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I never believed that anything I said publicly about the conservative philosophy was particularly inspired. I was born and raised a conservative. I didn't know any other way to think. As I grew up, I began to read and discuss new conservative literature. These "conservative doctrines" seemed to me to be as much a part ...
I had hoped to be named to the Senate Armed Services Committee, but as a freshman I was named instead to Labor and Public Welfare and to Commerce and Banking. There were few conservatives in Congress during those days. Although Dwight D. Eisenhower had become the first Republican president in twenty years, the nation ...
Behind all the promises of the planners lay a cynical contempt for the individual freedoms which make Americans different from most of their contemporaries around the world. My political mission was to restore the emphasis on those individual freedoms despite the welfare state. It was also a private promise to one man—...
Despite the hopes of the freshman senator from Arizona, these high-minded thoughts quickly floated down from the political clouds to reality. Ohio's Senator Bob Taft, the GOP minority leader, wanted a businessman—citizen Goldwater—on the Labor and Commerce committees. It was that simple. The decision was a stroke of f...
The national television networks began broadcasting the hearings live after dramatic confrontations erupted between the eight-member committee and union bosses Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa. The hearings disclosed how Beck, the West Coast chief of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, had stolen hundreds of thousands...
Bobby was right in seeing that Hoffa was giving the entire labor movement a black eye. Hoffa ruled the union by muscle and employers by threats—and acts—of violence. Bobby was doing the labor movement's dirty work, cleaning up its house for them. It was only after Bobby beat Hoffa at his own game—the bully on the block...
In 1959 President Eisenhower and most senators supported a labor reform bill written by Senators John Kennedy and Sam Ervin, both Democrats. The bill passed, ninety-five to one. I was the lone opponent, calling the measure ineffective. That was the most significant vote of my first term in the Senate. President Eisenh...
The Senate took up the measure again and did a flip-flop, voting ninety-five to two against the Kennedy-Ervin bill—one of the most stunning reversals I ever saw in the Senate. The Landrum-Griffin bill—a still inadequate but tougher version that had been adopted by the House—was finally approved. I voted for it as somet...
In the years that have passed, unions have increased their financial help to the Democrats. They have every right to do so, but the pervasive influence of such money is making reelection to Congress even more of a spoils system. Another development appears even more significant. Union leadership has manipulated the uni...
I was convinced it was necessary to fight unions in the trenches—no surrender and no negotiated peace. In those days, unions were tough. When they fought, they went to war. I respected that. I did the same. My fights with unions have never ceased. Various union leaders have accused me of all kinds of nefarious deeds o...
My acquaintance with Bioff began during my senatorial campaign in 1952. My wife's uncle Paul Davies brought a man named Bill Nelson by our store to meet me. The two apparently knew one another fairly well. After I was elected, Nelson returned and asked if I remembered him. I said that I did and recalled he had sent a c...
We had gone there since I was a speaker at a convention of the American Mining Congress. When we met, Bioff mentioned they were having trouble getting back to Phoenix since their commercial flight had been delayed by mechanical problems. He asked how we were returning. I said we had rented a plane, and I was flying it ...
In 1976, after Phoenix newspaper reporter Don Bolles was killed when his car blew up, out-of-town newsmen dug into my "association" with Bioff and Greenbaum. Bolles had been investigating organized crime just before he died. My brother, Bob, and Rosenzweig had often gone to Las Vegas to gamble. Both knew reputed mob f...
Other union allegations in the book and other media were a crude attempt to embarrass me as a Jew. It was claimed that Phoenix had a Jewish Mafia that was closely linked to the Nevada underworld and other vice. My family and other Jews who came to Arizona established a long, clear record of hard work and exceptional p...
Jews were elected to leadership posts throughout the state without any real alliance among themselves or a single report of anti-Semitism among those early settlers. In addition to my family, other Jews elected to public office in those days were Emil Ganz, twice elected mayor of Phoenix, and A. Leonard Meyer, who serv...
Neither my father nor any of our family ever took any part in the Jewish community. We never felt or talked about being half Jewish since my mother took us to the Episcopal church. It was only on entering the power circles of Washington that I was reminded I was a Jew. I never got used to being singled out in that way...
Peggy and I were unable to make ends meet on my Senate salary. Over the years, we spent about $1 million of my and her savings to pay our bills. Part of that came from my share in the sale of the three Goldwaters stores to the Associated Dry Goods Company of New York in 1962. We had been grossing some $7 million a year...
I believe the old union bosses and the Mafia, wherever they may be, would consider me a financial flop. I wouldn't argue the point with them. I look back on my battles with the country's union leadership as worthwhile. There have been major changes in union operations, from the handling of pension funds to greater acc...
Friends have asked me why I waged some of the wars. Many of the senators around me were so much more seasoned and capable of taking on powerful opponents—established leaders like Walter George and Richard Russell of Georgia, Everett Dirksen and Paul Douglas of Illinois, John Stennis and James Eastland of Mississippi, H...
The day of Humphrey's funeral I was barely able to walk because of an operation, but I would not have stayed home even if I had to crawl. Hubert was a clean fighter. One of the big question marks in my early Senate life was my relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower. I was grateful to Ike from my first day on Capitol H...
Some of my GOP colleagues in the Senate passed the word that they couldn't figure out me or the speech, but there was nothing mysterious about what I had said. I had declared that Ike's budget "weakens my faith in the constant assurances we have received from this administration that its goal is to cut spending, balanc...
We conservatives were determined to reverse the policies of "moderate" Republicans who were little more than "Me Too" Democrats. Eventually, frustrated because Ike and the "moderates" would not cut back their spending policies, I called the Eisenhower administration a "dime store New Deal" because of its expanding prog...
That dispute with Ike and fight with the moderates led to three significant developments over the next thirty-year period—my presidential nomination, the movement of Republican Party power from the Eastern seaboard to west of the Mississippi River, and finally the full flowering of the conservative movement during the ...
Russell Kirk's _The Conservative Mind,_ published the year I entered the Senate, was also important to me. Kirk gave the conservative viewpoint an intellectual foundation and respectability it had not attained in modern society. He assailed the planning mentality of the times. Kirk rightly said it undermined the role o...
Of course, liberals do not admit these stark terms. They disguise their state-controlled plans and programs with vague promises. That was the high-flown rhetoric of all the New Dealers from Roosevelt to Truman, from Kennedy to Johnson and Carter. The aim of every one was the same—they would take your money and freedom...
World-class economists like Milton Friedman and writers like Ayn Rand opened a new conservative horizon. The weekly newspaper _Human Events_ and the monthly magazine _The Freeman_ lifted conservatives from the doldrums of defeat to new hopes of recapturing some of the nation's political high ground. We were sowing the...
But the signs of change in the GOP were evident. Governor Rockefeller, after announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, was the principal speaker at the Western Republican Conference in Los Angeles. He delivered a "Me Too" speech—more of the New and Fair Deals—to polite applause. I took the s...
5 Revolt on the Right Five simple words tell it all—no one wanted the job. So in 1955 my GOP colleagues chose me—with only two years' experience in the Senate—to be the new chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. The post opened the way to the GOP presidential nomination. I had no idea of what was b...
The Communists launched the Korean war in 1950 to test the American and free world's staying power in Asia. That faraway battlefield left more than 50,000 Americans dead and political bitterness here at home. We did not try to win the war in Korea. It was the first time in U.S. history that an American President sent ...
No wonder my colleagues ducked the senatorial campaign chairmanship. It was a grueling, unrewarding, unglamorous job. The exhausting two-year responsibility was spread across the country—raising funds, rallying the party faithful, exhorting conservatives in particular to remain steadfast in the hope of better days, and...
The thought of taking names of or notes on people who might later be personally helpful never occurred to me. To my knowledge, no previous chairman had used the post as a political launching pad to higher office. It would also have been wrong. Goldwater was sent around the country to blow not his own horn but that of h...
Despite Eisenhower capturing the White House and the GOP controlling Congress, many Eastern Republicans continued to concede the New Deal changes of bigger, wider government. The Eastern GOP establishment was a pale imitation of the Democratic Party. It's important to understand who and what constituted this network. ...
On the social side, Republicans were club members—country clubs and other exclusive private groups. In those days you could not climb the heights if you were not from an Ivy League university or a member of some exclusive set. Other analysts of the political scene, such as Theodore White, saw the Eastern establishment...
White argued with me face to face that these bankers and other Eastern interests could no longer command the GOP because the Eastern establishment was not centralized. It was true that these men were divided in their competitive business world, but they were united in their politics—and their large campaign funding. Th...
I could not have cared less about their country clubs. My message was, if you work harder, you deserve more than the other guy. The test was not whether you were Ivy League or a corporate officer, but whether you cared deeply about individual initiative and individual rights. The double standards and selfishness of th...
The mid-1950s were very tough days for a conservative. What kept me going? Mostly the young people I met along those highways and byways. I saw myself in them, with their hunger for new ideas instead of the old handouts in social thinking and public programs. If there was one sentence which inspired these young people,...
Rockefeller operated with the same double standard toward conservatives. It was only a matter of time before we fought one another. These intraparty differences wouldn't strengthen us in Congress or in a run for the White House. Rockefeller sensed that the Eastern establishment might be losing some of its grip on the ...
Liberalism and its rhetoric had dominated American politics for most of this century. But the political winds were almost imperceptibly beginning to change. So was the Republican Party. More Republicans were calling themselves conservatives. The right had begun to stir. William Rusher, a New York attorney and political...
Without fully realizing it, I was tapping into a growing conservative reservoir across the country. In the late fifties and early sixties, none of us could see the bottom of that reservoir. Nor did I comprehend how much it would affect me. If anyone had said in those days that I was the symbol for a massive new conserv...
I went before the convention, withdrew my name from nomination, and suggested that those who would support me cast their votes for Nixon. Those impromptu remarks, spoken from the heart, have been called the "Grow up, conservatives; we'll be back" speech. This is what I said: "We've had our chance, and I think the cons...
Representative Morris Udall, an Arizona Democrat and my longtime sidekick in Congress, said it was the finest speech I ever made. He believes those few simple words were the beginning of the nation's conservative upsurge. Others suggested it might have started with a book. In 1960 a thin 123-page publication with a re...
_The Conscience of a Conservative_ was the college student underground book of the times. It was virtually ignored by the media, most college professors, and other liberals, who had long held a monopoly on the information flowing to the American people. That first printing was ten thousand copies at three dollars each....
• The basic difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives account for the whole man while liberals tend to stress the material man. Liberals tend to regard economic satisfaction as the dominant mission of society. • Conservatism puts material things in their proper place, subsidiary to the spirit...
In its simplest terms, conservatism is economic, social, and political practices based on the successes of the past. It rejects socialism, fascism, and other ideologies of failure. These principles have a long history, adapted and refined with the passage of centuries. Conservatism was an intellectual movement with fe...
My office was deluged with letters—from two thousand to, eventually, as many as eight thousand a week. We were also receiving more phone calls and mail from the media than we could handle. I had worked directly with the media since arriving in the Senate. As a concession to the times, I hired Tony Smith to be my press ...
Despite my promises to myself and my family to spend less time on the road, I was still giving many speeches around the country in 1960. It was a merry-go-round. Tony kept slipping into my office, showing me letters from people saying I should run for the presidency. I pooh-poohed the whole thing. Answer the Arizona le...
Finally I agreed to some interviews. _Time_ came, and they interviewed me for hours, asking all kinds of silly questions, like how it felt being the golfing partner of Sammy Snead in the 1940 Phoenix Pro-Amateur match. They wanted to make a big deal out of the fact that I played in army boots and a beaten-up T-shirt wh...
It was a very unpleasant, unhappy experience. The senator from Arizona didn't want _Time_ or anyone else floating his name as a candidate for the White House. What would friends and the folks back home think? Had Barry Goldwater become an arrogant, strutting peacock in Washington? And people around the country—wouldn't...
White was a pro, much more than a mere political public relations man or college instructor in political science. He had been a GOP party worker since his twenties and was a very experienced technician. No one in the Republican Party knew more about the mechanics of putting a political machine together. He was now taki...
Few people have ever understood my fierce resistance in those days to seeking higher office. I got damned mad about it because the whole idea was so silly. Not only did it seem preposterous, but I had never even jokingly considered the matter. And, to dismiss the notion entirely, I stressed that Arizona was a very smal...
Tony was well aware that I sometimes said things for immediate effect, to get people on my side by making them listen or laugh. And I made too many joking references, like "lobbing one into the men's room of the Kremlin." (Boy, did I pay for that offhand quip!) It wasn't funny anymore. Tony was right. I'd have to watch...
With these snappy, twenty-second answers, members of Congress aim to do two things at one time—twist their response to meet almost any question on a given subject and grab a quick headline on network radio and television news. It's now obvious that too many members of Congress are victims of the network syndrome—one qu...
Paul Healy, of the New York _Daily News,_ was the first Washington correspondent to "discover" and brand me. Healy wrote an anecdotal piece that made me into a rootin', tootin', shootin' Westerner who spoke his mind as few politicians in generations had. That was quite a mouthful because we've had a lot of colorful ch...
I plead guilty to firing back at some of our liberal critics. My aim was to win loyal converts to conservatism based on our principles. Contrary to any other perception, that was always my goal. Despite some national attention and more speaking invitations, I was never personally convinced I had started a bonfire to li...
After reading part of the manuscript, I returned it to Welch, saying his conjecture about Eisenhower and other matters was inaccurate. I suggested he not print the work because he could harm not only himself but the anticommunist cause. Welch never sought my advice again. Throughout the early 1950s, both the John Birc...
Liberals blamed conservatives for years for the most extreme statements of both Welch and McCarthy. We became "the radical right," yet the overwhelming number of conservatives could hardly be considered radical. I said publicly in a letter to _National Review_ that Welch's views were "irresponsible" and did not represe...
We were disturbed by the long liberal lock on the White House, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. The Eisenhower administration broke the lock momentarily, but it was mostly made up of passive Republicans, not a conservative majority dedicated to major changes. We hoped to curb the concentration of power in the hand...
In examining Joe McCarthy, it's important to place him in the temper of his times as well as the perspective of today. The Wisconsin Republican did not act alone. He was backed by many respected people, including Joseph P. Kennedy. I supported some of McCarthy's investigations after arriving in the Senate in 1953. Ther...
For all his personal problems and excesses, McCarthy's central idea was on target—that not only was world communism a threat to this country and the free world, but its bloody repressions in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere could not go unanswered by civilized men and women. Those murders, purges,...
McCarthy cursed and threw the pen at us. The outburst caused the nurses to come running, and we were ordered to leave the hospital for disturbing a patient and not return without permission, or we would be arrested by the Shore Patrol. I voted against censuring McCarthy for several reasons. Liberals themselves were gu...
No one but I knew why Joe was admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He had invited me up to Milwaukee to make a speech for him. When I arrived at his hotel room, Joe was gassed. He fell and hit his elbow on a glass tabletop. It later became infected. Once Indiana Senator Bill Jenner, several other senators, and I t...
I've never spoken this candidly about McCarthy before because it's not part of my character to harpoon people. However, McCarthy was a very important part of our generation, good and bad. And that's just how I felt about him—very mixed feelings. He recognized the Communist menace, as many of us did, and conservatives r...
That was my message in those days, mounting an intellectual and spiritual challenge to a society whose goals seemed only to be more and more of everything. In my long travels, I'd often wonder whether I was relating to the young people who had come to hear and ask questions. It seemed self-serving and presumptuous that...
Tarrance had never been active in politics. On graduation in 1962, he went home to Texas and began inquiring about what he might do in the GOP. The young Texan was disappointed by what the old-timers said, that his only role would be to lick envelopes and help at rallies. That was all right with him, but he wanted more...
Gold had grown up in the era of the New Deal. Americans didn't have the opportunity they have today, with a more balanced presentation of viewpoints, to discover their own political identities. That was one reason why we adopted our slogan in 1964: "A Choice—Not an Echo." Vic worked in public relations and later became...
Pat is one of those who committed a good part of his life—and a salty dash of journalism—to politics, as a speechwriter for President Nixon and communications director for President Reagan. In 1962, while a graduate student at Columbia University's journalism school, he led a contingent of friends to hear me and other ...
Tarrance, Gold, Feulner, and Buchanan—four names representing several hundred thousand young people who joined the ranks of conservatives in the late fifties and early sixties. Not Republicans—conservatives. More than a half million Americans would participate as volunteers and in other ways in the 1964 GOP campaign fo...
Conservatives and many younger Republicans, especially those just out of college, were furious at the way we were being brushed aside by the old-line leadership. Bill Buckley and Bill Rusher had formed and helped build a new national conservative youth organization, Young Americans for Freedom. The YAFs were to transfo...
Such a coalition had never defeated the liberal East and its allies—New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, plus smaller states in the East, Middle West, and Northwest. The GOP had already cracked the solid South in Eisenhower's campaigns. The increasing shift of population to the West had made the old Republican c...
Another group of samurai were about to capture the nation's attention. On a chill April morning in 1961 I was adjusting my straps in the cockpit of an F-86 fighter plane at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. It was April 15, Uncle Sam's Christmas. I was about to fly to Luke Air Force Base outside Phoenix to mai...
There might not be much time with Kennedy. My views had to be clear, concise, firm. The longer I thought, the clearer my position became. It was one word: will—political and moral will. Truman's no-win in Korea policy had been wrong. We could not adopt a no-win policy now that we were involved in a military operation ...
Sixteen bombers were to have made the run, but this number had been slashed in half. The State Department wanted to be able to officially deny our support of the exiles. The United States had furnished the planes. The State Department had told Kennedy it would be easier to defend the cover story that anti-Castro forces...
Kennedy could see the shock on my face. There could be no turning back now. Nearly 1,500 men would soon be on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. We had helped put them where they were. The commander does not abandon men he has sent to fight. The President had a professional and moral responsibility to those men. I grimac...
Kennedy still seemed to equivocate. I didn't understand how the President could, or why he would, abandon these men. They would be killed or captured without a chance of accomplishing their mission or even defending themselves. I remember the moment well. Kennedy continued to search my face and eyes for an answer. Thi...
I didn't have to remind the President that the American people had twice turned Stevenson down for the job that Kennedy now held. What made Stevenson think he could now go over the head of the President to the United Nations? Neither world opinion, nor the United Nations had stopped the Soviet tanks in Hungary and othe...
I left the Oval Office fairly sure that the B-26s, escorted by U.S. Navy fighters, would soon blow holes to lead those freedom fighters off the beaches toward Havana. I was wrong. The brigade left Guatemala. The B-26s were first to destroy Castro's air force on the ground and then support the landing group with air co...
In the end, Kennedy's big lie in the 1960 campaign, that the Soviets enjoyed a large missile superiority over the United States, had returned to haunt him. The Bay of Pigs ultimately allowed the influence of Castro and the Soviet Union to rise in the region. It was to spread to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other parts ...
The President sent a total of 17,000 American troops to Vietnam—with orders not to shoot back. Kennedy told me that Eisenhower had first sent troops there. In shifting blame for the U.S. presence there, he was technically correct. Ike had, however, sent only five hundred military advisers there. Kennedy was engaged in ...
A Kennedy-Goldwater clash would have been quite different from my campaign against Lyndon Johnson. It would have been a direct and continuing attack on Kennedy policies, with much less time spent on irrelevancies. Kennedy and I informally agreed—it seems a pipe dream in looking at some of today's negative campaigning—...
It was not until 1963 that I privately decided to oppose Kennedy by seeking the Republican nomination. The decision came quietly, matter-of-factly, in talking with my wife and a few friends. I said nothing publicly but sat back and waited. Earlier, in 1962, it had seemed certain that Rockefeller intended to become a p...
By the early fall of 1962, it appeared likely that Rockefeller, Michigan Governor George Romney, and perhaps Nixon—depending on how his race for the California governorship came out—would run for the 1964 GOP nomination. I preferred Rockefeller. It was obvious that the vast majority of conservatives didn't share my vi...
Meantime, I told anyone who would listen that I wasn't seeking the nomination. The door wasn't closed. I simply hadn't made up my mind about whether to run. I told a persistent reporter, "A man would be a damn fool to predict with finality what he would do in this unpredictable world." Peggy did not want me to run. Ho...
The governor said he had been married that afternoon to Mrs. Margaretta "Happy" Murphy. He wanted to tell a few friends and close associates about the wedding before it broke in the national media. The message was clear but the meaning confusing. Why call me? I asked myself. Finally I wished him happiness, put the rec...
The mail hit Capitol Hill and Rockefeller's office like a May snowstorm, totally unexpected. The writers were mostly women and some clergy. There were two complaints—that Rocky had been dating a married woman and that her husband, a physician, wanted their four children. The governor had been leading me nearly two to ...
I was very uneasy about these developments. In fact, I was genuinely unhappy about them. The country needed a campaign of national and international issues, not personalities and moralizing about private lives. Many conservatives saw the matter as a victory of sorts over the GOP's leading liberal. I didn't view it that...
Tony Smith then showed me a poll done by _Congressional Quarterly_ among delegates to the 1960 Republican National Convention. The questionnaire had been distributed both before and after the Rockefeller marriage. The before-the-wedding poll reported that nearly 65 percent of those questioned thought Rockefeller would ...
Still, I tried to determine how he could possibly have come to such an opinion. I thought back to the phone call on his wedding day. Would he really call me because he thought I was the type of guy who might lead a conservative moral crusade against his remarriage? That was ridiculous, I concluded. I had never uttered ...
Rockefeller described these "extremists" as being involved in "threatening letters, smear and hate literature, strong-arm and goon tactics, bomb threats and bombings, infiltration and takeover of established political organizations by Communist and Nazi methods." There was absolutely no doubt about those he was referri...
I was shocked and saddened by the declaration, especially since I had received no advance warning from Rockefeller. It had seemed that we had developed a reasonably good relationship, maybe even the beginning of a personal friendship. The memory of those breakfasts and dinners at his Washington home was still warm. He ...
Well, I consoled myself, at least he had spared me personally by not implying I might be an extremist. Wrong again. A few days later, Rockefeller came very close to calling me just that in saying I was a dupe and a puppet of sinister right-wing forces. That was too much. I fired back, saying we should be more concerne...
From the historical perspective of an Arizonan and Westerner, there was another element in the battle to win control of the GOP. I had no qualms about taking on the Eastern establishment, whether it was Rockefeller, the banks, or the large corporations, because we had long been dominated by these interests. For a cent...
Washington still holds half the spread in the West—hundreds of millions of acres—and often dictates how such land may be used. Individual states are not trusted to manage it well environmentally. That is because some states historically have not done a good job of land management. Times have changed. Nevertheless, the ...
With Mike Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey. The last formal portrait with Peggy. Today we are still under pressure from national companies and the Washington bureaucracy as to how we may use our land and other natural resources from copper to tungsten, uranium, oil, coal, shale, and forests. The federal government and ...
Kitchel had no political background. I had chosen him through a twist of fate. In the spring of 1963, at a meeting of Arizona Republican leaders in Phoenix, Dick Kleindienst had stepped down as state party chairman: he was considering running for governor. The party leaders had informally selected Denny, who had been o...
Everybody asked, "Is that so?" I replied, "Certainly." Everyone then looked at Denny, who showed a bit of surprise but quickly responded, "Yes, yes. That's right." Timing was a factor in the choice, but there were many more important reasons to bring Denny on as my right hand. We were old and very close friends. I t...
Denny listened. It seemed that everyone in the party was soon bending his ear—congressional representatives, my GOP colleagues in the Senate, leaders of the Draft Goldwater Committee, and political veterans like Ed McCabe, a Washington lawyer and longtime White House aide to President Eisenhower, and William J. Baroody...
The pressure from conservatives in Congress mounted with letters and phone calls. Eight hundred to a thousand letters a day poured into my Senate office from conservatives around the country, all urging me to run. Conservative intellectuals said that the right had found a new respectability and that we deserved a chanc...
I'm convinced today that Baroody leaked the report. So are Kitchel and others. Bill has since passed away, so it's impossible to know with absolute certainty. The record is, however, important. None of the others present at the dinner spoke with the _Times_ about the conversation. If that is true, why would Baroody di...
Buckley and Bozell, who married one of Buckley's sisters, saw the _Times_ leak as a rebuff by the inner circle and perhaps by me. They were offended. The truth is, I would have welcomed both into the campaign with open arms. It had been impossible to do so earlier, for this reason: _National Review_ supported the Draft...
On November 2, 1963, the Associated Press took a poll of GOP state and county leaders. An overwhelming majority, more than 85 percent, chose me as the "strongest candidate" against Kennedy. Rockefeller had less than 4 percent; Nixon about 3 percent. More than 64 percent believed I would receive the nomination. As the ...