Apr. 18, 1964 - A strong Republican ticket will win the Democratic Vice-Presidential nomination for Robert F. Kennedy, the nation’s newspaper editors were told today by Richard M. Nixon. A lackluster Republican ticket will mean that President Johnson will pick Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, “whom he likes best,” said Mr. Nixon in a talk at Washington’s Statler Hotel to members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Mr. Nixon called this “a professional’s judgment.” He said that “if the polls are like they are now” when the Democrats convene in Atlantic City, “it will be Humphrey.” But if they are closer and “it appears there will be a fight, it will be Bobby.”
Mr. Nixon, who recently returned from a trip to Southeast Asia, also said the U.S. must recognize that “all the chips are now in the pot” in South Vietnam. He said this war concerned not just Vietnam, but all of Southeast Asia. If we surrender there, he said, it will be a signal to Asians that the U.S. has no answer to the Communist thrust there.
Mr. Nixon said he did not agree that the war could be confined to South Vietnam. He asked that it be expended to Laos or to North Vietnam. He would have the South Vietnamese troops “in hot pursuit” of the Communist guerrillas into Laos, he said, adding that he would not limit carrying the fight into North Vietnam to “hot pursuit.”
He said the goal of the South Vietnamese Army must be a free North Vietnam, and that the war must be carried north to achieve that goal.
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