Free Republic

Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men's room in Washington. Evidently, the president was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election. Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files. When the press reported this, I received a call in my office from Mr. Moyers. Several of my assistants were with me. He was outraged; he claimed...

Goldwater's 1964 Acceptance Speech The following is the text of Barry Goldwater's 1964 speech at the 28th Republican National Convention, accepting the nomination for president. Provided by the Arizona Historical Foundation To my good friend and great Republican, Dick Nixon, and your charming wife, Pat; my running mate and that wonderful Republican who has served us well for so long, Bill Miller and his wife, Stephanie; to Thurston Morton who has done such a commendable job in chairmaning this Convention; to Mr. Herbert Hoover, who I hope is watching; and to that great American and his wife, General and...

Through half of lifetime of observing American conservatives' and neoconservatives' passionate and principled resistance to affirmative action (a resistance that notably waned after the 2003 Grutter decision), I many times heard them quote Hubert Humphrey's famous pledge that if the 1964 Civil Rights Act required racial quotas, he would "eat the paper it's written on." Recently I looked up the text of Humphrey's remark, which he made on the floor of the U.S. Senate on April 9, 1964: It the Senator can find in Title VII ... any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the...

Goldwater's 1964 Acceptance Speech The following is the text of Barry Goldwater's 1964 speech at the 28th Republican National Convention, accepting the nomination for president. Provided by the Arizona Historical Foundation To my good friend and great Republican, Dick Nixon, and your charming wife, Pat; my running mate and that wonderful Republican who has served us well for so long, Bill Miller and his wife, Stephanie; to Thurston Morton who has done such a commendable job in chairmaning this Convention; to Mr. Herbert Hoover, who I hope is watching; and to that great American and his wife, General and Mrs....

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Edgar Ray Killen, the reputed Klansman accused of killing three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, says he knew nothing about the deaths until he heard media reports about the case. Killen was interviewed by Jackson television station W-J-T-V, which began airing brief segments of the interview early this week in advance of running the full interview beginning tonight. Killen told W-J-T-V he wasn't shocked by his indictment after so many years. Killen also said he was at a funeral home when the murders occurred. Quoting here from the W-J-T-V interview: "It looks like they...

FOUR decades on, an alleged Ku Klux Klansman known as The Preacher yesterday became the first person to be charged with murder in the “Mississippi Burning” killings that rocked 1960s America. Edgar Ray Killen Edgar Ray Killen, now 79, a former sawmill owner and Baptist minister, appeared in court accused of leading the mob of white supremacists who chased down three young civil rights workers in the racially divided Southern state 40 years ago. Dressed in an ill-fitting orange prison uniform, Mr Killen boomed “not guilty” three times as he entered his pleas. Shortly after he was remanded the courthouse...

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - Reputed Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was arrested late Thursday on murder charges in the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, officials said. Neshoba County Sheriff Larry Myers told The Associated Press that Killen, a 79-year-old preacher, was arrested at home without incident. The arrest came after a daylong grand jury meeting Thursday that apparently included testimony from people believed to have knowledge about the killings. "We've got several more to arrest, but we went ahead and got him because he was high-profile and we knew where he was," Myers said. Myers...

August 20th marks the 40th anniversary of one of the major turning points in American social history. That was the date on which President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating his "War on Poverty" program in 1964. Never had there been such a comprehensive program to tackle poverty at its roots, to offer more opportunities to those starting out in life, to rehabilitate those who had fallen by the wayside, and to make dependent people self-supporting. Its intentions were the best. But we know what road is paved with good intentions. The War on Poverty represented the crowning triumph of the...

It was just a chance encounter with a little piece of history.      LIFE Magazine, the Aug. 21, 1964, edition, just waiting to be snatched up at the Boston Public Library book sale.      Ah, the summer of '64! I would have called it an idyllic one - days at the beach (in pre-casino Atlantic City), nights listening to the Philadelphia Orchestra under the stars at Robin Hood Dell. The future filled with possibilities.      The pages of LIFE chronicled the fact that ``The Munsters'' was the TV hit of the year, the widowed Jackie Kennedy was vacationing in Europe and Chesterfields were...

A Time For ChoosingRonald Reagan - 1964 I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this. It’s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, “We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government.” The idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in...

On Saturday they would appear before the convention’s Credentials Committee and ask to be seated as the official Mississippi state delegation... Shortly after he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson told his aide Joseph Califano, "I think we’ve delivered the South to the Republican party for your lifetime and mine." Maybe so, but he was determined to hold onto the region long enough to ensure his own re-election; the opinion polls might show him leading the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, by an enormous margin, but he was desperate not to stoke the fires of sectional conflict. Only one...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version July 26, 2004, 1:19 a.m. Atlantic City Without the Girls...is not so hot, says the author, as he watched sadsack delegates carry out orders from on High. Democrats at work, perhaps, but not democracy. By William F. Buckley Jr. EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appeared in the September 8, 1964, issue of National Review. National Review went to press several hours before the renomination of Lyndon Johnson and the selection of the Vice Presidential candidate. The following are the dispatches received, until our deadline, from Wm....

The East Room THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all for coming, and welcome to the White House. I am so pleased you could join us to celebrate a great anniversary of justice and equality in America. I appreciate members of my Cabinet being here, and a lot of members of my administration. I want to thank many of our distinguished guests who have joined us today. I'm so pleased to see Dr. Dorothy Height -- thank you so much for coming. (Applause.) We've got two Lieutenant Governors, Michael Steele and Jennette Bradley, with us. Thank you both for being here today....

This is the last 1/3 of speech. This is the part that reveals Reagan's vision and his clarity. The entire speech is worth reading, but this is the beginning rumblings of a man who would ultimately win the war some Democrats of that era wanted to surrender. Ronald Reagan "Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways...

I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this. It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government." This idea? that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we...

Over Two Days, Hurricane, President, Beatles Visited North Fla. Ron Word/Associated Press May 30, 2004 JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. (AP) - It was a remarkable two-day period in northeast Florida's history: Sept. 10-11, 1964. In less than 48 hours, Hurricane Dora's high winds and storm surge devastated Jacksonville and St. Augustine, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a surprise visit to inspect the damage, and the Beatles performed for 20,000 screaming fans at the Gator Bowl. Glenn Guthrie remembers all three events - he witnessed each one. At the time, surfing was Guthrie's life. Big waves are rare along north Florida's coast...

Condoleezza Rice is a "true illiterate," said a patronizing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. This Marxist thug added that he had asked his comrade Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to mail America’s National Security Advisor samples of Cuban books now being used to teach Venezuelan children literacy to “see if she learns to respect the dignity of the people and learns a bit about us." Apparently President Chavez is both a racist and a puny macho sexist to make such stupid remarks. His stunted manhood is threatened by criticism from this powerful woman. Condoleezza Rice, who recently called on Chavez to accept...

The Democrats have an image problem, but it's not, as some pundits insist, a mcgovern. The image problem is a goldwater. Anyone who was around in the winter of 1964 appreciates it at once. Barry Goldwater thrilled angry Republicans, conservatives and political correspondents with deliciously quotable remarks, fired from the lip (not even the hip). This chilled the Republican barons who could recognize a fatal self-inflicted wound when they saw one. The senator from Arizona, unlike the former governor of Vermont, was personally likable and had a gift for saying sensible things in an outrageous way. This was poison at...

Japan pursued a de facto "two-China" policy recognizing both China and Taiwan while officially maintaining a one-China policy, according to declassified diplomatic documents released Wednesday. A December 1964 document quotes Prime Minister Eisaku Sato as conveying this position to British Ambassador Francis Rundall. "The Japanese government has been saying that there is only 'one China,' but we are simply using the words employed by both communist China and Nationalist China," the prime minister said. "In reality, we are aware that there are two governments." That May, Foreign Minister Masayoshi Ohira told his British counterpart, Richard Butler, that Japan wanted to...

Bush, Nixon & LBJ Posted: December 8, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Re-election year is shaping up as positively for George W. Bush as it did for LBJ in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1972. Recall: Both LBJ and Nixon had engineered surging economies for the election year. Both held the face cards in foreign policy in wartime, with electorates wary of the perceived radicalism of their rivals. Both were facing opponents, Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, who had been luridly painted as outside the mainstream. And both benefited from an opposition party polarized over its...