IT was impossible to foresee, as the calendar turned the pages of the new year, just how great would be the Republican disaster of November to come. But the forecasts were already dark.
All through the three transition years of Kennedy leadership, as the nation moved from the postwar world into the unnamed present, the Republican scenery had been alive with the restless comings and goings of men stalking or seeking a Presidential candidate. These ambitions, conspiracies, bustlings and explorations, which had begun as early as October of 1961, were, of course, entirely normal. But what was abnormal, even before the death of John F. Kennedy, was the chaos that kept surfacing among Republicans more and more often as 1963 wore its way to the end. The bitterness was of a new order of intensity; and it had begun within weeks after the election of 1960 had closed the truce of the Eisenhower years.
The election of 1960 could have been called by no man a Republican disaster. The tiny, almost invisible margin of Democratic victory had made it the closest run in American history. But the very narrowness of the defeat had brought on Richard M. Nixon the most violent abuse of both wings of his Party—if he had just made this speech, they chanted, or taken this position, they complained, or adjusted his stance that mite, said both his enemies and former friends, victory might have been his. Thus, instead of credit for a hard-fought near thing, Nixon, always a loner, found himself patronized and scorned by left and right of his Party, both of whom felt that his rejection of their advice had booted away the Presidency. Neither side could forgive the solitary Californian his solitary effort to apply the same stickum that Eisenhower had applied in his Presidency over the growing civil war in the Party.
This civil war in the Republican Party of the United States is one of the more fascinating stories of Western civilization. Historically, its solution may determine whether any nation in the Western world can adjust the traditional system of open enterprise to public need or whether enterprise, in the classic Western sense, must perish because the Republicans have let the word become a fossil. The rift is deep, a subject for a philosopher of government more than for a reporter. Yet one should touch, briefly, on the difference between America’s two great parties before plunging into the Republican dilemma.
The Democrats believe in government—government as an instrument to do things. Thus they can promise all their client groups with complete sincerity that, when elected, a Democratic government will do something to help each of the groups. These promises are often contradictory; and when Democrats win, they find their promises all too frequently paralyzed in a Congress of feuding Democrats whose public contracts defy each other. Yet, nonetheless, the Democrats are the party that guarantees government will do things.
The Republicans’ impossible dilemma is that they have never sorted out properly what it is that government should do and should not do—and at what level. Perhaps no political party should be asked to make an orderly philosophical sorting out of governmental responsibilities. But the Republicans’ largest client group, business, wants the government to do nothing—to leave it alone; other client groups, chiefly inspired by the old Protestant ethic of individual salvation, feel morally that the individual must be left master of his own destiny. In the years of their governing of the United States, the Republicans have, of course, immensely added to the reach of government activity, and more than honorably acquitted themselves of great tasks thrust on them. From the establishment of the Department of Agriculture in 1862 to Eisenhower’s Federal Highway Act of 1956, the record of Republican achievement is one of massive acceptance of government responsibility.1 But the Republicans do not campaign on such issues. They campaign, generally, against government; the Democrats campaign, generally, for government. The Republicans are for virtue, the Democrats for Santa Claus. These are the rules of the game, implacably stacked against Republicans, and in their attempt, year after year, to solve this dilemma the Republicans confuse one another and the nation, and, in defeat, distill a bitterness among themselves greater than their bitterness against Democrats.
By the fall of 1963 this bitterness within the Party had reached a condition of morbid intensity, and battle lines were more clearly drawn for struggle than at any time since the Roosevelt-Taft cleavage of 1912.
One must set the stage carefully to see what was about to happen. Each of the two sides had ranged the other and had given the other a name of contempt: on the one side were “the primitives” and on the other “the Eastern Establishment.” Both names are corruptions of reality. But they are convenient shorthand for describing a twenty-year period of politics, from 1940 to 1960, during which the Eastern Establishment dominated the national machinery of the Republican Party and its major governorships, while the primitives dominated its Congressional machinery and set its national lawmaking posture.
One must start, in 1964, with the apparently dominant Eastern Establishment—with what it appears to be and what it actually is. From beyond the Alleghenies, the Eastern Establishment seems to inhabit a belt that runs from Boston through Connecticut to Philadelphia and Washington. Its capital is New York, a city shrouded in a blur of symbolic words like “Wall Street,” “International Finance,” “Madison Avenue,” “Harvard,” “The New York Times,” “The Bankers Club,” “Ivy League Prep Schools,” all of which seem more sinister and suspect the farther one withdraws west or south.
Technically, of course, the capital of the Establishment, New York, can easily be described as the executive center of the Western world. Here is the center of the cobweb of world finance; here is the greatest pool of investment money on the globe; here is the interlocking machinery of the idea-and-word business. Here are the image-makers, the idea brokers, the dream-packagers. Such executive services as the Establishment offers out of New York are rarely available to New York City or State; it uses New York as a base from which it intervenes around the entire world and across the nation. More than London ever was, it is a headquarters town for sophisticated expertise. The Persian economy was reorganized by men working out of New York; the Franco-British cross-channel tunnel scheme was revived by two young New Yorkers; the world center for the war against cancer lies in a four-block area on Manhattan’s East Side; Robert A. Taft’s victorious campaign against the “intruding” CIO in Ohio in 1950 was masterminded by public-relations talent who produced some of Taft’s best speeches from an office in Rockefeller Center.
In politics, however, it is best to look at the Establishment capital in New York as a rather large village or a peculiar kind of community which has brought together, by an indefinable selection process, a group of men with the same kind of worries, families, little quarrels, private pleasures as other men elsewhere, yet at the same time set apart from other men by their enormous executive ability, superior responsibilities or great wealth.
There are several neighborhoods in New York which the Eastern Establishment—if there is one—makes particularly its own. It dwells, generally, on the east side of Manhattan in the Perfumed Stockade that runs from the East Nineties south to the East Fifties and from Fifth Avenue east to the river. There is, indeed, no greater assembly of executive ability, inherited wealth and opinion leadership in all the world than is domiciled in this Perfumed Stockade. Four Rockefeller brothers live here, several Whitneys, three Kennedy families, six Harrimans, half-a-dozen Strauses. There are Sulzbergers, Bakers, Millikens, Clarks, Sloans, Pierreponts, Roosevelts—old names without number—but also an equal number of more important new names. Their children go to the same half-dozen Manhattan private schools (all excellent) whence they emerge, go on to boarding school, and hope to attend proper Ivy League colleges. They meet at dances, charities, art festivals, dinners as neighbors. It is by no means a closed community; but raw money cannot buy entrance. It may be said of old New York that its members resist change of their own ways, but welcome change-makers in their midst. Fearful of appearing themselves in the newspapers except at birth, marriage or death, they enjoy the company of those who do make news. Persons who make a mark in the world—be it in industry, politics, art, science, writing—gradually find acceptance in the Perfumed Stockade. And then discover they enjoy it. Those who come to New York to live when great corporations summon them to headquarters stay on to watch their children grow up and marry. And, as they age, they find there companions of their own high level of interests, with whom they live out happily their fading years.
Washington is only an hour away by shuttle plane, and Paris or London only seven hours. The ambience of conversation and contact here is one of great affairs. All the United Nations embassies cluster in or around the Perfumed Stockade; eminent visitors from abroad or from the hinterland linger longer here than in Washington; many linger and stay. Three former High Commissioners to Germany live here (none native to New York); two former Ambassadors to England, fourteen former Cabinet members of various administrations (five of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s last Cabinet, including Richard M. Nixon), and sub-Cabinet members and generals in countless numbers. The community intermeshes a span of American life that reaches from the brightest young playwrights of Broadway (if successful) to such aging patriarchs as Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur (born, respectively, in West Branch, Iowa, and Little Rock, Arkansas), both of whom chose to see the end of their days at the Waldorf Towers.
The fact that this community is suspect to the broader nation beyond the Alleghenies comes generally from the strange way in which the Establishment fathers of families earn their generous living or shepherd their fortunes and corporations. And this suspicion is generally summed up in two phrases: “Wall Street” and “Madison Avenue,” which can always rouse a healthy growl at any meeting in the hinterland.
Both of these symbol phrases are so generally misread that they deserve some clarification.
What is essential to grasp, first, about Wall Street today is how much it has changed—reflecting the nation’s changes over the past twenty years. There are no longer any individual titans of finance in New York. The Chase Manhattan Bank, whose President is David Rockefeller (the Governor’s brother), is, indeed, the last great bank influenced by an individual family fortune. But the Morgans, the Bakers, the Seligmans, the Schiffs no longer dominate any bank. Instead the great banks and insurance companies are managed, as most great corporations are today, by skilled, carefully selected managerial personnel who, as executives, are paid generously but who lack private fortunes of their own and worry about the tax bite and the college bill just as do all other Americans. Predominantly, they are intelligent, hard-working men—of small-town origin. The Chairman of the Chase Manhattan is George Champion—from Normal, Illinois. The president of the First National City is George S. Moore—of Hannibal, Missouri. The chairman of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust is R. E. McNeill, Jr.—of Live Oak, Florida; and the president of that bank, the scholarly Gabriel Hauge, is a preacher’s son from Hawley, Minnesota. The chairman of the board of the Chemical Bank is Harold H. Helm—from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and the president, William S. Renchard—from Trenton, New Jersey. The chairman of the board of the Morgan Guaranty Trust, the most elegant symbol of all American high finance, is Henry C. Alexander—from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. One could go on—but these are the five largest banks in the greatest financial center of the world.
If anyone is part of the Eastern Establishment, then these men are part of it. They came there not by inheritance, however, but by hard work and luck, and remain subject to dismissal for failure—hired managers of contractual rivulets of savings which, under their direction, accumulate into the fantastic financial pool of fluid capital that makes New York the world’s banker. As managers they perform a service function—they make credit available to the great industries when need calls for expansion. But they can no longer, as they did fifty years ago, dictate the decision of industry. General Motors, American Tel & Tel, U. S. Steel make their decisions about the geography of American investment, at home and abroad, by the cold logistics furnished by their own figurings. Then they use the great banks as a home owner uses a savings-and-loan association—to help him do what he has already decided to do—and shop for the best interest rate where they can find it, or conscript capital from insurance companies or out-of-town balances.
There is another change, too, in the power and character of these New York banks. As the country has changed since the war, so has its financial geography. Swelling population, swelling industry, the shift of energies and the gushing of regional wealth have created great rival centers of finance in America since the war. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit and Dallas have been added to the great traditional centers—New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston—as sources of capital financing. New York’s share of the banking resources of the nation has shrunk from 25 percent at the end of World War II to 12 or 13 percent today.
Wall Street can no longer command. Yet it still leads. The Wall Street men do not meet collectively at The Bankers Club, nor can they be gathered any longer in a cozy group in J. P. Morgan’s study to turn on or off the spigots of credit in America. Yet they set the climate. They know that a threat to the British pound is as much a threat to Liverpool, Texas, as to Liverpool, England. They can see the meaning of gold outflow long before anyone else. They must finance overseas investments and discount bills of foreign trade in every currency in the world. They are neither internationalists nor liberals. But they must live with the world as it is—as it is described to them daily in the flow of information from every capital in the nation and around the globe: information on personalities, economics, markets; information public, secret and diplomatic. A dogmatic man could not survive as head of a Wall Street bank, nor could an isolationist. Only in this sense are they liberal. Republican almost to a man, the Wall Street bankers and corporate executives must learn to live in a world of constant adjustments. They are, to be sure, “businessmen,” but they can be compared to Midwestern industrialists or a Phoenix, Arizona, merchant only in the distant sense that one can compare an elephant and a sheep as herbivorous animals.
Republicans also dominate the other great enterprise of the Establishment—the idea factories of “Madison Avenue”—but they must share this domination with a highly vocal component of Democrats and a subordinate staff of “creative” or editorial talent largely Democratic.
Madison Avenue is even more difficult for strangers to understand than Wall Street, even though Madison Avenue toys with the spirit and the dreams of strangers across the land in a way far more intimate than Wall Street. “Madison Avenue” is more than a single lane; it is a twenty-block-by-four-block area in which all the communications in America are gathered into the single most complicated switchboard of words, phrases and ideas in the world. All three national broadcasting networks operate from here. So do both major wire services; so do 90 percent of the great book-publishing houses of America; so do most of the major magazines—Time, Life, Fortune, Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, The Ladies’ Home Journal—as well as The Reporter and the National Review. The hundreds of thousands of people who work here (and who drink, chat, gossip and swap schemes or fancies with one another) are without doubt the largest community in the world that lives by wit, words and communication. Several facts must be signaled about them: First—since they live by words, they deal constantly in abstractions, in phrases, in intellectualizations that make a house jargon, a neighborhood dialect as unfamiliar to the rest of America as the automobile talk of Detroit or the oil talk of the Petroleum Club in Dallas. Secondly—since they live so closely packed, their interconnections form a switchboard for all transmission of American ideas and fashions, and anyone who lives in New York thus has immediate access to the largest megaphone and finest brainwashing system the world has ever known. Lastly—except for the local New York newspapers, the commanding summits of this world are occupied by Republican small-town boys quite similar to those who dominate Wall Street—by men like Henry Luce (born in Chefoo, China) or Gardner Cowles (in Algona, Iowa) or Norton Simon (of Fullerton, California) or J. Wes Gallagher of the Associated Press (of San Francisco) or the late Roy Howard (of Indianapolis, Indiana) or David Sarnoff (of Uzlian, Minsk, Russia) or Leonard Goldenson (of Scottdale, Pennsylvania)—or the Wall Street Journal’s editor, Vermont Connecticut Royster (of Raleigh, North Carolina).
All these leaders in Wall Street, in Madison Avenue, in the Perfumed Stockade (Republicans and Democrats alike) share a great concern for America. They and their law firms (where the old native New York blood runs bluest) know they must get along with government; they know that though they influence government, government influences them even more; good government, understanding government, is to them a prime condition of their own prosperity. They are concerned with the condition of American life as much as any men anywhere in the country—and more aware than any other group of its infinite complexity.
If one could choose a single institution which illustrates how profound and important is their concern for American policy and destiny, one might choose, say, the august Council on Foreign Relations, set center in the Perfumed Stockade at the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue in the old Pratt mansion. The Council counts among its members probably more important names in American life than any other private group in the country—not only ex-Presidents, ex-Senators, ex-Governors; not only executives at the summit of all the great banks and industries headquartered in New York; but scholars, writers and intellectuals too. The meetings of the Council are deeply, profoundly concerned with government and America’s role in the world. Its roster of members has for a generation, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, been the chief recruiting ground for Cabinet-level officials in Washington. Among the first eighty-two names on a list prepared for John F. Kennedy for staffing his State Department, at least sixty-three were members of the Council, Republicans and Democrats alike. When, finally, he made his appointments, both his Secretary of State (Rusk, Democrat) and Treasury (Dillon, Republican) were chosen from Council members; so were seven assistant and undersecretaries of State, four senior members of Defense (Deputy Secretary of Defense, Comptroller, Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Assistant Secretary for Manpower), as well as two members of the White House staff (Schlesinger, Democrat; Bundy, Republican).
I cite the Council on Foreign Relations not to emphasize the centralization of the Establishment, but to emphasize its brooding concern for America’s larger position in the world which is the atmosphere of higher New York executive life; and because this sense of national responsibility is so rare in any country.
For the last fact to be stated about the Eastern Establishment is that it is not centralized. It shares a common code, indeed. But it is divided among Republicans (predominantly) and Democrats; and the dominant Republicans are themselves split and torn by groups, factions and personal antipathies which give to no one man, no one name, no one bank absolute and unquestioned leadership—a fact that was soon to become evident in 1964.
It is the dominant Republican element of the Establishment that concerns us here—for, as the curtain rose on the events of 1964, it was these men who apparently held the power in their Party. For an unbroken twenty years the Establishment of the East Coast had dominated the conventions of the Republican Party; in any floor fight it had been able to prevail by finding beachheads of Midwestern Republican Governors (Stassen for Willkie in 1940, as floor manager; Youngdahl for Eisenhower in 1952) about whom other Midwestern groups could be led to rally. The Establishment Republicans were content to let the primitive element write the record of the Party in Congress, if they could choose the Executive candidate and thus set the image of the Party. In 1964 they were to find, too late, no single Midwestern progressive to join them and frustrate Goldwater.
Their hegemony dated back to 1940, in the world of yesterday, when they had compelled the party to name Wendell Willkie as Republican nominee by a combination of every kind of pressure the publishers, broadcasters and bankers could collectively exert around the country. Through the provincial banks, then in trailing-strings to New York banks, the Wall Street men could mobilize for their Indiana favorite almost inexorable pressure on local businessmen who controlled delegates. (One Eastern political observer later reported, “I bet on money—not just any kind of money, but old money. New money buys things; old money calls notes.”) From 1940 on, under the foremanship of Dewey, then under the Presidency of Eisenhower, the Easterners persisted in the illusion that they still could, when the chips were down, control the nominating mechanism and thus the image machinery of the Party. Yet as the years wore on, the Easterners were almost unaware of how the country was changing. They knew professionally that great rival banks were growing up in the West and Far West, that great new industries were surging with a power they could not control. They could spot population shifts and market shifts, for that was their business. But they could not grasp that, in the world of politics, faces and forces change far faster than in the world of business; voters’ loyalties are more fickle than those of a board of directors. The men who had imposed Willkie in 1940, won the nomination for Dewey in 1944 and 1948, frustrated Taft and installed Eisenhower in 1952, still met as neighbors or companions in New York—and still thought their power of veto over the Party was undiminished.
Yet the Party was changing. It was changing at home in New York, where Nelson Rockefeller, never a favorite of the Establishment, was beginning to grow larger and larger. It was changing, too, in the West, where new names of which they had never heard were rising. It was changing most dramatically with the echo of a man named Barry Goldwater, who gave them the defi proper, an outright challenge, a taunting enmity which never, even in their wars with Taft, had they experienced before.
Slowly, as they came into the fall of 1963, they became aware that if Barry Goldwater meant what he said, and Nelson Rockefeller meant what he said, then the Party was on collision course. Even before the assassination, as this became clear in downtown New York and in the Perfumed Stockade, the more vigorous leaders of the old Dewey-Eisenhower team began to study the situation to see what could be done to avert the disaster that lay ahead.
For months, in their uncoordinated gropings, the old team had vested their hopes in the old lion of the Party, the hero who had never known failure—Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was impossible, agreed the few remaining veterans of the old triumphs, to stop either Rockefeller or Goldwater without a leader; and only the old leader had a name which was still magic. Yet the old leader, now in retirement, found politics even more distasteful than he had in his prime.
A genial man throughout his life, Dwight D. Eisenhower has always acted best when duty was clearest. Given the clean assignment to destroy the Nazis or armor the West, he could perform such historic masterpieces as the invasion of France or the organization of NATO. But politics was a murky world, alien to him. Even after the eight years of the Presidency, he could lament in 1964 (after the San Francisco convention) that “I was never trained in politics; I came in laterally, at the top. In the service, when a man gives you his word, his word is binding. In politics, you never know.”2
His attitude to politics in 1963 was still as fresh and honorable, but as simple, as that of a teacher of high-school civics; he felt that with good open discussion of issues and candidates the American people would always reach the best choice. The cookery and jiggering and fixings that go on in practical politics always annoyed him. So did the constant importunities, the demands made on him since his departure from the Presidency, the efforts of so many to grab and use his name as a factional label, to bend his great reputation to serve what other people considered the need of the Republic or the Party. In July, 1964, on his transcontinental train trip to the San Francisco convention, he amazed an old newspaper friend by suddenly quoting verbatim and with enormous feeling a passage from Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body, in which Lincoln is caused by the poet to say:
“They come to me and talk about God’s will
In righteous deputations and platoons,
Day after day, laymen and ministers.
They write me Prayers from Twenty Million Souls
Defining me God’s will and Horace Greeley’s.
God’s will is General This or Senator That,
God’s will is those poor colored fellows’ will,
It is the will of the Chicago churches,
It is this man’s and his worst enemy’s.
But all of them are sure they know God’s will.
I am the only man who does not know it.
And, yet, if it is probable that God
Should, and so very clearly, state His will
To others, on a point of my own duty,
It might be thought He would reveal it
Directly, more especially as I
So earnestly desire to know His will.”
All through 1963, deputations and platoons of politicians had been buzzing through his farm at Gettysburg, telling Eisenhower what was God’s will for the Republican Party and what he must do, whom he must support, how he must use his strength. Yet Eisenhower would not move.
In his own mind, Eisenhower knew but few men who, in his opinion, would make great Presidents. Had any of them sought his help, he would have bestirred himself and taken active leadership. The war hero listed them thus: His first choice was Robert Anderson, who had been his second Secretary of the Treasury (but Anderson did not want the job on any terms; later, in 1964, he actually supported Lyndon Johnson). His next choices were two war companions, General Alfred Maximilian Gruenther and General Lucius Clay; both of these are men of extraordinary ability; but Gruenther was ailing, Clay had no lust for the Presidency, and both were realistic enough to know they stood no chance for the nomination. For any of these three, Eisenhower would have saddled up and battled. And there was a fourth choice: his own brother, Milton Eisenhower. At Eisenhower’s birthday party that year on October 15th, a gathering of his old Cabinet and political friends in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he had put Milton on the dais, seen to it that Milton was the only speaker of the evening besides himself. Friends of the old President were discreetly exploring the support for Milton around the country with the old President’s knowledge and encouragement.
But Milton, as far as most of the New York group went, was out. (“It would have destroyed the brother issue,” said one. “How could we hammer Jack and Bobby Kennedy if Ike was running his brother for the Presidency?”) Moreover, Milton would not risk political exposure; he shrank from it; he showed no aptitude for political visibility.
Not being able to command the nomination of any of these four, Eisenhower had contented himself in August, 1963, with listing ten eminent Republicans who, in addition to Goldwater and Rockefeller, he thought were Presidential timber. He hoped the good civics of the Republican Party would choose among them in open discussion.
This attitude did little to satisfy the downtown New Yorkers whose operations on behalf of Eisenhower himself in 1952 had borne little resemblance to civics as taught at West Point thirty-five years before. They knew they could not attack Nelson Rockefeller at home in New York without tearing the state Party apart; they knew that the nomination of Barry Goldwater might permanently wreck the national Party. If they were to create a new candidate, then the fall of 1963 was already very late; and nothing could be done unless Eisenhower took an active role.
Eisenhower was due in New York to accept an award at Columbia University on Thursday, November 2 1st, 1963. The following Saturday afternoon they hoped to gather with the General and make him see reason: that Milton could not be nominated, that Goldwater and Rockefeller would split the Party, that they must find a new candidate—and he must lead. Lucius Clay was to be at the meeting. So, too, was Herb Brownell, Dewey’s long-time political chief of staff. Dewey himself was reluctant to be officially a part of the Rockefeller opposition. (“You have to remember,” said one of the group, “that Dewey’s been a New York Republican all his life and he can’t oppose a Republican Governor of New York—not until Rocky’s out of it. Besides, he has his law business to consider. He doesn’t handle any Chase Manhattan business. But still, he’d have to talk to his partners before taking a public stand.”)
Thus, on assassination weekend the old Eastern Establishment considered the situation already desperate. Dewey, as we have seen, was lunching with Rockefeller when the news of the assassination came. Eisenhower was a guest at a U.N. lunch at the Chatham when he heard. And, suddenly, the tragedy erased politics: Eisenhower flew to Washington to meet Johnson; there was no Saturday meeting.
For a few weeks more several friends continued to explore the possibility of making a candidate of Milton Eisenhower before reporting to the General that it was out of the question. But by then it was January, and the Rockefeller and Goldwater forces, full steam up and flags at battle staff, were heading for the first clash in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
The crew that Nelson Rockefeller took into battle in New Hampshire was one of the most elaborate ever to enter political war in America in modern times.
Tempered by the experience of its 1960 clash with Richard M. Nixon and beefed up with new talent, the Rockefeller staff of 1964 was a thing of splendor. Its ambassador-at-large and closest man to the candidate was George Hinman, who had become a veteran of national politics without losing the gentility of manner which had won him so many friends in 1960.2 Hinman had added to the ambassadorial staff for national contacts the young and extremely promising Robert R. Douglass. Dr. William Ronan, of the Governor’s Albany staff, had found a way of combining his professor’s knowledge of political theory with an administrator’s knack for cutting to the heart of things. Charles F. Moore, once vice-president of the Ford Motor Company, had volunteered as strategist of public relations as much out of determination to stop Barry Goldwater as out of simple gaiety of spirit.4 A new and labyrinthine research department was directed by Roswell Perkins. Robert McManus, the press secretary of 1960’s effort, had by now acquired an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the important newsmen and news outlets across the continent. Thomas E. Stephens and Anne Whitman of Eisenhower’s former White House staff offered connections to old Eisenhower loyalists around the country. Carl Spad, later to be New York State Republican Chairman, controlled schedule. Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard had replaced Emmet Hughes as chief theoretician on foreign affairs, and Hugh Morrow prepared speeches. Capping them all was one of the outstanding campaign directors on either side, John A. Wells, senior partner of the law firm of Royall, Koegel and Rogers, and a splendid administrator. Beyond these were second-string members of the Rockefeller staff in such quality and such numbers as to staff several campaigns.
Lavishly funded, high-minded, shrewdly deployed, enthusiastic and tough, this team had been put together over three years of effort. The first and initial survey of the Presidency had taken place within a few weeks of the election of 1960, at the Rockefeller grounds near Tarrytown, New York, in the playroom on the Rockefeller estate. Successive and irregular meetings in the executive dining room of the Radio City Music Hall had followed as an informal strategy board surveyed the information from around the country and its developing mood. The gubernatorial campaign of 1962 had been won by a margin large enough to keep Rockefeller the dominant contender for his Party’s nomination. By the spring of 1963 a campaign biography for publication in early 1964 was being written by Frank Gervasi. And by the fall of 1963 the planners had begun to grapple with their two major problems.
The first was the nature of their hero.
Their hero was one of the wealthiest men in the world; he was one of the most stubborn men in the world; he was also one of the most high-principled. And he was rough. His enemies called him, quite simply, the most ruthless man in politics. But what in other men would be simple arrogance was in Rockefeller the direct and abrupt expression of motives which, since he knew them to be good, he expected all other men to accept as good also. He could name his cousin (Richard S. Aldrich) City Councilman of New York over the protest of all New York City Republicans at this bit of nepotism, simply because he knew Aldrich to be the best man. He loved government—he delighted in the complexity of problems, as problems; he loved mauling them, taking them apart, putting them together again. His campaign speeches in the early primaries were to drive some of his associates to despair by their earnest, didactic quality; when a questioner at an open meeting would ask about a matter of public policy, Rockefeller would respond with a cascade of fact, figure and detail as if the questioner did indeed want to learn as much about government as Rockefeller could tell him.
When he said that he put principle above party, he meant it. The Rockefeller family, for example, has abolitionist roots that go back through a century of American life. His great-grandfather Spelman had run a station of the Underground Railroad in Ohio before the Civil War, to help runaway slaves get to Canada; his family had endowed the first Negro women’s college (Spelman College) in 1876 before it was fashionable to send white women to college, let alone Negro women. In all, they had given approximately $80 million to Negro causes and institutions. Rockefeller would as soon repudiate these roots as the American flag. But his counselors moaned that even an abolitionist running for President would not go as far as Rockefeller went. If there were to be any hope of peeling off Southern delegates from Goldwater at the convention, why, why did he have to encourage the Negro revolution of 1963 in the South just at that time? Two gifts of $5,000 and $10,000 each to Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference were openly on record. But what was not announced was even more upsetting: a loan of $20,000, arranged through the Chase Manhattan Bank, to the firebrands of the revolution, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Principle demanded it, and principle committed Rockefeller. Principle had similarly demanded a three-year stress, as Governor, on the politically unappetizing project of fallout shelters. He had felt it was up to him to protect New York.
Principle defined, politically, the type of candidate the Rockefeller men had to run—a hard-line foreign-policy man, committed to stiffening America against Communism and increasing its military wallop. Yet, at the same time, a man who supported the Test Ban Treaty and the United Nations. He was for the most rigidly balanced Federal Budget and sound fiscal policy; yet he was for Medicare, and in his state budget, aid to education had doubled in his six years of office; state college scholarships had tripled. It was difficult to enclose Nelson Rockefeller in any neat political pigeonhole except that he yearned for the post of President, that he was supremely convinced that he could direct the problems of the United States, and that his talent, energy and experience made him obviously one of the rare men fully equal to the great task. John F. Kennedy had once observed that if it had been Rockefeller rather than Nixon he faced in 1960, Rockefeller would have won. Rockefeller shared that opinion—his problem as he saw it was not how to manage the United States but how to get the Republicans to nominate him and let him try.
Which brings us to the second problem of the Rockefeller campaign—his personal life. For one can no more discuss the Republican politics of 1964 without dealing with Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce and remarriage than one can discuss English Constitutional development without touching on the stormy marriage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
It would be good if the private lives of public figures could be sealed off from their political records, and their leadership discussed as an abstract art in the use of men by other men. The politics of an open democracy, however, dictates otherwise. Men and women both vote, and they choose a leader by what they catch of his personality in the distortion of quick headlines. Yet the private lives of public figures are as three-dimensional, as complicated, as unyielding to interpretation by snap judgment as the lives of ordinary people. And the divorce and remarriage of Nelson Rockefeller offer a classic example of an immensely complicated tangle of personal tragedies distorted by quick summary into oversimplified scandal and blame. They warrant exploration as much to show how greatly public report distorts, as for their shattering impact on the politics of the Republican Party in the seeking of a candidate in 1964.
One must draw back and view the critical episodes in the tale of Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce and remarriage against the background of his growth—against the backdrop of the Pocantico Hills estate at Tarrytown with all its four thousand acres, the old brownstone mansion on 54th Street in New York, the splendor of sea, rock and surf in the Rockefeller retreat at Seal Harbor, Maine.
It is the estate at Pocantico Hills that gives the clearest impression of the isolation and separation so characteristic of all the Rockefellers—as well as the near-paralyzing effect the Rockefeller fortune has on those who approach too casually its field of force. Only forty minutes from Manhattan, off a winding road in Westchester County, surrounded by a low fieldstone wall, the estate stretches away to the Hudson, so hidden from the public eye that the hurrying motorist will miss the gate unless forewarned. Behind the wall stretches some of the greenest and loveliest land anywhere in America—low, rolling hills, perfectly planted yet not manicured, that come to a crest in a Renaissance mansion built by the original John D. Rockefeller shortly after he transplanted his family here from Ohio in 1884. It is a beautiful mansion, yellowing now with mellow age, with grottoes for children, a loggia, a terrace, a swimming pool. From the terrace on the far side one looks out over the Hudson River as it winds majestically down from the north, with all its freight of the American past, before it is squeezed into the angry present by the Palisades. Both sides of the valley are equally green with grass and forest, and as one gazes down in enchantment on the broad-flowing river, it is difficult to imagine sorrow or anger or any ordinary human concern penetrating this paradise.
When Nelson was growing up, the Rockefeller children lived in the city during the week, carefully exposed to the proper schools; but on weekends and on vacations they would enter the shelter of the great estate where all the world could offer was theirs—sheltered and guarded from any turbulence. Playrooms and skating rinks, gardens and swimming pool on the estate all provided an ease protected by an outer privacy that was a fetish of the entire Rockefeller clan. To this estate Nelson Rockefeller returned in the summer of 1930 with his bride, Mary Todhunter Clark of Philadelphia. His parents had not been highly enthusiastic or encouraging about this marriage so soon after Nelson’s college graduation; Nelson was very young (twenty-one); they themselves had known each other over six years before their marriage. But Mary Todhunter Clark was of the finest Philadelphia Clarks—intelligent, shy, as withdrawn, as jealous of her privacy as the most reclusive of the Rockefellers. She soon won their complete affection.
What happened within the marriage of Nelson and Tod Rockefeller must be a matter of private speculation. Five children were born of it. But somewhere in its long course, difficult to fix in time, it ceased to be a marriage of love. Some time after the birth in May, 1938, of the twins, Michael and Mary, the marriage ceased to be a true marriage—and remained thus for the last eighteen years of their married life, a fact well known to close friends. But during that period and for the sake of the children, both agreed to continue to remain together as a family and cherish the children while they were growing up.
It was during the war years that the separation matured. For Rockefeller is an activist, fretful and frustrated when not in action, and the approach of war in Europe called him down to Washington, where he found an excitement in government life which he could not find in the splendid privacy which his wife so prized within the Rockefeller estates. Going down again and again to Washington, returning again and again to the estates in Pocantico and Seal Harbor, Rockefeller found that the walls chafed—as did his marriage to a woman who chose not to share the excitement of political and social life beyond those walls.
When, in 1958, Rockefeller finally burst out of the traditional restraint of family to enter the governor’s race in New York, what had become an empty marriage long before, bound only by love of children, became slowly a prison. Campaigning in America is done with wives; wives are on public display; the code calls for their participation, however unrealistic this code may be. Tod Rockefeller is a highly intelligent woman; she shared her husband’s liberalism in politics. But her taste was rather for good causes than for people in the raw. Meeting people was a chore for her. She did try, however, and she tried hard. But her lack of relish for the pressure of people, as politics constantly throws them into a governor’s circle, was not only evident publicly; it was more deeply voiced privately—for the first Mrs. Rockefeller is a lady of no uncertain opinions and no hesitation at reiterating them in the private presence of her husband—or his staff. Her attitude, which was an irritant from the beginning of Rockefeller’s political career in 1958, ended by creating a bitterness in a marriage which love had long left and of which only the form remained.
In November of 1961 it was announced from the family office in Rockefeller Center that Nelson Rockefeller was about to be divorced. American politics can accept divorce: for every four new marriages each year, one old marriage breaks up, for there is no civilized way of imprisoning people in the agony of forced partnership. Divorced candidates get elected and re-elected in American life; and even after his divorce Nelson Rockefeller was re-elected in 1962 by the margin of 529,169 votes (and would have surpassed his 1958 margin of 573,034 had not the newly formed Conservative Party peeled off 142,000 traditionally Republican votes).
Remarriage, however, complicates even more the political problem—which brings us to the unhappy Murphy family.
Among those who lived in the gravitational field of the Rockefeller power was Dr. James S. Murphy, a distinguished scientist of the Rockefeller Institute, whose father before him had been included in the Rockefeller family’s inner circle. Dr. Murphy—called “Robin” by his friends—was married to Margaretta Fitler Murphy, like Tod Rockefeller a Philadelphian. Tall, with fawn-colored hair, healthy, dressed not so much fashionably as wholesomely, she had thrown off from girlhood a smiling outgoing quality that had won her the nickname “Happy.” Meeting her, one thought of tennis, not nightclubs; soap, not perfume; sailing, not sports cars. Radiant, warm and handsome, she appeared to be as serene a specimen of American woman as a good upper-class American family can produce.
But she was not serene—nor was her husband. Both were children of broken and unhappy marriages. Margaretta’s father, an alcoholic, had separated from her mother when she was a child. Robin Murphy’s father and mother, too, had separated when he was young. Margaretta and Robin had married when she was twenty-two, in December, 1948. And in the lives of both the central gravitational force became the Rockefeller family.
The first to favor Margaretta Fitler Murphy was the elderly father of Nelson Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Robin brought Margaretta to Seal Harbor as his father had brought Robin as a child. The young bride filled a void in the life of the solemn and aging John D. Rockefeller, whose own wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, had just died in 1948. The lonesome head of the Rockefeller clan saw the young woman almost as a daughter; she had just married the son of his own friend who had just died. She walked in the woods with him, cheered him, made his days brighter.
The favor of the patriarch of the Rockefeller family was not to be taken lightly. Robin Murphy wanted to be a medical scientist—the old man saw to it that he was posted as a junior scientist to a medical research project at the Rockefeller Institute in San Francisco, from where he returned with his family to summer at Seal Harbor. The promising young scientist wanted to come back to New York. And so David Rockefeller, then charged with the family’s responsibilities in matters concerning the magnificent Rockefeller Institute, capitol of American biological research, saw to it that young Dr. Murphy was transferred to the New York headquarters. It was also David who later arranged that the Murphys be given the rare permission to build a house of their own on the Rockefeller acres at Pocantico Hills. So ordered, however, is the beautiful, landscaped estate that a new house must be planned so as not to break the skyline but to fit into the gentle curve of the hills and the valley. And among the Rockefellers the one most interested in housing and architecture and art is Nelson. Thus one has the picture of Nelson Rockefeller—who had known Happy Murphy and her husband at his brother David’s Seal Harbor house, on sailing and swimming parties along the Maine coast—as he discussed with her the plans, designs and drawings of the house in which she would live.
It could not be hidden from Nelson Rockefeller, himself caught in an unhappy marriage, that the young woman was similarly caught. Scientist Robin Murphy was intensely jealous of his wife, and there had been frightening scenes. She had sought psychiatric help as to what she should do to preserve and rebuild her marriage. She did not want her children to grow up in a broken marriage, as she had herself. But finally she had been advised by her psychiatric counselor that it would be hopeless for her to try further—within the framework of her marriage to Robin Murphy—to do for her children what a conscientious mother wants to do for her children. She must leave him.
Thus—two unhappy marriages.
Thus—two unhappy people trying to escape.
And thus Happy Murphy was there in 1958, as a political volunteer, when Nelson Rockefeller first tried to break out of the walls of privacy to run for Governor of New York. Politics is exciting, and in its excitement Happy Murphy found a new and engrossing world. By 1960, at the Republican Convention, she was a working member of the volunteer Rockefeller staff at the Sheraton-Towers command post in Chicago from which was directed the Rockefeller clash with Nixon that climaxed in the Compact of Fifth Avenue.
Yet the Presidential try of Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 was only a preliminary. He knew then that he would run again in 1964. There was the politician—and the man. The man felt he could not campaign for the Presidency if he had to relive the public sham of private life which he had endured in 1960. He would break clean; and so he told his wife late in the fall of 1961. He was hoping to marry Happy Murphy.
But Happy Murphy’s problem was the final complication of the political problem, and it was to echo and re-echo through every turning of the Republican struggle of 1964—from supermarket rally of housewives to smoke-filled gatherings of politicians: Happy Murphy was the mother of four children, whom her husband refused to yield. Should she stay penned in a marriage which her medical adviser and counselor told her had no hope of success—or should she try to get out for the sake of her children? And, very importantly, for the sake of her own health as well. This last consideration—her health—was causing her physician more concern than any other among the problems he and she were trying to solve.
All divorces are ugly; they often harden and make unreasonable antagonists of the finest of human beings; and they violate common sense and good taste most when children are involved. The cleanest of motives, the frankest of statements become punishing wounds when marriage partners fight for emotional reasons beyond their own recognition. Both Robin and Happy Murphy loved their children; their own love was at an end; how does one separate? Particularly if both, remembering their own childhoods, feel that the children should have the benefit equally of father and mother, equal access, equal kindness, equal control. But such delicate thoughts do not work out in a court of law, where matters must be written down in legal terms.
A friend explains Happy Murphy’s thinking thus: “There she was, trapped. In prison. Loving Nelson—and loving the children. She feared her husband and she also felt that somehow the children would suffer from it. I don’t think she knows herself yet whether she did right or wrong. But I believe I know what her thinking must have been. Although she realized the custody agreement placed the children, technically, in her husband’s hands, it called for her to have the children with her at least half the time; she expected that Robin Murphy would want to work out with her—and in the best interests of the children—an arrangement fair to all. On at least two occasions, before the divorce decree was granted in Idaho, she talked with Robin Murphy on the phone with a view to reconciliation. But both times he refused to discuss the matter with her. Later, after her marriage to Nelson, it became abundantly clear to her that the original agreement was not working out satisfactorily for anyone, least of all for the children. That was why she went to court again in the summer of 1964; and though the custody agreement wasn’t reversed, the situation has improved, following the new court action, to an extent that she can now work more effectively and confidently for the health and happiness of her children.”
This hidden, private and many-sided anguish was, of course, going on untold, or lay ahead as the Republican voters sampled or savored their choices in the spring and summer of 1963. Yet voters had to react to what they read, or what was told them. And what lay in the mind of all four members of the two marriages could not be spoken either baldly or delicately in public. The voters must react to hard news: as they did on May 4, 1963, when Nelson Rockefeller and Happy Murphy made known that they had been married that day. Then followed the coarse but inescapable reporting of the nuptials and their aftermath: Nelson Rockefeller at his Venezuela ranch with the glowing and smiling Happy Rockefeller in blue jeans and sports shirt. There followed the immediate gathering of the Hudson River Presbytery to censure as a “disturber of the peace” the unfortunate pastor who had married the two. In Chicago the Young Adults for Rockefeller disbanded in anger. Ex-Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, a long-time friend of Rockefeller’s, branded him a destroyer of American homes. And from supermarket to sewing circle to parlor to cocktail lounge there rose almost instantly the henyard clucking that every correspondent was to hear for a year thereafter wherever he tried to read the feminine psyche: “I ain’t going to vote a woman into the White House who left her children.”
If Goldwater was later to be hung on the “bomb issue” and “Social Security,” Rockefeller was to be hung first on the “morality issue.” One was to hear more of “morality” in the campaign of 1964 than ever before in American life, but Rockefeller was the first to suffer from a virtually uninformed public discussion of his life.
What, indeed, was the morality issue here? Said one of Rockefeller’s friends, “Here were two marriages already actually broken, already destroyed and at an end. Here were two people in love. Should they marry publicly or have a clandestine love affair? A man of Rockefeller’s wealth can have a love affair on any terms he wants. But he didn’t want Happy that way. He wanted it open, she as his wife. He kept holding off hard delegate commitments until he could announce his remarriage—so that they could make up their minds with the facts on the table.”
At least two of his most intimate advisers—George Hinman and Emmet Hughes—pointed out to the New York Governor that if he married again he would be putting his chances of nomination at an extreme risk. So did Robert McManus and William Ronan when they learned later. To which Rockefeller replied—so be it. He would not give up the woman he loved, even for the Presidency. He would stand openly with her—and morality demanded that he make the matter public, as directly and as quickly as possible.
It was a decision frankly faced, morally accepted—but politically perilous. People will forgive a politician they love almost any sin—as witness James Michael Curley, Huey Long, Adam Clayton Powell, Jimmy Walker and a score of others; in matters of romance, particularly, they will forgive him almost any peccadillo, as everyone who has worked on Capitol Hill knows—so long as the peccadillo is not flaunted. But the frank and open acceptance of a new marriage was a breach with the general indulgence of the hypocrisy of politics, and in Rockefeller’s case was particularly hazardous. Rockefeller occupied few hearts as a politician; he had earned his strength by winning respect for his talents as a governor, his ability to solve problems and administer affairs. As a politician, he appealed to the mind—not the emotions. No counter reserve of emotion was available to him as now the emotions of millions of women across America were engaged against him.
To measure the impact of the divorce on the Rockefeller campaign, one must go back to the spring of 1963, before the remarriage. By that spring all the Rockefeller machinery was on stand-by. Directed from George Hinman’s corner office on the 56th floor of the RCA building in Rockefeller Center, its reach covered the map. All of New England—practically sewed up. The Middle Atlantic States—the same. The Midwest—good (Ohio poor, but Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa very promising). In California the chief problem was how to keep the bandwagon jumpers from jumping on too early. Washington good; Hatfield in Oregon to be counted on; Smylie of Idaho friendly. Even in the South there were pockets of friendship.
The horizons of the Rockefeller staff in early 1963, as they surveyed the nation, had not been, of course, entirely cloudless. There was John F. Kennedy in the White House, and by early 1963 Kennedy was entering his phase of mastery. The Republican nomination of 1964 was Rockefeller’s for the taking, thought the unknowing, younger Rockefeller men in the spring; the only questions were: Could any man beat Kennedy in 1964? And if Rockefeller dodged Kennedy in 1964, how could he later claim the nomination in 1968? As they read the portents, their critical problem was simply whether to accept the nomination or pass it off on someone like Scranton. All waited on word from Rockefeller, and meanwhile the machinery purred, ready to go.
From Hinman’s office, as one peered over the spires of New York in early 1963, the Rockefeller prospects had never been brighter—except for what Hinman privately knew and would not reveal to callers: that Nelson Rockefeller meant to marry Margaretta Fitler Murphy as soon as the New York State legislative session ended in late April.5
With the news of the remarriage, the Rockefeller operation staggered. And when, by late May, the Gallup Poll had taken its first reading, the results read even worse than Rockefeller’s staff had expected. Goldwater, previously the choice of only 26 percent of Republicans as against Rockefeller’s 43 percent, was now the choice of 35 percent as against Rockefeller’s 30 percent.
None of the conventional gambits of politics could now work. Rockefeller’s power in the Republican Party had never rested on his liberal politics. It had rested on his sock at the polls, the fact that he could get votes. In July, struggling for a comeback, he fired a bruising volley against the extremists of the Republican Party, a volley provoked by the rowdy tactics of the right-wing Young Republicans at their June gathering in San Francisco; but it misfired. His trip to Europe in September, to limn his silhouette as an international statesman, likewise brought no apparent political gain.
There was, for Rockefeller, no other court of appeal but the people. That had been Kennedy’s route in 1960—to appeal directly to people at the primaries, over the heads of politicians. This is why primaries are important. But to appeal to people he must be an open candidate. Thus, on November 7th, two weeks before the assassination, Rockefeller announced from his chambers in Albany that he was an open candidate for the Presidency—and flew off to New Hampshire to begin his primary campaign there.
It was still, to all men except Rockefeller, a hopeless proposition.
But two weeks later John F. Kennedy died. I saw Rockefeller about ten days after that, and he was in a reflective mood. He was as cold and analytical about his own candidacy as if he were examining a case exposed for surgery. The chances were slim. No one, he felt, would vote for him unless a national crisis forced them to do so. The new Mrs. Rockefeller did not want him to run for the Presidency; no one, in fact, wanted him to run except himself. If the people needed him, they would take him. He had been impressed by the reaction to him not only at the Kennedy funeral ceremonies in Arlington National Cemetery, but also at the funeral of Herbert Lehman two weeks later. He had walked the half block down Fifth Avenue from Temple Emanu-El, where the services had been held, to his brother Laurence’s apartment, and people had turned to clutch at him and shake hands—extraordinarily, as if he were in midcampaign. The Kennedy assassination had shocked the country; Rockefeller felt it wanted leadership—strong, visible continuity of leadership. But did it want him? Was this public turning to him an ephemeral reaction or something deeper? And since it was obvious that the politicians did not want him, he must, as Kennedy had done, show them his muscle at the polls, in the primaries. This was the only way. There were three critical primary appeals to the people—in New Hampshire on March 10th, in Oregon on May 15th, in California on June 2nd. He must fight in all of these—so he was off to barnstorm New Hampshire.
The Eastern leaders watched Rockefeller’s headstrong course in consternation. They were convinced he could not win. But so long as he put himself forward as their champion against Goldwater’s primitives, no one else would enter the lists; they insisted that this would split the Eastern forces. Many did not like Rockefeller—some disliked him personally for what they thought was his arrogance; others disliked him simply for his family name.6 But now, added to their dislike was the bone-sure feeling that he would lose—and, in losing, forfeit the nomination of their Party to Goldwater. Many who had not dared to oppose Rockefeller before now found, in his remarriage, a convenient pretext for open opposition.
Yet who else was there? It was too late to create another Willkie out of nowhere, and the choices were few.
The first name to come to mind was that of Richard M. Nixon. But Nixon’s name brought a wrinkling of the nose in Manhattan. He was acceptable, yes. But his campaign of 1960 had left so many internal scars in the Party that it would be difficult to make him even a compromise choice—Rockefeller froze at mention of Nixon’s name, and Goldwater had contempt for him. Besides, Nixon had run for Governor of California in 1962 and lost, thus adding to his odor of a loser. He had been defeated by Governor Edmund G. Brown, a man who in New York has the reputation of an affable but inconsequential man. Brown’s really large achievements in California, his thoroughly grand triumphs in irrigation, education and highways, are unknown beyond the Rockies; so Nixon’s defeat by Brown’s genuine but unrecognized force marked Nixon as a man who could not carry his own state against a nobody. Moreover, Nixon, with typical bad luck, had announced his permanent departure from California only two days before Rockefeller’s remarriage, and thus was a man without a home base. Moreover, in New York Nixon was again unstaffed. A man of modest means, he had come to New York to imitate another Republican loser, Thomas Dewey, a shrewd, controlled operator who had made his mark—and a fortune—as one of New York’s highest-priced lawyers in the years since he had left politics. Now Nixon was cool; he was working as a lawyer; he showed no great desire to bestir himself; his own sense of politics told him that if he were to have the nomination in 1964 it could be only after Rockefeller and Goldwater had knocked each other out, when the Party might again turn to him as the healer. He wanted to affront no one at this early stage.
There was George W. Romney, Governor of Michigan. Romney had as yet shown no large appetite for the Presidency, and his first-year record as Governor of the unruly Michigan legislature had ensnared him, so it seemed, in provincial futilities. A feeble attempt had been made to launch Romney as a national figure earlier in the spring of 1963 by several old Nixon men (chiefly Len Hall and Cliff Folger), but it had failed to catch fire.
Then there was Henry Cabot Lodge. Henry Cabot Lodge has, to be sure, all the devotion to public service and the great name to make him a certified member of the Establishment—but with a New England twist. Lodge had the old New England disdain for the New York money men, plus a manner of aristocratic haughtiness that chilled even the oldest New Yorkers. There was no doubt that money could be raised for Lodge in downtown New York (as it was to be later), but not much enthusiasm. He was like medicine—good for you, but hard to take.
The chief thrust for Lodge in early December, 1963, was that he might just possibly have Dwight D. Eisenhower’s support—and Dwight D. Eisenhower was still the key. Although wistfully continuing to hope that the mantle could settle on his own brother Milton, the General had, in November, urged Lodge to come home and run for the Presidency. He had spoken to Lodge on the telephone during Lodge’s visit to Washington. The General’s conscience required that he be sure Lodge, as Ambassador to Vietnam, had had nothing to do with the assassination of the Diem brothers in the November coup (“the King and his brother,” as Eisenhower referred to them); and when Lodge assured him that he indeed had not, but instead had actually offered the asylum of the American Embassy in Saigon to the two murdered men, Eisenhower was pleased. He then urged Lodge to return permanently from Vietnam (Eisenhower very much disliked the service in the Kennedy administration of Lodge and Dillon, two of the most eminent members of his own administration) to stand up and make speeches as a candidate and show where he stood on the issues of the day. He should run as the “commonsense” candidate; “common sense” was a term Eisenhower was using more and more frequently, for he had come to dislike such words as “moderate,” “progressive,” and “middle of the road,” used as labels by his kind of Republicans to distinguish themselves from the primitives.
Such conversations with Eisenhower as they leaked to the press were to baffle and confuse Republicans for months, for when they surfaced, as this conversation did in a front-page story in The New York Times, it would seem always that Eisenhower had finally chosen a candidate. But when checked, Eisenhower would always go back to his original line: he was for a wide-open discussion of issues by all possible candidates, so, in urging as many as he could to run, he was only pursuing his high-minded civic duty. Yet to those who got the word direct from the General, the distinction between being “urged” to run and the implicit promise of support if one did run was always obscure—and even more so to the press.
Thus, there was Lodge, placed square on the front pages by Eisenhower—but from Lodge himself no word. There was much to be said for Lodge, who could be seen in a role similar to Eisenhower’s own in 1952. In 1952 Eisenhower had been built as the Republican nominee while he captained the reorganization of Western defense from SHAPE headquarters in Paris; Eisenhower had returned from this great service, crowned with success, only ten weeks before the Republican convention, and thus been spared the exertion of the primaries and the inquisition of a questioning press. Lodge, etched against the sky by the distant war in Vietnam, similarly had been cast in a heroic role. If Lodge could pull the Vietnam situation together, he would be a major possibility—but it was too early to tell, too early to opt for a man whom Kennedy had so resoundingly trounced in Massachusetts eleven years before and who now served Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy’s appointee.
Which left William Warren Scranton, Governor of Pennsylvania.
Of the development of Scranton’s character and conscience during the next year, there will be much to say later in this book. But now, in December, as he first appeared on the national stage, he was without doubt the most attractive new face on the Republican scene. Lean, handsome, young, polished, endowed with a magnificent wife and four handsome children, he had the quality of a Kennedy—whose friend, indeed, he had been and whose autographed picture (as then-Senator Kennedy) hung in Scranton’s home office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Moreover, in his first year as Governor of Pennsylvania, Scranton had written a startlingly effective record. In the house of mastodons which shelters the Republican legislators of Pennsylvania, the Republican governors for a full century had been gentlemen noted for their florid impotence. Pennsylvania heavy industry ran the state; its lobbyists, when the Republicans controlled the State House, managed its legislation as Boss Croker used to manage Tammany Hall. But Scranton had defeated Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor, Richardson Dilworth (uncle of the Rockefeller financial Dilworth of the same name), in a brawling, venomous campaign for the governorship in 1962—and then gone on to amaze all by actually mastering the beasts of his Republican legislature in his own State House. He had reformed the Pennsylvania Civil Service, one of the most spoils-ridden in the nation; doubled education appropriations; passed an unpopular but necessary increase in the sales tax; and begun on a major program of industrial development for the state overdue since the end of the war.
Much more conservative than Rockefeller, Scranton was different from Goldwater too. He had served a year in the State Department as special assistant to John Foster Dulles, and had a finesse in his conversation about foreign affairs that came not only from reading but from an understanding of reality. No breath of scandal touched him. His war record was outstanding. His young men at the State House more than made up in enthusiasm and vigor what they lacked in experience. He was an absolute gentleman, but he had proven himself a major, gut-fighting campaigner.
And he had the finest sponsorship. It was not that Scranton, as a modest millionaire, was a member of the Establishment; he belongs to the squirearchy of American life (like the Knowlands of California) rather than to the Establishment. But his Establishment connections were superb. Not only was his brother-in-law James Linen president of the Time Incorporated publications, but Henry Luce was bound by affection to the Scranton family, which had supported his father’s missionary enterprises in China. Scranton’s connections with the movers and shakers had been cemented by the proper prep school (Hotchkiss) and the proper college (Yale), and strengthened further by his successful business career in eastern Pennsylvania. He was the favorite of most of the older men who had ever met him, and while his own young staff had begun, without his consent, the most positive and dramatic efforts to call national attention to him, his older friends were proceeding at a much higher level. Chief among these was Tom McCabe, Sr., chairman of the board of Scott Paper Company, a full member of the Philadelphia branch of the Eastern Establishment. McCabe observed once that he knew only two young men who he thought would make great Presidents—Bob McNamara, now Secretary of Defense, and Bill Scranton. Since McNamara was ruled out by his service to Lyndon Johnson, McCabe was now equally pleased to put his energies behind Scranton.
McCabe’s luncheons for Scranton were as good a sampling of the names of men who move things in the East as any other, and a typical guest list at a Scranton luncheon in McCabe’s office at Scott Paper Company, on November 8th, arranged for display of the young Governor by his elderly patron, ran thus: From New York, William S. Paley, boss of the Columbia Broadcasting System; the New York Herald Tribune’s Walter Thayer; Herbert Brownell, Dewey’s political chief of staff. From Ohio, George Humphrey, former Secretary of the Treasury under Eisenhower. From New Jersey, William Beverly Murphy, president of Campbell’s Soup, plus Bernard Shanley, the state’s Republican finance chairman. From Pennsylvania, Thomas Gates, Eisenhower’s last Secretary of Defense and president of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company; plus Walter Annenberg, owner-publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer. From Delaware, a top Du Pont official, plus Harry Haskell, Delaware’s Republican National Committeeman. Meade Alcorn of Connecticut, former Republican National Chairman under Eisenhower, was scheduled to come but was weathered-in at a Chicago airport.
Much more important, however, than such quiet exposure as McCabe could make available to the Pennsylvania Governor, or the press exposure that the media began to focus on him soon after the assassination, was the sponsorship of none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower.
For, no more than one week after Eisenhower had catapulted Henry Cabot Lodge into the race with the New York Times story of December 8th, Eisenhower did the same thing for Scranton. En route to his winter hibernation at Palm Springs, California, on December 14th Eisenhower halted his special train at the railway yard in Harrisburg for a five-hour dinner with the young Pennsylvania Governor and his wife. To Scranton also the ex-President preached the gospel—get out there and fight, stand up and run, discuss the issues and be a candidate. With this very friendly session (for Mamie Eisenhower and Mary Scranton are extremely fond of each other in the warm relationship that women of different ages can develop), Scranton, too, was faced with the same conundrum as Lodge: Was the old hero simply urging him to run as an exercise in civics or was the old hero implying support? Alas for Scranton, the question was never to be answered, even at the last minute.
Thus, as January began, there was Scranton’s name as the subterranean favorite of the entire Eastern Establishment. Yet no one could get a forthright statement from Scranton himself, for Scranton, in his way, was as sibylline as Dwight D. Eisenhower. He would do anything at all for the United States and, in the war, had been willing to die for it. But unless he saw it clearly as his duty, a call to conscience that could not be denied, he would not seek the nomination. A parade of dignitaries and eminent journalists made their way over the miserable rail-and-air connections to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to learn what was on Scranton’s mind. And they came away confused; the Governor’s staff was running him for President as hard as it knew how, yet the Governor insisted he was not running for President. Sessions with Scranton, a man of captivating charm, would wind up at his fireplace with Scranton’s teasing question, “All right—can you tell me one good reason why I should want to be President of the United States?” And there was no answer.
Such a man is difficult for politicians to work with, and thus the weeks idled by into midwinter as observers turned their attention to the man who, on January 3rd, 1964, from his hillside home on the bare crags of Phoenix, Arizona, had announced that he, too, was a candidate for nomination and election as 36th President of the United States. And Barry Goldwater was front and center stage.
Barry Goldwater’s announcement came as a surprise to no one.
But who was Barry Goldwater? And what was the Goldwater movement?
For three and a half years, from the tock of the gavel that closed the Republican convention of 1960, politicians and journalists had recognized the “Goldwater movement” as a new force in American politics.
The term “Goldwater movement” was an annoying one.
It would have been more convenient to call it a Goldwater campaign or a Goldwater draft. But “movement” was the proper word. The wordless resentments, angers, frustrations, fears and hopes that were shaping this force were something new and had welled up long before Goldwater himself took his Presidential chances seriously. Always, to the very end of the campaign, two almost independent elements were involved: the movement—and the candidate himself. We must look at the candidate as a man more closely later. But the movement was something deep, a change or a reflection of change in American life that qualified as more than politics—it was history.
One could almost fix the moment of its birth at the Chicago convention of 1960. The Rockefeller-Nixon compact of Fifth Avenue 7 had enraged the primitives of the Party who had written what, for them, was an advanced platform. It had been changed only marginally by the night rendezvous of July 22nd-23rd of Nixon and Rockefeller in Manhattan, when a new draft was imposed on them. But those who were present at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago in 1960 remember the near violence of the demonstrations against the Rockefeller-Nixon compact—the placards, the shrieks, the emotions, surpassing any of the bitterness the old Taft conservatives had brought to their wars with the Easterners. Nor can anyone forget the smoldering anger of Barry Goldwater, taking the platform in the Hilton Hotel press conference to denounce this Betrayal in Babylon. From Saturday of the compact to Wednesday of the balloting, a procession of men pressed a mission on Goldwater—he must lead a revolt. They promised him 300 votes on the convention floor if he would voice the principles they shared. To them Goldwater said simply, “Get me three hundred names of delegates on paper. Show me.” From Saturday to Wednesday they counted; and they counted only 37 names who would openly vote against Nixon on roll call.
Yet the name count was meaningless. For what was there at the Republican convention, however difficult to measure, was a deep fear of what the American Republic was becoming; it was to these Goldwater spoke as he rose from the floor to march to the rostrum and make the nomination unanimous: “Let’s grow up, conservatives! If we want to take this Party back, and I think we can some day, let’s get to work.”
Now, Goldwater’s favorite style in politics is exhortation; he is a moralist, not an organizer. He preaches; he does not direct. He arouses emotion—he does not harness it.
Organization was to be the work of other men, for it was almost three years before Goldwater was invited to claim leadership of the Goldwater movement.
What these men could see and could sense was the response and emotional echo to Goldwater’s words. They did not think of themselves as primitives. America is changing so rapidly that the principles Americans were taught in school twenty or thirty years ago are challenged at every turn of event or development. What is valid of the old morality and what is not? Across the country, from Maine to California, families and individuals, cherishing the old virtues and seeing them destroyed or ignored or flouted, were in ferment. Across the sky of politics there began to float new names like the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, the National Indignation Convention, Freedom-in-Action and other groups. At the extreme of the frustration were madmen and psychopaths disturbed by conspiracy, Negroes, Jews, Catholics, beardies, but toward the center it involved hundreds of thousands of intensely moral people who hated and despised not only adultery but Communism, waste, weakness, government bureaucracy and anarchy. In the cradle of the Rockies the disturbance of conscience could shape itself, unnoticed by the East, in political terms such as those accepted by the legislature of the State of Wyoming, which in 1963 called for supplanting of the Supreme Court of the United States by a “court of the union” made of fifty individual state chief justices; getting the United States out of the United Nations, and the UN out of the U.S.; abolition of all foreign aid; repeal of the Arms Control Act. (It had already, two years earlier, gone on record for repeal of the Federal income tax.) The Negro revolution of 1963 was yet to come, but all over the country there were both men of good conscience and men of evil intent who felt themselves cramped into suffocation by the appetite and need of government for control over their individual destinies. It was a mood entirely different from the mood of the Taft conservatives of the forties and fifties who had wanted, simply, to hold the country still; the new mood of the primitives insisted that the course of affairs be reversed.
This mood was there; but it could be tested only by organization. And though Goldwater himself was not yet willing to test by premature organization the emotions that his incantations aroused, others were. For these were authentic grass-roots American emotions, and by the summer of 1961 the map of politics was sprouting with self-winding political groups which attached their names to Barry Goldwater without any authority from him to do so.
Among these we must single out one group and one individual, in order to pull order out of chaos. All politics, Will Durant has said, is a struggle among the few to control the many. The few must be gathered first, of course, and then they must fight other similar groups. And from the Committees of Correspondence of the American Revolution to the organization of the Kennedy strike in 1960, countless tiny groups have tried to change the course of American history. There is, actually, no other way—Dwight D. Eisenhower to the contrary notwithstanding.
The individual that we pull, then, from the turbulence in the summer of 1961 is F. Clifton White of New York—by no means a member of any Establishment, but a genuine Appleknocker nonetheless. Of old upstate New York stock (his grandfather had been one of the first Civil War volunteers from Cortland County), his mother had actually trekked West as a child of ten in a covered wagon; later she had married and come back to live near Hamilton, New York, where White’s father was a farmer and gasoline-station operator. White himself went to Colgate University, majoring in social science; an apprentice schoolteacher when war came, he enlisted and flew twenty-five missions with the Eighth Air Force over Europe in the early days before fighter cover could reach the Ruhr and when his bomb group lost 50 percent of its effectives in its first sixty days of mission. Returning, he became a postgraduate at Colgate—and also chairman of the local chapter of the American Veterans Committee, a champion of public housing for campus veterans, who were being gouged by local landlords. Housing brings one to politics; and in his local housing battles, as a liberal, White learned all about petitions, votes, registrations.
With politics White found his avocation; and as some men become seized by the fascination of a specialty until they become technicians useful only to men of larger vision, White became a technician of politics—one of the finest in America. As a specialist in politics—in petitions, organization of meetings, nominations, convention tactics, floor seating, the buttoning of votes—White moved to lead, and hold the leadership of, the Young Republicans.
The Young Republicans are far, far more important in their party than any junior Democrats on the other side of the divide (young Democrats, apparently, strike for the big leagues immediately, without bothering with junior-league politics). For ten years, from 1950 through 1960, White, as a hobby, exercised a tighter control over the National Federation of Young Republicans and their conventions than anyone had exercised before. But as a professional White discovered his services to be of enormous value, first to the Dewey machine in New York, then to big industry. His own private consulting services to such firms as U. S. Steel, Standard of Indiana, Richardson-Merrell Inc. (Vicks VapoRub) and General Electric had made him an expert in the instruction of aspiring junior executives (both Democratic and Republican) who were assembled by great corporations to be taught how they should participate in public affairs. White could teach them all about county chairmen, convention rules, petitions—the finest minutiae of organizational politics which they, as citizens, must understand. Since executives and employers should at least understand the nerve system of the body politic in which they operate, White became something like a black-belt master lecturing on judo to an audience of nonparticipants.
It was obvious, therefore, to such a lecturer on political judo that something could well be done to cause the emotions of the primitives to flip and flop politically if only the right nerve spots were touched. And in his old friends of the Young Republicans he had, ready-made and available, a national net. This complicated strand of the Goldwater movement must be followed, however briefly, for this was the group that seized control of the Republican Party, turned it over to Barry Goldwater, then lost it to Goldwater’s inner circle.
White had been used as a technician by the Nixon people in 1960, and one remembers him then as a pale young man with China-blue eyes, given to jaunty bow ties, very courteous yet quite tense, in and out of the offices of the Nixon citizen-committee headquarters in Washington, never one of the inner circle—a supporting technician. The Nixon campaign upset White, a professional in politics, and caused him to think. “I’d always been interested in back-room politics. I’ve probably elected more presidents of more organizations in back rooms than any other man in America. But after a while you get to think about the dimensions of the room. What’s going on in the country?” said White later.
White had returned from the Nixon campaign to his own prosperous private business in New York, disturbed. By now he had made the long journey from his youthful liberalism to a dedicated conservatism, and something of the alarm that was sounded in Goldwater’s phrase “moral decay” was alive in him. In late summer of 1961 a luncheon conversation at the Hotel Commodore with some old friends of the Young Republicans organization provoked him to a new proposition: Could he exercise his technical skill at a Presidential level? Could or could not the organization of the National Republican Party be seized and held as he had seized and held the organization of the Young Republicans years before? Above all, could one reach beyond the convention with a nominee who could rouse the voters themselves in the fall of 1964, three years away?
On October 8, 1961, White gathered a preliminary and absolutely secret meeting of twenty-two of his national friends at the Avenue Motel, on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, to examine this proposal. After a long afternoon and evening of talk, they decided they would form an adhoc committee to seize the Republican Party for the conservative cause—and White would report to Goldwater. After some difficulty White saw Goldwater in November and found the Senator indifferent—but amused. Unwilling to lend his name officially to their cause, Goldwater was nonetheless unwilling to repudiate this group, which must have seemed like just another group urging the Presidency on him. A second meeting at the same motel on December 10th (twenty-seven in attendance, including the Governor of Montana) brought the decision to divide the country into nine regions for the mobilization of conservatives; to establish an office that White would run; to raise $60,000 for financing the effort. By the spring of 1962 White was installed in the Chanin Building of New York with modest funds, operating out of Suite 3505 and able to travel back and forth across the country contacting each of the nine regions in which regional volunteer directors were already preparing to gather Goldwater delegates for the Convention of 1964.
By April of 1962 White could reassemble his group at a hunting lodge in Minnesota (“I wanted them to spend two days together and not only talk, but drink whiskey together, and get to know each other, and be friends and trust each other”). Not until the next meeting of the cabal—now grown to fifty-five—on December 2nd, 1962, at the Essex Inn Motel in Chicago, did the press finally hear what was under way and announce the formation of a “sinister” Draft Goldwater movement (at this meeting, actually, the session opened with a prayer for God’s blessing on its work). White’s next meeting with Goldwater was in January. Goldwater, annoyed by the publicity, chilled White, but did not repudiate him outright.
The early months of 1963 were difficult months in which to generalize on politics; Kennedy had lost three Congressmen, but gained four Senators; there was no national mandate of any kind, conservative or liberal; Rockefeller was still the leader in the polls for the Republican nomination. Yet, since nothing stands still, it became more and more obvious that the South was the region of the country in most violent disturbance; and the most impressive and remarkable event of the elections of 1962 was the phenomenal showing that the Republicans had made in the State of Alabama, coming within 6,800 votes of capturing a Senate seat. There was a Southern strategy to be shaped—if the Republican Party did indeed want to court the South.
On February 17th, 1963—again in Chicago, at the O’Hare Inn—the executive committee of the group met once more and decided to go open and national: they would form the National Draft Goldwater Committee. Peter O’Donnell, Texas State Republican Chairman, thirty-six years old, would be chairman; White would be national director; and they would “draft the son of a bitch” whether he wanted to run or not. On July 4th the National Draft Goldwater Committee called a rally for its candidate in the National Guard Armory in Washington, knowing he would not grace it with his presence. By now the White-O’Donnell organization had had almost two years for mobilization. From New York no less than forty-three busloads of Goldwater zealots arrived; from Connecticut, thirteen more; from as far away as Chicago, Indiana and Texas, some 7,000 people chose to give up their holidays to urge that Barry Goldwater be President. Only three gatherings at the armory, it is said, surpassed this initial Draft Goldwater showing: the inaugurals of Kennedy and Eisenhower, and the preachings of Billy Graham.
Goldwater could not be indifferent to this; and, indeed, he was not. Not only was there quite evidently a powerful army of faithful, marshaled and waiting for him to seize the baton, but events were changing the climate of politics too. The Negro revolution that had begun in Birmingham in the spring of 1963 was now spreading like crownfire all across the South; and the North, too, was beginning to see the demonstrations that a year later were to spill over and bloody the big cities. Moreover, Nelson Rockefeller’s remarriage in May had erased his political lead—or so said, at least, all the public-opinion polls. Whether he wanted to be or not, Goldwater was by late summer and early fall of 1963 the foremost candidate for the Republican nomination. Time, Newsweek, Life all had given him cover displays; the television cameras attended his comings and goings, and, starting in September, his face began to appear with increasing frequency on the evening television shows.
He had not planned it this way. But there it was. Earlier in 1963, when asked whether he was really running for President or not, he had replied, “I’m doing all right just pooping around.” It is difficult for anyone, even Goldwater, to say when he decided to run. Essentially, Goldwater thought of himself, and still does, not as a man prepared to or even desiring to run and administer the government of the United States, but as leader of a cause. This cause is precious to him; his loyalty to it is sincere and unblemished. It is the cause of conservative revival and puritan virtues in the United States of America.
Goldwater had begun to talk reflectively with his Arizona cronies about the Presidency as early as 1961—not so much as a strike for power as a strike for control of the Republican Party, and for its purification. He had then set a figure which was to be the benchmark of his inner planning—if he could come within 5 percent of Kennedy in a national contest, then he would have scored a major victory for the conservative cause. A loss by more than 5 percent, he felt, would hurt the conservative cause.
Through 1962 Goldwater toured the country. As Chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee—his third round at the job—his senior-level contacts were nationwide, and he could sense the same support for him in the upper hierarchy of the Party in the West and Midwest that Clifton White and Company were discovering at the grass roots.
But the Presidency, as a job, still seemed as remote to him as the day he had discussed it with John F. Kennedy in 1961. Goldwater had gone to visit President Kennedy at the White House on the dismal day of the Bay of Pigs. As Goldwater tells the story, the President’s secretary urged him to enter the great Oval Office and wait for the President there. “So I went in and sat on his rocker,” recalls Goldwater. “I forget whether I did a test, because we both used the same doctor and she was trying to get me to get one, but I didn’t want one. And he came in smoking that little cigar and he looked at me and he said, ‘Do you want this job?’ I said, ‘No, not in my right mind.’ So he said, ‘I thought I had a good thing going up to this point.’”
It was in the July—August period of 1963, apparently, that decision began to firm in his mind—the Civil Rights Bill was now before Congress; the Negro unrest was growing; Rockefeller seemed out of the race. But Goldwater, as a candidate, proceeded cautiously. He had a sure seat in the Senate coming up for re-election again in 1964. Should he risk that in a long shot at the Presidency?
In August he began to explore the proposition seriously. The Draft Goldwater volunteers were now a national force, operating under White from a fully functioning headquarters at 1025 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. They could no longer be ignored as just another group—they were the combat troops of the Goldwater movement. But they were not Goldwater’s troops. There had always been a distance that Goldwater put between himself and White’s personality. Goldwater saw himself as a man of purpose and philosophy. He saw White as a technician—loyal but, in Goldwater’s eyes, nonetheless limited. To take over the organization without offending White would be difficult. But the organization must be used. To coordinate with the volunteers, while himself remaining independent, Goldwater brought to Washington a polished, gray-haired lawyer from Phoenix—Denison Kitchel, an Ivy Leaguer born and bred who had moved West after graduation from Harvard Law and was now one of Goldwater’s closest confidants.
Kitchel arrived in Washington in late August with the title of campaign manager—but campaign manager ostensibly for the Senatorial, not the Presidential, race of 1964.
Actually, Kitchel’s duties were no secret to anyone: he was to explore further the Presidential possibilities and help guess whether they could reach the magic 5-percent range against John F. Kennedy.
There was the volunteer organization to be studied and restudied. White had already purged and repurged the volunteer groups of kooks and fanatics; Kitchel now restudied and screened the organization again for extremism; the problem Goldwater might have with his wildeyed supporters was already apparent. But the prospects looked bright: already the regional volunteers had formal campaign organizations in no less than thirty-two states, and several states had been locked up completely. (In South Carolina the Goldwater volunteers had so buttoned down that state that the official State Republican Committee passed an official resolution that it was now reconstituted organically and simultaneously as the state’s Draft Goldwater Committee.)
There was also the record to be re-examined. And Kitchel undertook, with the assistance of Edward McCabe (later to be named Research Director for Goldwater), the sorting out of the tangle of statements, speeches, judgments, columns and comments that Goldwater had made with such eloquence, intemperance and contradiction over the previous ten years. With a morbid pre-taste of the fun both Rockefeller and the Democrats were later to have extracting nuggets of flamboyant and inflammatory phrases from this lode, Kitchel and McCabe began to catalogue them.
By November of 1963 there was no doubt in the mind of either Kitchel or Goldwater that Goldwater was going to run. For Goldwater, John F. Kennedy was history’s perfect opponent—they would debate the issues up and down the country, they would draw the line between the conservative and liberal philosophies. Kennedy would probably win; but Goldwater felt certain of carrying both South and West and, thus, the magic 45-percent mark would be reached or passed.
And then came the assassination. The assassination shocked Goldwater as it shocked every American by its brutality and senselessness. More than that—Goldwater had liked John F. Kennedy, a liking that was reciprocated. When they were fellow Senators, Goldwater had frequently chided the younger man on his voting, saying, “Jack, your father would have spanked you [for that vote],” when they disagreed, which was frequently. Now, after the assassination, he was faced with running against another man, a Southerner, of an entirely different sort. Moreover, his heart was sick within him. Poison-pen letters and hate letters poured across his desk in hundreds as if he, personally, were responsible for the killing of the man he was so fond of. (“Are you happy now?” asked one letter.) And so, for a period of about ten days, Goldwater gave up politics. To his wife he said, “The heck with the Presidential thing,” and somberly drew into himself.
Yet a Presidential campaign cannot be dismantled that easily; beyond those of the individual candidate, the ambitions, the energies, the plans of too many other people are engaged. And thus, on December 5th, there gathered in Goldwater’s suite at The Westchester apartments in Washington a few senior allies of his campaign. There Kitchel and Goldwater faced Senator Norris Cotton of New Hampshire and ex-Senator William Knowland of California in the presence of a few others. Both Cotton and Knowland needed a decision. If Cotton was to direct the New Hampshire primary for Goldwater in the winter, he had to know now; and Knowland was well along in organizing the huge apparatus needed for the California primary fight. Goldwater listened to their pleas (including an impassioned peroration by Norris Cotton that no matter what happened Goldwater would never die politically, for the American people were ready for his principles)—and asked more time to think it over. He would get back to them in a week or ten days. A second meeting followed a few days later in Goldwater’s Senate chambers—Goldwater and Kitchel, Cotton and Senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska, Dean Burch of Arizona, Clif White of the volunteers, Raymond Moley, an amateur of Presidential politics since his service to Franklin Roosevelt, were all there. Together, once more they reviewed the changed topography of post-assassination politics. Goldwater’s mind was slowly changing. This time they were discussing dates and timing—if he were to go, when should he go? Moley urged that Goldwater make the race—but counseled that he stay out of the primaries. Others were of contrary view. Goldwater was perplexed still. It was not to be the campaign he had hoped for against Kennedy; it was to be a struggle with Johnson, and Goldwater disliked Johnson (“the biggest faker in the United States” was the way he would describe the President of the United States at the San Francisco Convention); but, on the other hand, there was his duty to the conservative cause; and the Goldwater volunteers, an entirely new group in politics, might drift away in four years.
Goldwater is unsure himself exactly when he made the decision or how. He was in his den, he recalls, probably sitting at his desk when, according to his own account, he told himself, “You’ve got to do it.” He told his wife first. “Honey,” he recalls saying, “what do you think about my running for the Presidency?” And she replied, “Well, if that’s what you want to do, you go ahead and do it. I don’t particularly want you to, but I’m not going to stand in your way.”
When, precisely, this happened is as obscure as are all those obscure moments when a man finds himself on the other side of a decision he has been approaching, step by step, for weeks. By mid-December, Kitchel could call Cotton and tell him secretly that he would have a candidate to run in New Hampshire. By Christmas, Goldwater was home in Phoenix and preparing to announce. He had made, earlier, a serious effort to secure the services of Len Hall, one of the standard East Coast professional campaign managers, to direct his campaign; Hall had turned him down, for his loyalty belonged to Richard M. Nixon and until Nixon was out of it, Hall wanted to make no other commitments. On the evening of New Year’s Day Goldwater called a young and dynamic Arizona friend of his, Richard Kleindienst, and gave him an overnight decision to make: Would Kleindienst come to Washington and manage the national campaign that Goldwater was going to announce on January 3rd? Kleindienst had just driven home to Phoenix from the Rose Bowl game; he slept on the decision and, the next morning, enlisted. Forty-eight hours of advance notice was given to press and television nets that the Arizona Senator was going to make an announcement from the terrace of his home on the slope of Camelback Mountain.
On the morning of Friday, January 3rd, 1964, dressed in blue jeans and bedroom slippers, he puttered with his ham radio set. Then he dressed and walked outside and welcomed the nation to Be-Nun-I-Kin, which in Navajo means “House on the Hill,” then said that he was openly seeking the Republican Presidential nomination “because of the principles in which I believe and because I’m convinced that millions of Americans share my beliefs in those principles.”
What those principles were he did not state at the moment. How many shared them remained to be determined. How he planned to translate them to the voters in the fall of 1964 was obscure; and how his opponents, both Republican and Democratic, would define them in the heat of battle was unknown. But with this the contest was now formally joined.