Barry again

National Review rode an impressive postwar tide of conservative intellec-
tual 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 imper-
iled 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 material-
ism’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 king-
dom of heaven on earth (Buckley liked to call that “immanentizing the escha-
ton”). 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.
I. 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 presi-
dent. A group of them who had met through the loyalty oath fight fonned
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 headquar-
ters 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 anold 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 dol-
lars 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,
lllfit below the notice of a media and political establishment for whom such a
¢0nfluence was unimaginable, something was happening—-“like the meeting of
I116 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 Chris-
tians!”
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 Caro‘lina Republican Party at their state conven-
tion 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 I3. People were coming to the dean and asking how to
organize their own clubs; soon there were hundreds of Americans for Gold-
water 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 I960 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 sony. Privately he resolved
to force Nixon’s hand. “In the last six weeks Dick has shown a decided ten-
dency to drift far to the left,” he wrote a friend, Phoenix lawyer William Rehn-
quist, in a letter instructing the Arizona delegation to vote for Nixon at the
convention, “and this has caused such constemation 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 I960 fighting on
principle, than I would care to see us win standing on grounds we know are
wrong and on which we will ultimately destroy 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 Syng-
T E MEETING or Tl-[E BLUE AND WniTi: NILE 77
ll
man Rhee; in Turkey another friendly govemment held on by a thread after
- ‘ May. Soviet foreign minister Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba, to an
Hots 1:11 warm reception as part of Khrushchev’s campaign for Third World
untlllsxrieg to rise up against “capitalist imperialism”; then Castro nationalized
fife 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
mutual security pact Japan’s government had signed with the United States;
fl Af ‘ca independence celebrations in the new nation of the Democratic
glepulmcof 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 suc-
cession, 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 Rocke-
feller.
J 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 Con-
science: 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 El Clvll
defense seminar in March, “when the president will say: ‘Well, how Can W6
afford to stand for freedom? With the people exposed, can we run that risk?i ”
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 presi-
dential 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 nonex-
istent. But that intelligence was top secret, unknown even to a New York gov-
ernor—a rule of espionage being that you can’t let your enemy know whatyou
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.hand-
ful of people who knew that the empire that threatened to bury us could infact
do no such thing.) Republican leaders scurried to shut Rockefeller up. Nixon
leaked that the govemor 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 tumed 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 perfomiing 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 mis-
sile I,3oo miles deep in Russian territory, and the Soviets canceled the honey-
i"noon——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, Rocke~
feller 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 pro—
cedures, 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 paity’s “destiny,” he con-
cluded, “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,
intemationalist 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 I944 manfully pledged “such
additional humanitarian, labor, social and farm legislation as time and experi-
ence may require”; Woodrow Wilson’s platform in I912 opposed second
terms.) But Rockefeller rather fantastically assumed that if he could just
demonstrate intellectually how inadequate the platform draft was to modern
needs, concemed Republicans couldn’t but flock to his banner.