Republicans Fear Party Split.

By fall 1963 the Eastern Establishment Republicans who dominated their party at the national level began to fear that it would split in two if Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona went head-to-head for the Republican presidential nomination. For years the Eastern Establishment — the wealthy group of (mostly) Ivy League-educated international bankers and businessmen living mainly in and around New York — were willing to let the conservative Republicans of the Midwest and West speak for the party in Congress as long as the Establishment could control the presidential nomination, placing someone with moderate views consistent with their own in the position that created the party's national image. Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in America, was a member of the Establishment by virtue of heredity, education, and social class, but politically...