from wealthy donors on the right such as Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Edison, and J. Howard Pew. He found this method distasteful, "I realized I didn't want to do that kind of thing, and figured there must be a better way. So, I started raising money by mail, but the secretaries could only write so many letters a day. So I said, there must be a better way than this, and one thing led to another, and I got into direct mail." During the Republican presidential primaries Goldwater was opposed by establishment Republicans such as governors Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, and George W. Romney in a "Stop Goldwater" effort that continued unto the 1964 Republican National Convention. While Goldwater remained confident of his chances to secure the nomination, he did consider dropping out of the presidential race altogether after the Assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. While Goldwater and his supporters held that it was unlikely that voters would choose to go through three different men as President in the span of 14 months, he was convinced to continue if only to wrest party control away from the Republican Eastern establishment (a goal his campaign aide J. William Middendorf called the "noble reason"). Viguerie attended that National Convention, held in San Francisco's Cow Palace, as an alternate delegate. He recalled years later, "I was there at the Cow Palace in 1964. I was in the rafters, where the boos for Rockefeller came from." He also recalled coming across a large group of people surrounding a film star, "It was Ronald Reagan. Two years later, he was the governor there." Because Goldwater was viewed as an anti-establishment candidate by wealthy Republican benefactors who supported Republican New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, his campaign was forced to seek alternative means of funding. Rather than focusing on a few big donors the campaign relied on large-scale direct-mail fundraising. Lee Edwards, a Goldwater communications aide for the 1964 campaign would later recall "We couldn't go to the fat cats, because they were all with either Rockefeller or Johnson, so we had to develop our own financial base. There had been direct mail around, but not in presidential campaigns. We had a need that had to be met, and we had some experts who knew how to do direct mail. Everybody does it now, but that was a revolution in fundraising back in '64."