Word: ripon
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...agonizing Republican reappraisals of the 1964 elections, by far the best documented and most out spoken is that of the Ripon Society, a group of some 80 young G.O.P. intellectuals, mostly from academic circles, who aspire, as one leader describes it. "to be a link between the ivory-tower group and the people ringing doorbells." In a recently issued report, the society said that the Republican presidential campaign was "one of the dullest, emptiest, lowest-level campaigns in the history of American presidential politics. The whole cast of the Republican effort was too often amateurish, almost never profound, occasionally tasteless...
...night of the election, as other Republicans watched in horror, Ripon members set up an elaborate communications center in the basement of a Cambridge inn. Monitoring calls from contacts in 31 states--including Milton Eisenhower and the office of Pennsylvania's Governor Scranton--the Society rapidly compiled a detailed picture of the GOP disaster and two days later issued a nine-page statement in Washington asking Goldwater to drop his leadership role...
...Ripon's immediate formula for a GOP revival, embodied in 13 recommendations at the end of the report, revealed few surprises. Perhaps the most novel suggestion--and the one least likely to reach fruition--asked the Republican National Committee to "extend a formal apology to Dr. Martin Luther King for efforts attributed to one of its employees to induce King voters to waste their votes by writing in Dr. King's name...
When they dream, Ripon members like to think of themselves as heirs of Kennedy, not Eisenhower. "We in the Ripon Society," they say at the end of Election '64, "and young Americans generally, remember these words of a young President: 'Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans ...' Today that torch burns only at an Arlington grave, for today no man and no Party carries the torch of our general." This is the Ripon vision--"the great opportunity...
...this is the root, the real measure of the Ripon Society's success will be its ability to end-this alienation