GOP Moderates Call on Barry To Drop Leadership

Attacking both the ideology and the political "ineptitude" of the Goldwater campaign, the Ripon Society yesterday called upon the GOP presidential nominee and his lieutenants to step down from the party leadership.

The Society, a group of moderate Republicans composed largely of Harvard graduate students, charged that the Gold-water campaign had dragged down to defeat "many of the future leaders of our party" and had alienated "huge blocks of voters."

It claimed that the Republicans who did best in the lopsided election were those who disassociated themselves with the national ticket.

At a press conference in Washington, Ripon's president, John S. Saloma, assistant professor of political science at M.I.T., outlined the Society's views and issued a nine page detailed attack of the Goldwater campaign. A part of the press conference was shown on the Huntley-Brinkley news program.

The Ripon attack came amidst an increasingly loud chorus of both private and public criticism of Goldwater by GOP leaders. Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York was asked in Madrid, where he just arrived for a short vacation, whether he thought Goldwater should continue as the head of the party.

"That has been sufficiently answered in the elections," he replied.

The Ripon statement, although noting that Republicans "have no common ground" with the "strange ultra-conservatism" of the Goldwater camp concentrated the brunt of its attack on the general conduct of the Senator's campaign.

"Tris election marked the consumation of the Republican National Committee's Southern strategy. Its implicit racist appeal attracted significant support only in redneck rural areas of the South," the statement said.

The Society also charged that "A whole new generation of Negro voters has been alienated from the Republican side at a time when Negro registration is at an all time high--close to 6 million persons."

Further on in the statement, it claimed that "In suburbia, the Goldwater-Miller campaign was a disaster. The Southern strategy wiped out the substantial gains made by Eisenhower and Nixon in the Southern suburbs. And in the North, the radical appeal of the national ticket was overwhelmingly rejected."

The Ripon statement criticized the "insensitivity" of the Goldwater national organization to local problems, frequent "questionable tactics" employed during the campaign, and the "oppressive exclusiveness (of the Goldwater leadership) which put loyalty to a small cabal ahead of loyalty to the Republican party.