“Let’s Grow Up, Conservatives!”
THE MID-1950S SEEMED TO BE A TIME OF ECLIPSE FOR THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE movement. Bob Taft was dead and Joe McCarthy, after his Senate censure, was as good as dead. Eisenhower was offering a “dimestore” New Deal at home, while John Foster Dulles was accused, by some conservatives, of practicing chickenship rather than brinkmanship abroad.1 When Hungarian freedom fighters rose up in October 1956 (with the encouragment of the U.S.-backed Radio Free Europe) and Soviet forces invaded, the Eisenhower administration declined to help when the Soviets brutally crushed the Hungarian revolution. The GOP rested in the hands of eastern Republicans who tried to remove Vice President Nixon from the 1956 ticket because “he was not a creature of their making” and had ridden to fame as the man who had sent Alger Hiss to jail.2 Liberals abandoned their anti-Nixon efforts when regular Republicans made it clear that they would rather fight than accept such an unwarranted ouster.
The conservative movement could claim only a few publications, Human Events being the most prominent. There were even fewer organizations, the new youth group, the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), being a rare exception. Newspaper columnists like John Chamberlain and George Sokolsky and popular radio broadcasters like Fulton Lewis, Jr., plied their trade, but liberals undercut their effectiveness by invariably describing them as part of the “militant right wing.” Typical was the comment by CBS’s Mike Wallace, who invited television viewers one evening to listen to Fulton Lewis explain “the attraction the far right has for crackpot fascist groups in America.”3
But better times were coming for conservatives. A chorus of articulate critics of the Left was making itself heard. One was Russell Kirk, who was only thirty-five when his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, exploded on the American scene in 1953. Liberals smirked that the title was an oxymoron, but they stopped laughing when they read Kirk’s brilliant book. It was a 450-page overview of conservative thinking over the previous 150 years and a scathing indictment of every liberal nostrum, from human perfectibility to economic egalitarianism.
The New York Times favorably reviewed The Conservative Mind, as did Time, which referred to the “wonder of conservative intuition and prophecy.” Of the first fifty reviews, forty-seven were favorable.4 There were several reasons for the extraordinary reception of the book. First, it was an impressive feat of scholarship: a synthesis of the ideas of the leading conservative thinkers of the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, including Edmund Burke, John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Disraeli, Orestes Brownson, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. Second, it was written by a young American who had taught not at Harvard or Yale, but at Michigan State College. Here was no European emigré, no liberal apostate, no southern agrarian, but a midwestern intellectual.
Third, the book established convincingly that there was a tradition of American conservatism, one that had existed since the founding. Russell Kirk made conservatism intellectually respectable. In fact, as William Rusher would later point out, he gave the conservative movement its name.5
There were other encouraging signs. Human Events celebrated its tenth anniversary in February 1954, pointing out modestly that over the years, it had been prescient more than once. In its first issue, William Henry Chamberlin had denounced the Teheran Conference for allowing Stalin to “impose” a Munich-like settlement of the Polish question. In August 1945, Frank Hanighen had warned that by surrendering to Soviet demands, America was risking “the loss of [its] war in the Far East.”6 In mid-1955, the newsletter’s circulation reached 13,502, but it had an influence far beyond such modest numbers.
Conservatives also began to get organized. One of the first groups was the Committee of One Million (Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations). The committee prevailed as one of the most successful citizen groups in America for nearly twenty years because it reflected the majority opinion of the American people, who did not want a government that played a major adversarial role in the Korean War to be admitted to the United Nations. The committee was strictly bipartisan at the insistence of its chairman, Walter Judd, who understood that if the organization was ever branded as the ideological creature of Republicans and/or conservatives, its effectiveness would be severely impaired.
With President Eisenhower’s imprimatur and the backing of the American Federation of Labor, the American Legion, and other citizen groups, the committee set to work collecting signatures. On July 6, 1954, it sent a telegram to the White House announcing that it had received its one millionth signature. In just nine months and with total expenditures of less than $60,000 (most of the contributions were for $10 or $15), the Committee for One Million became the Committee of One Million and a formidable anti-communist force for the next two decades.7
And in Chicago, conservatives of both parties launched a new organization, For America. Clarence Manion, former dean of Notre Dame’s law school, along with author John T. Flynn, former Democratic senator Burton K. Wheeler, and former Republican congressman Hamilton Fish of New York, headed its board. Its purpose was to forge a conservative counterpart to the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action and to encourage a “realignment” of parties, with conservatives making up one party and liberals the other.8
But in the mid-1950s, the Right by and large lacked focus. Conservative victories, wrote William F. Buckley, Jr., were “uncoordinated and inconclusive” because the philosophy of freedom was not being expounded systematically in the universities and the media. Conservatives decided that a new journal was needed to combat the liberals, compensate for “conservative weakness” in the academy, and “focus the energies” of the conservative movement.9
It had seemed, briefly, that the Freeman (a title taken from an earlier magazine edited by libertarian Albert Jay Nock in the 1920s) might serve the purpose. Started in 1950 by journalist John Chamberlain, author Henry Hazlitt, and writer Suzanne LaFollette, who had worked with Nock, the Freeman declared that it would be a voice for classical liberalism and decentralization as the New Republic and the Nation had been for the Left and for centralization in past decades. But before long, two factions (one more intellectual, the other more political) began fighting over the Freeman’s editorial direction. A final falling-out occurred over whether the journal should endorse Taft over Eisenhower in 1952. When the board endorsed a handsoff policy, Chamberlain, LaFollette, and journalist Forrest Davis, a Taft partisan, resigned in disgust.10
Many believed, however, that the right publication would appeal to the three kinds of American conservatives who existed in the mid-fifties: traditionalists, libertarians, and anticommunists. After all, as one historian wrote, there were “no rigid barriers” between them; traditionalists and libertarians were usually anticommunist, and anticommunists generally endorsed the free market and Western traditions.11
Conservatives knew who the true conservatives were, although liberals clearly did not. Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., thought that the leaders of an “intelligent conservatism” included Henry Cabot Lodge, Jacob Javits, and Wayne Morse, the most liberal members of the liberal wing of the Republican party. When the Freeman first appeared, the left-wing Nation, while conceding the need for an intellectual conservative journal, criticized the “sneers and snarls” it found in the first issue. Schlesinger, the apostle of the so-called vital center, added to the distortion, accusing economist F. A. Hayek of adding “luster” to the “homegrown McCarthys” with his thoughtful 1954 work, Capitalism and the Historians, and condemned James Burnham’s slice of realpolitik, Containment or Liberation? as “an absurd book written by an absurd man.”12
But things were to change dramatically with the appearance in 1955 of the right magazine. The editor and sole owner of the new conservative weekly was the irrepressible William F. Buckley, Jr., a thirty-year-old, six-foot-tall enfant terrible with a flashing smile, a rapier mind, bright blue eyes, and a half-British, half-southern drawl. Buckley had wanted to start his own magazine for a couple of years, first hoping to buy Human Events and then corresponding with the conservative Chicago publisher Henry Regnery, who suggested that Buckley edit a monthly magazine along with Russell Kirk. In the summer of 1954, Buckley joined editorial forces with the European emigré and veteran journalist William Schlamm, who had been helping to edit the Freeman. As Buckley’s biographer John B. Judis observed, Buckley would have founded a magazine eventually, but because of Schlamm, who was obsessed with the idea of starting a journal of conservative opinion, “Buckley threw himself into the project.”13
Both men believed that the way to change American politics was to challenge the liberal intellectuals who dominated American ideas and that the best vehicle for doing this was a weekly intellectual magazine like the New Republic. Their determination was intensified when Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education bought the Freeman in 1954 and converted it to a monthly magazine concentrating on economics. To Buckley, this shift accentuated the critical vacuum in conservative ideas. Liberals had eight weekly journals of opinion, ranging from the New Republic and the Nation to Commonweal and the New Leader. Conservatives had only Human Events.
With a $100,000 pledge from Buckley’s father, Buckley and Schlamm wrote a prospectus to attract financial contributors and writers. They declared that the “political climate of an era” was fashioned by serious opinion journals and it was possible to “rout intellectually” the jaded liberal status quo with the “vigor of true convictions.”
They described their own convictions as a synthesis of the libertarian, conservative, and anticommunist wings of American conservatism. They sharply attacked the United Nations and the “Social-Democrat” impulses of both parties, but did not mention the Eisenhower administration in order not to offend potential pro-Ike donors. Buckley, however, wrote a letter to former leftist Max Eastman (whom he was trying to recruit as an editor) in which he confided that in an early issue he intended “to read Dwight Eisenhower out of the conservative movement.”14
Buckley’s anti-Eisenhower pledge was significant on two counts: It indicated the uncompromising conservatism he intended to promote in his magazine, and it reflected the growing awareness of conservatives that they did in fact belong to a movement.
In pursuit of funds, Buckley traveled to Texas and southern California. However, oil millionaire H. L. Hunt and other members of the Texas Right found Buckley “too Catholic, too eastern, and too moderate.”15 And they already had their own “opinion journal,” Facts Forum, edited by former FBI agent Dan Smoot. At one point, a frustrated Buckley wrote to Herbert Hoover, “It is sad that with so much [writing] talent available, there is so little capital. We might as well be living in Somaliland.”16
The young fund raiser discovered more congenial conservatives in the Golden State. In Beverly Hills, he met several wealthy businessmen through Hollywood writer Morrie Ryskind, an outspoken anticommunist who had written most of the Marx Brothers’ movies and had won a Pulitzer Prize for the book of the Gershwins’ musical satire, Of Thee I Sing. By June 1955, thanks to Ryskind’s constant prodding, sympathetic Californians had contributed some $38,000 to the magazine’s founding (Buckley figured he needed a total of $450,000 to meet the deficits of the first two years); they continued to help over the next several decades.
But often there were more pats on the back than checks. After being turned down by several of his closest and richest friends, Ryskind wrote Buckley that although it was Rosh Hashanah and he should have been “shouting Happy New Year,” it felt more like Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.17 Undeterred, the young entrepreneur pulled out all the stops, including asking Joe McCarthy to approach his financial supporters like the oil-rich Murchisons of Texas.
By September 1955, with the additional help of Yale alumni like South Carolina textile manufacturer Roger Milliken and New York financier Jeremiah Milbank, Jr., Buckley had raised over $300,000. Milliken made the largest single commitment, $20,000, through advertising and future subscriptions to the three thousand members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and friends. When the young editor hesitated, Schlamm was adamant that the magazine go ahead. “Willi’s point,” Buckley recalled, “was that if you get twenty-five thousand readers, your subscribers won’t let you die, and that proved almost exactly accurate.”18
The thirty-page first issue of Buckley’s magazine, christened National Review, appeared in November 1955, looking, with its blue-bordered front cover, much like the pre-1953 Freeman. But the new journal was not a replica of the Freeman or any other previous conservative publication; its mission was not just “to renew the attack against the Left” but to consolidate and mobilize the Right.19 National Review was not a journal of opinion but a political act.
Not that the magazine’s, or Buckley’s, political judgment was infallible. The first issue featured a cover article on foreign policy by Senator Knowland, who, the editors suggested, ought to challenge Vice President Richard Nixon in 1956. The suggestion was unrealistic: Nixon was the solid favorite of regular Taft Republicans who appreciated the vice president’s courting of the Right and his anticommunist credentials. As Human Events put it, conservatives might prefer Knowland, but they would “rally” behind Nixon because he drove New Dealers “berserk.”20 This sentiment would help Nixon in future crises too.
Buckley’s success in welding a broad-based intellectual coalition was impressive. On National Review’s masthead and among its writers were traditionalists Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, libertarians John Chamberlain and Frank Chodorov, and anticommunists James Burnham and Frank Meyer. From the first, the magazine identified the number one enemy as liberalism, with which there could be no accommodation. In their statement of beliefs, the editors declared themselves to be “irrevocably” at war with “satanic” communism; described the central crisis of the era as the conflict between the “Social Engineers” and the “disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order”; and joined with the “libertarian side” in the battle against “the growth of government.”21
In the first issue, Buckley averred that conservatives lived, as did all other Americans, in “a Liberal world” and therefore were “out of place.” National Review intended to stand “athwart history yelling Stop,” confident that “a vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion” could make a critical difference in the realms of ideas and politics.22
Although circulation remained small (fewer than twenty thousand in its first three years, thirty thousand by 1960) and the magazine faced so many financial crises that it converted to a biweekly in 1958, National Review became, as Bill Buckley proudly claimed, the voice of American conservatism. The solution to the magazine’s perpetual financial deficit was frankly antilibertarian: an annual fund appeal to subscribers who generously made up the difference year after year. When asked why the magazine did not “sink or swim” according to free market principles, William Rusher (who became publisher in 1957) explained that National Review was not a commercial enterprise but a “journal of opinion” that combined the qualities of a church, a university, and a political party.23
Young activists who would found organizations like Young Americans for Freedom and the New York Conservative party and man the political barricades for Barry Goldwater in the 1960s and then Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s found in National Review “exactly the things I felt I believed,” in the words of Patrick J. Buchanan.24 Young conservatives were inspired by Buckley’s willingness to take on and best any liberal, in both the pages of his magazine and public debates on dozens of college campuses.
Future book publisher Jameson Campaigne, Jr., recalls that as a student at Williams College, Massachusetts, in 1960, he invited Bill Buckley to debate one of his deans before almost the entire college. After demolishing the dean during the formal debate, the still fresh Buckley took on most of the Williams faculty during the question-and-answer period. “Buckley performed like ‘Braveheart,’” says Campaigne, “lopping off the heads of one faculty lord and knight after another…. It was a devastating performance … an inspiration.” Campaigne reveals that he still receives letters from Williams graduates recalling that special evening.25
Human Events had been the most philosophically dependable and oftquoted conservative publication since its founding in 1944. Many of its writers now began writing for National Review, including Buckley himself, John Chamberlain, William Henry Chamberlin, M. Stanton Evans, and James J. Kilpatrick, and the new magazine quickly superseded its elder in intellectual influence. There was one journalistic area, however, in which Human Events was always superior: coverage of Washington politics. Under its new Capitol Hill editor, Allan Ryskind, the weekly became must reading for members of Congress.
It also responded to National Review’s intellectual dominance by expanding the space devoted to conservative movement activity. The new activist emphasis was shaped by James L. Wick, a political author and longtime Republican who in mid-1955 became the executive publisher of Human Events. In 1956, the weekly began using the ratings of the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education (COPE) to rank members of Congress on the basis of their votes on issues. Among the senators who received a zero from COPE and therefore scored 100 percent “conservative” were Republicans Barry Goldwater, Joe McCarthy, Bill Knowland, and Everett Dirksen, and Democrat Harry Byrd.26
In the spring of 1963, seeking to expand the publication’s influence, Wick converted Human Events from a newsletter to a weekly tabloid newspaper. Two years earlier, Human Events had begun sponsoring political action conferences in Washington, D.C. The major speakers at the first conference in January 1961 were Senators Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond, then still a Democrat. Several hundred enthusiastic conservatives from across the country paid their own way to the meeting, which was intended to “rally those who believe in limited constitutional government, states’ rights, private enterprise, and individual freedom.”27
The Human Events meetings were the model for the movement-building Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPACs) of the 1970s and 1980s, cosponsored by the American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, National Review, and Human Events. CPAC became the single most important conservative event of the year, affording leaders and workers the opportunity to take the measure of each other and the movement. When President Reagan addressed a CPAC banquet in the 1980s, as many as two thousand conservative activists turned out to salute him.
When Barry Goldwater took to the Senate floor on the afternoon of April 8, 1957, he knew he was crossing a political Rubicon. During his first four years as a U.S. senator, he had been a loyal Republican, voting with President Eisenhower almost all of the time and rarely breaking with the party on issues important to the White House. He had been an effective chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, raising several million dollars and supporting all Republicans, regardless of their ideology.
But he had been taught that a man should keep his word. And he remembered that in October 1952, presidential candidate Eisenhower had promised to eliminate the federal deficit and lower federal expenditures to $60 billion by fiscal 1955. Goldwater also remembered what Bob Taft had said: “If you permit appeals to unity to bring an end to criticism, we endanger not only the constitutional liberties of our country, but even its future existence.”28
The Eisenhower administration, in the view of the junior senator from Arizona, warranted serious criticism: it had posted deficits in 1954 and 1955, although it did manage to balance the budget in 1956, an election year. Now Ike had sent to Congress a $71.8 billion budget for fiscal 1957, the largest ever submitted by any president in peacetime.
Nor had modern Republicanism delivered the political goods. Although Eisenhower handily won reelection in 1956, receiving 57.4 percent of the popular vote and 457 electoral votes to Adlai Stevenson’s 73, Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress. As Human Events put it, in just a decade, liberal Republicans “had changed a substantial GOP majority into a commanding lead for the Democrats.”29 Someone had to take the president and his decisions to task.
Goldwater explained to his Senate colleagues that just as he had campaigned “against waste, extravagance, high taxes, unbalanced budgets, and deficit spending” under a Democratic administration, so he would battle against “the same elements of fiscal irresponsibility in this Republican administration.” His criticism, Goldwater made clear, was directed not at the president, but at the policies of his administration that he felt were inconsistent with traditional Republican principles. He would stand or fall on his conservative position when he ran for reelection, adding that if he did not survive 1958, “it will not be because [I have] broken faith with either the American people or the principles of the Republican party in this almost frenzied rush to give away the resources and freedoms of America.”30
At a presidential news conference two days later, when Eisenhower was asked to comment on Goldwater’s characterization of his budget as a “betrayal” of public trust, he responded, “Of course these people have a right to their own opinion.” American politics “is a history of the clash of ideas.” But, he added, “In this day and time we cannot … limit ourselves to the governmental processes that were applicable in 1890”—a none-too-subtle variation of Harry Truman’s sarcastic line that Robert Taft was a nineteenth-century mossback.
The president said he believed “profoundly” that the programs he had proposed were “necessary for the country,” and there was “no chance of reversing them.” He added a few conciliatory words, but there was no mistaking his meaning: big government was here to stay, and it was up to “modern” Republicans to demonstrate they could manage government better than the Democrats.31 Ike could not have waved a larger red flag at conservatives.
Goldwater and other traditional Republicans from the Midwest and the West were determined to resist the policies of the modern “Me-Too” Republicans: those who trailed in the wake of Democrats as they promised more and fatter giveaways, yelling at the top of their lungs, “Me too, me too!”32
It was a measure of Goldwater’s growing importance as a Republican leader as well as the spreading influence of the conservative movement that Goldwater’s critical remarks sparked strong reaction both within and outside the nation’s capital. Newspapers blared that Goldwater, who had just finished a highly praised term as chairman of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, had “broken” with the president. Taftites and McCarthyites noted that the Arizona senator did not hesitate to stand up for his beliefs. Conservatives needed a leader, wanted a leader, and demanded a leader. And so they wondered, Could Goldwater do what none of their earlier champions had been able to accomplish: capture the presidential nomination and then the White House?
Conservative frustration with Eisenhower and his modern brand of Republicanism manifested itself in different ways, including the formation of the John Birch Society in 1958 by Robert Welch, a soft-spoken but autocratic Massachusetts businessman. The society took its name from John Birch, a Protestant missionary to China who had served in the U.S. Army in the Far East during World War II and had been murdered by the Chinese communists in 1945. Society members liked to say that Captain Birch was “the first casualty” of the cold war. From its beginnings, the John Birch Society specialized in shock tactics, with such slogans as “Impeach Earl Warren” and “Get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.”
An indifferent public speaker but mesmerizing in small, private meetings, Welch subscribed to the conspiracy theory of history and argued that a small but powerful group of bankers, industrialists, publishers, and politicians was responsible for the spread of collectivism in the twentieth century. The conspiracy was everywhere and had ensnared the most unlikely people. Sometimes Robert Welch made Joe McCarthy sound almost like a Harvard professor. In his book, The Politician, for example, Welch asserted that President Eisenhower was either “a mere stooge” for the communist cause or “has been consciously serving the communist conspiracy for all of his adult life.”33
As Russell Kirk wisecracked, “Ike’s not a communist—he’s a golfer!”34 But Welch persisted in his extremism. Indeed, it was the key to his success; it provided a ready explanation to angry, frustrated conservatives as to why America had lost China, why it had not pursued victory in the Korean War, how Alger Hiss had risen so high in government, why Castro was able to seize power in Cuba, and why government continued to grow and taxes to rise.
While not agreeing with all of Welch’s conclusions (particularly his charge that the man in the White House was a communist and therefore a traitor), Americans by the tens of thousands joined the society, forming local chapters, opening bookstores, and working “in the political arena on behalf of candidates deemed worthy of their support,” recounted William Rusher.35 So seductive was Welch’s appeal that in 1962, Buckley and National Review were forced to read Welch publicly out of the conservative movement.
Before he formed the John Birch Society, Welch visited Goldwater in Phoenix and asked him to read The Politician. The senator told Welch that his notion about Ike’s being either a dupe or a conscious communist agent was inaccurate in the extreme and that the work would harm Welch and the anticommunist cause. “Welch never sought my advice again,” recalled Goldwater.36
Once the Birch Society was formed, Goldwater often disagreed with its statements but declined to condemn its members. The last thing conservatives needed when they were building a movement, he said, was “to begin a factional war by reading small minorities or individuals out of our ranks.”37
A more rational kind of political activity was being contemplated by Bill Buckley—in his words, “right-wing political action in New York State.” Meeting in New York City in late January 1957, Buckley, philanthropist Jeremiah Milbank, Jr., lawyer Thomas Bolan, and several other conservatives decided that “the time may have come to attempt to establish a counterpart to the Liberal Party in New York.”38 They believed that such an outside effort could move the Republican party to the right just as the Liberal party had moved the Democratic party to the left and kept it there over the years.
Rather than setting forth “ideological” positions on specific issues like public schools and segregation, argued Buckley and the others, “The Conservative Party” should represent “the right wing of the Republican Party, just as the Liberals represent the left wing of the Democratic Party.” Buckley and the others thought that Raymond Moley (a one-time Roosevelt brain-truster turned conservative columnist and author) “would make an excellent chairman of the Conservative Party.”39 It would take several years of discussion and planning, but these early meetings would lead to the founding of the New York Conservative party in 1962 by two young, dynamic lawyers—Dan Mahoney and Kieran O’Doherty.
A clear sign of emerging conservatism among younger Americans was the rousing tenth annual convention of the Young Republicans (YRs), held in Washington, D.C., in June 1957. Decisively rejecting modern Republicanism, the YRs adopted a platform that opposed federal aid to education, military aid to communist nations, United Nations membership for communist China, and compulsory union membership as a condition of employment (calling, in effect, for a national right-to-work law). Its favorite senator was Senate Republican leader William Knowland, who was commended for his “vigorous affirmation of the traditional foreign and domestic policies of the Republican Party.”40
When Professor Philip E. Jacobs of the University of Pennsylvania, author of Changing Values in College, was asked whether college students had “radical” political ideas, he replied, “Quite the opposite. This is a conservative generation…. They believe that the Government should have a very minimal role in running the economic life of the country.”41
The same year, Russell Kirk, with the financial help of publisher Henry Regnery, launched the quarterly journal Modern Age, which stressed the traditional rather than the libertarian or anticommunist strains of conservatism. Most of the editorial advisers held appointments in universities, and many were Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, or self-described “pre-Reformation Christians.”42 Modern Age’s circulation never rose above five thousand, but its contributors included such influential thinkers as southern agrarian Richard Weaver, economist Wilhelm Röpke, strategist Gerhart Niemeyer, and newspaper editor James J. Kilpatrick.
Meanwhile, Barry Goldwater’s attention was focused on Arizona politics. After one term in the Senate, he was generally described as personable, hardworking, and possessed of strong conservative convictions, and he was often praised for his willingness to attack sacred cows and popular presidents. But few Washington analysts were predicting that this Republican maverick would be reelected from a solidly Democratic state, particularly when he again faced Ernest McFarland, whom he had narrowly defeated in 1952 and who had been a popular governor for the last four years.
But Goldwater had more going for him than the eastern experts realized, for the Arizona Republican party had become a significant political force. Young men and women were attracted by the senator’s conservative beliefs and personal charisma. Goldwater’s campaign was well financed with donations coming from across the country. The candidate campaigned nonstop, visiting every corner of the state in a twin-engine Beech Bonanza, which he personally piloted. Night and day, he was on television and radio, campaigning the only way he knew how: “Meet the people, tell them how you stand, answer their questions directly. They may not like what you say, but they’ll respect you for it. That’s what Americans want,” he insisted, “somebody that speaks up.”43
Here was Barry Goldwater, a candidate who would not change his style of campaigning or his beliefs for any man or any office. When all the votes were in, Goldwater had carried eleven of the state’s fourteen counties, including the two largest. The final tally showed a decisive 56 to 44 percent victory, making the senator one of the few prominent Republicans to win reelection easily that November.
His impressive showing in a tough year for Republicans (among those who lost was Bill Knowland, who failed in his bid to gain the California governorship and vanished as a national conservative leader) and his willingness to confront President Eisenhower over deviations from conservative principle made Barry Goldwater, two months before his fiftieth birthday, the leading conservative politician in America. Looking ahead to the 1960 Republican National Convention, some conservatives wondered whether he would challenge Vice President Nixon, almost certain to be the nominee.
In May 1959, Clarence Manion, moderator of the popular weekly radio program The Manion Forum, and one of the most respected conservatives in the country, called on Goldwater in his Washington office. With him was Hubbard Russell, an old California friend of the senator. They wanted to discuss the formation of a national Goldwater for President organization.
Manion argued that the nomination of either Nixon or Rockefeller would not only lead to defeat in 1960, but would also “shatter the last chance of survival of the Republican Party.” The senator repeated his public position that he supported Nixon over Rockefeller but admitted that he was disappointed over the vice president’s recent endorsement of the World Court, which Goldwater regarded as a threat to U.S. sovereignty.44
Goldwater revealed he had been approached about the presidency by several southerners, including Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had run for the presidency as a Dixiecrat in 1948. But Goldwater argued that he had drawbacks, like his name (the senator’s forebears had been Jewish, though he had been raised as an Episcopalian), and he felt unqualified for the presidency because of his meager education—about which Manion later wrote in the margin of a confidential memorandum about the meeting, “This may be asset.” Undeterred by his objections, the two visitors asked Goldwater not to block their efforts, and Manion noted, “He assured us that he would not at any time repudiate the move.”45
Manion was elated: the plan to nominate a true conservative as the Republican party’s presidential nominee in 1960 had taken a giant step forward. He immediately began writing prominent conservatives, asking them to join a Committee of One Hundred to draft Barry Goldwater for the GOP nomination. Manion argued, “I honestly believe that [Goldwater’s] nomination for president by the Republican Party is the one thing that will prevent the complete disintegration of that party once and for all in the 1960 election.”46
The committee’s composition was eclectic, including business leader Herbert Kohler of Wisconsin; Colonel Archibald Roosevelt of New York (a member of the Theodore rather than the Franklin branch of the Roosevelts); businessman Fred Koch of Kansas; former ambassador to Cuba Spruille Braden; Roger Milliken, the South Carolina industrialist who was National Review’s top financial supporter; and John Birch Society founder Robert Welch. What they had in common was an unshakable belief in God, country, and capitalism.
To help advance the cause, Manion mentioned the possibility of Goldwater’s writing a pamphlet, What Americanism Means to Me. Frank Brophy, a longtime Goldwater friend and adviser, suggested Brent Bozell, who was already writing speeches for the senator, as a collaborator. Manion’s proposed Americanism pamphlet would become the most widely read political manifesto of modern American politics.
Although Manion tried to keep the Committee of One Hundred confidential, Human Events led off its July 1, 1959, issue with an item entitled “Goldwater to the Fore,” which reported that Republican professionals were giving serious thought to a Goldwater candidacy. The arguments for the senator included his “smashing” victory the previous fall, his stand on organized labor, and his western heritage, which meant he carried “no taint of New York or Tom Dewey.”
GOP pros were impressed, reported Human Events, with Goldwater’s easy charm and ability to arouse enthusiasm among average citizens. Conceding that the nomination of a candidate from a small state with a limited number of delegates was unprecedented, Human Events pointed out that in a time of “political flux and the crumbling of party traditions,” precedents could well be broken.47 There was no similar item about Goldwater’s rising political fortunes in National Review.
In December 1959, Bozell flew to Phoenix to show the completed manuscript of The Conscience of a Conservative (a title suggested by Manion) to Goldwater. The senator, who had seen earlier drafts, read quickly the two-hundred-page manuscript, and then handed it back to his ghostwriter, saying, “Looks fine to me. Let’s go with it.”48
So casually, Goldwater approved a book that would establish him as the leader and the conscience of a political movement. Had he known how the book would change his life, he might have hesitated. But that would not have been Barry Goldwater. However seriously others might take the book, to him The Conscience of a Conservative was an “unpretentious introduction to conservative thought.”49 And if there was a high cost to its authorship, so be it. He liked to quote his uncle Morris, who believed that successful people had a moral duty to repay the community that had helped them.50
Bozell would have finished the manuscript sooner but was heavily involved in organizing a series of anticommunist demonstrations against the visit of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to the United States. A highlight was a rally at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, where Bill Buckley defiantly promised, “In the end, we will bury him.”51
Goldwater and Bozell were unlikely literary collaborators: the easy-going westerner and the high-strung midwesterner; the college dropout and the Yale law graduate; the principled politician and the activist intellectual. But they shared a belief that small government is good government. The Constitution was their cornerstone, and they regarded communism as an enemy that had to be defeated. Their book was suffused with a fervor common to all crusades, and there was no denying that American conservatism was a political crusade in 1960.
Like National Review before it, The Conscience of a Conservative was a skillful fusion of the three major strains of conservatism: traditionalism, classical liberalism or libertarianism, and anticommunism. It presented unequivocal positions on a wide range of issues, from foreign aid to organized labor to education, while always reflecting the need for freedom and responsibility. It called for “the prompt and final termination of the farm subsidy program,” the enactment of state right-to-work laws, and a flat tax, declaring that “government has a right to claim an equal percentage of each man’s wealth, and no more.” And it recommended that federal spending on domestic programs be reduced by 10 percent each year.52
The final third of the manifesto was devoted to the cold war. America’s objective, insisted Goldwater, himself an officer in the air force reserve, “is not to wage a struggle against communism, but to win it.”53 His multifaceted strategy included the maintenance of defense alliances like NATO, the elimination of economic foreign aid, unquestioned military superiority over the Soviet Union, and a drastic reduction in support for the United Nations. In anticipation of the Reagan Doctrine of the 1980s, he urged the U.S. government to recognize that “the captive peoples are our friends and potential allies” and encourage them “to overthrow their captors.”54
When The Conscience of a Conservative was published in April 1960, it was a political sensation, creating a new national spokesman and proclaiming a major new force in national politics: conservatism. In the Chicago Tribune, George Morgenstern declared that there was “more harsh fact and hard sense in this slight book than will emerge from all of the chatter of this year’s session of Congress [and] this year’s campaign for the presidency.” Time wrote that The Conscience of a Conservative served notice that “the Old Guard has new blood, that a hard-working, successful politico has put his stand on the right of the road and intends to shout for all he is worth.” And veteran columnist Westbrook Pegler asserted perceptively that “Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona certainly is now the successor to Senator Taft of Ohio as defender of the Constitution and freedom.”55
Although most political analysts assert that party platforms are meaningless, both Democrats and Republicans devote significant time and attention every four years to writing one. The platform is particularly important to conservative Republicans because they believe that its rhetoric can determine nominations and elections.
It happened that in 1960, liberal Republicans agreed. Their champion, New York governor Nelson Rockfeller, was demanding bold new policies in such areas as care for the aged, civil rights, foreign affairs, and, most of all, national defense. Echoing Senator John F. Kennedy and the Democrats, Rockefeller declared that America faced a missile gap and urged that at least an additional $3 billion be spent on the construction of missile bases. The governor was, in effect, suggesting the repudiation of the policies of a president who had brought Republicans a national victory eight years before.
Thus, a fierce battle was joined once again between liberals and conservatives. The man in the middle was Nixon, who needed the backing of both groups—not to win the nomination (despite the Goldwater boomlet, nearly everyone was agreed that the vice president would be nominated), but to win the general election. Goldwater made it clear where he stood: as critical as he had been of the administration, he rejected Rockefeller’s unqualified criticism and his big-government solutions. And he knew from his military contacts and sources that there was no “missile gap”: the United States was far ahead of the Soviet Union in the development and delivery of missiles.56
While the Republican platform committee went about its business in Chicago, Nixon met secretly with Rockefeller in the governor’s Fifth Avenue apartment to resolve their differences. If Rockefeller had gone to Washington to see Nixon, most Republicans would have approved a Nixon-Rockefeller meeting. But when Nixon went kowtowing to Rockefeller, most Republicans were shocked. Conservatives were furious. As Phyllis Schlafly wrote, “Nixon had paid the price that Taft had been unwilling to pay … his independence…. Rank and file Republicans knew that this forbode a turn toward the same ‘liberal me-tooism’ which had twice defeated Dewey.”57
Goldwater felt betrayed. That spring, as chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, he had called on the vice president. Goldwater told Nixon bluntly that “a number of people I’ve talked with are disappointed with your failure to take a strong stand on some conservative issues—federal spending, a balanced budget, the growing bureaucracy.” Nixon quickly explained that he had remained silent because whatever he said would have been interpreted as criticism of the administration. He assured Goldwater that before long, he would demand a reduction in spending, a balanced budget, and a halt to bureaucratic growth.58
The two men then took up the question of the platform committee, which Nixon knew was important to Goldwater. As he did throughout his career, Nixon told his visitor what he thought his visitor wanted to hear: “Rockefeller wants to talk to me [about the platform]. I am treating him very politely, but, I promise, I’m not going to visit with him until after the convention.”59
That was good enough for Goldwater. The vice president of the United States, his party’s future presidential nominee, had promised that he would take a conservative position on key issues like spending and national defense and would not meet with Rockefeller until after he had been nominated.
Now, four months later, a coldly furious Goldwater called the Nixon-Rockefeller meeting “an American Munich” and a “surrender.” He insisted that the party’s platform should not be “dictated” by two men a thousand miles away.60 Goldwater suddenly found himself at the center of a Republican rebellion. Because he dared to speak out when others were silent, he became the conscience of a convention.
Amid the political turmoil surrounding the “American Munich,” the Texas delegation that had come to Chicago pledged to Nixon began rethinking their commitment and invited Goldwater to address them. Arizona began taking its favorite son candidate more seriously as delegates from several different states in the South and the West demanded to be released from their pledge to Nixon. A group of Young Republicans, led by an energetic young conservative named Robert Croll, staged a lively street parade, carrying signs that read, “Youth for Goldwater for Vice President.”61
Clarence Manion and other members of the Committee of One Hundred opened an Americans for Goldwater office in downtown Chicago and lent logistical support to Croll and others. Goldwater’s suite in the Blackstone Hotel was jammed with enthusiastic friends and frustrated delegates who urged the senator to “get in there and fight.” They argued that he could count on the support of 287 delegates—nowhere close to the 666 needed to win the nomination, but far more than enough to show that conservatives were a force that could not be ignored.
Goldwater, like his one-time mentor Bob Taft, could count. He estimated that including the twenty-seven from Arizona and South Carolina, he had perhaps fifty solid delegates and no more. But fervent supporters kept pressuring him so hard that finally he said: “All right, you go out and get those delegates you say are willing to vote for me. I’ll sit in this room all night. You bring them in. I want them to sign a paper saying they’ll vote for me.” Then, he said, we will see what can be done. Goldwater sat patiently, and skeptically, in his hotel suite hour after hour “and not a damned delegate came in.”62 He would never forget that long, fruitless wait.
Despite the lack of a groundswell and despite the fact that the Nixon forces controlled the convention, the South Carolina delegation nevertheless insisted on placing Barry Goldwater’s name in nomination. Goldwater opposed such a move, arguing that although it would not affect the outcome, it could hurt his supporters. It was Jay Gordon Hall, the Washington lobbyist for General Motors and sometime speechwriter and adviser to Goldwater, who suggested a way out. He proposed that Arizona nominate Goldwater as a favorite son. After some seconding speeches, Goldwater would take the podium, withdraw his name, and urge all delegates supporting him to vote for Nixon. The nomination would please conservatives, and the withdrawal would satisfy Nixonites.
Goldwater promptly endorsed the idea, pointing out that if everyone handled his part skillfully, “we might unite the party,” always a high priority for him, as it had been for Taft. Hall began drafting the senator’s speech.63
After Nixon was nominated with the usual “spontaneous” fanfare, Governor Paul Fannin of Arizona stepped forward and asked Republicans to pick Goldwater “as the voice of conscience speaking for the conservatives of the nation.”64 Pandemonium broke out as the banners of Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Washington, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Puerto Rico filled the aisles, proclaiming that Goldwater was the favorite of the South and the West and sending shivers down the spines of eastern liberals.
Delegates tooted horns, whistled, and shouted while the band played “Dixie.” At last, the silver-haired conservative signaled for quiet and said, “Mr. Chairman, delegates to the convention, and fellow Republicans, I respectfully ask the chairman to withdraw my name from nomination.” A cry of “No!” rose from the floor and was echoed by the galleries, “No! No! No!”65
That cry was filled with the bitter memories of Taft, Dewey, and Eisenhower, of narrow defeats and public humiliations at previous conventions. It signaled the ongoing struggle between liberal kingmakers and conservative activists for control of the Republican party.
But at this convention, the liberal establishment had the votes, and Goldwater was no kamikaze conservative. He continued, “Please. I release my delegates from their pledge to me, and while I am not a delegate, I would suggest they give these votes to Richard Nixon.” The few shouts of “No!” were drowned out by the roar of Nixon supporters.66 Knowing that many thought he had let them down, Goldwater talked directly to the true believers who had placed his name in nomination: “We are conservatives. This great Republican party is our historical house. This is our home.”67
Goldwater then laid it on the line to conservatives: Either support the Republican party or let the socialists run the country. Echoing Taft, who had stayed with the party in 1952 despite his deep disappointment over losing to Eisenhower, Goldwater warned what would happen if conservatives walked out of the GOP, as many were threatening to do. “If each segment, each section of our great party,” he said, “were to insist on the complete and unqualified acceptance of its views, if each viewpoint were to be enforced by a Russian-type veto, the Republican Party could not long survive.”68
He concluded with the words that completed the transformation of a junior senator from Arizona into the leader of the American conservative movement:
This country, and its majesty, is too great for any man, be he conservative or liberal, to stay home and not work just because he doesn’t agree. Let’s grow up, Conservatives! We want to take this party back, and I think some day we can. Let’s get to work!69
Some ultraconservatives refused. Commentator Dan Smoot accused Goldwater of “betraying” conservatism and advancing “the socialist-communist cause” when he endorsed Nixon. Goldwater later commented, “I didn’t realize until later there were some conservatives you can never satisfy.”70 Robert Taft had encountered the same cold dismissal from hard-core conservatives when, as Senate majority leader, he accommodated the Eisenhower administration on the Bohlen nomination and other early actions.
The debate within the Republican party also manifested itself in the editorial offices of National Review. In May, two months before the Republican convention, senior editor Frank Meyer stressed the sharp difference between the “steady growth of conservative influence on the intellectual level” and the “debacle on the political level.” Eight years of a liberal Republican in the White House, he said, had “immensely weakened” the conservative opposition in Congress and the states. Meyer argued that it was therefore the responsibility of conservative leadership, led by National Review, to develop and maintain “an independent position” and not endorse Nixon.71
Instead, Meyer stated, the magazine should support the nomination of Barry Goldwater, whose emergence as a “principled conservative” gave the conservative movement a powerful “public symbol.” Conceding that Goldwater’s nomination was improbable, he counseled that in the fall, the magazine could then criticize Nixon and Kennedy on “the basis of the [conservative] standard” that had been established before the conventions.72
Bill Rusher argued that conservatives should “oppose Nixon” as a means of “recapturing the Republican Party,” seeing opposition as “the first step in breaking away from the Republican Party altogether—toward a third party, to be formed when the moment is ripe.” “A vote for Nixon,” Rusher added, “merely enhances the power and prestige of the present [liberal] management of the Republican Party.”73
On the endorse-Nixon side were senior editor James Burnham and managing editor Priscilla Buckley. A conservative, argued Burnham, “has to set his course within the frame of reality.” And the reality was that those supporting Kennedy were National Review’s “primary targets,” including leftist ideologues, appeasers and collaborationists, socialists, fellow travelers, and communists. The only meaningful way to declare against them in the election was to “vote for Nixon.” Any “dodge,” said Burnham, would be “a mistake, counter to NR’s best interests, and perhaps injurious to its future.” Priscilla Buckley admitted that although Nixon was “hardly the champion we would choose,” he and his advisers were “less apt to play the appeasement game than Kennedy and his advisers.”74 How prophetic were her words when one considers President Kennedy’s future inaction with regard to Cuba, Laos, the Berlin Wall, and Vietnam.
Bill Buckley responded that although Burnham’s arguments were “compelling,” Rusher had made “a very good case” that National Review would increase its leverage “by failing to join the parade.” Nor did he see how, after five years’ sharp critiques of the Eisenhower administration, the magazine could “declare” for Nixon, even “with reservations.” He hoped to satisfy Burnham, and Rusher, with a “very diligent disparagement of Kennedy.”75
In the end, Buckley announced in an editorial that the magazine would neither endorse a candidate nor recommend abstention. He listed the major arguments for each man and then concluded, rather wanly, that “National Review was not founded to make practical politics. Our job is to think, and write.”76
In contrast, Human Events endorsed Nixon early and often, publishing, for example, a major article by Goldwater, who argued that conservatives should support Nixon because he was the most “dedicated anti-Communist” on the Eisenhower team and would prove to be “equally sound on domestic issues.” In this hour of “Armageddon,” said Goldwater, there was “no alternative to Nixon” for conservatives, whether they were Taft Republicans or Jeffersonian Democrats.77
As important as the presidency was, it was not all. Conservatives were intent on building a national political movement that would last regardless of who sat in the White House. And there were signs everywhere that America was swinging away from the welfarist ideas that had dominated the country for a generation.
There was, for example, the best-seller status of Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, with 400,000 paperback copies in circulation in addition to the original 100,000 hardback copies. The New York publisher of the paperback called the slim Goldwater volume “the biggest political book of my time.”78 There was the continuing success of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, which had grown from a mailing list of four hundred students in 1953 to twelve thousand in 1960, including professors.
There was the 1958 launching of Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA) by Admiral Ben Moreell, a World War II naval hero and past chairman of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. ACA’s trustees included the former presidents of the American Bar Association, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Medical Association, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce.
Herbert Hoover had at first declined Admiral Moreell’s invitation to join the ACA board because he was too busy trying to raise funds for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. But he joined the board in the spring of 1960 after “all the liberal foundations” had turned him down, the Stanford faculty had proclaimed him a “reactionary,” and he had still managed to raise $1.25 million for his institution from “righteous foundations.” If Moreell still wanted him, said Hoover, “you can add my name to your collection of reactionaries!”79
That May, ACA released its “ACA Index,” the first analysis of votes by members of Congress ever compiled by a conservative organization. Until then, conservatives had usually reversed the ratings of the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education and similar liberal groups, giving a rating of 100 percent to those whom the liberals rated 0 and a rating of 0 to those whom the liberals rated 100 percent. The ACA Index was rightly called a “monumental” effort, because it tabulated and evaluated all the major votes in the Senate from 1955 through 1959 and in the House from 1957 through 1959.
There was no mistaking the sharp differences between the two political parties. Of the 277 Democrats in the House, 200 voted less than 30 percent of the time for “the constitutional principles” embodied in the ACA Index. In contrast, thirteen House Republicans earned a 100 percent rating. Although there were no 100 percent senators, John Williams of Delaware received a 99 percent rating, followed closely by Barry Goldwater (98 percent) and John Marshall Butler of Maryland (93 percent). Harry Byrd was the top Democrat with 92 percent.80
All the ingredients of a national political movement were coming together: a charismatic political leader, Barry Goldwater; widely known popularizers both young (Bill Buckley) and old (George Sokolsky); thinkers like Hayek, Kirk, and Milton Friedman in their intellectual prime; and two influential journals of opinion—National Review and Human Events.
Movement leaders decided that next on the agenda was an organization of energetic young activists who would serve as the ground troops of conservatism. In the fall of 1960, some eighty young conservatives founded Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), with a little help from older Americans for freedom like Bill Buckley, Bill Rusher, and Marvin Liebman. In fact, the young organizers met under the great elm of the Buckley estate in Sharon, Connecticut.
The political action group’s beginnings lay in the Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath, created by David Franke and Douglas Caddy in 1958, when both were college students in Washington, D.C. The National Defense Education Act contained a provision that a student had to sign an affidavit stating that he was not a member of any subversive organization and was loyal to the U.S. government from which he was seeking a grant for his higher education. This reasonable stipulation did not sit well with the American Civil Liberties Union and similar groups, and a campaign was launched among liberal-left students to eliminate the provision. The New York Times and other establishment publications took up the cry in the name of free speech and civil liberties. Undaunted, Caddy and Franke organized a counter-offensive.
The Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath established campus chapters, collected petitions, testified before congressional committees, wrote articles, distributed literature, and stirred up conservative students. It was the first major manifestation of what author M. Stanton Evans described as a conservative “revolt on the campus.”81
At Sharon, the young conservatives named themselves Young Americans for Freedom and elected officers, including their first president, the brilliant and irreverent Robert M. Schuchman of Yale, a Jew. Douglas Caddy, a Catholic graduate of Georgetown University, was named executive director. Such ethnic diversity frustrated the attempts of liberals to dismiss YAF as a WASP group. The young conservatives also adopted the magisterial Sharon Statement, drafted by Stan Evans, which affirmed certain eternal truths at “this time of moral and political crisis”:
That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;
That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;
That the purposes of government are to protect these freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice….
That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government….
That the forces of international communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;
That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace.82
These are the central themes that have been at the core of modern American conservatism for the past fifty years: Free will and moral authority come from God; political and economic liberty are essential for the preservation of free people and free institutions; government must be strictly and constitutionally limited; the market economy is the system most compatible with freedom; and communism must be defeated, not simply contained.
With this philosophical foundation, YAF members went on to serve the conservative movement throughout the 1960s, providing the National Draft Goldwater Committee with critical manpower in a dozen states; challenging the liberal agenda of the National Student Association on a hundred college campuses; supporting American servicemen in Vietnam through “bleedins” (blood donations), debates, and symposia; and picketing the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company when it tried to build a synthetic rubber plant in communist Rumania.
The Kennedy-Nixon presidential race was one of the closest in American politics; Kennedy won by barely 114,000 votes out of more than 68 million votes cast. His electoral margin was respectable, 303 to 219, but depended on razor-thin victories in Illinois and Texas. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley delivered the Democratic vote (living and dead) in Cook County while yellow-dog Democrats provided the margin in the Lone Star State. Despite the loss at the top of the ticket, Republicans were heartened by the gain of twenty-two seats in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate, including such future conservative leaders as Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio and Senator Peter Dominick of Colorado.
Goldwater, a Republican loyalist like Robert Taft, did not share the satisfaction of some conservatives over Nixon’s defeat, although that did not stop him from criticizing the vice president’s campaign. He argued that Nixon and his patrician running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, failed to give the voters a “clear-cut choice.” They did not challenge “the legitimacy of the expanding federal establishment.” They lost, in short, “because [they] were not Republican enough.”83
If he ever ran for president, Goldwater vowed, he would not repeat Nixon’s mistakes but would campaign as a traditional Republican and conservative without apology. He quickly added that he had no intention of seeking the presidency; he was content to be a U.S. senator. As he told Time when asked about the 1964 presidential race, “I have no staff for it, no program for it, and no ambition for it.”84