In Front

There seemed slight likelihood of a smash political success. The speech was scheduled for Monday, a stay-at-home night most everywhere. The scene was to be Dodger Stadium (more popularly known as Chavez Ravine) -- yet every properly baseball-batty Angeleno should have been glued to a television set watching the opening game of the showdown series between the Dodgers and the Cardinals in St. Louis. Thus, organizers of the Barry Goldwater rally had been having Technicolor night mares of rows of pink, aqua and maize stadium seats -- all empty.

"Them & Thee." But the way this presumably unpropitious occasion turned out was that Goldwater drew some 40,000 fans to Chavez Ravine --in the biggest Republican rally that Southern California has seen since Thomas E. Dewey appeared there in the mid-presidential campaign of 1944.

In his own casual, generally unpolished way, Goldwater pleased his partisans by goading, in turn, the Kennedy Clan and Nelson Rockefeller. "America needs a change," he declared. "Rocking-chair leadership isn't enough. The Republican Party is a party of principle, not the captive of a clan or cult of personality. This is not a party controlled by any one man's money. It believes in an executive branch that is an equal partner, not a ruthless boss; in a judicial branch that is equal and independent, that interprets laws but does not make them."

As to Rocky and his argument that radicals should be read out of the Republican Party, Goldwater said: "These practitioners of defeat and advocates of political suicide, these political isolationists, are suffering from a purge complex. They want to purge the party until no one is left but them and thee--and they aren't so sure of thee."

And, turning to the subject of civil rights, Goldwater cried: "It is not the Republican Party that has bred racial discontent in this land. It is not the Republican Party that has dealt mortal blows to the progress that was being made between men of good will who know that the point of a bayonet can kill the point of a principle. It is not the Republican Party that has played politics with prejudice."

"Entirely Himself." The next morning in Washington, Barry dropped in on Chevy Chase Women's Republican Club, delighted the dames with his relaxed off-the-cuff answers to questions.

Can a Republican beat Kennedy in 1964? "If he keeps on doing what he is doing, he'll probably beat himself," said Barry. Was Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department stalling on the prosecution of "students" who defied U.S. travel regulations and paid a propaganda visit to Castro's Cuba? "I'm not as close to Bobby as I was. He threatens a lot of people, and about all he does is walk the dog." How would Barry treat an unpatriotic teen-aged girl? "Maybe if she took off her tennis shoes and got her hair cut and took a bath, she'd be all right." When will he announce his presidential intentions? "I can't give you any timetable. I would much prefer to stay in the Senate, where my tongue can wag more than in the redecorated White House. Jackie's got it ready for me --it's got an 18th century decor."

Such informality led Columnist Mary McGrory to contrast Goldwater with Kennedy. "At a similar stage in his career, John F. Kennedy was beating his brains out in the provinces, hoping to look older than he was, hoping to sound wiser than anybody else in the field. He spewed statistics like a sociologist, he quoted liberally from the historians and the poets. He never dared to be funny, except in the most sedate and magisterial way. Senator Goldwater doesn't strain at all. He is entirely himself."

Another columnist unburdening himself about Goldwater was Walter Lippmann--who just happened to be making a sedate sort of turnabout. Only a few weeks before (TIME, Sept. 6), Lippmann, the high priest of liberal Democratic pundits, had practically excommunicated Goldwater from the G.O.P. as one whose "philosophy is radically opposed to the central traditions of the Republican Party."

But last week Lippmann seemed to be un-excommunicating Barry. The Arizona Republican, wrote Lippmann, had backed away from such radical stands as repeal of Social Security* and the graduated income tax laws. Now, Goldwater "is well along on the road where he will sound less and less like Goldwater and more and more like Eisenhower. If he is to be nominated and is to stand any chance of election, he must make himself acceptable to the preponderant mass of the voters. They are not on the right and they are not on the left, but around the center." Concluded Lippmann: in this "suction toward the moderate Center, Goldwater, who is not a fanatic of the extreme but an ambitious politician, is now in the process of reshaping himself for the political realities of this country."

When asked about charges that he has been reshaping some of his positions, Goldwater (who is, as a matter of fact, not much more and not much less inconsistent than most politicians who get that presidential gleam in their eye) chuckled happily. If nothing else, he said, his present presidential-race prominence had set a lot of people to scouring his past books and speeches in search of inconsistencies. "By looking up what I have been saying, they are beginning to understand my position."

The Man to Beat. Perhaps the greatest compliment that was paid to Republican Goldwater last week was by a bunch of Democrats. Some 300 Western state Democratic leaders met in Salt Lake City to discuss their campaign strategy for 1964. And almost to a man, they talked as though Goldwater were the only Republican they had to worry about.

The tone of the session was set by Idaho's Democratic Senator Frank Church, the 1960 Democratic convention keynoter. Cried Church: "One man, in this day and age, clothed with the power of the presidency, can deliver us into fiery oblivion--foolishly, unnecessarily and finally, by just one error of judgment. Any American President who mistrusts the winds of freedom and tampers cavalierly with the delicate balance of terror upon which the peace presently depends, might well be the last American President."

By way of explanation for this at tack, Church said: "You may wonder why I have chosen to discuss the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater, a man with whom I differ politically, but who is personally my friend. The reason is simple enough. It is the Goldwater brand of Republicanism against which we Democrats must prepare to wage the coming campaign."

With that sort of left-handed advertising, Barry Goldwater became even more obviously the G.O.P. front runner.

* Goldwater's position on Social Security actually has been consistent. He has long advocated repeal of Social Security as it now stands, would substitute a voluntary program for the present compulsory system. That is still his position.

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