JoePa Takes the Fall by Bill Keisling

Author:Bill Keisling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yardbird
Published: 2012-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Exposed by TV anchorman Walter Cronkite, The Letter caused a national uproar. Everyone from Barry Goldwater to Time magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer screamed for my old man’s head. Scranton protected him.

My father became the enfant terrible of the national Republican Party. With almost forty years’ hindsight, though, The Letter today seems to me on the money, courageous, and prescient. Lincoln and TR, I’m sure, would be happy with it. It said what had to be said.

But The Letter was incendiary. At the volatile, unscripted convention it was a match thrown into a pool of gasoline. There was an explosion, and the wheels came off the Republican Party at the convention in the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

Pandemonium ensued. This was in the day when political conventions were real human affairs, not the pre-programmed, canned commercials they’ve become. When Nelson Rockefeller took the podium to address the convention, he was shouted down and drowned out by Goldwater partisans, who would not let him speak, and who choked the hall for sixteen minutes with boos and catcalls.

“The scene was set for the battle over the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” is how the PBS show American Experience recounts it:

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