Nation: KEYNOTE TO OPPORTUNITY

IN 1964 an eve-of-execution atmosphere enveloped San Francisco as the Republican Party convened to nominate its presidential candidate. Lyndon Johnson was at the zenith of his popularity. The G.O.P. was preparing to counter him with Barry Goldwater, an all-but-certain loser. The economy was booming, taxes were down, the cities were more or less tranquil, and Viet Nam was a relatively far-off rumble.

In 1968 the mood is palpably different. This time the Democrats are in decline, taxes and living costs are up, the cities are seething, and Viet Nam has turned into the nation's longest, least popular war. The heady awareness of opportunity that infects the entire G.O.P. assemblage is a measure of the distance the party has come since the dismal post-Goldwater days. When the Republican Governors met in Denver to conduct a post mortem on the 1964 election, the party was at its nadir. It had lost the presidency by the greatest popular margin in history. The Democrats had swollen 2-to-1 majorities in both the Senate and the House, and 33 of the nation's 50 Governors as well.

Said Robert E. Smylie, Governor of Idaho, without exaggeration: "We have suffered a defeat as severe in quality and quantity as any that the Republican Party has ever sustained."

In that grim year, Republicans had little to cheer about. An exception was the gubernatorial election in Washington State, where Civil Engineer Daniel Jackson Evans, still in his 30s, bucked the Johnson tide and pulled off a long-shot upset over a two-term Democratic incumbent. Two years later, a flock of Republicans duplicated Dan Evans' blueprint. On Capitol Hill, where they added 47 Congressmen and three Senators, and in the statehouses, where they picked up eight governorships, 1966 was a G.O.P. year.

Oratory and Opera. Building on that foundation, Republicans hoped to make Miami Beach the prelude for even bigger victories. Fittingly, the man they selected to strike the theme for the convention by delivering its keynote speech was Washington's Dan Evans. The age of television demands a keynoter who is young, attractive and vigorous. Evans is the prototype of a class of pragmatic, nondoctrinaire, problem-solving Republicans who came to the forefront after the 1964 debacle. Before television, keynote speeches were all too often incredible and interminable. Historian Mark Sullivan once called them "a combination of oratory, grand opera and hog calling." After Ohio Senator Simeon Fess's keynote at the 1928 Republican Convention, Will Rogers chortled: "Here are just a few things I bet you didn't know the Republicans were responsible for: radio, telephone, baths, automobiles, savings accounts, law enforcement, workmen living in houses and a living wage for Senators."

Evans was determined that his speech would be different. All too many keynotes, he found, had been "half diatribe, tearing down the opposition party, and half breast beating, or boasting about accomplishments of the past." He had put uncounted hours into the speech since early June, soliciting ideas from a spate of party leaders, trying out phrases in speeches all over the Northwest.