Landslide (27 page)

News editors across the country were reading these words and planning their own coverage. That meant that Neshoba County was now Johnson’s problem. He knew that the outcry from the friends and relatives of the missing men would only grow. But he remembered well the recent history—and the not-so-recent history—of the
South. He was desperate to avoid a confrontation over federal authority in Mississippi.

The local authority in Mississippi, meanwhile, was disinclined to admit that the men had gone missing at all. Sitton’s dispatch quoted Deputy Price’s boss, Neshoba County sheriff L. A. Rainey. “
If they’re missing,” said Rainey, “they just hid out somewhere, trying to get a lot of publicity out of it, I figure.”

“
I don’t believe there’s three missing,” Mississippi senator James Eastland told Johnson on the phone that Tuesday afternoon, “I believe it’s a publicity stunt.… There’s no white organizations in that area of Mississippi. Who could possibly harm ’em?… It’ll take a crowd to make three men disappear.”

“
That depends on the kind of men, Jim,” an indulgent President Johnson said. “It might take a big crowd to take three like you. I imagine it wouldn’t take many to capture me.”

Presently, their conversation was interrupted by a call from FBI director Hoover, who had details from his investigators on the scene. Some Choctaw Indians had come upon a burned-out station wagon near a swamp. “
Apparently, what’s happened,” Hoover said, is “these men have been killed. Although, as I say, we can’t tell if anybody’s in there, in view of the intense heat.”

Johnson wondered if he ought to send word to the missing men’s families.

“
I don’t like you having to see these people,” Hoover said, “because we’re going to have more cases like this down South …”

T
HAT WAS WHAT
Johnson feared most. The charred station wagon in the forest changed things. Now there was a picture around which the TV networks could build a story. More reporters rushed to Neshoba County. Soon the newscasts were showing the familiar Southern story: a sinister local sheriff backed by a sullen white citizenry, statements of outrage from civil rights leaders, a swarming federal presence. Hoover would have more than a hundred men in
the area by week’s end. At Johnson’s urging, McNamara would mobilize members of the armed forces in the region to aid in the effort.

But still the missing workers were nowhere to be found. “
Officially, at the weekend, they were missing,” wrote
Newsweek;
“unofficially, few doubted that they were the first martyrs of a fiery Mississippi summer.” The first, the magazine suggested, but hardly the last. “There were those in Washington who feared that the summer so grimly begun might yet end in a Federal occupation amounting to no less than a second Reconstruction.”

This was exactly the kind of talk Johnson did not want. The following week, he expected to pass the 1964 civil rights bill, an attempt to bind up the South’s wounds once and for all. Johnson’s strategy of calling the Republicans’ bluff on civil rights—“
they’re either the party of Lincoln or they ain’t”—had paid off. Two months into the Southern filibuster of the bill, the Democrats had offered a new, slightly watered-down bill in hopes of attracting Republican support for breaking the southerners’ back. On June 10, the break came in a fiery speech from Republican leader Dirksen on the Senate floor in which he declared, “
Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.” It was set to be the signal accomplishment of the Johnson presidency to date.

“
We have now come to a time of national testing,” Johnson told the country in a televised address before the bill passed the House on July 2. “We must not fail.” That day, he signed the bill in a White House ceremony.
A Universal newsreel that played in theaters that summer captured perfectly the story that Johnson wanted told:

Notably absent from the triumphant newsreel footage was Barry Goldwater. The Arizonan, now the presumed favorite for the Republican nomination, had been one of the six Republican senators to vote against the bill. Reporters assumed he was offering a banner around which the Southern racists could gather in advance of the Republican convention. “
If he is nominated for President,” Walter Lippmann wrote, “he will stand out as the rallying point of nonobservance and of passive resistance to the law.”

But that wasn’t Goldwater’s intention—it wasn’t a crass political calculation. Goldwater didn’t do crass political calculations. If he had, he would have concluded that the immediate costs of a no vote on civil rights were too great. He was berated for his vote by no less a figure than President Eisenhower. His own party leader assailed him on the Senate floor: “
You can go ahead and talk about conscience,” Dirksen said. “It is
man’s
conscience that speaks for every generation.”

Rather, Goldwater’s vote came from contorted constitutional reasoning. His legal advisers had convinced him that he could not vote for the bill—that it constituted an unprecedented usurpation of state powers by the federal government. Before announcing his vote, he was “
a shaken man,” Perlstein writes, “convinced that the Constitution offered him no other honorable choice.”

Characteristically, he expressed his inner turmoil through outward surliness. Asked by a reporter if his position on the bill would hurt him in November, Goldwater exploded: “
After Lyndon Johnson—the biggest faker in the United States? He opposed civil
rights until this year!… He’s the phoniest individual who ever came around.”

This was the other story Johnson hoped the country would see that summer. The party that had produced two out of every three presidents for the past one hundred years, the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, the great Republican Party, was rapidly coming unhinged. After Goldwater’s June primary victory in California, the party’s moderate establishment wanted desperately to keep him from seizing the nomination at the San Francisco convention. But how? Or, more precisely, with whom?

Scranton, with his fresh, Kennedy-like looks, became the last, best hope of the anti-Goldwater faction when he jumped into the race in June. Rockefeller, conceding defeat after California, pledged the full resources of his campaign organization to the Scranton team. Eager to play the part of a vigorous young statesman in the Kennedy mold, Scranton threw himself energetically into the race.
His stroke of luck, he believed, would come in the form of a benediction from Eisenhower, who had watched Goldwater’s rise with dismay. But Ike had always preferred to appear above crass politicking. Having seized the cliffs of Normandy and two terms in the White House, he was disinclined in his dotage to give an inch of high ground. Scranton was disappointed to learn Ike’s coveted endorsement would never come.

Without it, Scranton had no remaining strategy for stealing the nomination, save what Teddy White would call “
the gallantry of hopelessness.” Hopeless was the key word. At the party convention, which opened in San Francisco’s Cow Palace on July 13, Goldwater’s grassroots strategists wrangled his delegates expertly, carefully choreographing the state delegations by radio connection from a trailer adjacent to the convention hall. Goldwater was nominated on the first ballot. In the end, all that the Scranton opposition at the Cow Palace achieved was the thorough discrediting of Goldwater at the hands of much of the party leadership. Scranton, making his desperate case, reminded voters of just how extreme Goldwater was. In a
letter published days before Goldwater’s nomination, he called Goldwaterism
a “crazy-quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions that would be soundly repudiated by the American people in November.”

But it was July, and this kind of talk made the movement diehards hot with rage. It was the kind of anger Reagan had seen in his political audiences throughout the year. Watching the assemblage in San Francisco, millions of Americans got to see the rage for themselves. The television networks, expecting a boring Johnson coronation at the Democratic convention in late August, had pinned their hopes for drama on the possibility of a bloody floor fight in San Francisco.
NBC had 173 cameramen navigating the convention floor. CBS laid 180,000 feet of cable inside and outside the Cow Palace, aiming to capture every moment of the convention’s experience. “
When a delegate goes to the bathroom,” producer Bill Leonard said, “CBS wants to know.”

Mercifully, this was overstatement, but what the networks did broadcast of the delegates wasn’t much more pleasant to behold. Revved up to quash a moderate challenge that didn’t need much quashing, the Goldwater army plundered about in search of a suitable foe. They found it in the press galleries. Smarting over the coverage of his primary-season prevaricating,
Eisenhower urged the delegates to “particularly scorn … sensation-seeking commentators and columnists.” Ike was far from a movement favorite, but this message was one the crowd could get behind.
Time
magazine described delegates who “
leaped off their chairs, shook their fists at the glass television booths high above,” and “jeered newsmen in the aisles on the convention floor.”
When Rockefeller addressed the convention in support of a platform amendment against extremism, he was shouted down with catcalls. The antiextremism measure failed.

Goldwater, who spent much of the convention holed up in agonizing tedium at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, was in no mood for making nice. Conventions were supposed to feature optimistic tunes like the Democrats’ “Happy Days Are Here Again.” When Goldwater
approached the speaker’s stage on the night of July 16, the band blared “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” To his audience, and to the millions of Americans watching at home, the nominee described an America altogether different from the one described in the official narrative of prosperity and good feeling. In his America, the new GOP nominee saw a land marked by “
violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders.”