On this day in 1964, delegates to the Republican National Convention, meeting at the Cow Palace in Daly City, a suburb of San Francisco, nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona to run against President Lyndon B. Johnson in the race for the White House.
In accepting his party’s nomination, which he won on the first ballot, Goldwater said: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
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Some GOP moderates saw Goldwater’s remarks as a deliberate insult. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller — who at one point before the convention led GOP primary polls by wide margins — refused to endorse or campaign for Goldwater. Michigan Gov. George Romney took a similar stance.
In the ensuing campaign, Goldwater tacked right, championing the conservative cause, embracing libertarianism, deriding liberalism and denouncing the New Deal, founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
“Sometimes I think this country would be better off,” Goldwater had said at a 1961 news conference, “if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.”
This was Goldwater’s way of signaling dislike of liberal economic and social policies, which were widely popular in that part of the country. Democrats gleefully highlighted this remark — as well as Goldwater’s Senate vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his idea of making Social Security voluntary and his advocacy of privatizing the government-owned Tennessee Valley Authority.
In November, Goldwater suffered a crushing defeat, claiming 39 percent of the vote and carrying five states. Nonetheless, the election enshrined Goldwater, who died in 1998, as the political godfather of the modern conservative movement.
Source: “The Making of the President: 1964,”
by Theodore H. White (1965)