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At that meeting were his wife Mary, daughter Susan, 17, son Joe, 14, Senator Hugh Scott, Administrative Assistant Bill Keisling, Speechwriter Malcolm Moos, and nine other state party officials and Scranton staffers. At 5 p.m. Scranton walked into the room, seated himself by the great stone fireplace, listened for some three hours while his family and friends urged him to go all out for the nomination. Finally, Scranton stood up. "Now," he said abruptly, "we have a lot to do. I am going to run." Moos, who used to write speeches for President Eisenhower, reached over, picked a piece of paper from the coffee table, wrote Scranton's last five words, dated the paper and said: "I'm going to keep this for my scrapbook."
Telephone calls immediately went out to top Republicans across the U.S. —to Romney, Rockefeller, Ray Bliss. Dwight Eisenhower and many others. As Scranton later recalled his conversation with Ike: "I told him I was going to run. He simply said that was that, and it was fine, and I said thank you and I got off the phone." Dick Nixon was reached in London, where he had flown on private business. Scranton tried to tele phone Goldwater, failed, and sent him a telegram instead.
"Those Noble Words." Hasty arrangements were made for Scranton to appear next day at the Maryland state convention to deliver his announcement.
His speech also was hastily written, but it was no less effective for that reason.
"I come here," cried Scranton, "to announce that I am a candidate for the presidency of the United States."
He bore down heavily on the civil rights issue, fully aware that Goldwater's image is badly flawed on that subject. The Republican Party, said Scranton, must be "responsible for human liberty, its preservation on the North American continent and its inspiration around the entire world; responsible for giving every American a fair chance at a share of the good life; responsible for underlining the injunctions of the Constitution and the Declaration of Inde pendence; to put solid flesh on those noble words that all men are created equal." In that statement, Scranton reflected the mainstream of national Republican thinking on civil rights as evidenced, also last week, by Senator Everett Dirksen's leadership in achieving cloture against a segregationist Democratic filibuster (see cover story).
Perhaps even more telling was Scranton's argument that Goldwater, as the party's presidential nominee, would help bring to defeat scores of Republican state and local candidates. "Lincoln," he said, "knew, as all of you know and I know, that in a presidential year the candidate at the top of the ticket can obviously help those below, or he can doom them to undeserved defeat.
"Therefore, any political party which seriously undertakes to lead the Government of this nation—not only in Washington but also in the state capitols, in the courthouses, in the city halls—such a great party will not lightly throw away the top places on its ticket."