Before the Storm (57 page)

Next, Lodge's campaign crew rented a storefront in Boston's financial district for a “Lodge for President” headquarters. They unveiled their new office with great fanfare on January 3 to steal the thunder from Goldwater's candidacy announcement in Arizona and the Rockefeller trip into New Hampshire. It was another publicity stunt. Their action was illegal: Massachusetts law required permission from the candidate to open a campaign office. Reporters did their duty, passing on word throughout the country of an exciting new entrant into the presidential field; the organizers did theirs and shut the place down the next day. The president of New Hampshire's largest printing firm, Richard Jackman (his company printed
Reader's Digest),
read the item about the unveiling of Lodge's campaign headquarters in the
Concord Monitor
and marched up to the state capitol with ten signatures and $100 to sign up as a Lodge delegate candidate. Grindle read about Jackman in the
Monitor
and recruited him as state campaign chair, giving him responsibility for coming up with the remaining delegates—who, since every Republican luminary in the state was already claimed by Goldwater and Rockefeller, were all friends of his.

Only then did Grindle and his cronies secure an office in Concord and set up in earnest. They set a goal: if they won 12,000 votes and three or four delegates, they would enter the next big primary, in Oregon. Mullen sent a background memo to the D.C. press corps: Don't expect to see Lodge showing up at any GOP fund-raisers any time soon—he had a nation to save from Communism, after all. “On the other hand,” the memo continued, “I personally have no question but that, given any sort of respite in South Vietnam and given a clear signal that he has a fighting chance for the nomination, Cabot will make the race.”

There was no respite; that very day five American helicopter crewmen died in hard fighting over the Mekong River Delta. And Mullen, whatever his assurances, had plenty of questions about whether Lodge would come back from Vietnam whatever the situation there. But Nelson Rockefeller didn't know that. Around his office, his people had begun referring to the ambassador as “Henry Sabotage.” Rockefeller dispatched his Northeast regional coordinator, Sandy Lankier, to Lodge headquarters. “I wouldn't say this if you had a chance to win,” the dapper, high-placed Washington attorney said conspiratorially. “But as long as all you're doing is hurting us and helping Goldwater, why not pull out?” Grindle laughed Lankier off. “How many people do you have?” he asked. Rockefeller had sixty on staff in New Hampshire alone. Lodge had four. Since the third and fourth were beautiful twenty-three-year-old women
(immortalized by Teddy White as “fresh with first bloom”), the office became a favorite, festive redoubt for reporters. Everyone was having a good time. The Lodge outfit thought he would make a good President. They thought Rockefeller would not. Why quit?

By the end of January they had made some progress: a former state rep told a newspaper he had endorsed Rockefeller in the interests of stopping Goldwater, but, he said, “my first personal choice is Ambassador Lodge.” Reports were that the State Department had begun contingency planning in case Lodge left Saigon; the
Herald Tribune
noticed Lodge as a “conspicuous absentee” at GO-Day. Each poll revealed more undecideds than the last—potential Lodge voters, Grindle dared dream. Mullen sent out a second backgrounder: “We know that if the clear call is sounded, he will report for duty, and that he will report with the full elan of a good soldier, full of fight and spirit, and with the smell of victory in the air. His own commitment to an all-out campaign is the least of the worries.”

At this point their worry was sending brochures to each of New Hampshire's 97,000 Republican voters—Lodge pictured on the front flap, standing ramrod straight behind a podium, looking presidential, and on the inside everything patriotic but the slice of apple pie: young Lodge beside an antiaircraft gun (“This military service now stands him well in Saigon, where on some days he can hear Communist gunfire through his embassy office windows”); Lodge at the UN (under his watch “Communist expansion was brought to a halt”); Lodge with Eisenhower's arm draped around his shoulder (“It was natural that this relationship should culminate in President Eisenhower's recent request that Ambassador Lodge return to the United States and seek the Republican nomination for president”). The brochure cited a Gallup poll showing Lodge running better against Johnson than Goldwater or Rockefeller (neglecting to note that Nixon ran best of all); it concluded by flattering Granite Staters' abundant political vanity by inviting them to “lead the nation in drafting Lodge.” An enclosed card bore a write-in pledge to sign, preaddressed to “United States Embassy, Saigon.” They were to send the card in a postage-paid envelope to Draft Lodge headquarters in Concord—where hundreds piled up each morning. The names were entered into a database, and only then were the cards forwarded to Saigon, where they served as a campaign within the campaign to convince their man he had a chance.

It worked. On February 18, Bill Loeb took a break from running photos of Rockefeller embracing Khrushchev, and proclamations of Goldwater's “holy crusade against those who have stolen the birthright of America,” in order to abuse Henry Cabot Lodge on his front page. He ran a picture of a group of weeping mothers of Korean War MIAs who claimed that in 1954 they had tried
to petition their UN ambassador—“an appeaser ... partially responsible for the cynical betrayal of our missing fighting men”—only to be turned away. At Lodge headquarters there was rejoicing: now they were a threat.

Within a few days, a curious episode sent Draft Lodge past the tipping point. The mysterious goings-on in Vietnam had hardly been mentioned on the presidential stump that winter. Then Goldwater, returning to the state after ten days' break surlier than ever (“I'm not one of those baby-kissing, handshaking, blintz-eating candidates,” he blurted out at a Hanover coffee hour), opined that Lodge had “kind of balled up” Vietnam. Candidates who criticized ongoing American military operations were vulnerable to backlash, by the principle that politics stopped at the water's edge. Even so oblique a criticism as Goldwater's was enough for the Lodge camp to become terrified that Rockefeller would surge into the lead any minute by impugning Goldwater's unpatriotic lapse. For two days his people waited with bated breath. They were almost ready to close up shop and go back to Boston.

Instead, Rockefeller called the Saigon embassy from the home of one of his supporters. In the age before communications satellites, such connections were hit-or-miss. He was waiting impatiently for the operator to get the call through when his hostess chirped, “If your Saigon call comes through, you can take it in my husband's office.” Reporters overheard. The papers filled with speculation that Rockefeller had issued Lodge an ultimatum: Lodge should make an announcement one way or another as to whether he would campaign for the race, or Rockefeller would denounce him. When Rockefeller actually got through to him, Lodge, as he had been doing for weeks, refused to address the distracting subject. Rocky retaliated with a blistering statement on the “mess” in Vietnam. Then he called back to apologize, and made sure reporters knew it. That put Lodge's name in the papers again—as an embattled, self-sacrificing patriot, while Rockefeller came off simultaneously as bully and wimp. By taking Lodge seriously, Rockefeller spat in the wind: newsmen weary of the stalemated Goldwater-Rockefeller race now filed story after story with news of the ambassador—just as New Hampshire Republicans received their second Lodge mailing, a sample ballot showing how to write in his name and a card listing the times the one Manchester TV station, WMUR, was showing Lodge's five-minute TV commercial.

That commercial was their niftiest caper of all. Grindle had arranged to procure a copy of one of the most effective commercials from the 1960 Republican presidential campaign, “Meet Mr. Lodge.” It was a quiet breakthrough in televisual technique: Lodge had sounded so snooty in scripted shoots that Nixon's television guru Gene Wyckoff had decided to use photographs of him instead, with a biographical voice-over from General Eisenhower. Wyckoff's
innovation was to shoot the photos with an animation camera, panning and zooming dramatically, producing a surprising heroic effect (the technique would be copied in dozens of historical documentaries in decades to come). Grindle had the spot edited to remove the references to the Nixon presidential campaign—and fiddled with the sound over the final shot, a picture of Eisenhower literally embracing Lodge, so it sounded like Eisenhower was recommending him for the presidency, not the vice presidency. Livid, Goldwater implored Eisenhower to put a stop to the deception. Ike did no such thing. He wanted Goldwater to lose.

The fact that the Lodge campaign could only afford to buy time on Manchester's one TV station turned out to be an advantage. Both Rockefeller and Goldwater evaded the official spending limit of $20,000 by buying time from broadcasters in neighboring New England states. WMUR gave Lodge just enough exposure to let the people know about him without making them as sick of his face as they were of Goldwater's and Rockefeller's. Meanwhile, New Hampshire's secretary of state issued a ruling that last names only would be accepted for write-in votes—and that misspellings would be valid. It was another coup for Lodge's backers.

More ravens of disorder took wing. On February 25 in Miami, two weeks before the March 10 New Hampshire balloting, Cassius Clay, a 10-to-1 underdog, beat Sonny Liston in seven rounds. His behavior beforehand had been so flamboyant that the boxing commission's physician questioned whether he was sane enough to enter the ring. That same day it was reported that Air Force One had been accompanied on the way to Miami by fighter planes to protect the President against a suspected Cuban kamikaze-style attack—and the next day the rail line between Miami and Jacksonville was obliterated by a bomb planted by labor militants locked in a strike with the Florida East Coast Railway. Morning brought news of a school boycott in Louise Day Hicks's Boston, an hour's drive away from half of New Hampshire's population; three days later came news that black author Louis Lomax had won a standing ovation from two thousand students at California's Pomona College with the declaration “Non-violence is downright un-American.” Cassius Clay suspected the same thing—which was one of the reasons he now announced membership in the Nation of Islam and chose a new name, Muhammad Ali. Against this background, the voters of New Hampshire seemed eager to fix upon old familiar Henry Cabot Lodge as the answer to every fear. “I hear him praised for views he just does not hold,” a Lodge man admitted, “and I have to keep my mouth shut. But it's all to the good, as long as they like him.”

One week after he had not even been included among the possibilities, the Harris poll predicted Lodge would earn 16 percent of the vote as a write-in can-dictate—
31 percent, enough to win, if only he had let his name be printed on the ballot. It was another milestone: now Lodge was judged an option. Out went the campaign's third mailing, this one to people who had returned pledge cards. They were given names of Republicans in their district to convert to Lodge. The mailing also recruited an amazing 1,700 doorbell ringers—one for about every fifty-five Republican voters—for Election Day.

It was the beginning of March. Robert Mullen and George Lodge began traveling the byways to convince local leaders that the ambassador really truly was a candidate, and Norris Cotton was out reassuring the same people that Goldwater was an upstanding and responsible man (Cotton recalled it as “one of the most discouraging experiences of my life”). Lyndon Johnson concluded a morning of agonizing conclaves on Vietnam with a single decision—treat Henry Cabot Lodge like “Mister God.” “As long as we got him there and he makes recommendations, we act on them,” he told Bob McNamara. The last thing he wanted was a Republican nominee who knew how disastrous this adventure was becoming.

By that time it was hard to find a TV picture in New England absent the square jaws of Henry Cabot Lodge, Barry Goldwater, and Nelson Rockefeller. You could watch the eighteen-minute “Nelson Rockefeller Story” on WFEA at 9:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 11:45 a.m., and 5:00 and 6:00 p.m.; his eleven-minute show on WKBK at 8:00, 9:00, 10:30, 12:30, 3:00, and 4:00; the five-minute one on another channel at 5:00 p.m. and 5:30; the nine-minute one at 7:00 and 11:00 p.m.; the one-minute spot on WBBX at 8:15 a.m. and 12:15, 1:05, and 5:55 p.m.—sixteen ads from three different agencies in constant circulation. There were a like number of Goldwater spots—dreary where Rockefeller's were flashy, consisting of footage of their candidate standing at lecterns explaining at length why he wouldn't blow up the world, per the insistence of Kitchel and Baroody that once the electorate just got to
know
Goldwater they would love him.

His partisans agreed bad commercials didn't matter. Goldwater had finally found his voice in public appearances—Jeremiah's. “There isn't a person here who doesn't realize that something is wrong with our world today,” he would cry. “This is the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world. And yet—our citizens are harassed and abused even in countries which have depended on us for aid.” (A few weeks earlier in the African nation of Zanzibar rebels had kidnapped the U.S. counsel; “Death to the U.S.A.” was chanted the night before by street mobs in Greece.)

“At home our crime rates soar, rising four times as fast as our population,” Goldwater declared. “The quick buck, the dime-novel romances, pride and arrogance, morality that works on a sliding scale depending on your position—
and these have replaced what Teddy Roosevelt once called Americanism: ‘the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood'—the virtues that made America.”