July 30, 1964 - Senator Barry Goldwater (pictured last September) said today that he lost all interest in running for the Presidency after the assassination of President Kennedy last November.
The Republican Presidential nominee made the statement in a television interview filmed on June 18, a little less than a month before he won the nomination. He said that he had told his wife, about five days after the President’s death: “To heck with the Presidential thing.”
But after the initial shock, Goldwater said, he was sitting alone at a desk in his study in Phoenix when he decided to make an all-out effort to win the nomination.
That was last December. Goldwater said his decision was based partly on what he called a “responsibility to conservatism and to the young people who had become interested in it.”
The interview with Goldwater appeared on an hour-long documentary. “Choosing a Candidate,” on NBC-TV.
Speaking from his office in Washington, Goldwater indicated that he had been looking forward to campaigning against President Kennedy. But after the assassination, Goldwater said, he lost interest in the campaign because: “I couldn’t see Johnson able to draw the fine line. Johnson is a man whom I’ve known for a long time, and I like him personally, but I’ve watched him change, just in the 12 years that I’ve known him, from a conservative Democrat to an extreme liberal Democrat.”
President Kennedy, Goldwater said, “was a liberal and a true liberal, and he always stayed that way.”
According to NBC News, the interview was granted to Robert MacNeil on the condition that it not be shown until after the results of the Republican convention were known.
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