Republicans: Only 725 Days

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Vacationing in Jamaica's Montego Bay last week, Barry Goldwater and his top lieutenants engaged in what G.O.P. National Chairman Dean Burch described as "mopping-up operations." Many Republicans were wondering, however, just what was left to mop up.

Traitors & Scalawags. In their prolonged post-mortem on the 1964 election, most Republicans could agree to the fact that it had been an awful show. Beyond that, there was static from all parts of the party. Cried Actor Ronald Reagan, co-chairman of California's Citizens for Goldwater and an early-form pick among right-wingers for the state's 1966 gubernatorial nomination: "We don't intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended." Between rounds of golf, Goldwater himself took time out to lambast such middle-roading Republicans as Governors Nelson Rockefeller of New York and George Romney of Michigan and Senators Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and Thomas Kuchel of California as "socalled Republicans." Barry suggested that "the time has come for a real realignment of the parties," naming them "liberal and conservative," not "Democratic and Republican."

South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond, whose recent bolt to the G.O.P. probably saddened more Republicans than it did Democrats, voiced the hope that the G.O.P. "eventually will become the conservative party in the nation, in spite of Rockefeller and his ilk." If not, added Thurmond, whose losing Dixiecrat defection from the Democratic Party in 1948 had apparently taught him nothing, "then some other party would have to arise."

If Thurmond was anxious to drum the liberals out of the party, some liberals and moderates were equally eager for a purge of ultraconservatives. Senator Scott, who barely survived the Johnson landslide in his bid for reelection, insisted that "Southern scalawags" and the "hardcore radical right" be thrown out of the G.O.P. "The present party leadership," he said, "must be replaced —all of it." Some moderates were upset over reports that the G.O.P. had wound up the 1964 campaign with a $1,200,000 surplus instead of the usual deficit, suggested that the money was withheld to strengthen Goldwater's grip on the party.

Trying hard to make themselves heard above all the noise, a few Republicans sensibly pleaded for unity. "We're not going to improve our situation by cutting each other up," said Iowa's Senator Jack Miller. Washington's Governor-elect Daniel J. Evans, a 39-year-old engineer who upset two-term Democrat Albert Resellini, urged the party to "reconstruct our framework in terms that will encompass a variety of opinion." Former Vice President Richard Nixon, who had reinstituted himself as the favorite target of some cartoonists by attacks on his fellow moderate Nelson Rockefeller, now called for a centrist leadership that would make enough room for both liberals and conservatives—but not for "the 'nut' left or the 'nut' right." In case anybody was wondering who might qualify as a centrist leader, Nixon pointed out: "I'm perhaps at dead center."