Sept. 29, 1964 - Senator Barry Goldwater (pictured earlier today in Marietta, Ohio) charged in Cincinnati tonight that the Johnson Administration “is soft on Communism.” The Republican Presidential candidate also said the Democratic party was the party of “the corrupt, the power-made, and the radicals of the left.”
But he deleted from his speech a charge that all President Johnson knew how to do was to “acquire fortune and power” and a charge that Johnson had used a television monopoly in Austin, Tex., “so that he may build a private fortune.”
It was the first time Goldwater had accused the Administration of being “soft on Communism.” His speech, delivered at a rally at the Cincinnati Gardens, was regarded as the hardest-hitting of his campaign.
The Senator this evening wound up his first day of whistle-stop electioneering on a 14-car special campaign train. He spoke, usually from the rear platform of the train, at Marietta, Athens, Chillicothe, and Blanchester, Ohio, before reaching Cincinnati.
In the next four days, the train will wind through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, making 30 more stops.
Goldwater’s press secretary, Paul F. Wagner, said he had no explanation for the deletion of the charges about Johnson’s methods of acquiring a fortune. The passages were on a prompter roll that was prepared late this afternoon.
In his speech, Goldwater singled out the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, Senator Hubert Humphrey, as “this A.D.A. radical of the left.”
Goldwater asked why Humphrey wanted “so badly to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency — to drag our nation into the swampland of collectivism, to take hundreds of billions of dollars from your pockets to spend on silly socialistic schemes?”
“Are you proud,” Goldwater continued, “when no country is too small to pull Uncle Sam’s whiskers and get away with it?”
He argued that “Communism will give way to freedom if we stand up to the challenge.”
Some protestors brandished signs linking Goldwater with war. Goldwater said that despite talk of peace, the nation was “at war today” in South Vietnam.
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