True. In fact, no Republican could have won after the JFK assassination.
Even Goldwater himself knew it. He'd written in his memoir
With No Apologies that any hope for a Goldwater presidency
died with John F. Kennedy. The two men genuinely liked each other and, when Kennedy assumed Goldwater would be his
1964 opponent, invited Goldwater to lunch and gave him a piece of advice:
Don't announce too soon, Barry. The minute
you do you become the target. You give them eighteen months to shoot you down, they'll do it.Goldwater said Kennedy also promised the two could and would run an issues-rooted campaign in 1964 without personality
clashes or hatreds, another promise Goldwater said was shattered by Kennedy's death and made him reluctant to become
the candidate aside from the mood of the country over an assassinated president:
Everything I knew about Lyndon
Johnson, Goldwater wrote,
told me he would be incapable of campaigning without hatred.Some things never really change. Today we have a few candidates on both sides who aren't capable of campaigning without
hatred.