| March 22 |  |
Editor says, what if President Goldwater had lost the plot big time? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the June 2012 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1914, on this day the thirty-seventh President of the United States, William Edward Miller (pictured) was born in Lockport, New York, of Irish and German ancestry, the son of Edward J. Miller, a factory floor sweeper, and Elizabeth Hinch, who owned a small millinery shop.
William E. Miller
37th US PresidentHe attended the University of Notre Dame and Albany Law School before served in the United States Army during World War II. At the Nuremberg trials he helped prosecute German war criminals before returning to the States. In 1948, Governor Thomas E. Dewey appointed him district attorney of Niagara County, New York.
He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1951 to 1965 and was chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1961 to 1964. At the Republican Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Barry Goldwater chose Miller as his running mate. Despite being considered an extremely obscure congressman from Western New York, he was nominated unanimously on a roll call vote. He was chosen because, as Goldwater remarked: "he drives Johnson nuts". In his acceptance speech, he declared communism as a "principal disturber of the peace in the world today" and said, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue". Despite the preponderance of Conservatives, some people, including those within his own campaign staff, believed this weakened Goldwater's chances, as he effectively severed ties with the moderates and liberals of the Republican Party. They were plain wrong, and their platform ("A Choice not an Echo") resonated with an American public tired of the stories of sleaze surrounding President Johnson.
Unfortunately, Johnson and his immediately predecessors left a much bigger legacy problem than sleaze: VIETNAM. And the real problem was, Johnson drove Goldwater nuts. Because this developing conflict placed a great strain upon Goldwater. He suffered a third nervous breakdown during 1966. Forced to resign, he was succeeed by his Vice President and fellow scourge of Communism, William E. Miller.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Alternate Historian, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Politicians Source: Wikipedia Labels: William E. Miller, Barry Goldwater, Presidency, America, 1964. Editor says, in authoring this article we repurpose significant amounts of content from Wikipedia. Peggy Goldwater allegedly told a reporter for Ladies Home Journal that her husband had suffered a "nervous breakdown" early in their marriage, a statement that Senator Goldwater afterwards adamantly denied.
~ Have Sirhan Sirhan shoot Goldwater in LA. Harder part is coming up with a scenario where LBJ loses the election. Easiest is Bobby Kennedy leading a rebellion demanding faster movement on civil rights. The Kennedy-MLK ticket splits the Democratic vote and Goldwater wins an electoral vote majority with 32% of the vote [second to Kennedy and ahead of LBJ]. While LBJ and Kennedy would have quarreled on Vietnam in fact neither was especially eager for that war. The BIG split would be over civil rights/justice with LBJ stuck in the middle of the road where there are only white lines and dead armadillos. Look up the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for where the fault lines lay. In OTL Kennedy sat out 1964 and let LBJ straddle.
~ There was no way in hell that Goldwater was going to win in 1964. I know something about that week -- I was there, at the Cow Palace in 1964. (I also met Martin Luther King on the San Francisco City Hall steps that week. i didn't like him, but that was another story.)
Basically, the Goldwater nomination amounted to a well organized coup d'etat against a non-conservative majority in the party. He actually never intended to win the election. His goal was to shift the party to the right, but that didn't happen until Reagan took over.
It should be remembered that Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, believing that it was a matter of states' rights. Just about everyone at the time believed put him against the tide of history. He subsequently admitted the error, and along with Bill Buckley and other conservatives, apologized.
That being said, Goldwater was a fine, descent gentleman without an unkind bone in his body (I later ran across him at Cal State Fullerton, where I got to shake his hand. He gave regards to my dad. Goldwater's family and mine came from the same small time in Poland.)
Regarding this nervous breakdown stuff -- Goldwater was an Air Force pilot and not nervous breakdown material.
~ Goldwater 1964 was belated revenge for Taft being cheated out of the nomination in 1952 by Dewey who was working to nominate Ike. It was the last hurrah of the old anti-New Dealers. It also damned near killed the party. LBJ's implosion and Nixon brought it back. Reagan did not so much complete a turn to the right as in-gather a host of Democrats who had been left stranded by the Democrats Long March to the left. The Democratic Party of 1962 had a progressive wing but was a populist center party. The Democratic Party of 1982 was a progressive party with some residual hereditary moderate and conservative voters. Then again that was Ronnie Raygun, who had migrated from New Deal Democrat and union president to conservative a few years ahead of the Reagan Democrats.
~ I don't know aout any nervous breakdowns; to get to a Miller presidency I'd have had Goldwater die of a heart attack in office or perhaps be assassinated.
~ Miller became something of a joke after the election. He appeared in commercials, "Remember me? I ran for vice president back in '64..."
~ I'd have voted for Goldwater.I think he was right about the Civil rights Bill.
~ On the balance the Civil Rights vote ]the first time Barry had ever voted against a civil rights bill] helped more than hurt. What killed him was proposing t abolish the New Deal while coming off as a dangerous wacko on military affairs. Press coverage was murderous and near universal against him. This is the era when advocacy journalism came in.
~ In 1964 I don't think any Republican could have won; the country did NOT want three presidents in ca. 17 months. Also, the full horror of the consequences of the New Deal hadn't come to fruition yet. And the news media gleefully portrayed Goldwater as a war-monger. My mom commented bitterly: "They said that if I voted for Goldwater, we'd end up at war in Asia. I did---and they were right!"
~ LBJ's war was the least of it. The killer was how he handled Second Reconstruction. He kept trying to split the difference on stuff that had no middle ground. Any Texan should have known that the only two things in the middle of a highway are white lines and dead armadillos. Google for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for a good example.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
