QUOTE from Lyndon Johnson during the 1964 campaign: "We can't let Goldwater and the Red Chinese both get the bomb at the same time. Then the shit will really hit the fan."
The campaign in 1964 was one of the dirtiest and nastiest campaigns in our history. It ranks right up there with the 1928 campaign between Al Smith and Herbert Hoover. (I personally feel this 1964 race was worse than 1928.)
The CANDIDATES in 1964.
DEMOCRAT: LYNDON JOHNSON.
Johnson had spent twenty years in Congress as a member of the House and as a senator. He knew the ins-and-outs of how Congress worked - in other words he knew how to get things done. Johnson's talkative, folksy, back-slapping Texas manner hid an extraordinary desire for power and an intimate knowledge of how to get it. He chose Hubert Humphrey as his VP mate. (He didn't treat Hunphrey very nice. When he chose Humphrey for VP, he said to him, "If you didn't know you were going to be VP a month ago, you're too dumb to have the office.")
REPUBLICAN: BARRY GOLDWATER.
Goldwater was 55, from Arizona, and the son of a Jewish father and Presbyterian mother, a WWII pilot, had worked in the family's department store, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952. He was ultra-conservative. He made the comment that "Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern liberal seaboard and let it float out to sea." Republicans like Ike and Nixon didn't agree with this but in 1964 the Republican Party was controlled by untra-conservatives - and Goldwater was the result. His VP choice was William Miller, a complete unknown who was also an ultra-conservative. He was a congressman from upstate New York.
The CAMPAIGN in 1964.
Johnson and the Democratic Party were ready to destroy Goldwater - and they did. What follows is a summary of how they did it.
- Their campaign strategy was to portray Goldwater as "ridiculous and a little scary, trigger-happy, a bomb-thrower.. and to keep the fear of Goldwater as unstable, impulsive, and reckless in the public's mind." Johnson didn't waste any time implementing the strategy.
- At campaign stops he would point to the sky and say that JFK's spirit was "there in heaven
watching us." Who would the martyred JFK, and this audience, like to see in the White House - Johnson or Goldwater?" "Which man's thumb do you want to be close to the button...and which man do you want to reach over and pick up that hotline when they say, 'Moscow calling?'"
- As the campaign heated up Johnson instructed his staff to influence the press in whatever way they could ("reporters are puppets," he told them). One way they did that was to get a financial columnist named Sylvia Porter to write two columns about how a Goldwater victory would be bad for America's economy and would have a huge negative impact on the stock market. Newsweek called him "the fastest gun" and Life Magazine said he was man of "one-sentence solutions." It was reported that a nationwide survey of American psychiatrists found that a sizable percentage thought Goldwater was unfit to serve as president because he suffered from clinical paranoia.
- And Goldwater himself helped Johnson win a landslide victory by making stupid statements like these:
---"Let's lob one into the Kremlin and put it right into the men's room."
---"All men are created equal at the instant of birth...but from then on, that's the end of equality."(Not exactly a good way to get black votes.)
--- And Goldwater struck fear at white Americans' fear of black criminals by saying this: "I don't have to quote the statistics to you. You know. Every wife and mother-yes, every woman and girl knows what I mean." (Is this another way to win black votes? Of course, he didn't have to worry about black votes because most of them couldn't vote in 1964.)
---And then this stupid statement: "You know, I haven't got a really first-class brain."
---Probably the most famous and effective campaign ad was run on September 7, 1964. The TV showed a little blonde girl walking through a field. She stops to pick up a daisy and begins pulling off the petals and counting in a high innocent voice, "1...2...3...4.." As she finishes, a military voice begins a countdown: "10...9...8...7...6.." As the counting reaches zero, the little girl looks up, startled. You stare into her frozen face and ...a huge mushroom cloud explodes, filling the screen. Over the mushroom cloud, Lyndon Johnson's voice says, "
"These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must love each other, or we must die."The Democrats only paid to air it once, but much to their delight it was run over and over by the networks. Talk about free exposure - and it drove home the message. Perhaps the ad was overkill. Yet no one who saw it could ever forget its stark simplicity.
---Other media dirty tricks pulled by the Johnson team were writing books about Goldwater:
some examples were "Barry Goldwater:Extremist of the Right" and "The Case Against Barry."
Another one was the Goldwater joke book entitled "You Can Die Laughing." and there was a children's coloring book in which kids could color pictures of Goldwater dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes.
Another tactic was to write letters to columnist Ann Landers under the guise of ordinary people who were terrified of Goldwater becoming president.
Goldwater and Repubicans fought back.
The Republcnas weren't afraid to use the media to get their message out.
His campaign produced a vulgar book entitled "A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power." The book brought together all the nasty stories about Johnson using a whole bunch of free-swinging slurs. The author said Johnson was guilty of all types of vote buying and sleazy politicking, even worse, he was responsible for the murder of several business associates and even the assassination of JFK. In the first year of its publication, the book supposedly outsold the Bible in the state of Texas.
The National Republican Committee planted numerous newspaper articles wondering how Johnson had amassed a personal fortune of ten to fourteen million dollars during a lifetime of public service.
Republican ads in Western newspapers spread rumors that Johnson had kidney cancer and speculated how long he had to live.
The Opinion Research Poll reported in October that Goldwater was rapidly gaining on Johnson (it wasn't true). It was proved that the Opinion Research Group was a part of Goldwater campaign.
The Goldwater committee made up a fake film group known as "Mothers for a Moral America." They made a film called "Choices", which showed Americans that they had a choice between good and evil. On the good positive side they showed conservative kids having good clean fun with the American flag flying high, the Statue of Liberty gleaming in the sun and Barry Goldwater giving inspiring patriotic speeches.
The bad negative side showed people dancing the TWIST, people reading pornography, women in topless bathing suits, black kids dancing and throwing rocks while rioting, and a speeding Lincoln Continental where the driver was throwing empty beer cans out the window (this was a knock at LBJ who used to throw beer cans out his car window when driving at his ranch in Texas.
The film ended with the question, "Which side would you choose? Tough call? Mothers for a Moral America.
Two conflicting bumper sticker slogans of that time say it all about this 1964 campaign.
GOLDWATER SUPPORTER: "In your heart you know he's right."
JOHNSON SUPPORTER: "In your heart you know he's nuts."
The WINNER was LYNDON JOHNSON and he continued as the 36th president of the United States.
Johnson got 43,129,566 popular and 486 electoral.
Goldwater got 27,178,188 popular and 52 electoral.
Johnson got 61.1% of the vote - the largest percentage win in U.S. history. His 16,000,000 popular vote was the largest up to that time but was surpassed by Nixon's 1972 victory and Reagan's 1984 victory.
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