The Draft Goldwater Drive: A. Progress Report

Early supporters of Barry Goldwater will always look back on the winter of 1962-1963 as their own private Valley Forge. Their man, unconvinced that the 1964 Republican Presidential nomination was worth having, sternly and publicly repudiated all efforts to promote his cause. The press blithely ignored the grass-roots sentiment for the Arizona senator and, without the slightest basis in any plausible count of the likely convention line-up, all but unanimously hailed New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as the odds-on front runner.

In February and March, however, the first serious analyses of the 1962 election returns were published, and they clearly demonstrated: 1) that as a vote-getter Nelson Rockefeller was a paper tiger; and 2) that Goldwater, by carrying a huge chunk of the South, could more than offset any supposed disadvantage of a conservative Republican in the Northeast— and might thus give John Kennedy a run for his money. When the National Draft Goldwater Committee formally initiated its campaign in Washington on April 8, it was already riding a floodtide of pro-Gold water sentiment, and Rockefeller’s remarriage to Mrs. Murphy on May 9 probably served only as a useful, though to be sure definitive, headstone for the political grave dug for him by the 1962 returns.

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William A. Rusher

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Early supporters of Barry Goldwater will always look back on the winter of 1962-1963 as their own private Valley Forge. Their man, unconvinced that the 1964 Republican Presidential nomination was worth having, sternly and publicly repudiated all efforts to promote his cause. The press blithely ignored the grass-roots sentiment for the Arizona senator and, without the slightest basis in any plausible count of the likely convention line-up, all but unanimously hailed New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as the odds-on front runner.

In February and March, however, the first serious analyses of the 1962 election returns were published, and they clearly demonstrated: 1) that as a vote-getter Nelson Rockefeller was a paper tiger; and 2) that Goldwater, by carrying a huge chunk of the South, could more than offset any supposed disadvantage of a conservative Republican in the Northeast— and might thus give John Kennedy a run for his money. When the National Draft Goldwater Committee formally initiated its campaign in Washington on April 8, it was already riding a floodtide of pro-Gold water sentiment, and Rockefeller’s remarriage to Mrs. Murphy on May 9 probably served only as a useful, though to be sure definitive, headstone for the political grave dug for him by the 1962 returns.