1964 Johnson VS. Goldwater

"Social Security"

Transcript

Museum of the Moving Image
The Living Room Candidate - Transcript
"Social Security," Johnson, 1964

MALE NARRATOR: On at least seven different occasions, Barry Goldwater has said he would drastically change the social security system. In the Chattanooga, Tennessee Times, in a Face the Nation interview, in the New York Times Magazine, in a Continental Classroom TV interview, in the New York Journal American, in a speech he made only last January in Concord, New Hampshire, and in the Congressional Record. Even his running mate, William Miller, admits that Barry Goldwater's voluntary plan would wreck your Social Security.

JOHNSON: Too many have worked too long and too hard to see this threatened now by policies which promise to undo all that we have done together over all these years.

MALE NARRATOR: For over thirty years President Johnson has worked to strengthen Social Security. Vote for him on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.

Credits

"Social Security," Democratic National Committee, 1964

Maker: DDB: Aaron Erlich, Stan Lee, Sid Myers, and Tony Schwartz

Video courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.

From Museum of the Moving Image, The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012.
www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1964/social-security (accessed May 16, 2025).

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1964 Johnson Goldwater Results

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who took office following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, enhanced his image as a tough legislator by winning a hard-fought battle to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which guaranteed African-Americans access to all public facilities, and banned discrimination by race, religion, or sex. The Vietnam War was escalating, but had yet to become a real liability for Johnson.

The margin of Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964 was partly a repudiation of Barry Goldwater’s extreme right-wing views. Goldwater, an Arizona senator and author of the best-selling book The Conscience of a Conservative, won the Republican nomination after a bitter primary campaign against moderate New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. In his acceptance speech, Goldwater made the infamous statement, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." The assertion, meant as a defense of conservatism, merged in the public consciousness with statements in which Goldwater advocated the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam and argued that Social Security be made voluntary.

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