`We Gotta Eat'

MURRAY KEMPTON writes from Hershey, Pa:

Senator Goldwater innvited those Republi- cans who represent his party's past and present to come here last week and pledge him recognition as his party's future.

When the business was done, and Senator Goldwater announced that he could now live in harmony with the dubious and the hostile in his own house, a journalist asked him whether, with all his wounds, he might also now be reconciled with the jackals of the New York Times and the hyenas of the television networks. Senator Gold- water almost smiled. 'I'll get along with you fellows,' he said. 'You gotta cat and I gotta eat.'

He had expressed the entirely utilitarian spirit of a gathering which was held together by no feeling warmer than acceptance of the conven- tional lesson that, in the American party system, defectors seldom eat. When his guests departed, he had the endorsement of no Republican who had not already pledged it, the voice of no Republican who had before been silent, and the detectably-increased temperature of no Republi- can who had before been tepid.

Most of those present were Republican gover- nors and Republican governor-pretenders, a class not prematurely pro-Goldwaterite. The Senator favoured them with a speech clarifying those views which had chilled so many Republican moderates in his speech accepting the nomina- tion. He sought, he explained, the votes of no extremist; his government would be 'compassion- ate' towards the poor and `moral' in its concern for the rights of the Negro. Even so, the tempera- ture was cool at Senator Goldwater's summit.

At the end, General Eisenhower, Goldwater's heaviest military trophy, was fetched forward to announce that he was grateful that the Sena- tor had cleared up sonic of his prior uncer- tainties and that he was now fully on the Goldwater-Miller team. No, General Eisenhower said, he had threatened no one; and, even if the Senator had not granted him the flattery of clari- fication, he would still have supported the ticket.

Having arrived at clarity, would the General now move towards intensity as a campaigner? 'I'll be seventy-four years old in October,' the General laughed. That was precisely the answer he had given in San Francisco a month ago when he was asked about his fitness for active service. The Republicans had never seemed more the party of the status quo.

Only Senator Goldwater was noticeably al- tered from his last prior public manifestation. The difference was more in his tone than in what he said, which was mostly what he has said often enough before, along with its opposite. But most of us had seen him last at San Francisco and there he had been the sorest of winners. Now the scars of victory had visibly healed; here was a man we could trust not again to be nasty until election night and then only if he should win.

His speech had repudiated 'character assassins, vigilantes, Communists, and other groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.' Did that spectrum include the John Birch Society? 'They're not on the Attorney-General's subversive list,' Senator Gold- water answered. 'The KKK is.'

This list was compiled in 1947 as a guide to organisations whose members might be judged

unfit for employment in government; it-embraces

103 groups, all of which, except the Klan, the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Workers' Party, were described as under Com- munist control. The grand dragon of the Georgia Kiang, the presiding bishop of that establishment, had endorsed the Republican ticket at the end of July; the first responses of Senator Gold- water's Vice-Presidential candidate and of the chairman of his national committee had sounded unexpectedly gratified.

Now, the new Barry Goldwater was carefully explaining that the only proper standard for per- sonal taste in associations is the dictate of the state he comes to save us from. 'I think it was the Germans,' the historian in him remembered, 'who originated the modern concept of peace through strength.' He was answering the question of a Pole. 'I will be a civilian President,' the constitutionalist purist in him promised. 'I'm not going to try and run the army and the navy.'

So he, too, had not changed in anything essen- tial, and neither had Governor Nelson Rocke- feller, who came to stand in the residue of the Eisenhower-Goldwater press conference and re- iterate his faith in the two-party system and his resignation to support of the Republican candi- date. Governor Rockefeller welcomed *hat seemed to him Senator Goldwater's position 'as of now.' He himself would go on fighting for basic principles.

The unfortunate Mr. Nixon had sat at the public ceremonies beside Barry Goldwater with neither duty nor impulse to speak and with no responsibility except the private one of doing his best to look like a man who had not sunk but only dived and would get up again. Gover- nor Scranton was there as founder of the feast, exercising his most intense public enthusiasm, which is for greeting and seating visitors.

The other guests had a low visibility rate and that, too, could have been a consequence of calculation. Some of the governors seem, in fact, to have felt that this was not a house of the sort in which a wise man attracts the notice of the self-righteous or the prurient. The distraction of the Eisenhower-Goldwater ceremonies must have been a convenience to them; when it was over, the journalists emerged to find that such habitual volubles as Governors Romney of Michigan and Rhodes of Ohio had already fled.

By all the old rules, it had been a barren day. But, as we have wondered before, can anyone say for sure that Barry Goldwater is governed by the rules or the hopes which control other politicians and that he is not less a traditional politician than a force of nature, who asks of his hereditary allies no more than that they agree to co-exist with him while he follows his im- pulse to travel alone? Can we suppose, indeed, that Barry Goldwater called all these defeated captains together out of no real desire except publicly to forgive them for the sin of having lost to him?