Team D called itself the “Five O’clock Club” or the “Anti-Goldwater Program,” specializing in the quick counterpunch. Myer Feldman and Fred Dutton, two Kennedy holdovers, were in charge and more than a dozen smart people contributed, including Wilbur Cohen, Tom Finney, James Sundquist, and Adam Yarmolinsky. The team met daily at 9:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. According to Theodore White, they had Goldwater’s schedule and even the texts of his speeches in advance. Thus, the Democratic mayor, governor, or congressman was supplied with a refutation that would appear in the same issue of the local paper with the story on Goldwater’s speech. Rockefeller turned over his files, which saved Team D time. It also published books—You Can Die Laughing, Goldwater vs. Republicans, a book of cartoons, a picture book. They prepared questions for reporters who were at Goldwater press conferences and suggested topics for columnists. They wrote letters to advice columnists Ann Landers and Mary Hayworth. When Goldwater attacked Kennedy in Seattle, they prepared a sentimental newspaper reply.
Team E was the Democratic National Committee chaired by John Bailey of Connecticut. Johnson had a low regard for the committee and Baily realistically described its role as “housekeeping.” It concentrated on voter registration and, along with AFL-CIO’s COPE, probably added 2 million Democratic voters in 1964.
The masterpiece was Jim Rowe’s citizens’ committees for businessmen, labor, farmers, women, youth, scientists and engineers, artists and writers, and others. They served two main purposes: to provide a home for disaffected Republicans and to offer prominent citizens an opportunity to voice their concerns over Goldwater, particularly on The Bomb.
Goldwater, of course, had divided his party decisively in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter a dozen top Republicans, including Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Rockefeller, Scranton, and Governor Romney of Michigan, had met in Hershey, Pennsylvania, hoping to reunite the party. Theodore White, who read a copy of the transcript, wrote that “no more dreary document has turned up in American political history.” Goldwater made no effort to stanch the flow of blood.
The result was a massive Republican defection to the Johnson-Humphrey ticket, including some very important people. The former showed up in the polls. Alf Landon, the presidential candidate in 1936, had worked for a year to stop Goldwater. He pointed to the “terrible destruction of a Goldwater candidacy to the good Republican candidates at all levels, as well as to the party institution, and the damage Goldwater’s candidacy does to maintaining a responsible foreign policy.” Rockefeller, of course, detested Goldwater and helped Johnson. Lewis Douglas of Arizona, who had been FDR’s first budget director and had resigned over the unbalanced budget, had not supported a Democrat since 1932 and had backed Goldwater in both of his Senate races. Now he thought his fellow Arizonan’s nomination a “tragic mistake” and publicly backed Johnson. He was one of many prominent bankers and businessmen to do so. Ed Mennis of the Wellington Fund had attended a luncheon of eleven top business executives. One “confessed” that he would vote for Johnson. Eight others made the same confession. Only two had ever voted for a Democrat before—for Al Smith in 1928! One was undecided. Goldwater got one vote.
Former undersecretary of the treasury Henry H. Fowler had created the highly successful Business Committee for Tax Reduction to push the tax cut. Rowe got Fowler to repeat this performance with the National Independent Committee for Johnson and Humphrey, whose members consisted of many of the industrial and financial leaders in the U.S.
Writers and artists, already heavily Democratic, could hardly be restrained from showing their distaste for Goldwater. Rowe installed Roger L. Stevens, the theatrical producer, as head of that committee, which included many of the brightest minds in the country.
The Bomb. Goldwater made nuclear war the fundamental issue and it vaporized him. Following the new conservatives, he had long argued that the U.S. must not negotiate with the Soviets but must defeat them. No one had any idea of how this could be done without the use of nuclear weapons. His name appeared on the spine of a book called Why Not Victory?. In September 1963 he had made an impassioned speech against the test ban treaty and had then voted against ratification. It was hardly the first time, but in October he told the press that the U.S. could reduce its forces in Europe if “commanders” were empowered to use tactical nuclear weapons on their own initiative. During the primaries Rockefeller and Scranton had attacked him mercilessly on this issue. But Goldwater did not know how to keep his mouth shut. He insisted that he was misunderstood and repeatedly “explained” his position to a puzzled and increasingly fearful public.
Thus, the Democrats got free an issue that in itself guaranteed their victory. Larry O’Brien said later, “The overriding issue in 1964 was, very simply, in one word, Goldwater.” Rovere asked a matron in Atlanta covered with Goldwater-Miller buttons if her candidate’s views on nuclear warfare troubled her. “Certainly not,” she replied. “We’re not cowards down here.” There were very few who shared this view.
The Democrats exploited the issue relentlessly. Television expert Tony Schwartz created two extraordinary TV commercials. The first opened with a little girl, her hair tossing in the wind, picking daisies. She then plucked the petals of a flower, counting up. A doomsday male voice joined hers at 10, but counted in reverse. When he reached zero, there was an immense explosion and a mushroom cloud rose slowly into the sky. President Johnson said, “These are the stakes. … We must either love each other, or we must die.” The voice of doom returned: Vote for Johnson. “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”
The second showed a little girl licking an ice cream cone. A woman’s voice told her that atomic bombs used to be exploded in the air and that the fallout made children die. A treaty now forbade testing in the atmosphere. But Goldwater had voted against it. A Geiger counter clicked in crescendo. The announcer repeated the voting message.
These spots ran on television in mid-September and created a sensation. Goldwater and many others, including many Democrats, were outraged and the first ad was withdrawn. But it was too late; the damage had been done. “It is my candid opinion,” O’Brien wrote the President, “that this ad did more to crystallize public opinion against Goldwater than any other single tool we are using.”
The Republicans agreed. Their headquarters team desperately tried to think of an answer without success. Kitchel said, “I would lie awake asking myself at night, how do you get at the bomb issue? My candidate had been branded as a bomb-dropper—and I couldn’t figure out how to lick it.” He called in experts on selling toothpaste and cars, but they, too, were helpless.
Johnson would not allow Goldwater to self-destruct and insisted on presenting himself as the only candidate who advocated peace, especially in Vietnam. According to his Public Papers, he reassured mothers several times that he would not send Americans to die in a war in Vietnam that should be fought by Asians:
I want to be very cautious and careful … when I start dropping bombs around that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700 million Chinese.
…for the moment I have not thought that we were ready for American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. What I have been trying to do … was to get the boys in Viet-Nam to do their own fighting with our advice and our equipment.
Goldwater as Radical The bomb issue fed into an extraordinary transformation: the nation’s leading conservative became a radical in the public mind. A Harris poll released in July 1964 forecast this result. It asked how Americans stood on ten basic foreign and domestic issues. On eight, Harris wrote, “The American people feel they are in sharp disagreement with the Arizona senator.” Conclusion: “Barry Goldwater has a massive communications problem.” While the logic may be strained, it followed that a politician who failed to communicate with the American people must be a “radical.”
By September the Democratic polls showed that folks were afraid of Goldwater because he was a “kind of radical.” Stephen Shadegg, the manager of the Arizonan’s earli
er senatorial campaigns, wrote that “Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater had changed places. The Republican candidate was now the dangerous radical.”
Goldwater and Race. Though he had voted against the Civil Rights Act, Goldwater insisted that he was not a racist and bristled when he was called one. But, excepting his home state, the only region from which he won any support was the Deep South and there because he was perceived as a racist.
Goldwater prided himself on being for states’ rights. Yet, in his law and order speech in St. Petersburg, Rovere wrote, he asserted that crime was so rampant that the federal government must stamp it out. He allowed himself to become the centerpiece for “great numbers of unapologetic white supremacists to hold great carnivals of white supremacy.” This was certainly the case in the lily-white rally in Crampton Bowl outside Birmingham. The football field was strewn with living lilies—700 white Alabama girls in long white dresses. Rovere concluded that the large Goldwater movement in the South “appears to be a racist movement and very little else.”
Ronald Reagan’s Appearance. The former movie actor and General Electric luncheon speaker was testing the right-wing political waters in 1964. He had supported Goldwater against Rockefeller in the California primary. Now, basing his remarks on his G.E. speech, he taped an address, “A Time for Choosing,” scheduled for network TV on October 27. But Kitchel tried to cancel it because Reagan attacked Social Security and he thought his man had suffered enough on that issue. A distressed Reagan appealed to Goldwater to overrule Kitchel and, when the candidate made no decision, interpreted this as assent. The speech went on the air. While it had no impact on the election, Republican conservatives lapped it up, and, according to Clifton White, Reagan’s performance “catapulted him into the political limelight.”
Johnson’s Campaign. There was some talk at the outset, particularly by John Connally, that he should be “presidential,” tending to the nation’s business in the Oval Office, going out to the country only on ceremonial and nonpolitical missions. If this was, in fact, the plan, it belied Lyndon Johnson’s nature and his Texas origin. He loved to say on the stump, “Y’all come down to the speakin’.” He throve on a political contest, was exhilarated by the crowds, and loved to press the flesh.
On September 28 the real Johnson emerged. He ventured into Kennedy country for six stops in one day—Providence to Hartford to Burlington to Portland to Manchester and on into Boston at 2 a.m. If he had any doubts about the reception he would receive, Providence put them to rest. The Rhode Island capital had a population of 208,000; Theodore White estimated the turnout as “perhaps half a million.” Richard Goodwin had campaigned with Kennedy in 1960 and had been impressed by the number of people on the streets. Now there were “unprecedented crowds, dwarfing the Kennedy receptions.” Despite the fact that the Warren Commission report had been published that day, Johnson gave the Secret Service fits. He yelled at the crowds through a bullhorn, encouraged them to climb on the car, and shook so many hands that his right paw became swollen, bruised, and bled. He was 70 minutes late for the convocation at Brown University. So it went at every stop he made.
On October 9 Larry O’Brien met with the campaign managers, along with Speaker McCormack and Chairman Bailey, at the Parker House in Boston for a five-hour review of New England. He reported to the President:
You are about to make history in New England. You should become the first Democratic candidate for President in history to win all six New England states. It seems certain you will win Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island; it is highly likely that you will win New Hampshire; and the chances of your winning Maine and Vermont are much brighter than I would have believed at the start of this campaign. As you know, Vermont never has gone Democratic in a Presidential election, but our people there firmly believe you will win the state.
O’Brien was confident that the four Democratic senators up for reelection would win. The Republican in New Hampshire looked safe, but his opponent had an outside chance. He thought it fairly likely that the House delegation, already heavily Democratic, would add another Democrat in each of Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire.
After the smashing success in New England, Johnson poured it on across the country. Since the polls showed him victorious by a landslide and his crowds were enormous and enthusiastic, he no longer seemed satisfied with merely winning. He seemed to want, Rovere wrote, “about seventy million [votes] and five hundred and thirty-eight in the Electoral College.” Someone observed that, if he lost ten states, “he might decline to serve, saying that he just didn’t want to be President unless he could be President of all the people.” Johnson wanted to win by the biggest margin in history and received a staff memorandum on that topic.
“Biggest margin” presented a problem. If one measured by the number of electoral votes, FDR in 1936 held the record with 515. If by the percentage of electoral votes, Washington was supreme with 100 percent in 1789 and 1792. During the Era of Good Feelings Monroe would have reached the same level except that William Plumer of New Hampshire wanted only Washington to be perfect. Thus, Monroe received 99.006 percent. In modern times Roosevelt in 1936 was at the top with 98.5. He was also first in his winning margin of 11,072,014 votes. For the percentage of the total vote Harding in 1920 led with 60.4 and FDR in 1936 was second with 60.2 percent.
The Jenkins Affair. Johnson’s supreme confidence in his campaign was temporarily shattered on October 14. Walter Jenkins was the most trusted and loyal member of his staff. He had worked for Johnson, excepting military service and an unsuccessful campaign for Congress, since 1939, and made himself available at any hour. He was dedicated, thorough, and precise. Listeners knew that he spoke for the President. He was treasurer of the Johnson family corporation, handled sensitive tax papers, and dealt confidentially with the FBI. He was married, the father of six children, and a devout Catholic.
Jenkins had been arrested and booked by the Washington police in 1959 on a morals charge. Then and in 1964 homosexuality was illegal in most states and the District of Columbia. On October 7, 1964, he left work at the White House for a party celebrating the opening of the new offices of Newsweek, where he had several drinks. He then went to the basement of the YMCA, a rendezvous for homosexuals, which had been staked out by the police. Shortly, Jenkins and an elderly Army veteran were arrested and booked on charges of disorderly conduct. Jenkins posted a $50 bond and was released. He went back to work at the White House.
The FBI, according to Theodore White, leaked the story to the Republican National Committee and the committee’s investigator examined the police blotter. Goldwater learned of the arrest and chose to remain silent. The Chicago Tribune and Cincinnati Enquirer (two of the few Republican papers that remained loyal to Goldwater) received the story and decided not to publish. On October 14 the President was in New York campaigning jointly with Robert Kennedy and was staying at the Waldorf Astoria. George Reedy, his press officer, was with him.
That morning Charles Seib, the assistant managing editor of the Washington Star, called the White House, White wrote, “with heavy heart,” to seek confirmation of the story. The call was relayed to Walter Jenkins. When he hung up, he went straight to Abe Fortas at his home.
Jenkins was so distraught that, Fortas said, he “could not at that moment put one word consecutively after another.” The lawyer slowly drew the outline of the story from him. He then phoned Clark Clifford. “Walter Jenkins is here with me. He needs our help.” He told Clifford to meet him outside the latter’s office in ten minutes.
Fortas recounted to Clifford what he knew as they drove to the Star. “It had to be a mistake,” Clifford said. “It couldn’t be the same Walter Jenkins we both knew.” They agreed to tell no one at the White House or the President.
They met with Newbold Noyes, Jr., the editor of the Star, and told him what they knew. They asked him not to publish the story. Noyes asked whether they knew all the facts. They did not. He told them two of his reporters had examined t
he police blotter on October 8, had confirmed the arrest, and had learned of the 1959 incident. Noyes said this was a human tragedy as well as a news story. Normally the Star did not print such stories and would hold back if the other papers also did so. The News also had the story and agreed not to publish. The Post did not know about the event and its editor said that he wanted time to consider the question.
Fortas went to his home where Jenkins was resting with his doctor. When the attorney told him what he had learned, Jenkins, Clifford wrote, “came apart completely.” The doctor gave him a sedative and took him to the George Washington University Hospital.
Clifford went to the White House where he talked to Moyers and, later, Fortas. They decided to ask the President for the authority for Fortas to obtain Jenkins’s resignation. They talked to Johnson in New York, who, according to Clifford, was “struck dumb” by the news. He reluctantly granted the authorization and Fortas persuaded Jenkins to resign.
By late afternoon the news was all over Washington and, soon, the entire country. Reedy, weeping openly for an old friend, confirmed the story in New York. Dean Burch, chairman of the Republican National Committee, issued what Clifford called “a cruel and cryptic statement.” “There is a report sweeping Washington that the White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security.”
Guns or Butter Page 22
