Slaughter of the Innocents
T1111, voters of New Hampshire were the first Republicans to pronounce a judgment on the more active aspirants for a chance at President Johnson next November; and, within less than half an hour, they had left almost no visible sur- vivors. Just eighteen minutes after the last polling place had closed in New Hampshire, one tele- vision network's computer could announce as an indisputable mathematical projection the victory of Henry Cabot Lodge, our Ambassador to South Vietnam, who at that moment happened—one doubts entirely by chance—to be physically farther away from the scene of struggle than any Republican who could possibly be nominated.
At the moment the computer pronounced its judgment, Senator Goldwater's campaign com- mittee had barely opened the parlour in the Hotel Madison here where it had invited its believers to receive the New Hampshire returns together in the great company of the conservative revolution. The computer pronounced its judgment and the congregation never came. The television reporters and cameramen were at their stations. There were the girls in their Western hats and Goldwater sashes arrayed for the photographers who would have no need to take their pictures; as the even- ing went on, these acolytes remained as fresh as ever, the indifferent serenity of their smiles un- changed. The professionals on Senator Gold- water's staff had no duties of hospitality except to explain to the attendant journalists how inconse- quential New Hampshire is, the way Eddie Fisher explains how inconsequential Elizabeth Taylor is. The only sort of face that was conspicuously absent was the one recognisable as of the simple faithful, who had heard the pronouncement of the computer and who had still repaired to his pew to mutter his prayers to that God who re- deems every genuine believer and whose hand can be trusted in the late returns.
The Senator's ordinary faithful may, in fact, have commenced to give up even before the polls opened. One journalist with the good sense to know that, if we have to canvass the mind of a voter, we had best pick the most appetising one possible, asked a girl in a Goldwater hat how it felt to know that her hopes for a better America were being rendered into ashes this night. He re- ported that she replied, untroubled, that her in- volvement with the remains was minimal. She had, she explained, been dispatched to the scene by the Young Republicans of Washington after the Goldwater headquarters had called to say that the committed were so laggard in indicating their attendance that it would be a fraternal act if a few neutral girls came around to provide a back- drop. She herself supposed she was for Governor Rockefeller.
• The ddcor, along with the blue bunting and the trumpeting papier =kite elephant head with glasses, included a never-stirring telephone labelled 'Direct Wire to Concord, N. H.,' and a great blackboard with the names of the state's townships running down its side and the names of the candidates—New Hampshire had almost as many potential presidents as it has townships— across its top with blank spaces for the vote totals of each below. At eight o'clock the vote spaces were still virginal; twenty minutes later, a young man advanced to the board with his chalk. There was a sob of resignation in the crowd, and the young man carefully chalked beside the name of each township the number of its polling places. Not a single vote had yet been posted.
An hour and a quarter after the polls closed, Clifford White, Senator Goldwater's operational director, was telling the television cameras that Ambassador Lodge's vote was a great bath of re- gional sentiment. His television duties completed, he addressed what few ordinary worshippers might be scattered among the priests, the acolytes and the sextons. 'We're going to have a long evening,' he told them. 'In ten or fifteen minutes we're go- ing to give some of the returns.' There was a half- hour while the professionals hoped for some dramatic rescue; at last the attendant went to the board and ravished its pure spaces with what everyone else knew.
There cannot ever have been a night like this in our political history. Two powerful national politicians, limitless in resource, had exposed themselves wherever two or three were gathered together in the sight of God and the boundaries of New Hampshire. Senator Goldwater thought he had shaken hands with half the voters of New Hampshire; Governor Rockefeller, having worked twice as hard, must have pressed twice as many. And, when they had finished, 58 per cent of the voters had found against either of them, and the candidate who got more votes than any other turned out to be 10,000 miles away. No one can explain, but the suspicion is that the explanation would reflect unexpected credit on the New Hampshire Republicans. Senator Goldwater had wandered over New Hampshire saying the first thing that came to his mind. President Kennedy is supposed to have said that the illusions about Senator Goldwater's powers to persuade could never survive the first month after he opened his mouth in serious debate; the results in New Hampshire have turned out a tribute to Mr. Kennedy's remarkably subtle political intelli- gence. Governor Rockefeller, on the other hand, seemed determined to conceal his own high quali- ties of maturity and wisdom in a whirl of buying lollipops for children.
New Hampshire, then, had confronted a Gold- water who was perfectly serious and a Rockefeller who seemed imperfectly so, and it had turned appalled to a man who, 10,000 miles away, was struggling with the impossible, if not in a manner notably competent, at least with a devotion absolutely splendid. And Goldwater had told us for five years that the untapped resource of our politics was the American conservative; he need only be given a choice and he would rise in his legions. Now Goldwater had offered that clear choice and he was getting 23 per cent of the vote. The week before the primary, Goldwater had made the point that the Lodge movement was a threat not to himself, but to Rockefeller. The
impulse to write in the name of our former Ambassador to the United Nations was, he
argued, far more apt to overcome a voter who was leaning to the Rockefeller rather than the Gold- water position. That is sound reasoning and it impels the thought that, if New Hampshire had offered no other alternative, Rockefeller would have left Goldwater for dead and, at this moment, we would all be entertaining illusions of Rocke- feller's majestic recovery. Nothing that is said about poor Goldwater ever damages him quite as much as what be says himself.
Yet at ten Barry Goldwater was on the stage There were shouts of 'We want Barry' and he answered, cheerful as always in trouble, that they were going to get him. He wanted, he said, to thank all of them and to say that he would do better in California, since he is a Westerner. He ended accepting all the blame for himself; he had made mistakes he would not make again, and he told them that they still had a whale of a chance and cheerfully departed.
Going away, a journalist asked him to detail his mistakes and he answered, 'None of your busi- ness.' He was noticeably not using 'damned' any longer; it would be sad if he thought that this en- gaging practice had been his only mistake.
While he waited upstairs, the rest of us started down and homeward meeting other, more porten- tous figures arriving late. One was Arthur Sum- merfield, former Postmaster-General of the United States and former National Chairman of the Republican Party, who had bet on Goldwater last August and whose certification of his destiny had been a bond to major financial contributors. He is a large man with a face not to be changed by a bet won or lost; he greeted old acquaint- ances as if we had all just happened to meet on the street. And then his broad flannelled back went through the door to the hall to the Senator's suite. It was hard not to believe that Barry Gold- water's late vigil with the election returns was about to end with a visit from his banker to say that the line of credit could run no further.
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