Getting It Right

by William F. Buckley

  Tish shrugged and, using her hands, made a sign of helplessness. She pointed an index finger down the little hallway. That meant Woodroe was in.

  She opened his door without knocking. Woodroe was on the phone.

  She stepped up to his desk and slammed her wrist down on the telephone plunger.

  “I was talking to Helena.”

  “I’m surprised they allow any Bircher in Dallas to use the phone. Now listen, Woody, and don’t contradict me. You can tell already. There are people boiling mad, and they’re looking for scalps. Right-wing scalps. They’ve already decided that the president was the victim of the Radical Right. You’re coming with me to the apartment and we’re both going to pack overnight bags. Then we’re going to the garage at Thirty-ninth Street, where I rent cars for Nathaniel and Frank. And we’re going to get out of New York City. Out to where anybody looking for Birch meat can’t find you.”

  They drove north on Route 22. “This is the road I traveled going to Sharon,” Lee said. “I guess you did too.”

  It didn’t greatly matter which motel they checked in at. “Far enough to be just plain out of the way, but not so far we’d be out of reach of television coverage. You remember Mrs. Coley in Sharon? At her house she didn’t get any TV signal.”

  They stopped in Dover Plains at a roadside motel.

  Woodroe kept the engine running while Lee went in to check.

  Did they have television in the rooms?

  Yes.

  Was there a restaurant?

  In the back.

  In their room, Lee sat in the armchair, Woodroe on the bed, his shoulders against the headboard. On the screen was a dizzying whirlwind of pictures centered on the assassination. Every few minutes there were shots of the president smiling as he entered the fateful car, Jackie on his left wearing the pink hat that would be famous. Up front, Texas governor John Connally, and the driver. Then the entourage arriving at Parkland Hospital. The gurney carrying the stricken president in. Then forward to twenty minutes later and the shot of the doctor, announcing that the president was dead. Then Air Force One, waiting for its godforsaken passengers, one of them dead in a coffin. Then shots of a movie theater. Of a police car approaching the theater. Of a handcuffed young man being bustled into a police car. Of cars with sirens sounding. Of the outside of a police station. The voice of a U.S. marshal, insisting on silence, all but blinded by the flashbulbs. Finally he could make himself heard.

  One Lee Harvey Oswald had been charged with the murder of Patrolman J. D. Tippit. Tippit was a member of the Dallas police force, found dead a few blocks from the Texas Theater, in which the alleged assailant was detected and taken away in handcuffs.

  But was that the same guy who killed Kennedy?

  The police chief said that a second arraignment was expected later in the evening, and would be given to the press in an orderly way.

  Obviously it was Oswald.

  But if it was Lee Harvey Oswald who did it, who was Oswald? And what was he up to? Killing John Fitzgerald Kennedy? The most personable, the most—enchanting president, chief of state, anywhere. In a matter of minutes, it seemed, the idol of the Western world.

  David Susskind was giving background on Channel 13, the educational television channel in New York. He reported that the “consensus”—“How do you get a consensus in eight hours?” Lee thundered—“around the country” was that the assassination had been done by a right-winger inflamed by the “odium” the president was held in, again, in “right-wing circles.” In Phoenix, a reporter sometime after 10 P.M. flashed the news that an unidentified gunman had pumped two shots through the window of a John Birch Society office. A witness had heard the shooter cry out, “You killed my man!” The young man in charge of the National Draft Goldwater Committee in Washington closed down the office. He was visibly reluctant, when the microphone was thrust on him, to comment on the assassination, but the enterprising reporter, who had acted on a rumor that the Goldwater office would be closing down, finally prevailed on him. Lee Edwards told the reporter that threatening phone calls had come in back-to-back and that Goldwater secretaries had received death threats.

  “Death threats like what?” the reporter persevered, pursuing Edwards right to the door of his car.

  “Like?” Edwards’s face showed exasperation and a measure of fright. He let it all out finally: “Like, they’re saying, some of the callers, You sons of bitches, you killed him! Exasperation like that.”

  NBC viewers saw then the doleful face of a bishop in Wisconsin who had summoned his parishioners for a special vesper service. The camera closed in on his words. “I know that very often, each of us did not just disagree, we poured forth our vituperation. The accumulation of this hatred expressed itself in the bullet that killed John Kennedy this afternoon. I think we know this and I think it has made us realize just how dreadful we people can be.”

  Woodroe closed his eyes and thought hard on those words. Was he in fact engaged in peddling mortal hatred? Was the JBS? Was Bob Welch?

  The NBC camera moved back to the airport, back to Dealey Plaza, back to Parkland Hospital, back to the Texas Theater.

  Lee said she was going downstairs to bring up something to eat. Twenty minutes later, carrying a package, she worked the door open.

  “Quiet!” Woodroe hissed, absorbed.

  She turned toward the television set, easing her package of food and drink down on the bed.

  “Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee”—the police chief was reading from notes. “He is a former marine who in 1959 renounced his citizenship and emigrated to Communist Russia. But in February of this year, Oswald reclaimed U.S. citizenship.”

  “My God!” said Lee. “It was one of them.”

  37

  THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS did not end, could not end, with the assassination. The king is dead. Long live Lyndon Baines Johnson. But of course there were dissenters. The Grand Old Party. And the question for many was: Who would contend against the new king in November, a year away?

  William J. Baroody, age forty-eight, liked to think of himself as more than just a think-tank executive. He was proud of the American Enterprise Institute he had taken on. It was now twenty-one years old and, by covenant and practice, was as forthrightly devoted to the promotion of free markets and to opposition to statist government as it could be without arousing the Internal Revenue Service. It was, after all, the IRS that vouchsafed the precious tax-exempt status, required by most prospective donors contemplating gifts. What the AEI did was undertake research on projects Baroody thought useful to right-minded students of economics and politics. It sponsored and conducted seminars and made modest grants to graduate students of what the AEI deemed the right persuasion who needed economic help to pursue their studies.

  But churning in the big, convivial, cunning Armenian was a consuming desire to get his hand into street politics. Specifically, he wanted a creative hand in effecting the nomination of Barry Goldwater as Republican presidential candidate in San Francisco, six months down the road.

  Goldwater liked Baroody (everybody liked Baroody) and agreed to detach the better part of two days of his planned fortnight in Palm Beach with his wife’s family to a very private meeting with Baroody and four others nominated by Baroody and individually approved by Goldwater.

  They were Jay Gordon Hall, a discreet lobbyist for General Motors whom Goldwater knew and had been advised by in matters dealing with labor legislation; Stephen Shadegg, the journalist, writer, and man of affairs who had managed Barry Goldwater’s successful campaign for the Senate in 1952; Russell Kirk, a young yet already eminent historian and political scientist whose book The Conservative Mind was continuingly influential and who wrote a fortnightly column for National Review; and William Buckley, National Review’s editor and founder, whom Goldwater had several times met and shared a platform with.

  There was one negative injunction. Baroody placed a conference call with the participants early in th
e week: No direct exhortation to run for president.

  Baroody’s endearing swagger worked also over the telephone. “Goldwater has not said he would seek the Republican nomination, and has said he won’t make his mind up on the matter until some unspecified time in the next few months. Just understand, between us: He has thought about the nomination, and he has decided to seek it.

  “Now, that doesn’t mean he mightn’t change his mind. One thing we want to do is—encourage him. Treat him as if he hadn’t made up his mind. But do it without seeming to be egging him on. And very much on the agenda is the whole Radical Right business, especially the John Birch Society. Jay, you have some special something to tell us on that score, right?”

  “Right, Bill.”

  “So see you in the sunny climes of West Palm Beach. As Ralph Emerson said to Walt Whitman, I greet you at the outset of great careers! Kingmakers!”

  The guests were housed in small oceanfront suites in the mammoth Breakers Hotel, uncrowded this week in January. The hotel had shuffled off its Christmas patrons and was preparing now for the guests who would come in February and stay, many of them, through Easter.

  Baroody had set up a comfortable meeting room with sofas and armchairs and a couple of card tables, as required for the six participants. They had been instructed to dress informally. The senator, predictably, would appear in his Arizona-style jeans, including the leather belt with the silver border and turquoise buckle. Steve Shadegg, also from Arizona, was similarly dressed, though without the great Aztec belt. Informal dress was no hardship for Russell Kirk, who, for all his cosmopolitan travel, lived and worked in the rural north of Michigan, surrounded by lakes and great trees and a thousand books. The code proved unsuited to Jay Hall, denizen of that studiedly withdrawn little division of the General Motors Corporation whose concern was for public policy as it affected GM. In the warm Florida weather, Jay was persuaded to put his jacket aside, but the best he could do with his tie was to loosen it. Buckley appeared in his usual Ivy League off-duty garb: khaki pants, blue button-down shirt, and light gray sweater.

  They sat down and had coffee, awaiting the senator.

  “Don’t have to save any coffee for Barry. He doesn’t drink it,” Baroody said pleasantly.

  “You’re right about that, Bill.” Goldwater had walked into the room and put down his cowboy hat. He greeted everyone. “Steve, Jay, Bill, Dr. Kirk.”

  Baroody never seemed pressed, and so for a half hour the conversation touched informally and engagingly on events of recent days. On the last day in November, President Johnson had appointed a commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. Its chairman was Chief Justice Earl Warren. “That will confirm to Bob Welch that the whole thing was a Communist operation,” Goldwater wisecracked. “But there’s not going to be much fooling around on this subject. It’s a pity that Communist son-of-a-bitch Oswald had to go and get himself killed. We need to find out if there are any ties there.”

  Baroody encouraged talk on the implications of the sudden end of John Kennedy. He knew that Kennedy’s death had greatly affected the political Goldwater. A few weeks after the assassination, Goldwater had said over drinks one night that he couldn’t see the American people tolerating three presidents in twelve months’ time. “The 1964 election will take place less than one year after Dallas. So are the American people going to want Kennedy. . . Johnson . . . Goldwater in the space of twelve months?”

  The thing to do, Baroody thought, was to emphasize that Kennedy was gone and that Johnson was headed in the wrong direction for America. Baroody cited, with amusement shared by Goldwater, the one-sentence editorial in National Review in December. “The editors regretfully announce that their patience with President Lyndon Johnson has been exhausted.”

  Goldwater was coming around, and every reference to Kennedy as yesterday’s news helped. The Warren Commission would emphasize not the tragedy but who and what were responsible for that tragedy.

  But then Jay Hall said he thought it would be of general interest, and of very great interest to the senator, to discuss a report done for the benefit of the leaders of the United Auto Workers, the Reuther brothers. “It’s secret. But the White House has a copy of it and—is acting on it. Let me give you the guts of it. It’s twenty-one pages long, but I have parts of it pulled out.”

  He handed a sheaf of papers to each participant. “You’ll notice they are numbered, ’cause I’ll have to have them all back. Remember, this is a supersecret private report to the Reuther brothers. The United Auto Workers are to the left of the American labor movement generally, but the UAW dominates union industrial policy. The Reuthers are interested in November 1964: Johnson versus—versus whoever is nominated by the Republicans.”

  Hall brought up his own copy and read, “‘The Radical Right’s forces are bounded on the Left by Senator Goldwater and on the Right by Robert Welch.’”

  “So I am a left-winger!” Goldwater grinned. He turned to Buckley. “Will you people read me out of the party?”

  Everyone laughed. Hall went on.

  “The report says, ‘It is late in the day to start dealing with these problems.’ It says the same thing several times. Now, here is something else I have, and something not even Baroody has got hold of. It’s a White House report reacting to the Reuther report. It’s written by Lee White of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s staff. It outlines proposed means of combating the American Right. (1) Curb right-wing activities in the armed forces. (2) Get the attorney general to classify a few ultraright outfits as ‘subversive,’ in the same way the attorney general has identified some Communist organizations, ever since the 1930s, as subversive. (3) Get the IRS to review the records of these organizations—like the John Birch Society and YAF—and see if some damage can be done through discreet publicity. And (4) get the FBI to plant some informers in these organizations.”

  There was silence.

  Goldwater said, “Steve, Bill, why don’t you people get on this? Steve has his contacts in the press, Bill has his magazine.”

  “Barry, you’re right. But”—Baroody dramatically covered his eyes with his open hand—“we need to look into our own stable here for a minute. So I think between now and lunch we should talk about . . . the John Birch Society. Bobby Kennedy has singled it out for criticism, and everybody guessed the JBS was what JFK was talking about in his speech in California in November 1962. I’m wondering, Barry, whether you shouldn’t just step forward and . . . shrug off the John Birch Society.”

  Round and round they went. Shadegg several times reported on how many of his friends in Arizona were members of the Society. “They don’t know that Welch thinks Ike is a Communist, and if they knew they wouldn’t care.”

  Jay Hall worried about the fragility of the conservative movement within the GOP, which was dominated by such liberal stalwarts as Governor Rockefeller. “With the administration and, who knows, even the FBI going after our people—you saw the list. It’s not only the John Birch Society and General Walker and Ayn Rand. It’s George Benson and Fred Schwarz, the Volcker Fund, the H. L. Hunt outfit, what’s left of it—”

  “Facts Forum,” said Buckley.

  “Yes, Facts Forum. I just don’t think we should give ground here.”

  Russell Kirk vigorously disagreed. “It’s not a matter of giving ground, Jay. It’s a matter of not ce-ceding” (Kirk spoke with an occasional stammer) “ground we don’t want. It’s not like giving up Quemoy and Matsu, which would be surrendering Taiwanese islands to mainland China. In giving up John Birch, we’re not giving up anything we should want.”

  At 12:30, the maître d’hôtel came in, followed by two waiters, two trays of food, and a bar.

  “Tell you what,” Baroody said, “let’s get off this subject at lunch. There’s a lot else to talk about. Like the increasing cost of Johnson’s government and—good sign—presidential economic adviser Walter Heller urging tax reduction.”

  “Yes,” said Shadegg, pausing to sig
nal to the waiter, scotch on the rocks, a twist of lemon. “There’s a whole lot the GOP has to concern itself with. But on how it should deal with the Radical Right is something we—you especially, Barry—can have a lot to say about.”

  Baroody turned to Buckley. “What are you thinking, Bill?”

  “What I’ve got to worry about is whether any of those FBI plants have gotten into National Review!”

  Reviewing his notes at the end of the afternoon, Baroody said that Kirk and Buckley would continue to expose the weaknesses of the Birch Society, but without calling for its corporate rejection from the conservative movement. “And you, Barry, you’re willing to go, but only with criticizing Bob Welch. Steve, you’ve said you’d do a survey in Arizona and tell Barry what you came up with. Tell me too, will you, old buddy? Jay, you’ll look for an opportunity to get a copy of the Reuther report through conventional channels. Barry will look for an opportunity to get somebody from the administration to demand a congressional hearing. Ask some questions. Those questions need asking. There’s the First Amendment somewhere around, supposed to protect dissent.”

  The assembly dispersed. Buckley was off to give a speech at St. Augustine and would be back late that evening. Kirk had a lecture to prepare, and a chapter for his new book. Baroody went to Peggy Goldwater’s for drinks and supper.

  They’d all reassemble the next morning.

  38

  THE WARREN COMMISSION hearings into the assassination of John F. Kennedy were conducted in different cities, always in utmost secrecy. Witnesses were permitted counsel. And of course, as the chief counsel for the commission, J. Lee Rankin, had said on the first day, “This is not a criminal proceeding. There is of course abundant evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald fired at the president, but the commission will be bound by no presuppositions. The commission proposes to unearth anything we can that will be useful to an evaluation of the whole, tragic event.”