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Two Retrospective Road Maps to San Francisco

The Agony of the G.O.P., by Robert D. Novak. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965.

Like so many precinct delegates, Goldwater really believed the campaign oratory he used. He was genuinely upset when the Administration didn't decrease federal spending and balance the budget, didn't take the offensive against International Communism and expel all the pinkos and homosexuals from the State Department. Goldwater thrived on the Republican platform platitudes of the early 1950's--the declamations against big spending, big government, unbalanced budgets and inflation--all the defiant orthodoxy of the 1930's, originally designed to prove that Hoover had been right in 1932. To this Goldwater, William Miller, among many others added outraged attacks on Communism, Corruption, and Korea.

This is the only winning rhetoric that the Republicans have had in a long time and it is no wonder that Goldwater and Miller, whose political careers began around 1950, fell back on these comfortable issues when their their new, barely disguised appeals to racism failed. Goldwater, it will be remembered, at one point called Lyndon Johnson soft on Communism (he said Nixon suggested it, which isn't very hard to believe). He parried criticism from abroad by claiming that the Europeans were simply afraid that he would cut off American economic aid. Bill Miller fell back on such early-'50's chestnuts as the dangers of letting cheap foreign labor immigrate freely to our country.

Crowding in Wilderness

These appeals show how far Gold- water and Miller were from public opinion as well as from reality. They were the hysterical cries of men who were sure they had the truth and knew that no one was listening any more.

Goldwater won the nomination, then, not simply because he had the approval of assorted racists. Birchers, and National Review brand ideologues but because he had the whole-hearted, deepthroated support of the long-time Republican party worker, who has his own, somewhat different ideology. These workers feed on the 15 and 30-year-old dogmas that still dominate Republican thinking. Even Republican "liberals" nourish these beliefs when they seek those necessary votes in Rockford, Illinois or Phoenix

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One of the services of Novak's book is its recollection of what seems scarcely credible today, the rapport that existed between Rockefeller and Goldwater before May, 1963. Rockefeller had been active and not unsuccessful in wooing conservatives by stressing areas of Republican agreement. That meant, of course, using the standard Republican lines about the menace of communism, the menace of budget deficits, and so forth. Rockefeller as well as Goldwater helped confirm bedrock Republican's picture of a world gone wrong, of national leaders departing from the Americanism that made our country free and strong.

Lately Republican candidates have taken to pleading for votes on the rather barren grounds that a second party must be kept in the running. Patent political grows out of grave weaknesses in the character of the Republican Party, weaknesses which resulted in the Goldwater nomination. Rovere with his careful analysis of Goldwater and Goldwaterism, and Novak with his step-by-step account of the Goldwater victory in San Francisco, expose these weaknesses and help show what a faltering and confused animal the Republican elephant has become

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