Before the Storm (82 page)

 

LBJ's opening speech was on Labor Day in Detroit's Cadillac Square. It was Democratic tradition to ring in each presidential campaign to the roars of loyal workingmen grateful for bigger paychecks, better job security, stronger unions, and the political party that made it all possible. This year, though, the fear was that bigger paychecks and better job security would not be enough to keep the audience from Lyndon Johnson's throat.

It was a fine month for backlash. New York came close to further rioting after a grand jury refused to indict the officer whose bullet set off the July disturbance ; that same week, white parents pulled their children out of New York schools to protest what the Republican platform called “federally sponsored
‘inverse discrimination' ... the abandonment of neighborhood schools, for reasons of race.” Blunter, one protester carried a sign reading “YOU'LL TURN INTO A NIGGER.” (The seething issue had by then earned a journalistic shorthand: “busing,” sometimes spelled “bussing.”) Another court ordered union locals to dismantle father-son apprenticeship programs that “automatically excluded” Negroes. One of Johnson's advance men filed a report on the comments of a New York cabbie: “He exploded—traffic terrible, Negroes pushing, city in snarl, politicians ruining country, everything a mess. Pent-up fury.” He found similar sentiments among four of the seven hacks he met. The AFL-CIO budgeted $12 million for education efforts to counter the myth that the Civil Rights Act demanded hiring quotas based on race. It didn't work; polls taken at factory gates in South Chicago and Gary, Indiana, favored Goldwater 53 to 47. (It would be some time before a backlash could build up against another new civil rights program, inaugurated for the 1964-65 school year at Cornell University: intentionally increasing the representation of entering black students to 8 in a class of 2,300, from a previous high of 4.) In California, the Senate campaign between former JFK and LBJ press secretary Pierre Salinger and George Murphy was playing out as a moratorium on Proposition 14. Salinger proudly declared himself against the proposed amendment (that is, in favor of open housing). Murphy refused to take a position. Salinger, it transpired, was about as popular as the prospect of open housing—which is to say that on his whistle-stop through southern California he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes.

Johnson comforted himself with talk of the “frontlash”—the infelicitous phrase he coined to describe all the disillusioned Republicans moving over to support
him.
Members of the Establishment media comforted themselves by wishing all of it away. “In pre-campaign figuring,”
Time
reported of Goldwater, “it was generally assumed that he would also gain in the North from the ‘backlash' of white resentment against the excess of the Negro revolution. But if there were any such backlash, it would surely have shown itself last week in a Democratic primary in Michigan's Sixteenth Congressional District and it failed to materialize.” That was a slim reed: the Sixteenth did, in fact, vote out a sluggish incumbent who voted against the Civil Rights Act. But it was also an area where racial boundaries were policed as violently as in Alabama. Time might just as well have chosen Massachusetts as its bellwether, where incumbent governor Endicott Peabody, an unbending civil rights supporter, was swept from office in a primary. Or Detroit itself, where a politician named Thomas Poindexter, after a decade of electoral disappointments as an economic populist, had finally won a seat on the Common Council as the “Home-owners' Champion”—first by testifying against the civil rights bill on behalf of the “99 percent of Detroit's white residents” who feared the “general lowering
of moral standards” that would follow its ratification; then by becoming the all-but-official voice of a primary-ballot initiative that thumped the city's open housing laws from the books.

Fear of backlash made for no little tension in the little jet Johnson had packed with Democratic pols and AFL-CIO officials for the trip to the Motor City from the capital. They exchanged pleasantries—and thought to themselves, Would Lyndon Johnson suffer Endicott Peabody's fate?

Here was their answer. He stood side by side, hands held aloft, with Walter Reuther and—both men's fathers spinning in their graves—Henry Ford II, then wrapped up in difficult negotiations over the next UAW contract. In the crowd, 100,000 union members cheered themselves hoarse. Labor and management, allies not adversaries, reasoning together for their common good: this was Lyndon Johnson's dream.

He spoke, with a tremor in his voice, about responsibility. “I am not the first President to speak here in Cadillac Square, and I do not intend to be the last. Make no mistake, there is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon.... I believe the final responsibility for all decisions on nuclear weapons must rest with the civilian head of this government, the President of the United States, and I think and reiterate that I believe that this is the way the American people want it.” These sturdy proletarians took in the words like a comforting balm. Property values, seniority systems, busing: after facing their planet's mortality, these things seemed like chickenshit indeed.

There was at least one person who blanched at this kind of talk: National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. He thought national security would be better served by telling the truth. Johnson's constant claim that the President was solely responsible for firing nuclear weapons was open to charges of deception, Bundy gingerly advised his boss. Bundy laid out four separate scenarios in which military commanders could authorize a nuclear strike without presidential approval, and he implored the President for the sake of the Atlantic alliance to “make a statement in which you make clear that there are indeed very specialized contingencies for which certain presidential instructions already exist.” His entreaties were ignored.

 

Goldwater broke ground for Bill Baroody's conservative utopia on the first stop of his first tour, Los Angeles, with the help of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. “Every individual endeavors to employ his capital so that its produce may be of greatest value,” Adam Smith famously wrote in
The Wealth of Nations
(1776), “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which has no part of his intentions. By pursuing his own interests he frequently promotes that of society more effectively than when he really intends to promote
it.” At Chicago, the revolutionary economics department was applying the gleaming instruments of mathematical proof to remove the qualifying “frequently” from that formulation, taking on every Keynesian orthodoxy their profession had come to hold dear. Professor Friedman, the Brooklyn-born son of an immigrant sweatshop worker, was their most fervent evangelist. By the 1950s this compact, muscular bulldog of a man was splitting his time between making pathbreaking contributions to his field (distinguished by a single-minded relentlessness in taking first principles to their logical conclusion, no matter how counterintuitive that conclusion might seem) and speaking to popular audiences around the nation (though so uncompromising was his devotion to individual liberty that when he traveled to private schools he refused to speak at compulsory chapel services).

In 1961 his schedule included a well-publicized debating victory over Pennsylvania's liberal senator Joseph Clark, who was reduced to spluttering that his opponent was a “neo-anarchist” who would make “a fine candidate for the next President of the John Birch Society.” The next year Friedman published a popular treatise,
Capitalism and Freedom.
It was so iconoclastic—and so lucid in its iconoclasm—that some Keynesians successfully lobbied to have it purged from their universities' libraries. Among its off-the-deep-end arguments were that corporations should not make charitable donations (lest stockholders be defrauded by this economic irrationality); that the Post Office should be sold off; that licensing procedures for professionals like doctors should be banned (the market would take care of the problem of quackery on its own)—and that the government should disburse educational “vouchers” to force public schools to compete in the marketplace.

It seemed only a matter of time before Friedman and Goldwater should meet. Friedman first wrote Goldwater with a policy suggestion in late 1960, but he received only a perfunctory acknowledgment in return. After the professor bludgeoned Goldwater's Senate adversary Joe Clark, however, Goldwater proposed a meeting. They first got together at one of the salons Bill Baroody held at his home (Friedman served on AEI's Academic Advisory Board). Soon Goldwater took Friedman on as an informal economic adviser. Though Friedman surely never expected to see his ideas boomed over the public address system of Dodger Stadium.

Goldwater had played Dodger Stadium almost a year earlier, and then as now the event was a sellout (both times it was a rare political rally that charged admission; in southern California, people were willing to
pay
to see Barry Goldwater). Youngsters poured from buses wearing “Goldwater à Go-Go” sweat-shirts. (“These niggers are trying to make me a second-class citizen,” one told Stewart Alsop. “I guess a man has to be for Goldwater or be a Communist.”)
Mexican-American supporters hung a huge “ARRIBA CON BARRY” banner from the upper left-field tier. Cesar Romero, Walter Brennan, Raymond Massey, and Ronald Reagan spoke, and as usual Reagan stole the show. (Another Hollywood star, Charlton Heston, would convert to Goldwaterism a few weeks later. Looking up at an “IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE'S RIGHT” billboard at a Sacramento intersection, road-to-Damascus-style, on the way to a movie shoot, he thought to himself, “Son of a bitch, he is right.”)

At Dodger Stadium, Goldwater was introduced by World War II bombing ace General James Doolittle: “I give you the leader of the modern American revolution!” The revolutionary emerged from the shadows in a blue convertible. He circled the warning track for fifteen minutes of extended cheering. It pealed on for another seven minutes as the candidate stood in front of the microphone. This was far more pleasant than his morning stop in San Diego, where hecklers pulled a fire alarm and a steel fire escape crashed right through the center of a frightened crowd.

Finally, the stadium was stilled. And Goldwater hit the ground running:

The scoreboard flashed “CHARGE!” at the applause lines. The Washington Post described the response as a “religious revivalistic fervor.”

Then Goldwater switched gears. “I will, as one of my first actions in the White House, ask the Congress to enact a regular and considered program of tax reduction,” he said. “I will also ask that Congress stop the wild spending spree begun by this Administration.” More applause.

“The legislation for which I will ask would provide an across-the-board reduction of 5 percent per year in all income taxes—both individual and corporate. The initial request will provide for such regular, prudent reductions in taxes in each of the next five years,” he plodded. “At the end of the first year you would calculate the tax you owed under the present law. Then you would reduce it by 5 percent. At the end of the second year you would reduce the payment
by 10 percent. Each year you would take off the 5 percent so that by the fifth year the total reduction would be 25 percent ...”

The audience began drifting off.

“All along, of course, the amount of money that the government takes from you every payday, in withholding taxes, would be reduced at the same rate—5 percent the first year, 10 percent the next and so on until the 25 percent mark...”

He went on. And on.

Economic theory predicted that Dodger Stadium should have rejoiced: the marginal utility of paying 95 percent of your tax bill instead of 100 percent was unmistakable. And one of Friedman's most treasured insights was that the unpredictability of government fiscal policy was an impediment to private investment, so knowing tax rates five years in advance would free up capital to boost economic growth.

Instead, the speech landed with a thud. Five percent, 10 percent, 25 percent, first year, fifth year, initial request, withholding taxes: it went by in a gust of confusion. Did a 5 percent tax reduction mean the 15 percent tax bracket would become 10 percent? Or that a $570 tax bill—the bite of the typical American family—would become $541.50? The answer was the latter. Those quick enough to do the back-of-the-envelope calculations couldn't have been too impressed—since that typical tax bill had just been reduced from $750 by the Johnson tax cut. Listeners were supposed to appreciate that Johnson's tax cut was designed to create a deficit, while Goldwater's would close the deficit. But why it would close the deficit—by forcing the government to cut spending because of reduced revenue—new by in half a garbled sentence. Many conservatives for whom fiscal irresponsibility was the gravest sin could only agree with Treasury Secretary Dillon's assessment: “No one with the slightest understanding of fiscal affairs,” he said, “could countenance the prospect of blindly binding us to annual tax cuts for many years ahead regardless of the state of the economy.”

In his speech the next day Goldwater proved he could bomb just as well when he was being crystal clear. Seattle's Coliseum was full to bursting with 15,000 patrons, at $I a pop, with a 3,000-person overflow milling outside. The speech was a screed against the doctrine of “coexistence” in the Cold War. Goldwater revived the old Republican cry that America's wars began under Democrats, scored Kennedy and Johnson for failures at the Bay of Pigs, in the Congo, Zanzibar, Panama—“Our flag, torn down, spat upon”—and warned that Vietnam was “as close as Kansas or New York or Seattle” in “the mileage of peace and freedom.” The audience, packed with men who riveted Boeing warplanes together, was his. A big helium balloon trailing a “JOHNSON '64”
bedsheet was stealthily released, bopped its way along the rafters, and met its end colliding with a floodlight; after it
flumphed
to the floor the audience ripped it to shreds like mad dogs. Goldwater said that that was what he was going to do with the Johnson Administration. His audience roared.