Landslide (25 page)

Democrats, he believed, were pushing his GE bosses to muzzle him. Like Johnson, he suspected one powerful Democrat in particular of machinations against him. His daughter Patti would later recall her parents’ fear that the Kennedy administration was pressuring GE to silence him through threats to the company’s contracts:

And so when, in 1962, GE decided not to renew Reagan’s television show, he suspected his politics had something to do with it. GE had grown tired of Reagan’s political persona. Management also asked that in his appearances as a GE spokesman he refrain from making political statements. This was a deal breaker for Reagan. “
There’s no way that I could go out now to an audience that is expecting the type of thing I’ve been doing for the last eight years and suddenly stand up and start selling them electric toasters.” He and GE parted ways.

In time, the split with GE would become part of the Reagan legend—how he’d refused to compromise his principles for personal gain. But in early 1964, the split looked like something else altogether. However principled, it was a setback, a failure. And crucially, it was a repeat of the lesson he had learned during the worst days of his movie star career, when audiences had ditched his “Mr. Norm” type for the broody, moody, sensitive male stars. He would long remember the studio bosses who had controlled his career then, how they had failed to see how the preferences of the moviegoing public had changed after World War II. “
They thought I was the hottest thing around,” he would say, “and didn’t realize that the sixteen-year-olds didn’t know who I was.” In politics, as in Hollywood, it was all the same. Events happened. People’s tastes changed. A star could regret the public’s mood, but if he wanted to eat, he would respect it.

And so a pragmatic Reagan, considering a life in politics, had to look beyond just the roars of approval he found from his conservative crowds. He had to think about what conservatism meant to the people he’d always cared about the most—the everyday, “normal” people in the American mainstream. Entering politics offered any number of risks. To take the leap, Reagan needed an opening, a moment when his worldview aligned with the public mood.

Could he gain confidence from Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign? Before Kennedy’s death, conservatives, having infiltrated the party leadership in key areas of the country, liked their chances of winning the nomination in 1964 and were looking forward to challenging the New Frontier in dramatic style. Kennedy—as aware as anyone of the vast distance between the beliefs of Goldwater’s movement diehards and majority opinion in the country—liked the idea of a race against Goldwater, too. At his last political meeting in November 1963, Kennedy had discussed potential Republican opponents in the election. “
Give me Barry,” said the president; “I won’t even have to leave the Oval Office.”

At first, it looked as if Goldwater’s chances at the nomination had died with Kennedy. The press had stopped holding conservatives directly responsible for Kennedy’s death when it was revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s political views, such as they were, tended toward Marxism. But still, reporters speculated for months about whether extremist politics of the Goldwater variety had contributed to a climate of hate in which minds like Oswald’s had flourished. (Johnson gave a nod to this line of reasoning in his January 1964 State of the Union address, saying, “
In these last seven sorrowful weeks, we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as faith, and nothing is so degrading as hate.”) In the month after the assassination, Goldwater’s standing in national polls dropped by double digits. In a mid-December column assessing the GOP’s 1964 prospects, Scotty Reston did not even mention the Arizona senator’s name.

Goldwater, who loathed the preening and posing required of
presidential candidates, had been dreading a White House run in the months before Kennedy’s death. After the assassination, he wanted to drop out of the race, but his advisers implored him not to give up. They eventually persuaded him the only way you could persuade Barry to do anything—by asserting that it was simply unmanly to drop out of the race at such a late date.

So he stayed in, to the delight of a scornful national press. To political journalists, Goldwater’s winter primary efforts were fun to watch, not as a campaign but as a series of comic calamities: Barry stepping on the drama of his January announcement by telling an off-color joke about his own daughter; Barry recovering from a bone spur injury, sliding around the New Hampshire ice on crutches, snarling at any voter who happened into his path; Barry, confused and belligerent in an interview on
Meet the Press
, asserting (incorrectly) that Kennedy had never sent federal troops to the South to enforce the law; Barry reiterating his most controversial established positions, that Social Security should be abolished and the Tennessee Valley Authority privatized, and floating new ones that were even more incendiary, that field commanders should be granted the ability to launch nuclear weapons without presidential approval. “
There is no mathematical way of recording the pathetic fate of the Arizona senator’s candidacy,” wrote the former Eisenhower aide Emmet John Hughes in February, “simply because most of his followers are still unsure of the direction in which they will desert.”

That was the urgent question for the Republican establishment: Who was their alternative to Goldwater? Barry’s only announced rival was Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican governor of New York. Blessed with his family’s resources, Rockefeller bought himself a superb national organization in advance of a 1964 run. But in 1962 he’d doused himself in scandal, leaving his first wife for the married Margaretta “Happy” Murphy. The Kennedy assassination revived his chances, but he had a long way to go to win over traditionalists in his party and overcome a snippy press corps.
Newsweek
’s thinly veiled taunting was typical: “
Nelson and Happy
Rockefeller couldn’t have been happier. The new year would bring a new heir—in June, the governor and his wife disclosed after the newspapers broke the news—and, on the strength of his weekend reception in New Hampshire, Rocky’s political fortunes were showing signs of life too.”

Party leaders scrounged for another alternative but had little luck. Thanks to an independent write-in campaign, the New Hampshire primary went to the patrician Massachusetts politician Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Lodge indicated his lack of enthusiasm for a presidential run when, shortly after New Hampshire, he announced his intention to stay on as Johnson’s ambassador to South Vietnam. Michigan’s moderate governor George Romney considered jumping in. The press swooned over a potential run by Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, whose good looks and ample fortune earned him a reputation as the Republican John F. Kennedy.

In the White House, Johnson worried most about the man whom Kennedy had barely beaten in 1960. As 1964 dawned, Richard Nixon was working as a New York lawyer, swearing he was out of politics but acting like an aspiring politician. When the party’s financial backers gathered for a meeting that included presentations by Goldwater, Rockefeller, Romney, and Scranton, Nixon appeared by closed circuit television. He was opportunistically ambiguous. “
I say with confidence tonight,” the noncandidate told the crowd listening to him, “that one of those whom you will hear on this program will be the next president of the United States.”

Johnson couldn’t quite believe he would be lucky enough to have Goldwater as an opponent. And when Rockefeller upset the Arizonan in the Oregon primary in May, creating momentum that would carry him into the decisive California primary, much of Washington assumed that the Goldwater moment had come to an end.

But they hadn’t seen what Reagan saw. They hadn’t seen the devotion Goldwater inspired in young conservatives like the ones in that San Diego ballroom. The ones who’d been talking up a Goldwater presidency since before Nixon lost in 1960. The ones who
were enthusiastic volunteers in the national Draft Goldwater Committee. Under the leadership of a brilliant organizer, F. Clifton “Clif” White, Draft Goldwater had set out to secure commitments from seven hundred Republican delegates before the party’s nominating convention in July 1964 (655 votes would secure the nomination). It was an ambitious target, and it was dependent on strong support from new converts to the Republican Party in the segregationist South. The young Goldwaterites were convinced they could achieve it. They
had to
achieve it. The future of the party, of the country, of civilization itself was at stake.

And more important, the wise people in Washington hadn’t seen the California that Reagan knew. They hadn’t seen places like Orange County. In those Southern California suburbs, middle-class white refugees from the Midwest had embraced Goldwater’s style of conservatism as a modern religion. There, voters needed no convincing that the Communist threat to civilization was real and that conspirators lay within their midst. There, the John Birch Society was no fringe group; it had thousands of county residents on its newsletter subscription list. There, Phyllis Schlafly’s manifesto “A Choice, Not an Echo” was passed around like a secret Bible speaking the one true faith in a world of heretics. There, in February 1964, Goldwater supporters set out to collect thirteen thousand signatures to get their candidate on the state’s primary ballot. By the end of their first day, they already had close to three times that many. And there, the weekend before the California primary, when Reagan appeared at a rally for Goldwater, the crowd that turned out was twenty-eight thousand strong. You didn’t have to look closely at the faces in that crowd to know one thing: Barry Goldwater was going to be the Republican Party’s nominee in 1964.

S
URE ENOUGH
,
G
OLDWATER
won the primary. His victory on June 1 would come almost exclusively from the movement diehards in the southern part of the state: Rockefeller would win fifty-four of the state’s fifty-eight counties, but Barry’s vote totals in Los Angeles,
San Diego, and Orange counties were large enough to give him the primary victory by a narrow margin. It was the conservatives’ day. A poll of California primary voters found that their top issues were, in order, federal spending, Cuba, and Soviet espionage.

The establishment gulped hard. Anything could happen at a convention, but after California, Goldwater would be hard to beat. Barry’s true believers rejoiced. At last their moment had come.

Reagan cheered Goldwater’s victory, too. For a hardworking Goldwater surrogate like Reagan, it was a happy result. For a conservative true believer like Reagan, the victory was an ideological triumph: finally they had a nominee who would fight for the cause. And for a dramatist like Reagan, it was a delicious story: the man the elites had discounted was getting the last laugh.

But for a pragmatic would-be politician like Reagan, Goldwater’s triumph presented a nagging problem: Where did the movement go from there?

After all, you only had to read the newspaper to understand that federal spending and Soviet espionage did not exactly top the list of most Americans’ concerns. Goldwater’s followers, however many of them there might be, would be working against the public mood, not with it.

That seemed just fine with their candidate. Goldwater had never had much appeal to the faint of heart. His persona was one of adolescent rebellion, the senator bored by the conventions of the staid Senate, the Republican willing to throw rocks at no less a revered figure than Dwight David Eisenhower. “
Out here in the West and Midwest, we’re not constantly harassed by the fear of what might happen,” Goldwater said. “Sure there are risks, but we’ve always taken risks.”

Long before Kennedy’s death, Goldwater’s supporters in the party were arguing for “a choice, not an echo”—the line Schlafly memorialized in her book. The choice, as they saw it, was clear. On one side were the liberals in both parties who offered appeasement abroad and statist policies at home. On the other side were conservatives
who would confront the Communist menace, unchain the spirit of individual freedom in America, and return the nation to its frontier values. Had Kennedy lived, he and his campaign aides would have painted Barry as a dangerous extremist, most likely with great success. But against Kennedy, Goldwater’s critique would have garnered a kind of legitimacy from Kennedy’s own rhetoric. Again and again, Kennedy argued that the work before the country would be hard, that the country’s bright future could not be achieved without sacrifice. The progressive program he envisioned was not possible without risk. The choice in the never-to-be Goldwater/Kennedy election would have been a choice over which side’s risks were acceptable, which side’s vision was so enticing it was worth taking a chance.

But that choice had died with Kennedy. The public had learned that day in November all about the downside of risk. Now the new president was running a nonstop campaign to convince the public that the time of trauma had passed, that all was fine. With power passing from Kennedy to Johnson, the Democrats’ message had changed, and the new message was clearly what average Americans wanted to hear. Yet the Goldwater message didn’t change at all. He kept talking of imminent danger, of the nuclear war that was just around the corner, of the liberal policies of appeasement that amounted to a “suicide pact.” To believe in Goldwater’s vision was to rebel against the great national project of proving that all was right in America again. To believe in Barry Goldwater, you had to believe that things had been going wrong in America for quite some time and that things were about to get much worse. Johnson was the kindly uncle who had come in to take charge of an orphaned nation after the loss of a beloved father figure. Barry was a maniac, rushing in to say the house was burning down.