Nation: Running Mate

The Goldwater press aide had been up almost all night celebrating his boss’s victory. Now, as the telephone rang in his hotel suite, he struggled from bed, picked his way through a litter of empty champagne bottles, listened briefly and wearily. Before stumbling back to the bedroom, he told waiting reporters: “Okay, we’ve made it official about Bill Miller.”

Who was Bill Miller? And why had he just been named as Barry Goldwater’s choice for the Republican vice-presidential nomination? Republicans might be arguing the answers for quite a while.

As chairman of the Republican National Committee since 1961, U.S. Representative William Edward Miller, 50, has proved himself a tireless, effective party organizer. A Roman Catholic and a New Yorker, he gives a semblance of religious and geographic balance to the ticket. A compact 5-ft. 7-in., 140-pounder, he makes a good appearance —particularly when accompanied by his highly photogenic wife Stephanie and their daughters Elizabeth Ann, 20, and Mary Karen, 17. A conservative after Barry’s own heart, Miller is an acid-tongued orator with a notable talent for getting under Democratic skins. In fact, Goldwater told a meeting of Republican state chairmen that one reason he picked Miller was because “he drives Lyndon Johnson nuts.”

A Loyalist’s Name. Miller is the modern, urban equivalent of the candidate who was born in a log cabin—he is the son of a factory janitor in Lockport, N.Y. (pop. 27,300), an industrial suburb of Buffalo. He worked to help pay his way through Notre Dame and the Union University Law School at Albany, entered the service during World War II, was commissioned a first lieutenant in 1945 and assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s war-crimes section, where he was an assistant prosecutor at the Nurnberg trials. Returning to New York, Miller was elected district attorney of Niagara County, and in 1950 won election to the first of his seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

There he won little distinction as a lawmaker; he has sponsored no significant legislation. But Miller did win a name as a party loyalist with a penchant for party organization, and as a good man to avoid in any debate. This reputation got him the chairmanship of the National Republican Committee, and he did a diligent job, traveling some 150,000 miles, delivering nearly 600 speeches, appearing on national television more than 100 times, and jabbing at the Democrats every inch of the way. He has called Adlai Stevenson “completely inept,” castigated Averell Harriman as the man “who loused up Laos,” described Pierre Salinger as “the thinking man’s filter.”

After the Senate defeated President Kennedy’s medicare program in July 1962 and Kennedy called in reporters to denounce the vote, Miller accused him of putting on “a smoothly rehearsed crybaby performance.” Nor has Miller neglected Lyndon Johnson since he became President. Said Miller, referring to Johnson’s weekend driving habits and the Bobby Baker investigation: “There are only two businesses in the country that are better off today than they were under the Republicans. One is the seat-belt business in Texas and the other is the paint business in Washington, because they sell so much whitewash to all the congressional investigating committees.” On another occasion, Miller quipped: “Bobby Baker is going to write a book entitled Somebody Up There Likes Me—Or At Least I Thought He Did”

As a party organizer, he beefed up Republican strength in the South and he gets some of the credit for recent Republican comebacks in such cities as Philadelphia, Baltimore and Chicago. Says his predecessor as National Committee chairman, Kentucky’s Senator Thruston Morton: “He’s done an effective job, and he’s done it on skin and bones. He’s liquidated the party’s debt. and he’s run the committee well on K rations.”

“A Cruel Hoax.” Still and all, Bill Miller entered 1964 as a politician without a visible political future. In 1962, he won re-election to Congress by a scant 5,702 votes out of 139,710 cast, and the prospects for this year were worse. Among other things, he could expect little help from Governor Rockefeller’s state organization, since he and Rocky had been at odds off and on for a long time. He therefore announced that he would retire from Congress and return to his law practice in Buffalo.

Barry Goldwater’s San Francisco decision saved Miller from that fate. And in his acceptance speech, Miller seemed strangely subdued, as though overwhelmed by the honor. About the most partisan thing he said was: “To reestablish reason in government is no less than a thrilling experience.” But in a news conference, he gave a foretaste of the campaign to come. Said he: “I’m tired of the Democrats trying to create problems at election time so they can solve them. The poverty program is a cruel hoax. You couldn’t cure poverty in New York City with a billion dollars. Who knows anything about poverty in this Administration? Bobby Baker is the chief expert on poverty in Washington.”

Some Republicans loved this sort of talk. Said Texas’ National Committeeman Albert Fay: “You’re not going to beat Lyndon Johnson unless you give him hell. No patsy campaign is going to win. Lyndon’s got more skeletons in his closet than they’ve got down at Galveston medical school, and Miller can work on them.”

Perhaps so, but some voters might wonder if a gift for vitriol is a sufficient qualification for Vice President.