Before the Storm (74 page)

“Am I going to be carried out?” Chancellor asked the cop as a sheriff's officer moved in as backup to help herd him toward the door. He was followed by one of those network cameramen in helmets sprouting a monstrous broadcast antenna, as if a visitor from outer space. “I'm in custody,” Chancellor announced into the camera. “I want to assure you that NBC is fully staffed with other reporters who are not in the custody of the Daly City police and the San Mateo sheriff's office. I formally say this is a disgrace. The press, radio, and television should be allowed to do their work at a convention. I'm being taken down off the arena now.... I'll check in later.” He signed off: “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.” Later an attempt was made to remove CBS's Mike Wallace from the Alaska delegates' area—although the action was thwarted when an Alaska delegate shouted into an open microphone, “This is an attempt by Goldwater or other forces to control the convention and prevent free airing of issues of the convention!”

The reading was completed, gavels were banged, order was restored. Hugh Scott was recognized to offer the first amendment, which repudiated “the
efforts of irresponsible extremist groups, such as the Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, and others to discredit our Party by their efforts to infiltrate positions of responsibility in the Party or to attach themselves to its candidates.” Five minutes were yielded to the first speaker for the motion, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. He strode to the great raised podium, beneath the enormous banner graced by the silhouette of Abraham Lincoln alongside the words “FOR THE PEOPLE,” to cheers—which didn't outlast the accompanying chorus of Goldwaterite howls.

With great difficulty, Thruston Morton gaveled the crowd into silence. Rockefeller began by repeating his July 14, 1963, warning about “a radical well-financed minority ... wholly alien to the sound and honest Republicanism that has kept this party abreast of human needs in a changing world; wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principles.” His partisans applauded. He told of a year spent defending the party against extremist takeover. A lone
boo
rang out. It came from a young man from Santa Rosa who had nearly bankrupted his family that spring by working for Goldwater in the California primary when he should have been out selling real estate. Rocky had jerked them around all spring. He had lost. Now he was lording it over them like he had won. It felt damned good to boo.

Scattered voices joined him. Rockefeller smiled thinly as the ripple became a wave. A “We Want Barry!” chant proved too overpowering for him to continue. He cocked an eyebrow, smiled wider, and muttered under his breath, “That's right, that's right.” They were falling into his trap; they were displaying their brutishness for all the world to see.

Clif White saw what he was up to. He pushed his all-call button. Thirty phones were picked up on the convention floor. He commanded, “If there is any booing in your delegations, stop it immediately.” But he was helpless. The delegates weren't the problem. The noise came from the spectator galleries. He had drilled his regiments to the letter. There was nothing he could do about irregulars mounting a charge of their own.

Standing next to Rocky with an imploring look on his face, his oversized gavel ringing with an oddly hollow
plink,
Thruston Morton seized the microphone. “The chair must ask for order. We're going to have several speakers here on various amendments. We must proceed in an orderly manner. I think it's only fair and right to all concerned.” Rockefeller continued, nodding as if to coax them on: “Their tactics have ranged from cancellation by coercion of a speaking engagement at a college, to outright threats of personal violence.”

Now the noise was all-enveloping. There was a huddle at the rostrum. Rockefeller testily demanded an extension of his time; Morton granted it and
turned around to return to his seat. It was as if he had given a cue: the sound now crashed the threshold of pain. “This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” Rockefeller simpered, relishing the moment—and they screamed some more.

Jackie Robinson was hanging back near an exit of the hall—next to the Alabama delegation, as it happened. “C'mon, Rocky!” he cheered. A burly Alabaman glared at him menacingly and rose from his seat. His wife pulled at his coat. “Turn him loose, lady!” Robinson roared. (“Luckily for him, he obeyed his wife,” Robinson boasted later.)

Rocky: “You don't like to hear it, but it's true—” (a network camera cut to Happy, in pearls, a pained and embarrassed look on her face) “—they engender suspicion, they encourage disunity, and they operate from the dark shadows of secrecy—” (the camera found a row of young Goldwater partisans who rhythmically slapped their thighs with glee) “—The Republican Party must repudiate these people.... I move the adoption of this resolution.”

The voice vote: a roar of nays. Tom Kuchel was asked how he felt. “Fine, physically,” he replied sorrowfully. “God save the Union.”

The next motion was called, Romney's anti-extremism amendment. The hearing was more respectful; the voice vote was the same. For the next, which would add six resounding paragraphs specifically attesting to the constitutionality and desirability of the civil rights law, Scranton had arranged for a roll-call vote, banking that some delegates would be ashamed to go on the record as being against it. The result, 897 to 409, only served to give a reliable prediction of the roll call for the Republican candidates the next day. The amendment on control of nuclear weapons was called, Romney's on civil rights (so innocuous that White even considered letting his people vote for it), speeches made for and against—two more walls of nays. The platform was ratified, as written, on the dawn side of 2 a.m.—breakfast viewing for early risers in the East. Scranton's last chance at redemption had failed. The boys who weekended in Newport Beach had ground the boys who summered in Newport to dust. The winners were not gracious. “The South took the Mason-Dixon line and shoved it right up to Canada,” one Texas leader proclaimed to a
Newsweek
reporter.

 

The day Barry Goldwater was to be nominated Republican candidate for President of the United States he was nervous enough to cut himself shaving. He descended on the service elevator, squeezed for the umpteenth time between smelly garbage cans and the rolling carts—and was greeted in the kitchen by a brace of microphone-waving correspondents. “Do you think that the Democrats will make an issue of the GOP convention's refusal to endorse the constitutionality
of the new civil rights law?” he was asked. He snapped, “After LBJ, the biggest faker in the United States, having opposed civil rights until this year—let 'em make an issue out of it. I'll just recite the thousands of words he has spoken against anti-poll-tax legislation, equal accommodations, and the FEPC [the Fair Employment Practices Commission]. Johnson is the phoniest individual that ever came around.” He did not seem to be savoring his day of triumph.

In another hotel Bill Scranton was fending off his own microphone-wielding mob. “I came here to address the delegates,” he said at a gathering of the Missouri caucus. “Will everyone clear the room except the live press and the Missouri press?” Each reporter considering himself either alive or from Missouri, all stayed. They saw the delegation vote 22 to 1 for Goldwater.

In the Cow Palace parking lot, all was chaos. Fifteen hundred screaming ticket holders and credential wielders were outside. The fire department had barred the doors because the hall was already thousands past capacity. Soon police had seized thousands of forged tickets, all entitling the bearer to Seat 4 in Row G of Section A. Some had been bought from scalpers; some had unwittingly been distributed by congressmen. But the lion's share were held by Scranton ringers, some recruited outside Scranton's downtown headquarters, most from a table set up on Berkeley's Bancroft Way, just off campus, the traditional spot for student politicking (advocating partisan causes on university grounds was banned).

And, unable to stomach the thought of Republicans monopolizing the news, the President of the United States chose this particular afternoon to take a very public stroll in the park across from the White House hand in hand with his wife. “I think it would look very spontaneous!” his press secretary gushed.

It was the latest move in Johnson's permanent campaign. In May he defused one potential problem—(untrue) rumors that the FBI had the goods on his once having belonged to a Texas branch of the KKK—by buying off J. Edgar Hoover by exempting him from the federal mandatory retirement law; then he defused another by goosing the economy through raising the debt ceiling and pushing through a generous federal pay increase (he also ordered his budget director to study what tricks he might use to keep unemployment down through the fall). The DNC was on its way to registering four million new voters; a “Salute to President Johnson” at the D.C. Armory raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then a tragedy reenergized a certain primordial advantage of the incumbent: after the civil rights vote, Senator Ted Kennedy was flying back to Massachusetts, where a roomful of Democrats were waiting to renominate him by acclamation, when his plane plowed into an apple orchard,
killing the pilot and badly injuring Kennedy's back. Everyone knew that Joseph Kennedy Jr., the oldest Kennedy brother, had perished in a plane crash, and sister Kathleen; the near-miss moved the cult of Kennedy martyrdom once more to the forefront of people's minds.

Campaign planning began in earnest on July 11, when White House deputy Bill Moyers met with representatives of Doyle Dane Bernbach, the ad agency JFK had chosen for his campaign a year earlier. The agency's ads for Volkswagen's goofy Beetle—headed “Think Small”—caught Kennedy's eye; it fit his wry, ironic take on the world, his instinctive grasp of the power of images, his compulsion to be
new.
Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science. Industry guru Rosser Reeves—Eisenhower's adman—preached the doctrine of the “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP): a successful ad must stake a claim as to why the company's product is different from the competition‘s, then pound it in like a jackhammer. (“You can have a lovelier complexion in fourteen days with Palmolive soap, doctors prove!”) A rival theory, David Ogilvy's, held that ads should never be entertaining. DDB set all that on its ear. It was the best agency in the business, years ahead of its time. And Moyers—a shy, thick-spectacled ex-seminarian who at barely thirty was the youngest of LBJ's inner circle, perhaps the most ambitious, surely the most ruthless—gave it a green light to unleash its full creative powers on behalf of the President.

Politics would not likely emerge from DDB's clutches unchanged. In May the networks announced that for the first time they would sell thirty-second and one-minute spots during, instead of just at the end of, regularly scheduled programming. Under ordinary circumstances this would hardly have made a difference: the preferred lengths for political ads in the past had been five, fifteen, and thirty minutes. Doyle Dane Bernbach, which had never handled a political account before, never bothered to consult other agencies' precedents. In
The Making of the President 1960,
Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, a politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB found nothing to lament in the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to
know
about a product, which in this case happened to be a human being, in half a minute—the speed not of thought but of emotion.

Bill Bernbach intuitively grasped the same insights that were making a Canadian literature professor named Marshall McLuhan the thinker of the moment. “The medium is the message,” went his gnomic injunction. A medium did not just neutrally deliver some preexisting bundle of information into the viewer's brain; instead, each medium—storytelling, print, radio, television—conditioned
users' very perception in its own distinct way. A TV set was a box plunked in the middle of a living room, competing for attention with a dozen different household distractions. DDB TV commercials exploited this fact by making use of searing, disjunctive images designed to cut through the clutter. Or, because television, that most mass of media, projected built-in anxieties about conformity, other DDB spots flattered viewers by assuring them they were much too smart to be
taken in
by advertising—thus the VW ads, which mocked advertising itself by bragging about how small the car was, how ugly, what little power it had. That “cute little bug” image moved a mountain: never again would Volkswagen be primarily associated in the public mind with Nazi Germany.

From the agency's eight hundred employees, Bernbach and account executive James Graham assembled forty dedicated Democrats thrilled at the prospect of savaging Barry Goldwater. They worked twelve-hour days in their own floor of DDB's building on West 43rd Street. Through the spring of 1964 they produced a wealth of civil rights pieces; by the time of the July 11 meeting with Moyers, these had been mothballed. Civil rights, they realized, was just as likely to lose votes as to win them. Now they were kicking around the idea of associating Goldwater in voters' minds, as press secretary George Reedy put it, with the image of “kids being born with two heads.”

 

At the Cow Palace the doors were sealed before bad tickets drove out good. The senior senator from Illinois approached the podium to place his candidate's name into nomination. But he made the mistake of uttering Goldwater's name a few minutes into the speech—and then he had to wait impatiently for the plink of Thruston Morton's gavel to finally shut down the delirium that followed.