Dec. 14, 1964 - Senator Barry Goldwater said today that former President Dwight D. Eisenhower — who was ineligible—was the only Republican who could have defeated Lyndon B. Johnson for the Presidency in the November election.
“I don’t say this in a bragging way, but I don’t know of any other one that could have gotten as many states as I got,” the defeated Republican candidate said in an interview with U.S. News & World Report. “They might have lost by a smaller plurality, but some would not have even carried a state, including their own.”
Goldwater carried six states — South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arizona, his home state.
The Senator ruled out the possibility of another Presidential race. He said he did not believe the nomination would be offered to him and that “in all fairness, somebody else should have a go at it next time.” He said if he ever ran for public office again, it would be for the Senate.
Among the “likely people” who could not be ignored in selecting a Republican Presidential candidate in 1968, Senator Goldwater mentioned Govs. Mark Hatfield of Oregon, George Romney of Michigan, and William W. Scranton of Pennsylvania —in that order. But he responded affirmatively when an interviewer said: “Nixon?”
“I think Nixon, as of now, has the biggest hand upon the wheel,” said the Senator.
Goldwater mentioned among factors contributing to his defeat the failure of Governors Romney and Rockefeller to campaign actively in support of his candidacy. Asked whether Rockefeller and Scranton “were partly responsible for your defeat,” Goldwater replied:
“Frankly, I think that I was beaten July 15” — the day of his nomination at the Republican National Convention — “when Rockefeller and George Romney —not Scranton so much, because Scranton pitched in—when they refused to back the ticket, except by voice in Rockefeller’s case.
“I think that made it virtually impossible for us to do anything to retain Republicans that they, seemingly, influenced by the bomb scare and the Social Security scare.”
Goldwater said one of the biggest problems facing the party today was how to recapture the support of those members “who didn’t vote for the ticket through fear.”
“Fear of what?” an interviewer inquired.
“The whole campaign against me was run on fear of me,” Goldwater said. “My opponents built a caricature of Goldwater, and this was used by both my Republican primary opponents and Johnson in the general election campaign.
“This caricature was built upon a ‘trigger‐happy’ fellow, the man who is going to drop the bomb, and the man who would tear up Social Security cards. Both of these premises were completely false. But this thing started in the primaries —and try as I would, it could not be erased.”
Goldwater said it would have been impossible for any qualified Republican to beat Johnson in November “because he was President and because he, for the first time in my experience, used the full muscle of the federal Government.”
He continued:
“It wasn’t a case of the Republican party running against the Democratic party. It was the Republican party running against the Federal Government.”
Asked to elucidate, the Senator went on to explain:
“Cabinet members, for example, out making speeches. Now this is something Ike wouldn’t allow. They used the news media of various Federal bureaus —even the military, although not so much there. But the agriculture bulletins, the economic bulletins, were slanted their way. I had at least six prominent people in this country tell me that they were threatened with Internal Revenue problems unless they did this or that thing.”
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