Sept. 9, 1964 - Senator Barry Goldwater campaigned along the Pacific Coast today, accusing the Democrats of trading national interest abroad for votes at home.
The Republican Presidential candidate charged that the Kennedy Administration had timed the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 for “maximum domestic political effect” in that year’s election and warned that Americans should be prepared for a similar pre-election crisis this year.
He said the Administration had allowed the United Nations to drift into a “potentially disastrous deadlock” over the refusal of the Soviet Union to pay special assessments to the world body.
Goldwater said the Democratic position was that “if an element of foreign policy hurts Lyndon Johnson’s election chances, forget it. If it helps his election chances, assign 10 press agents to it.”
He accused Democratic Senator J.W. Fulbright of Arkansas, who assailed him in a Senate speech yesterday, of engaging in both “McCarthyism” and guilt by association. He said that Fulbright’s head had “shrunk enough to fit that Rhode Scholar’s cap.”
Goldwater said he was an “underdog” at this point, but said he was so used to that condition that he would “not know what to do if I wasn’t the underdog.”
At Klamath Falls, he said wryly that “I was no shining light” in the Oregon primary in May, where he ran fourth. But he added:
“I’m going to come in here like gangbusters in the general [election], and we’re going to win it.”
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