Johnson took office on November 22, 1963, following the assassination of his predecessor, and generally continued his policies, except with greater emphasis on civil rights.

Kennedy's death shocked and saddened many Americans, while opposing candidates were put in the awkward position of running against Johnson following JFK's assassination.

[2] Until around the time of the convention, President Johnson insisted that he was undecided about seeking a second term, leading supporters in primaries to either write him in as a candidate or vote for Favorite sons.

Eventually, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Reuther, and the black civil rights leaders, including Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bayard Rustin, worked out a compromise: The MFDP took two seats; the regular Mississippi delegation was required to pledge to support the party ticket; and no future Democratic convention would accept a delegation chosen by a discriminatory poll.

Many white delegates from Mississippi and Alabama refused to sign any pledge, and left the convention; and many young civil rights workers were offended by any compromise.

[7] Johnson biographers Rowland Evans and Robert Novak claim that the MFDP fell under the influence of "black radicals" and rejected their seats.

Shortly after the 1964 Democratic Convention, Kennedy decided to leave Johnson's cabinet and run for the U.S. Senate in New York; he won the general election in November.

Johnson chose United States Senator Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota, a liberal and civil rights activist, as his running mate.

The conservatives favored a low-tax, small federal government which supported individual rights and business interests, and opposed social welfare programs.

Goldwater's chief opponent for the Republican nomination was Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York and the long-time leader of the GOP's liberal faction.

The committee solidified growing conservative strength in the West and South, and began working to gain control of state parties in the Midwest from liberal Republicans.

Throughout the rest of the year, speculation about a potential Goldwater candidacy grew, and grass-roots activism and efforts among conservative Republicans expanded.

"[10] In the first primary, in New Hampshire, both Rockefeller and Goldwater were considered to be the favorites, but the voters instead gave a surprising victory to write-in candidate U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. who was Nixon's running mate in 1960 and a former Massachusetts senator.

With Rockefeller's elimination, the party's moderates and liberals turned to William Scranton, the Governor of Pennsylvania, in the hopes that he could stop Goldwater.

The presidential tally was as follows: The vice-presidential nomination went to little-known Republican Party Chairman William E. Miller, a Representative from western New York.

In accepting his nomination, Goldwater uttered his most famous phrase (a quote from Cicero suggested by speechwriter Harry Jaffa): "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

Governors Nelson Rockefeller of New York and George W. Romney of Michigan refused to endorse Goldwater due to his stance on civil rights and his proposal to make Social Security voluntary, and did not campaign for him.

[37] The New York Herald-Tribune, a voice for eastern Republicans (and a target for Goldwater activists during the primaries), supported Johnson in the general election.

The article received heavy publicity and resulted in a change to the ethics guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, now known as the Goldwater rule.

[citation needed] In December 1961, he told a news conference that "sometimes, I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea", a remark which indicated his dislike of the liberal economic and social policies that were often associated with that part of the nation.

That comment came back to hurt him, in the form of a Johnson television commercial,[49] as did remarks about making Social Security voluntary (something that even his running mate Miller felt would lead to the destruction of the system)[50] and selling the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In his most famous verbal gaffe, Goldwater once joked that the U.S. military should "lob one [a nuclear bomb] into the men's room of the Kremlin" in the Soviet Union.

[51] On July 10, the USS Maddox was ordered into the Gulf of Tonkin, authorized to "maintain contact with the U.S. military command in Saigon ... and arrange 'such communications ... as may be desired'".

[54] That night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, the Maddox intercepted radio messages that gave them "the 'impression' that Communist patrol boats were bracing for [another] assault".

CIA Director William Colby asserted that Tracy Barnes instructed the CIA to spy on the Goldwater campaign and the Republican National Committee, to provide information to Johnson's campaign; E. Howard Hunt, later implicated as a ringleader in the Watergate scandal, disputed this, instead claiming the operation had been ordered by the White House.

In the end, Goldwater won only his native state of Arizona and five Deep South states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina — which had been increasingly alienated by Democratic civil rights policies, and where Jim Crow laws tended to be still active to varying degrees, before the following year's Voting Rights Act outlawed them entirely.

The 1964 election marked the beginning of a major, long-term re-alignment in American politics, as Goldwater's unsuccessful bid significantly influenced the modern conservative movement.

Although Goldwater was decisively defeated, some political pundits and historians believe he laid the foundation for the conservative Reagan Revolution to follow.

Among them is Rick Perlstein, historian of the American conservative movement, who wrote of Goldwater's defeat: "Here was one time, at least, when history was written by the losers.

Johnson used his victory in the 1964 election to launch the Great Society program at home, sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and start the War on Poverty.