William M. Rainach - Unpledged Elector Candidate

Unpledged Elector Candidate

As a former senator, Rainach, along with future Governor David C. Treen and Leander Perez, was an unsuccessful unpledged presidential elector candidate in 1960. Though he was a delegate to the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, California, Rainach said that he could have supported the Republican presidential nominee, Richard M. Nixon, had Nixon not yielded the conservative platform drafted by the delegates at the convention in Chicago, Illinois, to demands from New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. In Rainach's words "the Republican platform is not quite as bad" as that offered by the Kennedy/Johnson forces. He said that Rockefeller's influence had reduced the practical usefulness of the GOP to southern conservatives. Rainach added that if the unpledged electors had gained sufficient support across the South, he would have urged negotiations among the electors themselves. He indicated that having the United States House of Representatives chose a president in a deadlock would have meant an automatic Kennedy victory because the majority of state delegations were in Democrat hands.

LeRoy Cullom Smallenberger (1912–2002) of Shreveport, the Fourth Congressional District GOP chairman in 1960 and soon the state party chairman, agreed with Rainach's analysis of the GOP and the unpledged elector slate. Smallenberger said that the original Republican platform was conservative but it was moved to the political center when Nixon offered concessions to Nelson Rockefeller in a bid for greater support on the East Coast. Smallenberger, a native of Peoria, Illinois, was later appointed as a federal bankruptcy judge in the future Nixon administration.

In several north Louisiana parishes, the main competition in the 1960 general election was between Nixon and the unpledged electors, with the state and nationally victorious Kennedy/Johnson ticket not bothering to contest the region.