Winds of Change

"With greater or lesser enthusiasm," read the editorial in the 142-year-old Binghamton Sun-Bulletin, a New York State daily of 30,000 circulation, "we have endorsed every Republican nominee for President since the party was founded in 1856." But confronted with the Republican Party's 1964 presidential choice, the Sun-Bulletin ran out of enthusiasm altogether: "We cannot accept the ideas, the philosophy or the purposes of Senator Barry M. Goldwater." The Sun-Bulletin's editorial went on to label Goldwater "a reckless and irresponsible man temperamentally unfitted for the presidency." With that, the paper broke its 108-year record of party loyalty by lining up behind the candidacy of Lyndon Johnson.

No Sale. By itself, the Sun-Bulletin's defection was hardly enough to rattle the Republican high command. But it showed the way the early campaign breezes were blowing through the press and gave an early sign of things to come. Even before the G.O.P. Convention in July, the sturdily Republican Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, which in more than 100 years has never supported a Democrat for President, announced that it "could not and would not" support Goldwater. In Vermont, the jointly owned Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald declared last week for Johnson, despite an unblemished allegiance to Republican presidential nominees that goes back to Abraham Lincoln.

Behind the breezes, more powerful winds of change are building up on bigger papers that until 1964, at least, were considered safely Republican. In Kansas City it was no secret that Board Chairman Roy A. Roberts planned to lead the Star into the Democratic camp --although the Star has not supported a Democrat for President since Grover Cleveland. "No decision has been made," said an executive of the Chicago Daily News, which has regularly endorsed Republican presidential candidates in living memory. "However, there is no question about the paper's position with respect to Goldwater to date. We just don't buy the guy."

Unchained. Goldwater could not even count, it seemed, on the support of the major Republican-leaning newspaper chains. The ten Hearst papers, which endorsed Nixon in 1960, are expected to favor Johnson this year--a prediction confirmed by a Hearstman who sits in the chain's policymaking councils. Scripps-Howard's 17 papers, which also backed Nixon last time, haven't yet had their say. But in conversation last week President Jack R. Howard dropped a broad hint. "We endorsed Johnson as the Democratic nominee in 1960," he said, "because many of the things he stood for were the things that we stand for. You can certainly evaluate that as a factor in our decision this year."

Switches were also in the making along the politically varied length of Samuel I. Newhouse's 19-newspaper chain, whose proprietor grants his papers full editorial autonomy. Said Newhouse last week: "If I dictated the editorial policy of my papers, which I do not, all of them would endorse Johnson for President. Even so, some of my Republican papers have told me that they cannot in good conscience endorse this year's Republican candidate."

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