I remember the anger or amusement of people at Goldwater’s comment about “lobbing one (a nuke) into the men’s room in the Kremlin.”
This was scary talk to some after experiencing the Cuban missile crisis showdown in October 1962.
I know I had been scared then living within 10 miles of Washington, DC. "
In 1964 I was in high school, living near Monterey, California.
I attended primary rallies for both Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
Goldwater's rally was much larger, and he won the primary, though lost in a landslide to LBJ in November.
In the whole state, Goldwater carried only a couple of rural counties.
As I remember it, throughout that campaign the only references to Goldwater and nuclear weapons I saw were those "Daisy Girl" hit-ads Johnson's campaign ran against him.
On the other hand, whatever Goldwater may, or may not have said about nukes, he was not the first one to recommend using them -- that would be Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Korea, who wanted to A-bomb the Yalu River to keep the Chi-Coms out.
It was part of why Truman fired MacArthur.
Anyway, the key point about Goldwater's views on Vietnam had nothing necessarily to do with nukes, but rather with Goldwater's insistence that we shouldn't just go fight in Vietnam, we had to have a plan to actually win the war, and Johnson never had a plan to win.
So Johnson's "Daisy Girl" adds against Goldwater successfully obscured the fact that Johnson himself had no plan to win, indeed, didn't really care about winning.
What Johnson absolutely cared about was gaining the political power to defeat Republicans, and his "Daisy Girl" ad did that for him, actually winning in Vietnam was irrelevant to him.
Anyway, that's how I remember it.