Harold Stassen et al.

In Indiana the “anything but” vote went to the redoubtable Harold E.
Stassen: boy-wonder governor of Minnesota in I936, a presidential prospect in
1940, the loser in an upset to Dewey in I948, sold out by a young lawyer
named Warren Burger in his favorite-son bid in I952, architect of a failed
Richard Nixon purge in I956, the losing candidate for governor of Pennsylva-
nia and mayor of Philadelphia in the years since——the Republican Party’s
embarrassing old Don Quixote. (When he announced he was running for Pres-
ident once more, a politically precocious youngster in Queens dubbed his soap-
box derby car “Harold Stassen’s Ticker Tape Parade”) Stassen had managed
to find his name the only other one on the Indiana Republican ballot besides
Goldwater’s. He financed a raft of brochures promising “progress for all along
the middleway, avoiding both extremes,” and asserting that a Stassen delega-
tion would “open the door at the convention to consideration of the other five
Republican candidates: Ambassador Lodge, Richard Nixon, Govemor Rocke-
feller, Governor Romney, and Governor Scranton.” Anyone-but-Goldwater
and the middle-of-the-road: that was all it took foroafish Harold Stassen to
siphon off an embarrassing 27 percent of the votes from Goldwater in one of
the most conservative states in the country. And thanks to Kleindienst’s inabil-
ity to put up a publicity firewall, commentators continued to refer to Gold-
water’s “wretched showing” in a primaiy where he won upwards of 70 percent
of the vote.
At any rate, few were paying attention to the Republican race. Indiana was
George Wallace’s stand-or-fall battle. Open-primary Wisconsin could be writ-
ten off as a fluke. But party loyalty was sacred in Indiana. If Wallace could pee]
off significant numbers from Johnson’s stand-in, Governor Matthew Welsh,
that would mean the backlash was for real. Dozens of print and television CO]:
“respondents descended on the Hoosier State; Walter Cronkite moved his news-
cast to a storefront in downtown Indianapolis. Wallace’s act had been polished
until it gleamed; at Butler University, his kickoff speech began to jeers and
closed with 56 percent of those present saying he had their vote.
‘ Since taking the podium in front of Bronco Gruber and his friends in Mil-
waukee’s Serb Hall, Wallace drew sustenance from a new theme. A crime
upsurge was now the obsession of barrooms and water coolers across the land:
on March 27 the New York Times reported that in a white middle-class neigh-
borhood in Queens, thirty-eight neighbors were awakened by the screams of a
young woman named Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered over the
course of an hour, and no one bothered to call the police. That the perpetrator
was black, although the Times did not print the fact, soon became well known.
And Wallace began playing the attendant fears like a violin.
“If you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today, the man who
knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital,” he said.
“They’re building a new bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals
fleeing to Virginia.”
“Anyone here from Philadelphia? You know, they can’t even have night
football games anymore because of the trouble between the races. And that’s
the city of brotherly love!”
The message was moving voters. Governor Welsh wamed thousands of
patronage employees that they backed Wallace on pain of their jobs. Regis-
tered Republicans requesting a Democratic ballot were forced to pledge to vote
for the Democratic candidate for President in November (and were threatened
with having their names published). The state’s two Democratic senators sent
out franked letters pronouncing that a vote for Welsh was a vote for the mem-
ory of John F. Kennedy.
In Indiana Wallace beat his Wisconsin totals by 5 percentage points. He
earned almost three-quarters of the vote in one Gary steelworkers’ district.
“The noises you hear now,” he declared, “are the teeth falling out in Indiana.”
It was a good thing few people were paying attention to the Republicans
in Indiana, because by now it appeared that White was presiding over a coup.
He didn’t count the number of delegates he’d secured anymore; he counted
down from the 655 needed to nominate. His secret ledger read 400, four-fifths of
those chosen to date. He claimed 250 publicly. He wanted to have at least I72
with which to surprise the public if Rockefeller won California on June 2. But
once more undisciplined Arizonans spilled the secret. Not long ago Time had
deglaféd Goldwater “flat on his back.” Now the magazine reported: “Suddenly,
fike a brush fire racing out of control, the word crackled among informed
Republicans: _Goldwater’s almost got it. . . . Goldwater kept collecting dele-
gates while the unavoweds and disavowed collected press clippings.”
Though how the party would sell a candidate to the nation that polls sug-
gested only I4 percent of Republicans supported, White did not appear to con-
sider.
“Far more united and at peace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights,
than it has been for a long time ”: future generations might be excused for won-
dering how many conflagrations need burn, or how few votes Bill Scranton
need win, before columnists would break down and concede the point that
America was a nation deeply divided against itself. But the architecture of their
thought would not permit it.

and


The candidate landed, exhausted, to a Goldwater circus. Only after Kitchel
screamed in his face, “Dammit, Parry, you’re a national figure!” did Goldwater
stride out to receive his adoration. A reporter poked a microphone in his snoot;
Goldwater scowled. A pretty young thing tried to plop a big white cowboy hat
on his head; he shoved her away. A guy was peddling a canned soft drink with
the unfortunate name of “Gold Water” (“The Right Drink for the Conservative
Taste”) from the tailgate of his truck. Goldwater was offered a sip. He spit it
Out. “This tastes like piss! I wouldn’t drink it with gin!”

and

Now, with nearly as many reporters covering the reporters as were covering the
results, for the first time CBS News was using Lou Harris’s new computer-
sampling exit poll techniques to attempt to call the race before the polls closed
at 7 p.m. local time——during, that is, prime time in the East.
With three hours to go, news chief Bill Leonard and Fred Friendly pored
over printouts that showed Rockefeller with a small but significant lead. A few
minutes later new numbers came in: Goldwater had pulled ahead with 51.6 per-
cent. They started sweating: 51.6 was just barely on the safe side of their mar-
gin of error. A few more samples came in; the Goldwater trend was confirmed.
It was 7:15 Pacific standard time.
Leonard turned to Lou Harris: “I want to be 100 percent sure.” Harris shot
back confidently, “We’re within our guidelines.”
Leonard called Cronkite in Washington—and, at 7:21 p.m., astonishment
evident in his voice at both the news and speed with which he was able to
deliver it, Cronkite told America that CBS News was projecting Barry Gold-
water as the winner.
Several hours passed. No other network called the race. Friendly and
s final samplings arrived: Goldwater, still—but this time below their
error. The actual precinct tabulations flooding in were distinctly.
ockefeller.
Fred Friendly had to get on a plane to make an important meeting in New
York the next morning. He fell asleep and awoke to the pilot’s voice: “Good
morning, ladies and gentlemen. We’re just about to make our approach into the
New York City area, and it’s going to be a beautiful day. . . . And by the way,
if you’re interested, Governor Rockefeller has won the Califomia primary.” '
Walter Cronkite, it turned out, was not nearly as trusted a man as CBS had
thought. The wire services, using their old-fashioned methods, had called the
election for Rockefeller; so did the CBS local station in New York City, hours
after Cronkite gave the race to the Arizonan senator on the national broadcast.
It was only the counting of the absentee ballots that gave the race officially to
Barry Goldwater, 1,120,403 votes to 1,052,053. The tumout was 72 percent.
Rus Walton’s polling suggested that Goldwater got 20 percent more votes in
precincts where A Choice Not an Echo had been distributed. Scores of wob-
bling delegates in other states committed for Goldwater. It was now hard t0
imagine a scenario in which Barry Goldwater would not be nominated. H6
responded to the news by drinking so much he had to be helped onto the plane
back to Washington. Rockefeller refused to quit the race, promising, “Fm
going right down the line no matter what happens.”
Goldwater people celebrated as if they were witnessing the risen Lord. But
hating Barry Goldwater was taking on transcendent overtones, too: in Missis-
sippi, Freedom Summer organizers found sharecroppers who were terrified that
a Goldwater victory would give locals license to shoot them in their homes.
Everywhere cartoonists pictured Goldwater’s base as “little old ladies in tennis
shoes”-——an image California attorney general Stanley Mosk used in his report
on the John Birch Society in 1961 to portray conservatives as the kind of peo-
ple taken in by aluminum-siding salesmen (and for which Mosk received angry
packages filled with loafers, sandals, and pumps for weeks on end). The Glas-
gow Herald called Goldwater “stupid to a degree that is incredible”;,the Lon-
don Times keened over “a major party endorsing and promoting a man so
blatantly out of touch with reality, so wild in his foreign policy, so backward in
his domestic ideas, and so inconsistent in his thinking”; and the Frankfurter
Rundschau called Goldwater “a confused and weak man who hides his weak-
ness and uncertainty with fiery speeches”—no small thing coming from Ger-
many, then witnessing a dramatic suicide epidemic among old men threatened
by new “dc-Nazification” trials.
Graham Molitor, unwinding from the Califomia bout at a religious retreat,
confessed ashamedly to a divine that when he first came to Washington in the
1950s, Goldwater had been his hero. Now he had worked to destroy the man’s
very name. The priest replied that considering the gravity of the situation,
Molitor had done no wrong.


from Before the Storm