Before the Storm (96 page)

Choice
told its story in the opening two minutes. Under the pulse of blaring jazzy trumpets and a jungle beat, a black Cadillac careened out of control on a country road, kicking up a cloud of dust that dissolved into a scene of garishly- gyrating revelers. Cut to a criminal resisting arrest. Back to the revel. Then the Cadillac; then a civil rights protest; then the revel; then the criminal; then a close-up of a shapely, twisting rump; then the Caddy spinning out of control; then a topless dancer and a chick in a poodle bikini; then the Caddy careening once more—and its owner, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was identified when an empty Pearl beer can popped out the side.

Cue “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, pans over the Statue of Liberty and bucolic countryside and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Cue Raymond Massey: “Now there are two Americas. One is words like ‘allegiance' and ‘Republic.' ... The other America—the other America is no longer a dream but a nightmare.”

It was that second America that worried NBC president Robert Kintner, to whom the delicate matter of censoring a political announcement fell. He said the show could run only if the exposed breasts and close-ups of covers of books the likes of
Male for Sale, Sex and Hypnosis,
and one depicting a semi-nude woman spanking another, were excised. (He let the kid giving the cop the finger stay.) Meanwhile, Walton and White made the mistake of releasing the incendiary product to the press, which obligingly reported on every shocking image. Two hundred prints being a lot to keep track of, one found its way into
the hands of the Democratic National Committee, which called the film the “sickest political program to be conceived since television became a factor in American politics.” Conservatives jumped the gun with public showings (San Francisco headquarters projected theirs in its front window); Democrats directed people to these showings with sound trucks. The Wednesday re-airing of the Mormon Tabernacle morality speech hadn't happened before the Republican Party was under suspicion for trafficking in dirty movies, at the very same time that Johnson's “Confessions of a Republican” ad was drawing attention to just how perverse this new GOP was. The RNC was defenseless—for neither Goldwater nor Dean Burch had seen the thing.

Smart politics would have been to keep it that way—isolating
Choice
as the work of rogues. Instead the campaign's response was to let it be known that Goldwater had just reviewed the picture, found it “sick” and “racist,” and personally ordered all showings canceled and all prints recalled. To the broad public, it seemed that the Goldwater campaign had produced a disgusting film, then disowned it when the heat was on. Half of Goldwater's diehards were flushed with shame and confusion at the idea of their hero commissioning such a thing; the other half were outraged at his weak-kneed backing away from exposing the Johnson Administration's perfidy. “AS THE RESULT OF CANCELING TV NETWORK RELEASE OF CHOICE THE MORALE AND ENTHUSIASM OF OUR WORKERS HAVE HIT BOTTOM,” White's Northern California leadership telegrammed him. Some Citizens chapters simply held on to their prints and broadcast them locally, topless dancers,
Male for Sale
, and all, although few home viewers likely watched the whole thing; TV production was not Rus Walton's métier. Like grand opera, it was about twice too long. And the fat lady only sang—it was only identified as a
Goldwater
commercial—in the last five minutes, when John Wayne appeared, a rifle on the mantel behind him, to drawl, “You've got the strongest hand in the world ... the hand that marks the ballot. The hand that pulls a voting lever,” and clips were shown of Goldwater receiving the Republican nomination.
Choice
proved to be that unique thing: a lose-lose-lose proposition.

 

The withdrawal of the film was the
Post
's banner the next day. The
New York Times
went with the headline “NO EVIDENCE IS UNCOVERED THAT EXPRESIDEN-TIAL AIDE COMPROMISED NATION.” Johnson was thrilled. “That was a wonderful thing you did for me and Walter,” he told DeLoach, referring also to the Bureau's—illegal, fruitless—file checks on sixteen Goldwater staffers.

Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity. One day he joshed with the press: “I know I'm gonna beat Goldwater. What I'm trying to do with all this travelin' is to help elect as many deserving Democrats as I
can.... You-all know a good bit about the Republicans in Congress, and there must be at least a few of them that you think deserve to be defeated. Give me some names and either Hubert or I will try to get into their districts in the next few days and talk against 'em.” (His press corps was stunned into silence by the cynicism—until one reporter finally piped up that he couldn't think of anyone who better deserved it than young Bob Dole of Kansas.) Another day, LBJ sent a Secret Service man to snarl at a hapless photographer for shooting the President's right side instead of his left.

He saw no reason to coast. The next race riot could break out any day. (“The crackpots must know by now Goldwater will lose,” John Bartlow Martin wrote Moyers. “Some are unbalanced. One might act.”) And above all Johnson lusted after that landslide that would legitimize him in the eyes of history. Press secretary George Reedy found himself increasingly disgusted with his boss's and Bill Moyers's continued boyish obsession with cloak-and-dagger schemes. “We passed out 10,000 of these outside Madison Square Garden during Goldwater's rally,” an assistant wrote Moyers proudly a week before the election, referring to a flyer from an invented group they called “RAGE: Republicans Against Goldwater Extremism.” A pamphlet put out by the Republican Committee in the District of Columbia (voting in its first presidential election) bemoaning the weakness of Johnson's civil rights record and the strength of Goldwater's was reproduced and graciously distributed by Johnson state committees in the most racist districts in the South.

“We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” Johnson repeated in Akron on October 21—but this time he didn't append his usual caveat about how America would always fight back when provoked. When John Kenneth Galbraith, three days after Gallup listed Johnson at 64 percent to Goldwater's 29 percent, conveyed the message that Governor Brown of California hoped Johnson would say “a word or two in support of open housing when you are next in California,” Moyers nixed the idea: no use taking chances. (Open housing ended up losing two to one on Election Day, although Johnson won California with a cushion of well over a million votes.) Johnson even risked a dip into Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina (where feeble new local Democratic campaign offices were flailing about uselessly, because no Democratic presidential candidate ever bothered to campaign there before)—and was so enraged by anti-LBJ and pro-Goldwater pickets he ordered that they be removed by any means necessary, the means his traveling team chose being a pinch of itching powder sprinkled discreetly on the back of the offender's neck. He even shamelessly commandeered one last opportunity for a free “nonpolitical” televised address on October 24—a lecture to school-children
on American democracy. “A great strength of the two-party system,” he explained,

Maine had begun opening absentee ballots. It was found that a disconcerting number of voters were declining to vote for either presidential candidate.

 

The RNC would have the chance to slap Johnson back three nights later. The campaign had purchased a half-hour slot on NBC with the boodle left over from Goldwater's response to LBJ's foreign policy address. The campaign had just finished a one-day whistle-stop through Goldwater country: Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego Counties, where crowds were stirred to foot-stomping frenzies. Mississippi GOP chair Wirt Yerger and Virginia finance chair Stets Coleman were tagging along in yet one more unsuccessful attempt to hijack the attention of the candidate from his palace guard. In San Diego's Balboa Stadium, Yerger turned to Coleman and called over the din, “Where the hell has this been the entire campaign? They just want to show him having brunch with a bunch of old ladies!”

This was just what was gnawing at the conservative movement potentates watching from the VIP boxes. They had invested in this campaign in amounts to boggle the mind. Henry Salvatori, the oilman without whose $50,000 stake
National Review
might never have gotten off the ground in 1955, had raised $1 million for the June primary. Much of it had come from just a few men: Cy Rubel of Union Oil; Holmes Tuttle, the Cheops of Southwestern car dealers; Patrick Frawley, a frenzied acquisitions specialist with an empire worth $200 million, who had just sent out 40,000 copies of
A Choice Not an Echo
to Catholic clergymen—and Walter Knott, whose restaurant that grew from his wife's little berry pie stand now served ten thousand diners a day. These friends shared several things in common. They were all either on or close to the ostensibly “figurehead” Goldwater TV Committee. And the only thing men like this hated more than being controlled was being controlled by anyone three
thousand miles to their east. They felt used, like bagmen. And they liked what they were hearing from their lawyers. It happened that they had convened a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser not too long ago in L.A. that Goldwater couldn't attend. “We'll send you a surrogate speaker,” a Washington factotum assured Salvatori. “Don't get a surrogate, we can get our own speaker,” he responded. “No, no, you must have a surrogate.” “We'll get our own speaker!” Salvatori roared back, shutting the pest up. He knew exactly who he wanted: Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was one of them. When
General Electric Theater
was suddenly canceled in September of 1962, the actor took it in stride; he was working in politics practically full-time. He had finally changed his party registration, had chaired Loyd Wright's primary campaign against Tom Kuchel (after beating back entreaties that he run himself), and had become so important to the conservative cause that the month after the cancellation of the show he was honored at a 13,000-person YAF rally in Long Island. By the time the California primary came around, he was so busy he was squeezing in noontime speeches in shopping-center parking lots. In September he was named California co-chair of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller and taped a TV commercial for the RNC (Reagan's brother was an executive in Goldwater's ad agency). It was a pip: Reagan alone on-screen, sitting casually but radiating strength, arms crossed, looking the audience in the eye, gently rebuking them that they knew better than to trust—than to trust—well,
them.
“Believe me. If it weren't for Barry keeping those boys in Washington on their toes, do you
honestly
think our national defense would be as strong as it is?” Exactly 60 seconds later, likely on the first take, he drew to a close and sucked in the audience like a tractor beam: “So join me, won't you? Let's get a real leader, and not a power politician, in the White House.” Barry admired Reagan's gifts. In one of his own spots, he began his answer to an offscreen question with an attempt at a textbook-Reagan dismissive chuckle—although as usual he made it seem like he was reading it off a cue card.

By then Reagan's G.E. speech had been burnished to a blistering sheen—ineffective lines winnowed with Darwinian ruthlessness, apt examples mined from a thousand bitch sessions with fellow conservatives and hundreds of issues of his favorite magazines,
Reader's Digest
and
Human Events,
one-liners carved to a tolerance that would put Jack Benny to shame. It was a joke in SoCal circles—“The Speech,” they nicknamed it, as in: “ ‘What are you doing tonight?' ‘I'm going to the Chamber of Commerce dinner to hear Reagan give The Speech.' ”They weren't mocking him; Reagan was the best they had. Few $1,000 donors felt shortchanged when they learned that he would speak in place of Goldwater at Salvatori's dinner. Many
preferred
to hear Reagan speak
in place of Goldwater. And it was over cigars and brandy afterward that Salvatori et al. came up with the idea to ask Reagan if he would go into a studio to film The Speech for TV, to show as a Goldwater commercial. “Sure,” he replied earnestly, “if you think it will do any good”—just the “gee-whiz, golly-shucks crap,” as Frank Sinatra put it, that so endeared him to Republicans, and which annoyed the likes of Sinatra to no end. Only he had a few suggestions. He wasn't one of those cynics who believed that if you could fake sincerity you had it made, but if Ronald Reagan knew anything, it was that sincerity wouldn't come off on-screen without quite a bit of fakery.

Walter Knott, keeper of P.O. Box 80, presented the film to Eye Street with an ultimatum: it would run in the campaign's October 27 network slot. Bill Baroody hit the ceiling. These southern California loonies ruining Goldwater's dignity; this
actor
despoiling a campaign of ideas: it was an affront to everything Baroody was fighting for. Though the problem was also that The Speech contained one too many ideas: about an eighth of it was devoted to Social Security, including a passage about Goldwater's preference for “voluntary features that would permit a citizen to do better on their own.”
This
was too impolitic for even Baroody to allow. The word came back to California: No way.