Viguerie 's Young Americans for Freedom ( YAF ) , had been founded by William F. Buckley Jr. and would play an important role in helping Goldwater secure the Republican nomination . On March 7 , 1962 Viguerie and the YAF held a sold out event entitled " A Conservative Rally for World Liberation from Communism " at Madison Square Garden in New York City attended by 18,500 mostly young people with senators John Tower , Strom Thurmond , and Goldwater as featured speakers . Viguerie would later write of his opinion of the event , saying " I would nominate the Madison Square Garden rally as the day the modern conservative movement had its public debut . Before that day , what we in the conservative movement were doing was mostly out of the public eye . But when thousands were lined up around Madison Square Garden and the speeches and sellout crowd were front-page , ' above the fold ' news the next day in The New York Times , the conservative movement leapt onto the national political stage — and it was a movement largely inspired by Goldwater and the new brand of conservatism he shared with intellectuals such as William F. Buckley , Jr. , M. Stanton Evans , Russell Kirk , Frank S. Meyer , William F. Rusher and L. Brent Bozell Jr. " In late 1962 YAF moved their headquarters to Washington , D.C. Viguerie moved into a house there on Capital Hill with his new bride Elaine O'Leary Viguerie . The organization had racked up $ 20,000 in debt and Viguerie had to seek donations from wealthy donors on the right such as Eddie Rickenbacker , Charles Edison , and J. Howard Pew . He found this method distasteful , " I realized I did n'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 " )
Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Richard Viguerie