In the Thick of It

While Johnson hovered above the battle, Barry Goldwater plunged right into the thick of it last week with a four-day, 4,350-mile swing through seven Western and Midwestern states. Speaking from a makeshift platform over second base in Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium, from a mule-drawn buckboard in Sacramento, and from the stump of a 6-ft.-thick Douglas fir in Eugene, Ore., Barry stayed on the offensive with slashing vigor.

Welfare v. Crime. Once in a while he indulged in campaign high jinks, such as in Oregon, Ill., where he waggled a pair of corncobs behind Wife Peggy's ears. But mostly, Barry was all business, and wherever his chartered Boeing 727 jet, the Yia Bi Kin (Navajo for House in the Sky), touched down, Goldwater ripped into the Democrats. He accused them of planning to dismantle U.S. defenses, joked that the Air Force might soon need "Hertz rent-a-bombers," repeatedly attacked Lyndon Johnson for listing prosperity, justice and peace, "but not freedom," as his goals for the U.S.

Sensing that his "law-and-order" theme is catching hold, he blamed Democratic "welfare state" attitudes for a nationwide crime increase (see story on page 38). "If it is entirely proper for Government to take from some to give to others," he asked, "then won't some be led to believe that they can rightfully take from anyone who has more than they?" Referring to the civil rights bill, he declared: "The more the Federal Government has attempted to legislate morality, the more it actually has incited hatreds and violence."

Even though he lacked any solid evidence to back up his charge, Goldwater claimed that the Kennedy Administration had deliberately delayed acting in the Cuban missile crisis so as to influence the 1962 congressional elections, implied that Lyndon Johnson might try to rig a pre-November international crisis for the same purpose. That came at just about the same time that the Johnson Administration let it be known that all Cabinet officers except the Secretaries of Defense, State and the Treasury would be taking to the stump this fall. It also happens that both Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara have long since been campaigning from within their own offices, issuing instant replies to every criticism Goldwater has made of their departments. Now Rusk called a press conference. "I can assure you," he said sarcastically, "that the Democratic National Committee has not made arrangements with Indonesia to drop parachutists into Malaysia, or with the rebels to occupy Stanleyville in the Congo."

In Los Angeles, Barry advanced a proposal that made headlines all over the U.S.--an automatic 5% cut in in come-tax payments each year for five years. "As our economy grows," said Goldwater, "the amount of taxes collected by the Government has grown even faster." The added money could be used to pay off debts, he added, but instead, "new schemes have been dreamed up to spend the increase." Barry admitted that he voted against a more modest tax cut only six months ago, but he explained that he had done so only because it was a "politically motivated" gimmick designed to create "an artificial boom that would carry at least past election time."

"Classical Liberals." Barry's tax-cut proposal was framed chiefly by two conservative economists who style themselves "classical liberals" in the Adam

Smith tradition. One is the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman, 52, a brainy, Brooklyn-born theorist who suggested the idea to Barry after reading a speech on the subject by Arthur Burns, onetime chairman of Dwight Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers.

According to Friedman, if half of the normal, $6 billion increase in tax revenues were applied to a tax cut, "you can provide for a 5% across-the-board reduction, or roughly $3 billion a year."

The other major architect was the University of Virginia's G. Warren Nutter, 41, now a fulltime member of Goldwater's research staff. Nutter, the author of a massive, 700-page study of Soviet industry that questions whether the Russians will ever catch up to the U.S. in industrial output, was chiefly responsible for framing the specific terms of the proposal.

Impeach Earl Warren? In his parting shot of the week, Goldwater bitterly attacked the Supreme Court of the U.S. Speaking to 1,500 members of the American Political Science Association in Chicago, he accused the court of usurping power. "Of all three branches of Government," he said, "today's Supreme Court is the least faithful to the constitutional tradition of a limited government and to the principle of legitimacy in the exercise of power." In its recent decisions on reapportionment and school prayer, he added, the court betrayed a clear lack of "judicial restraint."

In a sense, Goldwater certainly had a point: there are plenty of Americans who feel that the Supreme Court has considerably overstepped itself; that it has been legislating as well as interpreting the law. But Goldwater's charges were of dubious political value. It seemed unlikely that they would bring into his fold anyone who had not long since been convinced of Supreme Court intrusions into the realm of Congress. And to the great majority of the population, the court remains a revered institution, one not to be lightly attacked --as Franklin Roosevelt, to his great discomfiture, learned in 1937.

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