Two Retrospective Road Maps to San Francisco

Anyone who has lived in an upper- suburb already knows Richard Rovere's Barry Goldwater. He the man-at-the-backyard-barbecue, , good-natured, gadget-ridden: pleasant person to chat with in the afternoon. But one knows better to let politics meander into the conversation, for geniality will soon way to deadly serious declamations about Creeping Socialism, Communism Within Our Gates, the Fall the Roman Empire, the Sanctity Private Property--followed by an embarrassed grin and a question about your golf game.

This is the central figure in Richard Rovere's The Goldwater Caper. The , private Goldwater has somehow made his way into the U.S. Senate has become a presidential candidate. The second, public Goldwater a hard-line ideologue who lets his speech writers make him appear less attractive and less open-minded than the private Goldwater. The whole, ambivalent Goldwater is be first presidential candidate to buy computer to find out what the says he has said.

The public Goldwater, as Rovere out, breaks all the political . He speaks out against , TVA, social security, the United Nations, civilian control of nuclear weapons. The easy-going man who readily admits his own inadequacy and the ideologue who sees extremism as no vice and moderation as no virtue together become the Republican presidential nominee.

Goldwater won the Republican nomination, Rovere says, precisely because he did not play by the rules. The "moderates" made the mistake of trusting a sort of free market theory of politics. The nominations would, they thought automatically go to the candidate with the maximum vote potential, that is, to one of the "moderates."

"In a most peculiar sense," Rovere concludes, "Goldwater owes his success to the widespread belief that the system was a machine constructed to produce a result opposite from the one about to be produced in San Francisco."

Robert Novak's The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964 explains more exhaustively how the political market mechanism went awry. He goes back to 1960 and follows the machinations of the whole cast of G.O.P. characters in intrepid, eye-at-the-keyhole style.

Rocky Bedfellows

Nelson Rockefeller's remarriage, in Novak's opinion, was the event that threw the market mechanism most violently out of whack. It removed Rockefeller from the number one position in the race and, more important, showed just how lukewarm his support had been all along.

Rockefeller's--and all "liberal" Republicans'--basic political strategy is, as Novak puts it, expediential. The liberal asks, and gets, support from conservative bedrock Republicans because he can win and they can't. But the hardy 27 per cent of American voters who still call themselves Republicans don't really trust Rockefeller or his kind. The difficulties governors like Rockefeller, Scranton, and Romney have had with the Republican majorities in their legislatures--to say nothing of the disagreements between the Eisenhower Administration and the G.O.P. leadership in Congress--show what different political worlds these Republicans live in.

The natural constituents of the expediential Republicans are those voters who call themselves Independents but who almost always vote for Republicans. Such people, however, seldom show up at Republican convention. In order to win, the expedientials must cater to bedrock Republican predispositions.

"Taft (or Goldwater) can't win" was the expedientials' trump. But they failed to notice that 1964 was being played in no trump, because for the first time in twenty years no one really expected any Republican candidate to beat President Johnson. When it became clear that Rockefeller's popularity was on the way down, most of his backing quickly vanished.

Goldwater's convention victory has often been described as a wild deviation from Republican norms. "Liberal" Republican orators especially insist that Goldwater's nomination was utterly atypical of their party.

But both Rovere and Novak, from their different perspectives, suggest that it was no such thing. For them, the San Francisco convention was a plausible, if unusual, product of the political market mechanism, the result of varying proportions of stupidity and astute planning plus a few unpredictable contingencies. Despite Goldwater's blunders and speech writers, despite all the primary results, the Arizonian ambled downhill to the nomination after Rockefeller's remarriage. It was Clifton White's roundup of 300 solidly Goldwater delegates (with 655 needed to nominate) plus the Goldwater victory (and 86 votes) in California that corralled the convention.

If this is true, it says something about the character of the Republican national convention delegate. Since San Francisco, commentators have stressed the uniqueness of the 1964 delegates' strident, unswerving commitment to Goldwater. But if Novak is right, if only 386 of the delegates were irrevocably tied to Goldwater, then what may be important about the convention is its similarity to the supposedly liberal conventions of previous years.

A seat on the convention floor is a reward for the party faithful, the precinct delegates, envelope stuffers, and phone callers, and there are always many to be rewarded. Presumably such people predominated at the rubber-stamp conventions of 1956 and 1960 and constituted rather more than a majority of the 1964 convention.

That these convention delegates were such strong Goldwaterites may have surprised many of the expediential politicians who led them. (An example: last June Republican precinct delegates in Michigan's Oakland County the suburban stronghold and home of George Romney, preferred Goldwater over Scranton by a 2-1 margin). The 1964 convention showed that Republican grass roots workers, subleaders, cadres, party hacks, call them what you like, are far more conservative than the politicians they serve and the voters they try to persuade. They are perhaps, good representatives of those who still call themselves Republicans (80 per cent of whom voted for Goldwater in November), but not of those who can usually be depended on to vote Republican. In contrast, Democratic party workers virtually never fail to support their chief's programs.

True Believers

Why is the G.O.P. party worker so peculiarly out of line with his leaders? The answer is suggested in Rovere's sketch of Goldwater's career. In 1952 Goldwater was only a few years removed from the party worker level (big contributor variety); he was a conservative Eisenhower Republican. But somewhere between 1952 and 1956, as Rovere puts it, the conservative and his conscience met. Goldwater got ideology. He repudiated the Eisenhower Administration, the essence (and justification) of expediential Republicanism.

Like so many precinct delegates, Goldwater really believed the campaign oratory he used. He was genuinely upset when the Administration didn't decrease federal spending and balance the budget, didn't take the offensive against International Communism and expel all the pinkos and homosexuals from the State Department. Goldwater thrived on the Republican platform platitudes of the early 1950's--the declamations against big spending, big government, unbalanced budgets and inflation--all the defiant orthodoxy of the 1930's, originally designed to prove that Hoover had been right in 1932. To this Goldwater, William Miller, among many others added outraged attacks on Communism, Corruption, and Korea.

This is the only winning rhetoric that the Republicans have had in a long time and it is no wonder that Goldwater and Miller, whose political careers began around 1950, fell back on these comfortable issues when their their new, barely disguised appeals to racism failed. Goldwater, it will be remembered, at one point called Lyndon Johnson soft on Communism (he said Nixon suggested it, which isn't very hard to believe). He parried criticism from abroad by claiming that the Europeans were simply afraid that he would cut off American economic aid. Bill Miller fell back on such early-'50's chestnuts as the dangers of letting cheap foreign labor immigrate freely to our country.

Crowding in Wilderness

These appeals show how far Gold- water and Miller were from public opinion as well as from reality. They were the hysterical cries of men who were sure they had the truth and knew that no one was listening any more.

Goldwater won the nomination, then, not simply because he had the approval of assorted racists. Birchers, and National Review brand ideologues but because he had the whole-hearted, deepthroated support of the long-time Republican party worker, who has his own, somewhat different ideology. These workers feed on the 15 and 30-year-old dogmas that still dominate Republican thinking. Even Republican "liberals" nourish these beliefs when they seek those necessary votes in Rockford, Illinois or Phoenix

One of the services of Novak's book is its recollection of what seems scarcely credible today, the rapport that existed between Rockefeller and Goldwater before May, 1963. Rockefeller had been active and not unsuccessful in wooing conservatives by stressing areas of Republican agreement. That meant, of course, using the standard Republican lines about the menace of communism, the menace of budget deficits, and so forth. Rockefeller as well as Goldwater helped confirm bedrock Republican's picture of a world gone wrong, of national leaders departing from the Americanism that made our country free and strong.

Lately Republican candidates have taken to pleading for votes on the rather barren grounds that a second party must be kept in the running. Patent political grows out of grave weaknesses in the character of the Republican Party, weaknesses which resulted in the Goldwater nomination. Rovere with his careful analysis of Goldwater and Goldwaterism, and Novak with his step-by-step account of the Goldwater victory in San Francisco, expose these weaknesses and help show what a faltering and confused animal the Republican elephant has become

This is the central figure in Richard Rovere's The Goldwater Caper. The , private Goldwater has somehow made his way into the U.S. Senate has become a presidential candidate. The second, public Goldwater a hard-line ideologue who lets his speech writers make him appear less attractive and less open-minded than the private Goldwater. The whole, ambivalent Goldwater is be first presidential candidate to buy computer to find out what the says he has said.

The public Goldwater, as Rovere out, breaks all the political . He speaks out against , TVA, social security, the United Nations, civilian control of nuclear weapons. The easy-going man who readily admits his own inadequacy and the ideologue who sees extremism as no vice and moderation as no virtue together become the Republican presidential nominee.

Goldwater won the Republican nomination, Rovere says, precisely because he did not play by the rules. The "moderates" made the mistake of trusting a sort of free market theory of politics. The nominations would, they thought automatically go to the candidate with the maximum vote potential, that is, to one of the "moderates."

"In a most peculiar sense," Rovere concludes, "Goldwater owes his success to the widespread belief that the system was a machine constructed to produce a result opposite from the one about to be produced in San Francisco."

Robert Novak's The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964 explains more exhaustively how the political market mechanism went awry. He goes back to 1960 and follows the machinations of the whole cast of G.O.P. characters in intrepid, eye-at-the-keyhole style.

Rocky Bedfellows

Nelson Rockefeller's remarriage, in Novak's opinion, was the event that threw the market mechanism most violently out of whack. It removed Rockefeller from the number one position in the race and, more important, showed just how lukewarm his support had been all along.

Rockefeller's--and all "liberal" Republicans'--basic political strategy is, as Novak puts it, expediential. The liberal asks, and gets, support from conservative bedrock Republicans because he can win and they can't. But the hardy 27 per cent of American voters who still call themselves Republicans don't really trust Rockefeller or his kind. The difficulties governors like Rockefeller, Scranton, and Romney have had with the Republican majorities in their legislatures--to say nothing of the disagreements between the Eisenhower Administration and the G.O.P. leadership in Congress--show what different political worlds these Republicans live in.

The natural constituents of the expediential Republicans are those voters who call themselves Independents but who almost always vote for Republicans. Such people, however, seldom show up at Republican convention. In order to win, the expedientials must cater to bedrock Republican predispositions.

"Taft (or Goldwater) can't win" was the expedientials' trump. But they failed to notice that 1964 was being played in no trump, because for the first time in twenty years no one really expected any Republican candidate to beat President Johnson. When it became clear that Rockefeller's popularity was on the way down, most of his backing quickly vanished.

Goldwater's convention victory has often been described as a wild deviation from Republican norms. "Liberal" Republican orators especially insist that Goldwater's nomination was utterly atypical of their party.

But both Rovere and Novak, from their different perspectives, suggest that it was no such thing. For them, the San Francisco convention was a plausible, if unusual, product of the political market mechanism, the result of varying proportions of stupidity and astute planning plus a few unpredictable contingencies. Despite Goldwater's blunders and speech writers, despite all the primary results, the Arizonian ambled downhill to the nomination after Rockefeller's remarriage. It was Clifton White's roundup of 300 solidly Goldwater delegates (with 655 needed to nominate) plus the Goldwater victory (and 86 votes) in California that corralled the convention.

If this is true, it says something about the character of the Republican national convention delegate. Since San Francisco, commentators have stressed the uniqueness of the 1964 delegates' strident, unswerving commitment to Goldwater. But if Novak is right, if only 386 of the delegates were irrevocably tied to Goldwater, then what may be important about the convention is its similarity to the supposedly liberal conventions of previous years.

A seat on the convention floor is a reward for the party faithful, the precinct delegates, envelope stuffers, and phone callers, and there are always many to be rewarded. Presumably such people predominated at the rubber-stamp conventions of 1956 and 1960 and constituted rather more than a majority of the 1964 convention.

That these convention delegates were such strong Goldwaterites may have surprised many of the expediential politicians who led them. (An example: last June Republican precinct delegates in Michigan's Oakland County the suburban stronghold and home of George Romney, preferred Goldwater over Scranton by a 2-1 margin). The 1964 convention showed that Republican grass roots workers, subleaders, cadres, party hacks, call them what you like, are far more conservative than the politicians they serve and the voters they try to persuade. They are perhaps, good representatives of those who still call themselves Republicans (80 per cent of whom voted for Goldwater in November), but not of those who can usually be depended on to vote Republican. In contrast, Democratic party workers virtually never fail to support their chief's programs.

True Believers

Why is the G.O.P. party worker so peculiarly out of line with his leaders? The answer is suggested in Rovere's sketch of Goldwater's career. In 1952 Goldwater was only a few years removed from the party worker level (big contributor variety); he was a conservative Eisenhower Republican. But somewhere between 1952 and 1956, as Rovere puts it, the conservative and his conscience met. Goldwater got ideology. He repudiated the Eisenhower Administration, the essence (and justification) of expediential Republicanism.

Like so many precinct delegates, Goldwater really believed the campaign oratory he used. He was genuinely upset when the Administration didn't decrease federal spending and balance the budget, didn't take the offensive against International Communism and expel all the pinkos and homosexuals from the State Department. Goldwater thrived on the Republican platform platitudes of the early 1950's--the declamations against big spending, big government, unbalanced budgets and inflation--all the defiant orthodoxy of the 1930's, originally designed to prove that Hoover had been right in 1932. To this Goldwater, William Miller, among many others added outraged attacks on Communism, Corruption, and Korea.

This is the only winning rhetoric that the Republicans have had in a long time and it is no wonder that Goldwater and Miller, whose political careers began around 1950, fell back on these comfortable issues when their their new, barely disguised appeals to racism failed. Goldwater, it will be remembered, at one point called Lyndon Johnson soft on Communism (he said Nixon suggested it, which isn't very hard to believe). He parried criticism from abroad by claiming that the Europeans were simply afraid that he would cut off American economic aid. Bill Miller fell back on such early-'50's chestnuts as the dangers of letting cheap foreign labor immigrate freely to our country.

Crowding in Wilderness

These appeals show how far Gold- water and Miller were from public opinion as well as from reality. They were the hysterical cries of men who were sure they had the truth and knew that no one was listening any more.

Goldwater won the nomination, then, not simply because he had the approval of assorted racists. Birchers, and National Review brand ideologues but because he had the whole-hearted, deepthroated support of the long-time Republican party worker, who has his own, somewhat different ideology. These workers feed on the 15 and 30-year-old dogmas that still dominate Republican thinking. Even Republican "liberals" nourish these beliefs when they seek those necessary votes in Rockford, Illinois or Phoenix

One of the services of Novak's book is its recollection of what seems scarcely credible today, the rapport that existed between Rockefeller and Goldwater before May, 1963. Rockefeller had been active and not unsuccessful in wooing conservatives by stressing areas of Republican agreement. That meant, of course, using the standard Republican lines about the menace of communism, the menace of budget deficits, and so forth. Rockefeller as well as Goldwater helped confirm bedrock Republican's picture of a world gone wrong, of national leaders departing from the Americanism that made our country free and strong.

Lately Republican candidates have taken to pleading for votes on the rather barren grounds that a second party must be kept in the running. Patent political grows out of grave weaknesses in the character of the Republican Party, weaknesses which resulted in the Goldwater nomination. Rovere with his careful analysis of Goldwater and Goldwaterism, and Novak with his step-by-step account of the Goldwater victory in San Francisco, expose these weaknesses and help show what a faltering and confused animal the Republican elephant has become

The public Goldwater, as Rovere out, breaks all the political . He speaks out against , TVA, social security, the United Nations, civilian control of nuclear weapons. The easy-going man who readily admits his own inadequacy and the ideologue who sees extremism as no vice and moderation as no virtue together become the Republican presidential nominee.

Goldwater won the Republican nomination, Rovere says, precisely because he did not play by the rules. The "moderates" made the mistake of trusting a sort of free market theory of politics. The nominations would, they thought automatically go to the candidate with the maximum vote potential, that is, to one of the "moderates."

"In a most peculiar sense," Rovere concludes, "Goldwater owes his success to the widespread belief that the system was a machine constructed to produce a result opposite from the one about to be produced in San Francisco."

Robert Novak's The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964 explains more exhaustively how the political market mechanism went awry. He goes back to 1960 and follows the machinations of the whole cast of G.O.P. characters in intrepid, eye-at-the-keyhole style.

Rocky Bedfellows

Nelson Rockefeller's remarriage, in Novak's opinion, was the event that threw the market mechanism most violently out of whack. It removed Rockefeller from the number one position in the race and, more important, showed just how lukewarm his support had been all along.

Rockefeller's--and all "liberal" Republicans'--basic political strategy is, as Novak puts it, expediential. The liberal asks, and gets, support from conservative bedrock Republicans because he can win and they can't. But the hardy 27 per cent of American voters who still call themselves Republicans don't really trust Rockefeller or his kind. The difficulties governors like Rockefeller, Scranton, and Romney have had with the Republican majorities in their legislatures--to say nothing of the disagreements between the Eisenhower Administration and the G.O.P. leadership in Congress--show what different political worlds these Republicans live in.

The natural constituents of the expediential Republicans are those voters who call themselves Independents but who almost always vote for Republicans. Such people, however, seldom show up at Republican convention. In order to win, the expedientials must cater to bedrock Republican predispositions.

"Taft (or Goldwater) can't win" was the expedientials' trump. But they failed to notice that 1964 was being played in no trump, because for the first time in twenty years no one really expected any Republican candidate to beat President Johnson. When it became clear that Rockefeller's popularity was on the way down, most of his backing quickly vanished.

Goldwater's convention victory has often been described as a wild deviation from Republican norms. "Liberal" Republican orators especially insist that Goldwater's nomination was utterly atypical of their party.

But both Rovere and Novak, from their different perspectives, suggest that it was no such thing. For them, the San Francisco convention was a plausible, if unusual, product of the political market mechanism, the result of varying proportions of stupidity and astute planning plus a few unpredictable contingencies. Despite Goldwater's blunders and speech writers, despite all the primary results, the Arizonian ambled downhill to the nomination after Rockefeller's remarriage. It was Clifton White's roundup of 300 solidly Goldwater delegates (with 655 needed to nominate) plus the Goldwater victory (and 86 votes) in California that corralled the convention.

If this is true, it says something about the character of the Republican national convention delegate. Since San Francisco, commentators have stressed the uniqueness of the 1964 delegates' strident, unswerving commitment to Goldwater. But if Novak is right, if only 386 of the delegates were irrevocably tied to Goldwater, then what may be important about the convention is its similarity to the supposedly liberal conventions of previous years.

A seat on the convention floor is a reward for the party faithful, the precinct delegates, envelope stuffers, and phone callers, and there are always many to be rewarded. Presumably such people predominated at the rubber-stamp conventions of 1956 and 1960 and constituted rather more than a majority of the 1964 convention.

That these convention delegates were such strong Goldwaterites may have surprised many of the expediential politicians who led them. (An example: last June Republican precinct delegates in Michigan's Oakland County the suburban stronghold and home of George Romney, preferred Goldwater over Scranton by a 2-1 margin). The 1964 convention showed that Republican grass roots workers, subleaders, cadres, party hacks, call them what you like, are far more conservative than the politicians they serve and the voters they try to persuade. They are perhaps, good representatives of those who still call themselves Republicans (80 per cent of whom voted for Goldwater in November), but not of those who can usually be depended on to vote Republican. In contrast, Democratic party workers virtually never fail to support their chief's programs.

True Believers

Why is the G.O.P. party worker so peculiarly out of line with his leaders? The answer is suggested in Rovere's sketch of Goldwater's career. In 1952 Goldwater was only a few years removed from the party worker level (big contributor variety); he was a conservative Eisenhower Republican. But somewhere between 1952 and 1956, as Rovere puts it, the conservative and his conscience met. Goldwater got ideology. He repudiated the Eisenhower Administration, the essence (and justification) of expediential Republicanism.

Like so many precinct delegates, Goldwater really believed the campaign oratory he used. He was genuinely upset when the Administration didn't decrease federal spending and balance the budget, didn't take the offensive against International Communism and expel all the pinkos and homosexuals from the State Department. Goldwater thrived on the Republican platform platitudes of the early 1950's--the declamations against big spending, big government, unbalanced budgets and inflation--all the defiant orthodoxy of the 1930's, originally designed to prove that Hoover had been right in 1932. To this Goldwater, William Miller, among many others added outraged attacks on Communism, Corruption, and Korea.

This is the only winning rhetoric that the Republicans have had in a long time and it is no wonder that Goldwater and Miller, whose political careers began around 1950, fell back on these comfortable issues when their their new, barely disguised appeals to racism failed. Goldwater, it will be remembered, at one point called Lyndon Johnson soft on Communism (he said Nixon suggested it, which isn't very hard to believe). He parried criticism from abroad by claiming that the Europeans were simply afraid that he would cut off American economic aid. Bill Miller fell back on such early-'50's chestnuts as the dangers of letting cheap foreign labor immigrate freely to our country.

Crowding in Wilderness

These appeals show how far Gold- water and Miller were from public opinion as well as from reality. They were the hysterical cries of men who were sure they had the truth and knew that no one was listening any more.

Goldwater won the nomination, then, not simply because he had the approval of assorted racists. Birchers, and National Review brand ideologues but because he had the whole-hearted, deepthroated support of the long-time Republican party worker, who has his own, somewhat different ideology. These workers feed on the 15 and 30-year-old dogmas that still dominate Republican thinking. Even Republican "liberals" nourish these beliefs when they seek those necessary votes in Rockford, Illinois or Phoenix

One of the services of Novak's book is its recollection of what seems scarcely credible today, the rapport that existed between Rockefeller and Goldwater before May, 1963. Rockefeller had been active and not unsuccessful in wooing conservatives by stressing areas of Republican agreement. That meant, of course, using the standard Republican lines about the menace of communism, the menace of budget deficits, and so forth. Rockefeller as well as Goldwater helped confirm bedrock Republican's picture of a world gone wrong, of national leaders departing from the Americanism that made our country free and strong.

Lately Republican candidates have taken to pleading for votes on the rather barren grounds that a second party must be kept in the running. Patent political grows out of grave weaknesses in the character of the Republican Party, weaknesses which resulted in the Goldwater nomination. Rovere with his careful analysis of Goldwater and Goldwaterism, and Novak with his step-by-step account of the Goldwater victory in San Francisco, expose these weaknesses and help show what a faltering and confused animal the Republican elephant has become

Goldwater won the Republican nomination, Rovere says, precisely because he did not play by the rules. The "moderates" made the mistake of trusting a sort of free market theory of politics. The nominations would, they thought automatically go to the candidate with the maximum vote potential, that is, to one of the "moderates."

"In a most peculiar sense," Rovere concludes, "Goldwater owes his success to the widespread belief that the system was a machine constructed to produce a result opposite from the one about to be produced in San Francisco."

Robert Novak's The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964 explains more exhaustively how the political market mechanism went awry. He goes back to 1960 and follows the machinations of the whole cast of G.O.P. characters in intrepid, eye-at-the-keyhole style.

Rocky Bedfellows

Nelson Rockefeller's remarriage, in Novak's opinion, was the event that threw the market mechanism most violently out of whack. It removed Rockefeller from the number one position in the race and, more important, showed just how lukewarm his support had been all along.

Rockefeller's--and all "liberal" Republicans'--basic political strategy is, as Novak puts it, expediential. The liberal asks, and gets, support from conservative bedrock Republicans because he can win and they can't. But the hardy 27 per cent of American voters who still call themselves Republicans don't really trust Rockefeller or his kind. The difficulties governors like Rockefeller, Scranton, and Romney have had with the Republican majorities in their legislatures--to say nothing of the disagreements between the Eisenhower Administration and the G.O.P. leadership in Congress--show what different political worlds these Republicans live in.

The natural constituents of the expediential Republicans are those voters who call themselves Independents but who almost always vote for Republicans. Such people, however, seldom show up at Republican convention. In order to win, the expedientials must cater to bedrock Republican predispositions.

"Taft (or Goldwater) can't win" was the expedientials' trump. But they failed to notice that 1964 was being played in no trump, because for the first time in twenty years no one really expected any Republican candidate to beat President Johnson. When it became clear that Rockefeller's popularity was on the way down, most of his backing quickly vanished.

Goldwater's convention victory has often been described as a wild deviation from Republican norms. "Liberal" Republican orators especially insist that Goldwater's nomination was utterly atypical of their party.

But both Rovere and Novak, from their different perspectives, suggest that it was no such thing. For them, the San Francisco convention was a plausible, if unusual, product of the political market mechanism, the result of varying proportions of stupidity and astute planning plus a few unpredictable contingencies. Despite Goldwater's blunders and speech writers, despite all the primary results, the Arizonian ambled downhill to the nomination after Rockefeller's remarriage. It was Clifton White's roundup of 300 solidly Goldwater delegates (with 655 needed to nominate) plus the Goldwater victory (and 86 votes) in California that corralled the convention.

If this is true, it says something about the character of the Republican national convention delegate. Since San Francisco, commentators have stressed the uniqueness of the 1964 delegates' strident, unswerving commitment to Goldwater. But if Novak is right, if only 386 of the delegates were irrevocably tied to Goldwater, then what may be important about the convention is its similarity to the supposedly liberal conventions of previous years.

A seat on the convention floor is a reward for the party faithful, the precinct delegates, envelope stuffers, and phone callers, and there are always many to be rewarded. Presumably such people predominated at the rubber-stamp conventions of 1956 and 1960 and constituted rather more than a majority of the 1964 convention.

That these convention delegates were such strong Goldwaterites may have surprised many of the expediential politicians who led them. (An example: last June Republican precinct delegates in Michigan's Oakland County the suburban stronghold and home of George Romney, preferred Goldwater over Scranton by a 2-1 margin). The 1964 convention showed that Republican grass roots workers, subleaders, cadres, party hacks, call them what you like, are far more conservative than the politicians they serve and the voters they try to persuade. They are perhaps, good representatives of those who still call themselves Republicans (80 per cent of whom voted for Goldwater in November), but not of those who can usually be depended on to vote Republican. In contrast, Democratic party workers virtually never fail to support their chief's programs.

True Believers

Why is the G.O.P. party worker so peculiarly out of line with his leaders? The answer is suggested in Rovere's sketch of Goldwater's career. In 1952 Goldwater was only a few years removed from the party worker level (big contributor variety); he was a conservative Eisenhower Republican. But somewhere between 1952 and 1956, as Rovere puts it, the conservative and his conscience met. Goldwater got ideology. He repudiated the Eisenhower Administration, the essence (and justification) of expediential Republicanism.

Like so many precinct delegates, Goldwater really believed the campaign oratory he used. He was genuinely upset when the Administration didn't decrease federal spending and balance the budget, didn't take the offensive against International Communism and expel all the pinkos and homosexuals from the State Department. Goldwater thrived on the Republican platform platitudes of the early 1950's--the declamations against big spending, big government, unbalanced budgets and inflation--all the defiant orthodoxy of the 1930's, originally designed to prove that Hoover had been right in 1932. To this Goldwater, William Miller, among many others added outraged attacks on Communism, Corruption, and Korea.

This is the only winning rhetoric that the Republicans have had in a long time and it is no wonder that Goldwater and Miller, whose political careers began around 1950, fell back on these comfortable issues when their their new, barely disguised appeals to racism failed. Goldwater, it will be remembered, at one point called Lyndon Johnson soft on Communism (he said Nixon suggested it, which isn't very hard to believe). He parried criticism from abroad by claiming that the Europeans were simply afraid that he would cut off American economic aid. Bill Miller fell back on such early-'50's chestnuts as the dangers of letting cheap foreign labor immigrate freely to our country.

Crowding in Wilderness

These appeals show how far Gold- water and Miller were from public opinion as well as from reality. They were the hysterical cries of men who were sure they had the truth and knew that no one was listening any more.

Goldwater won the nomination, then, not simply because he had the approval of assorted racists. Birchers, and National Review brand ideologues but because he had the whole-hearted, deepthroated support of the long-time Republican party worker, who has his own, somewhat different ideology. These workers feed on the 15 and 30-year-old dogmas that still dominate Republican thinking. Even Republican "liberals" nourish these beliefs when they seek those necessary votes in Rockford, Illinois or Phoenix

One of the services of Novak's book is its recollection of what seems scarcely credible today, the rapport that existed between Rockefeller and Goldwater before May, 1963. Rockefeller had been active and not unsuccessful in wooing conservatives by stressing areas of Republican agreement. That meant, of course, using the standard Republican lines about the menace of communism, the menace of budget deficits, and so forth. Rockefeller as well as Goldwater helped confirm bedrock Republican's picture of a world gone wrong, of national leaders departing from the Americanism that made our country free and strong.

Lately Republican candidates have taken to pleading for votes on the rather barren grounds that a second party must be kept in the running. Patent political grows out of grave weaknesses in the character of the Republican Party, weaknesses which resulted in the Goldwater nomination. Rovere with his careful analysis of Goldwater and Goldwaterism, and Novak with his step-by-step account of the Goldwater victory in San Francisco, expose these weaknesses and help show what a faltering and confused animal the Republican elephant has become