Hey! Page 100! 
Kurt_Steiner: If you think that is a long time, just think how long it will take me to get to the Modern Day Scenario mod.
I spent the first several months of the game thinking that the Viet Cong divisions would simply surrender once I captured Rach Gia. Clearly that didn’t happen.
Taylor really did think he could defeat the Viet Cong with just 40,000 soldiers. Clearly that isn’t going to happen either.
Kaiser Chris: Nice movie reference.
Considering this is the first time I’m playing the scenario, I’m not sure yet whether it will be victory or defeat. The Americans are not in a very good position at the start of the game, meaning I can’t just walk over the enemy. I have to gradually put troops into South Vietnam, not knowing what the enemy is going to do next.
For the first several months of my game, I was wondering why the enemy was being so passive. Then after I captured Rach Gia, the enemy stopped being so passive.
I think the 100,000+ troop level is most likely where I will end up. As for Scoop's emphasis on timetables, it certainly brings to mind the saying about a military plan only being good until it meets the enemy.
There’s actually an in-game event where South Vietnam gets reinforcements from Australia and New Zealand. You’ll see it in the next Vietnam War update.
I’m using Ground Attack to wear down the enemy divisions. As for the Ho Chi Minh trail, you actually can’t do anything to it unless you declare war on Laos...which doesn’t seem like a good idea given her neighbor to the North.
Giant robots operated by cute girls with very noticeable “assets”. Now there’s a research tech for Japan.
jeeshadow: Let’s just say the enemy stops sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
SirNolan: It does get you up to the conventions, if that helps.
“Lily white Plain Stater lefty”...I like that description.
Goldwater did vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1963, which I assumed he would have given he had voted for other civil rights bills dealing with the right to vote.
A less extreme Goldwater...you know you’re unpopular when Goldwater looks more attractive than you do.
God, the current Presidential race.
It is going to get worse in Vietnam. As for Cambodia, her future is very much uncertain. She’s on the American side, but just barely. We might be able to avoid the Kent State incident, though.
Operation Downfall...the result of the Japan AI not surrendering no matter what I did. I actually had to chase the Japanese government down to Hong Kong before I could finally annex Japan and win the war.
Kaiser Chris: We’ll see what happens.
I already ran Prescott Bush as VP in 1960 and he retired from seeking political office in 1963. It is true that Goldwater and the elder Bush were friends, and Bush’s son George ran as a Goldwater Republican in his 1964 bid for the Senate.
As for Nixon, he could be the VP depending on how things turn out.
Unification of Vietnam under Saigon...hmm...that might be easier said than done.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Republican Hats in the Ring
For Americans, the fourth weekend in November 1963 went by like any other. People went about their business as they would on any autumn weekend. There was weekend shopping to do, especially with Thanksgiving coming up on the Thursday after. There were college football games to catch, the main games that weekend being Harvard-Yale and Princeton-Dartmouth. The following weekend would see the traditional Army-Navy Game in Philadelphia, where CBS would introduce a new broadcasting technique called “Instant Replay”. There were shows to watch on Broadway and movies to see, such as the popular all-star comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”. Life proceeded as it normally did, uninterrupted. Nothing shocking happened that weekend that otherwise would have brought life to a screeching halt (like a Presidential assassination for example). That Friday in particular was such a slow news day that on CBS that evening, news anchor Walter Cronkite ran a feature story about the most popular band in England: The Beatles. American television viewers saw footage of a Beatles concert in which the roar of screaming girls in the audience was drowning out the four performing musicians. Girls in England were going into such frenzy over John Paul George and Ringo that a new term was coined to describe it: “Beatlemania”. At the end of the evening news broadcast, Cronkite crisply gave his trademark sign-off:
“That’s the way it is, Friday, November 22nd, 1963. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
(Also that same weekend, a little show you might have heard of made its’ debut in England)
Next November of course would see Americans head to the polls to vote for who should be President for the next four years. The incumbent President’s re-election chances were looking quite dim one year out. A troubled Presidency filled with unpopular decisions made Henry M. Jackson’s prospects in the next campaign the weakest since Herbert Hoover had to face the voters in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression. Just as Hoover didn’t have much of a chance in that election campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt (“Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous” read one telegram to the incumbent), many people thought Jackson would be done after just four years. According to a Gallup Poll, 74% of Americans thought Scoop would lose his re-election bid. A series of trial match-ups conducted by Gallup showed the Democratic President losing to nearly all the major Republican candidates by either single or double digits:
Exactly one month later, Happy married Rockefeller with whom she had been having an extramarital affair with. This sudden remarriage didn’t sit well with the public (to put it rather mildly); they thought it was outrageous behavior for a divorced Governor and a woman who had just left her husband and four children to quickly marry. The public backlash from Rockefeller’s controversial second marriage effectively sank his second Presidential campaign before it had even begun. The New York Governor’s standing within his party dropped 20 points overnight as angry supporters deserted him in droves for other candidates. Although Rockefeller would plow ahead in the 1964 primaries undeterred (and with Happy by his side), he would be greatly hindered by the public view that he was – in the words of one disapproving party official – “a wife stealer” who “broke up two homes. Our country doesn’t like those who break up homes.”
Probably the sharpest attack Rockefeller endured in the wake of his remarriage came from a fellow Eastern Establishment Republican: Prescott Bush. The former Governor of Connecticut and the 1960 Republican Vice Presidential nominee (as well as the father of a senatorial candidate down in Texas), Bush was a man who took marriage and family very seriously. Deeply offended by Rockefeller’s seemingly nonchalant conduct, an angry Bush went after him in public despite the fact that they were friends:
“Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state – one who aspires to the nomination for President of the United States – can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?”
(Rockefeller defiantly campaigned in the 1964 primaries with his new wife by his side, which didn’t help him any)
With Rockefeller’s campaign stalled at the starting line, the 1964 GOP primaries essentially became a four-man race between Forbes, Goldwater, Nixon, and Romney. The winner of this battle for the nomination would find a general election climate favoring the Republicans. In addition to the states that were reliable for the Republicans like Maine and Indiana, several states that Jackson carried in 1960 were leaning towards the GOP. One of those states was North Dakota. In 1960, Scoop carried the state with 53% of the popular vote. Now the President was trailing his Republican challengers in the Peace Garden State. Here Romney had the best showing in potential match-up polls, beating Jackson by eleven points. Likewise, the news for the Democratic incumbent was grim in Pennsylvania. In 1960, Scoop won the state with 54% of the popular vote. Heading into 1964, his popularity in the Keystone State had dropped to the point that Forbes was beating him there by twelve points. As one commentator put it:
“Governor Forbes is running stronger in Pennsylvania than Governor [William] Knowland [of California] did in 1960. The President is going to have difficulty defeating him there.”
As Governor of the Garden State, Forbes had established a reputation as being a numbers man. He was constantly obsessed with numbers. How can we get one more New Jerseyan employed? How can we get one more dollar into his wallet? How can we be more efficient at spending the money he does pay for taxes? With Forbes, it wouldn’t be unusual to see him up at two o’clock in the morning crunching numbers in order to figure out how to get them to go the way he wanted them to. He struck some people as being more an accountant than the Governor of New Jersey (the fact that he looked like a stereotypical accountant fed that impression). As bookish as he came across, Forbes had demonstrated to be an effective and competent Governor. Elected in 1957 and soundly re-elected in 1961, Forbes had built a record of lowering taxes, creating jobs, and streamlining the state government. He had balanced cutting spending with ensuring that essential government programs got the funding they needed. The reduction in red tape enabled new businesses to open their doors, generating more jobs. Forbes had even been able to phase out the state income tax, which he viewed as being wholly unnecessary and a drain on peoples’ wallets. He was now running for President on this record, believing that the country “needs to be straightened out as far as her finances are concerned. We have not had a sound economy in a decade. There has been too much money being spent without really studying how it will affect everything. There has been no effort made by those responsible to get the budget balanced the way it needs to be. This is no way to run the government.”
Now in 1964, Forbes wanted to take his numbers obsession to Washington to restore the “fiscal responsibility” which he claimed had been absent since the Dewey Administration. However, he wasn’t the only one who was eager to reverse years of “reckless” liberal governing. Whereas Forbes was the default candidate of the Eastern Establishment, Goldwater was the undisputed choice of the grassroots. Goldwater’s articulate and staunch advocacy of conservatism made him a hero among those looking for an alternative to the stale tired liberalism represented by Jackson. They saw him as the fresh breath of air the country badly needed, someone who would go into the proverbial temple and overturn the table of the status quo. Goldwater didn’t so much decide to run for President as he was drafted into running by a national grassroots movement that wanted to see him go to the White House and bring about a much-needed new way of doing things. The Arizona Senator’s conservative brand proved to be a double-edged sword though; for other Republicans, he was too right-wing for their comfort. Goldwater’s calls to roll back government welfare programs and be even more militant in foreign affairs made him an extremist in the eyes of Republicans who feared that a Goldwater nomination would lead to a repeat of the ideological split the Party suffered during the 1950s. Although polls showed the Arizona Senator with a narrow lead over the President, Republicans were divided over whether a sharp turn to the right would be in the best interest of their political party.
Goldwater’s entry into the Presidential race presented Forbes with a strategic dilemma. On the one hand, the New Jersey Governor did think the Arizona Senator was too conservative to unite the Republican Party. As a member of the Eastern Establishment, Forbes accepted the need for social programs to provide the American people with a safety net. He was particularly troubled by Goldwater’s comments about nuclear weapons. Whereas the New Jersey Governor was open to reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union to mutually reduce the size of their nuclear stockpiles, the Arizona Senator was open about “lobbing [a nuclear weapon] into the men’s room of the Kremlin.”
On the other hand, Goldwater had a national following Forbes dared not alienate in the primaries. When it was suggested to him that he attack Goldwater on the campaign trail as an extremist, Forbes flat-out rejected it:
“I want to win this election. Doing that will guarantee that I will not.”
He very much had 1952 and 1956 on his mind. In both Presidential elections, the Eastern Establishment and the conservative wing refused to support each other. This enabled the Democrats to win both elections. Forbes knew that once he got the nomination, it would be critical for him to unite the Party. Even though 1964 was shaping up to be a Republican year, recent history gave Forbes the fear that they could blow it with one wrong move. If Forbes attacked Goldwater as an extremist, it might benefit him in the short term. However in the long term, doing so might create ill will between him and Goldwater’s supporters, making uniting the GOP for the fall campaign all the more difficult. As Forbes told former President Thomas E. Dewey (who regarded Goldwater as being the reincarnation of his bitter archenemy Robert Taft):
“I need Barry’s voters. I cannot expect them to vote for me if I say their man is a nut job.”
He wouldn’t make Goldwater’s well-known conservatism a campaign issue. Instead, Forbes settled on a strategy of emphasizing his record of balancing the state budget, lowering unemployment, and improving New Jersey’s business climate while painting Goldwater as someone who lacked the executive experience to do all that on the national level. He hoped the strategy would allow him to attack Goldwater without creating headaches for himself after the Republican convention in San Francisco. If Forbes had worries about running against Goldwater in the primaries, he had no such worries about running against Nixon. Indeed, none of the political experts thought Nixon could win the nomination. Although the California Senator had his supporters and had built an image of always looking out for the best interest of the people, he was widely seen as being a long-shot candidate. The underlying problem for the Nixon campaign in 1964 was that Forbes and Goldwater were the established front-runners. He didn’t have an obvious path forward to the nomination like they did and it was hard to see how he could overcome Forbes’ Eastern Establishment support and Goldwater’s grassroots appeal. The best Dick Nixon could hope for was to beat expectations in the primaries and keep his campaign alive long enough to reach the California Primary in June, where he should theoretically have the home state advantage.
(Nixon campaigning in New Hampshire)
Then there was Romney, whose candidacy people had mixed views about. Some didn’t take the Michigan Governor seriously as a potential President. A devout Mormon (a Christian denomination founded by Joseph Smith in 1830), Romney neither drank or smoked. When he announced his candidacy to seek the Republican nomination in Detroit in November 1963, Romney declared that God had sent him a message telling him to run for President. For some, Romney came across as being weird and wasn’t regarded as being part of the mainstream. Other people thought he was the most formidable candidate on the Republican side in 1964. A successful and media-savvy automotive executive before he became Governor of Michigan, Romney was a political moderate who appealed to voters across the political spectrum. He could attract independents, suburbanites, labor union members, blacks, progressives, and conservatives. He had demonstrated an ability to reach across the political aisle and work with Democrats to get things done. To Democratic National Committee Chairman John F. Kennedy, this was one hell of a package. “Romney does that God and country stuff and people buy it,” Kennedy privately remarked. He then added that if he was President and he was running for re-election, “I would not want to run against him.”
Unlike Forbes, the tall and handsome Romney looked like a President. With the Gallup Poll showing Romney leading Forbes in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire Primary by a margin of 39% to 31%, the New Jersey Governor recognized that he had two major opponents to overcome and that anything could happen as the Republican primaries got underway in March 1964.
Kurt_Steiner: If you think that is a long time, just think how long it will take me to get to the Modern Day Scenario mod.
I spent the first several months of the game thinking that the Viet Cong divisions would simply surrender once I captured Rach Gia. Clearly that didn’t happen.
Taylor really did think he could defeat the Viet Cong with just 40,000 soldiers. Clearly that isn’t going to happen either.
Kaiser Chris: Nice movie reference.
Considering this is the first time I’m playing the scenario, I’m not sure yet whether it will be victory or defeat. The Americans are not in a very good position at the start of the game, meaning I can’t just walk over the enemy. I have to gradually put troops into South Vietnam, not knowing what the enemy is going to do next.
For the first several months of my game, I was wondering why the enemy was being so passive. Then after I captured Rach Gia, the enemy stopped being so passive.
I think the 100,000+ troop level is most likely where I will end up. As for Scoop's emphasis on timetables, it certainly brings to mind the saying about a military plan only being good until it meets the enemy.
There’s actually an in-game event where South Vietnam gets reinforcements from Australia and New Zealand. You’ll see it in the next Vietnam War update.
I’m using Ground Attack to wear down the enemy divisions. As for the Ho Chi Minh trail, you actually can’t do anything to it unless you declare war on Laos...which doesn’t seem like a good idea given her neighbor to the North.
Giant robots operated by cute girls with very noticeable “assets”. Now there’s a research tech for Japan.
jeeshadow: Let’s just say the enemy stops sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
SirNolan: It does get you up to the conventions, if that helps.
“Lily white Plain Stater lefty”...I like that description.
Goldwater did vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1963, which I assumed he would have given he had voted for other civil rights bills dealing with the right to vote.
A less extreme Goldwater...you know you’re unpopular when Goldwater looks more attractive than you do.
God, the current Presidential race.
It is going to get worse in Vietnam. As for Cambodia, her future is very much uncertain. She’s on the American side, but just barely. We might be able to avoid the Kent State incident, though.
Operation Downfall...the result of the Japan AI not surrendering no matter what I did. I actually had to chase the Japanese government down to Hong Kong before I could finally annex Japan and win the war.
Kaiser Chris: We’ll see what happens.
I already ran Prescott Bush as VP in 1960 and he retired from seeking political office in 1963. It is true that Goldwater and the elder Bush were friends, and Bush’s son George ran as a Goldwater Republican in his 1964 bid for the Senate.
As for Nixon, he could be the VP depending on how things turn out.
Unification of Vietnam under Saigon...hmm...that might be easier said than done.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Republican Hats in the Ring
For Americans, the fourth weekend in November 1963 went by like any other. People went about their business as they would on any autumn weekend. There was weekend shopping to do, especially with Thanksgiving coming up on the Thursday after. There were college football games to catch, the main games that weekend being Harvard-Yale and Princeton-Dartmouth. The following weekend would see the traditional Army-Navy Game in Philadelphia, where CBS would introduce a new broadcasting technique called “Instant Replay”. There were shows to watch on Broadway and movies to see, such as the popular all-star comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”. Life proceeded as it normally did, uninterrupted. Nothing shocking happened that weekend that otherwise would have brought life to a screeching halt (like a Presidential assassination for example). That Friday in particular was such a slow news day that on CBS that evening, news anchor Walter Cronkite ran a feature story about the most popular band in England: The Beatles. American television viewers saw footage of a Beatles concert in which the roar of screaming girls in the audience was drowning out the four performing musicians. Girls in England were going into such frenzy over John Paul George and Ringo that a new term was coined to describe it: “Beatlemania”. At the end of the evening news broadcast, Cronkite crisply gave his trademark sign-off:
“That’s the way it is, Friday, November 22nd, 1963. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
(Also that same weekend, a little show you might have heard of made its’ debut in England)
Next November of course would see Americans head to the polls to vote for who should be President for the next four years. The incumbent President’s re-election chances were looking quite dim one year out. A troubled Presidency filled with unpopular decisions made Henry M. Jackson’s prospects in the next campaign the weakest since Herbert Hoover had to face the voters in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression. Just as Hoover didn’t have much of a chance in that election campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt (“Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous” read one telegram to the incumbent), many people thought Jackson would be done after just four years. According to a Gallup Poll, 74% of Americans thought Scoop would lose his re-election bid. A series of trial match-ups conducted by Gallup showed the Democratic President losing to nearly all the major Republican candidates by either single or double digits:
- New Jersey Governor Malcolm Forbes
- Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater
- California Senator Richard Nixon
- New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller
- Michigan Governor George Romney
Exactly one month later, Happy married Rockefeller with whom she had been having an extramarital affair with. This sudden remarriage didn’t sit well with the public (to put it rather mildly); they thought it was outrageous behavior for a divorced Governor and a woman who had just left her husband and four children to quickly marry. The public backlash from Rockefeller’s controversial second marriage effectively sank his second Presidential campaign before it had even begun. The New York Governor’s standing within his party dropped 20 points overnight as angry supporters deserted him in droves for other candidates. Although Rockefeller would plow ahead in the 1964 primaries undeterred (and with Happy by his side), he would be greatly hindered by the public view that he was – in the words of one disapproving party official – “a wife stealer” who “broke up two homes. Our country doesn’t like those who break up homes.”
Probably the sharpest attack Rockefeller endured in the wake of his remarriage came from a fellow Eastern Establishment Republican: Prescott Bush. The former Governor of Connecticut and the 1960 Republican Vice Presidential nominee (as well as the father of a senatorial candidate down in Texas), Bush was a man who took marriage and family very seriously. Deeply offended by Rockefeller’s seemingly nonchalant conduct, an angry Bush went after him in public despite the fact that they were friends:
“Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state – one who aspires to the nomination for President of the United States – can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?”
(Rockefeller defiantly campaigned in the 1964 primaries with his new wife by his side, which didn’t help him any)
With Rockefeller’s campaign stalled at the starting line, the 1964 GOP primaries essentially became a four-man race between Forbes, Goldwater, Nixon, and Romney. The winner of this battle for the nomination would find a general election climate favoring the Republicans. In addition to the states that were reliable for the Republicans like Maine and Indiana, several states that Jackson carried in 1960 were leaning towards the GOP. One of those states was North Dakota. In 1960, Scoop carried the state with 53% of the popular vote. Now the President was trailing his Republican challengers in the Peace Garden State. Here Romney had the best showing in potential match-up polls, beating Jackson by eleven points. Likewise, the news for the Democratic incumbent was grim in Pennsylvania. In 1960, Scoop won the state with 54% of the popular vote. Heading into 1964, his popularity in the Keystone State had dropped to the point that Forbes was beating him there by twelve points. As one commentator put it:
“Governor Forbes is running stronger in Pennsylvania than Governor [William] Knowland [of California] did in 1960. The President is going to have difficulty defeating him there.”
As Governor of the Garden State, Forbes had established a reputation as being a numbers man. He was constantly obsessed with numbers. How can we get one more New Jerseyan employed? How can we get one more dollar into his wallet? How can we be more efficient at spending the money he does pay for taxes? With Forbes, it wouldn’t be unusual to see him up at two o’clock in the morning crunching numbers in order to figure out how to get them to go the way he wanted them to. He struck some people as being more an accountant than the Governor of New Jersey (the fact that he looked like a stereotypical accountant fed that impression). As bookish as he came across, Forbes had demonstrated to be an effective and competent Governor. Elected in 1957 and soundly re-elected in 1961, Forbes had built a record of lowering taxes, creating jobs, and streamlining the state government. He had balanced cutting spending with ensuring that essential government programs got the funding they needed. The reduction in red tape enabled new businesses to open their doors, generating more jobs. Forbes had even been able to phase out the state income tax, which he viewed as being wholly unnecessary and a drain on peoples’ wallets. He was now running for President on this record, believing that the country “needs to be straightened out as far as her finances are concerned. We have not had a sound economy in a decade. There has been too much money being spent without really studying how it will affect everything. There has been no effort made by those responsible to get the budget balanced the way it needs to be. This is no way to run the government.”
Now in 1964, Forbes wanted to take his numbers obsession to Washington to restore the “fiscal responsibility” which he claimed had been absent since the Dewey Administration. However, he wasn’t the only one who was eager to reverse years of “reckless” liberal governing. Whereas Forbes was the default candidate of the Eastern Establishment, Goldwater was the undisputed choice of the grassroots. Goldwater’s articulate and staunch advocacy of conservatism made him a hero among those looking for an alternative to the stale tired liberalism represented by Jackson. They saw him as the fresh breath of air the country badly needed, someone who would go into the proverbial temple and overturn the table of the status quo. Goldwater didn’t so much decide to run for President as he was drafted into running by a national grassroots movement that wanted to see him go to the White House and bring about a much-needed new way of doing things. The Arizona Senator’s conservative brand proved to be a double-edged sword though; for other Republicans, he was too right-wing for their comfort. Goldwater’s calls to roll back government welfare programs and be even more militant in foreign affairs made him an extremist in the eyes of Republicans who feared that a Goldwater nomination would lead to a repeat of the ideological split the Party suffered during the 1950s. Although polls showed the Arizona Senator with a narrow lead over the President, Republicans were divided over whether a sharp turn to the right would be in the best interest of their political party.
Goldwater’s entry into the Presidential race presented Forbes with a strategic dilemma. On the one hand, the New Jersey Governor did think the Arizona Senator was too conservative to unite the Republican Party. As a member of the Eastern Establishment, Forbes accepted the need for social programs to provide the American people with a safety net. He was particularly troubled by Goldwater’s comments about nuclear weapons. Whereas the New Jersey Governor was open to reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union to mutually reduce the size of their nuclear stockpiles, the Arizona Senator was open about “lobbing [a nuclear weapon] into the men’s room of the Kremlin.”
On the other hand, Goldwater had a national following Forbes dared not alienate in the primaries. When it was suggested to him that he attack Goldwater on the campaign trail as an extremist, Forbes flat-out rejected it:
“I want to win this election. Doing that will guarantee that I will not.”
He very much had 1952 and 1956 on his mind. In both Presidential elections, the Eastern Establishment and the conservative wing refused to support each other. This enabled the Democrats to win both elections. Forbes knew that once he got the nomination, it would be critical for him to unite the Party. Even though 1964 was shaping up to be a Republican year, recent history gave Forbes the fear that they could blow it with one wrong move. If Forbes attacked Goldwater as an extremist, it might benefit him in the short term. However in the long term, doing so might create ill will between him and Goldwater’s supporters, making uniting the GOP for the fall campaign all the more difficult. As Forbes told former President Thomas E. Dewey (who regarded Goldwater as being the reincarnation of his bitter archenemy Robert Taft):
“I need Barry’s voters. I cannot expect them to vote for me if I say their man is a nut job.”
He wouldn’t make Goldwater’s well-known conservatism a campaign issue. Instead, Forbes settled on a strategy of emphasizing his record of balancing the state budget, lowering unemployment, and improving New Jersey’s business climate while painting Goldwater as someone who lacked the executive experience to do all that on the national level. He hoped the strategy would allow him to attack Goldwater without creating headaches for himself after the Republican convention in San Francisco. If Forbes had worries about running against Goldwater in the primaries, he had no such worries about running against Nixon. Indeed, none of the political experts thought Nixon could win the nomination. Although the California Senator had his supporters and had built an image of always looking out for the best interest of the people, he was widely seen as being a long-shot candidate. The underlying problem for the Nixon campaign in 1964 was that Forbes and Goldwater were the established front-runners. He didn’t have an obvious path forward to the nomination like they did and it was hard to see how he could overcome Forbes’ Eastern Establishment support and Goldwater’s grassroots appeal. The best Dick Nixon could hope for was to beat expectations in the primaries and keep his campaign alive long enough to reach the California Primary in June, where he should theoretically have the home state advantage.
(Nixon campaigning in New Hampshire)
Then there was Romney, whose candidacy people had mixed views about. Some didn’t take the Michigan Governor seriously as a potential President. A devout Mormon (a Christian denomination founded by Joseph Smith in 1830), Romney neither drank or smoked. When he announced his candidacy to seek the Republican nomination in Detroit in November 1963, Romney declared that God had sent him a message telling him to run for President. For some, Romney came across as being weird and wasn’t regarded as being part of the mainstream. Other people thought he was the most formidable candidate on the Republican side in 1964. A successful and media-savvy automotive executive before he became Governor of Michigan, Romney was a political moderate who appealed to voters across the political spectrum. He could attract independents, suburbanites, labor union members, blacks, progressives, and conservatives. He had demonstrated an ability to reach across the political aisle and work with Democrats to get things done. To Democratic National Committee Chairman John F. Kennedy, this was one hell of a package. “Romney does that God and country stuff and people buy it,” Kennedy privately remarked. He then added that if he was President and he was running for re-election, “I would not want to run against him.”
Unlike Forbes, the tall and handsome Romney looked like a President. With the Gallup Poll showing Romney leading Forbes in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire Primary by a margin of 39% to 31%, the New Jersey Governor recognized that he had two major opponents to overcome and that anything could happen as the Republican primaries got underway in March 1964.
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