A New Frontier with New Challenges (JFK Survives)
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An Inside Look In The Goldwater Presidential Campaign.
This is an inside look at the Republican nominee's campaign, travelling with Senator Goldwater in seven states of the Old Confederacy and in two Border states.
"Actually, I did not so much travel “with” the Senator as “behind” him. He made his rounds in a Boeing 727, a three-engine jet, flying at very nearly the speed of sound. With him in this plane—the Yai Bi Ken, which is Navajo for “House in the Sky”—were Mrs. Goldwater, five or six campaign advisers, and fifty-odd journalists of one sort or another, most of them representing what some Goldwater enthusiasts call “the rat-fink Eastern press.” (“I’m on a political trip, and the Republican Party is paying for it,” Goldwater said in Tulsa the other day, adding that a lot of President Kennedy and Vice President Jackson's “political” trips are paid for by the taxpayers. He might have gone on to say that while Republican treasurers may be signing the checks, this involves merely a transfer of funds from an account into which newspapers, magazines, and television networks have put thirty-six hundred dollars for each of their representatives travelling with Goldwater.) I was part of the journalistic overflow from the Yai Bi Ken. We travelled about—sometimes as many as twelve of us, sometimes as few as five—in a two-engine propeller plane that cruised at a little better than one-third the speed of the candidate’s plane. In theory, we were “following” Goldwater, but this was almost as hopeless as giving hot pursuit to an Alfa Romeo on a tricycle. We made only about half as many stops as he did, and it was not uncommon to arrive at a Goldwater rally just as the preacher was saying the benediction, or to leave one after only a few words of the invocation. In Missouri, we never saw Goldwater at all. We landed at the Springfield airport, learned that he had left for a meeting in town, stopped in the coffee shop for a quick lunch, and took off for Charleston, West Virginia, where, it had been announced, Goldwater was to make a major speech on the administration’s anti-poverty program. All this had its rewards as well as its frustrations. It takes a powerful constitution to endure attendance at eight or ten political rallies a day, and Goldwater rallies in the Deep South are especially taxing. On the whole, I was relieved by the news that our group would be unable to make Shreveport, Louisiana, where, according to one authority in our entourage, “there are more haters per square mile than anywhere else in the country.” It was, though, disappointing not to be in Knoxville, Tennessee, to hear Goldwater, standing beneath the Confederate flag, say that he still thought the Tennessee Valley Authority ought to be sold to private interests, just as it was disappointing to miss his address to senior citizens in Orlando, Florida, on the iniquities of providing hospital care for the aged under the Social Security system. In any case, the experience, though neither as rich nor as wearing as it might have been, was instructive and, in many ways, novel. I don’t suppose, for example, that anyone before us has ever logged several thousand miles in the South and visited a dozen or so of its great centers of population without seeing any more Negroes than one might expect to encounter on, say, an average winter afternoon in Spitsbergen. In a Negro-less Memphis or Atlanta or New Orleans, some of us had the feeling of having lost our bearings. We would peer out beyond the edges of the crowds and down side streets trying to see if we could find a single Negro and, whenever we saw one, telling one another of our rare discovery. There were novel sounds as well as sights. It has been my lot to attend political gatherings of many sorts for many years, but never until I went South with Goldwater had I heard any large number of Americans boo and hoot at the mention of the name of the President of the United States. In Alabama and Mississippi, there were thunderous, stadium-filling boos, all of them cued by a United States Senator (Carroll Gartin).
Goldwater was asked how it happened that the family department store donated a gold watch as a commencement prize to each of the all-white schools but not to the school he headed. Goldwater explained that he was opposed to segregation and didn’t intend to encourage it by supplying an all-Negro school with a prize. The principal replied that, as he saw the matter, an all-white school was every bit as segregated as an all-Negro one. Goldwater thought this over for a moment or two and then declared, with a delighted grin, that the educator’s reasoning was absolutely unassailable. The school got its gold watch. As an individual, he is elated by illuminations of this kind. It may even have pleased him, the other day, to have Walter Lippmann inform him that it hardly makes sense to accuse the President, as Goldwater did in Charleston, of planning an economy in which “no one is permitted to fall below the average,” since, in Lippmann’s icy words, “there cannot be an ‘average’ if no one is below it.” The Republican nominee’s capacity for astonishment is matched by his capacity for astonishing. He is everlastingly outwitting—if that is the word—those who think they know most about him. For two or three years now, a number of reasonably intelligent people have been studying Goldwater and Goldwaterism as intently—and, in some cases, almost as morbidly—as Cotton Mather ever studied the doings of Satan and the manifestations of witchcraft. But not even the most assiduous and imaginative of Goldwaterologists was prepared for the Senator’s emergence in San Francisco as a candidate for High Sheriff as well as for President. If Goldwater was anything, he was a states’-rights man, and if there is one states’ right, or responsibility, that no one has ever thought of challenging, it is the maintenance of public safety and the enforcement of criminal justice. In his acceptance speech, though, Goldwater said that law and order were in jeopardy almost everywhere and that he proposed to do something “to keep the streets safe from bullies and marauders.” Goldwaterologists in the Cow Palace and across the country were stunned—and stunned again when, in a press conference the following morning, he said, “I think the responsibility for this has to start someplace, and it should start at the federal level.” How on earth did this strictest of Constitutional fundamentalists propose to exercise federal “responsibility” to keep order in the streets? That question was put to Goldwater in Phoenix a day later, and he was vague in response—reassuringly vague from the Goldwaterologists’ point of view. He said a few words about creating an improved “moral climate” by force of Presidential example, and some about bettering the quality of the federal judiciary. Though still a bit unsettled, the Goldwaterologists assumed that this was about the size of it—that the Republican candidate would continue to take a stand against “bullies and marauders” but would not undermine his whole position as a strict Constitutionalist by proposing any specific strategy of intervention. For him, they reasoned, there was more than the Constitution at stake. The autonomy of Southern state troopers and “public-safety” units is a vital element in the defense of the Southern status quo. Moreover, the sight of Goldwater stickers on police cars and motorcycles is by no means unusual along Southern highways.
Until the first day of the Southern tour, it seemed that Goldwater would not go much beyond the rhetoric of the acceptance speech and the amplifying statements he made in the days immediately after the Convention. But on his first evening out, in a baseball park in St. Petersburg, he delivered a speech that went well beyond anything he had said in San Francisco or Phoenix. It was by far the most radical statement he has ever made. In it he not only undermined his position on the Constitution but threw the document itself away, and the Magna Carta with it. He began by reminding his audience of what he had said about crime and violence in San Francisco and by declaring that it was “a tragedy [that] the breakdown of law and order should be an issue in this campaign for the highest office in the land.” But, he went on, “it must be an issue, a major issue,” for “the war against crime [is] the only needed war.” (So much for India or a flare up in South Vietnam.) He cited a number of alarming statistics on crime (nationwide, he said, it has climbed “five times faster than the population” during the Kennedy-Johnson and the subsequent Kennedy-Jackson administration), and demanded to know how President Kennedy can “ignore the six thousand or so major crimes committed in the last twenty-four hours.” (The President was vulnerable enough; like Goldwater, he was in Florida at that very moment, addressing some machinists in Miami Beach and saying not a word about the last twenty-four hours of crime.) Goldwater then put, in his audience’s behalf, the question that had bothered the Goldwaterologists: “How, you will rightly ask, will Nelson Rockefeller and I restore domestic tranquility to this land? Well, let me tell you how we will do it.” In essence, what Nelson Rockefeller and he would do to combat lawlessness would be to change the law or ignore it. In the first place, they would appoint officials who understood, as they did, that the important thing about law enforcement and criminal justice was to get offenders off the streets and behind bars. When the law got in the way of prosecutors, the law should be either revised or overlooked. “Something must be done, and done immediately, to swing away from this obsessive concern for the rights of the criminal defendant,” Goldwater said. He gave some examples of this “obsessive concern,” all of which were Supreme Court rulings intended to assure the observance of the “due-process” clause and the rights set forth in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. It was nonsense, Goldwater said, for the Supreme Court to hold a confession inadmissible merely because a defendant did not have his lawyer’s advice at the time he made it; the only point was whether the confession was a recital of the truth. He said that he and Miller would urge upon Congress a statute voiding the Mallory ruling, which, as he summarized it, “holds that any statement made by a defendant to police officers is inadmissible if arraignment is delayed.” If he had said that the Constitution is a lot of ink on paper, he would have described it about as adequately as he described the Mallory ruling in St. Petersburg. The ruling, made by the Supreme Court in 1957, deals at some length with the appropriate limits of pre-arraignment examination of a suspect and with the question of how much time between arrest and arraignment is enough and how much is too much. Most policemen are unhappy with it, and so is Goldwater. About it, and about other manifestations of the “obsessive concern” with the rights of defendants, Goldwater said he would do two things. He would, “in making appointments to the federal judiciary, [consider] the need to redress Constitutional interpretation in favor of the public.” And, as insurance in the event that court-packing didn’t work, he would support a Constitutional amendment to “give back to the states those powers absolutely needed for fair and efficient administration of criminal law.” If the amendment were to embody his present view of what “powers” the states need, it would effectively repeal about half the Bill of Rights. “In your hearts, you know there must be a change,” he said. “And in your hearts you know that Nelson Rockefeller and I will be that change.”
The crowd at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg was, like most of Goldwater’s Southern crowds, good-sized, enthusiastic, and more responsive to his presence than to his words. It is axiomatic, of course, that political crowds are more interested in seeing than in listening, and most candidates nowadays give the live audience their material presence and direct their words to radio and television audiences and to readers of newspapers. But in this, as in so many other matters, things have always been a bit different in the South. Its masses have always relished strong, vivid political rhetoric. They will travel long distances to hear it, and—other things being equal, or even a little unequal—will reward eloquence at the polls. Goldwater nowhere attempted to satisfy the Southern appetite for language. The lines he got from his writers were as flat as his delivery of them. Even when the substance was inflammatory, the form was soporific—statistics on crime, discussions of previously unheard-of Supreme Court rulings and internal-security cases, arguments over the relative merits of defense contractors. But this rarely dampened the enthusiasm that the crowds had brought with them to the gatherings. The quality of this enthusiasm, one felt, was essentially non-political. These were not really political rallies—they were revels, they were pageants, they were celebrations. The aim of the revelers was not so much to advance a candidacy or a cause as to dramatize a mood, and the mood was a kind of joyful defiance, or defiant joy. By coming South, Barry Goldwater had made it possible for great numbers of unapologetic white supremacists to hold great carnivals of white supremacy. They were not troubled in the least over whether this would hurt the Republican Party in the rest of the country. They wanted to make—for their own satisfaction, if for no one else’s—a display of the fact that they had found and were enjoying membership in one organization that was secure against integration, because it had made itself secure against Negro aspirations; as long as they could put on shows of this kind, no Negro would ever want in. By far the most memorable of the shows was staged in Cramton Bowl, in Montgomery, Alabama, on the second night of Goldwater’s tour. Some unsung Alabama Republican impresario had hit upon an idea of breathtaking simplicity: to show the country the “lily-white” character of Republicanism in Dixie by planting the bowl with a great field of white lilies—living lilies, in perfect bloom and gorgeously arrayed. The night was soft; the stars and the moon were bright; the grass in the bowl was impossibly green, as if it were growing out of something far richer than dirt; the stadium lights did not destroy the colors and shadows of evening yet illuminated the turf so well that individual blades of grass could be seen. And springing from the turf were seven hundred Alabama girls in long white gowns, all of a whiteness as impossible as the greenness of the green. The girls came, we were told, from every one of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties—from Tallapoosa and Bibb and Etowah and Coffee—as well as from Montgomery, Birmingham, and Mobile. Their dresses were uniform only in color and length; taken all in all, it was a triumph for, among other things, the seamstresses of Alabama. The strewing of the lilies had been done about half an hour before the proceedings were to begin. The girls stood on the turf, each waving a small American flag, while the bands played and the local officials made and announced last-minute arrangements. Then, right on schedule, an especially powerful light was focused on a stadium gate at about the fifty-yard line, and the candidate of the Republican Party rode in as slowly as a car can be made to go, first past fifty yards or so of choice Southern womanhood and then, after a sharp left at the goal line, past more girls and up to the splendidly draped stand. It was all as solemn and as stylized as a review of troops by some master of the art like General de Gaulle. The girls did not behave like troops; they swayed a bit as Goldwater passed, and sounds came from them—not squeals or shrieks but pleasing and ladylike murmurs. Yet in a sense, of course, they were Goldwater’s troops, as well as representatives of what the rest of his Southern legions—the thousands in the packed stands, the tens of thousands in Memphis and New Orleans and Atlanta and Shreveport and Greenville—passionately believed they were defending. When at last he mounted the platform, the lilies departed the gridiron and arranged themselves on the sidelines. There they listened to what was by far the limpest speech Goldwater delivered anywhere in the South. It wasn’t about anything in particular. He said that big government was bad and that he and Nelson Rockefeller proposed to put an end to it, though not right away. (“Because of existing commitments, we cannot do this overnight. But we can gradually replace this undesirable and complex system with a much simpler and more sensible one . . . without making dangerous cuts in national defense or in necessary domestic programs.”) The crowd loved it. It may even have been relieved that the speech was low in key and did not drive out memories of the spectacle that had preceded it.
Opinion polls show the region as a whole to be just about evenly split between the candidates. Goldwater cannot lose Alabama, where the President will be vilified on the ballot by Governor George C. Wallace and his organization, and he should have no trouble winning Mississippi, where the Democratic organization has put up a slate of Kennedy electors and urged everyone to vote against them. It would surprise most experts if Kennedy won Louisiana, especially now that Governor Chep Morrison was killed in a airplane accident a few months ago. Also in the Pelican State where Goldwater has more billboard space than Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors put together; it wouldn't also surprise most experts if the President lost Georgia, Arkansas (where the Vice Presidential nominee's brother is running for Governor), the Carolinas, and Kentucky. But in most places the division is expected to be close. There are, plainly, large numbers of Southerners—white Southerners—who will cast their votes on issues other than race. In August, Senator Albert Gore, one of the two Southern Democrats to vote for the Civil Rights Bill, easily won a nomination for Senator against a segregationist. In late September, Representative Harry Wingate, Jr., of Georgia, the one Democrat whom Kennedy endorsed on the Southern tour, lost his seat, in a district said to be full of racists of the most benighted sort, to a man supporting the national administration. A former Goldwater Democrat, Senator Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, made his first appearance as a Goldwater Republican at the candidate’s side in Greenville, and the man who introduced him to the airport picnickers there said that Thurmond’s decision of the day before had been as notable an event in Southern history as Robert E. Lee’s decision to resign his commission in the United States Army for a command in the Army of Northern Virginia. Thurmond’s defection was undoubtedly an event to be noted; it gladdened the party he left and saddened the party he joined, which can no longer boast that it has no racists in high elective office. Southern politicians do not believe that Thurmond joined the Republicans because he thought the Party had a bright future in South Carolina; he crossed over, they think, because he would not, in all probability, have been re-nominated as a Democrat in 1966, when he was due to be opposed by the incumbent governor, William Jennings Bryan Dorn. He now is facing a forced special election versus a rather dull but still loyal Democrat, the states' Lt. Governor who is the son and namesake of the Senator who once held Thurmond's Senate seat.
Still, the Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority, remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and almost nothing else. On his tour, Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned “race” or “Negroes” or “whites” or “segregation” or “civil rights.” But the fact that the words did not cross his lips does not mean that he ignored the realities they describe. He talked about those realities all the time, in an underground, or Aesopian, language—a kind of code that few in his audiences had any trouble deciphering. In the code, “bullies and marauders” means “Negroes.” “Criminal defendants” means negroes. States rights means “opposition to civil rights.” “Women” means “white women.” This much of the code is as easily understood by his Northern audiences as by his Southern ones, but there are also some words that have a more limited and specific meaning for the Southern crowds. Thus, in the Old Confederacy “John FITZGERALD Kennedy” and “my opponent” means “integrationist.” “Henry Martin Jackson” (it somehow amuses Goldwater to drop the “Scoop”) means “super-integrationist.” “Federal judiciary” means “integrationist judges.” It would be going too far to say that Goldwater touched Southern sensibilities on race when he brought up “Baby Brother Bobby (Kennedy) the Chief Enforcer (Attorney General)”, the TFX controversy, fiscal policy, or “Solo” Lodge, and he certainly was not arousing them when he talked of the T.V.A. in Knoxville and Medicare in Orlando. One always had the feeling, though, that the Goldwater Republicans in the South could find a racial or regional angle in almost anything. When the name of Bobby Kennedy, a man who before he was Attorney General once enjoyed a friendly relationship with Senator Thurmond—was hooted at Goldwater meetings (as it was everywhere except in Greenville, where delicacy prevailed and he was not mentioned), it was not because the speaker was deploring Kennedy's legal activities in business and politics. It was because of his embarrassing connections of being the chief enforcer of his brother's integrationist attitude in the White House. And Goldwater generally played it that way. He would rattle off some figures on murders, rapes, and muggings, explain that “nothing is more clear from history than that the moral decay of a people begins at the top,” and follow this with a quick mention of Bobby Kennedy, as if he were some kind of hoodlum lieutenant and riot organizer, rather than the country's Attorney General. Among Goldwater Southerners, even thermonuclear warfare gets identified with regional pride, sentiment, and rancor. An Atlanta matron, bedecked with Goldwater-Rockefeller buttons, was asked if she had ever been disturbed by things the candidate had said about war and weaponry. “Certainly not,” she replied. “We’re not cowards down here.”
There was a moment during the Southern tour that seemed made to order for a revival of McCarthyism. Early in the morning of his last day in the South, Goldwater flew from New Orleans to Longview, Texas, for an airport rally, where the candidate was to be presented by the Honorable Martin Dies, a former congressman from Texas who most recently ran in the special election for the U.S. Senate, losing to Senator Lady Bird Johnson. Dies was the architect of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which in his day was always called the Dies Committee. He was the John the Baptist of McCarthyism. There was a time, in the late thirties and early forties, when liberals and radicals, and more than a few conservatives, blanched at the mention of his name. His committee once solemnly declared that Shirley Temple, then a recent alumna of a Hollywood kindergarten and a child actress whose performances dampened handkerchiefs all around the world, was a stooge of the Stalinists. Now an attorney in private practice, this lifelong Democrat and scourge of subversives had come out of political retirement to introduce Barry Goldwater in his maiden appearance in Texas as a Presidential candidate. And it was to be an all-star show—not only Goldwater and Dies but Strom Thurmond (once aboard, he seemed impossible to lose; he stayed with Goldwater until the campaign headed North) and the "boy wonder from Connecticut" Senate nominee George H.W. Bush. The airport crowd—respectable in size, overwhelming in ardor—was ready for a resurgence of McCarthyism. But the men on the platform were not. Senator Thurmond, who introduced Dies, was so out of tune with history that he couldn’t pronounce the great Texan’s name—once a household word—properly. It rhymes with “cries,” but as Thurmond had it, it was “Die-ease.” And then Martin Dies arose and, without a mention of Communist termites, said he was honored to introduce Goldwater, who mumbled a few words about some work of a Paul Revere type that Dies had once done, long ago, and followed these with his basic speech: “When you woke up on a typical morning of this administration, Kennedy’s day of spending was just beginning. And by the evening, when his day of spending was complete, he would have spent ten million dollars more than Eisenhower ever spent. When the meeting was over, I asked Dies if he intended to follow Thurmond’s lead and switch parties. The forerunner of McCarthy looked at me as though I had asked a question of utter madness. “I just introduced Goldwater,” he said. “I’m voting the Democratic ticket.”
Goldwater ended his first Southern tour with the rally in Longview, where he cast a bit more light on questions of strategy by saying, “I do not intend to go around the country discussing complicated, twisted issues.” That evening, the Yai Bi Ken—some of its passengers had taken to calling it the Enola Gay—made a Northern reëntry by way of Charleston, West Virginia, where Goldwater said, “The task of the true statesman, said Aristotle, is to see dangers from afar. Now, I do not claim to be a statesman.” There, in the capital of Appalachia, he also unburdened himself of some thoughts on poverty. The President’s program was, he said, “phony.” Poverty was as much a state of mind as anything else. It was also a verbal and statistical trick, put over by economists who simply “redefined the luxuries of yesterday.” He said that the administration was compelling people to think poor: “If someone who ought to feel deprived [for lack of yesterday’s luxuries] doesn’t respond that way, some politician in my opponent’s curious camp—perhaps the leader himself—will drive up to his door to see to it that he feels the way he ought.” He pointed out that people in Pakistan are much poorer than Americans. The living standards of the American “poor”—in the written text of his speeches, the word is always in quotation marks—“represent material well-being beyond the dreams of a vast majority of the people of the world outside these United States.” He conceded that there was some problem in this country about unemployed youth and school dropouts, but the administration’s retraining program, he said, was no fit solution; for one thing, it would “cost ten thousand dollars for each recruit.” He had a money-saving plan for high-school dropouts: “It would be cheaper to give them four years of education in your own fine state university, where they would learn a lot more.” He did not linger on the problems that such a solution might pose for American higher education. In an ad-libbed section on the origins of the capitalist system, he said he thought that it really started when some “smart ape” began setting aside coconuts fallen from trees and selling them to other “apes,” some of whom lacked the spirit of enterprise and became resentful at having to buy what formerly was a bounty of nature. He thought the President’s views on the economy “dreadful,” because they provided “no penalty for failure.” “In your hearts, you know this is so,” he added. I have never seen as grim and uncomprehending a group of politicians as those West Virginia Republicans who sat on the platform with Goldwater in Charleston. They joined in two bursts of applause—once when he mentioned the Ten Commandments, and again when he said, “We will not convert the heathen by losing our own souls.”
"Actually, I did not so much travel “with” the Senator as “behind” him. He made his rounds in a Boeing 727, a three-engine jet, flying at very nearly the speed of sound. With him in this plane—the Yai Bi Ken, which is Navajo for “House in the Sky”—were Mrs. Goldwater, five or six campaign advisers, and fifty-odd journalists of one sort or another, most of them representing what some Goldwater enthusiasts call “the rat-fink Eastern press.” (“I’m on a political trip, and the Republican Party is paying for it,” Goldwater said in Tulsa the other day, adding that a lot of President Kennedy and Vice President Jackson's “political” trips are paid for by the taxpayers. He might have gone on to say that while Republican treasurers may be signing the checks, this involves merely a transfer of funds from an account into which newspapers, magazines, and television networks have put thirty-six hundred dollars for each of their representatives travelling with Goldwater.) I was part of the journalistic overflow from the Yai Bi Ken. We travelled about—sometimes as many as twelve of us, sometimes as few as five—in a two-engine propeller plane that cruised at a little better than one-third the speed of the candidate’s plane. In theory, we were “following” Goldwater, but this was almost as hopeless as giving hot pursuit to an Alfa Romeo on a tricycle. We made only about half as many stops as he did, and it was not uncommon to arrive at a Goldwater rally just as the preacher was saying the benediction, or to leave one after only a few words of the invocation. In Missouri, we never saw Goldwater at all. We landed at the Springfield airport, learned that he had left for a meeting in town, stopped in the coffee shop for a quick lunch, and took off for Charleston, West Virginia, where, it had been announced, Goldwater was to make a major speech on the administration’s anti-poverty program. All this had its rewards as well as its frustrations. It takes a powerful constitution to endure attendance at eight or ten political rallies a day, and Goldwater rallies in the Deep South are especially taxing. On the whole, I was relieved by the news that our group would be unable to make Shreveport, Louisiana, where, according to one authority in our entourage, “there are more haters per square mile than anywhere else in the country.” It was, though, disappointing not to be in Knoxville, Tennessee, to hear Goldwater, standing beneath the Confederate flag, say that he still thought the Tennessee Valley Authority ought to be sold to private interests, just as it was disappointing to miss his address to senior citizens in Orlando, Florida, on the iniquities of providing hospital care for the aged under the Social Security system. In any case, the experience, though neither as rich nor as wearing as it might have been, was instructive and, in many ways, novel. I don’t suppose, for example, that anyone before us has ever logged several thousand miles in the South and visited a dozen or so of its great centers of population without seeing any more Negroes than one might expect to encounter on, say, an average winter afternoon in Spitsbergen. In a Negro-less Memphis or Atlanta or New Orleans, some of us had the feeling of having lost our bearings. We would peer out beyond the edges of the crowds and down side streets trying to see if we could find a single Negro and, whenever we saw one, telling one another of our rare discovery. There were novel sounds as well as sights. It has been my lot to attend political gatherings of many sorts for many years, but never until I went South with Goldwater had I heard any large number of Americans boo and hoot at the mention of the name of the President of the United States. In Alabama and Mississippi, there were thunderous, stadium-filling boos, all of them cued by a United States Senator (Carroll Gartin).
Goldwater was asked how it happened that the family department store donated a gold watch as a commencement prize to each of the all-white schools but not to the school he headed. Goldwater explained that he was opposed to segregation and didn’t intend to encourage it by supplying an all-Negro school with a prize. The principal replied that, as he saw the matter, an all-white school was every bit as segregated as an all-Negro one. Goldwater thought this over for a moment or two and then declared, with a delighted grin, that the educator’s reasoning was absolutely unassailable. The school got its gold watch. As an individual, he is elated by illuminations of this kind. It may even have pleased him, the other day, to have Walter Lippmann inform him that it hardly makes sense to accuse the President, as Goldwater did in Charleston, of planning an economy in which “no one is permitted to fall below the average,” since, in Lippmann’s icy words, “there cannot be an ‘average’ if no one is below it.” The Republican nominee’s capacity for astonishment is matched by his capacity for astonishing. He is everlastingly outwitting—if that is the word—those who think they know most about him. For two or three years now, a number of reasonably intelligent people have been studying Goldwater and Goldwaterism as intently—and, in some cases, almost as morbidly—as Cotton Mather ever studied the doings of Satan and the manifestations of witchcraft. But not even the most assiduous and imaginative of Goldwaterologists was prepared for the Senator’s emergence in San Francisco as a candidate for High Sheriff as well as for President. If Goldwater was anything, he was a states’-rights man, and if there is one states’ right, or responsibility, that no one has ever thought of challenging, it is the maintenance of public safety and the enforcement of criminal justice. In his acceptance speech, though, Goldwater said that law and order were in jeopardy almost everywhere and that he proposed to do something “to keep the streets safe from bullies and marauders.” Goldwaterologists in the Cow Palace and across the country were stunned—and stunned again when, in a press conference the following morning, he said, “I think the responsibility for this has to start someplace, and it should start at the federal level.” How on earth did this strictest of Constitutional fundamentalists propose to exercise federal “responsibility” to keep order in the streets? That question was put to Goldwater in Phoenix a day later, and he was vague in response—reassuringly vague from the Goldwaterologists’ point of view. He said a few words about creating an improved “moral climate” by force of Presidential example, and some about bettering the quality of the federal judiciary. Though still a bit unsettled, the Goldwaterologists assumed that this was about the size of it—that the Republican candidate would continue to take a stand against “bullies and marauders” but would not undermine his whole position as a strict Constitutionalist by proposing any specific strategy of intervention. For him, they reasoned, there was more than the Constitution at stake. The autonomy of Southern state troopers and “public-safety” units is a vital element in the defense of the Southern status quo. Moreover, the sight of Goldwater stickers on police cars and motorcycles is by no means unusual along Southern highways.
Until the first day of the Southern tour, it seemed that Goldwater would not go much beyond the rhetoric of the acceptance speech and the amplifying statements he made in the days immediately after the Convention. But on his first evening out, in a baseball park in St. Petersburg, he delivered a speech that went well beyond anything he had said in San Francisco or Phoenix. It was by far the most radical statement he has ever made. In it he not only undermined his position on the Constitution but threw the document itself away, and the Magna Carta with it. He began by reminding his audience of what he had said about crime and violence in San Francisco and by declaring that it was “a tragedy [that] the breakdown of law and order should be an issue in this campaign for the highest office in the land.” But, he went on, “it must be an issue, a major issue,” for “the war against crime [is] the only needed war.” (So much for India or a flare up in South Vietnam.) He cited a number of alarming statistics on crime (nationwide, he said, it has climbed “five times faster than the population” during the Kennedy-Johnson and the subsequent Kennedy-Jackson administration), and demanded to know how President Kennedy can “ignore the six thousand or so major crimes committed in the last twenty-four hours.” (The President was vulnerable enough; like Goldwater, he was in Florida at that very moment, addressing some machinists in Miami Beach and saying not a word about the last twenty-four hours of crime.) Goldwater then put, in his audience’s behalf, the question that had bothered the Goldwaterologists: “How, you will rightly ask, will Nelson Rockefeller and I restore domestic tranquility to this land? Well, let me tell you how we will do it.” In essence, what Nelson Rockefeller and he would do to combat lawlessness would be to change the law or ignore it. In the first place, they would appoint officials who understood, as they did, that the important thing about law enforcement and criminal justice was to get offenders off the streets and behind bars. When the law got in the way of prosecutors, the law should be either revised or overlooked. “Something must be done, and done immediately, to swing away from this obsessive concern for the rights of the criminal defendant,” Goldwater said. He gave some examples of this “obsessive concern,” all of which were Supreme Court rulings intended to assure the observance of the “due-process” clause and the rights set forth in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. It was nonsense, Goldwater said, for the Supreme Court to hold a confession inadmissible merely because a defendant did not have his lawyer’s advice at the time he made it; the only point was whether the confession was a recital of the truth. He said that he and Miller would urge upon Congress a statute voiding the Mallory ruling, which, as he summarized it, “holds that any statement made by a defendant to police officers is inadmissible if arraignment is delayed.” If he had said that the Constitution is a lot of ink on paper, he would have described it about as adequately as he described the Mallory ruling in St. Petersburg. The ruling, made by the Supreme Court in 1957, deals at some length with the appropriate limits of pre-arraignment examination of a suspect and with the question of how much time between arrest and arraignment is enough and how much is too much. Most policemen are unhappy with it, and so is Goldwater. About it, and about other manifestations of the “obsessive concern” with the rights of defendants, Goldwater said he would do two things. He would, “in making appointments to the federal judiciary, [consider] the need to redress Constitutional interpretation in favor of the public.” And, as insurance in the event that court-packing didn’t work, he would support a Constitutional amendment to “give back to the states those powers absolutely needed for fair and efficient administration of criminal law.” If the amendment were to embody his present view of what “powers” the states need, it would effectively repeal about half the Bill of Rights. “In your hearts, you know there must be a change,” he said. “And in your hearts you know that Nelson Rockefeller and I will be that change.”
The crowd at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg was, like most of Goldwater’s Southern crowds, good-sized, enthusiastic, and more responsive to his presence than to his words. It is axiomatic, of course, that political crowds are more interested in seeing than in listening, and most candidates nowadays give the live audience their material presence and direct their words to radio and television audiences and to readers of newspapers. But in this, as in so many other matters, things have always been a bit different in the South. Its masses have always relished strong, vivid political rhetoric. They will travel long distances to hear it, and—other things being equal, or even a little unequal—will reward eloquence at the polls. Goldwater nowhere attempted to satisfy the Southern appetite for language. The lines he got from his writers were as flat as his delivery of them. Even when the substance was inflammatory, the form was soporific—statistics on crime, discussions of previously unheard-of Supreme Court rulings and internal-security cases, arguments over the relative merits of defense contractors. But this rarely dampened the enthusiasm that the crowds had brought with them to the gatherings. The quality of this enthusiasm, one felt, was essentially non-political. These were not really political rallies—they were revels, they were pageants, they were celebrations. The aim of the revelers was not so much to advance a candidacy or a cause as to dramatize a mood, and the mood was a kind of joyful defiance, or defiant joy. By coming South, Barry Goldwater had made it possible for great numbers of unapologetic white supremacists to hold great carnivals of white supremacy. They were not troubled in the least over whether this would hurt the Republican Party in the rest of the country. They wanted to make—for their own satisfaction, if for no one else’s—a display of the fact that they had found and were enjoying membership in one organization that was secure against integration, because it had made itself secure against Negro aspirations; as long as they could put on shows of this kind, no Negro would ever want in. By far the most memorable of the shows was staged in Cramton Bowl, in Montgomery, Alabama, on the second night of Goldwater’s tour. Some unsung Alabama Republican impresario had hit upon an idea of breathtaking simplicity: to show the country the “lily-white” character of Republicanism in Dixie by planting the bowl with a great field of white lilies—living lilies, in perfect bloom and gorgeously arrayed. The night was soft; the stars and the moon were bright; the grass in the bowl was impossibly green, as if it were growing out of something far richer than dirt; the stadium lights did not destroy the colors and shadows of evening yet illuminated the turf so well that individual blades of grass could be seen. And springing from the turf were seven hundred Alabama girls in long white gowns, all of a whiteness as impossible as the greenness of the green. The girls came, we were told, from every one of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties—from Tallapoosa and Bibb and Etowah and Coffee—as well as from Montgomery, Birmingham, and Mobile. Their dresses were uniform only in color and length; taken all in all, it was a triumph for, among other things, the seamstresses of Alabama. The strewing of the lilies had been done about half an hour before the proceedings were to begin. The girls stood on the turf, each waving a small American flag, while the bands played and the local officials made and announced last-minute arrangements. Then, right on schedule, an especially powerful light was focused on a stadium gate at about the fifty-yard line, and the candidate of the Republican Party rode in as slowly as a car can be made to go, first past fifty yards or so of choice Southern womanhood and then, after a sharp left at the goal line, past more girls and up to the splendidly draped stand. It was all as solemn and as stylized as a review of troops by some master of the art like General de Gaulle. The girls did not behave like troops; they swayed a bit as Goldwater passed, and sounds came from them—not squeals or shrieks but pleasing and ladylike murmurs. Yet in a sense, of course, they were Goldwater’s troops, as well as representatives of what the rest of his Southern legions—the thousands in the packed stands, the tens of thousands in Memphis and New Orleans and Atlanta and Shreveport and Greenville—passionately believed they were defending. When at last he mounted the platform, the lilies departed the gridiron and arranged themselves on the sidelines. There they listened to what was by far the limpest speech Goldwater delivered anywhere in the South. It wasn’t about anything in particular. He said that big government was bad and that he and Nelson Rockefeller proposed to put an end to it, though not right away. (“Because of existing commitments, we cannot do this overnight. But we can gradually replace this undesirable and complex system with a much simpler and more sensible one . . . without making dangerous cuts in national defense or in necessary domestic programs.”) The crowd loved it. It may even have been relieved that the speech was low in key and did not drive out memories of the spectacle that had preceded it.
Opinion polls show the region as a whole to be just about evenly split between the candidates. Goldwater cannot lose Alabama, where the President will be vilified on the ballot by Governor George C. Wallace and his organization, and he should have no trouble winning Mississippi, where the Democratic organization has put up a slate of Kennedy electors and urged everyone to vote against them. It would surprise most experts if Kennedy won Louisiana, especially now that Governor Chep Morrison was killed in a airplane accident a few months ago. Also in the Pelican State where Goldwater has more billboard space than Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors put together; it wouldn't also surprise most experts if the President lost Georgia, Arkansas (where the Vice Presidential nominee's brother is running for Governor), the Carolinas, and Kentucky. But in most places the division is expected to be close. There are, plainly, large numbers of Southerners—white Southerners—who will cast their votes on issues other than race. In August, Senator Albert Gore, one of the two Southern Democrats to vote for the Civil Rights Bill, easily won a nomination for Senator against a segregationist. In late September, Representative Harry Wingate, Jr., of Georgia, the one Democrat whom Kennedy endorsed on the Southern tour, lost his seat, in a district said to be full of racists of the most benighted sort, to a man supporting the national administration. A former Goldwater Democrat, Senator Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, made his first appearance as a Goldwater Republican at the candidate’s side in Greenville, and the man who introduced him to the airport picnickers there said that Thurmond’s decision of the day before had been as notable an event in Southern history as Robert E. Lee’s decision to resign his commission in the United States Army for a command in the Army of Northern Virginia. Thurmond’s defection was undoubtedly an event to be noted; it gladdened the party he left and saddened the party he joined, which can no longer boast that it has no racists in high elective office. Southern politicians do not believe that Thurmond joined the Republicans because he thought the Party had a bright future in South Carolina; he crossed over, they think, because he would not, in all probability, have been re-nominated as a Democrat in 1966, when he was due to be opposed by the incumbent governor, William Jennings Bryan Dorn. He now is facing a forced special election versus a rather dull but still loyal Democrat, the states' Lt. Governor who is the son and namesake of the Senator who once held Thurmond's Senate seat.
Still, the Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority, remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and almost nothing else. On his tour, Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned “race” or “Negroes” or “whites” or “segregation” or “civil rights.” But the fact that the words did not cross his lips does not mean that he ignored the realities they describe. He talked about those realities all the time, in an underground, or Aesopian, language—a kind of code that few in his audiences had any trouble deciphering. In the code, “bullies and marauders” means “Negroes.” “Criminal defendants” means negroes. States rights means “opposition to civil rights.” “Women” means “white women.” This much of the code is as easily understood by his Northern audiences as by his Southern ones, but there are also some words that have a more limited and specific meaning for the Southern crowds. Thus, in the Old Confederacy “John FITZGERALD Kennedy” and “my opponent” means “integrationist.” “Henry Martin Jackson” (it somehow amuses Goldwater to drop the “Scoop”) means “super-integrationist.” “Federal judiciary” means “integrationist judges.” It would be going too far to say that Goldwater touched Southern sensibilities on race when he brought up “Baby Brother Bobby (Kennedy) the Chief Enforcer (Attorney General)”, the TFX controversy, fiscal policy, or “Solo” Lodge, and he certainly was not arousing them when he talked of the T.V.A. in Knoxville and Medicare in Orlando. One always had the feeling, though, that the Goldwater Republicans in the South could find a racial or regional angle in almost anything. When the name of Bobby Kennedy, a man who before he was Attorney General once enjoyed a friendly relationship with Senator Thurmond—was hooted at Goldwater meetings (as it was everywhere except in Greenville, where delicacy prevailed and he was not mentioned), it was not because the speaker was deploring Kennedy's legal activities in business and politics. It was because of his embarrassing connections of being the chief enforcer of his brother's integrationist attitude in the White House. And Goldwater generally played it that way. He would rattle off some figures on murders, rapes, and muggings, explain that “nothing is more clear from history than that the moral decay of a people begins at the top,” and follow this with a quick mention of Bobby Kennedy, as if he were some kind of hoodlum lieutenant and riot organizer, rather than the country's Attorney General. Among Goldwater Southerners, even thermonuclear warfare gets identified with regional pride, sentiment, and rancor. An Atlanta matron, bedecked with Goldwater-Rockefeller buttons, was asked if she had ever been disturbed by things the candidate had said about war and weaponry. “Certainly not,” she replied. “We’re not cowards down here.”
There was a moment during the Southern tour that seemed made to order for a revival of McCarthyism. Early in the morning of his last day in the South, Goldwater flew from New Orleans to Longview, Texas, for an airport rally, where the candidate was to be presented by the Honorable Martin Dies, a former congressman from Texas who most recently ran in the special election for the U.S. Senate, losing to Senator Lady Bird Johnson. Dies was the architect of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which in his day was always called the Dies Committee. He was the John the Baptist of McCarthyism. There was a time, in the late thirties and early forties, when liberals and radicals, and more than a few conservatives, blanched at the mention of his name. His committee once solemnly declared that Shirley Temple, then a recent alumna of a Hollywood kindergarten and a child actress whose performances dampened handkerchiefs all around the world, was a stooge of the Stalinists. Now an attorney in private practice, this lifelong Democrat and scourge of subversives had come out of political retirement to introduce Barry Goldwater in his maiden appearance in Texas as a Presidential candidate. And it was to be an all-star show—not only Goldwater and Dies but Strom Thurmond (once aboard, he seemed impossible to lose; he stayed with Goldwater until the campaign headed North) and the "boy wonder from Connecticut" Senate nominee George H.W. Bush. The airport crowd—respectable in size, overwhelming in ardor—was ready for a resurgence of McCarthyism. But the men on the platform were not. Senator Thurmond, who introduced Dies, was so out of tune with history that he couldn’t pronounce the great Texan’s name—once a household word—properly. It rhymes with “cries,” but as Thurmond had it, it was “Die-ease.” And then Martin Dies arose and, without a mention of Communist termites, said he was honored to introduce Goldwater, who mumbled a few words about some work of a Paul Revere type that Dies had once done, long ago, and followed these with his basic speech: “When you woke up on a typical morning of this administration, Kennedy’s day of spending was just beginning. And by the evening, when his day of spending was complete, he would have spent ten million dollars more than Eisenhower ever spent. When the meeting was over, I asked Dies if he intended to follow Thurmond’s lead and switch parties. The forerunner of McCarthy looked at me as though I had asked a question of utter madness. “I just introduced Goldwater,” he said. “I’m voting the Democratic ticket.”
Goldwater ended his first Southern tour with the rally in Longview, where he cast a bit more light on questions of strategy by saying, “I do not intend to go around the country discussing complicated, twisted issues.” That evening, the Yai Bi Ken—some of its passengers had taken to calling it the Enola Gay—made a Northern reëntry by way of Charleston, West Virginia, where Goldwater said, “The task of the true statesman, said Aristotle, is to see dangers from afar. Now, I do not claim to be a statesman.” There, in the capital of Appalachia, he also unburdened himself of some thoughts on poverty. The President’s program was, he said, “phony.” Poverty was as much a state of mind as anything else. It was also a verbal and statistical trick, put over by economists who simply “redefined the luxuries of yesterday.” He said that the administration was compelling people to think poor: “If someone who ought to feel deprived [for lack of yesterday’s luxuries] doesn’t respond that way, some politician in my opponent’s curious camp—perhaps the leader himself—will drive up to his door to see to it that he feels the way he ought.” He pointed out that people in Pakistan are much poorer than Americans. The living standards of the American “poor”—in the written text of his speeches, the word is always in quotation marks—“represent material well-being beyond the dreams of a vast majority of the people of the world outside these United States.” He conceded that there was some problem in this country about unemployed youth and school dropouts, but the administration’s retraining program, he said, was no fit solution; for one thing, it would “cost ten thousand dollars for each recruit.” He had a money-saving plan for high-school dropouts: “It would be cheaper to give them four years of education in your own fine state university, where they would learn a lot more.” He did not linger on the problems that such a solution might pose for American higher education. In an ad-libbed section on the origins of the capitalist system, he said he thought that it really started when some “smart ape” began setting aside coconuts fallen from trees and selling them to other “apes,” some of whom lacked the spirit of enterprise and became resentful at having to buy what formerly was a bounty of nature. He thought the President’s views on the economy “dreadful,” because they provided “no penalty for failure.” “In your hearts, you know this is so,” he added. I have never seen as grim and uncomprehending a group of politicians as those West Virginia Republicans who sat on the platform with Goldwater in Charleston. They joined in two bursts of applause—once when he mentioned the Ten Commandments, and again when he said, “We will not convert the heathen by losing our own souls.”
This is an inside look at the Democratic nominee's campaign, travelling with President Kennedy as he seeks reelection.
"It's been almost a year since the President was shot by a crazed madman and his Vice President suffered a fatal heart attack. Now the President is campaigning as if his whole life depends on this reelection. In 1960, when he ran first for the Presidency, first of all, if he won, he was going to be the youngest man ever elected to the White House. Secondly, he was going to be the first Catholic, so there was something fresh and new, and this is what he spun out in the campaign. He called his potential administration the 'New Frontier,' and he said the torch was being passed to a new generation. Now as he seeks reelection he is calling his reelection, "New Horizons" and saying they are continuing the work.
One of the key components was Kennedy's star quality. He also tapped into popular culture to appeal to voters. His ads moved beyond the stodginess of past campaigns. There was no bigger star than Frank Sinatra who sang:
"Everyone wants to back Jack
Jack is on the right track
'Cause he's got high hopes, he's got high hopes
1964's the year high hopes are for.
Come on and reelect Kennedy
Reelect Kennedy, Reelect Kennedy, and we'll come out on top
Oops, there goes the opposition...."
The Kennedy campaign also featured a strong outreach to Hispanic voters, presenting an ad with the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, speaking in Spanish.
In order to overcome Kennedy's advantage in public recognition, Goldwater challenged Kennedy to a series of televised debates. Kennedy in a surprise countered by accepting and also suggesting their running mates debate. The series of debates between the two candidates became the first extensive use of what would thereafter become a staple medium of American political campaigns—television. Broadcast live on national television in late September and early October, the four debates ultimately provided the Kennedy campaign with a huge boost. Seventy million people watched the first debate. Barry Goldwater appeared stern, tense, and uncomfortable. Some say the focus on facts and figures by Goldwater made the appearance that he offered a less-than commanding presence. By contrast, Kennedy appeared relaxed, tanned, and telegenic. A mythology has taken root about post-debate opinion polls and their revelations about popular perceptions of the two candidates. Allegedly, those who had listened to the debates on the radio thought that Goldwater had won, with the larger television audience being generally more impressed with Kennedy. No such comparative polls exist, however, and the market research on which those conclusions rest incorporated too few radio listeners to be statistically valid.
Meanwhile, the President has done more than campaign, but he has served as President at the same time. President Kennedy worked long hours, getting up at seven and not going to bed until eleven or twelve at night, or later. He read six newspapers while he ate breakfast, had meetings with important people throughout the day, and read reports from his advisers. He wanted to make sure that he made the best decisions for his country. "I am asking each of you to be new pioneers in that New Frontier," he said. The New Frontier was not a place but a way of thinking and acting. President Kennedy wanted the United States to move forward into the future with new discoveries in science and improvements in education, employment and other fields. He wanted democracy and freedom for the whole world. One of the first things President Kennedy did was to create the Peace Corps. Through this program, which still exists today, Americans can volunteer to work anywhere in the world where assistance is needed. They can help in areas such as education, farming, health care, and construction. Many young men and women have served as Peace Corps volunteers and have won the respect of people throughout the world. Thousands of Americans joined together, people of all races and backgrounds, to protest peacefully this injustice. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, were two of leaders of the movement for civil rights. Many civil rights leaders didn’t think President Kennedy was supportive enough of their efforts. The President believed that holding public protests would only anger many white people and make it even more difficult to convince the members of Congress who didn't agree with him to pass civil rights laws. By June 11, 1963, however, President Kennedy decided that the time had come to take stronger action to help the civil rights struggle. He proposed a new Civil Rights bill to the Congress, and he went on television asking Americans to end racism. "One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free," he said. "This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds…[and] on the principle that all men are created equal." President Kennedy made it clear that all Americans, regardless of their skin color, should enjoy a good and happy life in the United States. That bill was signed into law in late September 1964.
Recently, the President arrived in Pennsylvania on a campaign swing. It is now, October 1964 in the run up to the election that a crowd of thousands waited hour upon hour for President Kennedy to arrive at the Levittown, Pa. shopping center for a rally. Traveling with him was former Judge Michael Musmanno (D) who backed by the Philadelphia machine is hoping to snag a coveted Senate seat. President Kennedy and Judge Musmanno had been in a motorcade that was supposed to pass a half block from the most crowded part of houses in Croydon, then up to Levittown for the speech. Little did the press corps know that the motorcade from Philadelphia up Route 13 was to take hours as it passed slowly along the crowded route through the mostly white and very Catholic section of northeast Philadelphia and its suburbs. Women in fur coats with pillbox hates and men in hats. Young ladies with red lips, “Let’s back Jack” sashes, and flower corsages. An accordion player, judges, reporters, vendors, bobby-soxers, college students, hecklers, and local politicians — “a mass of humanity.” They pressed up to the courthouse and filled every foot of ground, peered out of upstairs windows, and clogged Adams Street in Levittown.
And when President John F. Kennedy arrived — nearly two hours late for this scheduled campaign stop — the “roaring throngs” welcomed him appreciatively. A reported 25,000 smashed around the courthouse, where the crowd barely parted to let the candidate through. President Kennedy told the crowd that Pennsylvania was crucial to his victory.
“We are coming to an end in this trip to the Keystone State. But this state is key. Whoever carries Pennsylvania will carry the United States,” he said, according to a speech transcript. “Whoever secures the electoral support of you on Tuesday night, of your collective judgment, you in this state will re-elect or elect the President of the United States.” A festive spirit surrounded the courthouse gathering. Big brown balloons, printed with the slogan “Re-Elect Jack Kennedy for President,” and "Kennedy-Jackson" dotted the grounds. Bars reportedly did brisk business as the crowd waited for the candidate’s arrival. He shook many hands — though he gripped gingerly because he was sore from so many campaign stops.
Across the country, the scene was repeated. The University of Portland was a stop on the campaign trail for President Kennedy, when he appeared before a capacity crowd in Howard Hall in the closing days of the campaign. Kennedy, who downplayed his Catholicism during his campaigns, was hoarse from days on the campaign trail and so did not speak at the event: U.S. Representative Edith Green, (D-Ore.) and chairperson for the Kennedy in Oregon, delivered Kennedy’s speech for him. The President did manage to use some of his voice to answer questions following the speech. A campus group, Students to Re-Elect President Kennedy, sponsored the event including a reception in the Pilot House.
Finally in one of his last campaign stops, Kennedy campaigned in Massachusetts to an overflow crowd. His speech was as follows:
I first of all want to express my thanks for the warmest welcome in a long campaign. I am delighted to be back home in Boston. [Applause.] I would like to present my two sisters and sister-in-law who in the last 2 months have been in the campaign in over 40 States, and since we started the re-elected campaign in January, while I still was recuperating, have spent far more time away from home than at home. My sister Patricia Lawford, from California. [Applause.] And her husband, Peter Lawford. [Applause.] My sister, Eunice Shriver, from Illinois. [Applause.] The wife of my brother, Teddy, who is our western manager. This is Jean Kennedy. [Applause.] Ladies and gentlemen, let me say that I am delighted to be here on the platform with my distinguished running mates of this State who I hope you will elect tomorrow, Edward M. Kennedy and [applause] I know he's my brother, but we need a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts who will continue to vote for progressive legislation, and we have it in Senator Kennedy. The name you know and the name you trust! [Applause.] Chub Peabody, who I am hopeful will be re-elected Governor of Massachusetts tomorrow [applause] and continue a Democratic administration. Edward McLaughlin, for Lieutenant Governor, and I are friends. We served together in the Navy in the Pacific, and I hope he will be the next Lieutenant Governor, Edward McLaughlin. The candidate for the Commonwealth's State Attorney General has done an outstanding job. He is a nephew of our beloved friend, John McCormack, and in his own right deserves to be reelected attorney general of the State of Massachusetts. [Applause.] Tom Buckley, who is an orator, who, of course, will go back to office to lead us all. [Applause.] The candidate for State treasurer, John Driscoll, is one of the finest men I have ever met in public life, and I am confident he is going to be elected tomorrow. [Applause.] And the candidate for secretary of state, Kevin White also will be elected by a large majority I predict. [Applause.] They and the Democratic Members of Congress from this State I am confident will be returned by a large margin tomorrow, and I ask your support of them. [Applause.] And when you have voted for all of them, vote for Kennedy. [Applause.] I come here to Boston to this garden which is located in the 11th Congressional District of the State of Massachusetts, which my grandfather represented 60 years ago, and which I had the honor of representing 14 years ago when I was first elected to the House of Representatives. I have therefore proudly come back to this spot a second time and a last time [Crowds moans] No no no, we have a lot to do, but I come here and ask your help tonight to be re-elected President of the United States. [Applause.]
I run for the office of the Presidency and Henry "SCOOP" Jackson, whom I have chosen at a critical time and has been my colleague and running mate for the Vice Presidency. [Applause.] We don't run as a committee. We haven't sent a rescue squad headed by a former President of the United States to bail us out. [Applause.] I am not asking anybody to hand me anything. I am not running as a protégé. I am running as a Democratic candidate for the office of the Presidency and my record of getting a lot accomplished in the last four years. [Applause.] And I do not believe in a time of change and revolution, of hazard and opportunity, of change and progress, I do not believe the people of this State or country are going to turn over their Government to a party and a candidate who have opposed progress for the last 14 years in the Congress of the United I cannot recall a single instance where the Republican Party in the last 25 years has introduced as original legislation, sponsored, fought for it, and passed, a single piece of progressive legislation on behalf of the people. [Applause.] A month ago at Cleveland I said I could not think of anything in this century that they had done, and the next day a Republican paper corrected me and reminded me of the work that President Taft had done early in this century on child labor. I accept the correction but what have they done since then? [Applause.] This race is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned, between those who believe that we should rest and lie at anchor and drift, and between those who want to move this country forward in 1964. [Applause.] And I believe that there is no doubt where Massachusetts will be found tomorrow, as it has been in the past. [Applause.] I run against a candidate who reminds me of the symbol of his party, the circus elephant, with his head full of ivory, a long memory and no vision, and you have seen elephants being led around the circus ring. They grab the tail of the elephant in front of them. [Applause.] That was all right in 1952 and 1956, but there is no tail to grab this year. It is Mr. Goldwater himself and I don't believe he will secure an endorsement of a majority of the citizens of this country in a time of change. [Applause.]
I am proud of what we have accomplished. [Applause.] Medicare [Applause.] Medicaid [Applause.] The Peace Corps [Applause.] Missles Out of Cuba and Freedom BACK in Asia[Applause.] And most recently the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [Applause.]!
I welcome the opportunity to be engaged in this struggle for four more years as the chief arm of freedom. It is a proud privilege that we hold as citizens of this country. I welcome the opportunity, if re-elected, to serve as President of the United States, and if unsuccessful then I will return to the Cape filled with pride and satisfaction. Their history and their own choice has made it possible for them to be the defenders of freedom. [Applause.] And I want to make it clear that while I may downgrade the leadership we are promised for the future, and the leadership which we have had in the past, I have traveled this country from one end to another. I have spent many days in nearly every State, and I come back to Boston, Mass., with a stronger feeling of confidence, of hope, of knowledge of the vitality and energy of this society and our people than I could have ever had before. It is the best education for a candidate for the Presidency. All the criticisms that are leveled at presidential reelection campaigns in my judgment fade away against the knowledge which a four more years as President may have of the strength of this society of ours and our people. [Applause.] So I come here tonight. I thank you for your past support. I ask you to join us, and most of all, I ask you to join us in all the tomorrows yet to come, in building America, moving America, picking this country of ours up and sending it from 1964 into 2004. [Applause.]
"It's been almost a year since the President was shot by a crazed madman and his Vice President suffered a fatal heart attack. Now the President is campaigning as if his whole life depends on this reelection. In 1960, when he ran first for the Presidency, first of all, if he won, he was going to be the youngest man ever elected to the White House. Secondly, he was going to be the first Catholic, so there was something fresh and new, and this is what he spun out in the campaign. He called his potential administration the 'New Frontier,' and he said the torch was being passed to a new generation. Now as he seeks reelection he is calling his reelection, "New Horizons" and saying they are continuing the work.
One of the key components was Kennedy's star quality. He also tapped into popular culture to appeal to voters. His ads moved beyond the stodginess of past campaigns. There was no bigger star than Frank Sinatra who sang:
"Everyone wants to back Jack
Jack is on the right track
'Cause he's got high hopes, he's got high hopes
1964's the year high hopes are for.
Come on and reelect Kennedy
Reelect Kennedy, Reelect Kennedy, and we'll come out on top
Oops, there goes the opposition...."
The Kennedy campaign also featured a strong outreach to Hispanic voters, presenting an ad with the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, speaking in Spanish.
In order to overcome Kennedy's advantage in public recognition, Goldwater challenged Kennedy to a series of televised debates. Kennedy in a surprise countered by accepting and also suggesting their running mates debate. The series of debates between the two candidates became the first extensive use of what would thereafter become a staple medium of American political campaigns—television. Broadcast live on national television in late September and early October, the four debates ultimately provided the Kennedy campaign with a huge boost. Seventy million people watched the first debate. Barry Goldwater appeared stern, tense, and uncomfortable. Some say the focus on facts and figures by Goldwater made the appearance that he offered a less-than commanding presence. By contrast, Kennedy appeared relaxed, tanned, and telegenic. A mythology has taken root about post-debate opinion polls and their revelations about popular perceptions of the two candidates. Allegedly, those who had listened to the debates on the radio thought that Goldwater had won, with the larger television audience being generally more impressed with Kennedy. No such comparative polls exist, however, and the market research on which those conclusions rest incorporated too few radio listeners to be statistically valid.
Meanwhile, the President has done more than campaign, but he has served as President at the same time. President Kennedy worked long hours, getting up at seven and not going to bed until eleven or twelve at night, or later. He read six newspapers while he ate breakfast, had meetings with important people throughout the day, and read reports from his advisers. He wanted to make sure that he made the best decisions for his country. "I am asking each of you to be new pioneers in that New Frontier," he said. The New Frontier was not a place but a way of thinking and acting. President Kennedy wanted the United States to move forward into the future with new discoveries in science and improvements in education, employment and other fields. He wanted democracy and freedom for the whole world. One of the first things President Kennedy did was to create the Peace Corps. Through this program, which still exists today, Americans can volunteer to work anywhere in the world where assistance is needed. They can help in areas such as education, farming, health care, and construction. Many young men and women have served as Peace Corps volunteers and have won the respect of people throughout the world. Thousands of Americans joined together, people of all races and backgrounds, to protest peacefully this injustice. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, were two of leaders of the movement for civil rights. Many civil rights leaders didn’t think President Kennedy was supportive enough of their efforts. The President believed that holding public protests would only anger many white people and make it even more difficult to convince the members of Congress who didn't agree with him to pass civil rights laws. By June 11, 1963, however, President Kennedy decided that the time had come to take stronger action to help the civil rights struggle. He proposed a new Civil Rights bill to the Congress, and he went on television asking Americans to end racism. "One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free," he said. "This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds…[and] on the principle that all men are created equal." President Kennedy made it clear that all Americans, regardless of their skin color, should enjoy a good and happy life in the United States. That bill was signed into law in late September 1964.
Recently, the President arrived in Pennsylvania on a campaign swing. It is now, October 1964 in the run up to the election that a crowd of thousands waited hour upon hour for President Kennedy to arrive at the Levittown, Pa. shopping center for a rally. Traveling with him was former Judge Michael Musmanno (D) who backed by the Philadelphia machine is hoping to snag a coveted Senate seat. President Kennedy and Judge Musmanno had been in a motorcade that was supposed to pass a half block from the most crowded part of houses in Croydon, then up to Levittown for the speech. Little did the press corps know that the motorcade from Philadelphia up Route 13 was to take hours as it passed slowly along the crowded route through the mostly white and very Catholic section of northeast Philadelphia and its suburbs. Women in fur coats with pillbox hates and men in hats. Young ladies with red lips, “Let’s back Jack” sashes, and flower corsages. An accordion player, judges, reporters, vendors, bobby-soxers, college students, hecklers, and local politicians — “a mass of humanity.” They pressed up to the courthouse and filled every foot of ground, peered out of upstairs windows, and clogged Adams Street in Levittown.
And when President John F. Kennedy arrived — nearly two hours late for this scheduled campaign stop — the “roaring throngs” welcomed him appreciatively. A reported 25,000 smashed around the courthouse, where the crowd barely parted to let the candidate through. President Kennedy told the crowd that Pennsylvania was crucial to his victory.
“We are coming to an end in this trip to the Keystone State. But this state is key. Whoever carries Pennsylvania will carry the United States,” he said, according to a speech transcript. “Whoever secures the electoral support of you on Tuesday night, of your collective judgment, you in this state will re-elect or elect the President of the United States.” A festive spirit surrounded the courthouse gathering. Big brown balloons, printed with the slogan “Re-Elect Jack Kennedy for President,” and "Kennedy-Jackson" dotted the grounds. Bars reportedly did brisk business as the crowd waited for the candidate’s arrival. He shook many hands — though he gripped gingerly because he was sore from so many campaign stops.
Across the country, the scene was repeated. The University of Portland was a stop on the campaign trail for President Kennedy, when he appeared before a capacity crowd in Howard Hall in the closing days of the campaign. Kennedy, who downplayed his Catholicism during his campaigns, was hoarse from days on the campaign trail and so did not speak at the event: U.S. Representative Edith Green, (D-Ore.) and chairperson for the Kennedy in Oregon, delivered Kennedy’s speech for him. The President did manage to use some of his voice to answer questions following the speech. A campus group, Students to Re-Elect President Kennedy, sponsored the event including a reception in the Pilot House.
Finally in one of his last campaign stops, Kennedy campaigned in Massachusetts to an overflow crowd. His speech was as follows:
I first of all want to express my thanks for the warmest welcome in a long campaign. I am delighted to be back home in Boston. [Applause.] I would like to present my two sisters and sister-in-law who in the last 2 months have been in the campaign in over 40 States, and since we started the re-elected campaign in January, while I still was recuperating, have spent far more time away from home than at home. My sister Patricia Lawford, from California. [Applause.] And her husband, Peter Lawford. [Applause.] My sister, Eunice Shriver, from Illinois. [Applause.] The wife of my brother, Teddy, who is our western manager. This is Jean Kennedy. [Applause.] Ladies and gentlemen, let me say that I am delighted to be here on the platform with my distinguished running mates of this State who I hope you will elect tomorrow, Edward M. Kennedy and [applause] I know he's my brother, but we need a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts who will continue to vote for progressive legislation, and we have it in Senator Kennedy. The name you know and the name you trust! [Applause.] Chub Peabody, who I am hopeful will be re-elected Governor of Massachusetts tomorrow [applause] and continue a Democratic administration. Edward McLaughlin, for Lieutenant Governor, and I are friends. We served together in the Navy in the Pacific, and I hope he will be the next Lieutenant Governor, Edward McLaughlin. The candidate for the Commonwealth's State Attorney General has done an outstanding job. He is a nephew of our beloved friend, John McCormack, and in his own right deserves to be reelected attorney general of the State of Massachusetts. [Applause.] Tom Buckley, who is an orator, who, of course, will go back to office to lead us all. [Applause.] The candidate for State treasurer, John Driscoll, is one of the finest men I have ever met in public life, and I am confident he is going to be elected tomorrow. [Applause.] And the candidate for secretary of state, Kevin White also will be elected by a large majority I predict. [Applause.] They and the Democratic Members of Congress from this State I am confident will be returned by a large margin tomorrow, and I ask your support of them. [Applause.] And when you have voted for all of them, vote for Kennedy. [Applause.] I come here to Boston to this garden which is located in the 11th Congressional District of the State of Massachusetts, which my grandfather represented 60 years ago, and which I had the honor of representing 14 years ago when I was first elected to the House of Representatives. I have therefore proudly come back to this spot a second time and a last time [Crowds moans] No no no, we have a lot to do, but I come here and ask your help tonight to be re-elected President of the United States. [Applause.]
I run for the office of the Presidency and Henry "SCOOP" Jackson, whom I have chosen at a critical time and has been my colleague and running mate for the Vice Presidency. [Applause.] We don't run as a committee. We haven't sent a rescue squad headed by a former President of the United States to bail us out. [Applause.] I am not asking anybody to hand me anything. I am not running as a protégé. I am running as a Democratic candidate for the office of the Presidency and my record of getting a lot accomplished in the last four years. [Applause.] And I do not believe in a time of change and revolution, of hazard and opportunity, of change and progress, I do not believe the people of this State or country are going to turn over their Government to a party and a candidate who have opposed progress for the last 14 years in the Congress of the United I cannot recall a single instance where the Republican Party in the last 25 years has introduced as original legislation, sponsored, fought for it, and passed, a single piece of progressive legislation on behalf of the people. [Applause.] A month ago at Cleveland I said I could not think of anything in this century that they had done, and the next day a Republican paper corrected me and reminded me of the work that President Taft had done early in this century on child labor. I accept the correction but what have they done since then? [Applause.] This race is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned, between those who believe that we should rest and lie at anchor and drift, and between those who want to move this country forward in 1964. [Applause.] And I believe that there is no doubt where Massachusetts will be found tomorrow, as it has been in the past. [Applause.] I run against a candidate who reminds me of the symbol of his party, the circus elephant, with his head full of ivory, a long memory and no vision, and you have seen elephants being led around the circus ring. They grab the tail of the elephant in front of them. [Applause.] That was all right in 1952 and 1956, but there is no tail to grab this year. It is Mr. Goldwater himself and I don't believe he will secure an endorsement of a majority of the citizens of this country in a time of change. [Applause.]
I am proud of what we have accomplished. [Applause.] Medicare [Applause.] Medicaid [Applause.] The Peace Corps [Applause.] Missles Out of Cuba and Freedom BACK in Asia[Applause.] And most recently the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [Applause.]!
I welcome the opportunity to be engaged in this struggle for four more years as the chief arm of freedom. It is a proud privilege that we hold as citizens of this country. I welcome the opportunity, if re-elected, to serve as President of the United States, and if unsuccessful then I will return to the Cape filled with pride and satisfaction. Their history and their own choice has made it possible for them to be the defenders of freedom. [Applause.] And I want to make it clear that while I may downgrade the leadership we are promised for the future, and the leadership which we have had in the past, I have traveled this country from one end to another. I have spent many days in nearly every State, and I come back to Boston, Mass., with a stronger feeling of confidence, of hope, of knowledge of the vitality and energy of this society and our people than I could have ever had before. It is the best education for a candidate for the Presidency. All the criticisms that are leveled at presidential reelection campaigns in my judgment fade away against the knowledge which a four more years as President may have of the strength of this society of ours and our people. [Applause.] So I come here tonight. I thank you for your past support. I ask you to join us, and most of all, I ask you to join us in all the tomorrows yet to come, in building America, moving America, picking this country of ours up and sending it from 1964 into 2004. [Applause.]
Deleted member 113134
This tl gets better and better. I imagine j.f.k wins but not as big as Johnson in o.t.l.
NEWSPAPER ENDORSEMENTS ROLL IN
Plain Dealer Endorsement - Our support of the Democratic candidates is based on on consideration alone, namely, what two men are best qualified to carry the awesome burdens of the greatest power on earth?
… President Kennedy has demonstrated … that he understands the Presidency and that he can cope with its responsibilities. He has proved to be amazingly effective in dealing with Congress.
… Sen. Goldwater’s record as a senator does not impress us. His statements during this campaign have been confusing and, more importantly, indicate a lack of a thorough knowledge about the government of the United States and the great issues of the day.
Post-Gazette Endorsement - This year the country looks for change, a new approach. We have picked Sen. Goldwater because we feel he is the candidate who has the best chance to give this country a new forward movement, a new point of view.
...The Republican candidate for president this year, Sen. Goldwater by choosing his chief rival, Gov. Rockefeller, as his partner on the ticket is directing his campaign toward unity - much as the current occupant did four years ago.
...We had High Hopes for President Kennedy, however, for all his allure to youth, he is a man of the old order. His administration is like direct descendants of the once original thoughts and ideals of the 1930's.
MORE NEWSPAPER ENDORSEMENTS
New York Times Endorsement - When John Fitzgerald Kennedy became President two years ago, this nation faced its greatest multiple crisis' since the Civil War. At this tumultuous moment, Mr. Kennedy provides the strong leadership and moral guidance needed to sustain the country. Because of this, and because of his record in office, The New York Times believes President Kennedy has earned the right to be re-elected to a full four-year term. The New York Times has always used one simple yardstick. “Are the incumbents all that bad, and do the challengers give you any reason to believe they can do better?”
The Goldwater-Rockefeller program so far is impossible to discern. If these two are for a big change, it is going to cost every American taxpayer a bundle. If they are not for a definite change, it is difficult to see what he would do that is not being done already. The New York Times is not for change just for the sake of change, even if our "hometown boy" is on the ticket.
Chicago Daily Tribune Endorsement - President John F. Kennedy has had four years to reposition the country's economy toward the 1960's. He has had four years to make this nation safer, stronger and greater. At that, his administration has failed. Even though The Daily Tribune endorsed Kennedy in 1960, his performance in office impels us, like so many Americans, to look for new leadership.
Sen. Goldwater shows the fire and desire to take on that mission. He offers the electorate thoughtful plans for meeting the enormous challenges facing this country. He exhibits the perseverance, maturity and toughness of mind required to turn those plans into action. And he has wisely led his party to the country's political center, where most Americans feel at ease. Many of his choice for a running mate, Rockefeller's human imperfections have been exposed in that he will speak up when he disagrees with his running mate. We believe that will make this duo stronger. But also during his long and dogged campaign, Goldwater has presented an agenda of frankness born of the premise that change can - and must - occur for the betterment of all Americans. In our hearts, we do know he is right ... right for us and right for America!
ELECTION DAY!!!!
In Massachusetts, the President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline B. Kennedy voted together around mid-morning. Around the same time in Arizona, Senator Barry M. Goldwater and Mrs. Peggy Goldwater voted together in Arizona, where it was three hours early. The Kennedys were expected to head up to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannisport to spend the day awaiting the end of Election Day and voting. Meanwhile, the Goldwaters climbed into a Beechcraft Bonanza H35 and flew off from the Yuma Municipal Airport to an undisclosed location. The Senator nor his wife filed a flight plan.
Meanwhile, in Everett, Washington, Vice President Henry M. Jackson and Second Lady Helen M. Jackson were accompanied by their daughter Anna Marie to the ballot box. Meanwhile, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and Mrs. Happy Rockefeller voted at their precinct then journeyed to the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan for a brunch with friends.
Polls are open across the country and one of the most significant and by far enthusiastic elections comes to a close and the country will vote.
POLLS CLOSED .... RESULTS TO BEGIN SOON.
The polls have closed and Election 1964 will now begin.
Walter Cronkite at CBS is on the air receiving reports from around the nation.
[CRONKITE] "This is Walter Cronkite and the polls are closing on the East Coast in a number of states. The President and the Senator from Arizona have battled down to the wire along with the Vice President and his contemporary the Governor of New York in pursuit of votes. What we are looking for tonight is can the President increase massively on his razor-thin lead from 1960 when he narrowly defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon, now the Governor of California or can the Senator from Arizona ride a wave of conservative resentment and win the White House back, fueled in part by a bold running mate choice and also a former Western actor who seems to have a bright future ahead of himself. Joining us this evening will be a host of CBS reporters including Election '64 coverage team and their "beats" for the evening are:
- Paul Niven, CBS News' chief Washington correspondent and anchor of FACE THE NATION, will join Cronkite in New York, providing overall analysis of the campaign, the candidates and the results.
- 60 MINUTES Correspondent Charles Kuralt will provide analysis of how and why people voted the way they did. Bradley has covered every election night for CBS News since 1976.
- 60 MINUTES Correspondent Douglas Edwards will cover the Senate, Governor, and House of Representative races.
- Chief White House Correspondent Dan Rather will provide live coverage and analysis of the national exit polls, using new technology to display vote counting and demographic data.
- CBS News Correspondent Roger Mudd will cover the Kennedy/Jackson campaign from its Election Night headquarters and on key battleground states.
- CBS News Correspondent Bob Schieffer, who has been covering the Goldwater/Rockefeller, will report live from Goldwater/Rockefeller headquarters and on key battleground states.
- Additional CBS News correspondents and reporters will be positioned in key battleground states, including Texas, California, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and others......"
[CHANNEL CHANGE]
Chet Huntley and David Brinkley are reporting from the NBC Studios in New York, sponsored by GULF Oil Corporation.
[HUNTLEY] "I'm Chet Huntley, joined by my colleague David Brinkley, and it's Election Night in America. We are looking at key battleground states from all across the United States. We will also see if President Kennedy gets a four year extended lease at the White House or if Senator Goldwater will become the 36th occupant of the most recognized address of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue......
MMM, i torn, While i Like Kennedys policies I kinda despise himself as a person given his Immoral life style. The opposite holds true for goldwater,As in I like him as a man but I do not like his polices.
FIRST FIVE STATES ALL GO FOR GOLDWATER
[BRINKLEY] The polls have closed and in Vermont, Kentucky, Indiana all have gone for Senator Barry M. Goldwater (R) of Arizona. But the once might Solid South for the Democrats no longer holds true. Both South Carolina and Georgia have gone for the Republican nominee, Goldwater.
The initial lead for Goldwater with 4% of the national vote in has the Senator off to an early 10 point lead over the President.
Meanwhile, members of the Kennedy family were mobbed as they arrived at the Armory Building in Boston where the Kennedy watch party is at tonight.
Meanwhile in a pair of statewide races, Governor Phillip Hoff (D) in Vermont has crushed his Republican opponent and U.S. Senator Vance Hartke (D) in Indiana has easily escaped a challenge by a former Lt. Governor to win reelection. This gives the Democrats something to cheer on. But at this moment many Democratic organization leaders are huddled in back rooms or calling workers to know the numbers before a new batch is released statewide.
The initial lead for Goldwater with 4% of the national vote in has the Senator off to an early 10 point lead over the President.
Meanwhile, members of the Kennedy family were mobbed as they arrived at the Armory Building in Boston where the Kennedy watch party is at tonight.
Meanwhile in a pair of statewide races, Governor Phillip Hoff (D) in Vermont has crushed his Republican opponent and U.S. Senator Vance Hartke (D) in Indiana has easily escaped a challenge by a former Lt. Governor to win reelection. This gives the Democrats something to cheer on. But at this moment many Democratic organization leaders are huddled in back rooms or calling workers to know the numbers before a new batch is released statewide.
REPUBLICANS CAPTURE INDIANA GOVERNORSHIP
In 1960, Bill Ruckelshaus (R) at 28 yrs. became the youngest statewide elected official when he was appointed as Deputy Attorney General of Indiana. Now at 32 yrs. he has become the youngest elected Governor of the Hoosier state. He defeated former Sheriff and U.S. Congressman Earl Hogan. Ruckelshaus was aided in part by his running-mate, World War Two veteran and decorated P.O.W. who was Indianapolis' youngest elected Mayor in 1951, Alex Clark, who will now become Lt. Governor. This win is bolstering conservative's hopes early on, in this election that there may be a sea change coming in the election.
SOUTH CAROLINA SPECIAL SENATE DEADLOCKED
With over half the vote counted, a gamble by U.S. Senator J. Strom Thurmond (R)* may have backfired. Thurmond, who was in the 1948 Presidential Election the States' Rights Party nominee who won four states and is a staunch segregationist, had been reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1960 as a Democrat. Thurmond switched parties earlier this year to the Republican Party and has been a strong supporter of Senator Goldwater. Governor William Jennings Bryan Dorn (D) declared the Senate seat vacant. The decision was challenged in court, but the Governor's decision was upheld. Thurmond is now facing off against Dorn's protege', Lt. Governor Burnet Maybank, Jr. (D) namesake of a former U.S. Senator who defeated Thurmond in the past for the Senate. Thurmond was expected to win handily and he delivered his state from the Democrats into the Goldwater column. But with 50% of the vote counted so far....Thurmond is ahead of Maybank by only 15 votes. Thurmond might be the biggest casualty of the evening....especially if President Kennedy is upset for reelection.
MORE STATES REPORT - KENNEDY WINS FIRST STATES
As more states are being called, President Kennedy finally has won some states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maryland, and New York State. Also the President is struggling in the South but Florida and North Carolina have been called for the President.
However, Goldwater is popping up wins in Vermont, Maine, and shockingly Delaware and New Jersey as well as in the South, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi so far. Phoenix Amphitheatre is filled to capacity as Goldwater-Rockefeller supporters enjoyed a barbeque meal and wore paper Goldwater face masks in a moment of revelry. It appears that the Republican nominee by choosing the New York Governor as a running mate is making inroads needed for an upset.
However, the Democrats won a key U.S. Senate victory. Former NYC Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (R) defeated Senator Kenneth B. Keating (R) to win a U.S. Senate seat.
Wagner was introduced to the crowd by former U.S. Postmaster General James A. Farley who was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Presidential Campaign Manager. Wagner appeared dimunitive and happy surrounded by former U.S. Senator Herbert Lehman, Farley, Mayor Paul Screvane (D), who succeeded Wagner, NYC Comptroller Abe Beame. Farley encouraged the crowd saying, "That man (Goldwater) is nothing but Herbert Hoover's twin. But don't worry as this election is not over yet and we will see the day carried for the President."
However, Goldwater is popping up wins in Vermont, Maine, and shockingly Delaware and New Jersey as well as in the South, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi so far. Phoenix Amphitheatre is filled to capacity as Goldwater-Rockefeller supporters enjoyed a barbeque meal and wore paper Goldwater face masks in a moment of revelry. It appears that the Republican nominee by choosing the New York Governor as a running mate is making inroads needed for an upset.
However, the Democrats won a key U.S. Senate victory. Former NYC Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (R) defeated Senator Kenneth B. Keating (R) to win a U.S. Senate seat.
Wagner was introduced to the crowd by former U.S. Postmaster General James A. Farley who was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Presidential Campaign Manager. Wagner appeared dimunitive and happy surrounded by former U.S. Senator Herbert Lehman, Farley, Mayor Paul Screvane (D), who succeeded Wagner, NYC Comptroller Abe Beame. Farley encouraged the crowd saying, "That man (Goldwater) is nothing but Herbert Hoover's twin. But don't worry as this election is not over yet and we will see the day carried for the President."
Bob Schieffer covering the Goldwater-Rockefeller campaign party at Hotel Roosevelt in New York City where many of Rockefeller's supporters had gathered had this report for CBS News.
"They called it a victory party but, at least at the start when the polls had not yet closed, it didn't feel that way. Yes, the Republican stalwarts - the movers, shakers and above all donors – who had converged on the Roosevelt Hotel had come dressed for a party, the men in their sharpest suits, the women in evening wear of the vividest shades. But it was their faces that gave them away. When their white headed knight Senator Kenneth Keating (R) conceded defeat for reelection, the nervousness increased. When party activists know they are on course for a win, they smile easily. They laugh and joke. They all but shine with the joy of imminent victory. They talk to a stranger with a notebook readily, eager to share what they are sure is the good news. But when things are more uncertain, the grin is of the rictus variety. When they encounter a reporter curious to know their mood, they scowl and refuse to talk, perhaps reluctant to say anything that might betray their pessimism."
"They called it a victory party but, at least at the start when the polls had not yet closed, it didn't feel that way. Yes, the Republican stalwarts - the movers, shakers and above all donors – who had converged on the Roosevelt Hotel had come dressed for a party, the men in their sharpest suits, the women in evening wear of the vividest shades. But it was their faces that gave them away. When their white headed knight Senator Kenneth Keating (R) conceded defeat for reelection, the nervousness increased. When party activists know they are on course for a win, they smile easily. They laugh and joke. They all but shine with the joy of imminent victory. They talk to a stranger with a notebook readily, eager to share what they are sure is the good news. But when things are more uncertain, the grin is of the rictus variety. When they encounter a reporter curious to know their mood, they scowl and refuse to talk, perhaps reluctant to say anything that might betray their pessimism."
MARGIN TIGHTENS
Republicans have added Ohio, Michigan, Louisiana, and a huge gain, TEXAS to their column. But Democrats are winning in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and snagged Arkansas. It appears this race will come down to the West Coast.
The President has been seen backstage at the Boston Armory working the phones along with trusted campaign aides. Meanwhile, Goldwater enjoyed cocktails at the Phoenix hotel adjacent to his victory party along with campaign staffers.
BUSH DEFEATS YARBOROUGH IN TEXAS
In another sign that there is a conservative bent, U.S. Congressman George H.W. Bush of Houston (R) defeated U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough (D) who was seeking a second full term. Bush is the son of former U.S. Senator Prescott Bush (R) of Connecticut, Bush's election means also, Senator Claudia Johnson (D), aka Lady Bird Johnson, the widow of the late Vice President who was first appointed earlier this year then elected in a Special Election will now make history, as the first female SENIOR Senator from Texas. She already made history as Texas' first female U.S. Senator. The man who appointed her to the Senate seat, who was wounded along with President Kennedy in a bizarre assasination attempt, that caused Senator Johnson's husband to suffer a fatal heart attack, Governor John B. Connally, Jr. (D), who is seen as more conservative and business oriented, won a crushing twenty points to defeat U.S. Congressman Bruce Alger (R), a right wing John Bircher. Senator Johnson celebrated with Governor and Mrs. Connally at an outdoor election night party. Many believe they also celebrated the defeat of Yarborough who has been a nemesis of Connally.
DEMOCRATS HOLD AZ, DE, NC, WV & PICKUP NEBRASKA - REPUBLICANS SCORE IL, IN, MA, SD in GOVERNORSHIPS
In the Governorships, the Republicans gained.
AZ - State Party Chair Sam Goddard (D) won the Governorship over State Party Chair Richard Kleindeinst (R) even as hometown favorite Goldwater was winning the state.
DE - Judge Charles Terry (D) defeated wealthy philanthropist Mrs. Esther duPont.
IL - Businessman and entrepreneur Charles Percy (R) defeated incumbent Governor Otto Kerner (D) despite the best efforts of the Chicago Machine.
IN - Deputy State Attorney General William Ruckelshaus (R) defeated Congressman Earl Hogan (D)
MA - Commonwealth Attorney General Edward Brooke (R) made history when he defeated incumbent Governor Chub Peabody (D) becoming the state's and the nation's first African-American Governor.
NE - In an upset unseen coming. State Superintendent of Education Frank Morrison (D) defeated incumbent Governor Fred Seaton (R).
NC - Governor Terry Sanford (D) chose his successor State Supreme Court Justice L. Richardson Preyer (D) who won a tough runoff. He then defeated State Senator Robert Gavin (R).
SD - U.S. Congressman Nils Boe (R), a decorated WWII Veteran defeated Governor Ralph Herseth (D) in a narrow upset.
WV - State Supreme Court Justice James Sprouse (D) defeated former Governor Cecil Underwood (R).
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