Political Observer recalls the Republican Convention of 1964, and the importance of Newspapers.

I watched the 1964 Republican Convection, as a high-school drop-out, I watched too much television. The expulsion of William Scranton, or at the least the public shaming of a Liberal, that Goldwater exemplified in his ‘ Extremism in pursuit of Liberty is no vice’. was the beginning of the end for the Liberal Republican, as political actor. That eventually became the Goldwater/ Reagan toxin, that metastasized into the ‘Tea Party’ and evetually Trump/Trumpism.

But my fascination with politics started in 1960 and the Kennedy’s: I read that Hearst rag The Herald Examiner provided gossip of Kennedy’s sexual escapades, in its ‘reporting’ on the Democratic Convention of 1960. My brother and sisters were taken with that cult of political glamour, too much television? As a younger child I had delivered the ‘Los Angeles Mirror’, in the time of the The Johnny Stompanato murder… my mother made my brother, and I swear, that we would not read the newspapers we folded, before delivery. Newspapers played a big part in my childhood and after.

It comes as no surprise that political commentators, self-proclaimed foreign policy experts, wedded to jejune moralizing, like Friedman and Brooks- yet in all their political babble, about the political toxicity about Trump and Trumpism, not one word about the Liberal Republicans of another time?

Millicent Fenwick, Edward Brooke, Mark Hatfield, Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Charles Percy, William Scranton, Margaret Chase Smith

What better way, than through a History, of those ignored/forgotten exemplars of a pragmatic Republican Party?

Political Observer