Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Richard Nixon’s coronation threatened to break into war, and the vice president was nervous. Lacking strength and specifics—the idea was absurd. All platforms lack in strength and specifics! Was this pretext for the New York delegation—nearly 10 percent of the votes needed for nomination—to lead a stampede for Rockefeller?

  Nixon had been working for this moment, sweating for it, slaving for it, cringing for it, bowing and scraping for it, since—since when? Since he was denied the chance to go to Harvard because he could only afford to live at home; since he was blacklisted from Whittier College’s one social club because he was too poor; since he was reduced to sharing that one-room shack without heat or indoor plumbing with four fellow students while working his way through Duke Law and finished third in his class; since he begged Los Angeles’s plutocrats, Navy cap in hand, for their sufferance of his first congressional bid; since he trundled across California in his wood-paneled station wagon to bring his Senate campaign “into every county, city, town, precinct, and home in the state of California”; since he was forced to plead cloth-coated poverty on television to keep his spot as vice-presidential candidate in 1952; since his vice-presidential career was interrupted every off year when he hit the road to campaign for other Republicans, pounding whiskey in the back rooms when his companions pounded whiskey, drinking juice in church basements when his companions drank juice. Richard Nixon: collector of chits. And now, when it was finally time to call them in, would the whole thing disintegrate before his eyes?

  And so over the heads of the lowly platform committee, behind the back of Charlie Percy—behind the backs of his own inner circle—Richard Nixon reached a decision. He would bow and scrape once more, before Nelson Rockefeller. Through Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Nixon relayed the message that he would come to New York whenever Rockefeller wished. Rockefeller’s lieutenants dictated the terms: a meeting at Rockefeller’s apartment that very night, in secret, followed by the announcement that the meeting had taken place at the vice president’s request, accompanied by a “joint” agreement over platform changes. Nixon flew to New York with a single mid-level aide in tow, arriving at 7:30 in the evening, Friday, July 23.

  They drove directly to Rockefeller’s apartment in the fading summer light. Nixon was led up the stairs of 810 Fifth Avenue, whose two upper apartments Nelson had purchased as his private home in 1934 upon receiving his $12 million trust—around the time Nixon was cranking a mimeograph machine in a sweltering basement to earn his keep at Duke Law. The bottom third of the building Rockefeller bought in 1938, around the same time Nixon married Patricia Ryan—for her money, he would joke: she had saved up for the honeymoon out of her teacher’s salary.

  Rockefeller might have been wearing the open-necked shirts and soft-soled shoes he favored; Nixon’s dress shoes would have click-clacked his presence as he traversed the eighteenth-century parquet floors Nelson had imported from France to match the rococo moldings his decorator had chosen to evoke Louis XIV’s Versailles. Rockefeller honored his guest with dinner, during which he refused Nixon’s entreaties to become his running mate. Rockefeller led Nixon up to the penthouse, his study. They would have swept first through the apartment’s showpiece, the living room. Rockefeller’s passion was modern art. The centerpiece of the living room was twin fireplaces, the andirons custom-designed by the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, their mantels stretching nearly to the ceiling and painted with specially commissioned murals by Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse depicting languid female figures and sinuous plantlike morphs. (“I always liked forms of art where I could feel the artist, feel the material,” Nelson said.) Ascending the circular marble staircase, the eye of the nation’s premiere tribune of middle-class morality might have been drawn by paintings by Picasso and Braque, glass cases filled with primitive carvings collected on their owner’s journeys to the four corners of the globe, sculptures by Alexander Calder, one of Gaston Lachaise’s over-endowed bronze Amazons.

  Then to the penthouse. Nixon was given a seat at Rockefeller’s desk; Rockefeller lounged on a nearby bed. Nixon spied the glorious floodlit expanse of Central Park; when Rockefeller had bought the place, a stone balustrade blocked the view, so he had the floor raised several inches. Nixon was handed a draft of fourteen points that Rockefeller wanted to see in the platform. As the governor’s people established a four-way phone line to Percy at the Blackstone and Rockefeller’s command center at the Sheraton, as well as extensions for both Rockefeller and Nixon, the two spent three hours haggling, tweaking, talking, listening—mostly Rockefeller talking and Nixon listening; most of the changes Nixon made to Rockefeller’s working paper were cosmetic. At 3:20 a.m. Nixon left for La Guardia. From there, Rockefeller phoned Chicago to give his people the first hint of the extraordinary event that had just transpired. Nixon’s press secretary Herb Klein was awakened by reporters who asked for confirmation that a meeting between Nixon and Rockefeller had taken place. Klein denied it. He was called a liar. He had no idea what they were talking about.

  Members of the Rockefeller apparat at the penthouse busied themselves editing and mimeographing the fourteen-point text for a 5 a.m. release: “The Vice-President and I met today at my home in New York City. The meeting took place at the Vice-President’s request.”

  Richard Nixon ignored hints that summer that he should be taking Goldwater and his conservatives seriously. In spring the Arizonan made his grandest tour yet, fourteen speeches in eleven states in May alone. In June he gave the keynote speech at the Mississippi Republican convention and appeared on Meet the Press, where he challenged Nixon to clarify his wishy-washy positions. The Arizona Republican convention pledged its delegate votes to Goldwater on the first ballot. So did Louisiana’s Republican convention. The July 4 Newsweek published remarkable news: “It was conceded in top party echelons that in a truly open convention, Republicans would probably nominate Goldwater for Vice President.” (National Youth for Goldwater for Vice President sent out two thousand copies of the clip with an arrow pointing to that line and the ominous question “Is it going to be an ‘open’ convention?”) Delegates were besieged with postcards and telegrams plumping Goldwater for the top spot. The ones orchestrated by Robert Welch read: ”Nominate anybody you please. I’m voting for Goldwater.” Indiana College Republicans chair James Abstine sent Nixon a letter so threatening it could only have come from someone too young to know better: ”We have worked, are now working, and will continue to work actively for your election as President, but if to so work for you requires the accommodation of our thinking so that we agree with you on all issues at all times just for the sake of agreeing with you, then, I suppose, that many of us would prefer the freedom to think our own thoughts than to be active politically in such a way that we could not do so.” Ignore Goldwater at your peril, warned a top Republican from Nixon’s home territory, Orange County, American Bar Association president Loyd Wright: ”Thousands and thousands of people every day are singing his praises for furnishing Republican leadership... people upon whom we must rely to punch doorbells and put up money.”

  Nixon took it all in, dutifully put Goldwater on a list of potential vice presidents, and presumed that was the end of it. Never one to get hung up on ideology, Nixon was dismissive. “They are against any change whatsoever, including good change,” he complained. “Whenever we talk about good ends, they charge us with being ‘me too.’ ” Even in the feverish summer of Conscience of a Conservative, only I percent of Republican voters thought Barry Goldwater should be nominated for the top spot over Nixon. But they were overrepresented at the convention in Chicago. And they were so sure in their convictions that they took on the aura of multitudes.

  The hottest ticket that weekend was a Hawaiian “Hukilau” to honor the newest state in the union, thrown by Illinois Federation of Republican Women president Phyllis Schlafly, with Goldwater as the featured speaker. Everywhere in Chicago one tripped over the new paperback edition of Conscience—distributed, along with fifteen thousand
Goldwater buttons, by Croll and Caddy’s Youth for Goldwater for Vice President. Doug Caddy talked like a power broker: “Nixon has a right to the nomination,” he said, and young conservatives would support him—because he “has been kept fairly well in line by Goldwater.” On newsstands, the August I Newsweek featured an article by Goldwater: “I am convinced we will lose the 1960 elections if we embrace the false notion that a majority of American citizens are eager to trade their birthright of responsible freedom for the mess-of-pottage promise of subsidy and support.” Delegations arriving early pestered Goldwater’s little gray-haired secretary Edna Coerver unsuccessfully for an audience. Nonplused, they stalked his suite at the Blackstone, a red-white-and-blue sea for him to part everywhere he went.

  “The country needs you, Barry!”

  “Autograph my Bible!” (A copy of Conscience would be pushed into his face.)

  “I want to shake your hand! You’re the only real Republican in the running!”

  Goldwater did his best to muster a thin smile and not break his stride while hiding his irritation, and to avoid the urge to snap—he was prone to snapping—“ I am not in the running!”

  “Those damned Goldwater people are everywhere,” Nixon aides muttered, relaxing, dining, their work, they thought, complete.

  Dawn, Saturday, July 23. In the press room at the Hilton, reporters scrambled to digest the detailed statement coming over the teletype and complete the brain-twisting task of cross-checking it against the finished platform draft. The AP was first into print with news of the “Compact of Fifth Avenue.” Nixon’s campaign manager Leonard Hall learned about it from them. Blinded by rage, streaming profanity, he sought out Barry Goldwater.

  Goldwater was about to address a breakfast meeting to the Republican finance committee. A messenger told him to see Len Hall immediately. Goldwater said he would just have to wait. The emissary whispered something in his ear. Goldwater excused himself from the room. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had to get it from Hall himself.

  Goldwater’s incredulity pointed to a facet of his character: slow to trust, once he accepted someone as a confidant he presumed in them the same deep-seated sense of honor that motivated him. It was why long after many Republicans abandoned McCarthy to his fate, Goldwater defended him: McCarthy had extended him important help in his 1952 Senate run. Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally. What he thought was not that Nixon must have had his reasons, or that Nixon was selling out the party, or that Nixon was just being Nixon. What he thought was that Nixon had assured him personally that he wouldn’t meet with Rockefeller until after the convention, and that when he had talked to him only the morning before, Nixon told him nothing about any meeting with Rockefeller, and that Richard Nixon would not lie to him.

  He soon learned from Hall, who was as angry as any man Goldwater had ever seen, screaming “This might cost Nixon the election!,” that Nixon had done just that. Goldwater was scheduled for a 10 a.m. press conference to magnanimously release his Arizona and South Carolina delegates to Nixon. He tore up his statement and spoke from hasty notes instead.

  “I think the Republican Party would both be breaking faith with itself and shirking its duty to the nation should we fail to identify ourselves with the conservative point of view in both domestic and foreign affairs,” he said. He continued: “Early today came the disturbing news that Mr. Nixon himself has felt it necessary to make overtures and concessions to the liberals.” It was “a sellout on nearly every point that once separated the Vice President and the Governor.” Goldwater removed his black-rimmed glasses. “I believe this to be immoral politics. I also believe it to be self-defeating.... Alienate the conservatives—as the party is now in the process of doing—and the handful of liberal militants that are seeking to take over the Republican Party will inherit a mess of pottage.” If Nixon folded before “a spokesman for the ultra-liberals,” he, Goldwater, would be forced to fight Rockefeller’s platform changes on the floor. “If the Fourteen Point agreement—both the substance of it and the process by which it was reached—is allowed to go unchallenged, it will live in history as the Munich of the Republican Party. It will be a Munich in two senses, that it subordinated principle to expediency; and that it guaranteed precisely the evil it was designed to prevent—in this case a Republican defeat in November.”

  Edna Coerver prepared Goldwater’s remarks for release to the press, toning them down slightly for diplomacy, typing so fast that the liberals were scored for their “shoeking unrealism.” In his diary Goldwater wrote of Nixon, “This man is a two-fisted, four-square liar.” Technically, the senator was still a candidate for the nomination. His wheels were turning.

  Rockefeller flew to Chicago and declared that since the platform was more important than the nominee, and that there was a “very good chance” his fourteen points would be written into it without protest, he could now support the ticket. “Hell, he’s playing elder statesman without waiting to be a statesman,” one reporter muttered. So much the statesman, in fact, he didn’t even bother to pay court to the small but fervid band of young Rockefeller for President enthusiasts who seemed to be everywhere, placing Rockefeller banners within the field of every television camera and Rockefeller cheers in range of every radio mike.

  Goldwater couldn’t have ignored his supporters if he tried. Kicked up like a sandstorm by the “Munich of the Republican Party,” shrieking conservatives made Michigan Avenue and its hostelries a cloud of scrawled picket signs: “LOUISIANA IS TIRED OF DICTATORS!”; “DON’T GO DOWN THE ROCKY ROAD TO RUIN!”; ”PLATFORM COMMITTEE—DON’T BE RAILROADED!” A significant plurality were Southerners. The convention had become a proxy fight in America’s second civil war. The day’s newspapers reported that Greensboro, birthplace twenty-two weeks earlier of the still-spreading sit-in movement, was on the verge of yielding to pressure to desegregate its restaurants. Congress debated whether the Temporary Commission on Civil Rights authorized by the 1957 Civil Rights Act would become a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. Liberal Republicans pointed out that their party owed Negro voters for one hundred years of loyalty. But the party was increasingly becoming a redoubt for those who either wished blacks ill or viewed them with indifference.

  It was point nine of the fourteen points that the Southerners were protesting:Our program for civil rights must assure aggressive action to remove the remaining vestiges of segregation or discrimination in all areas of national life—voting and housing, schools and jobs. It will express support for the objectives of the sit-in demonstrators and will commend the action of those businessmen who have abandoned the practice of refusing to serve food at their lunch counters to their Negro customers and will urge all others to follow their example.

  To Nixon deputies, states like Louisiana relayed threats: expect no campaign labor or money from them. Texas, legally pledged to Nixon, called a hasty caucus. Its leader, a quiet but dominating political science professor named John Tower who had resigned his teaching position to run for the Senate, said he could not in good conscience prevent them from voting for whichever candidate they wished—which was tantamount to delivering the delegation to Goldwater.

  Tower was a member of the platform’s civil rights subcommittee. Since platform delegates were apportioned to subcommittees based on their area of interest, the civil rights subcommittee was a self-selected gathering of pit bulls. Its hearings were chaired by New York assembly speaker Joseph Carlino—as a Rockefeller deputy, the de facto leader of the Northern, pro-civil rights faction. They were mêlées. Tower’s group had the majority. Their will was fought at every turn by Carlino, wielding the gavel like a jackhammer. The Tower faction’s desired draft platform plank was a pitch-perfect expression of what passed for the “moderate” position in the South on civil rights: although the sit-ins had been peaceful—so far—the protests were vulnerable to Communist infiltration, had they not fallen already; the likely result of continued protests would be viole
nce of the sort that had rocked Ankara, Tokyo, Kinshasa, and Berkeley; and although orderly progress toward Negro rights should be supported, if a Federal Employment Practices Commission could tell private business who to hire the government would be trespassing America’s most sacred liberties.

  Point nine would also, added Louisiana’s flamboyant Tom Stagg, “kill the Republican Party in the South. Lyndon Johnson is going to come across the border and talk ‘magnolia’ to them and they’ll vote Democratic.”

  Eisenhower, drafting his valedictory address for the Tuesday of the convention at his “summer White House” in Newport, was enraged by the Compact’s defense points. They had sold out his legacy—the most valuable thing a former President had. The document spouted off on nuclear strategy, calling for “a nuclear retaliatory power capable of surviving surprise attack to inflict devastating punishment on any aggressor... a modern, flexible and balanced military establishment with forces capable of deterring or meeting any local aggression”—as if Rockefeller knew what he was talking about. Eisenhower, knowing what only a President and a few others could know, wondered whether an arms race wouldn’t bankrupt us before it could save us; whether, in fact, the whole dismal business didn’t deliver more insecurity than security. He called Nixon in Washington and shamed him. How could he assent to calling for weapons there was no money to pay for? Kennedy had already picked up Rockefeller’s “missile gap” charge and gladly made it his own. How could Nixon run on a platform echoing the charges of the Democratic nominee? Ike called Thruston Morton, a loyal political friend, and told him to tell Rockefeller to get in line to testify before the platform committee like everyone else. Rockefeller had never given a single thought to any platform committee. He blithely assumed that Nixon could simply impose his will from on high.