Unprecedented, too, was the attention focused on the issue of television coverage. The volume of right-wing rage at the media was novel at this Republican convention. Brinkley forbade his son, Alan, to show his NBC insignia, except to security.
"You know, these nighttime news shows sound to me like they're being broadcast from Moscow," one conservative observed to another on the way down, loud enough for the two newsmen to hear. The logy Mark Hopkins elevators gave the insurgents, flooding into town for what Goldwater biographer Robert Alan Goldberg called the "Woodstock of the right," at least two chances a day to bait Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, anchors of NBC's nightly newscast-and crypto-liberals, according to their harassers. The conservatives-who wanted to contain the role of the federal government and roll back Communism-believed they were saving not just the party but Western civilization.
In an era in which a national consensus seemed to have coalesced around advancing civil rights, containing Communism and expanding government, the moderates believed they had to win to preserve the Republican Party. Goldwater's tone reflected the tenor of this ugliest of Republican conventions since 1912, as entrenched moderates faced off against conservative insurgents. "He's the phoniest individual who ever came around." Let them make an issue of it," Goldwater snapped back. "After Lyndon Johnson-the biggest faker in the United States? He opposed civil rights until this year.
That was where a reporter cornered the Arizona senator and asked him whether the Democrats would campaign on the fact that nearly 70 percent of the convention delegates, acting on his campaign's instructions, had voted down a platform plank affirming the constitutionality of the recently passed Civil Rights Act. The day Goldwater was to accept the nomination at the Cow Palace in nearby Daly City, he caught a service elevator in the hotel kitchen. The wait that hot July week could stretch to 45 minutes. There were only three small elevators at the Mark Hopkins, the splendid old San Francisco hotel that served as headquarters for contenders Barry Goldwater and William Scranton during the 1964 Republican National Convention.
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