Before the Storm (98 page)

Let Scranton and Rockefeller make their token gestures at the ticket; let Romney and Rhodes snub it altogether. Nixon had been as nauseated by the convention—literally, he would claim in his memoirs—as any of them. Only he had swallowed his bile—and swallowed the rubber chicken, the back-room whiskey, and the church-basement juice, sitting in airports, sleeping in airplanes (or not sleeping, if it was a prop plane that rattled like the end of the world), gripping and grinning just as he had for his party every two years since 1946. Once more he would pack the bags, kiss the girls goodbye, and set out to collect the chits. It was habit, strategy, a way of life.

The sophisticates would laugh and poke fun at “Tricky Dick” chasing around the country once more. They always did. But didn't Nixon always get the last laugh? While the Romneys and the Rockefellers sat on their hands, he
would be the one to court the conservative foot soldiers who now owned the precincts, grateful that at least someone in the Establishment hadn't sold them out. He would get chits from moderates glad to see someone out there holding the line
against
the conservatives; and chits from county chairs in places like Enid, Oklahoma, that were saved from having to cancel half-subscribed fund-raising dinners because no other Republican of marquee stature was out there touring; chits from the local candidates who flooded his office in New York with requests for the privilege of walking the tarmac with him to the pulse of a thousand flashbulbs: conservative candidates, moderate candidates, liberal candidates. “He's one of us,” they would say—again. Like that roomful of Orange County businessmen looking for a congressional candidate for 1946, when he presented himself in his Navy uniform because he didn't own a civilian suit and said that the men he talked to in the foxholes “will not be satisfied with a dole or a government handout”; like the civil rights people after “NIXON SAYS RIGHTS PLANK MUST BE MADE STRONGER” at the 1960 convention.

This year was the hardest. Day after day, candidates implored him not to associate them with their own party's presidential candidate; Nixon always managed to find some way to praise each independently of the other, an operation akin in delicacy to separating an egg yolk from the white. Liberal Republicans called him a traitor for undermining the unwritten pact to starve out the conservative wing and move in for the kill after November. Conservatives called him a traitor for evenhandedly offering his service to any candidate who asked. The scheduling office on Eye Street disdained to deal with him; but the press identified him as a loyal member of the Goldwater team nonetheless—as attested by the lowballed crowd estimates and the news cameras lingering on the empty seats or the fattest, ugliest blue-haired old lady they could find.

Nixon plowed on manfully. Goldwater would tumble into his grave on November 3. Rockefeller, Romney, Rhodes, Scranton, and the rest would stumble into theirs just as soon as the realization dawned that it wasn't Walter Lippmann and the Alsop brothers who nominated Republican presidential candidates, or television cameras, or Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Chits did. Chits knew no ideology. And, as the campaign dragged ignobly into its final weekend and he watched his own jowly face on the TV screen boring yet one more lackadaisical audience, Richard Nixon could comfort himself that he had bagged them all. Chits lasted a long time—four years at least.

 

Halloween weekend, and both sides were racing for the sewer. The man whom Johnson beat in his first congressional election went on statewide TV on behalf of “Texas Doctors for Goldwater” and compared his old opponent with “Hitler
and his crew of very curious people,” stating that the Civil Rights Act gave the President “all the power Adolf Hitler ever had.” A rumor spread that Goldwater's 9999th Air Reserve Squadron was really a cabal working for military takeover of the government,
Seven Days in May
-style. In states where black votes might provide the margin of victory, Republicans made sure that 1.4 million leaflets appeared in the ghettos urging write-in votes for Martin Luther King, the newly announced Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Bill Miller's daughter was the victim of a bomb scare. Volunteers handing out Goldwater pamphlets to passersby saw them smacked away with enough force that they feared their wrists would be broken. “Teenagers are the hard core of the trouble-makers,” a shocked
Philadelphia Inquirer
political columnist wrote. “Screaming girls and yelping boys try to dominate meetings and the police seem powerless to quell the disturbances caused by these young people.”

Johnson supporters wore “Goldwater for Halloween” buttons—a cryptic legend understood perfectly by the many for whom Barry Goldwater personified everything frightening and evil. For trick-or-treaters, Goldwater partisans kept by the door a store of the tiny anti-UN pamphlets the Birch Society published to be slipped into children's little UNICEF tins, or big bowls of “Barry Goldwater Taffy,” and displayed huge Goldwater signs on their lawns—and teenage liberals running in packs and howling like demons made Goldwater's face an awful goulash of rotten eggs and jack-o'-lantern fragments as Goldwater teens prowled after midnight prying Johnson bumper stickers from cars with razor blades.

The candidates set the example. The President sat up all night on October 30 reading noted Republicans' FBI files, the next day burbling excitedly to Bobby Kennedy about which tidbits he planned to leak to the press. The White House was crediting a rumor that the Goldwater campaign was on the verge of springing some scandalous last-minute announcement about one of Johnson's cabinet members. The campaign team in the West Wing had a retaliatory strike planned—a statement questioning the competence of a commanding officer of an Air Reserve squadron who could give “excellent” ratings to a security risk like Walter Jenkins. Air Force One was careening around the country on whims, like a pinball. Why not Pittsburgh and Houston in one day? Salt Lake City, unscheduled and unadvanced, then Philadelphia? (Finding the 47-by-47¼-inch podiums in each city that he demanded “so it hits mah belly button” drove Johnson's road crew to distraction.) His rhetoric devolved to the level of nonsense. “I'm depending on you young folks who are going to have to fight our wars, and who are going to have to defend this country, and who are going to get blown up if we have a nuclear holocaust-I am depending on you to have enough interest in your future and what is ahead of you to get up and prod Mama and Papa and make them get up early and go vote,” he pronounced at a stop in Delaware
(where he was devoting enormous resources to unseating Senator John Williams, instigator of the Bobby Baker investigation). In San Diego he ranted about a sexually deviant appointment secretary in Eisenhower's Administration, bragging that back then “we Democrats didn't capitalize on a man's misfortune.” (There had been no such appointment secretary, prompting an impromptu ethics seminar in the press quarters on whether it was allowable to misquote the President of the United States in order to save the real secretaries' honor.)

Goldwater's speeches were now sheer extrusions of rage. “He tells the American people in the most flagrant insult to our intelligence
I've ever heard
from a politician, that the only
—the only issue!
—is getting people up early in the morning to vote for him!” That was in Wyoming on October 30, the same day the
New York Daily News
all but withdrew its previous endorsement of Goldwater because “the Senator has made so many unfortunate remarks in public that one wonders how capable a President he would be.” The next day, resting in Phoenix, Goldwater came unhinged. There was awful news from Vietnam: a mortar barrage by the Vietcong had killed four American servicemen and destroyed half a dozen B-57 bombers. Goldwater made dark hints about LBJ's complicity. “I won't make any comment about it happening just before the election,” he said, “but if you will recall about three months ago I said something would happen just before the election either in Cuba or South Vietnam of this nature, and it's happened in South Vietnam.” He had traveled 74,000 miles since September 3.
Yia Bi Ken
was pinballing, too: California to New York to Tennessee to Iowa to Pennsylvania, then back to California, showing up in places so irrelevant to the outcome of the election that it was as if the plane were flying itself. The strain was wearing on the candidate, and his audiences absorbed the blame. “Does this make any sense to you at all?” he would howl after outlining the perfidies of Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes. “Or have you already forgotten about them?”

He went on existential rambles. “I can't help but wondering, sometimes, if you've asked yourselves why my campaign is the way it is.” Think of the Romans, he said. “They traded their votes for ‘bread and circuses.' They traded away their Senate for an emperor.” It was the only way he himself could understand this great national salivation over an opponent he now despised. He now viewed his job as just smacking people back to their senses.

The old restraints fell away. Sunday evening he gave his civil rights speech, the one he once reserved for a carefully selected Chicago audience and edited and reedited for any hint of racist taint—but now gave in Columbia, South Carolina, with a covey of segregationists sitting next to him. The extravaganza was beamed live to eighty-seven TV stations across the South.

 

Few people saw it, thanks to Ronald Reagan.

In Goldwater circles a cult was quickly forming. The checks, those grubby paper bags stuffed with cash, the envelopes full of children's spare change—they came and came and came after the October 27 Reagan speech, more money, even, than could be counted. Thanks to Reagan's old boss Cordiner, who was barely speaking with Burch after the RNC pleaded with him to allow expenditures outside the organization's stingy budget, they didn't have any outstanding bills. That meant they could now buy time for a last-minute blitz of spots. But they were too late. The networks no longer had any time left to sell. And the RNC ended up with a surplus of $500,000.

But one Goldwater campaign film was on the air constantly—Reagan's A
Time for Choosing.
Dozens of local committees had spontaneously begun raising cash to run it over and over again in their towns, some half a dozen times or more. In northern California a couple took out a second mortgage on their house to help get it on the air. A kid in Kentucky watched wide-eyed with his father, a janitor. The boy pointed at the screen, and said, “That man is going to be President. And I'm gonna work for him in the White House.” People called their crazy fascist Goldwaterite friends on the phone:
Now
I get it, they said. Conservatives were no less stricken; they had never heard as gripping and pithy a statement of what they believed. The Goldwater offices, down to the most ragged and irregular, were being irrigated by Reagan cash; whenever the show ran, people just sent money to whatever Goldwater outfit they could find. The Arizona Mafia fielded humiliating letters. A friend wrote Kitchel: “In my 30 years in politics I have never heard such glowing tributes as
the accolades for Ronald Reagan's speech.” Another dropped Kitchel a note of congratulations on how he had handled the campaign. “Incidentally,” he added, “Ronald Reagan was terrific.” It was one of the few times in his life that Goldwater was jealous. He never did thank Ronald Reagan, a wounded Nancy Reagan later noted.

Wirt Yerger, blunt as ever, called up one of the media chiefs in Washington and asked what it would cost to underwrite another network broadcast of the thing. It turned out that the Mississippi GOP had $120,000 left over from its own campaign fund-raising. (Mississippi's finance chair had pioneered yet another fund-raising innovation: automatically deducting a bank draft from the donor's account at set intervals.) Frantically, someone on Eye Street managed to cadge another half hour from the networks. So frantically, in fact, that no one realized that the Columbia, South Carolina, rally was running throughout the South at exactly the same time on another network.

On Monday, Goldwater traveled to San Francisco to deliver an exact reprise of his acceptance speech. (“IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW IT'S A LOT OF TRIPE, SO GO TO THE POLLS AND DO WHAT YOU THINK IS RIGHT,” read a theater marquee his motorcade passed on the way to the hall, under what was supposed to be a blizzard of ticker tape, but turned out to be gently falling flurries.) Goldwater's men made a last-ditch attempt to reclaim him as a member of the human race: a newspaper advertisement reprinted a beautiful and wise letter he wrote to his little girl, Joanne, back in 1948. It began: