The Goldwater Rule

      More Letters From Paradise
         The Goldwater Rule
The year 1964 was a big one for me. I had just graduated from the University of Michigan, and landed my first teaching job. I was assigned to teach American government and history to 47 senior students. This was also a presidential election year. The incumbent President Johnson who had been J.F.Kennedy's Vice President, was being challenged by the Republican  Senator Barry Goldwater.

The election took place on Tuesday November 3. I passed out an outline map of the U.S. and urged students to fill in each state as  soon as the results were known.

I should not have even bothered, as this election is the most lop-sided election in history. Johnson received 90.3 percent of the popular vote and Goldwater 9.7 percent.
Johnson carried 44 of the 50 states.

In addition to Goldwater's extreme conservative views, there was another factor which might have helped to cause him defeat. That year, "Fact" magazine published a petition signed by more than a thousand psychiatrists declaring that Goldwater was "psychologically unfit" to be President. Goldwater won a libel suit against the magazine.

This leads us to the erratic behavior of President Trump. Serious questions have been raised about his mental health and his control of nuclear weapons. We will just have to wait and see if this "Goldwater rule will be ignored. For more information see The New Yorker magazine May 22, 2017.

Also, I want to mention that two of my senior students that year, Vince Larocca and Bob Perry, following graduation enlisted in the Army, and were later killed in Vietnam.

    Aloha
    Grant