Columnists: If Goldwater Had Won . . .

How would the U.S. have fared if Barry Goldwater had been elected President? “The mind boggles to think of it,” mused Columnist Art Buchwald last week in the New York Herald Tribune. Nonetheless, Buchwald did his deadpan best to guess how things really would have turned out under Goldwater. To begin with, he wrote, “the Viet Cong would have blown up an American barracks. Goldwater would immediately call for a strike on military bases in North Viet Nam and announce a ‘new tit-for-tat policy.’ Democrats would make speeches that Goldwater was ‘trigger-happy’ and was trying to get us into a war with Red China.

“But Goldwater would ignore the criticism and continue the raids, using not only Air Force bombers, but also jets from the U.S. Fleet. As time went on, he would explain that, instead of a ‘tit-for-tat’ policy, we now intended to bomb North Viet Nam in order to let Hanoi know that they could not support the Viet Cong without expecting retaliation.

“Senators would call for some sort of negotiations. But Goldwater, with his lack of restraint, would retort that there is nothing to negotiate and we would only be selling out Southeast Asia if we sat down at a table with the North Vietnamese and Red China. Instead, he would recklessly announce that he was sending in a battalion of Marines with Hawk missiles to protect our airfields. His critics would claim he was escalating the war, but Goldwater would deny it. Instead he would bomb supply routes in Laos and Cambodia.

“To explain these desperate actions, Goldwater would have the Defense and State Departments produce a ‘White Paper’ justifying the attacks and proving that Hanoi was responsible for the revolution in South Viet Nam.”

Of course, wrote Buchwald, Democrats would hotly insist they had known all along that Goldwater would plunge the U.S. into a war. Republicans would argue that Goldwater had no choice, that anyway he had merely inherited the Viet Nam mess from the Democrats. “It all seems far-fetched,” allowed Buchwald, “and I may have let my imagination run away with itself, because even Barry Goldwater wouldn’t have gone so far. But fortunately, with President Johnson at the helm, we don’t even have to think about it.”