The Making Of The President 1964 – Theodore H. White, 1965 ★★★

Over Before It Began

Theodore H. White lost more than a president and friend in 1963. He also lost a chance to follow up his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1960 U. S. Presidential election with something nearly as riveting.

It wasn’t a race in 1964 but a coronation. The question wasn’t if Lyndon Johnson would be re-elected president, but by how wide a margin. Johnson’s campaign themes of peace and prosperity resonated with voters. After the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy, Americans were not ready to have a third president in just over a year.

Meanwhile, Republican challenger Barry Goldwater was barely trying to win over the undecideds. He delivered instead a bold libertarian message in a tone White likens to an Old Testament prophet, adopting a slogan that seemed unconvinced by itself: “In your heart you know he’s right.”

White didn’t have much of a story on his hands, not knowing in 1965 the explosive effects of Johnson’s re-election on both the war in Vietnam and government spending. What he had was a 44-state landslide, not as much of a story as that 1960 squeaker:

It was over before it began.

          The issue had been decided long before – perhaps within minutes of the fatal shot at Dallas.

So what can be said of this second installment in White’s Making Of The President series? For one thing, a lack of direct authorial investment makes for better, more objective reporting. While like every other reasonable liberal in 1964, White wanted Johnson to win, he didn’t have the same deep personal relationship he had had with Kennedy. In his frank appraisal, Johnson was a friendless bully who “lacks the capacity for arousing warmth.”

Senator Barry Goldwater gets a pat on the back from President Lyndon Johnson after the LBJ's decisive 1964 victory. "War and peace were to be the dominant issue of the campaign of 1964; Barry Goldwater was to be destroyed by this issue," White writes.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater#/media/File:President_Johnson_and_Senator_Goldwater.jpg 

Johnson wouldn’t even give White a personal interview, as White makes clear in one of his many expansive footnotes. Johnson had a difficult relationship with the press in the best of times, which these were, and little time for those who weren’t cronies or needed allies. So White was left to chat up campaign aides and other Democratic leaders.

Goldwater appears more likeable, merrily passing out “Eastern Liberal Press” buttons to reporters on his campaign plane. He was candid to a fault, happy to share his views on broadening use of nuclear weapons and cutting back Social Security, healing a generation gap by giving young and old people someone they could agree on not voting for.

Later on, much later, Goldwater would be credited with setting in motion a conservative revolution that has mostly endured for the last 11 election cycles. But winning was not his thing in 1964, not after the Republican National Convention in San Francisco where Goldwater told off unhappy moderates from the podium by declaring: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice!”

Moderate Nelson Rockefeller being booed at a contentious Republican National Convention in San Francisco while denouncing the Goldwater right. According to White, one female catcaller screamed at the recently-divorced governor: "You lousy lover!"
Photo by George Tames from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/upshot/a-short-history-of-convention-speech-booing.html

White writes: If I had had a pint of brains, recalled Goldwater after the election, I should have known in San Francisco that I had won the nomination and lost the election right there. As it was, he went on recalling, it wasn’t until August that I knew it was hopeless.

This book does not offer as good a story as The Making Of The President 1960 did, but White at least gives it straighter. He works from a more objective angle, less encumbered by his Kennedy connections. No, you don’t get the access that makes the earlier book such a compelling dive into a successful campaign, but his analysis is purer and sharper in places. A candid White makes for better reading.

On the Republicans, White has some fun with the battle taking place between the radicals backing Goldwater, and the moderates who settled first on New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, then on Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton. Both in turn had the support of the Republican establishment; both went down in flames against the doughty resistance of Goldwater’s grass-roots movement.

In Orange County, California, Goldwater’s citizen armada were so flush with can-do spirit they went ahead and collected 7,000 signatures to put Rockefeller on the ballot, since the plutocrat paid out half a dollar per. These new funds were then added to Goldwater’s campaign coffers.

Goldwater supporters rally for their man. "Whether the man Barry Goldwater had been chosen as the vessel of a wordless indignation across the country, or whether Barry Goldwater had roused this indignation, is of interest chiefly to philosophers who debate whether man is prisoner of his fate or its master," White wrote.
Photo by John Dominis from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/10/03/the-campaign-goldwater.

Luke Williams, a Goldwater supporter in Spokane, Washington, explains: “Police protection, fire protection, and sanitation and education at a local level – these are the basic things government should do. But we’ve gone dangerously beyond these basic things, and the government needs pruning back – that’s my concept of it.”

If such a concept was daft to White and many fellow liberal elites, Goldwater’s way of advancing it was even more so. “His candor is the completely unrestrained candor of old men and little children,” is White’s devasting verdict on a candidate he deemed unserious:

Essentially, Goldwater thought of himself, and still does, not as a man prepared to or even desiring to run and administer the government of the United States, but as a leader of a cause.

If his many past statements about selling off the Tennessee Valley Authority or vigorously defeating communism were not enough to trouble moderates, there was Goldwater’s vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which placed him on the extreme end of his own party. Goldwater was anti-big government and not a racist, but it was the wrong time for such nice distinctions and contributed to his lack of Republican support. Only three of the nation’s 16 Republican governors supported his nomination.

Widely considered the most effective campaign ad of all time, the "Daisy Girl" spot seized on public unease with Goldwater's statements about the tactical use of nuclear weapons. White notes: "The film mentioned neither Goldwater nor the Republicans specifically – but the shriek of Republican indignation fastened the bomb message on them more tightly than any calculation could have expected."
Image from http://www.yscnd.org/non-uk-politics/clinton-trump-and-daisy/

Johnson easily had his way against such a punching bag. But instead of using this opportunity to build a mandate around a specific, progressive agenda in line with his Great Society spending plans, White notes how President sat back and focused on broadening his appeal. “And I just want to tell you this – we’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few,” Johnson said when taking time on the campaign trail.

In White’s telling, Johnson wanted not to win, but win big. He was running not against Goldwater but John F. Kennedy:

Somehow it appeared that the man would not be content to win on technical points, but was trying to erase the flaw in the title papers of the Presidency which he had inherited by an assassin’s bullet.

If there was a flaw in that line of thinking, it was not exposed at the ballots. Johnson won over 60% of the popular vote, a nearly 16 million vote margin that gave him the highest share yet in American history. At one point, writing of future trends, White ponders how the country will look like when Johnson leaves office in 1972; myopic, yes, but understandable.

President Johnson with his new vice president, Hubert Humphrey, after the election. White captures Johnson telling Humphrey during the Democratic Convention: "If you didn’t know you were Vice-President thirty days ago, maybe you’re too stupid to be Vice-President."
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson_1964_presidential_campaign

White’s account suffers some from his pains at shoring up his alliance with the Kennedy clan. Not only did they lose John, but they endured the further indignity of Robert Kennedy’s exit as Attorney General. Johnson’s dislike for the younger Kennedy is the stuff of legend, but White tap-dances around the fact that dislike was mutual.

In a long appendix, White includes a memorandum by Philip Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post and unofficial Johnson advisor, to dispel the idea Robert Kennedy opposed Johnson being made his brother’s running mate in 1960. The memorandum begs the question why a publisher of a supposedly objective newspaper was advising a Democratic senator. Graham’s account also shows Robert indeed tried to keep Johnson off the ticket, White’s thin point being that it wasn’t a matter of personal animosity but party calculation.

There is less of the resonant scene-setting here than you got from Making 1960. No walks on a windy Hyannisport beach with seagulls gliding over the surf; no lonely campaigners hiking over Wisconsin tundra; no sweaty hotel corridors bristling with lights and cameras.

White does get a chance to revisit one of his heroes from the earlier book, Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, now leading Johnson’s party in enacting the Civil Rights Act and explaining in uncompromising terms the need not only to override the opposition of his fellow Democrats on the Southern Caucus, but finish them:

“This is no longer a battle of the heart for them – they simply have to die in the trenches; that’s what they were sent here for. They’re old and they haven’t any recruits. They know it – one of them said to me, ‘You simply have to overwhelm us.’ And so we have to beat them to a pulp. No one can make peace. They have to be destroyed.”

The Electoral College map after the 1964 Election. Goldwater's support only extended as far as five Deep South states and his home state of Arizona. While their opposing views on the Civil Rights Act was a chief factor in the results, both candidates avoided making race a topic on the campaign trail, White points out.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson_1964_presidential_campaign

The Civil Rights Act was probably a more important story than the election in 1964; White gives it much of his attention and some of his most fascinating, sidelong takes, however problematic those will be to some readers. Of those Blacks who helped its passage, he writes “though their leaders vary from authentic saints to potential killers, they are locked together not only by the color of their skin but by their consciousness of humiliation.”

A moderate at heart, White didn’t understand the radicalism brewing on either side of the political divide. Whether it be Goldwater or Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, White is not capable or interested in understanding their motives as much as noting their divergence from the mainstream. Of his time that way, but a bit of a shame.

Goldwater and Johnson presented a rare stark choice in American politics, but not much of a contest. White captures this fairly if rather matter-of-factly, most interesting for readers with an interest going in.