Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  On July 30, 1964, just before he went on television to announce his “final solution” to the Bobby problem, Johnson directed Rowe to make two points to Humphrey, which he did that evening. The first was that, if he won the vice presidency, he must be totally loyal to the President. Humphrey said that was no problem. The second, as Rowe put it, was, “If you’ve got any strength, show it.” Humphrey, already in the starting blocks, could hardly wait for the gun. At the same time, Johnson instructed Jenkins to notify McCarthy that he was still in the running. A week later Rowe sat Humphrey down on his front porch in the Cleveland Park section of Washington to examine virtually every aspect of his political and personal life to determine whether there was a skeleton in a closet. There was none.

  Humphrey now cashed in the chips he had spent years accumulating. He showed his support among liberal organizations, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and prominent Democratic politicians. A Gallup poll of 3000 Democratic county chairmen in June showed him ahead of Kennedy by almost two to one. He was endorsed by 40 Democratic senators, nearly all significant party leaders in 26 states and a majority in six others. His greatest strength was in the Midwest, where Johnson might be weakest. A Harris survey demonstrated that Humphrey was preferred over Miller by a margin of seven to three. Robert Kennedy endorsed him. He went on television to court the South.

  On Sunday, August 23, the day before the convention opened, Humphrey and McCarthy were both on national TV. Immediately afterward, Johnson phoned each to tell him that he had given him an A-plus. But Lady Bird stuck with McCarthy.

  In one sense Humphrey was lucky in being responsible for the crisis over seating the Mississippi delegations. Over the weekend and during the first two days of the convention he was so busy that he had little time to fret over the vice presidency. This was in the face of well-founded rumors that Johnson was now making advances to Mike Mansfield while courting McCarthy.

  The astonishing aspect of this unfolding melodrama was that it was produced and staged by the President of the United States. “It was,” Theodore White wrote, “a mixture of comedy, tension and teasing, it was a work of art; it was as if, said someone, Caligula were directing I’ve Got a Secret.” On August 22 Johnson had told Kenny O’Donnell to set the wheels in motion for a last-minute switch to Mansfield. O’Donnell, who was a close friend of the majority leader, said that Mansfield would not accept for all the copper in Montana. The President then ordered Jenkins to instruct Rowe, as the latter put it, “to take a reading on who would be better, Mansfield or Humphrey.” Rowe was from Montana, had been Mansfield’s campaign manager, and was his close friend. “Oh, come on, Walter,” Rowe said, “I am too old to be playing these games.” Jenkins said, “He means it.” Rowe retorted, “The hell he does.” Nevertheless, Rowe dutifully asked Mansfield whether he would accept the vice presidential nomination. The answer might have come from General Sherman. “No possible chance. I would not have the slightest interest in it.”

  Rowe had now become Johnson’s point man in Atlantic city. The President dictated detailed instructions to Jenkins, who took them down in shorthand and then typed them up for Rowe. On Monday Johnson had given correspondents from the Washington Post and Star the elaborate qualifications he expected his Vice President to have. Among others, they included no public disagreement with the President, speeches cleared by the White House, acceptance of all administration policies, and no breach of secrecy, even with his wife. They were published on Tuesday. Jenkins then transmitted the final instructions for Humphrey that Rowe would deliver: he would be nominated; the seconding speech was to be from Georgia and other seconders were named; Humphrey must read and accept the qualifications listed in the Star; he and his wife Muriel were to stand by for a special flight to Washington.

  Rowe could not find a copy of the Star in Atlantic City, but he did locate a Post. He called Humphrey to his suite at the Colony Motel. The senator arrived with his wife, William Connell, his executive assistant, and Max Kampelman, his close friend and adviser. Rowe took him into the bedroom and gave him the President’s instructions. The senator was delighted and relieved and started to open the door to inform Muriel. Rowe quickly closed it, telling him that Johnson forbade the sharing of secrets with his wife. By now the weather was bad and all flights had been canceled. Kampelman suggested that they drive to Washington. But the President had said fly. They waited for the weather to lift.

  Rowe now told Humphrey that he must come without Muriel; he would be accompanied by another senator, Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, which led, as Johnson intended, to press speculation over another vice presidential candidate. Jack Valenti met them in Washington and took them on a tour of the sights. This was because Lady Bird Johnson was landing in a helicopter in Atlantic City at that moment and the President did not want to divert TV attention from her. Eventually they made it to the White House.

  Johnson now engaged Humphrey in a long chat. He stressed the “thanklessness” of the vice presidency and that “most Presidents and Vice Presidents just don’t hit it off.” Again, “this is like a marriage with no chance of divorce. I need complete and unswerving loyalty.” Humphrey assured him. Then Johnson said something that moved the senator, that he was “the most capable of all the men [he knew] to take on the duties of the presidency if anything should happen.” They exuberantly phoned a number of Democratic leaders to share the good news. The President took Humphrey into the Cabinet Room, where he found Rusk, McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy. All of them, Johnson said, had supported his candidacy. Impulsively, Johnson phoned Muriel. “How would you like to have your boy be my Vice President?” Then on to meet the press and spread the news.

  On the flight to Atlantic City they watched a jittery television broadcast of Governors John Connally of Texas and Pat Brown of California putting Lyndon Johnson’s name into nomination. The demonstration followed. Johnson made his entrance and Humphrey was also nominated. The Democrats had their ticket.

  By midnight Tuesday McCarthy realized that he had been left out to dry. As Albert Eisele wrote, he had been “humiliated” and he was “deeply offended by Johnson’s playing with him like a puppet on a string, and he never forgave Johnson for it.” He sent a telegram withdrawing his name so that the President’s “choice would be a free one” and urging Humphrey as the man best fitted to Johnson’s qualifications. His assistant read it over the phone to Jenkins the next morning after it had been released to the press. He correctly assumed that Johnson would forbid its publication; in fact, Jenkins exploded. Later Jenkins phoned to ask McCarthy to nominate Humphrey. Having just heard that Dodd was on the airplane, McCarthy caustically recommended Dodd. Jenkins insisted and, after consideration, McCarthy agreed to make the speech.

  As Johnson had dominated the choice of the Vice President, so he dominated the shaping of the Democratic platform. It had two basic themes, opening with the first: “America is One Nation, One People.” The “survival of each of us resides in the common good—the sharing of responsibilities as well as benefits by all our people.” The platform was “a covenant of unity.” Republicans who were offended by Goldwater were urged not to go astray by “narrow partisanship.”

  The second theme was the Kennedy-Johnson linkage. Together they had carried the tremendous burden placed upon them. The platform pointed to the “towering achievement” of the legislation that had already been enacted. “We are proud to have been part of this history. … Let us continue.”

  None of this moved the delegates and the convention crowd. But there was one exhilarating moment: Robert Kennedy introduced a film about President Kennedy. It had been scheduled for Tuesday night, the evening before the Johnson-Humphrey ticket was nominated. But, as noted, Johnson feared that the Attorney General would stampede the delegates and be nominated for Vice President by acclamation. This, in fact, was not Kennedy’s intention. Nevertheless, the presentation was switched to Thursday night.

  Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington introduce
d Kennedy. He was greeted by an immense ovation that rolled on and on and on. Schlesinger, who was on the floor, wrote, “I had never seen anything like it.” On several occasions Kennedy tried to stop the demonstration without success. Jackson leaned over and said, “Let it go on. … Just let them do it, Bob. … Let them get it out of their system.” It continued for 22 minutes. Finally, Kennedy spoke briefly, concluding with the lines from Romeo and Juliet that Jacqueline Kennedy had given him.

  When he shall die

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with Night,

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  Theodore White wrote that the film closed with “the sense of the joy of life and youth and the dead President teaching his baby boy how to tickle his chin with a buttercup. And we all wept.”7

  If history can be said to have an Aristotelian logic, that is, a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, the 1964 presidential campaign was not history. The calendar, mercifully, imposed a beginning and an end, but neither had any particular relevance to the middle. The campaign was all middle, a series of disconnected episodes. In fact, there were two campaigns, Goldwater’s and Johnson’s, and they hardly intersected. “Looking back,” Goldwater said, “I see the campaign as less of a debate than two monologues.” The more important episodes were the following:

  Goldwater’s (Dis) Organization. Barry Goldwater, whatever his virtues, was born totally devoid of any sense of organization. Worse, the people he installed to run his campaign were genetically programmed to produce disorganization. The result must have been the most mismanaged and the funniest campaign in the history of the republic.

  Despite the western strategy propounded by the new conservatives, the campaign seemed to have no strategy. There was the shadow of one at the outset, but it quickly expired. Since Gallup showed him behind 65 to 29, Goldwater decided to clinch the three midwestern states which were the Republican bedrock—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—in September as a base for turning the country around in October. He hired a 22-car train to whistle-stop through the small towns and rural areas and drew quite good crowds. In Hammond, Indiana, the Yugoslav steel workers came out to demand that the U.S. overthrow Tito. Swinging into the mood, Goldwater made a bellicose speech with references to “holocaust,” “push the button,” and “atomic weapons.” This reinforced his image as trigger-happy, as not hesitating to use The Bomb. Almost everyone was terrified. In university towns the placards read, “STAMP OUT PEACE—VOTE GOLDWATER.” His crowds were also concerned about race. His answer: “Part of that civil rights law is nuts. It’s okay to say you’ll give a fellow civil rights, but once you tell him who can come into my restaurant and who can’t—then, boy, there’s trouble.” Some did not think this was carefully thought through.

  The organizers in Washington spent five weeks setting up their own quarters—new partitions, painting, and so on. But the folders, buttons, and bumper stickers that should have been ready in July did not go out till September.

  Ralph Cordiner, the former president of General Electric, was in charge of finance and tried to run the campaign like a business—in the black. But political cash flow does not fit that accounting theory. In September, when there was little money, he canceled TV time booked for late October, and later, when there was plenty of cash, the spots needed had been preempted by other advertisers. Cordiner got into an awful fight with Burch because the latter was spending too much. He tried to appeal to Goldwater, but he refused to see Cordiner. He even flew on the candidate’s airplane from Washington to Phoenix and was unable to breach the wall erected by the Arizona Mafia.

  Goldwater did make one wild stab at creative policy formulation. In a speech at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles he slipped in an idea proposed by Milton Friedman, the conservative monetarist economist from the University of Chicago: “I shall ask Congress to enact a regular and considered program of tax reduction of five per cent per year in all income taxes, both individual and corporate.” Aside from the fact that such a perpetual system would bankrupt both the government and the country, Goldwater had voted against the much more modest Kennedy-Johnson tax cut for exactly that reason. Friedman’s idea never left the ball park.

  The time of the kickoff speech in Prescott, Arizona, was suddenly changed from 4:00 to 2:00 p.m. Instead of a big out-of-town crowd, only local residents showed up. Somebody forgot to arrange for TV and radio coverage. The Boise appearances ignored an intra-party dispute that left the Republican governor, according to Stephen Shadegg, doing “a slow burn which rivaled the magnificence of the Idaho sunset.” The farm speech at the plowing contest in Fargo, North Dakota, seemed to advocate immediate abandonment of price supports, which frightened farmers and shocked conservative Republican senators from the Dakotas. Milwaukee, Shadegg wrote, was “the most incredible foul-up of the Goldwater campaign.” Elaborate publicized arrangements were made for live national TV coverage. On Kitchel’s orders at the last moment an earlier taped speech was substituted without informing the locals. The Milwaukee station threatened to sue for fraudulent advertising. Good Republicans stopped payment on campaign contributions. The advance man resigned. Further insult: Two nights later Humphrey spoke on television in the same arena to a big crowd from precisely 8:30 to 9:00.

  Richard Rovere spent a week in September “behind” Goldwater in seven southern states. The candidate had chartered a Boeing 727 jet which he christened Yai Bi Ken, Navajo for House in the Sky. It carried Goldwater, the missus and her hairdresser, half a dozen advisers, and about 50 representatives of what the Goldwaterites called “the rat-fink Eastern press.” The journalistic overflow, up to a dozen, including Rovere, followed in a slow propeller plane which they called the Enola Gay. It was, he wrote, like “giving hot pursuit to an Alfa Romeo on a tricycle.” Missing about half of Goldwater’s speeches was not all bad. “On the whole, I was more relieved than distressed by the news that our group would be unable to make Shreveport, Louisiana, where, according to one authority in our entourage, ‘there are more haters per square mile than anywhere else in the country.’ ” But he was sorry to be absent in Knoxville, where, under a rippling Confederate flag, Goldwater called for the sale of TVA to private interests, and Orlando, where he made a speech to senior citizens attacking Medicare. Rovere’s fellow traveler, Mary McGrory of the Washington Star, cheered him by pointing out the world records they had established: flying from New Orleans to Springfield, Missouri, for lunch and from Memphis to Macon for a cup of coffee.

  An embittered Goldwaterite later asked Theodore White about the new conservatives. “Where were they when we made our charge up San Juan Hill? They blew the trumpets—but when we charged, nobody followed.” Where were Bill Buckley and his stable of National Review writers? Where was Kirk? Bozell? “At least you got to say this for a liberal s.o.b. like Schlesinger—when his candidates go into action, he’s there writing speeches for them.” In fact, the Arizona Mafia considered using the new conservatives, but decided they were “too arrogant, too cold, too intolerant.”

  Johnson’s Organization. Theodore White wrote that it was “as bizarre as the organizational chart of the old China-Burma-India theater during the war.” But it worked. Johnson ran everything himself except for Jim Rowe’s citizens’ committees, which were exceptionally successful. “Until about the last week,” Rowe said, “he was perfectly happy, then he had everything so well organized, he started to come over and organize me.” The President, according to White, grouped everyone into teams.

  Team A, the Household Guard, was his immediate staff—Walter Jenkins (until his troubles), Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti. Moyers handled speeches and the media. Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, a noted word-smith and speech writer for Adlai Stevenson, moved into the Executive Office Building, where he worked up material coming in from the government agencies. He passed drafts to the speech-writing group—Richard Goodwin, Ho
race Busby, and Douglass Cater. They delivered to Moyers and the President. Moyers and Goodwin dealt with the advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, which played a critical role in the campaign.

  Team B consisted of the three lawyers in whom Johnson reposed the greatest trust—Clifford, Fortas, and Rowe. They reviewed major decisions and dealt with crises, notably the Jenkins affair, which is discussed below.

  Team C was composed of the two superb professionals inherited from Kennedy—Larry O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell. If anyone other than Johnson had been the candidate, O’Brien would have managed the campaign. Instead he ran a masterful intelligence operation. He took to the road for 23 meetings with 43 state Democratic organizations at which progress in the election was examined comprehensively, including problems and remedies. The President had never seen such political intelligence before and insisted that O’Brien dictate his analyses speedily over the telephone. Sample: A ten-page report on October 4 of eight regional meetings covering 19 states of key campaign leaders. O’Brien summarized Johnson’s standing and that of Democrats in every Senate and House race with a forecast of the probable outcome of each. The key to the election: “The bomb is the biggest issue by far. Voters are frightened of Goldwater and don’t want him in the same room with the nuclear trigger.” West of Chicago three hate books distributed by the Republicans and the Birch Society hurt. O’Brien urged putting $200,000 immediately into the close congressional races he identified.

  O’Donnell scheduled the President’s campaign trips, a complex undertaking. Efficiency note: As of October 3, every stop planned through October 17 had been fully worked out and advance people were in the field; the stops for the last two weeks of October were 80 percent finished, leaving details only in California and Pennsylvania. Significant O’Donnell observation: A serious problem was a “sense of overconfidence, which leads to apathy.” This was due to the polls and the fact that Republicans outside the South “have given up totally on the Presidential election.” This gloom spilled over onto the Democrats. O’Donnell’s was one of many reports to the White House in late September and early October of a Goldwater collapse. It was not confined to Democrats. Clifton White, after talking to Goldwater in early October, wrote that it was “obvious that the Senator had given up, though the election was then a month away.”