Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  The book that spoke to this issue was the autobiography of Whittaker Chambers, Witness, published in 1952. Chambers was a former member of the C.P. and a courier for Soviet intelligence who had offered the decisive testimony that had led to the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury. He was one of many former members who deserted the party, became witnesses against it, and allied themselves with new conservatism. Chambers was unusual among them in that he knew more about Communism and was an excellent writer.

  The third new conservative nest of doctrines was a loose collection of historical ideas expressed by Russell Kirk in his book The Conservative Mind, published in 1953. It seems to have been required reading for new conservatives. Since it was pretty deep stuff, it is unlikely that many got much beyond Kirk’s “six canons of conservative thought” on pages 7 and 8.

  Kirk was an intellectual extremist who made Buckley look like a liberal. The richer among the new conservatives, doubtless, enjoyed driving about in expensive motor cars. Kirk, however, despite the fact that he was born and raised in Michigan, would abolish the automobile. He sometimes seemed to be a refugee from a medieval monastery. Society, he wrote, was ruled by a “divine intent,” and politics was at bottom religion and morality. He adored the “mystery of traditional life.” A civilized society required “orders and classes.” Edmund Burke, the champion of order, was his hero. But he called himself a “Bohemian Tory,” which would have caused Burke to cringe. Whether a monk or a Tory, or, for that matter, both, Russell Kirk was not the kind of man one would turn to if practical decisions were to be made.

  The new conservatives spoke and wrote in two different tongues. One, used for public discourse, was heated, charged, laced with the language of struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil as though addressed to a revival meeting. The other was a medium for transacting business, what one would expect college-educated Americans who had done well in business or the professions to use in getting through the day. It was also a way of distinguishing themselves from the “extremists” who shared many of the same ideas—right-wingers who resorted to violence and Birchers who seemed to reside on some remote planet.

  The first of these languages of the new conservatives, and, even more, of Hayek, Chambers, and Kirk, was in a key not often heard in American political discourse. It was dark, morose, somber, often apocalyptic with Armageddon looming over the brow of a nearby hill. A satanic force, a sophisticated evil conspiracy, lay in the weeds ready to pounce on innocent America. The cherished liberties of a free people hung precariously in the balance. Though time was running out, there was just enough left to mobilize the patriots to attack the mortal enemy before he struck. Thus, the speaker or the writer rang the tocsin to arouse the defenders of freedom.

  This sounded like political paranoia and that is exactly what Richard Hofstadter called it in a notable essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Conspiracy became the driving force of history. It might be the New Deal or the New Frontier; it certainly was Communism. “The central image,” Hofstadter wrote, “is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.”

  When three new conservatives, F. Clifton White, William A. Rusher, and John Ashbrook, met for lunch at the University Club in New York on September 7, 1961, they did not speak the language of Armageddon. Rather, they spoke the hard tongue of business and their business was to launch a real conspiracy to take over the Republican party. White was from upstate New York, had been a lead navigator on B-17s during the war, had taught briefly at Cornell, and had then been active in Republican politics and had become a skilled political mechanic. Rusher, also from New York, had served in Air Force administration in India, had attended Princeton and the Harvard Law School, had practiced law on Wall Street, and was the publisher of National Review. John Ashbrook had been educated at Harvard and the Ohio State Law School, had been chairman of the Young Republicans, and was now a congressman from Ohio. Methodical, he kept the Young Republican files in good shape.

  These three talked all afternoon and long into the evening and agreed on the western strategy. They felt that the Republican apparatus had atrophied. As Rusher wrote, “The party had not a single leader of truly national dimensions. Eisenhower had retired; Nixon had been discredited by his defeat; Goldwater was the spokesman of what seemed a very narrow segment of opinion; and Rockefeller was the victim of the animosities his liberalism had created.” A dedicated small group, they agreed, could take over the party’s moribund machinery. This would require a candidate and the arrow pointed straight at the junior senator from Arizona.1

  Michael Goldwasser, one of twenty-two children in a Polish Jewish family, fled Tsarist Russia about 1837 and settled in London, where he lived with his younger brother Joseph. The men became excited about the California gold rush and decided to try their luck, but as merchants, not as miners. The brothers reached San Francisco in November 1852, and later opened a store in Los Angeles. They anglicized their name to Goldwater.

  By the late fifties the brothers operated stores in half a dozen towns with the headquarters in Prescott, the capital of the new Arizona territory. In 1877 Michael turned over management of the Arizona properties to his sons, Morris and Henry, and joined the rest of the family in San Francisco. In 1882 his son Baron moved to Prescott to work in the store. He reckoned that future growth would take place in Phoenix in the new farming area. In 1896 he opened M. Goldwater & Sons there and oversaw its development into Arizona’s leading department store.

  In 1903 Josephine Williams, a nurse, moved from Chicago to dry Phoenix for relief from tuberculosis. Baron married her in an Episcopal ceremony in 1907 and they had three children. They named the first, born on January 1, 1909, Barry Morris Goldwater. His education began in the Phoenix public schools, but, he wrote later, “My first year in high school … was not a scholastic success.” The principal “diplomatically” informed Baron that his son would do better in a private school. He was shipped off to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia. Goldwater instantly fell in love with the military life, was a great success, and was encouraged to go on to West Point. But his father was ill and his mother wanted him nearby. He enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1928, but it was not to be an enduring relationship. He quit before the year was over, he later wrote, because “I could see [that] I’d probably be the next twenty years getting out.”

  Goldwater went into the Phoenix store as a junior clerk and moved up to president in 1937. While he seems never to have been seduced by the romance of retailing, both he and store prospered. After the war he invented “Antsy Pants,” in Richard Rovere’s immortal words, “underdrawers with red ants rampant.”

  He was baptized and brought up in the Episcopal Church, though he seems not to have been much of a churchgoer. He married Margaret Johnson of Muncie, Indiana, and raised four children. He was a good athlete, sat well in the saddle, loved the desert, and was devoted to the Arizona Indians. He was an addicted hobbyist—photography, sports cars, short-wave radio, and electronic devices, such as one that raised and lowered the flag outside his house by the sunrise and sunset.

  But his big passion was flying, particularly military aircraft. In 1932 he had tried to get into the Air Corps, but was rejected for substandard vision. He spent much of World War II, along with other overage pilots, in the Ferry Command delivering supplies. Later he flew single engine P-47 Thunderbolts across the North Atlantic to Britain.

  “Any pilot can describe the mechanics of flying,” he wrote. “What it can do for the spirit of man is beyond description.” This is probably the key to the real Barry Goldwater, and his bid for the presidency.

  Goldwater was a very attractive person. He was stunningly handsome as a young man and aged gracefully. He was so good-looking, Hubert Humphrey said, that he got a movie contract with Eighteenth Century-Fox. He was friendly, gallant, courageous, without vanity, and had an “Aw shucks” weste
rn simplicity and integrity that were hard to resist. In thinly populated Arizona, where every voter either knew him or wished that he did, Goldwater was an unbeatable candidate. In 1952, with some help from Eisenhower, he upset Ernest McFarland, the Senate majority leader, by 7000 votes. In 1958, the year of the Democratic landslide, he again whipped McFarland, now governor, this time by 35,000 votes. Even in 1964 he would manage to hold onto Arizona by a slim margin.

  But Goldwater had a serious defect: he was not very bright. “You know,” he admitted to the newspaperman Stewart Alsop, “I haven’t really got a first-class brain.” When he got no response after reading to the Missus and a couple of her friends a speech he was going to make, “I said, what the hell is the matter, and Peggy said, look, this is a sophisticated audience, they’re not a lot of lame-brains like you, they don’t spend their time looking at TV westerns. You can’t give them that corn.” John and Robert Kennedy agreed with the Goldwaters. As RFK said, “He was not a very smart man. He’s just going to destroy himself.” President Kennedy was concerned that he would do so before he got the nomination and urged Walter Lippmann, who had written a column in 1963 that savaged Goldwater, to hold off. There is every reason to believe that Lyndon Johnson, who knew the members of the Senate extremely well, shared this estimate.

  Though Goldwater said that he revered the framers of the Constitution and the great document they crafted, he had the odd habit of amending it to suit his own style and prejudices. He stated, for example, that the federal government could not compel white schools to admit black children because “education is one of the powers reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment.” This was a doctrine long since rejected by the Supreme Court.

  Goldwater said, “My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them.” Article I of the Constitution creates a Congress with a House of Representatives and a Senate for the specific purpose of enacting laws. But as a senator Goldwater behaved as though the Senate lacked this power. He had virtually no interest in legislation except to oppose it. His name was on no law.

  In fact, he spent most of his time campaigning, not so much for himself as for other Republican candidates. During the fifties he devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to his role as chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. He was constantly on the road making speeches to party groups. He boasted that he logged a million miles and made thousands of speeches. He preached new conservative doctrines, even invoking Edmund Burke, to the already converted and they lapped it up. In 1960 his name, followed by “the leading conservative thinker in American public life,” appeared over a column published thrice weekly by the Los Angeles Times and soon syndicated to 162 other papers. “His” book, The Conscience of a Conservative, actually written by Buckley’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, was published in 1960 and within a few years sold 3.5 million copies. The campaign job, Goldwater wrote, “resulted in my exposure to grass-roots Republicans, and, I believe, ultimately made me the Republican nominee in 1964.”

  If Goldwater was actually running for President while he did this campaigning, he was ill-advised to do so. He came from a state with only five electoral votes. “My life style,” he later wrote, “is casual, informal, spontaneous.” If elected, he would become a “prisoner in the White House.” He did not want to surrender his privacy. He recognized his own mental shortcomings. Goldwater was “terrified” at confronting a Democratic Congress and the intransigence of the “bureaucratic overlords.” He was reasonably certain that Kennedy would defeat him and, after the assassination, was convinced that he had no chance. Lyndon Johnson, whom he detested, would use every dirty trick in the pack and would campaign with “hate.” While all this was probably true, there is little question that he had been bitten by the presidential bug and that the sting refused to go away. Or as Goldwater preferred to put it, millions of “dedicated Americans” demanded that he run and he felt that he could not let them down.

  Rovere, who observed the senator closely over time, concluded that “there are two Goldwaters.” It seems to have been his attitude toward the presidency: he coveted it and at the same time feared it.2

  White, Rusher, and Ashbrook called 22 carefully selected conservatives from 16 states to a secret meeting at the Avenue Motel in Chicago on October 8, 1961. They agreed that the Republican party must become a powerful conservative force in U.S. politics in order to save the republic. Several wanted to announce for Goldwater in 1964 immediately. White said that it was too early to endorse a candidate, but he was authorized to inform the senator.

  He reported to Goldwater on November 17 that the Chicago group would set up an “organizational vehicle.” Goldwater said this was the “best thing I’ve heard of since I became active in the Republican Party on the national scene.” He wished White luck and they agreed to keep in touch.

  A somewhat larger group held a second meeting in Chicago on December 10. By now White was firmly in control and the movement, which had no name, was called after him. They adopted a budget, largely for an office and salary for White, divided the nation into nine regions, and devised a strategy for selecting conservative delegates to the 1964 convention. White rented Suite 3505 in the Chanin Building at the corner of Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue in New York, and “3505” became the cover name for the group and, later, the title of his book. He stumped the country with considerable success to urge conservative Republicans to organize. He occasionally dropped into Goldwater’s office to report on the new “groundswell.”

  Shortly after Nixon’s defeat in 1960 Governor Rockefeller sought to make up to Goldwater. “Rockefeller,” as White put it, “was the ardent suitor in this strange misalliance, but Goldwater was by no means the reluctant bride.” They met regularly to discuss party politics. They agreed on two basic points: a strong distaste for Richard Nixon and the need to unite the party for the 1964 presidential election. Since each had the image of a party splitter, both hoped to appear as unifiers. The New Yorker also had modest success in persuading Goldwater that he was really more conservative than his reputation. The 1962 elections helped the relationship. Rockefeller was reelected governor of New York and Nixon was defeated by Pat Brown as governor of California.

  With Nixon gone and Goldwater partly neutralized, Rockefeller seemed to have a clear shot at the nomination. But in late 1962 and early 1963 two events torpedoed the Rockefeller candidacy.

  On October 18, 1962, White had called the next gathering of 3505 for the first weekend in December. “This meeting,” he wrote, “will determine where we go—whether we are serious or dilettantes.” He was now convinced that 3505 must have a candidate and that Goldwater was the man. He met the senator in the Presidential Suite at the new Americana Hotel in New York on November 12, a few days after the election. White had methodically prepared a huge briefing book containing an organizational chart by state, a budget, a timetable for state conventions and primaries in 1964, and his estimate of how many delegates they would win. This was not a paper performance; the apparatus was already in place. Goldwater was impressed. White said that he had an attractive job offer and was tempted to take it. Goldwater put his arm around White’s shoulder and said, “Clif, if I didn’t have to worry about anybody else I deal with in politics any more than I worry about you, I’d have a pretty pleasant life.” White’s conclusions: Goldwater had done nothing to discourage him and had left a “reasonably definite indication” that he would run. When White got home he told his wife that he would turn down the job offer.

  The Chicago meeting was scheduled for December 2. The evening before a nervous White met those who arrived early to propose that they become a “draft Goldwater” movement provided he agreed. This group, like the larger one the next day, was extremely conservative, detested Rockefeller, and endorsed the proposal enthusiastically. White outlined an enormous organizational expansion with requisite budget. He made optimistic forecasts for both the convention and the election based on the western strategy. They agreed to come ou
t of the closet on March 15, 1963.

  But on December 3 the Associated Press unmasked 3505, reporting that the Chicago meeting aimed to draft Goldwater and stop Rockefeller. That evening CBS News was on the scene. In Phoenix Goldwater made a noncommittal remark. In fact, White was pleased to be out in the open.

  His problem now was to deal with the two Goldwaters. On January 14 the senator said, “Clif, I’m not a candidate. And I’m not going to be.” White replied that they planned to draft him anyway. “Draft nothin’,” Goldwater snorted, “Don’t paint me into a corner. It’s my political neck. … ”

  White was serious. On April 8, 3505 announced formation of the National Draft Goldwater Committee. White rented P.O. Box 1964 in Washington. His group sighed with relief when an ambivalent Goldwater said, “I am not taking any position on this draft movement. It’s their time and their money. But they are going to have to get along without any help from me.” As the support came in, Goldwater weakened. Within a few days he told the New York Times, “A man would be a damn fool to predict with finality what he would do in this unpredictable world.”

  Thus, Rockefeller found Goldwater gaining on him in organization and in the polls. As if this were not trouble enough, he proceeded to shoot himself in the foot. In 1961 he had divorced his wife. While there were rumors of another woman, the event stirred little public interest. In April 1963 Margaretta (“Happy”) Murphy divorced her husband, Dr. James S. Murphy of Philadelphia.