Americans to Defeat Goldwater - a few historical notes

by James K. Sayre

Back in the summer of 1964, Barry Goldwater had just received the Republican nomination for President. He was running against Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), an incumbent Democrat. The war on Vietnam was at a low intensity, compared to what happened later, when the massive escalations occurred in the middle 1960s.

I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan and was a student in engineering school at the University. Several of us were appalled by the prospect of Barry Goldwater becoming President, and at the same time, we were very lukewarm about supporting President Johnson. So we formed our own group, Americans to Defeat Goldwater. We printed up some flyers and then went house-to-house in Ann Arbor to hand them out. We received mostly negative responses from the residents that we found at home. None of us looked weird (this was a couple of years before the "hippies" appeared), but we were young college students... That was about it.

A few months passed and President Johnson won a landslide victory. Barry Goldwater was overwhelmed. Some of his bitter supporters printed up bumper stickers that said, "26 million Americans can't be wrong."

End.

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Web page last updated on 14 August 2008.