No Cheers for
the Loser
From mURRAY KEMPTON NEW YORK
MR. GoLowATER's movement has always been a Vendee stirred in the west against the great capital on the Eastern Seaboard. As bishop of his sect, he came here among the un- churched but seldom; even now, as commander of a major national party, he will come to New York City for just one appearance between now and election day.
New York is horridly and unitedly infidel. There is an impression that one has never seen an intact Goldwater sticker on an automobile bumper. One of the faithful confirmed this im- pression the other day with the report that every morning for the previous week he had put a fresh, new orange 'Goldwater in '64' sticker on his car bumper and that, on three of those five mornings, this banner was defaced by parties unobserved while its bearer was still in transit. Goldwaterism exists here, then, only as occasion for extremism in its enemies. No one except the state chairman of the Republican Party even bothers to tell anti- Goldwater jokes any longer.
The Senator spent one day last week in New Jersey, which is across the river from New York but sunk in darkness hardly less deep for his cause. It was a day rather like a chapter from the Book of Martyrs, the mocking at noon, the anointment at night. He. began at Asbury Park, a New Jersey resort generally cheerful and even clean by the deplorable standards of an ocean- front whose most conspicuous symbol is Atlantic City, remembered by every victim of the Demo- cratic Convention as Appalachia-by-the-Sea. The ocean was calm and the sun bright on the Senator's helicopter as it waited above Asbury Park's vaguely Moorish Convention Hall.
There were perhaps 6,500 persons waiting for him there, but the only ones with the passion of hope and contempt were the Young Citizens for Johnson. Its cadre--perhaps 200—had taken its place in the balcony; and, as Senator Goldwater began to speak, these dreadful young people be- gan to chant, over and over again, `LBJ, whenever there was a pause. The Senator's delivery being what it is, there was little that was audible and nothing that was coherent in the hall except this effrontery.
What was most terrible was how helpless every- one was. We were watching a candidate and a party reduced to the state where children can mock him and they can only endure. Goldwater stood at the microphone incapable of any response but acceptance. His troops sat unprotest- ing in their seats. At San Francisco, people like these had treated Nelson Rockefeller the same way. But there is no juice left in them. For now they are losers and they were being treated as losers are always treated in America and they were pathetically resigned. The heart of youth is very hard: and I am afraid that children of the repellent sort who carry placards and thus represent the hope that American youth is in- terested in the serious public business turn out to boo a candidate only if they know they are booing a loser.
It is a horrid rule of politics in what Mr. John- son calls this lovable land that the winners are the ones who feel freest to conduct themselves with the least decency. It is a rule of the game generally; in our professional football, the team that wins the championship has a way of having drawn the most penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct. In politics the rule is fixed; whatever the Gallup Poll may say, we need only wait to see which candidate is the first to have eggs thrown at him and we can, in the United States, identify him as the loser. Those who hate the winner most will libel him in print and defame him at their dining-room tables; but a native reverence for the winner as an institution makes them forbid their children to turn out and boo him. Even Barry Goldwater seemed to know that he is unfashionable and has no rights, so, in deference to the majority, he cut his speech short and flew off to Northern New Jersey and the bedroom towns around New York.
There things were suddenly and strangely better. The Senator did not, of course, openly travel the streets; he seldom does. Goldwaterism is a Protestant sect, and those who clutch at it prefer the private communion of the church to the publicity of the street procession. There was, to be sure, an immense, lowing herd of Johnson pickets around the Essex armoury; but there was, in addition, a quite respectable troop of Goldwater people pounding at the doors and cursing and beating upon the police in their desperation to get close enough to hear Gold- water's demand that America learn to respect law and order.
Teaneck is across the Hudson from the towers of the City of Darkness but it was an unmixed balm. There were no pickets; 8,000 persons roared in the hall and busily bought John Birch Society tracts detailing the treasonable conduct of the last four Democratic and the only recent Republican Presidents of the United States. An Italo-American politician was encouraged to swear that the tide had turned and that every policeman and taxi driver in Newark was voting for Goldwater. The tide could hardly have turned; policemen and taxi drivers are definably losers; still New Jersey Republican professionals, after weeks of unchanging despair, could clutch for the moment at illusion. They concede, as the New York professionals do not, that they must live or die with Goldwater; they expect to die, but most of the other Republican candidates in the Teaneck area turned out to salute him.
These previously-separated brethren were not welcomed with universal joy by the audience. State Senator Walter Jones, the area's ranking Republican, seems to the truly committed a serious security risk, because he was against Goldwater at the convention and has been sparing with his graces since. He introduced the candidate in a long bray about how Republicans stand by Republicans, and went on so long with- out quite being able to pronounce the name of this particular friend that some of his auditors lost patience and began to howl: 'All right, Jones. Say his name.' Walter Jones never did quite pronounce the words 'Barry Goldwater'; and it was somehow a comfort to see that the Goldwaterites still had the spirit to give tongue to their sense of affront, and that there are still some havens where these poor people dare to be nasty again.
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