I was thirteen years old on July 14, 1964, when I sat in the living room with my parents and watched the beginning of the long, painful death of the Republican Party.
We were watching a live broadcast of the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco. For months New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater had fought to become the party’s nominee. Rockefeller was a pro-civil-rights star from the party’s traditional Northeastern wing. (When Martin Luther King was stabbed, Rockefeller quietly paid for his hospital bill.) Goldwater was the fiery leader of a starkly different, ultraconservative movement based in the West and South. He had voted against the Civil Rights Act and openly accepted the support of racist, extreme right-wing, conspiracy-driven groups like the John Birch Society.
During the campaign, Rockefeller predicted what would happen to his party if Goldwater were to win the nomination. Goldwater, Rockefeller said, was pursuing “a program based on racism and sectionalism.”
After a close race, Goldwater narrowly beat Rockefeller in the California primary and effectively clinched the nomination. When an aide called on Rockefeller to summon the power of the Eastern Establishment, Rockefeller told him, “You are looking at it, buddy. I am all that is left."
At the party convention at the Cow Palace, Rockefeller was given five minutes to address the delegates in defense of five amendments to the party platform that had been submitted by the moderate wing to counter the extremist Goldwater platform.
Rockefeller let the Goldwater delegates have it. Standing underneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Rockefeller told the furious Goldwater delegates that “There is no place in this Republican party for such hawkers of hate, such purveyors of prejudice, such fabricators of fear. There is no place in this Republican party for those who would infiltrate its ranks, distort its aims, and convert it into a cloak of apparent respectability for a dangerous extremism. The Republican party must repudiate these people.”
The Goldwater crowd gave it right back, interrupting Rockefeller 22 times and booing him lustily for sixteen long minutes while he stood his ground at the podium and insisted on his right to speak.
“This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” Rockefeller smilingly told them, condemning the “infiltration and takeover of established political parties by communist and Nazi methods.”
Rockefeller refused to support Goldwater in the 1964 election. Goldwater was crushed by Lyndon Johnson that November, but the Republican Northeastern establishment would never again control the party. The GOP had begun its horrific, inexorable journey toward Donald Trump, white supremacy, and fascism.