Before the Storm (88 page)

What had happened was less conspiracy than some kind of magic: a core of a few hundred activists told a story about the hypocrisies of consensus liberalism, and it rang true for the thousands of new allies who had never given the matter any thought before. They contemplated The Story—that America was fundamentally decent, its citizens content, their differences resolved through reconciliation and persuasion and compromise—and they refused it.

And so a strange, cosmic unity bodied forth that week in American political history, as Lyndon Johnson came off his first campaign tour: the FBI and the Warren Commission asserting that all it took was one man to tear a social fabric asunder; Mississippians bombing their way past illusions about the American way of reconciling conflict; Berkeley students saying no to “neutrality”; a third of the nation still stubbornly insisting on backing Barry Goldwater—all of them, at the same time, making the idea of an American consensus seem little more than a stubborn, fanciful mythology.

 

There were “no basic disagreements between intellectuals, bankers, trade unionists, artists, big businessmen, beatniks, professional people, and politicians, to name a few, or between the economic classes” in America today. “There are no real critics, no new ideas, no fundamental differences of opinion.”
Thus observed Richard Schlatter, provost of Rutgers University, in his contribution to “Some Comments on Senator Goldwater,” a forum in the fall issue of the quarterly Partisan Review, for decades a leading arbiter of American intellectual taste. He concluded that the striking thing about Barry Goldwater's imminent failure “is that it has demonstrated that we are all part of the American Establishment.” Richard Hofstadter wrote in the October 8 New York Review of Books: “It is no simple thing to account for the development and prominence of a mind so out of key with the basic tonalities of our political life.... When in our history has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?” He concluded worriedly that Goldwater was “within a hair's breadth of ruining one of our great and long-standing institutions”—the Republican Party. Partisan Review contributors thought Goldwater was within a hair'sbreadth of something else. “The ingredients of Goldwaterism could of course be put together in such a way as to form a fascist totality,” explained one (adding, with relief, that Goldwater's followers, “no better organized than is his own mind,” were not up to the work involved). Wrote another, “The danger is that he might well see to it that this year's election is our last free election.” His movement, with its “childish intolerance of tension,” represented “a recrudescence on American soil of precisely those super-nationalistic and right-wing trends that were finally defeated in Europe at the cost of a great war, untold misery, and many millions dead.”

Less empyrean publications put aside such idle speculation of what would happen in the event of a Goldwater victory to tick off the reasons that such a thing was unimaginable in the first place. “To meet the needs of the people,”
Atlantic Monthly
editors explained, “the federal government must contribute to the solution of the manifold problems of modern urban life—housing, education, welfare, mass transportation, health, and civil rights.” That President Johnson made these points “in language that can be easily understood” was why he was the best politician Americans were likely to see in their lifetimes. Partisan Review's editor agreed, after his fashion. He warned that although one should remain “uneasy about the neanderthalism lurking in the so-called average man,” we were stuck with this dreary “centrist Utopia” for the imaginable future.

To which a massed choir of the nation's editorialists could only respond: Amen. Then they reviewed the reports from Lyndon Johnson's New England travels and patted themselves on the back for their perspicacity.

 

Johnson started in Providence, Rhode Island, which suited his purposes well. It was Kennedy country, its soul divided between the martyr's two most loyal
constituencies: a proud Irish-Catholic proletariat and the eggheads at Brown University. Stewart Alsop reported that Oliver Quayle, whose polls the President now carried in his pocket like a lucky rabbit's foot, found that Kennedy's “fading but much-revered memory” was LBJ's “second-greatest asset” in the campaign. (The first was “the nervous and uneasy feeling Senator Goldwater imparts to a great many voters.”) Johnson was determined to show that there was so much more to his popularity than that—to show that he was loved. Although he was not exactly sure that he was.

Providence provided. The ground was marbled by frost as the President's plane made its early-morning approach. He landed; and before him at the airport was a crowd that was bigger than he had dared dream, some three thousand people. He was jumping out of his skin as he made his way down the steps. “If you want to see crowd reaction,” he called giddily out to his press corps, “follow me!”

It wasn't easy. The streets of Providence were so thick with well-wishers it was like parting a sea of molasses, and just as sweet; there were more spectators on the streets, some were claiming, than the population of Providence itself. People called to him, leaned toward him, grasped at him—and, a dozen or more at a time, Johnson just pulled them onto his limousine. (He had been frightening and aggravating his Secret Service protectors with such inexcusable security risks all year.) Other times he would stretch his tall frame over the crowd and bark consensus chestnuts through a bullhorn: “We're in favor of a lot of things, and we're against mighty few!” Armor plating had been added to the sides of the presidential limousine since the assassination, and stronger shock absorbers and brakes were installed to allow for the increased stress. But no car was sturdy enough for this. Inching up one steep incline, flames suddenly gushed from beneath the hood of the accompanying press car. Startled Secret Service agents dove for the President's calves to pull him down below window level. Much to his annoyance: “Any dumb son of a bitch would know enough to turn off the ignition when the engine temperature gets to four hundred and fifty degrees!” he complained.

He pulled a CBS cameraman into his car during the next motorcade, through Hartford. The cameraman was motioned to lie on his back on the floorboards and shoot up through the closed bubble top—and Walter Cronkite that evening got to introduce stunning shots of the masses crawling over their President like a thousand insects. Like an addict, Johnson had had microphones attached discreetly on the exterior so that when the top was closed he could continue taking in the roar. His speech, delivered regally from the portico of the
Hartford Times
building, was a blur that bore no resemblance to the carefully calibrated remarks distributed to reporters. He spoke in a hush of the
worker who “hopes someday he can have a little hospital care, he can have a little pension, he can have a little Social Security, he can have a place to take Molly and the babies when he retires.... His boys go to war; they fight to preserve this system. He likes his boss and respects him. He believes in free enterprise, and he does not hate the man who makes a reasonable return.” He cut to the chase: “I want to talk to you today about what I know is on your minds and what I believe is in your hearts. And that is irresponsibility.”

By the time he traveled the traditional Republican strongholds of Vermont and Maine (where the GOP governor rode in his car) he had shaken so many hands his cracked fingers oozed blood. By the time he arrived three hours late at the last stop, Manchester, New Hampshire, after a neurotic ramble to the crowd (“If you came out to hear me speak like I had a martyr complex and nobody loves me, you are going to be disappointed, because I think that we have the greatest system of government in the world”) he confidently mentioned his opponent for the first time by name, instead of his customary reference to “these people.” The context was Vietnam. “As far as I'm concerned, I want to be very cautious and careful and use it only as a last resort when I start dropping bombs around that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700 million Chinese,” he began, and since he would never dare flatter the Scylla of his Vietnam policy without paying court to Charybdis, he told a folksy story about the definition of a Texas Ranger: “A Ranger is one that when you plug him, when you hit him, he just keeps coming.... We must let the rest of the world know that we ... have the will and the determination, and if they ever hit us it is not going to stop us—we just keep on comin' !”

It was a triumph. At one point he dragged the AP's Frank Cormier beside him as the people's thousand tentacles reached out for the healing touch of their chief executive: “Write that in your story,” he said, “so the whole country can know!” Johnson was convinced, for now: when these crowds sighed, they sighed only for Lyndon Baines Johnson. Though the President's greatest rival, Bobby Kennedy, campaigning hard in a close race for Ken Keating's Senate seat, labored under a different assumption. He had stepped off a plane in Albany one night and beheld thousands before him—then thousands waiting streetside in their pajamas on the strength of only a rumor, waiting to pay their respects as he drove by on his way to somewhere else. His aides exulted. Bobby, still mourning, saw nothing to celebrate. “They're for him,” he muttered softly. “They're for him.”

 

Goldwater's next trip was a Heartland whistle-stop tour—a sentimental tradition whose origins harkened back to those pre-TV days when candidates
needed to cover as many miles as humanly possible and couldn't be bothered to take the time to walk to the town's auditorium. He kicked off defiantly at Union Station, the same day Johnson left for New England. “Living in Washington, and reading newspapers that are solidly against our campaign,” he said, “you might well wonder what's happening out in the real world.”

Roger Mudd of CBS sent him off by calling the whistle-stop a “rendezvous with nostalgia” and a “throwback.” Stewart Alsop, in that week's Saturday Evening Post, observed, “Goldwater's ‘choice' is not really a coherent, rational alternative at all—it is hardly more than an angry cry of protest against things as they are.” News cameras lingered over picket signs massed at the fringes of Goldwater's crowds: “DON'T STOP HERE, WE'RE POOR ENOUGH”; “DOWN THE DRAIN, GOLDWATER”; “FASCIST LIP IN THE WEST”; “C5H4N4O3 ON AUH2O”—translated roughly from the chemical as “Piss on Goldwater” (a Texas conservative later retaliated with “LBJ DON'T PEON US”). Partisans competed in ever greater displays of devotion; in one town a kid paraded around with a sign reading “I JUST HITCHHIKED 50 MILES TO SHAKE HANDS WITH GOLDWATER.” In another town blacks stood in line for the privilege of snubbing him by not shaking his hand. At every stop photographers and cameramen were taxed trying to keep the ubiquitous “YAF BACKS BARRY” banners out of their shots; in Lima, Ohio, they couldn't avoid shooting the three-story “LBJ-USA” banner Democrats unfurled over a building directly behind the rostrum. As Goldwater motorcaded through Sioux Falls, the Goldwater side dropped a parachuter from the sky; someone from the opposition dropped an egg from a rooftop that splattered the candidate's mohair suit. Everywhere Goldwater went, some Republican or another refused an invitation to share his platform; everywhere he left, he seemed to leave townspeople at each others' throats. “Crowds were more violent than anything a Presidential candidate has had to face in the last generation,” James Reston columnized. “Supporters of Mr. Goldwater declared they could not discuss the campaign with Democrats on a rational basis,” his paper's news pages reported. “Democrats said the Goldwaterites were too rabid for reason.”

Each new day provided new occasions for screwups. One day a publicist convinced the candidate by painful effort to pose wearing an engineer's cap. “Senator,” he said nervously, “if you'll just put this on now ...” And so Goldwater did, glaring coldly in the cameras for a few seconds. The next day the picture didn't even show up in newspapers; the publicist had the photographers shoot directly into the sun. In Hammond, Indiana, some wag had the band play “Bye, Bye Blackbird” as parting music to humiliate the three black Republicans the organization had persuaded to sit on the platform. Goldwater's speech
at the Cincinnati Gardens on the September 29 was a scorcher that won a standing ovation (“Does he hope that he can wait until after the election to confront the American public with the fact of total defeat or total war in Asia?”). The speech was supposed to be nationally televised, but thanks to Ralph Cordiner the campaign couldn't afford a network spot in time. In Frankfort, Indiana, the public address system couldn't project Goldwater's voice thirty yards past the platform.

Goldwater put forward new policy proposals. But his speeches mostly demonstrated the inability or indifference of his team to communicate unfamiliar ideas. Like his previous proposals—the draft ban, the tax cut, replacing federal programmatic grants with block grants—there was no follow-through, little repetition in future speeches, so the proposals floated around in the public's consciousness for a day or so before popping like soap bubbles. At the University of Toledo field house he proposed federal refunds based on the share of local property taxes allocated to schools—a complex form of unconditional grants to education—with little explanation, the essence of the proposal buried in pages of angry, cryptic hectoring: “What would you do if I told you you had to line up at six in the morning tomorrow and get a number?” What, people asked, was he talking about?

In Moline, where the chairman of the board of John Deere had just announced that he was a Johnson man even though he was the secretary-treasurer for Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Percy (a Goldwater supporter) and local school authorities announced that they would let kids out of school for the President's visit the following week, Goldwater finally addressed Social Security. A reauthorization bill that would have increased benefits had died in conference, he said, because the President held it hostage to his insistence that it include authorization for a Medicare program. Goldwater used the opening to point out that he had voted for expanding benefits every chance he got since 1954. “Now you know who the friends of Social Security are,” he said, “and you know why. Now you know who the enemies of Social Security are—and you know why.” To no effect. When staffers sounded out the crowd, people could not be shaken from the conviction that they had seen Goldwater himself tear up a Social Security card on TV. In Hammond, Indiana, the candidate demonstrated his gift for terrifying people while attempting to soothe them: “We must always maintain such superiority of strength, such devastating strike-back power, such a strong network of allies that the Communists would be committing suicide for themselves and their society if
they
push the button,” he said, and then: “In all likelihood, the President ... would not be around at all to push the button. It would be too late for button-pushing.”