{"id":133740,"date":"2020-08-16T07:06:57","date_gmt":"2020-08-16T15:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=133740"},"modified":"2020-09-08T14:02:13","modified_gmt":"2020-09-08T22:02:13","slug":"before-the-storm-barry-goldwater-and-the-unmaking-of-the-american-consensus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=133740","title":{"rendered":"Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rick Perlstein writes in 2001<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Goldwater\u2019s approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes\u2014an attitude most visible in his views on discrimination. \u201cThere never was a lot of it,\u201d he recalled of the Phoenix of his youth. Yet when he was eleven the chamber of commerce took out an ad boasting of Phoenix\u2019s \u201cvery small percentage of Mexicans, Negroes, or foreigners.\u201d Barry Goldwater delighted in, and journalists delighted in repeating, his corny put-downs of anti-Semites. Why couldn\u2019t he play nine holes, he was supposed to have responded when kicked off a golf course, since he was only half Jewish? They reported how when he took over as president of Phoenix Country Club in 1949, he said if they didn\u2019t allow his friend Harry Rosenzweig to join he would blackball every name. Rosenzweig became the first Jew the club ever admitted. Left out of the tale was that another Jew wasn\u2019t allowed in for a decade.
\nLater he would be described as a political innocent. This was not exactly true. Never a ruthless politician, he was ever a politician, with a classic politician\u2019s upbringing: a doting mother who convinced him he could accomplish everything; a distant, moody father who convinced him that no accomplishment was enough. <\/p>\n

* At the 1948 convention Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey declared it was \u201ctime for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states\u2019 rights and walk in the sunshine of human rights,\u201d and he maneuvered a robust civil rights plank into the platform. South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond led a walkout to form a third party.
\n Southern Democrats claimed the gestures toward civil rights were only demagogic and expedient attempts to hustle the votes of urban blacks in the North so the party could turn its back on the South. But where else could Southerners go? Until about 1958, Republicans were more liberal on race than the Democrats were (although it wasn\u2019t hard to take a liberal stand on race so long as it was seen as a Southern problem, and the Republicans didn\u2019t have any white Southerners to placate).<\/p>\n

* data from U2 spy planes had demonstrated that the USSR\u2019s arsenal of bombers and missiles that could reach the United States was nearly nonexistent. But that intelligence was top secret, unknown even to a New York governor\u2014a rule of espionage being that you can\u2019t let your enemy know what you know about them. (\u201cI can\u2019t understand the United States being quite as panicky as they are,\u201d Eisenhower once said, forgetting that he was one of only a handful of people who knew that the empire that threatened to bury us could in fact do no such thing.)<\/p>\n

* It was point nine of the fourteen points that the Southerners were protesting [at the 1960 Republican convention]: “Our program for civil rights must assure aggressive action to remove the remaining vestiges of segregation or discrimination in all areas of national life\u2014voting and housing, schools and jobs. It will express support for the objectives of the sit-in demonstrators and will commend the action of those businessmen who have abandoned the practice of refusing to serve food at their lunch counters to their Negro customers and will urge all others to follow their example.”<\/p>\n

* [In 1961] the Rabbinical Council of America recommended construction of bomb shelters beneath all new synagogues.<\/p>\n

* [In 1962] Nobody seemed to worry over the fact that Goldwater\u2019s momentum rose the more the peace was disturbed.<\/p>\n

* An insider explained the mystery to Life magazine: \u201cPeople fail to realize there\u2019s a difference in kinds of money. There\u2019s old money and there\u2019s new money. Old money has political power but new money has only purchasing power. Sure, everyone knows that when you get to a convention, you don\u2019t buy delegates. But you do put the pressure on people who control the delegates\u2014the people who owe the old money for their stake.\u201d<\/p>\n

* It was hard for white America to see anything benign in a mass gathering of Negroes. The fears were primal, subliminal. \u201cI don\u2019t like to touch them. It just makes me squeamish,\u201d one Northerner told Newsweek. Another said, \u201cIt\u2019s the idea of rubbing up against them. It won\u2019t rub off, but it don\u2019t feel right either.\u201d The magazine\u2019s polling showed that 55 percent of whites would object to living next door to a black person\u2014and 90 percent would object if their teenage daughter dated one. Over half thought that \u201cNegroes laugh a lot,\u201d \u201ctend to have less ambition,\u201d and \u201csmell different.\u201d \u201cIt is an oft-repeated statement among humans that the color of the hair and the pigment of the skin produce certain recognizable characteristics,\u201d observed the latest edition of Training You to Train Your Dog by Blanche Saunders (preface by Walter Lippmann)\u2014the \u201cexcitable nature\u201d of those with dark skin, for example. \u201cIf this be true, there is no reason why color of coat and pigmentation should not affect dogs as well.\u201d In an article that year, Harper\u2019s editor John Fischer congratulated himself for his courage in pointing out that much antiblack prejudice \u201cis not altogether baseless\u201d: \u201cTake the case of five Negro drivers who worked for a taxi company in Williamsburg, Virginia. On the first day of the fishing season, not one of them showed up for work.\u201d Even among the right-thinking and the respectable, seeing Negroes as civic equals was sometimes a stretch.<\/p>\n

* As early as his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann had come to believe that the world was so complex that political decisions would best be left to a specialized class of experts. Three years later the Scopes \u201cmonkey trial\u201d confirmed his conviction that a public uninstructed by expert opinion would succumb to the tyranny of the majority\u2014the very worst tyranny of all. Ideologically, the columnist vacillated from decade to decade, sometimes coming out liberal in foreign affairs and conservative in domestic, sometimes vice versa. But always, always, his thinking betrayed a constant: that he and his fellow pundits\u2014Hindi for \u201cwise men,\u201d a title first given to him by an admiring Henry Luce\u2014were the nation\u2019s best defense against the terror of the mob.<\/p>\n

* George Wallace appeared at Kennedy\u2019s alma mater, Harvard, and as the flower of American youth approached the microphone to show up a yokel, one by one they were folded up into a master debater\u2019s pocket.<\/p>\n

* Newsweek\u2019 s \u201cWhat the White Man Thinks About the Negro\u201d issue, out recently, concluded, \u201cExcept for civil-rights troubles, Mr. Kennedy could expect re-election by a landslide.\u201d Now, the newsmagazine concluded, \u201che could lose.\u201d A Look feature was headlined, \u201c \u2018Never Wrong\u2019 Iowa Township Forecasts the 1961 race: JFK Could Lose.\u201d The citizens were split down the middle on who they preferred for President\u2014but they agreed that they held the White House responsible for racial violence. \u201cI think Kennedy is too damned lenient with them damned niggers,\u201d one local farmer was quoted as saying. George Wallace, back from his successful Ivy League tour, proudly read his mail for a Time reporter: \u201c\u2018God willin\u2019 I won\u2019t vote for Martin Luther Kennedy…. You have my vote in the Presidential election.\u2019 That\u2019s from Detroit. Dayton, Ohio … \u2018Strongly recommend you to run for President Against Nigger Kennedy …\u2019\u201d Wallace said he was thinking about entering some Democratic primaries.<\/p>\n

* Nixon called J. Edgar Hoover. No small talk: \u201cWhat happened, was it one of the right-wing nuts?\u201d
\nMuch of the country had already decided it was. The Voice of America\u2019s bulletin announcing the shooting had described Dallas as \u201cthe center of the extreme right wing.\u201d Clips of Adlai Stevenson being jabbed with anti-United Nations picket signs a month earlier were shown again and again on TV. Under the headline \u201cDALLAS, LONG A RADICAL\u2019S HAVEN,\u201d the Herald Tribune pointed out, \u201cTexas is one of the few states that has a Senator ranking with Arizona\u2019s Barry Goldwater in conservatism\u201d\u2014that was John Tower, who, in the wake of the assassination, had to put up his family in a hotel because of the threats against them. Senator Maurine Neuberger of Oregon fixed her gaze at the television cameras and pinned the responsibility on H. L. Hunt. Walter Cronkite, on the air nonstop, was handed a slip of paper amid the chaos of CBS\u2019s studios and read aloud that Goldwater\u2019s reaction to the news while hustling to a political function had been a curt \u201cNo comment.\u201d (Cronkite skirted libel: Goldwater, in Muncie for the funeral of his mother-in-law, had given no such interview.) A deranged gunman pumped two shots through the window of a John Birch Society office in Phoenix, crying \u201cYou killed my man!\u201d In man-in-the-street interviews, a lawyer told the New York Times, \u201cWe have allowed certain factions to work up such a furor in the South with fanatic criticism of the office of President that a demented person can feel confident that such atrocious action is justifiable,\u201d and a Russian immigrant said, \u201cI\u2019m angry at these groups who call themselves Americans and don\u2019t know the meaning\u2014the Birchers, General Walker. Is this what they wanted?\u201d<\/p>\n

Before long the news of the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, a defector to the Soviet Union, was on the street. But the suspicion that the right was somehow to blame did not go away.<\/p>\n

* Partly the irrationality was rooted in fear; the thought that the killer was an agent of the Communist conspiracy was almost too awful to contemplate. (Desperate to close off such suspicions, which he thought might pin him to a commitment to retaliate against the Soviet Union, Lyndon Johnson spent much of his first weeks in office maneuvering hurriedly to close the books on the case by putting together a commission of inquiry led by Chief Justice Warren.) When the news of Oswald\u2019s arrest and Communist ties arrived, the public seemed almost willfully to forget the lessons of eighteen years\u2014that Communism was a devious, unitary global conspiracy that would stop at nothing to accomplish its aims\u2014and gladly chose another, less threatening scapegoat. Against the shocks of the recent past\u2014the civil rights uprising, the nuclear close calls\u2014Americans had inoculated themselves by repeating ever more fervidly that we were a good nation, a unified nation, peaceful, safe. The assassination was experienced as a sign that somehow America had let herself become the opposite. A word was repeated again and again, on the streets, before the television cameras, in the newspapers: hate. Americans read an indictment on themselves: hate killed Kennedy, our own hate\u2014hate that might consume us in violence, hate rife on both sides of the ideological spectrum, hate bred precisely by the act of veering too close to the extremes of the ideological spectrum. Extremism had killed Kennedy.<\/p>\n

* Kennedy had been right: Goldwater\u2019s loose lips were sinking the ship. Newsweek quoted a supporter: \u201cI\u2019m glad he has one foot in a cast or he\u2019d have that in his mouth, too.\u201d The AP\u2019s Walter Mears\u2014who had to file stories every few hours\u2014remarked that all they had to do was pepper Goldwater with a few questions and wait for him to slip, and they had their headlines. Then it was back to the nonstop frat party at the Manchester Sheraton.<\/p>\n

* It had been a busy winter for George Wallace. There was Alabama to keep segregated, for one thing. There was his ego to attend to, for another. In November the governor had undertaken a weeklong tour of Ivy League colleges. Then he took the show national. First he honed the act, blue-penciling his speechwriters\u2019 racist turns of phrase, having his aide Bill Jones pepper him with every hostile question they could think of. Audiences, expecting a monster, were charmed by talk of how \u201cproperty rights are human rights, too\u201d\u2014so sweet it almost sounded sensible, yet so incendiary that he led the evening news everywhere he spoke.<\/p>\n

* If Washington \u201ccan tell you what to do with your property, they can take it away from you,\u201d he would say; and, \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s my right as an Arizonan to come in and tell a Southerner what to do about this thing.\u201d He would speak of good intentions gone awry: \u201cI can see a police state coming out of that without any problem at all.\u201d In Jeremiah mode, he might say how much it sickened him to see questions of law being settled in the streets and wonder why the Democrats would sink so low as to tacitly support such tactics: \u201cIt is not understanding America or Americans that goads a man to abandon civility in this matter,\u201d he said the night after the World\u2019s Fair debacle (to an audience in Connecticut, only a commuter train ride away from the mob). He said again and again, \u201cwith the deepest possible sense of tragedy and regret,\u201d that at bottom, this was a problem of moral suasion, not of laws. Federal force only compounded the problem. \u201cUntil we have an administration that will cool the fires and the tempers of violence we simply cannot solve the rest of the problem in any lasting sense.\u201d Until then, he promised, \u201cwe are going to see more violence in our streets before we see less.\u201d All spring, Northern college students had been training with military rigor for a nonviolent assault for voting rights in Mississippi\u2014while that state was planning to counter them with all the terror at its disposal. Goldwater bespoke his frustration with Mississippi as the state \u201cwhere there is the most talk about brotherhood and the very least opportunity for achieving it.\u201d But the civil rights bill as written, he was convinced, would only make things worse. It was unconstitutional\u2014and if Negroes didn\u2019t have a stake in the Constitution, then who did?<\/p>\n

* But Goldwater didn\u2019t play well on TV. Letters and numbers darkened his presentations: RS-70 and B-70 (bomber programs the Pentagon was scrapping); A-11 (a plane Lyndon Johnson claimed was a new fighter but Goldwater said was really just a reconnaissance plane); TFX (a fighter General Dynamics was building in Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Texas despite the brass\u2019s insistence it could be built better and more cheaply in California); 1970 (by which time a bomber gap would turn \u201cthe shield of the Republic into a Swiss cheese wall\u201d).<\/p>\n

* Property values had become religion amidst the sun-dappled lawns of suburban southern California. \u201cThe essence of freedom is the right to discriminate,\u201d CRA\u2019s Nolan Frizzelle explained. \u201cIn socialist countries, they always take away this right in order to complete their takeover.\u201d After the state legislature passed a bill prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, it hardly took the blink of an eye for the California Real Estate Association\u2019s new \u201cCommittee for Home Protection\u201d to collect 583,029 signatures\u2014326,486 from L.A. County alone\u2014to put on the November ballot Proposition 14, an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting for all time laws that impinged upon the right of individuals to sell or rent property to \u201cany persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses\u201d\u2014segregationism in its politer, more patriotic form. The California Real Estate Association\u2019s billboards soon blanketed the state: \u201cFREEDOM: RENT OR SELL TO WHOM YOU CHOOSE: VOTE YES ON 14.\u201d (\u201cDON\u2019T LEGALIZE HATE,\u201d read the enfeebled opposition\u2019s.) The Los Angeles Times \u2014which had endorsed Nelson Rockefeller\u2014agreed, more or less, with Nolan Frizzelle: \u201cHousing equality cannot safely be achieved at the expense of still another basic right,\u201d the \u201cancient right\u201d of the property owner of \u201cusing and disposing of his private property in whatever manner he deems appropriate.\u201d The argument couldn\u2019t withstand scrutiny; after all, no one complained that owners were constrained from disposing of their private property in whatever manner they deemed appropriate when they inked formal and (after the Supreme Court outlawed them in 1948) informal racial covenants. And not all support for Prop 14 was couched so patriotically: blacks \u201chaven\u2019t made themselves acceptable\u201d for white neighborhoods, a Young Republican leader declared. Polls showed that 58 percent of voters of both parties supported Prop 14. Goldwater held fast to the position that it wasn\u2019t his right as an Arizonan to come in and tell a Californian what to do about this thing.<\/p>\n

* And Barry Goldwater was affording his audience the warm assurance, \u201cYou cannot pass a law that will make me like you\u2014or you like me. That is something that can only happen in our hearts.\u201d Goldwater\u2019s audience was unlikely aware that this was a close paraphrase from the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson: that \u201cprejudice, if it exists, is not created by the law of the land and cannot be changed by the law.\u201d They just gave Goldwater his biggest applause of the speech.<\/p>\n

* One piece of homemade campaign literature that was circulating in California like chewing gum, A Choice Not an Echo, came from one of the sophisticated ones. Phyllis Schlafly claimed to be a housewife from Alton, Illinois, and in that she was busy raising five children, in a sense she was. But this housewife had worked her way through college as a test gunner in an ordnance plant, had a master\u2019s degree from Harvard, and devoted forty-plus hours a week to right-wing agitation\u2014from chairing the Illinois Federation of Republican Women to running the Cardinal Mindzenty Society, a right-wing volunteer group, with her husband, a lawyer who operated the right\u2019s answer to the ACLU (a typical client was a farmer who refused to follow government quotas), and hosting her own radio show, America, Wake Up! The Schlaflys had been among the few nonbusinessmen on the Clarence Manion committee that published Conscience of a Conservative in 1960. Which in 1964 gave Phyllis Schlafly, home pregnant with her sixth child, an inspiration: to publish a slim little book on how \u201ca few secret kingmakers based in New York\u201d conspired to steal Republican conventions, \u201cperpetuating the Red empire in order to perpetrate the high level of Federal spending and control.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Schlafly was easy on the eye\u2014and savvy enough to put a picture of herself on the cover that intimated plunging d\u00e9colletage just out of the frame. The prose was short and sharp: \u201cEach fall 66 million American women don\u2019t spontaneously decide their dresses should be an inch or two shorter, or longer, than last year,\u201d she began. \u201cLike sheep, they bow to the wishes of a select clique of couturiers whom they have never seen, and whose names they may not even know\u201d\u2014just like Republican presidential voters. She never placed an ad; she never contacted a single bookstore\u2014and 600,000 copies were in circulation around the country by June. Most were purchased in lots greater than 100. One businessman bought 30,000. One man told her, \u201cYour book is the first book I ever read. I couldn\u2019t even get through Tom Sawyer.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Phyllis Schlafly was not the only political star from Illinois being minted in California that spring. Another was Ronald Reagan. A number of more famous pro-Goldwater celebrities worked the homestretch hustings for Goldwater. But it was Reagan, not John Wayne (a sometime Bircher) or Rock Hudson, who was chosen to narrate a half hour of testimonials from Goldwater\u2019s (especially black and Hispanic) friends on statewide television on May 29. As a regular MC for Goldwater\u2019s rallies, Reagan usually stole the show. \u201cAnd good evening to all you irresponsible Republicans,\u201d he would begin, and the crowd would be won; then he would hand them off to Goldwater, and the crowd would be lost. Sometimes, when the evening\u2019s program was completed, Reagan would greedily mount the rostrum for another speech that brought them to their feet one last time. At a San Francisco fund-raiser a startled waitress asked Rus Walton, \u201cI\u2019m confused. Which one was the candidate?\u201d<\/p>\n

* In Riverside, California, Barry Goldwater was proving once again that there was nothing like a homestretch to bring him to the rhetorical heights a more motivated politician would have occupied all along.<\/p>\n

* It was now hard to imagine a scenario in which Barry Goldwater would not be nominated. He responded to the news by drinking so much he had to be helped onto the plane back to Washington.<\/p>\n

* When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed on July 2, Johnson told his staff, \u201cI think we just gave the South to the Republicans for your lifetime and mine\u201d.<\/p>\n

* It immediately became clear that in this court of opinion at least, the Republican Party was Goldwater\u2019s and Goldwater\u2019s alone. For when the speakers reminded the audience of the GOP\u2019s glorious history of advancing civil rights, they were answered by laughs and boos.<\/p>\n

* Scranton left it to his press office to point up the truly impolitic statements in the Der Spiegel article: Goldwater\u2019s contention that Germany would have won both world wars if she weren\u2019t subject to the command of men \u201cwho didn\u2019t understand war\u201d; and that in Vietnam, \u201cI would turn to my Joint Chiefs of Staff and say, \u2018Fellows, we made the decision to win, now it\u2019s your problem.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

* Saturday evening, two days before the opening gavel, Walter Cronkite introduced a report from CBS\u2019s correspondent in Munich, Daniel Schorr: \u201cWhether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination, he is going places,\u201d Cronkite said, \u201cthe first place being Germany.\u201d Schorr picked up the cue and started in: \u201cIt looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, the center of Germany\u2019s right wing.\u201d He went on to report that Goldwater had accepted an invitation from his friend Lieutenant General William Quinn to visit him for a vacation at Berchtesgaden\u2014\u201conce Hitler\u2019s stamping ground, but now an American Army recreational center.\u201d He concluded, \u201cIt is now becoming clear that Senator Goldwater\u2019s interview with the newsmagazine Der Spiegel was an appeal to right-wing elements.\u201d Cronkite segued into the next piece, on the latest burning of a Negro church in Mississippi, and the Germany story hit San Francisco like a freight train.<\/p>\n

It was false; the trip was a vacation. CBS president William Paley, enraged and afraid he would be outed as a Scranton supporter, ordered Schorr to correct himself on the air. Goldwater\u2019s grudge against the Tiffany Network went back to a 1962 documentary on conservatism that made him want to throw something at the screen. It flared up again in 1963 after CBS News edited a tape of a July 4 interview with him that he thought would be broadcast live; it was inflamed enormously when Cronkite misquoted him to make him appear callous after the Kennedy assassination. \u201cI just don\u2019t trust CBS News,\u201d is what he said after the November 22 gaffe. Now he went berserk. \u201cI don\u2019t think those people should be allowed to broadcast,\u201d he said, refusing them access to any part of his campaign organization. But the damage was done. Scranton\u2014and the Democratic National Committee\u2014had already distributed reams of Xeroxed transcripts of the Schorr stand-up. \u201cYou can say what you want about Goldwater\u2019s conservatism and right-wing views,\u201d columnist Herb Caen wrote, \u201cbut personally, I find him as American as apple strudel.\u201d<\/p>\n

* The President was now drowning in a flood of wires such as \u201cI\u2019m afraid to leave my house. I fear the Negro revolution will reach Queens.\u201d The New Republic\u2019s TRB columnist had called white resentment 1964\u2019s political \u201cX-Factor.\u201d Walter Lippmann had coined the term \u201cGoldwater Democrats.\u201d Backlash had become Lyndon Johnson\u2019s new obsession. When Ollie Quayle prepared a fifty-five-page technical report on the blue-collar Wallace vote in Wisconsin and Indiana, Johnson devoured it in one night. When Wallace withdrew his candidacy on July 19\u2014because, he said, the Republicans had passed a segregationist platform\u2014Goldwater was genuinely surprised.<\/p>\n

* The day arrived. An exquisitely labored statement of the President\u2019s position sat on his desk for reference. Johnson ushered his guest into the Oval Office. There followed an awkward interval. The President was waiting for Goldwater to start, because Goldwater had called the meeting. When he didn\u2019t, Johnson uttered some banalities about how he would do nothing in the months to come that might contribute to violence in the streets. Goldwater said that was fine. Johnson lurched deskward and read his statement aloud. Goldwater thought that was fine, too, and asked for a copy. Another pause. Goldwater\u2019s face lit up like a child discussing a toy, and he said he would love to take a crack at flying the new A-II that was in development. Johnson (hiding his incredulity) said it wouldn\u2019t be ready for a year\u2014at which time, he joked, Goldwater might be the one issuing the orders. Chuckles were exchanged. Backs were slapped. Sixteen minutes had elapsed. The two emerged together to release a bland joint statement. Johnson\u2019s staff was stunned. \u201cWhat a confrontation,\u201d someone said. \u201cWish we could have one like that with de Gaulle!\u201d<\/p>\n

* Johnson had converted to a civil rights crusade more fervent than any President\u2019s since Lincoln. And what had that brought? Race riots, two weeks after the Civil Rights Act was signed. What more could he do? \u201cIf you give \u2019em jobs and education, you stop all of it,\u201d he told Hubert Humphrey, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself.<\/p>\n

* A melancholy man, Lyndon Johnson understood how souls were moved by dark thoughts that crept up on sleepless nights. \u201cMen worry about heart attacks,\u201d he would say, clasping his chest. \u201cWomen worry about cancer of the tit\u201d (here he jabbed the breastplate of his nearest companion). \u201cBut everybody worries about war and peace. Everything else is chickenshit.\u201d<\/p>\n

* The ad ran Monday, September 7\u2014Labor Day, for peak viewing\u2014on NBC, a few days after Goldwater\u2019s opening speech in Prescott and a few hours after Johnson\u2019s in Detroit. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Little girls went to bed in tears. Bill Moyers, working late in his office\u2014as was most often the case in Lyndon Johnson\u2019s White House\u2014was summoned by the boss. \u201cHoly shit!\u201d the President cried. \u201cWhat in the hell do you mean putting on that ad? I\u2019ve been swamped with calls!\u201d But he was chuckling. \u201cI guess it did what we goddamned set out to do, didn\u2019t it?\u201d He chuckled some more.
\nThe spot ran only once as a paid commercial. But CBS and ABC ran reports on the phenomenon on their news programs\u2014and thus, free of charge, they aired the ad itself. Dean Burch complained to the Fair Campaign Practices Commission. \u201cThis horror-type commercial,\u201d he said, \u201cimplies that Senator Goldwater is a reckless man and Lyndon Johnson is a careful man.\u201d Moyers was thrilled. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what we wanted to imply,\u201d he wrote the President. \u201cAnd we also hoped someone around Goldwater would say it, not us.\u201d Local campaign leaders told Johnson\u2019s field chief, Larry O\u2019Brien, that they hated the ad, that voters were turning off to LBJ. The White House was unfazed. They were thinking like Marshall McLuhan, like Bill Bernbach: the message people reported having gleaned from the ad bore no necessary relation to how it affected them where it counted\u2014in the place consciousness didn\u2019t touch.<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201cfederally sponsored \u2018inverse discrimination\u2019 … the abandonment of neighborhood schools, for reasons of race.\u201d Blunter, one protester carried a sign reading \u201cYOU\u2019LL TURN INTO A NIGGER.\u201d (The seething issue had by then earned a journalistic shorthand: \u201cbusing,\u201d sometimes spelled \u201cbussing.\u201d) Another court ordered union locals to dismantle father-son apprenticeship programs that \u201cautomatically excluded\u201d Negroes. One of Johnson\u2019s advance men filed a report on the comments of a New York cabbie: \u201cHe exploded\u2014traffic terrible, Negroes pushing, city in snarl, politicians ruining country, everything a mess. Pent-up fury.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

* Goldwater\u2019s speeches earned descriptions like \u201clow-keyed,\u201d \u201clistless,\u201d \u201cmonotone,\u201d and \u201cstumbling\u201d\u2014as if, someone wrote, the candidate were saying, \u201cTrain 28 now leaving on Track 1.\u201d The speeches themselves were so inappropriate to their occasions that The New Yorker\u2019s Richard Rovere was rubbing his eyes: \u201cThere were some times, traveling with Goldwater,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwhen one wondered whether the candidate really thinks of himself as a man seeking the Presidency of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

* The bulwark in the maelstrom was William Moyers\u2014as he was in most matters in Lyndon Johnson\u2019s White House. LBJ reserved his greatest affection for brilliant young climbers from the provinces who looked up to him as a father figure\u2014as he had himself with a series of mentors culminating in House Speaker Sam Rayburn. (It betokened his insecurities; he still couldn\u2019t quite believe these geniuses were willing to yoke their fortune to him.) Moyers was the most brilliant and loyal climber of all.<\/p>\n

* The reporters liked Barry Goldwater personally (\u201cHow could such a nice guy think that way?\u201d one asked). Two traveling publicists ministered efficiently to their every need. That was far less than enough to make the experience a pleasant one. They had missed the story of how Goldwater won the nomination, which was humiliating to their professional pride; it also meant twice as much work for reporters, because none of the people in the campaign were in their little black books.<\/p>\n

* Lyndon Johnson\u2019s relationship with his traveling press corps was altogether different: they protected him. The President\u2019s tongue was if anything more undisciplined than his opponent\u2019s… On his way to opening day in Detroit, in order to squeeze as many VIPs into his plane as possible, he booted onto an accompanying plane the military aide who kept the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist that contained the codes to launch a nuclear strike. That plane nearly ended up crashing. Reporters looked the other way. \u201cThank God for Lyndon Johnson,\u201d a scribe from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch thought to himself, as the President lit into Goldwater once more as a \u201cranting, raving demagogue who wants to tear down society.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Stodgy Time printed crude jokes: \u201cGoldwater\u2019s first major address as President: \u2018Ten … nine … eight … seven …\u2019 \u201d; \u201cWhat would a Goldwater presidency be like? Brief.\u201d In Tulsa, blacks crashed the hall where Goldwater was speaking and wouldn\u2019t stop singing \u201cWe Shall Overcome\u201d for fifteen minutes straight. In Winston-Salem, civil rights activists and conservatives were booked for assaulting one another. Each had begun chanting their opposing stories about freedom, slavery, and justice at the other; things escalated from there. (Teddy White liked to ask civil rights demonstrators and Goldwater partisans what they meant by \u201cfreedom.\u201d Each camp would denounce him for even asking such a patronizing question. \u201cIt is quite possible that these two groups may kill each other in cold blood,\u201d he wrote, \u201cboth wearing banners bearing the same word.\u201d)<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019 throats. \u201cCrowds were more violent than anything a Presidential candidate has had to face in the last generation,\u201d James Reston columnized. \u201cSupporters of Mr. Goldwater declared they could not discuss the campaign with Democrats on a rational basis,\u201d his paper\u2019s news pages reported. \u201cDemocrats said the Goldwaterites were too rabid for reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

* 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\u2014the draft ban, the tax cut, replacing federal programmatic grants with block grants\u2014there was no follow-through, little repetition in future speeches, so the proposals floated around in the public\u2019s consciousness for a day or so before popping like soap bubbles.<\/p>\n

* Indeed, when Milton Friedman published an article in the next Sunday\u2019s New York Times Magazine on \u201cThe Goldwater View of Economics,\u201d he had to protest, \u201cNo one seems to realize that Goldwater does have a philosophy and not merely views on particular economic problems.\u201d He proceeded to give readers of the Newspaper of Record a kindergarten primer on economic libertarianism: that providing for the common defense was a precondition for economic freedom, so that it wasn\u2019t contradictory for Goldwater to call for increased military spending; that only the free market, not the government, could produce prosperity; that governmental interventions often created baleful unintended consequences. The public clearly had a long way to go to attain even an elementary understanding of Goldwater\u2019s core ideas.<\/p>\n

* Barry Goldwater, on the plane to Chicago from Missouri (where he had ripped the knee of his best mohair suit), felt hardly more at ease. He would write about the whole business later, in a 1970 memoir, his words edged with the sting of four years of enforced political idleness\u2014because after winning the Republican nomination, he could no longer run for Senate in 1964. \u201cVery early in the last decade,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI found myself becoming a political fulcrum of the vast and growing tide of American disenchantment with the public policies of liberalism.\u201d There it was: controlled by events, following others\u2019 call, a horse to be ridden. Nothing had changed since those meetings with Clarence Manion and his people in 1959\u2014back when Goldwater had all but turned them down flat. \u201cIt is true enough that I sensed it early and sympathized with it publicly, but I did not originate it…. I was caught up in and swept along by this tide of disenchantment.\u201d It is harder to imagine a sharper expression of political alienation.<\/p>\n

* Harry Jaffa and Bill Rehnquist finally came up with an acceptable draft for Goldwater\u2019s speech. It was called \u201cCivil Rights and the Common Good,\u201d and it was polished all the way up to the last minute.<\/p>\n

* The President held crowds to a hush as he dramatically related the tale of sitting beside Kennedy (he hadn\u2019t) in October of 1962, as Khrushchev and Kennedy came \u201ceyeball to eyeball, and their thumbs started getting closer to mash that nuclear button, the knife was in each other\u2019s ribs, almost literally speaking, and neither of them were flinching or quivering\u201d\u2014\u201cuntil Mr. Khrushchev picked up his missiles and put them on his ships and took them back home.\u201d He told, in other words, bedtime stories: the child\u2019s deepest fears are aroused, to be safely assuaged when the scary monster under the bed is vanquished and everything turns out right at the end.<\/p>\n

* Only once did he devote an entire speech to how \u201cthe moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay.\u201d It was broadcast on TV from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. It was the highest-rated nonpresidential political address in the history of television\u2014a fact, of course, that the candidate likely ignored as a point of pride. But \u201cmorality\u201d was political gold. It was the only Goldwater theme that the White House felt compelled to react to. But Johnson\u2019s people weren\u2019t exactly sure how. Memos flew back and forth: Enlist \u201ca group of friendly criminologists\u201d? \u201cJudicious use of the candidate\u2019s family,\u201d \u201cinclusion of prominent women\u201d? Public appearances with Billy Graham and Cardinal Spellman?
\nThey were floundering. No other presidential candidate had tried staking a political claim for these issues before Goldwater. They had never been at issue before.<\/p>\n

* \u201cThe sexual pervert\u2019s … lack of emotional stability,\u201d as a government report put it, \u201cand weakness of moral fiber make him susceptible to the blandishments of foreign agents.\u201d In 1953 Eisenhower signed an executive order demanding homosexuals be fired not just from all federal jobs but from all companies with federal contractors\u2014one-fifth of the U.S. workforce.<\/p>\n

* In the previous twenty-four hours, China had detonated its first nuclear weapon; Harold Wilson was ousted as British prime minister; and Khrushchev was removed as Soviet premier, with no heir immediately apparent. Suddenly, with the Kremlin in turmoil, warnings of imminent danger from Russia just sounded paranoid. And paradoxically, with China more dangerous than ever, the terror rubbed off on whomever should dare mention the forbidden subject of the bomb\u2014which, of course, Goldwater continued to do. His momentum bogged down. Politics was on hold. Suddenly, the nation was interested in little more than having a steady hand on the tiller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rick Perlstein writes in 2001: Goldwater\u2019s approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes\u2014an attitude most visible in his views on discrimination. \u201cThere never was a lot of it,\u201d he recalled of the Phoenix … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t