cuts off communications to the outside world, then orders transmission of an attack code to the bomber wing he commands. The narrator explains (correctly) how America kept a fleet of bombers in the air twenty-four hours a day, each two hours from their targets within the USSR, each prepared to deliver a payload sixteen times greater than all the tonnage exploded by all sides in World War II.

Cut to the interior of one of these bombers (known in real life, unofficially, as “doomsday planes”), where the captain exchanges his flight helmet for a cowboy hat: “Well, boys, I reckon this is it—nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies!” He predicts medals and promotions all around.

General Ripper, it arrives, is a madman, possessed of the Birchite conviction that the Communists have fluoridated the water supply to sap Americans' “precious bodily fluids,” and that preventive war is America's only hope. By exploiting a top secret contingency plan for the possibility that a Russian sneak attack might take out the President—which the President doesn't remember approving—General Ripper exercises his authority to launch his own attack. He paraphrases Clemenceau: “Today, war is too important to be left to politicians,” who have “neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic
thought.” Kubrick could not have known that McGeorge Bundy had warned Kennedy in January of 1961 that “a subordinate commander, faced with a substantial Russian military action, could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you (by failure of communication at either end of the line).” Kubrick understood nuclear war's built-in absurdities well enough to be able to imagine it.

Cut to the cavernous War Room, where the President's top military and civilian advisers are gathered around a giant table (just like the conclave President Kennedy convened to defuse the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where Strategic Air Command chief Tommy Power's advice was to preempt the problem by—in the words of his alter ego in
Strangelove,
General Buck Turgidson—“hitting them with everything we've got”). As the simpering President (he looks like Adlai Stevenson) fervidly negotiates with the Soviet premier over the phone to convince him not to unleash his arsenal in retaliation, the Soviet ambassador steps into the room to explain the futility of the entire discussion: Any nuclear explosion over the Motherland, he dryly explains, will automatically set off a new, top secret “doomsday machine” with the power to destroy all life on earth.

Out of the shadows glides a queer man in a wheelchair—Dr. Strangelove, America's director of weapons research—who muses, impressed, in a thick German accent (suggesting at once the three towering emigre giants of American strategic thinking: Edward Teller, Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, and Herman Kahn, whose boast that America could limit its casualties in a nuclear exchange to a mere twenty million people inspired the movie's best joke) about how perfectly logical all of it is.

“Deterrence,”
he hisses, “ees the art of producing in zee mind of zee enemy zee fear to attack.” In the paradoxical world of nuclear combat, a doomsday machine is a splendid idea: “Because of zee irrevocable and unalterable decision-making process zat rules out human meddling, zee doomsday machine ees terrifying, and seemple to understand, and
complete-
ly credible and conveencing.” (“Gee, I wish we had one of those doomsday machines!” General Turgidson whispers lustily.) Then Dr. Strangelove screams: “Zee only problem is that the whole point of a doomsday machine ees lost if you keep it a secret!
Vye didn't you tell the world, ehhh?”

It was to be unveiled, the Soviet ambassador explains, at the next Party Congress on Monday. “As you know, the premier loves surprises.” Another sardonic joke: the doomsday machine, the purest possible manifestation of automation, is precisely that which is supposed to
eliminate
the possibility of surprise.

The balance of terror, delicate or not, is too clever by far more than half.
As they speak, a single B-52 gets through the Soviets' defenses. Dr. Strangelove, the only one who grasps the whole mad system, is revealed to be a madman himself—the maddest of all, in fact. The gung ho pilot rides his payload to earth like a bronco. A wild proliferation of mushroom clouds fills the screen. Thus the final satire. The whiz kids of the McNamara stripe, the LeMays of the old school: one sets up the system the other trips, each assuming the other thought just like them. The madness only begins with the madmen. In a world that coexists with the power to destroy itself, Stanley Kubrick had seen the enemy. It was us.

Attentive viewers couldn't fail to understand that Kubrick was satirizing an entire system, not any of the system's cogs. But most viewers were not attentive. Americans prefer to isolate villains who despoil a preexisting innocence, rather than admit that there might not have been any innocence there in the first place. In this case, the villain became the man chasing around New Hampshire talking incessantly of “another Pearl Harbor” unless we commissioned new nuclear bombers, distributed tactical nuclear weapons to our allies, and returned to John Foster Dulles's “brinkmanship” policy. The man, in other words, who did what ordinary politicians avoided wherever possible: reminded America that it coexisted with the power to destroy itself. For the sin, more and more people began viewing Barry Goldwater as an outright menace.

 

By January 20, four out of ten New Hampshire Republicans told pollsters they preferred anyone but Rockefeller and Goldwater. And the New Hampshire primary abhors a vacuum. A political cartoonist caricatured the two generals ousted in the recent coup in Vietnam—the second coup, as it happened, in ten weeks—sitting on a jailhouse bench. “If we get out of here,” one says, “we can always run in that New Hampshire primary.”

All it took to run as a pledged delegate was $10 and one hundred signatures. It did not require the candidate's prior permission. By January 28 voters could choose from among delegates for Rockefeller, Goldwater, Nixon, Lodge, Stassen—only Romney and Scranton had taken the necessary steps to strike their names from the ballot—and a few more for whom running was a quadrennial hobby, such as Lar Daly, the eccentric Illinois furniture upholsterer who had run for President in an Uncle Sam suit as nominee of his own “America First” party since the 1950s.

And there was one more candidate, whose presence made history.

Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith's admirers had been approaching her to run for President ever since she issued her courageous 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” condemning Joseph McCarthy. With the Kennedy assassination the cries increased. At the podium of a January meeting of the Women's
National Press Club, Smith listed all the reasons that a woman could never realistically run for President. She concluded, “So, because of all these impelling reasons against my running, I have decided”—long pause—“I shall.” The first female major-party presidential candidate brought down the house.