Feb. 21, 1965 - Barry Goldwater picked up today where he left off in the Presidential campaign by advocating more U.S. bombing raids in North Vietnam, even at the risk of war with Communist China.
He said President Johnson should order air strikes even at Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, “if that were necessary,” and “extend the attacks to what you might call strategic depots, materiel-gathering points, much as I think we should have done in Korea.”
The former Senator from Arizona conceded that China and North Vietnam might send ground forces into South Vietnam as a result, but he said they could be beaten with South Vietnamese troops and U.S. air and naval power.
Turning to domestic politics, Goldwater said Richard M. Nixon “stands head and shoulders above everybody else in the Republican party” and “would be the man I would see” as the party’s Presidential nominee in 1968.
Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee, made his remarks on the ABC program “Issues and Answers.”
Goldwater urged bombing raids on Hanoi and on “strategic depots” only if the bombing of supply routes “doesn’t do the trick and if we find no other solution.”
The “No. 1 step,” he said, should be “a clear explanation by the President to the American people of a foreign policy that is constructed on firmness and not just on, you might say, the Bay of Tonkin type of thing, where we are forced to retaliate.”
In his Presidential campaign, Goldwater repeatedly advocated bombing raids to “interdict” Communist supply routes into South Vietnam.
Goldwater, who said he might like to run for the Senate again in 1968, declared himself “very proud” of Republican support for President Johnson in the Vietnamese crisis.
He added: “I am a little bit disgusted with members of the Democratic party who seem a little weak-kneed on this, that want to turn tail. I think they ought to support their President.”
Support this project at patreon.com/realtime1960s
Comments