November 3, 1964: Lyndon Johnson Is Elected to a Full Term as President

Apparently, in 1964, the New York Daily News,

normally a populist conservative paper in those days,

was willing to print a color photo on the front page,

even though the President was a liberal Democrat.

November 3, 1964, 60 years ago: President Lyndon B. Johnson wins a full term over Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona. LBJ wins 44 States to Goldwater's 6. Goldwater won his home State of Arizona (barely), and 5 Southern States: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Johnson won 486 Electoral Votes to Goldwater's 52; and 61.1 percent of the popular vote, which remains an all-time record, to Goldwater's 38.5 percent.

Aside from the States where he actually won, Goldwater only got as much as 45 percent of the vote in 6 other States. They were 2 Southern States: Florida (48.9) and Virginia (46.2); and 4 Western: Idaho (49.1), Nebraska (47.4), Utah (45.1) and Kansas (45.0). Winning those States would only have swung enough Electoral Votes to make it 440-98. He never had a chance.

This was because Goldwater was seen as crazy, too far to the right, to the point where he only won his home State, Arizona (barely), and 5 Southern States due to LBJ having signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Goldwater having opposed it (on, he said, constitutional grounds).

Although he wasn't racist himself, he was an arch-conservative and an ardent anti-Communist, and had the support of the John Birch Society, the era's version of today's Tea Party lunatics who will believe any conspiracy theory. This made Goldwater look more conservative than he actually was, and more appealing to Southern racists and to men who, like him, were Western conservatives with a libertarian "Federal government, just protect the country and leave me alone" bent.

Goldwater thought the Cold War would be his winning card. Instead, it was Johnson's, and he projected strong, stable leadership, and cast Goldwater as the guy who might too easily go to a war that would be catastrophic even for the "winner."

Which leads us to Johnson having run a great campaign, leaving nothing to chance, including the infamous commercial known as The Daisy Spot. More than that, though, LBJ ran because he was JFK's successor.

Before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, a little less than a year before the election, he was popular, but not that popular. To the end of his life, Goldwater thought he could beat a living JFK in 1964. But in his 1987 memoir Goldwater, he admitted that his chance of winning the Presidency died when Kennedy did.

LBJ wouldn't take JFK's brother and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as his running mate, but he did, essentially, make JFK his running mate, with the slogan, "Let Us Continue." The Kennedy Administration might not have been "Camelot," as former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy suggested in her one and only interview after the assassination, but it was like running against King Arthur: Goldwater had no chance against a martyred national hero.

He said he ran anyway, because he thought it must be done, because the Republican Party needed to be more conservative, so that, when it did win again, he hoped by 1968, it would be ready to govern as a conservative party.

In addition, the Democrats gained 37 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, giving them 295 seats for the 1965-66 term, which remains their highest total since the 1937-38 session. And they gained 2 Senate seats, giving them 68, which remains their highest total since 1939-40.

Johnson's 1st year of his full term was a runaway success, passing Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. But the rest of his term saw America sink deeper and deeper into Vietnam, and he chose not to run for a 2nd full term in 1968. He died in 1973.

Goldwater was up for re-election to the Senate in 1964, and abandoned the seat to run for President. He ran for Arizona's other Senate seat in 1968, and won it, as Richard Nixon was elected President. A Republican, but not really the kind of Republican Goldwater was looking for.

On August 7, 1974, still the leader of the conservative movement, Goldwater joined his fellow Arizonan, House Minority Leader John Rhodes, and the Senate Minority Leader, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, on a visit to the White House. Rhodes told Nixon that there was nothing he could do any longer, that the revelations of Nixon's actions in Watergate meant that he would be impeached in the Senate. Scott told him that he could not survive a Senate verdict: He would be found guilty and removed from office. And Goldwater told him that the conservatives would not be able to save him. Nixon took this into account, and announced his resignation the next day.

Goldwater was re-elected to the Senate in 1974 and 1980, and retired rather than run again in 1986, happy to have gotten Ronald Reagan as President in 1980 and 1984. But he warned the Republican Party not to trust the religious nuts, that they would take the Party to a dark place. He was right. He died in 1998.