The marriage was instantly the subject of scrutiny and criticism from the press, fellow Republicans, and even the Presbyterian Church in America. Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, speaking at a prep school graduation, asked, "Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a mother of youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?" When the newlyweds attended the convention of the National Federation of Republican Women convention later that year (by then a loyal Goldwater organization), they were received with silence, and several women staged a walk-out. Others publicly criticizing the marriage included Reinhold Niebuhr and Nikita Khrushchev.
