F. Clifton White; Architect of ’64 Goldwater Campaign

F. Clifton White, a primary architect of the conservative movement’s domination of the Republican Party in the early 1960s, which led to the 1964 presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater, is dead.

A family spokesman said White, a professional consultant who also played a key role in the political ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, was 74 when he died Saturday at his home here. He was suffering from cancer.

Called a “politician’s politician” by the late Theodore White, a biographer of presidential campaigns and candidates, White--with Dean Burch, Denison Kitchel and Richard G. Kleindienst--were the neophytes who came to the forefront of the GOP three decades ago.

White was a New Yorker and the only one of the four with wide-ranging professional experience. The others were fellow Arizonans and close friends of Goldwater.

Among them, they took party leadership from the Eisenhower-Nixon-Rockefeller theorists and placed it in the hands of Goldwater, a tough-talking conservative from Arizona who suffered one of the most ignominious defeats in U.S. political history when he was trampled by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Despite that loss--by 16 million votes--White went on to manage the successful 1972 senatorial campaign of Jesse Helms in North Carolina and the 1970 campaign of James L. Buckley, who was elected senator as head of the small Conservative Party in New York.

After the failed 1964 campaign, White formed a national public affairs consulting firm with offices in New York, Washington, Minneapolis, Topeka, Kan., and Los Angeles.

He worked for Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald R. Ford, Reagan and Richard M. Nixon.

But it was his structuring of the Goldwater campaign, beginning with a 1963 rally in the nation’s capital that attracted 7,000 chanting partisans, that was deemed a classic. Goldwater later said that the outpouring of sentiment was a prime factor in his decision to run.

Within a year of the rally, Goldwater had locked up the nomination at his party’s convention in San Francisco’s Cow Palace.

White was a former political science teacher at Cornell University and Ithaca College before becoming a consultant.

He was last in the news 10 years ago when President Reagan named him to head the board of Radio Marti, the U.S. broadcasting enterprise designed to counter pro-Castro broadcasts from Cuba.