POLITICAL NOTES: Conservative Crusader

“This is the man I would vote for as President,” boomed Toastmaster Roger Main, a banker and Democrat, at a banquet in Jacksonville, Fla. “But since he is not a candidate, I intend to vote for his candidate.” Up rose the audience to give a standing ovation to the toastmaster’s hero, Republican Senator Barry Morris Goldwater of Arizona.* In mostly Democratic Jacksonville, many Democrats were among the 500 who had paid $25 each into the Republican campaign fund to hear Goldwater tell them to vote for Dick Nixon. In dozens of other cities and hamlets from South Carolina to Georgia to Florida last week, crowds were also large and enthusiastic, and Goldwater’s message was the same: “Don’t kid yourself that Jack Kennedy has any love for the South. Don’t vote for the Democrats just because your grandfather did. Vote Republican! Just try it once—you’ve no idea how good you’ll feel in the morning.”

Handshakes & Autographs. The role of Conservative Goldwater in the G.O.P. grand strategy is to play upon the South’s strong conservative feelings—in foreign relations, human relations, federal controls and states’ rights. “There’s hardly enough difference between the Republican Conservatives and the Southern Democrats to put a piece of paper between,” he says. How many Southern voters Goldwater swings is debatable, but there is no question that many want to hear him. The G.O.P.’s high command receives more Southern speechmaking requests for Goldwater than for any other campaigners except Dick Nixon and Cabot Lodge.

An energetic stumper, Goldwater keeps rolling 18 to 20 hours a day, often piloting himself in a chartered Beechcraft. He shakes every hand in sight. He autographs copies of his bestselling Conscience of a Conservative (now in print: 103,000 hardbacks, 400,000 softbacks). He was the first nationally known Republican in history to campaign in Spartanburg, S.C. last month.

Soft Sell & Hard Hit. The hardshell Conservative who had angrily denounced the Rockefeller-Nixon truce before Chicago as a “Munich,” now calmly ignores the liberal program built into the G.O.P. platform. The Republican platform is, he says, the lesser of two evils. He hard-hits Lyndon Johnson as “the forgotten candidate.” He writes off Jack Kennedy with sarcasm: “Sometimes I wonder how Jack gets that sailboat back to harbor.”

He calls for a tougher foreign policy, in words more violent than Nixon’s: “If it takes force to remove the Castro government, then we should use force. We cannot have a Communist country 90 miles off our shore.” Federal aid to education: “The Government has no right to educate children. The family has an obligation to educate children through local school boards and local taxes.” As for federal medical aid to the aged, “If my kids don’t take care of me when I’m old, I’ll whale the tar out of ’em.”

* If Nixon is defeated next month, Goldwater will be available in 1964, he told the Phoenix Press Club Forum at week’s end.