Shannon urged the southern states to leave the Democratic Party . He proposed " free electors " in 1964 , by which the committed to a conservative candidate , rather than the official party choice , U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson . He claimed that then Governor Jimmie Davis , a former Shreveporter , could have arranged for the unpledged slate to have been the official party designation in 1960 , instead of the Kennedy-Johnson national slate . In 1948 , Strom Thurmond , then the governor of South Carolina had carried the four states , including Louisiana , in which he was the official Democratic nominee in the general election against Harry Truman and Thomas E. Dewey . Shannon covered the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco , California , which nominated U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona to challenge President Johnson . The convention marked a defeat for the eastern wing of the party , many of whose delegates coalesced around either Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York or William Scranton of Pennsylvania . When the unpledged elector movement failed to develop . Shannon editorially endorsed Goldwater , and Thurmond defected to the Republican Party
1964 Republican National Convention
1964 Republican National Convention
George Shannon (journalist)