Presidential Election of 1964

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    Playing for Time, U.K. Leader Sets Up Chance of U.S. Election Overlap

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    Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signaled that voters will go to the polls in the fall, around the time that the United States will be in the midst of its own pivotal vote.When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said this week that he was not likely to call a general election in Britain before the second half of the year, he was trying to douse fevered speculation that he might go to the voters as early as May. But in doing so, he set up another tantalizing prospect: that Britain and the United States could hold elections within days or weeks of each other this fall.The last time parliamentary and presidential elections coincided was in 1964, when Britain’s Labour Party ousted the long-governing Conservatives in October, and less than a month later, a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, swept aside a challenge from a right-wing Republican insurgent. The parallels to today are not lost on the excitable denizens of Britain’s political class.“It’s the stuff of gossip around London dinner tables already,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington who is now a member of the House of Lords. For all the Côte du Rhône-fueled analysis, Mr. Darroch conceded, “it’s hard to reach any kind of conclusion about what it means.”That doesn’t mean political soothsayers, amateur and professional, aren’t giving it a go. Some argue that a victory by the Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, over President Biden — or even the prospect of one — would be so alarming that it would scare voters in Britain into sticking with Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party, as a bid for predictability and continuity in an uncertain world.A supporter of Donald J. Trump laying out signs on Tuesday before an event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesOthers argue that the Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, could win over voters by reminding them of the ideological kinship between the Conservatives and Mr. Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in Britain. Mr. Trump praised Mr. Sunak last fall for saying he wanted to water down some of Britain’s ambitious climate goals. “I always knew Sunak was smart,” Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social account.Still others pooh-pooh the suggestion that British voters would make decisions at the ballot box based on the political direction of another country, even one as close and influential as the United States. Britain’s election, analysts say, is likely to be decided by domestic concerns like the cost-of-living crisis, home-mortgage rates, immigration and the dilapidated state of the National Health Service.And yet, even the skeptics of any direct effect acknowledge that near-simultaneous elections could cause ripples on both sides of the pond, given how Britain and the United States often seem to operate under the same political weather system. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 is often viewed as a canary in the coal mine for Mr. Trump’s victory the following November.Already, the campaigns in both countries are beginning to echo each other, with fiery debates about immigration; the integrity — or otherwise — of political leaders; and social and cultural quarrels, from racial justice to the rights of transgender people. Those themes will be amplified as they reverberate across the ocean, with the American election forming a supersized backdrop to the British campaign.“The U.S. election will receive a huge amount of attention in the run-up to the U.K. election,” said Ben Ansell, a professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford University. “If the Tories run a culture-war campaign, and people are being fed a diet of wall-to-wall populism because of Trump, that could backfire on them.”Some argue that if the elections coincide, Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, could win over voters by reminding them of the similarities between the Conservatives and Mr. Trump.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesProfessor Ansell identified another risk in the political synchronicity: it could magnify the damage of a disinformation campaign waged by a hostile foreign power, such as the efforts by Russian agents in Britain before the Brexit vote, and in the United States before the 2016 presidential election. “It’s a two-for-one,” he said, noting that both countries remain divided and vulnerable to such manipulation.On Thursday, Mr. Starmer appealed to Britons to move past the fury and divisiveness of the Brexit debates, promising “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives.” That was reminiscent of Mr. Biden’s call in his 2021 inaugural address to “join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature.”Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who studied at Oxford and has advised Conservative Party officials, said he warned the Tories not to turn their campaign into a culture war. “It will get you votes, but it will destroy the electorate in the process,” he said he told them, pointing out that a campaign against “woke” issues had not helped Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida dislodge Mr. Trump.Mr. Sunak has vacillated in recent months between a hard-edge and more centrist approach as his party has struggled to get traction with voters. It currently lags Labour by 20 percentage points in most polls. While general elections are frequently held in the spring, Mr. Sunak appears to be playing for time in the hope that his fortunes will improve. That has drawn criticism from Mr. Starmer, who accused him of “squatting” in 10 Downing Street.“I’ve got lots that I want to get on with,” Mr. Sunak told reporters Thursday. He could wait until next January to hold a vote, though analysts say that was unlikely, since campaigning over the Christmas holiday would likely alienate voters and discourage party activists from canvassing door to door.Counting votes in Bath, England, during the U.K.’s last general election in 2019.Ian Walton/ReutersWith summer out for the same reason, Mr. Sunak’s most likely options are October or November (Americans will vote on Nov. 5). There are arguments for choosing either month, including that party conferences are traditionally held in early October.In October 1964, the Conservative government, led by Alec Douglas-Home, narrowly lost to Labour, led by Harold Wilson. Like Mr. Douglas-Home, Mr. Sunak is presiding over a party in power for more than 13 years. The following month, President Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Republican senator from Arizona, who had declared, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”Sixty years ago, the Atlantic was a greater divide than it is today, and the links between trans-Atlantic elections more tenuous than they are now. Mr. Trump, armed with a social media account and a penchant for lines even more provocative than Mr. Goldwater’s, could easily roil the British campaign, analysts said.And a Trump victory, they added, would pose a devilish challenge to either future British leader. While Mr. Trump treated Mr. Sunak’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, as an ideological twin, he fell out bitterly with Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, and there was little reason, they said, to hope for less drama in a second Trump term.The biggest pre-election danger — much more likely for Mr. Sunak than for Mr. Starmer, given their politics — is that Mr. Trump will make a formal endorsement, either while he is the Republican nominee or newly elected as president, said Timothy Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London.“Given how negatively most Brits feel toward Trump,” Professor Bale said, “such an endorsement is unlikely to play well for whichever of the two is unlucky enough to find favor with him.” More

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      Warren Boroson, Who Surveyed Psychiatrists on Goldwater, Dies at 88

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      The defeated Republican presidential candidate sued Mr. Boroson and the magazine he worked for, saying it had libeled him for suggesting that he was mentally unfit for the presidency.Warren Boroson, a journalist who conducted a survey of psychiatrists that declared the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Barry M. Goldwater, mentally unfit to be president — provoking a libel suit from the candidate and prompting a psychiatric association to muzzle its members from ever diagnosing a public figure from afar — died on March 12 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart ailments, his wife, Rebecca Boroson, said.Mr. Goldwater sued for $2 million, and Mr. Boroson, who had been the 29-year-old managing editor of the iconoclastic magazine Fact when he initiated the survey for it, feared a judgment against him would commit him to a lifetime of indentured servitude to that Arizona senator.A federal jury in New York found in favor of Mr. Goldwater, awarding damages of $75,000. But the verdict, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, put most of the blame on editing by others, largely absolving Mr. Boroson, who had to pay only a token 33 cents.Ethical questions raised by the survey, though, have roiled the psychiatric profession to this day.In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association adopted the so-called Goldwater rule, declaring that it was unethical for its members “to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” Only one board member, Professor Alan A. Stone of Harvard Law School, voted against the rule, calling it “a denial of free speech and of every psychiatrist’s God-given right to make a fool of himself or herself.”Since then, some psychiatrists have defied the rule when asked by journalists and others to comment about the emotional and mental state of public figures, including foreign officials, terrorists and, in particular, Donald J. Trump, both as a candidate and as president. Some have resigned from the association rather than be bound by the rule.In 1964, the Fact survey led to Mr. Boroson’s resignation from the magazine. He had suggested polling psychiatrists to Fact’s publisher, Ralph Ginzburg, but quit before the article appeared, in September 1964, because, he said, his draft had been rewritten and sensationalized.Mr. Boroson had apparently agreed that Mr. Goldwater was “out of his mind” and feared for America’s safety if he were ever entrusted with the nation’s nuclear trigger, according to a book by Dr. John Martin-Joy, “Diagnosing From a Distance: Debates Over Libel Law, Media, and Psychiatric Ethics from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump” (2020).Dr. Martin-Joy, a Cambridge, Mass., psychiatrist, said that Mr. Boroson had conducted “serious research into the best current thinking on how to prevent a recurrence of fascism,” and that his original draft represented “at least an effort to explain a complex psychological idea to the general public.”“I think he, with Ginzburg, was important in trying to push forward the frontiers of free speech on behalf of public understanding of the mental health of public figures,” Dr. Martin-Joy said. “However, the job they actually did was imperfect.”Senator Barry Goldwater and his wife, Peggy, arriving at the federal courthouse in New York in 1968 to testify in his libel suit against Fact magazine.Associated PressMr. Goldwater, who had lost the election in a landslide to the incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, filed suit in 1965.“It was clearly felt by the court that this met the definition of actual malice, that Ginzburg had creatively edited responses from psychiatrists and that they were departing from what they knew to be facts,” Dr. Martin-Joy said. “I think they undermined their own case.”Dr. Jacob M. Appel, director of ethics education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in Manhattan, said that “Boroson’s work in the 1960s had the unintended consequence of muzzling psychiatrists like me today.” Mr. Boroson recalled in interviews and unpublished notes that his fears about Mr. Goldwater’s fitness were piqued when he read that the candidate had suffered two nervous breakdowns — stressful conditions that were later said to have been overstated.“I said to Ginzburg, ‘Why don’t we ask a few psychiatrists whether a nervous breakdown incapacitates someone for public office?’” Mr. Boroson recalled. “Ginzburg immediately replied: ‘Let’s ask every psychiatrist in the country.’ So we did.”Fact reached out to all 12,356 members on the American Psychiatric Association’s mailing list, asking them, “Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States?” Of the 2,417 who responded, 657 answered “Yes,” and 1,189 replied “No.” The rest said they didn’t know enough about the senator’s psyche to make a determination.Mr. Boroson wrote that the magazine’s 41 pages of excerpted responses constituted “the most intensive character analysis ever made of a living human being.”The cover article, titled “The Man and the Menace,” was derived from Mr. Boroson’s draft, which was apparently rewritten by Mr. Ginzburg’s friend, David Bar-Illan, an Israeli pianist and editor.“In anger I resigned from Fact,” Mr. Boroson wrote in his notes. “And insisted that my name not be listed as the author of the Bar-Illan article.” The article appeared under Mr. Ginzburg’s byline.An appeals court concluded that Mr. Ginzburg had “deleted most of Boroson’s references to the authoritarian personality and reached the conclusion, which Boroson had not expressed, that Senator Goldwater was suffering from paranoia and was mentally ill.”Time magazine wrote that the published version depicted Mr. Goldwater as “as a paranoiac, a latent homosexual and a latter-day Hitler.”The Supreme Court upheld the jury award: punitive damages of $25,000 against Mr. Ginzburg and $50,000 against the magazine, and $1 in compensatory damages divided among the three defendants, including Mr. Boroson. Justices Hugo L. Black and William O. Douglas dissented, citing First Amendment protections.Warren Gilbert Boroson was born on Jan. 22, 1935, in Manhattan. His mother, Cecelia (Wersan) Boroson, was an office manager. His father, Henry, was a teacher.Warren attended Memorial High School in West Nyack, N.Y., and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1957.In addition to his wife, Rebecca (Kaplan) Boroson, a retired journalist, he is survived by his sons, Bram and Matthew, and his brother, Dr. Hugh Boroson. In 1968, four years after the Goldwater survey, Mr. Ginzburg sought to conduct a similar survey of psychiatrists regarding President Johnson’s mental health. If he succeeded, the results were apparently never published.  Mr. Boroson later wrote for local newspapers and magazines, including Mr. Ginzburg’s Avant Garde, under pen names. (Fact, a quarterly, was published from January 1964 to August 1967.) He was the author of more than 20 books, including self-help financial guides. He also taught music, finance and journalism at colleges.“What did I learn from the experience?,” he wrote in his reflective notes about the Goldwater case. “Not much. I regret not proposing to write a book about Trump when he first became famous: Trump: In Relentless Pursuit of Selfishness.” More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene Knows Exactly What She’s Doing

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarjorie Taylor Greene Knows Exactly What She’s DoingThe once-porous border between the right and the far right has dissolved.Feb. 5, 2021, 5:27 a.m. ETMarjorie Taylor Greene during the playing of the national anthem at a Second Amendment rally in Georgia on Sept. 19, 2020. Credit…C.B. Schmelter/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated PressMarjorie Taylor Greene is the QAnon congresswoman, a far-right influencer and gun fanatic who dabbles in anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. She endorsed violence against congressional leaders, claimed that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were faked and once shared an anti-refugee video in which a Holocaust denier says that “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”She showed a little contrition on Wednesday with a qualified apology to her Republican colleagues. For this, she received a standing ovation. On Thursday, after an afternoon of deliberation, the House of Representatives voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments. Or rather, Democrats voted to strip her of her committee assignments. All but 11 Republicans voted in her favor.Although it is tempting to make this episode another parable exemplifying the “Trumpification” of the Republican Party, it’s better understood as yet another chapter in an ongoing story: the two-step between the far right and the Republican Party and the degree to which the former is never actually that far from the latter.There’s a story conservatives tell about themselves and their movement. It goes like this: In the mid-1960s, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, made a decisive break with the John Birch Society, an ultra-right-wing advocacy organization whose popular co-founder, Robert Welch, believed that the United States was threatened by a far-reaching “Communist conspiracy” whose agents included former President Dwight Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren.“How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points, so critically different from their own, and, for that matter, so far removed from common sense?” Buckley asked of Welch in a blistering 1962 essay. “There are, as we say, great things that need doing, the winning of a national election, the re-education of the governing class. John Birch chapters can do much to forward these aims, but only as they dissipate the fog of confusion that issues from Mr. Welch’s smoking typewriter.”This attack on Welch, if not the John Birch Society itself, continued into the 1964 presidential election. Birchers helped carry Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona to victory in the Republican primary with skillful moves on the convention floor, in what would be their greatest display of strength before a final repudiation from Buckley and other leading lights of the conservative movement the following year. “I am not a member” of the group, Ronald Reagan declared in September 1965, “I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.”With this, Welch and the John Birch Society were pushed to the fringe. The conservative movement would win elections and power with an appeal to the mainstream of American society.Or so goes the story.Welch and the John Birch Society were pushed to the margins. The extremist tag, as Lisa McGirr notes in “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” did real damage to the organization’s ability to sustain itself: “The society was simply too strongly identified with minoritarian utterances and outdated conspiracies to remain an important vehicle for channeling the new majoritarian conservatism.” However, she continues, “The sentiments, grievances, and ideas the organization helped to define mobilize lived on and were championed by organizations and political leaders who thrust forth a new populist conservatism.”A campaign button for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid quotes from his speech accepting the Republican nomination.Credit…David J. & Janice L. Frent/Corbis, via Getty ImagesThe hard right wasn’t at the front of the charge, but it wasn’t purged either. Instead, it served as part of the mass base of activists and voters who propelled conservative leaders to prominence and conservative politicians to victory. If there were boundaries between the mainstream and the extreme right, they were — as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue in “The Long New Right and the World It Made” — “porous,” with movement from one to the other and back again. Several key figures of the New Right and the Christian Right of the 1970s and ’80s were, Sara Diamond points out in “Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States,” “veterans of the 1964 Goldwater campaign” who were “steeped in the conservative movement’s dual strategy of forming wide-ranging political organizations and activism based on more specific issues.”To illustrate their point about the porousness of the conservative movement, Schlozman and Rosenfeld highlight a series of interviews in which a “who’s who of the right of the late 1970s and early 1980s” sat for wide-ranging discussions with The Review of the News, a front publication of the John Birch Society. Figures from inside the Reagan administration, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Anne Gorsuch (mother of Neil), then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made an appearance, as did lawmakers like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Dick Cheney of Wyoming and Chuck Grassley of Iowa.This is a column, and I may be flattening some of the nuances here for the sake of brevity. But the essential point is sound: Extremism has always had a place in mainstream conservative politics, and this is especially true at the grass-roots level.What’s distinctive right now isn’t the fact that someone like Greene exists but that no one has emerged to play the role of Buckley. A longtime Republican leader like Mitch McConnell can try — he denounced Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer” on the party — but after he served four years as an ally to Donald Trump, his words aren’t worth much.Those once-porous borders, in other words, now appear to be nonexistent, and there’s no one in the Republican Party or its intellectual orbit to police the extreme right. Representative Greene is the first QAnon member of Congress, but she won’t be the last and she may not even ultimately be the worst.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More