The Goldwater Campaign

...A Gallup poll showed that this estimate of the situation was widely shared by the rank and file of the Party...

...But Novak forcibly reminds us that early in November, 1963, a few weeks before President Kennedy's assassination, a poll of grass roots G.O.P...

...The charge often leveled by historians against journalists—that they are superficial in their intellectual grasp and perfunctory about details—is one which will not be pressed here...

...The story of public opinion during the primaries and the fight to gather delegates reveals an interesting polarization...

...Macmillan...

...Governor Nelson Rockefeller's remarriage—Novak makes it clear that it was this, and not his divorce itself that did him in—was one of these...

...Granting the great difficulties in writing contemporary history, this is an historical work of exceptional solidity, drawn from personal observations, innumerable interviews and discussions with Party workers, and an extensive familiarity with G.O.P...

...Rovere savors juicy items ("Where fraternities are not allowed, Communism flourishes...

...As a contemporary record, The Agony of the G.O.P...

...By April, after the impact of the New Hampshire primaries was fully felt, and at the time that Goldwater was steadily and effectively gathering delegates around the country, he was hitting progressively new lows in the nationwide Gallup polls...

...In that month, forty-two per cent of the Republican voters professed themselves for Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, twenty-six per cent for Nixon, fourteen per cent for Goldwater, while Rockefeller, Romney, and Scranton trailed with a scattering...

...with The Goldwater Caper, by Richard H. Rovere...

...A Republican Party worker who is not blessed with total recall would do well to keep it by his bedside as a useful manual of the Party's disaster, while many a historian of contemporary affairs will be deeply indebted to it...

...Goldwater," he writes, "speaks of states' rights as though their omission from the Ten Commandments were a mere oversight on God's part...

...This means having a program and organization, to be sure, but one may hope that they will leave ideology to the ideologues...

...469 pp...

...3.95...

...literature...

...Gold-water sentiment could not be translated into a national victory, but under these conditions it was strong enough to put the opposition to rout...

...Insofar as Goldwater confronted the public at large, he generally ran backwards, losing in appeal as he went along, and as the public developed an increasingly clear image of him as a reckless man and a potentially dangerous President...

...At his leisurely pace Novak finds room, for example, for more than forty solid pages on the California primary alone, and his account of the events from the New Hampshire primaries to the end of the revels at the Cow Palace fills 164 pages...

...the relish of a true intellectual gourmet contemplating a feast of unreason...

...Kennedy, even though that many did not actually expect the Arizonan to be nominated...

...Goldwater was then the favorite of forty-five per cent of the Republican voters, as compared with twenty-three per cent for Rockefeller, sixteen per cent for Governor George Romney, five per cent for Governor William Scranton, and eleven per cent without preference or for a scattering of other candidates...

...Novak thinks Goldwater's Republican opponents lost because Goldwater had a "moral philosophy" that stirred people to enthusiasm while the moderates and liberals were too "pragmatic...

...The people who did the Party's hard work, as well as those who in many parts of the country paid most of its bills, were reasonably well persuaded of the validity of Goldwater's philosophy and its acceptability by the public...

...Of course, there were accidental factors in the situation, and it is a comforting thought that they may not recur...

...Rovere's relatively slender volume has the strength of wit and penetration...

...Among other things, it is a splendid pocket anthology of those bloopers which have made Goldwater one of the most hilariously quotable political leaders of our history...

...Rovere also struggles manfully to make a pattern of it all, and his notable gift for characterization has never been better...

...1964, by Robert D. Novak...

...What the Republicans need is not "philosophy" of any kind —we can see where that has led them —but a firmer and more resolute adherence to the pragmatic spirit of American politics...

...181 pp...

...1964 belongs on the shelf alongside Theodore H. White's book on the Presidential campaign of 1960, The Making of the President...

...I don't like to see my taxes paid for children born out of wedlock...

...There are today only half as many people in the country who profess themselves to be Republicans as there are Democrats...

...The facts in these books as well as events since the election point in a contrary direction...

...6.95...

...Harcourt Brace and World...

...For those who cherish the Goldwater effort as a rare, zany episode in our political meander-ings, this book will be a valuable memento...

...So long as the Republican Party remains a chronic and hopeless minority in national politics, there is always a chance that it will fall victim again to the activities of a zealous and well-organized minority...

...Those who imagine that, because Goldwater is without public office and Dean Burch has been displaced by Ray Bliss, the Republican Party will return smoothly to its old ways, will, I believe, be disappointed...

...In a sense, the pervasive hangback attitude of other potential candidates might also be called an accident—at least it is not a situation which usually occurs...

...Within the Republican Party, as in the country at large, the right wing was organized, while the liberals and moderates were not...

...Its leaders would do well to consider whether they would not be better off if, at the cost of losing a portion of these malcontents to a third-party movement, they could move over well toward the center to attract the independents and Democrats whose support they must have in order to win a national election, or even to restore their Congressional contingents to a more respectable and competitive dimension...

...The tragedy at Dallas dealt a strong blow to Goldwater so far as his broad public following was concerned, but it did not weaken his support among the Republican Party workers in anything like the same degree...

...Here I disagree...

...In the first place, it becomes plain, as one follows Novak's report, that Goldwater's nomination was no fluke or accident...

...It consists mainly of his reportage from The New Yorker, but those who were fortunate enough to read his pieces when they came out will find that they make pleasurable, and still enlightening, reading the second time around...

...Novak's record of Republican Party history is developed in impressive detail, and his account is more full-bodied than many readers might look for...

...The Gold-water Caper by Richard H. Rovere begins, in effect, with 1963, focuses rather sharply on Goldwater, and deals mainly with the conduct of the campaign itself, taking up largely where Novak leaves off...

...officials showed that eighty-five per cent favored Senator Goldwater as the strongest candidate against Mr...

...One concludes that if Goldwater remains in that obscurity which he has so richly earned he will be sorely missed by at least one member of the fourth estate...

...so was the birth of a child by this new marriage only a few days before the California primary...

...1964 by Robert D. Novak is a blow-by-blow account of Barry Goldwater's conquest of the Republican Party from the time of Richard M. Nixon's defeat in 1960 to the end of the San Francisco convention in 1964, covering all facets of the strategies and fortunes of the various would-be or potential candidates...

...They confront the difficult task of developing a program that does not merely reproduce or echo the Democratic program, that gives them a clear and separate identity, offers the country a meaningful alternative, and yet falls far short of irresponsible jingoism and reaction...

...Its opening section explores the mind of Barry Goldwater with an effect both comic and revelatory, which qualifies the author as one of the country's few outstanding Goldwaterologists...

...What is one to make of it all...