The Letter

There were few surprises in San Francisco. But an unexpected fracas was set off by a three-page letter that was stuffed in a plain white envelope marked "Personal" and hand-carried down one floor from Candidate Bill Scranton's headquarters in the Mark Hopkins Hotel to Barry Goldwater's suite. Had the contest for the nomination been even close, that letter might have gone down as one of the worst blunders in U.S. political history. As it was, it would be remembered as little more than a fascinating footnote.

Inexperienced & Groggy. On the convention's eve, Scranton, still clinging to hope, conferred with Henry Cabot Lodge and Nelson Rockefeller, decided upon the desperate ploy of challenging Goldwater to a man-to-man debate before the assembled convention. Scranton ordered his top speechwriter, William Keisling, 28, to draft a letter to Barry demanding the confrontation. Then he went off to make a television appearance.

Keisling, inexperienced in national politics and groggy from his efforts during Scranton's exhausting month-long campaign, batted out the document, then checked it with Pennsylvania's Attorney General Walter Alessandroni, Scranton's most trusted political adviser. A receptionist, one of several authorized to sign Scranton's name, did just that, and the letter went down to Barry. Scranton never read it.

What Keisling had composed was an intemperate, insulting attack on Goldwater, his delegates and his followers. It accused Goldwater of treating delegates as "little more than a flock of chickens whose necks will be wrung at will." It charged him with allowing the "radical extremists to use you." It denounced him for "irresponsibility in the serious question of racial holocaust." And it said that Barry's organization had "bought, beaten and compromised enough delegate support to make the result a foregone conclusion."

Fist of Steel. When Goldwater read it he exploded in rage, summoned his aides and tossed the diatribe to them to read. Between curses he cried, "What do you think of that?" They thought it was shocking--so shocking that it just might work to Barry's advantage. They photocopied the original, fired it back to Scranton without comment, then ran off 4,000 copies on a mimeograph machine. By early morning, Goldwater messengers had slipped a copy under the hotel-room door of every delegate and alternate in town.

The results were spectacular: in a convention where extremism was the bitterest of issues, the hot-eyed polemics of the Scranton-inspired letter infuriated scores of delegates, ended for good any possibility of conciliation between the rival camps. From that moment on, the Goldwater forces ruled the convention with a fist of steel--and refused to give the opposition even the slightest quarter.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.