Oct. 30, 1964 - Senator Barry Goldwater stumped the West today, concentrating his attack heavily on the Johnson Administration’s foreign policy.
He charged that the U.S. might be in the beginning of World War III in South Vietnam. And he cited a lengthy catalogue of alleged Administration foreign policy failures to back up his assertion that Johnson, running a “circus” campaign for “personal power,” had “turned his back on the pressing problems of foreign policy.”
Mr. Goldwater will travel to Columbia, S. C., tomorrow for a 13‐state live TV broadcast in a final effort to carry the South. On the way, he will stop at San Antonio, Tex. The rest of his campaign will be in California, a state whose 40 electoral votes he feels he must carry to win on Tuesday, and his own state of Arizona.
Today, Goldwater flew from Pittsburgh to Cheyenne, Wyo., Las Vegas, Nev., and Tucson, Ariz., for airport stops before continuing to Los Angeles for two rallies. One was for Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and the other a Republican fundraiser at the Sports Arena.
At Las Vegas, where oddsmakers were reported to be offering 8-to-1 on Johnson, Goldwater described himself as the biggest “underdog” in American political history. But he predicted that he would win on Tuesday because people agreed with him on the issues.
Goldwater began his attack on the Administration’s foreign policy at Cheyenne.
He charged that U.S. troops were being sent into the field in South Vietnam “without fully adequate equipment even though it has been requested and requested and requested.”
The Senator’s aides later reinforced this remark by distributing a list of equipment they said had been sought by U.S. forces in South Vietnam but not supplied.
The list named the new AR-15 rifle, high-frequency radios, heavily armored personnel carriers, and M‐40 cluster grenades. The list also said there had been “persistent, intermittent, shortages of 20 and 100‐pound fragmentation bombs.”
Goldwater, charging that the U.S. was disarming unilaterally by not buying new military equipment, declared:
“I believe that unless we keep our military strength high, we are doomed for a third world war — or a fourth one — because we may be in the beginning of the third one now in South Vietnam.”
“Even as I make these remarks,” Goldwater said, continuing his list of Administration “failures” in foreign policy, “Bolivia has been set ablaze again by Communist riots, and we have agreed to sell Red Yugoslavia $40 million worth of wheat on terms that are better than America could get.”
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