Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  The first issue rolled off the presses in November of 1955. The baffled criticisms came soon after. That of John Fischer, editor of Harper’s, was typical. He said he had high hopes for National Review as “a remarkably useful addition to the American scene.” Those hopes “did not survive the first half-dozen issues. By that time it was plain that the new magazine was an organ, not of conservatism, but of radicalism.” His conclusion: “it will have a certain interest for students of political splinter movements.” He wondered why these “conservatives” could not abide a fellow like Dwight Eisenhower, who was so judiciously conserving the progress of the FDR years, without recklessly expanding them. In the immediate postwar years, in fact, the meaning of “conservatism” had been up in the air. When Senators Nixon and Kennedy first ran for Congress in 1946, the former ran as a “practical liberal,” the latter as a “fighting conservative.” The poet and political philosopher Peter Viereck, the first to argue that conservatism was a rebellion against a liberal status quo, argued that a true conservative should welcome the welfare state as a stabilizing force. As did Tory journalist Peregrine Worsthorne: “For only if the many are spared economic hardship can the few expect to enjoy economic and social privilege.” But National Review’s conservatives seemed scarcely concerned with anything so pedestrian, so materialist, as economic and social privilege.

  “Are you for majority rule in the U.S.A.?” Mike Wallace asked Buckley on his television interview program.

  “Yes,” came the exhalation from the graceful man leaning back in his chair across from him. “Unless the majority decides we should go Communist. I would try to subvert any Communist society.”

  Wallace: “You mean you would turn revolutionary?”

  Buckley: “Yes. I am already a revolutionary against the present liberal order. An intellectual revolutionary.”

  There hadn’t been anything like National Review since the Marxist weeklies of the 193os—not surprising, since many of its editors were veterans. “The Tranquil World of Dwight Eisenhower” (an article that ran in the January 18, 1958, issue) was boring. National Review never was. “We are an opposition,” wrote NR chief theoretician Frank Meyer, “and we have to fight conformity.” Arch wit and stylistic daring were revered in the cramped offices on East 37th Street. Garry Wills, a young Midwestern seminarian brought on board as drama critic on the strength of one unsolicited manuscript, and two of the most influential critical stylists of the 196os, John Leonard and Joan Didion, got their start in the the magazine’s culture pages. But culture was the undercard. The main event was exposing the Liberals (the word was always capitalized, sticking out like an unlovely anomaly in the march of Western Civilization) as an unaccountable establishment—a mission formalized, in early issues, by eleven separate columns, each devoted to monitoring a single redoubt: the intelligentsia (Willmoore Kendall on “The Liberal Line”), foreign policy (James Burnham on “The Third Cold War”), newspapers (Karl Hess on “The Press of Freedom”), and on and on.

  National Review rode an impressive postwar tide of conservative intellectual work that, wrote an observer, “would tax the dialectical agility of a thirty-third degree Trotskyite.” They believed that the bulwark of any civilization was not industry or riches or men under arms, but ideas. The West was imperiled because it was infected by error: by materialism, in the philosophical sense of the word, believing the world to be wholly composed of ordinary physical matter and of valuing physical well-being as an ultimate end. And materialism’s handmaids: humanism and egalitarianism, which assumed man had unlimited power to order his own world; pragmatism, which said whatever worked was right; and utopianism, the doomed attempt to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth (Buckley liked to call that “immanentizing the eschaton”). The offenders were both Democrats (Kennedy: “Our problems are man-made; they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants”) and Republicans (Rockefeller: The ideal politician “goes in and says, ‘I want to find out what the facts are.’ Then he adapts his program and his approach to the realities”). It was the political water America was swimming in—a swamp, Buckley’s acolytes thought.

  If this was abstruse stuff, that only added to the thrill of belonging to the club. Young National Review readers were discovering one another. The spring that Conscience of a Conservative was published, the Midwest Federation of College Republicans meeting in Des Moines, overwhelmed with a record 435 delegates, resolved by voice vote to endorse Barry Goldwater for vice president. A group of them who had met through the loyalty oath fight formed Youth for Goldwater for Vice President, headed by Caddy and a University of Indiana student who was active in ISI, Robert Croll. Within a few weeks Youth for Goldwater had sixty-four campus chapters in thirty-two states, a headquarters in Washington, and a mentor: an edgy right-wing publicist named Marvin Liebman, for whom Caddy was working that summer, and who was going to the Republican National Convention to plump for an old China Lobby stalwart, Republican Walter Judd of Minnesota, for vice president.

  Restless, lonely teenagers discovering their first intellectual and political high; craggy old Midwestern foundry men counting their inflation-addled dollars and chasing the unions from their gates; the newly wealthy in a changing South—and the gruff and glamorous cowboy aristocrat whom they all pictured when they closed their eyes and imagined their political beau ideal: quietly, just below the notice of a media and political establishment for whom such a confluence was unimaginable, something was happening—“like the meeting of the Blue and White Nile,” as William Rusher, publisher of National Review, would describe it much later, although at the time he chose a different metaphor: “I think we had better pull in our belts and buckle down to a long period of real impotence. Hell, the catacombs were good enough for the Christians!”

  The tributaries would converge in Chicago that summer at Richard Nixon’s Republican National Convention. Croll began organizing National Youth for Goldwater for Vice President full-time out of a Chicago attic with funds raised via a National Review ad and a dollar-a-head membership fee. Manion’s allies in the South Carolina Republican Party at their state convention on March 26, clutching advance copies of Conscience of a Conservative, listened to Goldwater criticize Nixon’s “complacent attitude” toward the South and, in a move coordinated by Manion that caught Goldwater quite by surprise, pledged their thirteen convention delegates to him. Manion immediately began mobilizing for a repeat performance in Mississippi in April. He opened an Americans for Goldwater headquarters in Chicago on July 7; a full-page ad ran in the Tribune on July 13. People were coming to the dean and asking how to organize their own clubs; soon there were hundreds of Americans for Goldwater chapters.

  And, almost incidentally, there was a flesh-and-blood man named Barry Goldwater, the one who gave twenty-three speeches in thirteen states in the first two months of 1960 on behalf of the Republican Party. Three months after its debut, the Los Angeles Times column with his name at its head had drawn a thousand fan letters, three of four expressing a desire to vote for Goldwater for President; in April the column went into syndication. The book with his name on the cover would soon be selling in a torrent. A bit shaken by it all, the man behind the byline, a loyal party soldier, met with the vice president to assure him how startled and dismayed he had been when the crowd in South Carolina got so out of hand. But he added that if Nixon ignored the amazing swell in conservative sentiment in the country, he might be sorry. Privately he resolved to force Nixon’s hand. “In the last six weeks Dick has shown a decided tendency to drift far to the left,” he wrote a friend, Phoenix lawyer William Rehnquist, in a letter instructing the Arizona delegation to vote for Nixon at the convention, “and this has caused such consternation among the party workers across the country that we must employ means to get him back on track.”

  He concluded: “I would rather see the Republicans lose in 1960 fighting on principle, than I would care to see us win standing on grounds we know are wrong and on which we will ultimately destro
y ourselves.”

  There was ample provocation that spring and summer for Goldwater’s Cold War hard line to resonate: It seemed as if Communism was on the march. In April, student riots in South Korea brought down the government of ally Syngman Rhee; in Turkey another friendly government held on by a thread after riots in May. Soviet foreign minister Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba, to an unusually warm reception, as part of Khrushchev’s campaign for Third World countries to rise up against “capitalist imperialism”; then Castro nationalized the oil refineries. Eisenhower, in the Far East on a final goodwill tour, was kept from Japan for fear for his safety after students took to the streets in outrage at a mutual security pact Japan’s government had signed with the United States; in Africa, independence celebrations in the new nation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo were followed by the secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga, then an invitation by prime minister Patrice Lumumba to the Soviet Union to intervene, then by Westerners fleeing by the thousands one step ahead of—a new household phrase—“anti-American mobs.” Were the swarms in Turkey and Korea and Japan and the Congo, rising so close in succession, directed by the Communists? What, for that matter, about the student mobs from Berkeley who rioted that May in protest against hearings held in San Francisco by the House Committee on Un-American Activities?

  But it wasn’t Goldwater who seized the moment. It was Nelson Rockefeller.

  Rockefeller was a Cold War hawk almost to the degree (if not exactly the kind) of Goldwater. An early proposal he put forward as governor was to assess each New York family the over $300 it would require to build a bomb shelter for every household in the state. The argument was the same as in Conscience: whichever side was able to render nuclear war less unthinkable had the advantage. “Are we going to arrive at a point some day,” he asked at a civil defense seminar in March, “when the president will say: ‘Well, how can we afford to stand for freedom? With the people exposed, can we run that risk?’ ” He introduced a new phrase to the American lexicon that summer: “missile gap”—the assertion that the Soviets had hundreds more nuclear projectiles than did the United States. He based the charge on one of his Rockefeller Brothers Special Studies Fund reports. Then he amplified it to revive his presidential bid.

  In fact, data from U2 spy planes had demonstrated that the USSR’s arsenal of bombers and missiles that could reach the United States was nearly nonexistent. But that intelligence was top secret, unknown even to a New York governor—a rule of espionage being that you can’t let your enemy know what you know about them. (“I can’t understand the United States being quite as panicky as they are,” Eisenhower once said, forgetting that he was one of only a handful of people who knew that the empire that threatened to bury us could in fact do no such thing.) Republican leaders scurried to shut Rockefeller up. Nixon leaked that the governor was first choice for vice president; Kentucky senator Thruston Morton, chair of the Republican National Convention, offered him the keynote speech in Chicago. Rocky rebuffed them. “I hate the thought of Dick Nixon being president of the United States,” he told confidants.

  Events turned up the temperature. Another East-West summit was coming up, and it was so eagerly anticipated that it became a pop culture phenomenon: when Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis Jr. began performing together at the Sands in Las Vegas, the act was billed as “The Summit.” But then a U2 plane was felled by a Soviet S-75 missile 1,300 miles deep in Russian territory, and the Soviets canceled the honeymoon—vindicating Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative argument that Cold War thaws were reliable predictors of imminent Communist outrages. In Vegas, “The Summit” was rechristened the Rat Pack. And in Albany, Rockefeller launched himself back into the nomination race with a grandiloquent statement on June 8. “The failure of the Paris Conference,” Rockefeller declared, “places in serious question some of the illusions, as well as the procedures, that led to the summit itself.” He was, he said, “deeply concerned that those now assuming control of the Republican Party have failed to make clear where this party is heading and where it proposes to lead the nation,” a dilemma that was the “gravest in its history.” The party’s “destiny,” he concluded, “is to save the nation by saving itself.” For his program, Rockefeller Brothers Special Studies Fund reports were knocked into a series of campaign position papers—a nine-movement symphony of Immanentized Eschatons, internationalist idealism, and managerial expertise, delivered in installments across the country in any forum where his handlers could book him and in any publication that would grant him space.

  Rockefeller hoped to use the convention platform as a wedge to pry open a nominating process every other Republican presumed was sealed. A platform draft is composed by a functionary; a resolutions committee (colloquially called a platform committee) of a hundred or so delegates, usually pledged to one candidate or another, hears dreary testimony on proposed amendments; committee members “debate,” then vote the amendments up or down mostly by instruction of the campaign to which they owe their loyalty—making the contest interesting only to the tea-leaf readers seeking to gauge the relative strengths of the contenders. (The Democrats in 1944 manfully pledged “such additional humanitarian, labor, social and farm legislation as time and experience may require”; Woodrow Wilson’s platform in 1912 opposed second terms.) But Rockefeller rather fantastically assumed that if he could just demonstrate intellectually how inadequate the platform draft was to modern needs, concerned Republicans couldn’t but flock to his banner.

  When Rockefeller read the draft that July, he summoned Charles Percy, chair of the platform committee, an overpoweringly vital man who was the Fortune 500’s youngest CEO, to West 55th Street for a bit of unsubtle persuasion. The nation, Rockefeller reminded Percy, was in a state of Cold War emergency. The platform didn’t convey that at all. What’s more, there were problems out there, problems amenable to can-do government solutions, that the platform glossed over: civil rights, declining health among the aged, declining rates of capital investment in sectors ripe for federal stimulation. If these problems were not addressed in the document, Rockefeller said, he could not promise his support—hinting darkly at a divisive floor fight. It was with considerable agitation that Percy traveled on to Washington to meet with Nixon, with twelve days to go before his committee was to convene for its opening session in Chicago and seven days before the state delegations were to arrive, and heard Nixon reassure him that the authority over the platform was the platform committee’s to wield. If Rockefeller wanted to influence the proceedings, Nixon promised, he would have to line up to testify just like anyone else.

  And so from every state and territory they came, the 103 members of the Republican platform committee, two by two and one from each territory, straggling into the Crystal Ballroom at the Blackstone Hotel on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago on July 18, 1960, to begin the painstaking and unedifying work of bending the planks toward that elusive most banal common denominator. The only relief from the tedium came when Barry Goldwater presented his “Suggested Declaration of Republican Principles” before the committee members on the twentieth. “To our undying shame, there are those among us who would prefer to crawl on their bellies rather than to face the possibility of an atomic war,” he said. He earned a standing ovation. It sure beat listening to the Ford Foundation rep report that 7 percent of gifted children grow up maladjusted, versus 14 percent of the general student population.

  As the platform committee’s work wound down, the rest of the Republican delegates came straggling into Chicago—as they had before in 1952, 1944, 1920, 1916, and 1912 (when the convention ran two days over because of a knock-down-drag-out floor fight between William Howard Taft’s conservatives and Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” progressives); and in 1908, 1904, 1888, 1884, 1868, and, in the first successful nominating convention of the new party formed to fight the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, 1860. Taxi drivers, by order of Chicago’s Public Vehi
cle License Commission wearing fresh, clean shirts, massed on the South Michigan Avenue blocks across the street from Grant Park’s strip of greensward hard to Lake Michigan that contained the city’s finest hotel rooms. Republicans set down their valises amidst an imbroglio of sound trucks and pickets, pamphleteers and sandwich-board men, “Nixon Girls” parading up and down the street in pink-and-white gingham—and, led by activist Bayard Rustin, a civil rights march twice as large as the one held a few weeks before at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

  At the entrance to the convention hall, each delegate received an instruction card: “You’re on television,” it warned, admonishing them in verse:Don’t read papers in the hall,

  Even the latest issue.

  If you hold them up before your face,

  The folks at home will miss you.

  These were golden years for political conventions: television audiences tuned in hoping for a showdown like the one between Taft and Eisenhower in 1952, the parties not yet having learned how to script the events so as to make a showdown impossible. Factions, meanwhile, began playing for TV, hoping for some dramatic breakthrough that would inspire the folks back home to stampede their delegates with telegrams and phone calls—as had almost seemed possible at the Democratic Convention a few weeks back after the surprising roof-raising demonstration that greeted dark-horse candidate Adlai Stevenson when he took his seat with the Illinois delegation. Many conservatives hoped to do the same thing for Goldwater.

  But the real action still took place behind the scenes. Unbeknownst to the platform committee, at the Sheraton headquarters of the New York delegation (a rumor had it that Rockefeller had rented the entire hotel; it was only an entire wing), Rocky’s political chieftains were monitoring the committee’s every move. On Friday, his Albany press secretary delivered a surprise statement: “The Governor has been keeping in touch with all developments on shaping the platform.... He is deeply concerned that the reports reaching him clearly indicate that the draft on a number of matters—including national defense, foreign policy, and some critical domestic issues—are still seriously lacking in strength and specifics.”