Before the Storm (99 page)

Johnson ran get-out-the-vote spots: footage of an electrical storm, gale-force winds carrying umbrellas down the street, the narrator pronouncing, “If it rains on November 3, get wet.... The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”
Another showed a voter entering the booth as the announcer told him to remember as he pulled the lever that the United States was at peace.

Behind White House doors, the commitments had been made two months earlier: American pilots would gear up for bombing raids in North Vietnam as soon as the election was won. The only question now was the dates.

 

On Election Day, the officials waved the Goldwater family right in at their modest local polling station in Phoenix; they insisted on waiting in line. The candidate playfully borrowed a felt-tip and penned a tic-tac-toe board on his wife's neck. The cameras wedged in for prime real estate as Goldwater entered the booth. The curtain opened; Goldwater emerged, flashbulbs popped. The pictures recorded a man who looked like he would rather be somewhere else.

Across the nation, millions of ordinary Americans did exactly the same thing at exactly the same time in exactly the same way, the glory of democracy. At a carefully marked-off legal distance from the polls, union members passed out palm cards reading “From the Hip ... Or From the Head?” and “PRESIDENT JOHNSON ... Soldier of Peace,” and paraphrasing the President's Gulf of Tonkin speech: “We still seek no wider war.” Presuming as a matter of course that Lyndon Johnson would cheat, conservatives—over one per voting booth in Chicago and Cleveland—carried out what the RNC called “Operation Eagle Eye.” Poll watchers were instructed to hover over the precinct books from the opening until the closing of the polls to check that each signature corresponded to the one on record, and to tick off the names on their duplicate precinct books (the evening before, they had driven through the neighborhoods to make sure none of the addresses in the book corresponded to vacant lots or abandoned buildings). Hubert Humphrey, mindful that under the supervision of Bill Rehnquist and Dick Kleindienst in 1962, Arizona Republican Party workers attired in policelike uniforms had stalled voters in Negro and Mexican districts by forcing them to read the Constitution of the United States, called the effort “Operation Evil Eye.” Employees of the three television networks swelled the crowds at some polling stations even further. It was the new ritual: viewers were glued to the big charts slowly filling up behind the anchormen all afternoon, until, four hours and twelve minutes before the close of the California polls, NBC became the first to crunch the exit-poll data and call a winner. (Afterward the networks received postcards: “
You bastards!
Election night used to be fun. You spoiled it with your goddamned gimmicks.”)

It wasn't a hard election to call. No amount of cheating could run up a landslide like this. At Goldwater's D.C. election-night headquarters at the
Shoreham, reporters were swarming around Ronald Reagan, and Lee Edwards, drunker by the hour, finally wove his way to the lectern at ten or eleven after final word flashed that Goldwater had lost Illinois, that great Taftite redoubt where Edwards's father, the
Chicago Tribune
's Washington correspondent, had been publishing articles all month with headlines like “JOHNSON'S EGO MASKS UNDERLYING CONCERN OVER ELECTION OUTCOME.” He slurred something about how Goldwater would release a statement later after he'd analyzed the vote. Goldwater was back home in Arizona, where he'd been in bed for three hours, leaving Kitchel, Hess, and Paul Fannin (who won his old Senate seat) weeping in front of the TV, Goldwater never having graced either the Phoenix or Washington headquarters with his presence.

Lyndon Johnson, in Austin, was more vigilant. He was on the phone with Bill Moyers constantly, gorging himself with good news. At 5:45 p.m. he asked about Kentucky (final total: LBJ, 64 to 36), Indiana (65 to 33), New Jersey (66 to 34), and Oklahoma (56 to 44). At 5:52 he learned, unsurprisingly, that Goldwater was winning South Carolina (final total: 59 to 41), but that the Democratic ticket was on a pace toward carrying Ohio, whose governor had offloaded his convention delegates to Goldwater certain that the backlash would carry the Republican to victory, by a million and a half votes. At 6:22 the President looked into Maryland (65 to 35), Connecticut (68 to 32), Vermont (66 to 34, Democratic for the first time ever), North Carolina (a border-state landslide for LBJ, 56 to 44), Minnesota (64 to 36), and Georgia (Goldwater, 55 to 44). The news wasn't enough to cheer him. “I'm afraid of Vietnam,” he told Moyers in between returns. “We're in trouble in Vietnam, serious trouble,” he repeated to Hubert Humphrey. Congratulating his former attorney general on his projected New York Senate victory, Johnson, sounding perhaps a bit more pleading than he had intended, asked: “If you get any solution on Vietnam just call me direct, will you?”

Around nine, Johnson left for his Driskill Hotel headquarters to congratulate his thronging workers. From there he was driven to the Civic Center to make his victory statement. The radio was on. He heard the announcer say that President Johnson had just left the Driskill and was on his way to the Civic Center to make his victory statement. An assistant press secretary was the beneficiary of his hot Texas breath. “I didn't authorize any statement about where I'm going, when, or why!” He took the platform with the rostrum that hit his belly button and gave his victory statement. “I doubt that there has ever been so many people seeing so many things alike on decision day,” he said.

 

So many people seeing so many things alike on Election Day.
Thus the final ritual: the commentaries were published that the pundits had begun writing in
their heads in July, as soon as Barry Goldwater declared that extremism in defense of liberty was no vice.

“Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election yesterday but the conservative cause as well,” the
New York Times
's Scotty Reston wrote. “He has wrecked his party for a long time to come and is not even likely to control the wreckage.”

In embracing conservatism, proclaimed his
Times
colleague Tom Wicker, the Republicans strayed from the simple reality that “they cannot win in this era of American history” except as a “me-too” party. “With tragic inevitability,” he wrote, they “cracked like a pane of glass.”

“The Johnson majority,” Walter Lippmann pronounced—at over 61 percent the greatest popular mandate in history—“is indisputable proof that the voters are in the center.”

If the Republicans become a conservative party, “advocating reactionary changes at home and adventures abroad that might lead to war,” wrote the
Los Angeles Times
's Washington bureau chief, “they will remain a minority party indefinitely.”

How could they conclude differently? The numbers were spectacular: 43,126,218 votes for Johnson to 27,174,898 for Goldwater, who won only six states—one of them, Arizona, by half a percent. William Miller lost his home district by a ratio of 2 to 1. Goldwater won only sixteen congressional districts outside the South. Republicans had devoted enormous energy to disassociating their candidacies from Dr. Strangewater's. It didn't work. People ticked the Democratic column down the line. Come January, Lyndon Johnson would enjoy a 295 to 140 majority in the House, and 68 to 32 in the Senate, with which to build his Great Society. Only one incumbent Democratic senator lost his seat. The Republicans lost 90 seats in upper chambers of state legislatures, 450 in the lower. Blacks voted upwards of 90 percent for Johnson. The truck-loads of money the Democrats spent to register a million new black voters proved a windfall investment, because in many states they provided the margin of victory—and kicked out many a Republican officeholder even though he was a far greater champion of civil rights than his Democratic opponent was. According to the
Washington Post,
Goldwater had only God to thank that so many Republicans had voted for him at all. The vast majority did so “out of habit ... despite grave fears of victory if it should come.” A study of exit-poll statistics by Louis Bean and Roscoe Drummond published in
Look
was cited over and over: it concluded that the “pure” Goldwater vote was less than three million, the rest just party loyalty.

Goldwater's success in the South was historic, to be sure. In Alabama he won 70 percent, and his coattails swept in practically an entire new House
delegation, five of eight representatives, wiping out some eighty years of Democratic seniority. Less dramatic shakeups transpired in South Carolina (59 percent), Louisiana (57 percent), and Georgia (55 percent). In every Southern state he lost—Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, Florida (where he won 49 percent), Virginia, and Kentucky—Republicans were elected to statewide office in unprecedented numbers. In Mississippi he got 87 percent of the vote. He even won Hattiesburg, which was rather remarkable. On October 22, scientists had set off a nuclear device 2,700 feet beneath the ground a few miles southwest of Hattiesburg to study test-verification methods. The blast created a shock wave that rippled the ground ten inches high and knocked stock off warehouse shelves for miles around. (“The South shall rise again,” read a placard a sardonic technician placed next to the blast site.) The blast was detected as far away as Western Europe. Hattiesburg didn't mind that Goldwater was the Senate's premier advocate of unlimited testing. They went for him 89.2 percent.

Many a Southern liberal looked upon this development with serene confidence: any step back from the big-
D
Democrats was a step forward for small-
d
democracy. A Republican institutional presence was being built that would finally force Dixiecrats to actually attend to their constituencies. Then Southern Republicans “will see that their only hope for increasing party membership and winning elections is to be ‘for something' rather than to be consistently against Democratic programs which are now ingrained in the politics and life of the people of the region,” asserted Sam Ragan, executive editor of the
Raleigh News and Observer.
“Emotional issues may momentarily sway, but the pinched pocketbook nerve brings even quicker reaction.... The disadvantaged and the dispossessed will make themselves heard, and self-preservation will dictate to the politician that he must heed the cry.” Dixie's defection to conservatism, editorialized the
Washington Post,
was but a “one-shot affair.” Enlightened Republicans, wrote the keeper of the
Los Angeles Times'
s Dixie beat, now recognize that the Negro vote “can be as contestable as the Chinese vote, the white Protestant vote, the Catholic vote, the Jewish vote, or the vote of the freckle-faced redheads and one-armed shortstops.”

“WHITE BACKLASH DOESN'T DEVELOP”: so reported the
New York Times.
The blue-collar Slavs, Italians, and others who delivered Goldwater their majorities when polled at factory gates gave him numbers in the twenties in the only poll that mattered. Democratic loyalty held in the Boston neighborhoods where Louise Day Hicks reigned supreme, and in the Queens ones in which Parents and Taxpayers led antibusing school boycotts. Scores of formerly Republican suburbs known for guarding their neighborhood boundaries like medieval castles gave Johnson a clean sweep. For over a year, backlash had
loomed in the public imagination like a pit bull straining at the leash. Now it was judged the mouse that roared. “Leaders of both parties are confident,” Sam Ragan wrote, “that elections will be decided on issues other than civil rights.” Like most pundits, he ignored evidence around the country that didn't fit the comforting conclusion—like the fact that California decided against open housing by 2 to 1, even while going for Johnson by over a million votes. Or Goldwater's overwhelming success in hamlets with large numbers of Evangelical Christians, like Jerry Falwell's Lynchberg, Virginia.

Every Republican who wasn't a conservative—and many who were—immediately put his shoulder to the wheel to exorcise the Goldwater specter, lest Republicans be forced to run against Goldwater's rugged ghost until 1984, just as Herbert Hoover had haunted them for the twenty years until Dwight D. Eisenhower came to the rescue. “Our overriding, overwhelming distrust of big government as the Great Evil of Our Time must be abandoned,” the black Republican attorney general of Massachusetts, Ed Brooke, a rising star, put it starkly. New York's Republican chair lamented the party's having paid a “shattering price for the erratic deviation from our soundly moderate, twentieth-century course.” Iowa's specified the price that had been paid in his state: “Bold, drastic steps,” he said, would have to be taken to keep the two-party system in Iowa. Even one of Goldwater's top captains in San Francisco, Melvin Laird, allowed that it would be “suicidal”—the word popped up again and again—“to ignore the election results and try to resist any change in the party.” “The present party leadership must be replaced—all of it,” Hugh Scott declared at a press conference—a process akin to tracking down a stink that lingered mysteriously weeks after the housecleaning was done. “I don't even know
where
the leadership lies in that morass down there,” he said. Eisenhower placed a contrite call to Scranton: “If the Lord spares me for 1968, I am going to come out for somebody at least eighteen months ahead of time. This year I tried to do what was decent.” (Nixon, virtually alone, demurred: the “strong conservative wing of the Republican Party,” he said at his press conference, “deserves a major voice in party councils.” Liberals like Rockefeller, he said, were not role models but spoilsports and dividers.)

The winter wasn't over before the RNC had dumped Dean Burch in favor of Ray Bliss, the phlegmatic old Ohio pro who had endeavored to shore up Republican machines in the big cities as the royal road back after the Nixon defeat in 1960. He pledged to do the same now. Lyndon Johnson always said it: A century ago 80 percent of America was rural. Now it was 70 percent urban. The new Supreme Court reapportionment decisions spelled the death knell of the decades-old “conservative coalition” of rural Republicans and Southern Democrats that had choked progress in Congress. “Legislators represent
people, not trees or acres,” Earl Warren said in forcing states to redraw their districts in one-man-one-vote fashion. The power was in the cities now. The Republican Party couldn't afford to court that population with nineteenth-century ideologies. As Teddy White stirringly put it in
The Making of the President 1964
: “History would have to record that the Republican Party had not submitted docilely to this new leadership, but had resisted it to the end—so that from this resistance and defeat, others, later, might take heart and resume the battle.”