On His Own Terms by Richard Norton Smith

Author:Richard Norton Smith [Smith, Richard Norton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9687-6
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

7

WHEN THE REPUBLICAN National Committee convened in Denver for its summer meeting on June 22, George Hinman had a new partner in his advocacy of Rockefeller interests. Joining him in the elegant confines of the Brown Palace Hotel was the short, gnomish figure of Freddy Young (real name Fred Capobianco), the governor’s handpicked replacement for Jud Morhouse as GOP state chairman. Addicted to profanity and garish ties—which it was his habit to whip off before presenting them to surprised recipients—Freddy outdid himself in Denver. Table-hopping at a committee luncheon meeting, the New Yorker approached his patrician counterpart from Alabama and brightly inquired, “When are you going to stop jerking off with Goldwater?”

“I beg your pardon, suh,” said the disbelieving son of Dixie.

Young repeated his challenge. Violence was threatened. “Ten minutes later, however, they were pals,” said one onlooker. “They left arm in arm…the blue and the gray together, with Freddy as the force.” Sectional harmony was harder to come by when the conversation turned to a winning strategy for 1964, and especially to issues of race. For southern Republicans, many of them lifelong Democrats with the paint still wet, Birmingham had been as galvanizing as it was to progressives who shared Rockefeller’s allegiance to the party of Lincoln. Encouraged by their showing in the 1962 elections, still more by a decline in Kennedy support among white southerners as the administration became identified with Negro protesters, a new breed of southern Republicans rallied under the banner of states’ rights. For many in both parties, this was a code word for segregation. The Denver conclave heard the boisterous southern chairman talk openly of “niggers” and “nigger lovers.” “There’s an insanity in the air around here,” muttered George Hinman.

That their electoral votes, no less than their moral convictions, were deemed expendable by the emerging Goldwater majority came as a profound shock to Republicans in the industrial Northeast and Midwest. Their surprise turned to horror a week later, as they observed the strong-arm tactics and slashed telephone lines that characterized a two-day meeting of Young Republicans in San Francisco. Columnist Robert Novak wasn’t the only observer to conclude that California’s pivotal delegation was “infested” by members of the John Birch Society. Tactics of delay and disruption were employed, as one meaningless roll call after another exhausted the less ideologically fervent. It was shortly after five o’clock in the morning when the insurgents secured the victory, by two votes, of their candidate for YR chairman, one Donald “Buz” Lukens, a Capitol Hill staff member whose platform called for abolition of the income tax and exalted the free right of association—that is, opposition to federally mandated desegregation.

The outcome might have been different had George Hinman granted the request of Bruce Chapman, a Harvard undergraduate and cofounder of Advance, a magazine promoting the cause of progressive Republicanism. Early in 1963, Chapman pleaded with the Rockefeller organization for $50,000 to prevent the Young Republicans from falling under Birchite control. Since this ran counter to Hinman’s strategy of making no enemies that could be avoided, Chapman went away empty-handed.

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