Lodge Still Aims to Push Goldwater from Race

July 8, 1964 - Henry Cabot Lodge entered the pre-convention maneuvering in San Francisco today with the apparently firm conviction that the country’s concern over foreign policy affords a good chance of upsetting Senator Barry Goldwater’s bandwagon.

The former Ambassador to South Vietnam set out to exploit that concern in testimony before the Republican Platform Committee, at a news conference, and in private talks with delegates and party leaders.

At the news conference, he moved closer toward openly attacking Goldwater as unfit to conduct the nation’s foreign affairs than he had done in previous public statements.

He accused the Arizona Senator specifically of casting slurs on U.S. military leadership in World War II and of encouraging the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

He made the accusations in commenting on remarks by Goldwater in an interview June 30 with the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Lodge sharply challenged two points Goldwater had made according to the text published by the magazine.

One was that, “with all due respect to our military,” Germany would have won both world wars if she had not been badly led. The other was that French President Charles de Gaulle should have been given “a little help with his nuclear development.”

The first constituted a “slur,” Lodge protested, on American military leaders such as the late General of the Army George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff in World War II, and General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

The second point, Lodge argued, indicated a lack of appreciation of the extreme danger involved in the spread of nuclear power among the nations of the world.

“To me,” he said, “the proliferation of nuclear weapons would be an unmitigated calamity.”

Lodge, who arrived last night, again sought to make it clear that he was in San Francisco solely to promote the candidacy of Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania and was not himself available for the Presidential or Vice-Presidential nomination at the Republican convention opening next Monday.

He said he detected a widespread and “very deep-seated anxiety” in the country over the possibility of putting into the White House a man who is thought to lack the prudence required for the conduct of foreign affairs. He contended that this concern can be impressed on a sufficient number of delegates to deprive Goldwater of the nomination when the balloting starts July 16.

He estimated that 200 or so “hard-core” Goldwater delegates, mainly from the South, are the only ones so firmly committed as to be unmovable. And he strongly challenged the general assumption in San Francisco that the 655 votes needed for the nomination cannot be won by Governor Scranton.

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