by Joshua Zeitz
If his rhetorical barrages were ugly and reckless, they were not random. Between 1910 and 1970, roughly 6.5 million African Americans left the South, swelling the population of northern, midwestern, and western cities. In that same space of time, the portion of black Americans living in the former Confederacy fell from 77 percent to less than 50 percent.
Though leaving Dixie presented them with comparatively greater freedom, including the unqualified right to vote, discriminatory employment practices limited black residents to some of the lowest-paying jobs and highest rates of unemployment. Racially restrictive housing laws—some enforced by a complex web of regulations handed down by federal mortgage agencies—consigned them to the worst, most cramped—yet paradoxically most overpriced—housing stock. And an absence of basic public services like reliable garbage removal, building inspection, and quality schools made them second-class citizens in most places where they lived.
Discrimination created a vicious cycle. Because African Americans faced rampant job discrimination, they tended to earn less cash income than their white neighbors and rely more heavily on welfare. Because discriminatory rental and mortgage practices sharply limited their residential options, black residents enjoyed little recourse when landlords in transitional neighborhoods consolidated and subdivided their properties, creating more cramped and run-down housing stock. As a result, many urban black neighborhoods came gradually to resemble wastelands—at least in the eyes of watchful, working-class white residents whose own tidy neighborhoods stood in proximity. Boarded-up, abandoned buildings seemed to dot every block, because landlords often found it more advantageous to pack more tenants in one property than to pay property taxes and maintenance on two. Such decay did, in fact, tend to attract a disproportionate share of drug dealers, vagrants, prostitutes, and vandals. In short, when residents of white ethnic enclaves in Gary, Indiana, or Milwaukee, Wisconsin, pointed to surrounding black neighborhoods with fear, they were reacting from genuine experience. In their assumption that ghetto residents chose to live in such degraded circumstances, they spoke from a position of willful ignorance—ignorance of the privilege they derived from the G.I. Bill’s housing and educational opportunities, ignorance of their favored position in unionized industries, and ignorance of their superior access to public services. When they lashed out at white liberals, they had a point: no one was asking the residents of Georgetown or Chevy Chase to make personal sacrifices in the cause of civil rights. Even in the event that open housing laws prevailed, their neighborhoods were too expensive to attract large numbers of working-class black families. These contradictions would not be laid bare until later in the decade. But the early warning signs were already evident in the spring primary season. Wallace was a shrewd manipulator of public opinion and understood precisely how to broaden the appeal of his white supremacist agenda among urban and inner-ring suburban white voters outside the South.
LBJ’s advisers were acutely aware of the challenge before them. Dan Rostenkowski, a Democratic congressman who represented heavily Polish American neighborhoods in Chicago, privately shared polling with Jack Valenti that suggested 78 percent of his constituents opposed the Civil Rights Act. “They are mostly Catholic,” Valenti informed the president, “but in spite of the Church’s emphatic stand on civil rights, they are very much opposed to the Negro advances. The Polish people are real estate conscious and worry about the value of their homes.”
Richard Scammon, an influential political scientist whom JFK had installed as director of the census, warned Moyers that polling revealed a deep undercurrent of disaffection. “The American white majority’s view of civil rights and race can only be labeled as confused, contradictory, and apprehensive.” Most northern white respondents supported federal protection of civil rights activists, but they also believed that “mass Negro demonstrations are harmful.” A commanding majority supported the Civil Rights Act, but “it is in such areas as street violence, the busing of school children, the right of a home owner not to sell to a Negro, the movement of Negro families ‘onto this block,’ and the movement of Negro workers ‘into my job,’ that the deep, gut-level apprehension bites into a super-structure of white tolerance and liberalism. While almost no whites would deny the Negro the right to vote, the majority would say: ‘I’ll be Goddamned if my kid has to ride a bus across this city to go to school in a Negro slum.’” Scammon found this sentiment increasingly evident among “lower middle class and working class families, many of them life-long Democrats.” By his assessment, the race issue could very well spell the difference between a blowout victory on par with Roosevelt’s in 1936 or a narrow loss. “The vital importance of the race issue cannot be overestimated,” he informed Moyers. Scammon observed that most Americans identified neither as liberals nor as conservatives but rather as “middle-of-the-roaders.” Given his newfound zeal for civil rights and antipoverty measures, Johnson was almost assured solid liberal support. If he could fuse the vast middle of the spectrum to his left-wing base, he was assured to win. “[The] opportunities to identify the Administration with the viewpoints of moderation and of the middle-of-the-road seem obvious,” he concluded.
Other presidential advisers agreed. In July, Horace Busby warned the president that “many in the Democratic Party apparatus have a naïve, immature, unreal view of what the Party is up against.” Buzz worried that popular “euphoria” and “confidence” rested on the flawed assumption that since 1932 the Democratic Party had emerged as the presumptive “presidential party”; after all, it had won six of the last eight presidential elections, and it was easy to write off the Eisenhower interlude (1953–1961) as “an aberration, an interruption in an inexorable Democratic trend attributable solely to Eisenhower’s unique ‘war hero’ appeal.” These assumptions, Busby argued, did not hold up under an “unsentimental, hard-nose, reading of the political history.” On the contrary, it was the Roosevelt era that was anomalous—the peculiar product of the Great Depression and World War II. In the sixteen presidential elections to date in the twentieth century, Republicans had racked up a cumulative plurality of 9.2 million votes, and not simply because of their predominant position in the first three decades of the century. Since 1948, their advantage in presidential elections amounted to an aggregate plurality of 13.9 million votes. While Busby conceded that Democrats did enjoy a massive advantage at the state and local levels, it was not lost on Johnson—or on any member of his team—that this point reflected artificial padding by southern Democrats, who since the late 1930s gradually came to hold little common ground with the rest of their party. Johnson had spent over twenty years in Congress carefully straddling the ever-widening chasm between the party’s southern bloc, which was resistant to federal intervention in civil rights and the economy, and its northern and western blocs, which relied increasingly on the support of minority voters and organized labor. As a senator, Johnson had been more solicitous of the powerful southern committee chairmen who installed him as majority leader. As president, both hard electoral math and personal conviction required that he swing to the left.
Buzz believed that there was ample room to move leftward without losing broad support. He advised that Johnson abandon the interest group—or “bloc”—strategy that swept FDR into the White House in 1932 and that Harry Truman employed in his come-from-behind victory in 1948. Instead, Johnson should steer a clear course through the political center and “present himself not as a coalition leader of blocs but as a national interest leader.” While John Kennedy had, on the surface, pursued a bloc strategy aimed at re-fusing Catholic voters (who had defected in sizable numbers to Ike) and southern Democrats (who had been wobbly in their party affinity since 1948), once he assumed the presidency, Busby argued, JFK moved away from Franklin Roosevelt’s style, rhetoric, and electoral strategy and, “much to the surprise of some and the distress of others, attempt[ed] to broaden the Democratic Party’s base of appeal.” Johnson, he concluded, should do the same.
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p; Heading into late summer, neither LBJ nor his aides harbored any illusions that the path to victory was clear. But the president held three trump cards:
Jack Valenti, a former Texas adman armed with a keen eye for packaging his candidate—and his candidate’s opponent.
Bill Moyers, the bright-eyed preacher and Sunday school teacher who would prove an utterly ruthless and unforgiving campaign strategist.
And Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, who simply could not get out of his own way.
• • • • •
On July 13, 1964, the same day that Buzz penned his strategy memorandum to the president, moderate Republicans convened at San Francisco’s Cow Palace determined to block the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the recognized leader of the GOP’s archconservative wing, opponent of the Civil Rights Act, and hawkish supporter of military intervention against the Soviet bloc. “The hour is late,” lamented the moderate New York governor, Nelson Rockefeller, “but if all leaders in the moderate mainstream of the Republican Party will unite upon a platform and upon Governor [William] Scranton”—an eleventh-hour entrant in the race—“the moderate cause can be won.”
The hour was, in fact, too late. By virtue of early primary wins and a fortuitous meltdown on the part of Rockefeller, whose presidential bid fizzled out that spring over widespread disapproval of his divorce and remarriage, Goldwater had sewn up the nomination, but not before the convention broke into pandemonium. During a platform debate over immigration, a fistfight nearly ensued when a Goldwater supporter mocked Italian Americans, many of whom—including the moderate representative Silvio Conte of Massachusetts—took considerable umbrage at the insult. By a vote of 897 to 409, delegates flatly rejected a moderate amendment that would have strengthened the party’s plank on civil rights, infuriating moderates from the Northeast whose states and districts included sizable black populations. Goldwater devotees grew increasingly vicious as the days wore on. It “wasn’t just the galleries,” recalled one moderate attendee. “It was the floor, it was the hall. The venom of the booing and the hatred in people’s eyes was really quite stunning.” A leader of the New York Young Republicans recalled the event as “horrible. I felt like I was in Nazi Germany.” No less a party stalwart than former president Dwight Eisenhower called the gathering “unpardonable. . . . I was deeply ashamed.”
What one historian later dubbed the “conservatives’ Woodstock” reached its nadir not when Goldwater delivered his acceptance speech, in which he declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” but when his delegates shouted down Rockefeller as he addressed the convention. “These extremists feed on fear, hate and terror,” the New York governor intoned over the deafening jeers of the crowd. They offered “no program for America and the Republican Party . . . [they] operate from dark shadows of secrecy. It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now any doctrinaire, militant minority whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan or Birchers.” In the wake of the convention, George Wallace formally dropped his own bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. “My mission has been accomplished,” he explained.
Goldwater was a gift to Lyndon Johnson. A doctrinaire conservative and acknowledged leader of the Republican Party’s right wing, he was a bundle of contradictions. Though he deplored government “handouts” and pined for a simpler day when “you either worked or you starved,” Goldwater—the child of a wealthy department store owner—conveniently glossed over the strong links between his family’s fortune and federal spending, which in his lifetime transformed Arizona from a desert backwater to a thriving Sunbelt powerhouse. I. F. Stone, the crusading left-wing journalist, would quip that Goldwater’s base “likes to think of itself as rugged and frontier because [it is] Western and Southwestern. But the covered wagons in which it travels are Cadillacs and its wide open spaces have been air-conditioned.” Bill Moyers aptly captured the conservative icon’s charm when he told the president in confidence that “Goldwater has a basic appeal to people who want to return to America’s ‘Age of Innocence’—the days of county fairs, country bands, sawdust, candied apples, simple solutions to simple problems—days that never existed except in the minds of people who didn’t live in them but wish they did.”
Goldwater deplored the New Deal for its supposed creeping socialism, though he conveniently overlooked the $342 million in aid that Arizona collected from the federal government in those years—an era in which the state collected only $16 million in federal taxes. As a senator, he railed against the federal government but continued to champion federal spending on local infrastructure and water projects. Despite his personal fortune and his wife’s considerable inheritance, he lived lavishly and beyond his means, even as he preached the politics of frugality and personal responsibility. Goldwater fashioned himself a conservative theorist, but even by his own admission he had been at best a middling student and exhibited very little intellectual curiosity. “There was nothing I did that made me a success,” he acknowledged in a moment of candor. “You might say I was a success by being born into a successful family.” His sister later observed, “I don’t think he ever read a book growing up.”
Covering Goldwater in the early primary state of New Hampshire, Teddy White observed that his “candor is the completely unrestrained candor of old men and little children.” During his swing through the Granite State, the Arizona senator proposed authorizing NATO commanders to deploy atomic weapons. (“Let’s lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin,” he offered on another occasion.) He suggested that the Tennessee Valley Authority be privatized and Social Security transformed into a voluntary program. Goldwater discovered to his advisers’ chagrin that statements he made earlier in his career now weighted down his candidacy—as when he dismissed the Eisenhower administration as a “dime-store New Deal” or offered that “this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” Equally troubling, his movement earned the fervent support of far-right fringe groups like the John Birch Society. “We’ve got superpatriots running through the woods like a collection of firebugs,” groused one of his state organizers, “and I keep running after them, like Smokey Bear, putting out fires. We just don’t need any more enemies.”
Goldwater defied tradition when he named William Miller—an obscure congressman from upstate New York, armed with “a caustic tongue and a dedication to conservatism”—as his running mate, rather than a more established officeholder at the state or federal level. Miller was little known (as a popular ditty soon went, “Here’s a riddle, it’s a killer / Who the hell is William Miller?”). To the few Washington insiders who actually did know him, he was a cantankerous gadfly and prude who once took to the House floor to condemn the Kennedys for hosting a party at which guests danced the twist. Goldwater enjoyed telling reporters that Miller “drives [Lyndon] Johnson nuts.” In truth, the incumbent scarcely knew who he was. The congressman figured little in the fall campaign, appearing mostly at small venues in faraway places, like Bangor, Maine. Based on intelligence from the field, Larry O’Brien assured LBJ that he was a “complete zero.”
His shortcomings notwithstanding, Goldwater aroused a growing portion of the party’s conservative base that rejected the politics of consensus and aspired to dismantle the New Deal. He channeled their fervent anticommunism and resistance to the authority of the central state. Though personally opposed to racial discrimination, Goldwater galvanized segregationists with his opposition to the Civil Rights Act and his rhetorical veneration of free enterprise and association.
LBJ bore his opponent no personal ill will. The two men had enjoyed a friendly rapport during their joint tenure in the Senate, though in a private conversation with John Connally the president candidly sized up his opponent as “just nutty as a fruitcake.” In July, Buzz urged the president to assume the high road—at least until after Labor Day—and scrupulously to avoid terms like “whiffs of
fascism” and “scent of Nazism,” which could prove “explosive” and turn the tide of public sympathy toward the Republican nominee. Goldwater’s extremism spoke for itself. By late September, however, Busby argued that “the attack should be broadened on the extremes and factions. Republicans should be told, in effect, that their party is being taken over not by Birchites and Klansmen, but by the Reverend Billy Hargis”—an archconservative, segregationist preacher who pledged his support to Goldwater—“and all the other Right Wing Kooks who can be fairly named. None of these things require your participation. You can remain above the battle. But these are real and valid issues.” Instead, Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti would do it for him.
• • • • •
Johnson’s staff ran the campaign out of the White House in an era with less stringent rules governing the separation between government resources and partisan activities. Teddy White later broke the president’s organization into several categories. Team A comprised Moyers, Valenti, and Jenkins, the troika unquestionably in command of message, strategy, and execution. (White considered Busby and Goodwin worker bees, not leaders, of Team A.)
Team B included three well-regarded veterans of Democratic politics: Abe Fortas, Jim Rowe, and Clark Clifford.
Team C was “the Kennedy operational team”—namely, O’Brien and O’Donnell, who managed the campaign’s state-by-state political operation and ground game.
Team D leaned on mid-level administration employees who, under Valenti’s direction, drove the “Five O’Clock Club”—the first rapid-response operation in campaign history.
Finally, Team E—the Democratic National Committee and its operatives—contributed to the effort, though with less stature or consequence than in prior cycles.
Valenti and Moyers made the critical decision to retain Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), the upstart advertising agency that JFK had initially selected for his reelection effort. While larger shops on Madison Avenue debated the relative merits of David Ogilvy’s method (research-driven, tasteful, possessing a “Big Idea,” but not generally entertaining) and Rosser Reeves’s (differentiation through a “unique selling proposition”), DDB threw out both playbooks and conveyed a smart, modern sensibility striking for its embrace of irony and sardonic wit. Its breakthrough campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle—“Think Small”—made it one of the country’s most sought-after agencies. Though DDB had never worked on a political account, its principals understood better than rival agencies that the rules of communicating with voters—who were, after all, consumers—were changing. In the 1964 cycle, the major networks intended for the first time to sell advertising slots in the thirty-second and one-minute range during televised programs—a break with the standard five-minute or fifteen-minute follow-on spots. To capture and maintain viewer interest, they would need to appeal chiefly to emotion. “We’re selling the President of the United States,” a member of the account team offered.
