Oct. 21, 1964 - Senator Barry Goldwater said in Pikesville, Md., last night that President Johnson “doesn’t understand the President’s job.” The Republican Presidential candidate charged that in the field of foreign relations, Johnson and his “curious crew” had followed a “policy of drift, deception, and defeat” until the nation’s affairs abroad “are in a shambles — and you know it.”
“I charge that this Administration has a soft deal for Communism,” he said.
The situation in Cuba, Berlin, and Vietnam is the product of this “soft deal,” Goldwater contended.
“Lyndon Baines Johnson has sowed the wind of weakness,” he said. “He has reaped the whirlwind of war.”
He then promised to put an end to “the soft deal for Communism.”
At one point, Goldwater said he would be willing to substitute another word for “soft” in the phrase “soft on Communism” to describe the Administration’s policy.
Voices cried: “Treason!”
“That’s it,” replied the Senator.
Goldwater said that “four years of drift in Washington” had led the nation “into Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam.”
“And then they deceive and deceive and deceive,” he declared, and continued:
“They have never stopped deceiving the American public and the free world. American sons and grandsons are being killed by Communist bullets and Communist bombs. And we have yet to hear a word of truth about why they are dying.” He also accused the Kennedy-Johnson Administration of letting “us drift into a Berlin crisis” and then deceiving the nation and the free world “into believing we have no right or power to keep the East from literally walling itself off from the West.”
“They deprive victims of Communism of the last freedom left to them—the freedom to leave Communist enslavement,” he said.
He further accused the Administration of letting the nation drift into the Cuban missile crisis.
At home, the Senator said, the President has fostered “Socialism,” has deprived citizens of their freedom, has “made a truce with unemployment” and has undermined “the local law enforcement needed to protect the lives and property of our citizens.”
“Leaders of the present Administration say that government is master, not servant of the people,” Mr. Goldwater declared.
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