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His supporters also derided Ike by saying that he could not read if his lips were chapped.
    By 1960, the sometime conservative Nixon, now the nominee of the Republican Party, picked Lodge as his running mate, after being prodded by Nelson Rockefeller into doing so—a curious choice because Lodge was the one man whom John Kennedy had defeated in political combat.
    The best example of the problems of the Republican Party by 1960 were illustrated by one simple fact: at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, the party selected as a featured speaker former President Herbert Hoover, who had been run out of town on a rail twenty-eight years earlier and whose Presidency signaled the end of the era of Republican dominance in American politics. The GOP was the party of the past, the “eat your spinach” party. The Democrats were more fun, more intellectual, more relevant, more popular, and more interesting.
    Also adding to conservatives’ angst, around the time of the convention, Richard Nixon, the Vice President of the United States, the presumptive Presidential nominee of the Republican Party met in New York with Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Together, they produced the “Compact of Fifth Avenue” which steered the party and its nominee leftward in exchange for Rockefeller’s support of the ticket. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who never needed a map to find the jugular vein, said that if the compact became part of the GOP platform it “will live in history as the Munich of the Republican Party.” 10
    Rockefeller symbolized everything that grassroots Republicans, becoming increasingly conservative, despised about the other wing of the party. Gould wrote,
    The problem was that Rockefeller seemed to think that his money and celebrity appeal entitled him to leadership and he made little secret of his disdain for the opinions of rank-and-file Republicans. Dominant in New York where his money and a divided Democratic Party helped him, Rockefeller was not a very good national politician. Along with indecision went a tin ear for Republican attitudes, and his casual approach to his wedding vows compounded his problems. But through an array of publicists and sympathetic journalists, he could make noise about Republican issues whenever he chose. 11
    The concession to Rockefeller angered both Eisenhower and Goldwater. Given their opposing views of Republicanism, this was no small feat. At the convention, Goldwater’s name was placed in nomination for Vice President, and he took the podium to decline the opportunity to be considered as a candidate. But he did initiate a sensational and prophetic moment in the history of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Said Goldwater, “This great Republican Party is our historic house. This is our home.” 12 And addressing those who had placed his name in nomination, the Arizonan said, “Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this party back, and I think we can some day, let’s go to work.” 13 Four years later, Goldwater and his grassroots legions would do precisely that, much to the dismay of the “Eastern Elite” wing of the Republican Party.
    In the 1960 general election campaign, John Kennedy saw a high-hanging fastball and hit it out of the park. Kennedy successfully tapped into the vein in the American electorate that was gravely concerned about the Soviet threat. He positioned himself to Nixon’s right on the issue of anti-Communism, scorching his former House and Senate colleague over the rise of Fidel Castro, defending Quemoy and Matsu, and the “missile gap” where Kennedy accused the Eisenhower Administration of allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union. Continuing the tradition of the Democratic Party as the party of the future and the party of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Kennedy also zapped Nixon as he urged the need “to get this country moving again.”
    In 1964, Kennedy’s unlikely friend, Barry Goldwater, began