CHAPTER 12

The Goldwater Revolution

IN 1962, I signed a contract with the Macmillan Company for my first book, an account of the 1964 GOP presidential race for an advance of $2,500 (in 2007 money, $17,000), with the working title of Republicans Four.

All four were candidates for governor in 1962: Nelson A. Rockefeller, running for a second term in New York; George W. Romney, head of American Motors, making his political debut in Michigan; William W. Scranton, a first-term congressman, running in Pennsylvania; and Richard M. Nixon, the former vice president and near-miss presidential candidate in 1960, trying to deprive California Democratic governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown of a second term.

Nixon lost by nearly 300,000 votes, eliminating the only center-right candidate for president. It was now “Republicans Three.” Rockefeller, Romney, and Scranton—all center-left and all winning impressive victories in Democratic-dominated states in 1962 during the third consecutive general election resulting in overwhelming Democratic control of Congress.

What about Barry Goldwater, the hero of the party’s conservative foot soldiers?

         

THROUGHOUT 1961 and 1962, Goldwater told me he had no intention of being a candidate. During the midterm election campaign of 1962, he said, he would make no more than nine speaking appearances outside Arizona though he was the Senate Republican campaign chairman. In all of 1963, he went on, he would accept only ten out-of-state engagements, compared with more than 225 in 1961. “I believe I deserve a letup,” Goldwater explained. “Boost for Rocky Seen as Goldwater Curtails Nationwide Politicking,” declared the headline over my story in the September 14, 1962, Wall Street Journal. Goldwater was signaling he really was bowing out of the presidential race.

In the spring of 1963, Goldwater disclosed to me a series of secret breakfast meetings with Rockefeller at the governor’s Washington mansion on Foxhall Road. This was the basis of the first Evans & Novak column published on May 15, 1963 (“The Rocky-Barry Axis”).

Nelson Rockefeller was a master courtier who had risen in the dissimilar administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. I think so much personal attention from this leader of one of America’s most famous families flattered Goldwater. Rockefeller also cleverly convinced Goldwater that they were in the same boat, as I wrote in the first E&N column:

[T]he strange fusion of the leaders of the party’s Left and Right wings is directed against the Presidential boomlet for Michigan’s Gov. George Romney. But in a deeper sense the Rockefeller-Goldwater alliance is trying to block both former President Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon from playing a kingmaker’s role behind the scenes.

For more than a year, Rockefeller and Goldwater have been convinced that the Eisenhower-Nixon forces are maneuvering to engineer the nomination for Romney.

At the end of April 1963, two weeks before Evans and I launched our column, Rockefeller’s position for the nomination seemed impregnable. Nixon appeared eliminated. Romney and Scranton were kept busy as rookie governors. That left Goldwater, who not only trailed Rockefeller in the polls but seemed neutralized by him.

All that changed on Saturday, May 4, 1963, when Rockefeller telephoned Barry Goldwater in one of his few personal calls to any politician that day and three hours in advance of the public announcement that forever would change the Republican Party and American politics. That afternoon at the Rockefeller family’s baronial estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, he married Mrs. Margaretta Fitler (Happy) Murphy. At age thirty-six, she was twenty-one years her new husband’s junior and the mother of four small children. Her divorce from Dr. James S. Murphy, a Philadelphia physician, had been finalized one month earlier.

When I talked to Goldwater to complete the reporting for our first column of May 15, he remained enamored of Rockefeller and expressed the view that the governor still led for the presidential nomination. I suggested to Goldwater that, for the first time, he really had a chance to be nominated because of Rockefeller’s remarriage. Goldwater seemed genuinely distressed. “Don’t say that,” he told me. “Please don’t say that.”

In our inaugural column, I wrote, inconclusively, “Rockefeller’s remarriage has clipped the wings of his once high-flying candidacy.” In fact, he had crashed and burned.

Before the remarriage, the national Gallup Poll of Republicans showed 43 percent for Rockefeller and 26 percent for Goldwater. In Gallup’s first survey after the remarriage, the outcome flipped: 40 percent for Goldwater, 29 percent for Rockefeller. As the weeks went by, the margin widened.

         

WITH GOLDWATER NOW the front-runner, an organization calling itself the Draft Goldwater Committee announced a Fourth of July rally at the non-air-conditioned National Guard Armory in a black neighborhood in southeast Washington. I asked the opinion of Vic Johnston, a political old pro who worked for Goldwater at the Senate Republican campaign committee. “Oh,” he replied, “that’s really stupid. It’s being put on by a guy named Clif White. Strictly a PR type from New York. Not a politician.”

Although noncandidate Goldwater would have nothing to do with it, more than 9,000 people crowded their way into the 6,500-seat armory before the fire marshal locked the doors. I was impressed, and in early July I asked Clif White out to lunch. Vic Johnston was wrong. White was one of the most effective politicians of his time.

F. Clifton White, as a World War II veteran teaching at Cornell University and dabbling in Young Republican politics, attracted the attention of Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s well-oiled political machine. White headed “Youth for Dewey” in the governor’s 1948 race for president and became Tom Dewey’s muscleman in Young Republican politics. As a loyal Deweyite, he backed Dwight D. Eisenhower against the conservative Robert A. Taft for president in 1952. Still, White never was a liberal. After he started his own public relations firm in New York, he told me, he came to believe big government was stifling individual freedom and opportunity and that Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller were part of the problem.

For a year prior to the 1964 Republican national convention, I met with White—usually for a meal—once a week and talked to him on the telephone more frequently. He made available to me (for use in my book) secret memos dating back to 1961. They detailed a covert operation unknown to national political reporters, including me, until the 1963 Fourth of July rally. By the autumn of 1961, White had established a secret organization dedicated to the nomination of an unnamed conservative—who, of course, was Barry Goldwater. They were plotting a revolution in the Republican Party.

         

CLIF WHITE WAS developing the cadre for a mass movement whose members were unaware of his efforts. In our column of June 13, 1963, I wrote:

Unlike the carefully constructed Kennedy campaign organization of 1960, the Goldwater boom is the closest thing to a spontaneous mass movement in modern American politics.

It is a poorly organized rank-and-file movement of Republicans who recognize Goldwater as their savior and await his Presidency as their salvation.

A week later, I was in Denver for a Republican National Committee meeting and observed “a little-understood transformation in the party’s power structure” that was widely ignored by political reporters. In our June 24 column from Denver, I wrote:

This transformation…is nothing less than a quiet revolt. The aggressive post-war club of conservative young Republicans from the small states of the West and South are seizing power, displacing the Eastern party chiefs who have dictated Republican policy and candidates for a generation.

On July 14, 1963, Governor Rockefeller declared war against the conservative wing of the Republican Party. His statement contended “that the vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements boring within the party utterly reject” the party’s traditional principles. He cited the recent Young Republicans national convention in San Francisco as proof of “extremist groups” taking over the Republican Party with “tactics of totalitarianism.” Specifically, he condemned the bid for southern support as a plan “to erect political power on the outlawed and immoral base of segregation.”

Goldwater was stunned and disillusioned. He concluded Rockefeller was interested in personal friendship and party unity only when he was ahead in the polls. The Declaration of July 14 removed any doubt that Goldwater would do what he so often had pledged never to do: run for president. It was just delayed by Kennedy’s assassination. On January 3, 1964, Goldwater announced from his hilltop home near Phoenix. Because of Rockefeller’s attack and the assassination, Goldwater had lost his big public opinion lead among Republicans. Gallup’s January poll showed non-candidate Nixon (29 percent) ahead of Goldwater (27 percent), with Rockefeller falling fast (12 percent). But in declaring his candidacy, Goldwater did not reach out: “I will not change my beliefs to win votes. I will offer a choice, not an echo.”

Goldwater disbanded the Draft Goldwater Committee and brought close social and political friends east from Phoenix to take over. I believe I was the first to designate them as the Arizona Mafia. Most had no experience in big-time politics.

On January 5, Clif White telephoned me in high anxiety. In the five months I had known him, I had been impressed by his calm in a world filled with hysterics. Now his aplomb was gone. He had spent three years building an organizational superstructure on top of a mass movement and trying to connect with an aloof leader who did not want to lead. Now, White told me, he and his colleagues had been sent packing and replaced by Arizona amateurs.

White told me he was not going to hang around as a flunky. I was thirteen years younger than White, but I urged him to calm down and think things over.

White stayed. Goldwater’s politically inexperienced campaign director, his Phoenix crony Denison Kitchel, was ready to get rid of him, but the Arizona Mafia member sent to replace White, Richard Kleindienst, intervened. Having served as Arizona Republican state chairman, Kleindienst knew enough about politics to realize the Arizona Mafia were unqualified to run a national presidential campaign and that he needed a pro. White’s management of the campaign for delegates was one of the most impressive political performances I ever covered.

         

MEMBERS OF THE eastern Republican establishment were beside themselves. Although Goldwater had dropped in the polls, he was the only viable runner on the track. Rockefeller, his only announced opponent, looked like a dead man walking. The easterners had no interest in Nixon. Romney’s early attraction had faded. Who could stop the dreaded Goldwater?

If I had any doubts about the identity of the presumed Goldwater-slayer, they were dispelled when Rowly and I lunched at the Metropolitan Club shortly after Kennedy’s assassination with Walter Thayer, a suave Manhattan lawyer who as president of the New York Herald-Tribune was a major player in establishment Republican politics. He made clear that the Trib, unofficial house organ of eastern Republicanism, had made its choice: William Warren Scranton of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who had only three years’ experience in the political arena and had been elected governor of Pennsylvania just a year earlier.

The rich, aristocratic Scrantons, giving their name to their hometown, had helped finance the Republican Party in Pennsylvania since Lincoln’s time. But Bill had nothing to do with politics until 1960, when at age forty-three he was elected to Congress. In 1962, he was elected governor. In Congress, Scranton gave President Kennedy his vote on key issues. Once installed as governor, he concentrated on mobilizing Republican legislators in favor of a huge tax increase.

Why would the Herald-Tribune want Scranton for president? I tipped it off in our column of December 5, 1963 (“The Scranton Boomlet”), after our lunch with Thayer. With Kennedy’s death, I wrote, “influential Republican leaders” now argued that a candidate different from Goldwater was needed against Johnson (though these leaders did not really want Goldwater against Kennedy either). “To combat the homespun Johnson,” I continued, “many Republican professionals want another Kennedy-type candidate—patrician, youthful, Ivy-league. Scranton, boyish with graying hair, fits that formula.”

I was among many Washington-based political reporters who traveled to Harrisburg, where we were wined, dined, and lobbied by Scranton’s ardent aides. They assured us that, when the time was ripe, Scranton would run. After rebuffing out-of-state speaking bids, Scranton started accepting them in early 1964. He agreed to a fund-raising speaking engagement for January 29 on the Indiana Roof in downtown Indianapolis. Scranton’s expedition into Goldwater country attracted reporters from major newspapers and television networks.

My January 31 column from Indianapolis described Scranton as “a poised and attractive political star” who “is the hottest piece of merchandise in his party today.” I mentioned only in passing the governor’s wife, Mary. She would have been called plain had she not been rich, aristocratic, elegantly turned out, and evoking an aura of authority that eclipsed everyone in her presence, including Bill Scranton.

Mary Scranton did her duty, table-hopping with Bill on the Indiana Roof to shake every hand possible. But I got a clue something was amiss when I traveled in the governor’s limousine away from the postdinner reception. As Bill Keisling, Scranton’s press secretary and enthusiastic advocate for president, entered the car, Mrs. Scranton said, with a cutting edge in her voice: “Now be sure to close the door, Bill. We wouldn’t want to lose you. Or would we?” I later learned Mary hated the trip to Indiana, which she blamed on Keisling. She wanted no more of this. Governor Scranton turned down pending political invitations precisely when he should have been accepting them to build his base for a presidential run. After Indianapolis, he became (in Newsweek’s description) “the Hamlet of Harrisburg.”

         

AS 1964 BEGAN, Clif White had a two-part strategy. First, he had perfected a nationwide grassroots organization to swamp anti-Goldwaterites in competition for delegates in nonprimary states. Second, Goldwater would sweep through the 1964 primaries as Kennedy had in 1960, instantly returning to the top of the polls.

Although I had found Goldwater an ineffective senator, Jack Kennedy was not much of a senator either and proved a terrific campaigner. I assumed that Goldwater, as a conservative evangelist, was tailor-made to sweep Republican primaries. Was I ever wrong.

Before he became an official candidate and was (in his own phrase) “just pooping around,” Goldwater on the campaign trail replicated his free and easy style in the Senate. Rockefeller traveled on his private plane with one press secretary for himself and one for his wife, a radio-television adviser, a speechwriter, an advance man, a stenotypist, and a New York State Police bodyguard. Goldwater traveled on commercial airliners like a salesman, either with one aide or none at all.

There was none at all when I picked him up the second week of September 1963 at the WBKB-TV studios in the Chicago Loop where he was taping a segment of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet’s Saturday night talk show. It was a foreign policy debate with the University of Chicago political science professor Hans Morgenthau, a liberal who had been a member of the Democratic National Committee’s disbanded Advisory Council. I don’t believe Goldwater had advance knowledge of what he was getting into, and he was waxed by Morgenthau. The senator seemed oblivious.

Goldwater next informed me he had made no arrangements for his next stop: the national convention of the National Federation of Republican Women. Drive time from WBKB to the Conrad Hilton Hotel was normally ten minutes. But at rush hour in the rain, Barry and I could not get a cab. Very late for his speech, he just looked at me and shrugged. Luckily, a young man driving home from work stopped his car, saying: “I don’t know where you’re going, Senator, but I’m for you, and I’ll take you there.”

His travel plans tightened once Goldwater became a formal candidate, but his mind seemed more disorganized. On January 5, 1964, on NBC’s Meet the Press, he made one mistake after another. He defended his opposition to the nuclear test ban treaty because “just the other day, Dr. Hans Morgenthau, one of the great physicists in the world, backed my position up.” I had been in the WBKB studio three and one-half months earlier to hear Morgenthau, no scientist and certainly no foe of the test ban treaty, debate foreign policy with Goldwater.

         

REPORTING ON THE Goldwater versus Rockefeller battle in New Hampshire one Friday in early February, I was approached by an aide to Rockefeller, who said the governor was flying to New York City that night and offered me a ride. After we agreed the conversation would not be for quotation, Rockefeller opened up.

He said he considered Goldwater a lightweight at best, a menace to the Republican Party at worst. Rockefeller described himself threatened by two powerful elements. The first was the merciless personal assault he was undergoing every day in William Loeb’s Manchester Union-Leader, the state’s most powerful newspaper. The second was a write-in campaign in the Republican primary for Henry Cabot Lodge, who was on the other side of the world and barred from political activity as the Democratic administration’s U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam.

Rockefeller presumed Lodge could not win the primary but as a New Englander from neighboring Massachusetts could take enough votes away from him to permit Goldwater to finish first. Rockefeller angrily told me Lodge had turned a deaf ear to entreaties to turn off his young acolytes in New Hampshire. It was not for himself that Rockefeller said he worried, but for the Republican Party—and the country. I was turned off by the implicit claims of entitlement by one of the richest men in the world. I believe he wanted to sound tough, but it came across to me more like whining.

I soon received a bill for $63 for the plane ride from Manchester to New York ($412 in 2007 money and well above the prevailing commercial rate) payable to Rockefeller-for-President. Instead, I made it out to Nelson A. Rockefeller. I thought my mother would enjoy hearing about her son writing a check to a Rockefeller, and she did.

         

GOLDWATER TURNED OFF New Hampshire Republicans, but these voters could not swallow Rockefeller after his remarriage. A well-organized write-in campaign gave Lodge a landslide on March 10 with 35 percent to 22 percent for Goldwater, 21 percent for Rockefeller, and 17 percent for a slapdash Nixon write-in.

Clif White’s dream of a Kennedy-like romp through the primaries was dead, and Goldwater’s descent in the Gallup continued—down to 14 percent nationally with the absentee Lodge suddenly transcendent at 42 percent. Lodge was not a New England phenomenon. Rank-and-file Republicans were rejecting Mr. Conservative. His performance in the Illinois, Indiana, and Nebraska primaries was indifferent. His prospects in the coming Oregon primary on May 15 were so poor that he stopped campaigning there.

The eastern Republican establishment and its allies in the news media sighed in relief. They knew not who would fill the void, but Goldwater was surely dead. Or was he?

On April 9, 1964, the Evans & Novak column (“Reassessing Goldwater”) defied the conventional wisdom by calling him “the victim of premature burial,” adding:

Goldwater never really has been stopped. To the contrary, he is still very much the man to beat…. Goldwater’s foes today have no clear-cut plan for stopping him…. [I]f Goldwater beats Rockefeller in the June 2 California Primary, as now seems likely, Rockefeller is finished. Goldwater could enter the convention with perhaps 550 votes (only 100 less than is necessary for the nomination) and nobody else even a close second.

I had been doing the Evans & Novak reporting and writing about Republican politics, but this column was Rowly’s idea. He had breakfast April 7 with Nixon political aide Charlie McWhorter, who while advising Nixon kept close watch on local delegate contests. McWhorter’s Goldwater delegate count had reached 550, and he passed his research on to Evans. I told Rowly that confirmed what Republican politicians had been telling me and said we should go ahead with the column.

This meant Goldwater would be nominated, without sweeping the primaries and without leading opinion polls, by beating the Republican establishment, delegate by delegate, in the trenches. Clif White agreed with me that this state of affairs made the need to pacify the defeated liberal Republicans all-important.

         

ALTHOUGH POLLS SHOWED the absent Henry Cabot Lodge (still in Saigon) substantially ahead in the May 15 Oregon primary, Nelson Rockefeller, the only candidate to campaign actively in Oregon, pulled ahead at the end. Rockefeller won his first important primary with 33 percent to Lodge’s 27 per cent and Goldwater’s 18 percent.

Goldwater’s California lead immediately vanished in the polls. Lou Harris gave Rockefeller a ten-point lead there, and Mervin Field made it thirteen points. A week later I haunted the halls at the Marriott Twin Bridges Motel across the Potomac from Washington in Arlington, Virginia, where the Republican National Committee was meeting May 24–26. All but the most diehard Goldwaterites had abandoned the senator, sure Rockefeller would win in California June 2. Bill Scranton would be nominated, and the revolution would be over.

Then at four fifteen p.m. on May 30, three days before California voted, a seven-pound, ten-ounce Nelson Rockefeller Jr. was born in New York Hospital. The Harris Poll showed Rockefeller’s California lead dropping precipitately from nine percentage points on May 30 to two points on June 1. On June 2, Goldwater won the California primary with 51.3 percent to Rockefeller’s 48.7 percent—a difference of 59,000 votes out of more than two million cast.

That clinched Goldwater’s nomination and a changing of the guard in the Republican Party, but the fratricidal bloodshed had barely begun.