Republicans: Lameness & a Dry River

Republican hopefuls were doing and saying the same things that they had been doing and saying for weeks. But there was still news in their activities —and the biggest of all was that Arizona's Barry Goldwater was running like the lower Gila River during a drought.

A drum and bugle corps turned out to greet Goldwater in Littleton, N.H. (pop. 3,355). And in Lancaster, N.H. (pop. 2,392), they put together a parade too—a squad of high school boys carrying red railroad flares, followed by a shaggy pony pulling a cart containing Barry, who waved from beneath a buffalo robe. But crowds were not overwhelming, applause was skimpy, and after two days in New Hampshire it was becoming clear that Goldwater's campaign was not producing the whiz-bang reaction he had hoped for.

Most recent polls in New Hampshire showed Goldwater still leading but steadily losing ground to other Republicans for the March 10 presidential primary. Well aware of this, Barry last week jauntily told reporters that a victory in New Hampshire was not really crucial to his getting the G.O.P. nomination next summer because "the person who wins in California will win the nomination."

Nevertheless, he continued to talk a lot in New Hampshire. When he learned that Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro had ordered the water supply cut off from the U.S.'s Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Goldwater flailed out at the Johnson Administration: "This is another result of an indecisive foreign policy. Whenever a weaker country thinks it can thumb its nose at a stronger country and get away with it, it is going to do this." Barry called the water cutoff an "atrocity," and offered his own curbstone prescription: "Tell Castro to walk back and turn the water on or we are going to march out with a detachment of marines and turn it on."

Wooden Touch. With that shot from the hip, Goldwater may well have hit his own foot. True, many people think that Castro's presence in the Western Hemisphere is intolerable and that he should be ousted—if necessary, even by an invasion of Cuba. But any such effort must be well planned, well timed—and, above all, successful. To urge an impromptu attack because of such a relatively minor irritation as Guantanamo's water-supply cutoff smacks to many of gross irresponsibility.

And Barry did little to brighten his image when he spoke in Washington before a luncheon of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—presumably, an organization that should approve Goldwater's conservatism. Goldwater delivered his talk with a wooden touch, droned a pack of hazy platitudes, drew warm but hardly tumultuous applause when he was through—and caused worried murmurings among some Chamber men who had been for him.