THE campaign of 1964 was that rare thing in American political history, a campaign based on issues.
War and peace; the nature and role of government; the morality and mercy of society; the quality of life—all were discussed in a campaign that will leave its mark behind in American life for a generation. A myriad cross-currents of conscience, judgment and tradition were engaged in the voter choice of 1964—but they were cross-currents resolved in individual decisions in solitary voting booths, and the massive totals of the late fall tally gave little indication of how much and how deeply Americans had been stirred to think.
In retrospect, the clear and crushing margin of November’s decision was as distorted a reflection of the confusion in American thinking as the thin and ephemeral decision of 1960 was a distortion of American response to John F. Kennedy’s clear call.
Up and down the nation, at prop stop and whistle stop, by dawn and dusk and at high noon, Barry Goldwater first challenged and then, as November approached, grieved: “What kind of country do we want to have?”—and to this challenge Lyndon Johnson replied in as masterful a campaign as the Democrats have ever conducted. A hundred million Americans were asked to hear the two leaders give their vision of America, as if they were citizens of a Greek polis two thousand years before; and rarely, when questions were asked about the nature of fate and country, have citizens heard their leaders give answers so violently and unequivocally opposed.
The puzzling complexity of the campaign-about-to-be was apparent from the moment at the Democratic National Convention when the boardwalk first flared with the huge illuminated sign that showed Barry Goldwater, golden profile against dark blue background. IN YOUR HEART, read the giant sign, YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT. This was the challenger. But what lay in his heart? What did he want? What did he seek?
No Presidential candidate since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 had so completely separated himself from the then-reigning dogmas of American life and society as did Barry Goldwater in 1964.
For thirty years Republicans and Democrats had fought each other in the arena of the center, where their differences, though real, were small, narrow or administrative—differences of pace, posture and management in a direction that both parties alike pursued. Goldwater, however, proposed to give the nation a choice, not an echo—and not just one choice but a whole series of choices, a whole system of ideas which clashed with the governing ideas that had ruled America for a generation: a choice on nuclear weapons, a choice on defense posture, a choice on the treatment of Negroes, a choice on dealing with Communism, a choice on the nature of central government. There were many choices, but the rub was that no voter could pick at will among those choices. A voter must buy the entire Goldwater package of ideas—or reject them entirely. He could choose America as it was moving, in the direction it was moving, in full tide of power and prosperity—or he must choose to reverse the direction entirely. In Goldwater, one had to take all or nothing.
Over and over again, the Republican candidate and his staff members complained, with always increasing bitterness, that they had hoped to make this a historic campaign of issues, to make of it the great dialogue between the two philosophies, the conservative and the liberal—but that Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats refused to meet them issue by issue on the high ground of public debate. They were right in their exasperation; but so was the Democrats’ response. With firm decision, the Democrats insisted that the nation must choose the entire Goldwater package, the entire man, the entire attitude and bundle of emotions of the Republican candidate. No Democrat chose to debate issues at retail—only in the large. If Goldwater challenged, “What kind of country do you want to have?” the Democrats responded: “The kind of country we’ve made of it over this past generation.”
The response of the people to the personalities of the two candidates must be examined later, for this is a book of politics, and politics is a study in leadership and response.
Yet in 1964 the issues acted so powerfully on voters’ emotions that one must first examine all the subtleties involved to see how the final answer came to be as it was.
What exactly were the issues? What precisely were the choices offered in 1964? How valid were they? How did the craftsmen of politics convert these ideas technically and politically into the emotions which move American voters to vote? How ephemeral or how permanent will they prove in the future to be?
There is no doubt in the mind of any candidate, any political observer or any man who trooped the long marches from coast to coast with both candidates that one primordial issue overshadowed all others: the problem of War and Peace, pegged on America’s use of its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
How, when, by whose authority, where should such weapons be used?
The issue entered the campaign almost obliquely, obscure from the very moment of its posing. On October 24th, 1963, a year before the election, Barry Goldwater journeyed to Hartford, Connecticut, for a political caucus with Connecticut Republican leaders; at the Hartford Club he agreed to a routine press conference, and was questioned on his reaction to a recent statement of Dwight D. Eisenhower that America’s six NATO divisions in Europe could be cut to one. Answering the question by Chalmers Roberts, chief of the national bureau of the Washington Post, Goldwater observed that the six divisions could “probably” be cut by “at least one third” if NATO “commanders” in Europe had the power to use tactical nuclear weapons on their own initiative in an emergency. Sensing danger, Goldwater’s press adviser, the sage and genial Tony Smith, abruptly ended the conference. But the damage had been done, and the controversy arising from it, bungled to an unbelievable degree by Goldwater later, was to be central throughout the whole of the next year’s campaign.
What exactly had Goldwater said? And what exactly did Goldwater mean?
In Roberts’ notes on the conference the word is still scrawled: “commanders” (in the plural)1 The next morning it was a front-page story in the Washington Post—interesting but not yet critical. The Kennedy assassination erased politics for a month. In January, however, when politics resumed, they resumed in New Hampshire—and by now the Rockefeller research staff had noted the story, clipped it, and decided to make the issue of the “bomb” central to its primary campaign in that state. Among all the blunders of the New Hampshire campaign (see Chapter Four), none, certainly, was more important than Goldwater’s failure to scotch the issue then, in that forum, at that time. For the more Goldwater refused to clarify what he meant by “commanders,” the greater concern could be roused in the public mind by his rivals. Did Goldwater mean that any tactical unit commander could use the weapons of holocaust? Under what circumstances? To destroy a bridge? Or an enemy concentration? Or a city? And if so—who then held the trigger on the implacable escalation of destruction?
If one is to cut through the semantics of the debate, one must not only try to define the facts about nuclear war as known at the Pentagon, but also stress how difficult these facts are to come by.
Briefly, in the summer of 1964 the United States enjoyed (if that is the proper word) a spectacular (but probably superfluous) margin of superiority over the Soviet Union in strategic nuclear missiles: 18 Polaris submarines with 288 Polaris missiles were already operational, with 23 more such submarines and 368 more missiles programed. On land, American intercontinental ballistic missiles outnumbered Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (but not intermediate-range missiles) by 4 to 1; and the bomber force of America, 1,100 planes (500 of them on fifteen-minute alert), outnumbered Soviet bombers (estimated at 250) by more than 4 to 1. These strategic forces, as all men here and abroad know, are clearly under Presidential control at all times. Goldwater never questioned the rightness of this control.
The facts about American tactical nuclear weapons are much more difficult to ascertain. So is Goldwater’s position. The Army has at least seven types of nuclear tactical weapons plus an anti-aircraft nuclear missile in the works; the Navy has several nuclear weapons, chiefly concentrated on anti-submarine destruction; the Air Force has a panel of low-yield weapons in addition to the weird power of the strategic weapons outlined above.2
It was the Army’s ground weapons that engaged Goldwater’s earnest study. But his reflections could not in any way be translated into the idiom of public campaign discourse. How and where these weapons shall be used on the battlefield is a matter of the instrumentation and decision of a field commander; but when he shall use them is necessarily one of the most secret areas of American command and decision.
The history of these weapons is worth recalling. They were developed and designed in the early postwar period for use in Europe—at a time when both France and Germany were exhausted and the British and Americans, between them, mustered only three divisions for the defense of the Thuringian ridges. It was the fertile mind of Robert Oppenheimer that fostered the development of the tactical nuclear weapons as a response to the threat of Russian manpower—at that moment overwhelming. Only American blast power could protect from Russian manpower the ravaged and slowly healing Atlantic cradle.
In the fifteen years since then, all has changed. Today the Eastern European base of the Russians is far less secure than our Western European base. Europe has recovered. French and German manpower is now, or shortly will be, fully capable of engaging Russian manpower presently on the line; America has multiplied her divisions in Europe to 6, and highly mobile back-up has jumped in America by 4 times (8 divisions as against 2). The tactical nuclear weapons of 1949 and 1950, so essential at that time, can be considered now either a military luxury, an embarrassment—or a peril. Response with such tactical nuclear weapons in Europe must inevitably invite counter-response from the Russians—and how far is such a response to be taken? Does it go from a strategic bridge to a village concealing a regimental combat team that must be obliterated? To a rail junction at an important town? To a city like Breslau, turntable of the Russian southeastern command, which could be wiped out far in the enemy rear by a Pershing rocket with its 400-mile range? And if we take out Breslau and the Russians take out Düsseldorf—what next? London for Leningrad? Washington for Moscow? Just what is tactical use of a weapon—and at what range and kilo-tonnage does it escalate to that terrible moment when the underground silos in Siberia and the Great Plains silently roll back their concrete lids and loose havoc on a world to be incinerated?
Investigation at the Pentagon carries one only so far—and then, this side of the wall of secrecy, there is only surmise and speculation. Doctrine, public statement, reality and known fact all lead one to believe that the President of the United States now, alone, has the power to release any nuclear weapon, large or small. Yet emergency procedures do exist—“permissive action links”—in which Presidential permission has already been granted, in advance for emergency use of such weapons. The use of anti-aircraft nuclear missiles (or anti-missile nuclear devices if such exist) is already permitted to the commander in chief of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) if he cannot instantaneously reach the President and enemy missiles are already descending on American cities. It is believed that the commander of the Sixth Fleet in Asian waters has certain emergency permissions; and it is almost certain that the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, U.S. General Lyman Lemnitzer, has similar emergency provisions. And if, by stealth or trickery, an atomic bomb is smuggled into Washington and beheads the entire American government—such a contingency is also foreseen.
Necessarily, such procedures are secret; and thus, necessarily, the issue, once raised, could only place Goldwater at a disadvantage. To this disadvantage Goldwater did his best to add. A devoted patriot, a dedicated soldier and airman, Goldwater as an Air Force Reserve Major General has access to high-security information; in his military opinion, more “leeway” must be given tactical commanders in the field to respond to an enemy with nuclear weapons in an emergency—blast is better than blood. But just how much leeway should be given, Goldwater in debate would never make precise. Military security imprisoned him in silence as to specifics, yet his pride insisted that he must make clear the difference between himself, a technical military expert, and the warmongering Barry Goldwater described by Democratic propaganda.
Thus trapped, he would have been wiser to leave the matter alone. Yet constantly, over the counsel of all his advisers, he continued, as we shall see, to belabor the matter, digging the trap deeper and deeper with each statement. Duty and patriotism urged him to debate and clarify in public a matter which he, as a soldier, felt had to be clarified, yet must have known, as a soldier, was necessarily secret. But if he merely wanted public acknowledgment of existing permissive procedures at the Pentagon—then, in effect, he was supporting the administration’s practice and why had he brought the matter up? And if he wanted greater latitude of choice for subordinate commanders—just how far did he want to go?
Any such debate was bound to put Goldwater on the defensive—for he was, in effect, challenging not just a political antagonist but the whole United States government and its energetic spokesmen. The more he attempted to explain the matter, the worse his predicament became. It did little good for him to assail McNamara as he did. For example, Goldwater introduced the term “conventional nuclear weapons,” a term new in history, for only two nuclear weapons (at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) have ever been detonated in combat conditions. The Pentagon responded by pointing out that the average blast of tactical nuclear weapons in the field was several times the frightening but primitive Hiroshima twenty-kiloton blast. Angrily, Goldwater pointed out that there were little infantry-size weapons that went down to a fraction-of-a-kiloton blast. But even a fractional-kiloton blast, the Pentagon pointed out, was devastating; to call any nuclear detonation a “conventional” weapon of killing, they insisted, was absurd. Squirm as he might, Goldwater found himself described as a man fascinated by killing.
Another candidate might have been able to sterilize even such an exchange. But in Goldwater’s case every exchange rang with an echo of his own past—a past he could not shake. Three political books, hundreds of columns, a thousand speeches on patriotism and Communism had written the profile of a man whose views had not altered since, in his fundamental work, The Conscience of a Conservative, he wrote: “A craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness…. The Communists’ aim is to conquer the world…. Unless you contemplate treason—your objective, like his, will be victory. Not ‘peace,’ but victory.” At San Francisco, in accepting the nomination, he had insisted that Communism must surrender; his book Why Not Victory? had as its chief thesis the thought that only force will cause Communism to recoil. His press conferences and his quick rejoinders on a hundred occasions provided the Democrats, as they had provided Scranton and Rockefeller, with a score of choice quotes which proved that he did indeed sincerely believe that to avoid war one must first be willing to risk war.
The issue, in short, was not at what technical level nuclear weapons would be unleashed or which general might make command decisions.
The issue, as it rose steaming into politics and as deftly molded by the Democrats, was quite valid: Just what attitude should Americans take toward the use of nuclear power? How ready should government, as a whole, be to use nuclear weapons and risk the escalation to destruction?
The issue was never, as Democrats tried to define it to their advantage, a choice between war and peace. But it was a choice, nonetheless—between peace and risk of war. Later, as we attempt to explore the political reaction to the issue, we shall try to measure the response. But none of the stabbing slogans that blossomed in the wake of Goldwater’s journeyings ever caught the essence of this prime issue as did the one suggested to the Democratic National Committee by an anonymous North Carolinian: IN YOUR HEART, YOU KNOW HE MIGHT, read the last of the variations on the enigmatic Goldwater catch phrase. And in the end, because they had been persuaded that indeed he might, millions of Americans voted against the Republican.
Goldwater’s second great issue was an equally complicated one, equally overlaid with subtleties that had to be violated with a crude yes or no vote: this was his crusade against the central government—against an all-dominating, all-entangling Federal bureaucracy of Washington. Whenever a political reporter journeys with a Republican candidate—right, left or center—he knows the one sure-fire catch line is the attack on the government in Washington. All Republicans praise the flag—and denounce the government.
A shrewd candidate has, indeed, a very sound and forward-ringing issue in denunciation of this centralization—if he handles it skillfully. The American government is, to a large extent, stone-hardened in fossil structures and fossil theories that descend to it from the days of the New Deal emergency thirty years ago, too many of which have outlived their usefulness and hinder, rather than help, the bursting new society Americans have made.
Yet how to remove these fossil relics from American life is today one of the most technically complicated problems both of government and of politics. The farm subsidies, for example, have now developed into one of the most grotesquely unreasonable patterns ever stimulated by necessity and goodwill; yet to abolish them overnight would be as irresponsible as it would be cruel, and as heartless as cutting off a man innocently addicted to drugs from the habit with cold-shock treatment. Subsidies to American shipping, to American aviation, to American peanut growers; depletion allowances for gas and oil barons; labor legislation and many labor privileges—all have become obsolete.
All Americans, generally and as a matter of principle, will denounce distant Federal paternalism—but will scream if any tampering threatens the benefits which they personally get out of it. Thus, the roar that comes when any speaker denounces the distant Federal Government is a heartfelt response. Yet when the meeting is over and the hearers wander away to examine the general proposition, they very frequently have second thoughts; for what the other fellow calls a subsidy may seem to him a constitutional guarantee against need; what cramps one man is another’s crutch; restrictions placed on one individual guarantee someone else’s freedom; one man’s open cook-out pit is someone else’s smog; and the boss’s annoyance with the paper that clutters his desk is balanced by his secretary’s need for unemployment insurance.
The problems of governing a technological civilization like America are complicated enough in themselves. But they are fused by emotion into a general resentment of all forms of increasingly impersonal control over an increasingly accelerating complexity. The emotions of normal people resist the general condition of a Digital Society—digits for the boys who are drafted, digits for Social Security and income-tax people, digits on credit cards and union cards, digits replacing familiar telephone exchanges, the electronic recordings that answer the telephone at airports and railway stations. And the center of the digital web seems to lie in Washington, where more and more computers more and more rapidly chew up digits, to spew them out again in controls and directives that seem to promise man a more and more digital future. And to all of these confused emotions a final exasperation is added by the new Supreme Court—a Supreme Court which has abandoned the old concept of the judiciary as a balance wheel against excess, and replaced it by a concept of the judiciary as a propulsive wheel that speeds Washington faster and faster—from abolition of school prayers in village schoolhouses to legislative reapportionment.
For these confused emotions, no man over the years has been a more perfect voice than Barry Goldwater. Over the years he has denounced farm subsidies outright; advocated the abolition of Rural Electrification; urged the selling of TVA; indicted the National Labor Relations Board; excoriated the Supreme Court; riddled the bureaucracy with scorn and contempt. When over and over again during the campaign he would promise, “I will give you back your freedom,” his sincerity would evoke the wildest response. His misfortune was that he could not make clear just how, and by what degrees, he would free the American people from paternalism and central government without exposing them at the same time to some personal loss.
It was here, in his confusion, that the Democrats lanced him. Out of the vast mass of his many statements and speeches, they chose to hook and hang him on one issue: Social Security. Goldwater was general in his denunciation of big government; the Democrats chose a specific for response, and they could not have chosen better.
Of all the enterprises of big government, none except the income tax touches more people than Social Security. But whereas the income tax takes, Social Security gives. In 1964 the Social Security system paid out more than $19 billion to recipients of its insurance; in February of 1964 over 19 million people received its old-age or disability benefits—and another 90 million people had “insured status” with the Social Security from which they expected, in their turn, someday to draw a benefit.
To attack Social Security is thus, in the highest political sense, dangerous. Nor did Goldwater ever attack it—just as, indeed, he never demanded war. What he did instead was to ruminate aloud about what might be done with it—just as he ruminated out loud about the use of nuclear weapons. His campaign statement officially declared that “I favor a sound Social Security system and I want to see it strengthened. I want to see every participant receive all the benefits this system provides. And I want to see these benefits paid in dollars with real purchasing power.” But it was his earlier ruminations, rather than this final official statement, that frightened people. Just as his attitude toward war exaggerated and amplified every statement he made on nuclear weapons, so his general attitude toward government exaggerated every fear of 100 million Americans who get, or hope to get, Social Security payments from Washington.
It was headlines rather than statement that shaped the issue of Social Security against Goldwater. He had again and again, in columns, speeches and articles, toyed with various ideas of modifying Social Security. But it was in Concord, New Hampshire, in the fateful primary of that state, that on January 6th, in response to a question, he said one way Social Security might be improved would be to make contributions to it voluntary.3 Now, a voluntary Social Security system is statistically and actuarially a silly idea; if young family workers at the height of their earning power can voluntarily withdraw, there will be nothing left in the till to pay the old people who have already contributed their mite and gone into retirement. The headline of the Concord Monitor the next day, GOLDWATER SETS GOALS: END SOCIAL SECURITY…, was a flat distortion of his remarks which rankles in his memory more than any other item except the “trigger-happy” charge. (Goldwater believes that Rockefeller leaders planted the headline, which is not true.) Yet, in essence, this suggestion of Goldwater’s, if taken seriously, could only lead to a crippling and ultimately a collapse of the Social Security system as Americans now know it.
Republicans (and Democrats too) might recognize that the vast and tangled jungle growth of Federal bureaucracy is a menace to American values and American options; but if, as his opponents—Rockefeller, Scranton, Johnson and Humphrey—were quick to point out, it meant forfeiting their Social Security, what then? It was all too clear, even early in the campaign, that millions of modest Republicans in retirement—in southern California, in Florida, in New Hampshire, in Pennsylvania—were unwilling to risk those monthly checks that could run from as little as $40 to a maximum of $254 for a family.
And, again, the subtleties of the great issue of central government versus local or private initiative could not be separated out. Again, on this issue as on the bomb issue, America had to answer yes or no.
These were the issues that translated best, however coarsely, into the campaign clash. But there were other issues, equally weighty, with which neither of the candidates could grapple because these issues were even more subtle, even more complicated.
The issue of civil rights was as central to American concern in the campaign of 1964 as the issue of war and peace. Yet both candidates jointly decided to exclude from the campaign dialogue as far as possible any implied appeal to racism—and, accepting this exclusion with high principle and great responsibility, Goldwater took the loss.
Goldwater had, of course, begun by painting himself into a corner on this issue too. He had, out of conviction, voted against the Civil Rights Bill in June—against the warnings, it must be noted, of his political advisers. Thus he had pinpointed himself as the outright anti-Negro candidate of the campaign, clearly on record in an area where the decisive morality of America was against him. Now the exclusion agreement cramped him in exploring the subtleties and shadings of this morality.
The subtleties and shadings of white morality on the problem of Negroes are most realistically examined by the coarse measurement of politicians at the three rungs in the ladder of fundamental Negro need: jobs, housing and education.
Generally, across the country, politicians know that their white voters will accept Negroes as equals on the job—or, at least, as entitled to equal opportunity on the job. There is little danger of serious backlash at this first level of demand. No Congressman who voted for the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 was defeated for re-election; eleven of the twenty-two Northern Congressmen who voted against it did suffer defeat.
The next level of Negro demand, housing, is more dangerous; in general, if politicians can keep the issue within their city councils or at a deputized level, they will vote for open-housing ordinances; yet they know that when the issue has been brought to the people by open popular referendum, the people invariably, without exception, have voted against open-housing laws.4
The final level, education, is the flash point of peril. Politicians everywhere flee involvement in the integration of schools as if it were instant contamination. School boards are customarily removed from voter control, and politicians are thankful for it; yet one must recognize that all across the country—from Max Rafferty in California, to Ben Willis in Chicago, to Louise Day Hicks in Boston—the most solidly entrenched school officials are those who defend the neighborhood school. New York is perhaps the outstanding example of political cowardice on integration of schools in big cities. From top through bottom—from Governor Rockefeller through State Commissioner of Education James Allen, through Mayor Robert Wagner, through the vacillating Board of Education of New York City—all are in favor of integration. Yet none dares either to defend or to denounce publicly the neighborhood school, or to let the people of New York City vote on the matter. Instead, as in a game of snap-the-whip, the hapless new superintendent of New York City schools, Calvin Gross, an administrator with no political sense or drive, was flung to the wolves and dismissed for failing to solve a social problem which political leaders themselves shrank from facing.
What is involved in the present development of the civil-rights problem in America is the nature of all the silent, unrecognized neighborhood and ethnic communities that make up American urban life. The morality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—and the absolute political need for it—cannot be questioned. But the next question—which the campaign of 1964 might have illuminated, but did not—is how men once freed for civil equality in the general forum of employment, opportunity and politics shall go about living together, or apart, in communities of their own choosing. (See Chapter Eight.)
This, along with war and peace, was a central issue of the campaign of 1964. Discussion of this issue probably obsessed American conversation in the summer and fall of 1964 more than any other. From coast to coast, and from drawing room to corner bar, from union beer hall to old ladies’ home, probably no question agitated Americans more than the question, “What Do They Want?”—“they” being the Negroes. Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater each made but one major speech touching on this issue, Johnson in New Orleans, Goldwater in Chicago—but, for the most part, they recognized it as too difficult and dangerous to debate in public.
But the race issue as such, a cardinal manipulant of emotions, was left buried—left to work its own results in the states of the South that Goldwater carried. And left to work its way silently in the big cities, where the white workingman took out his fears on local candidates who threatened to open and perhaps destroy his neighborhood—but in his national choice, forced to buy either the Johnson package or the Goldwater package, chose Johnson.
There remained, finally, an area of contention and difference that is so new it still lacks an appropriate name. One can call it, perhaps, the issue of quality. Quality was what John F. Kennedy was all about, in its classic, Greek sense—how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy. Quality was what he sought in his brief three-year administration; but it had not been an issue in his campaign of 1960, except as his personality and eloquence gave an example of it.
Yet in 1964 two men with far less of the sense of quality than John F. Kennedy succeeded, together, in making quality the fourth and last of the major issues of the campaign. Goldwater called it the “morality issue” Johnson called it “the Great Society.” During the campaign neither could define what he meant—but they were bringing into engagement what in another decade, if peace persists, may well be the central issue of American life: What is the end of man? What is his purpose on earth? How shall he conduct himself with grace and mercy and dignity? No other society in history has ever been rich enough to face such a problem or to discuss it in the political forum; quality has been something left to the church and the philosophers; all other societies have been too deeply involved with making, getting, existing, subsisting and defending themselves. Americans in the 1960s are faced for the first time with the problems of abundance—the purpose and style of life in a society whose great majority has been relieved from real want and thus freed to express itself.
There was, of course, want enough in America in 1964—and to this the Democratic candidates, Johnson and Humphrey, constantly addressed themselves in their poverty speeches and program. But this want, though real and all the more galling because of its contrast with surrounding affluence (“the prison with glass walls” is how Eric Sevareid described the condition of the poor), was less than the giant fact of prosperity. There was no doubt that John F. Kennedy and his economists had brought about the first fundamental change in American economic policy since Franklin D. Roosevelt—and the nation glowed with a boom that was one of the world’s wonders. The boom terrified Europeans, angered the underdeveloped in the world, baffled the Russians. In America, in mid-campaign, the newspapers gave only scanty paragraphs to a settlement won by the automobile workers in Detroit—guaranteeing retirement to auto workers at age sixty at $100 a week; abroad, the statement could not be believed and could be taken as propaganda in a country like France, where a full colonel on active duty receives the same base pay. Luxuries undreamed of five years before were now mail-order items. A record eight million new cars were purchased; pleasure-boat sales were estimated at 400,000 a year; new dwellings were started at the rate of 1.5 million a year. The increase alone of America’s gross national product in the four years of the Kennedy-Johnson administration was greater than the entire gross national product of Germany in 1964—by $122 billion to $100 billion. Wages rose, profits rose, the stock market rose, vacations lengthened. The conscientious pointed out, quite rightly, that one fifth of the nation lived in poverty. But the other four fifths were the majority, freed apparently from the curse of Adam and invited to contemplate their souls and identities.
This contemplation of personality had led to a strange country: it was as if a radioactive dust, called money, was in the air, invisible but everywhere, addling or mutating old habits of life. PROFIT AND LOSS FACTORS IN RELIGIOUS PUBLISHING, read a headline in a trade journal of publishing. U.S. crime in the one year rose 15 percent. Assault and theft both rose sickeningly. When this reporter was young, fifteen years ago, the cliché was that New York had one murder a day; in 1964, New York, with a smaller population than it had in 1950, had 637 murders—or almost two a day. (In the first six months of 1964 the incidence of forcible rape in that city rose 28 percent over forcible rape incidents the year before; in Phoenix, Arizona, the hometown of the morality candidate, Goldwater, the crime rate was even worse.) Sociologists called their conferences week after week, and from their fascinating sessions emerged a profile of sickness and disturbance that was appalling: syphilis was rising, from 6,251 cases in 1957 to 22,733 in the year ending June 30th, 1964. (The Public Health Service pointed out that these were only reported cases, and estimated the more accurate figure would be 200,000, half among those under twenty-four.) Dryly, the service pointed out that syphilis had reached epidemic proportions in thirty cities—and, without editorial comment, ascribed it to a decline in morals among young people. Drinking was up, reported another group: 71 percent of all adults in America now drank hard liquor, and among doctors, lawyers, journalists and professional people the effective figure was approximately 100 percent. (Hard-liquor sales rose to a record of $6.5 billion in 1964—and the three largest companies had increased their annual gross by an average of 24 percent in five years.) Homosexuality had become a major problem in big cities, and local laws were being modified, not to eliminate it but to make it more permissible. Beach riots, resort hooliganism, raids on house parties were staple fare in the newspapers. In 1960 I remember reading for the first time of a morbid incident in New York where crowds, gathered to watch a suicide, had urged him to “Jump! Jump!” Now in 1964 one could hear or read about such cases in a number of large cities—as well as instances where men and women looked on or heard women scream and stood by and did nothing as murder and violence proceeded before their eyes.
America in 1964 was a perplexing place indeed. There was no doubt that American genius was surpassing itself in all the old measures of progress. The Japanese might be abreast of America in electronics and ahead in shipbuilding; the Germans were abreast of America in steel technology, the British in motor design, the French in biologicals. But no other nation possessed such capacity over the entire range—in steel, in electronics, in instrumentation, in plastics, in automation, in computer technique, in film direction, in chemicals, in medical innovation, in any exploration of man’s mastery over matter.
But did this make Americans happy? Here the evidence was varied and could be read either way. A study of suicide and mental health conducted in 1964 brought up the estimate that one in forty Americans—no less than 5 million—had attempted at one time or another to commit suicide; and the suicide rate was gently rising—from 10.1 per 100,000 (in 1954) to 11.0 (in 1963). More Americans lived longer than ever before—the number of Americans over sixty-five was estimated at over 17 million, as compared to 12.3 million in 1950. But who would care for them? Where would they live? The average sixty-five-year-old now has a life expectancy of over fourteen years. How could the agony and loneliness of old age be comforted without destroying the vitality and resources of younger families whose energies and efforts were bent on their children? Should government involve itself in the care of these aging citizens? Should a compassionate society tax itself to ease their woes, or would such a step lock citizens in another system of digits and taxes?
Goldwater’s response to this unsettling experience of America was to mourn. “What’s happening to us? What’s happening to our America?” he would ask wherever he marched.
And here again the Democrats hanged him, not on fact but on attitude.
For what was happening was not all bad. Newspaper headlines warned of the alarming rate of dropouts from schools and colleges. But when one read the texts beneath the headlines, the statistics told another story; of 1930’s fifth-graders, less than half finished high school; of 1950’s, almost three fifths; of those who were in fifth grade in 1954–55, 636 per thousand had graduated from high school by 1962. Thus, the drop-out rate was falling—only the need for education was growing faster than the effort to catch up. There was, indeed, a school crisis, but whereas twenty-five years earlier only one in three high-school graduates went on to college, now more than half go to college; and their numbers had jumped from 1.5 million in 1940 to an expected 5.2 million in 1965. Americans were spending more on hard liquor—but per-capita consumption was not increasing. Americans were merely buying more expensive brands. Crime was up—yes. But not felonies. The shocking figures came in the shrinking big cities with their tensions. Overall, however, the new America was much safer than thirty years before—with murder down from 8.9 per 100,000 in 1930 to 5.1 in 1962.
The Democratic answer was most masterfully given, as we shall see in later chapters, by Lyndon Johnson himself. But what the two parties were debating in this issue was the very nature of American experience in this half century; and of this experience I remember best as a campaign sampling the first journey of Hubert Humphrey to his native place in South Dakota. For, had Johnson pondered for years on the proper choice to demonstrate the golden side of the American experience in the half century, he could not have chosen better than he did in his Vice-Presidential candidate.
I journeyed to Doland, South Dakota, with Hubert Humphrey at the beginning of his campaign on a plane named the Happy Warrior. (The journey began with a champagne breakfast paid for by the Democratic National Committee—a far cry indeed from the last journey on cold coffee in West Virginia in 1960.) In Doland, where his father had owned a drugstore, Hubert Humphrey had spent twelve years in the single schoolhouse, and they remembered him still as Pinky, the mischievous boy. Humphrey visited the neat red-brick schoolhouse and recognized the huge silver loving cup on the second-floor landing. He recalled how Julian Hart, the minister’s son, and he had taken all the alarm clocks left for repair at his father’s drugstore, set them to go off at two-minute intervals, then stuffed them into the enormous loving cup; how they had clanged out to disrupt the entire school in mid-morning; and how old Jeanette Higgins, the principal, had shrieked at him.
He stood on the main street of the town. There was a park now, with Chinese elms. New fluorescent lights hung over the little street. There was a library, left by old Doc Sherwood. There was a supermarket. Television antennae brought national television. It was not a prosperous town—and the young people, as Hubert himself had done years before, were leaving it. But it was a good place to live in, far better than when Hubert Humphrey’s father had eked out a miserable living there. And the opportunities it offered its young people were no longer circumscribed by the flat prairie—they were nationwide. In the old Humphrey drugstore where he had once jerked sodas, the present management had hung up a fly-blown mileage chart which announced the distance from Doland to Ashley, North Dakota—142 miles; to Yankton, South Dakota—179 miles; to New York—1,217 miles; to Washington, D.C.—1,342.
Humphrey stood on a little platform, greeting old friends (“Remember when we punctured the rain barrel?”), and then began to reminisce. And as he reminisced, it was obvious he was not defending things as they were in Doland or as they used to be. He loved Doland. He was offering Doland not mourning but challenge, not yesterday but tomorrow. His twin themes were opportunity and government. And he bound them both with the gladness, not the peril, of American life:
I want to say that there are many improvements. First of all, the band is a lot better than I remember. They look better and they play better, and I can remember that I was in the local band here for a while…. When they got hard up for a bass drummer, the best you had to do at that time to qualify was to keep time, and since you were setting the pace, you could always blame others if things didn’t come out right, you see….
I look down this main street and…I remember when they built that hotel over there. If my father were here, he could tell you he remembers too, because they lost some money. But it is there. That is part of the way we built America. Some people had to take a chance, some people had to be willing to risk a little money, a little time, a little energy.
I would like to say that the great treasure of this community has been in its people. This isn’t from an esthetic point of view in terms of beauty…. I suppose you wouldn’t say that Doland would stack up with Rome, or Washington, D.C., or Paris…. I have bragged on this town, as I have said, all over, but I wonder if we have ever stopped to think for a moment what is so different about us. Because people look so much alike all over the world.
We have learned how to govern ourselves, making our mistakes but learning from them. We have learned that if we are going to have…[a government] that offers a future to each generation, you have to keep open the doors of opportunity.
There isn’t any opportunity for the illiterate, and there isn’t any opportunity for the uneducated. People who are uneducated nowadays…they are prisoners. They are like slaves. So, education, in a free society, where you have freedom of choice, where you have opportunity to make choices…is the secret of power, to freedom, to the good life.
Now, let me say that this system includes something else. It includes respect for one another. The only aristocracy that we have in America is the aristocracy of achievement and merit, not because of your color, not because of your creed, not because of your place of birth, but because of you. One of the commitments of my life has been to help eradicate in America these false barriers, these false standards of discrimination, of bigotry and intolerance that have denied so many people a chance to give of themselves to their country. We Americans need everybody helping out…. We need to set an example of how we can bind ourselves together in common purpose for great national and international objectives.
It was Humphrey, the next day, who out of his own past, suddenly made the life of America that he was defending, and its direction, come alive in a glorious passage of nostalgia and hope.
After a day of boyhood recapture in South Dakota, he left his native state the next morning with a prop stop at Rapid City. Rapid City is the site of the Ellsworth Air Force Base, the most complete center of nuclear destruction in the United States (command center for B52s, KC1350s, 3 Titan launching sites, 150 Minutemen missiles); the base personnel make up the fifth largest community in all South Dakota. After leaving this terrifying and beautiful place, the plane passed over Mount Rushmore with its stone carvings, and Humphrey remembered how as a boy he would come here on camping trips in the summer; then he explained the needle-point mountains in terms of erosion; then he was sad that this was such poor country, so difficult to make a living in. And that either tourism or the government must be its salvation. From that to the importance of defense industries and how when the government established a defense complex these days it was like the Queen of England giving the South Seas Charter in Elizabethan times—a defense complex was a charter of development. He went on to the impact of defense complexes and scientific research complexes in the rebirth of the Boston area, and at that point, someone asked him why Boston, with such intellectual resources, had such bad politics. This led him to the ethnic tangle of American municipal politics, and thus to his father—the first man in Doland, South Dakota, who had voted Democratic. “I remember Al Smith,” chuckled Humphrey. “My father was one of only five voters in Doland who voted for him.”
“Some day I think I’ll write a book about Dad,” he said, peering out his plane window as we left South Dakota for Colorado, and with his audience huddling over him, he went on about Dad Humphrey.
Dad Humphrey had been, obviously, Doland’s village radical. Mom Humphrey had been a good Lutheran, and Dad “used to drive her crazy” by quoting Bob Ingersoll to her. Then one day he saw God and joined the Methodist Church. But really joined it—he would preach on Sundays, and he had the biggest Sunday-school class in the entire county. Some days as many as 100 or 150 people would come to his Sunday-school class in Doland. When radio came in, Dad Humphrey’s horizons expanded. All day Sunday they would tune in the radio and hear the divines: S. Parkes Cadmon or the Reverend Cannon or Harry Emerson Fosdick.
But politics was just as important to Dad Humphrey as religion. Sometimes after church on Sunday he would come home with as many as ten people and tell Mom they were eating there; and from religion they would go on to politics, until midnight sometimes. (Dad never went to bed. He told Hubert, “Never go to bed, stay out of bed as long as you can; ninety percent of all people die in bed.”) Dad was a Democrat—he had become converted to the Democrats just as he had become converted to religion. William Jennings Bryan had converted him to the Democrats. And everybody else in town, and all the relatives, were Republicans. Even his own brothers. Uncle Harry was, of course, a scholar and not interested in politics. Uncle Harry went on and became the Chief Plant Pathologist of the Department of Agriculture in Washington. Uncle Harry was interested neither in politics nor money—only agriculture. Uncle John used to say, “You could put Harry sitting down on a pile of gold and he’d lose it all in a week.”
Uncle John and Dad Humphrey were, however, small-town businessmen—full of schemes and business deals. Together they dreamed up the scheme of “green stamps,” which later became, in the hands of more successful administrators, trading stamps. They went as far as opening an office on Wall Street—and they went broke; all they had left of the venture was cartons and cartons of unused stamps, which they stacked in Hubert Humphrey’s home (he held out his hands showing how many) “as big as a grand piano.”
When Dad Humphrey became a Democrat, the two brothers broke. They argued over everything. Rural Electrification, Missouri Valley Authority, price supports. “They got so mad at each other they didn’t speak for years.” But since the two brothers were close and both loved politics, they finally compromised. One year they would go to the Democratic state convention together, the next year to the Republican state convention together.
Business kept getting worse in Doland. They bought the hotel together, and they lost their money. And Dad’s attitude toward business didn’t help. He would have periods when he had a special interest in something. Late in the twenties he was in his music period. He got the Victrola concession for Doland, and he stacked the store with Victrolas. Then he’d buy cases and cases of Victrola Red Seal records and tell Mother that he was doing it for business. But, really, he bought the records for himself, and would take them home and play them and tell Mother he’d just made a bad business deal and overbought for inventory. Once, so carried away by music was he that he got up in the middle of the night, got in the old car and drove all the way to New York just to hear the Metropolitan Opera. Later on, when they were wiped out in Doland and moved on to the big city of Huron, South Dakota (population then 11,000) and business got better, Dad went on his poetry kick. He bought radio time with his own money on a Huron radio station to read poetry to the people—he felt they needed it.
Mom Humphrey must have had a hard time of it. But the two parents obviously loved each other. They disagreed on politics. Mom Humphrey felt that Dad was “mean” to people when he talked politics. But then, Dad did not take her politics seriously. Once he called the children in and said, “Now, look, everyone is a little nuts. The man down the street is a little nuts. I’m a little nuts. You’re a little nuts. Even your mother is a little nuts. Your mother’s a lovely woman, a fine faithful woman, she’s my sweetheart. And any time you argue with her or you don’t like it here—get out! But there’s only one thing about her I want you boys to remember. Sometimes she’s politically unreliable!” (At this point Humphrey added, as if defending his father, “You know, she voted for Harding, and Dad could never forget it.”)
Humphrey had now been reminiscing for a full hour and his plane was coming into Denver. It had been a hard life, all in all. Times had gotten better after they all moved from Doland to Huron, but old Dad Humphrey never trusted banks. Whenever they had any savings, old Dad had put the savings either into government bonds or into inventory. He loved to have his savings in inventory under the drugstore. (“I love to have it here where you can look at it.”)
Thus it was that Mom Humphrey (who at this writing, at eighty-four, lives in a nursing home in Huron) never got her rocking chair. There never was enough money to get her the rocking chair she wanted. Which led Humphrey on to another thought—about money. On which he disagreed with his father. “I believe in debt,” he said. “I tell my kids to borrow money. Look at me now, I’ve got two houses, both unoccupied, the kids are away, and I’m on the road most of the time. The time for people to have good things is when they’re young and when they need it, that’s the time they can enjoy it. My son-in-law talks about buying a house he can afford. I tell him you won’t like a house you can afford. Get something with a couple of big mortgages and then work like the dickens to pay it off. When you’re fifty they’ll all be gone. Enjoy it now.”
By then the plane was coming down into Denver and Humphrey was scheduled to address Denver newsmen—where he spoke of the Issues, with remarkable eloquence and staggering fact, answering questions on beef imports, the drought, the bomb, the income tax, rioting in the streets, the John Birch Society, and Vietnam.
Johnson and Humphrey, Goldwater and Miller, all believed that the purpose of America was to enrich the individual life. Something, perhaps, was wrong with the condition of that life in 1964. But Goldwater and Miller saw what was wrong as the government; and Johnson and Humphrey saw the government as the chief means of dealing with the wrong.
Perhaps both Democrats and Republicans were wrong, as they tried to explain America to Americans; perhaps the nature of life in the abundant society requires deeper thinking than can be done in a political campaign. Yet if the approaches of both sides were unsettling to people and unsatisfying to thinkers, Goldwater managed to bring to his approach a particularly joyless quality. What the Democrats offered was offered with glee, gusto and the colors of the rosy-fingered dawn.
Goldwater could offer—and this was his greatest contribution to American politics—only a contagious concern which made people realize that indeed they must begin to think about such things. And this will be his great credit in historical terms: that finally he introduced the condition and quality of American morality and life as a subject of political debate.
Goldwater caused nerve ends to twinge with his passion and indignation. Yet he had no handle to the problems, no program, no solution—except backward to the Bible and the God of the desert. Fiercely proud of his sturdy grandfather who had struggled, fought, wandered and, by manliness, made civilization grow on the Old Frontier, he could not quite grasp the nature of the newer enemies on the new frontier of life. Proud of his handsome, clean-lined family, proud of his radiant children, proud of his family’s war record and patriotism, he had in him neither the compassion nor the understanding to deal with the faceless newer enemies of the Digital Society.
These, then, were the issues—profound, moving, deeply dividing.
In 1960 either Richard M. Nixon or John F. Kennedy could well have campaigned under the other’s chief slogan: Nixon could easily have bannered his campaign with “Let’s Get America Moving Again,” and Kennedy could easily have accepted “Keep the Peace Without Surrender.” It was an inner music of the soul that separated them, an outer style of leadership which urged the Americans to the choice of 1960.
In 1964 it was otherwise.
The gap between Johnson and Goldwater was total. Though as masculine Southwest types they used the same language, the same profanities, shared the same drinking style, indulged in the same homespun metaphors, these similarities were meaningless when compared to the philosophies that separated them. How these philosophic differences were translated by organization, by orchestration, by campaign planning, by the combat leadership of the two chieftains is the story of the final election round of the campaign of 1964—to which we proceed next.