The Disenchanted

In an upper gallery of the Cow Palace, Maryland Republican David Scull, a candidate for Congress in the November elections, sat brooding as Barry Goldwater's juggernaut flattened the G.O.P.'s moderates. "Only a quarter of the country is Republican," scowled Scull, "and only a third of the Republicans are for Goldwater. That's about 8% of the country for him. I'm not going to leave the party, but I'm going to run an independent campaign."

Scull's figures may be open to dispute, but his deep gloom over the Goldwater nomination was by no means an isolated phenomenon. For just as the Senator from Arizona evokes an almost fanatic devotion among his followers, he stirs a feeling of horror among many who disagree with him. To them, he is the backward-looking leader of the new Luddites, enraged at the complexities of modern life and bent on smashing the machinery that has been painstakingly devised over the past 50 years to deal with them. "A group has taken control here," said Henry Cabot Lodge in San Francisco last week, "that doesn't understand the modern world."

Pop! It is not a personal thing, for nearly everyone who has met Goldwater--including Presidents Kennedy and Johnson--has professed to like him as a man. But many are repelled by his ideology, by the men who surround him, and by the stark fear that his fundamentalist theories will attract every manner of extremist to his banner. "He is a man filled with warmth," says former Eisenhower Speechwriter Malcolm Moos, who worked in Bill Scranton's foredoomed campaign. "But I fear his inability to curb his friends and some of the extreme zealots on the right."

Among anti-Goldwaterites, there is a feeling that the G.O.P. is now in the hands of a thoroughgoing Bourbon. "For all his warmth as a person," says Wall Street Lawyer Lyman Tondel Jr., a Republican, "he has an appalling lack of understanding of the problems of most people, particularly the man who is hit by forces beyond his control." Some worry that beneath his attractive exterior and easygoing manner is a deep, though untapped, vein of authoritarianism. Negro Leader James Farmer said that Goldwater Youth marchers reminded him of the Hitler Jugend, and a German banker in Munich recently told an American acquaintance, "If we give you four or five years, you'll start putting on brown shirts."

Among many Republicans, most Democrats, and nearly all foreign observers, the overriding concern is that Goldwater would bumble into a nuclear war through carelessness or plain pigheadedness. "Can you imagine what would have happened if Goldwater had been in the White House during the Cuban missile crisis?" asked an aide of Michigan Governor George Romney. The aide thereupon touched a lighted cigarette to an inflated balloon. Pop!

Back to the Store. Those who cherish the G.O.P.'s image as the party of Lincoln are also alarmed. They fear that Goldwater's managers will cynically seek to inflame Negro-white tensions in the hope that a civil rights explosion would propel their man into the White House on a tide of segregationist votes. As it is, Goldwater will get few Negro votes. "Some Negroes are Republicans because of their conservative philosophy," says Dr. Lee Shelton, Negro vice chairman of Georgia's Fulton County Republican committee, "but none are anti-Negro. That's what they're being asked to be in the Goldwater campaign."

To leaven the bitterness, anti-Goldwaterites crack wry jokes. Just before the convention began, a Republican leader snickered when asked how he would run his local campaigns with Goldwater heading the ticket. Said he: "I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it." In Chicago, stationery shops stocked a card designed for mailing to Barry. On the outside it says, "You made me what I am today," and on the inside, "... a Democrat."

To many Republican officeholders, that is no joke. New York Congressman John Lindsay said he might not vote for Goldwater because certain "principles are dear to me and I'm not going to desert them." Senator Kenneth Keating of New York indicated that he might run independently to maintain "the integrity of my beliefs." Michigan's Governor George Romney felt the same way. "Well," said he, after San Francisco, "we're going back to work just as hard as we can to assure Republican victories in Michigan." "Don't you mean Republican victories all over the U.S.?" asked a reporter. Snapped Romney: "I meant exactly what I said."

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