The Reluctant Champion
FOR CONSERVATIVES, THE SIXTIES WAS THE DECADE NOT OF JOHN F. Kennedy but of Barry Goldwater. Early in the decade, conservatives believed they had found their champion in Goldwater, a true son of the West, where freedom and independence were not simply words but beliefs worth fighting and even dying for. They admired Goldwater’s insistence on speaking his mind, regardless of the consequences. They loved his unflinching loyalty to family, friends, and country. And they thought he could go all the way to the White House.
He was certainly doing all the right things to win the presidential nomination. He had twice served as chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, helping dozens of candidates and raising millions of dollars across the country. He was a prominent member of the powerful Senate “Rackets” Committee (chaired by John McClellan of Arkansas) that exposed the illegal activities of power-hungry labor bosses like Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters Union and the wrongdoing of the United Auto Workers against the Kohler Company of Wisconsin. He became a good friend of William J. Baroody, Sr., president of the prestigious American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and was able to draw on AEI’s considerable public policy resources. Along the way, he collaborated with a gifted writer, L. Brent Bozell, to produce a best-selling conservative manifesto. And he challenged Vice President Nixon for his party’s nomination and transformed himself into a major contender at the next GOP convention.
But none of this was calculated. Barry Goldwater was not engaged in some grand political design but, in each instance, was simply responding to someone else’s suggestion or invitation. He was truly a man without ambition for the highest office in the land, but the cumulative effect of all these acts was to make him the leading conservative politician in America and a strong possibility to become president.
Three young but politically experienced conservatives recognized Goldwater’s enormous potential and created “the first authentic presidential nomination draft in the history of American political parties.”1 The three—close friends and all former leaders of the Young Republicans—were William A. Rusher, the strategist, who had served in World War II and then graduated from Harvard Law School before becoming a kingmaker (and breaker) in both the Young Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom; F. Clifton White, the tactician, a tall, bow-tied professional politician from New York who had taught politics at Cornell and then worked in the presidential campaigns of Dewey, Eisenhower, and Nixon; and Congressman John M. Ashbrook of Ohio, the ideologue, who represented the same congressional district his father had and was a former chairman of the Young Republican National Federation.
In mid-July 1961, Rusher traveled to Washington to lunch with Ashbrook. Over coffee, Rusher remarked, “If we held a meeting of our old YR crowd today, I’ll bet it would be about the third largest faction in the Republican party.” Ashbrook quickly agreed, and back in his congressional office displayed the folders of correspondence from across the country that he had accumulated since retiring as YR chairman two years before. The names constituted a national network of one-time YRs who had assumed leadership roles in the party. Rusher was confident that if they were invited to help draft Goldwater for the 1964 Republican nomination, “these old friends of ours would be overjoyed at the chance to work together again.”2
Back in New York City, Rusher took Clif White to lunch and suggested that the time was ripe for a conservative takeover of the GOP. White revealed that he too had been thinking about the Republican party’s future and mentioned his thick files of Young Republicans and other party contacts. They discussed merging the Ashbrook-White material and creating a national organization dedicated “to the nomination of a conservative candidate, or at the very least the drafting of a conservative platform, at the 1964 convention.”3
Almost exactly three years later—after many months of careful grassroots organizing, the raising of several million dollars (much of it through five- and ten-dollar contributions), the careful cultivation of key reporters, editors, and columnists, the shocking assassination of a sitting president, the losing and winning of key primaries from New Hampshire to California—Barry Goldwater became, however reluctantly, the first true conservative since 1924 to be nominated for president by a major party.4
Goldwater was reluctant because he wanted to remain in the Senate where he was comfortable and effective, because he had real doubts about his intellectual ability to be president (he once told a reporter he did not have “a really first-class brain”), and because all the polls showed him losing to President John F. Kennedy (and later to Lyndon B. Johnson).5 But he nevertheless accepted the presidential nomination because he wanted to pay back the country that had given him so much, and he was willing to raise high the bright standard of conservatism in 1964.
The process of drafting Goldwater began in October 1961 when some twenty well-connected, conservative Republicans (calling themselves the “hard core”) met in Chicago to discuss how they might translate the political passion the senator from Arizona aroused among Republicans into a majority of delegates on the first ballot at the next national convention. White warned that those who had controlled the Republican party for more than two decades, turning back every conservative challenge, “would fight us tooth and nail every inch of the way once they discovered what we were up to.”6
At a larger meeting in December, a strategy and a budget were adopted. No state, White emphasized, would be overlooked or written off. As Rusher wrote, “We knew that there were conservatives, and therefore potential allies, in the Republican organization of even the most liberal states.”7 While they hoped and expected to gain the support of southern voters, White, Rusher, and the other organizers intended to appeal strongly to voters in the Southwest, the Mountain West, and California. “We could already sense the shifting demographics and politics of these regions,” a shift that Kevin Phillips would document seven years later in The Emerging Republican Majority.8
From the winter of 1961 until the fall of 1963, the indefatigable Clif White traveled more than a million miles on behalf of the Draft Goldwater effort, visiting old political friends, enlisting political neophytes, building an organization in every state and congressional district, and discovering that conservatives (thanks to youth groups like the Young Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom and women’s groups like the National Federation of Republican Women) had more political strength than anyone, particularly the media, realized.
Money was another matter. Rusher called the first half of 1962 the “Valley Forge” of the draft movement. The money that Roger Milliken (an original hard-core member) had raised was almost gone, and White was forced to telephone people rather than see them in person. He even dipped into the money he had saved for his son’s college education. By September, creditors had become so threatening that a discouraged White and his assistant Rita Bree told Rusher they “would have to fold the tent.”9 But Rusher rallied their spirits and persuaded them to continue for at least one more month.
They were rescued by Robert C. “Randy” Richardson, an heir to the Vicks chemical fortune, who agreed to share the rent of the offices, and by businessmen J. D. “Stets” Coleman and R. Crosby Kemper, who wrote generous checks. J. William Middendorf II and Jeremiah Milbank, Jr., prominent in New York investment circles and Connecticut politics, provided enough money to keep the operation going until after the November elections. Indeed, over the next two years, Middendorf and Milbank became so good at producing cash for the Goldwater campaign whenever it was needed that they were nicknamed “the Brinks Brothers.” Rarely has so much been accomplished politically with so little: in its first year of operations in 1962, the draft effort spent a little over $43,000—about what Nelson Rockefeller paid his top speechwriter.10
The conservative movement and those seeking to nominate Goldwater were heartened by the astonishing rally of Young Americans for Freedom in March 1962, when more than eighteen thousand enthusiastic conservatives overflowed New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Their unmistakable message to the eastern liberal establishment was that conservatism had come of political age.
When the hero of the night, Barry Goldwater, finally appeared, the crowd would not stop chanting “We want Barry!” Finally, an exasperated Goldwater yelled into the microphone, “Well, if you’ll shut up, you’ll get him!” In his prepared remarks, the senator predicted that a “wave of conservatism” would eventually triumph in America.11
While the politicians, led by Clif White, were busy building a national organization to gain the presidential nomination, the popularizers, led by National Review, were busily removing counterproductive elements from the movement. In December 1957, Whittaker Chambers had taken up arms against Ayn Rand, the neo-Nietzschean founder of objectivism, and her 1,168-page novel Atlas Shrugged. Writing in National Review, he declared that its story was preposterous, its characters crude caricatures, its message “dictatorial.” Although Rand insisted she was antistatist, argued Chambers, she called for a society run by a “technocratic elite.” “Out of a lifetime of reading,” he wrote, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained.”12
Russell Kirk called objectivism a false and detestable “inverted religion.” Frank Meyer accused Rand of “calculated cruelties” and the presentation of an “arid subhuman image of man.” Garry Wills, then a young classical scholar and favorite of Bill Buckley, called Rand a “fanatic” and said flatly that she was “not conservative.”13 Furious, Rand described National Review as “the worst and most dangerous magazine in America.”14
The casting out of Robert Welch and the extremist positions of the John Birch Society that he headed would prove more difficult but nonetheless necessary.
By mid-1961, it was clear that conservatism was becoming a significant presence in American politics. There were the best-sellerdom of The Conscience of a Conservative, the sharp rise in the polls of Barry Goldwater, the increased circulation of National Review and Human Events, Republican John Tower’s upset senatorial victory to fill Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat in Texas, the accelerating activities of Young Americans for Freedom, the possibility of a Conservative party in New York, and the aggressive presence of the John Birch Society in many parts of the nation (its membership of some sixty thousand was concentrated in California and Texas). Liberals had ignored the conservative upsurge but were now driven to denounce and try to bury it. Politicians, academics, columnists, clerics, and even humorists used their various skills, creating what Bill Buckley called “the echo-chamber effect.”15
They zeroed in on the conservative movement’s weakest link: the John Birch Society. President Kennedy delivered a major speech in the fall of 1961 in which he urged Americans to reject “fanatics” who found “treason” everywhere and did not trust the people. Although Kennedy did not name the “fanatics,” the New York Times helpfully did so in its front-page story about his speech, mentioning the John Birch Society and the paramilitary Minutemen.16
The echoes kept coming. Under the title “Thunder Against the Right,” Time revealed that the president’s speech was one that “Kennedy had long wanted to get off his chest.” Alan Barth, a prominent Washington Post editorial writer, wrote in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that members of the “radical right” tended to simplify all issues, believed in the conspiratorial theory of history, and distrusted “deeply” the democratic process and democratic institutions.17
Over the objections of Rusher, Frank Meyer, and new senior editor William Rickenbacker, Bill Buckley, supported by his sister Priscilla and James Burnham, wrote a historic editorial reading Robert Welch out of the conservative movement. Although Meyer and others argued that National Review should concentrate its fire on communists and liberals, not on other conservatives, Buckley was adamant.
Titled “The Question of Robert Welch,” the detailed, six-page editorial declared that Welch was “damaging the cause of anti-Communism.” It charged him with consistently failing to make the critical distinction between an “active pro-Communist” and an “ineffectually anti-Communist Liberal.” Welch’s annual scoreboard, published in the society’s American Opinion, described the United States of America as “50-70 percent Communist-controlled;” that is, said the editorial scornfully, “the government of the United States is under operational control of the Communist Party.”18
Noting the criticism of Welch by such staunch anticommunists as Barry Goldwater, Walter Judd, Fulton Lewis, Jr., and Russell Kirk, the National Review editorial concluded that a love of truth and country called for the firm rejection of Welch’s “false counsels.” Anticipating the sharp reaction he knew would come, Buckley wrote, “There are bounds to the dictum: Anyone on my right is my ally.”19
Welch felt “personally betrayed” by Buckley’s attack but declined to respond in kind, affirming his own belief in the maxim that Buckley rejected. “To avoid adding fuel to all of the friction among the anti-Communist forces,” wrote Welch in American Opinion, “we shall even refrain from defending ourselves against the slings and arrows from the Right.”20
Senator John Tower was quick to describe the National Review editorial as “a courageous and responsible analysis,” and Barry Goldwater, in a letter to the editor, described Welch’s views as “irresponsible” and called on him to resign as president of the society.21 They knew that rather than dividing the conservative cause, Buckley’s editorial had strengthened it, and they saluted him for his courage and leadership.
As with any other political movement, there has always been a dark side of the Right. In the 1960s, there were conspiracy addicts, like Robert Welch, who believed that communists controlled much of America. There were rabid anti-Semites like Gerald L. K. Smith; Conde McGinley, publisher of the misnamed Common Sense; and Willis Carto, the founder of Liberty Lobby, who traced the decline and coming fall of America to Jews. There were racists, usually based in the South, who regarded blacks as less than human. There were armed militants like the Minutemen who lived in remote, isolated places and stockpiled guns, ammunition, canned water, and food in anticipation of the inevitable national collapse. There were fundamentalist preachers who railed against the forces of humanism, liberalism, and secularism and warned of approaching Armageddon. But while all of these doomsayers and paranoiacs were in the movement, they were not the movement, which as it grew and matured relegated them to the outer reaches of the Right, where most of them withered and eventually died.
There was one other important task that had to be accomplished before the conservative movement could operate effectively in the political realm: It had to be philosophically united. Increasingly, traditionalists and libertarians had been snapping and snarling at each other in the pages of National Review, the New Individualist Review, and elsewhere. Traditionalist Russell Kirk was accused of being hostile to individualism and laissez-faire economics, while libertarian Friedrich Hayek was faulted for defending freedom on strictly utilitarian grounds rather than according to “the absolute transcendent values upon which its strength is founded.”22
One conservative in particular was convinced that beneath all the differences lay a true consensus of principle: Frank Meyer, the fast-talking, chain-smoking, ex-communist senior editor of National Review. Through articles, books, and endless late-evening telephone calls, Meyer communicated his synthesis of the disparate elements of conservatism, which came to be called fusionism.
The core fundamental was “the freedom of the person, the central and primary end of political society.” The state had only three limited functions: national defense, the preservation of domestic order, and the administration of justice between citizens. The “achievement of virtue” was not a political question: indeed, it was not even the state’s business. Freedom, Meyer argued, was the indispensable condition for the pursuit of virtue. Freedom was the ultimate political end; virtue was the ultimate end of man as man.
And yet Meyer insisted that modern American conservatism was not classical liberalism, which had been significantly weakened by utilitarianism and secularism. Most classical liberals, he charged, were seemingly unable to distinguish between “the authoritarianism” of the state and “the authority of God and truth.” Meyer declared that conservatives were trying to save the Christian understanding of “the nature and destiny of man.” To do that, they had to absorb the best of both branches of the divided conservative mainstream. He insisted that he was not creating something new but simply articulating an already existing conservative consensus: “the consensus forged so brilliantly by the Founding Fathers in 1787” at the writing of the Constitution.
Regardless of their philosophical orientation, historian George Nash observed, all conservatives thought that the state should be circumscribed and were deeply suspicious of planning and attempts to centralize power. They defended the Constitution “as originally conceived” and opposed the “messianic” communist threat to “Western civilization.”23
Although both traditionalists and libertarians often challenged fusionism in the years to come, it prevailed as an effective synthesis until the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And without a united conservative movement behind him, Barry Goldwater would not have been nominated for president in 1964. Indeed, Goldwater was the political personification of fusionism in his presidential campaign, stressing the need for morality in government, lamenting a national decline in law and order, promising less government and more individual freedom, and calling for victory over the Soviet Union in the cold war.
But that was in the future. In the spring of 1961, Goldwater was preoccupied not with his possible presidency, but with the disappointing presidency of John Kennedy, especially abroad. President Kennedy invited his former Senate colleague to the White House in early April 1961, just before the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Kennedy revealed that the first phase of the Cuban operation had failed to achieve its primary mission: Castro’s air force had not been destroyed. Although the anti-Castro exiles were supposed to be given sixteen B-26 bombers, the State Department had persuaded Kennedy to halve the number to make more plausible Washington’s denials that the U.S. government was involved.
Goldwater was stunned at Kennedy’s indecision. “The president was not a profile in courage,” he later wrote. “He did not seem to have the old-fashioned guts to go on.”24 Goldwater argued that there was still time to launch a wave of navy bombers standing by and to destroy Castro’s planes. He said heatedly that the action was “moral and legal and would be understandable to the entire free world.”25
Goldwater left the Oval Office believing that sufficient U.S. air cover would be given the anti-Castro fighters to allow them to land safely at the Bay of Pigs and advance on Havana. But Kennedy approved only one air strike of B-26s and canceled a follow-up attack by U.S. navy jet fighters. Simply put, Kennedy lost his nerve, and three hundred members of the anti-Castro brigade lost their lives. The rest of the fifteen-hundred-man force was imprisoned, and Castro was free to continue his communization of Cuba.
The following year, Republicans began demanding that Kennedy do something about the Soviet program of increased arms aid to Cuba. Led by Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, who was being informed by Cuban exiles about the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Republicans called for a blockade, an invasion, or some other kind of visible action. In late August 1962, Kennedy denounced calls for an invasion of Cuba as “irresponsible” but promised to “watch what happens in Cuba with the closest attention.” A week later, he denied there was any provocative Soviet action in Cuba.26
Finally, on October 22 (more than two months after Keating had publicly raised the possibility of Soviet missiles in Cuba), President Kennedy delivered a national television address announcing the presence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba and the imposition of a U.S. blockade. Republicans and the nation did not learn until years later that Kennedy had pledged to Khrushchev that in exchange for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles, the United States would not invade Cuba and that other nations of the Western Hemisphere “were prepared to give similar assurances.”27 While it is true that the Kennedy-Khrushchev understanding was never formalized by executive order or treaty, it remains effective U.S. policy to this day. Liberal policymakers consider it a successful application of containment, conservative policymakers a glaring example of accommodation.
Meanwhile, Goldwater’s chances of winning the GOP nomination continued to rise. Rockefeller won reelection as governor of New York in 1962, but by a narrower margin than four years earlier. One major reason was the strong showing of David H. Jaquith, the gubernatorial candidate of the new Conservative party of New York, who received 141,877 votes. Bill Buckley’s 1957 memorandum regarding “political action” in New York had paid its first significant political dividend.
While Rockefeller was undoubtedly the leading presidential candidate during the first months of 1963 in the polls and the press, he was not the choice of the Republican rank and file. A survey of delegates to the 1960 Republican convention revealed that their favorite was Goldwater. The senator was also helped by the effective elimination of an otherwise leading 1964 contender, Richard Nixon, who had suffered an embarrassing loss to Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown of California in that state’s gubernatorial election in 1962.
The conservative cause was also helped by a widely quoted column by veteran political correspondent Lyle Wilson, who pointed out that with “me-too Republicans” in charge, the Republican party had lost three-fourths of the national elections since 1940. What the GOP needed, Wilson suggested, “is a commitment to a set of courageous political principles that clearly distinguish it from the Democratic Party.”28 The hard-core Republicans meeting in December 1962 to finalize plans for a National Draft Goldwater Committee knew where to find those clear-cut principles—in The Conscience of a Conservative.
Clif White outlined a Midwest-South-Far West strategy. A key event would be the California primary; its eighty-six delegates would offset any unexpected defections and demonstrate the senator’s popularity. White argued that the same focus on the Midwest, the South, and the West would produce a victory over President Kennedy in the general election.29 An essential element of the strategy was that the South no longer belonged to the Democrats because the national Democratic party had moved so far left. Goldwater could win much if not all of what had long been inviolate Democratic property. At the same time, the money men agreed to pledge a total of $250,000, and the Draft Goldwater movement was truly underway.30
Clif White was unanimously elected chairman and instructed to report to Goldwater in January 1963 about their plans. Unbeknownst to him, Goldwater was meeting over the Christmas holidays with Arizona friends and advisers to talk about his political future. The consensus: While Goldwater might be able to win the Republican nomination in 1964, it would be “very difficult” for anyone to defeat President Kennedy. The prudent course for Goldwater was to seek reelection to the Senate.
A wary Goldwater received a smiling White in his Senate office. The New Yorker had hardly begun reporting the “good news” from Chicago when the senator held up a large hand and interrupted, “Clif, I’m not a candidate and I’m not going to be. I have no intention of running for the presidency.”
Remembering the last eighteen months of careful planning, hard work, and unremitting travel, White retorted sharply, “Senator … You’re the leader of the conservative cause in the United States of America, and thousands—millions—of people want you to be their nominee for president.”
“Well,” responded a stubborn Goldwater, “I’m just not going to run.” He added lamely, “My wife loves me, but she’d leave me if I ran for this thing.”31
A despondent White took the first shuttle flight back to New York City where he bitterly told Rusher, “I’m going to give up politics and go back into business.” Even the congenitally upbeat Rusher was discouraged. He agreed with White that “you couldn’t take a grown man by the scruff of the neck and force him to run for president of the United States.”32 Or could you?
In mid-February, the hard core gathered in Chicago, seemingly for the last time. They considered and rejected a dozen different ways to persuade Goldwater, the only candidate in the minds of most conservatives, to run. After hours of talk and countless cups of coffee, silence fell, broken at last by an exasperated Robert Hughes of Indiana, who growled, “There’s only one thing we can do. Let’s draft the son of a bitch.”33
Amid exclamations and an old-fashioned western holler, the small band of conservatives decided that although they could not force a man to seek the presidency, they could draft him in the hope he would accept it for the good of his party and his country. Peter O’Donnell, chairman of the Texas Republican party, agreed to serve as chairman of the National Draft Goldwater Committee, although everyone was agreed that Clif White would steer “the bandwagon we were building right into San Francisco.”34
A side from a strong personal distaste for living as a “prisoner” in the White House, Goldwater had valid political reasons for hesitating to run for president. He was, after all, a westerner from a small state with only five electoral votes. He was a conservative in what was still a liberal land. And he could not be certain that his party, for all his many contributions to it, would unite behind him. Furthermore, he was proud of his two senatorial victories and did not want to taint them by losing badly as a presidential candidate. Perhaps most important of all, he worried about what an overwhelming loss would do to the conservative movement. In the end, Goldwater decided that if he campaigned as an unabashed conservative and came within five points of a majority (that is, 45 percent), “that would be really a victory for conservatism.”35
For the liberal establishment, the possibility that Goldwater might be the Republican nominee seemed remote. The front-runner was still Nelson Rockefeller, despite some grumbling about his personal life. In March 1962, Rockefeller had divorced his wife of thirty-one years and the mother of their five children, and he had been openly involved with a much younger, married woman, Margaretta “Happy” Murphy. The relationship, once much discussed, seemed to have been accepted or at least ignored by the public. Things turned upside down, however, on May 4, 1963, when Rockefeller suddenly married Happy Murphy just one month after she had divorced her husband, who was given custody of their four small children. The affair was thrust back into the news, where voters were reminded of it every time they saw a photo of the beaming New York governor and his new wife.
Rockefeller had been beating Goldwater by about 2 to 1 among Republicans in the Gallup presidential poll. But a month after his remarriage, he sank from 43 to 30 percent while Goldwater surged from 26 to 35 percent—a 22 percent swing. For the first time, the conservative Arizona senator led the liberal New York governor in the Gallup Poll. In a national trial heat between Kennedy and Goldwater, the new GOP front-runner still trailed the president, 60 to 36 percent. But political analysts noted that Goldwater had risen nine points, while Kennedy had dropped seven points since the last survey.36
The sharply rising fortunes of the conservative movement and its champion were confirmed by several major events that summer and fall. In mid-July, the Young Republican National Federation elected as its new chairman Donald E. “Buz” Lukens, an ardent Goldwater supporter. Goldwater himself addressed the convention and brought the young men and women cheering to their feet with a slashing attack on “today’s liberals” who were “intellectually bankrupt.” They had not had “a new idea in thirty years,” he declared. “They are dead and finished.”37
Earlier that same month, eight thousand ecstatic conservatives had jammed Washington’s un-air-conditioned National Guard Armory to hold an old-fashioned patriotic Fourth of July rally and help persuade Barry Goldwater to lead a crusade to make America strong and whole and right again. Goldwater was not present, but Senators John Tower of Texas and Carl Curtis of Nebraska and Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio were there along with Hollywood stars Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Walter Brennan, and Chill Wills, who crooned in his whiskey baritone to the delighted crowd, “We’ll All Be There in San Francisco.” A concerned liberal Democrat was quoted as saying, “Last month they were just a faction. But tonight it looks like they’ve become a political party.”38
That September, nearly fifty thousand people filled Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles to hear Goldwater deliver a rousing speech. It was the largest Republican rally in Los Angeles since presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey had campaigned there twenty years earlier. Goldwater was interrupted forty-seven times as he declared that “America needs a change” and “Freedom needs a chance.”39
These were heady times for Goldwater and the conservative movement, capped by a major article in Time, the establishment’s favorite magazine, that began:
Until recently most political observers figured that Democrat John Kennedy was a sure 1964 winner, and that it did not make much difference who the GOP candidate would be. Now, many are changing their minds….
A state-by-state survey of Time correspondents indicates that at least Republican Barry Goldwater could give Kennedy a breathlessly close contest.40
The weekly reported that while the president could easily beat any other Republican candidate, including Rockefeller and Nixon, he could be rated only even against Goldwater, who could count on carrying states (many of them below the Mason-Dixon Line) with a total of 266 electoral votes, 4 fewer than the total needed to win.41
For his part, President Kennedy looked forward to running against Goldwater, with whom he had served in the Senate for eight years. At a November 13 White House meeting about the 1964 campaign, a laughing Kennedy concluded, “Give me Barry. I won’t even have to leave the Oval Office.”42
But apprehensive Democrats were warning Kennedy that he faced reelection problems. Some had already conceded the Deep South if Goldwater were the Republican candidate. And Vice President Johnson pressed the president to visit Texas, where Goldwater was leading the president in the latest poll by 52 to 48 percent.
The contrasts between the two politicians were undeniably stark: Kennedy, the eastern elitist and Harvard graduate, versus Goldwater, the western self-educated cowboy; the cool liberal versus the hot conservative; the new politics versus the old.
As November drew to a close, Barry Goldwater was convinced he could run a strong conservative campaign against an incumbent liberal president. The national polls were encouraging, the organization under the direction of Denison Kitchel was coming together, Clif White and his associates were methodically accumulating delegates, and the money was steadily flowing in.
Everywhere there was abundant evidence that the American conservative movement had come of age and was poised to help him capture the Republican presidential nomination and then, perhaps, the most sought-after prize in American politics—the presidency. What could go wrong?
At 1:32 P.M., Washington time, on Friday, November 22, 1963, the first bulletin came over the wires: “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.” Thirty minutes later, at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the president was pronounced dead.43
The immediate, spontaneous reaction of many conservatives was, “Oh, my God, it must have been one of ours.” The majority of Americans were led to the same thoughts by the mass media, which constantly referred to Dallas as the “home of the extreme right wing” and the “heart of Goldwaterland.”44 Television networks ran and reran a film clip of UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson being spat on by “conservatives” in Dallas a month earlier.
Conservatives braced for the worst, and then at 4:23, NBC announced that a suspect had been arrested in Dallas. He was soon identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. All over America, conservative organizations began checking their membership and donor lists.
In Washington, D.C., senior editor Eugene Methvin of Reader’s Digest said to himself, “I know that name—he’s got some communist connection.” In less than a minute, his phone rang; it was a very excited Edward S. Butler calling from New Orleans. Butler was almost sputtering. “That’s the guy,” he kept saying, “that’s the guy I debated here in New Orleans—the guy you sent me all the material about.”45
Methvin had received a telephone call in August from Ed Butler, a young anticommunist organizer with whom he had been corresponding for several years. Butler was going to debate the secretary of the local Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro group, on a New Orleans radio station. He wanted to know whether his opponent had a communist background. Methvin directed Butler to Francis J. McNamara, staff director of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. McNamara agreed to send Butler any material the committee had in its public files about his opponent, whose name was Lee Harvey Oswald.
When Methvin returned from vacation in September, he had found a news release from Ed Butler describing his August 21 radio debate and giving Oswald’s background, including his defection to the Soviet Union and his public admission, “I am a Marxist.”46 Methvin had glanced through the material and added it to the growing stack behind his desk. Now he began hurriedly searching and at last found the most important news release he had ever received.
In his shirt sleeves and unwilling to wait for the elevator, Methvin ran down the stairs to the first floor where the Associated Press had its offices. “The place was bedlam.” He saw a reporter he knew and asked if he knew who Lee Oswald was. No, replied his friend, “and everyone in the world is trying to find out.” “Read this,” Methvin urged, handing him Ed Butler’s press release and the attached material.47
“They put it on the wire,” remembered Methvin, “and that’s how the nation and the world learned that Lee Harvey Oswald was no right-winger but a one-time defector to the Soviet Union.”48
Barry Goldwater was devastated by John Kennedy’s murder. He told his campaign director Denison Kitchel “to pass the word”—he would not run.49 The primary reason was his cold contempt for Lyndon Johnson, who would not engage, he was certain, in the issue-oriented campaign that he and Kennedy had envisaged. “Johnson was the epitome of the unprincipled politician,” Goldwater said, who would manipulate “Jack’s martyrdom” for his own political purposes. He was “treacherous,” a “hypocrite,” a man “who never cleaned that crap off his boots.” Goldwater understood that no Republican, especially a conservative Republican, could win in 1964. As he put it, “the American people were not ready for three presidents in little more than one year.”50
At Kitchel’s insistence, Goldwater called a meeting of his closest friends and advisers. He bluntly stated his position, “Our cause is lost,” and then sat silently as his fellow conservatives sought to persuade him to do what he so clearly did not want to do. Despite the assassination, they assured him, the Goldwater delegates were holding firm. He could not let them down.51
Goldwater made no response. At last he asked the group of anxious conservatives to let him “sleep on it.” Motioning Kitchel to remain, Goldwater sat silently with his old friend and watched darkness fill the room until at last he turned on a light and poured some bourbon for himself and Kitchel. Pacing up and down the room, an uncertain Goldwater asked his friend, “What do you think?” to which Kitchel retorted, “What do you think?”
The senator repeated the points that had already been made, returning again and again to the kind of campaign Johnson would conduct. “I wasn’t scared of a goddamned thing,” he later recalled, “but when you’re faced with the fact that black is black, you don’t try to change it to white. I knew that running against Johnson you’re running against all the controlled political organizations in the country.”52
Kitchel went to the heart of the matter. “Barry,” he said, “I don’t think you can back down.” What was at stake was not one man’s feelings or wishes, but “the millions of conservatives around the country who had made a stand in favor of Barry Goldwater.” Goldwater admitted that there was a “virtually unbreakable” bond between himself and conservatives and finally said, with mixed exasperation and resignation, “All right, damn it, I’ll do it.”53
It was an unprecedented act in American politics. Never before had a presidential candidate run knowing beyond any reasonable doubt that he could not win the general election. That hard political reality accounted for his grim face and voice over the next eleven months (no one enjoys committing political suicide), the uncompromising content of his speeches and positions (he would give the voters a real choice), and the all-Arizona composition of his campaign team (it was the last wish of the condemned politician to be accompanied by his closest friends as he went before the firing squad).
Yet as he prepared to announce his candidacy, Goldwater could depend on something that heretofore had not existed: a national political movement. Although untested in a national campaign, conservatism did have a clearly defined, consistent philosophy, as articulated by Hayek, Kirk, Weaver, and Chambers; an expanding national constituency, particularly strong in the West and the South; a charismatic, nationally known leader in Barry Goldwater; and a solid financial base, not dependent on a few wealthy individuals but on tens of thousands of grassroots supporters. Only in the mass media was conservatism conspicuously deficient and confronted by a largely skeptical and even hostile constituency.
If he had been able to call on such resources, Bob Taft would probably have been nominated in 1952. Conservatives were determined that Goldwater would not suffer Taft’s undeserved fate in 1964.
From the beginning of his presidential campaign on January 3, 1964, Goldwater promised to “offer a choice, not an echo.” He would not change his beliefs or tailor his positions “to win votes.” Instead, he offered the voters something rare in American politics—“an engagement of principles.”54
Against the recommendations of Peter O’Donnell, conservative columnist Raymond Moley, and William Loeb, the friendly publisher of the powerful New Hampshire newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader, Goldwater entered the always unpredictable New Hampshire primary. Political amateurs Kitchel and Baroody waved polls showing Goldwater to be the choice of 65 percent of the state’s Republicans and independents. Political professionals U.S. senator Norris Cotton and Stuart Lamprey, Speaker of the New Hampshire legislature, assured their fellow conservative that he was a shoo-in.
And so, still healing from an operation on his heel and hampered by a walking cast, Goldwater plunged into twenty-three days of campaigning with as many as eighteen appearances in a single day. As the senator later remarked wryly, “I remember every footstep of that campaign.”55 Nor was he prepared psychologically. He was still looking back at the campaign that might have been against John Kennedy rather than toward the campaign that was against Lyndon Johnson.
Accordingly, he said careless, controversial things—for example, that participation in the social security system might be made optional. “If a person can provide better for himself,” he replied when asked for his views about the program, “let him do it. But if he prefers the government to do it, let him.” Within hours of the news conference, the pro-Rockefeller Concord Monitor ran a banner headline: “Goldwater Sets Goals: End Social Security, Hit Castro.” Thus was born the myth of “Goldwater the Destroyer of Social Security.”
At another news conference, Goldwater was asked about NATO and the use of nuclear weapons and replied, “The commander should have the ability to use [tactical] nuclear weapons.” As the senator knew from briefings as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was stating longstanding NATO policy in certain situations—when, for example, there was a communications breakdown during an invasion by Warsaw Pact forces. But the Rockefeller propaganda machine suggested that Goldwater wanted to turn over the authority to use theater nuclear weapons to all commanders in the field. And so was created the image of “Goldwater the Trigger-Happy Warrior.”
While Goldwater and Rockefeller were trying to win over the hard-nosed, tight-spending, balanced-budget Yankees who constituted a majority of New Hampshire Republicans, a Lodge for President headquarters quietly opened in Concord, across from the state capitol. Because Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S ambassador to South Vietnam, was not on the ballot, his name would have to be written in. There was an intriguing precedent: the upset, write-in victory of General Eisenhower over favored Bob Taft in 1952.
Although the polls showed a tightening race, few observers believed that a write-in candidate halfway around the world could beat the well-organized, well-financed campaigns of Goldwater and Rockefeller.56 Once again, in an unconventional year, conventional wisdom was proved wrong.
Less than twenty minutes after the polls closed, CBS News projected that Henry Cabot Lodge had won the presidential preference primary in New Hampshire, receiving 33,521 write-in votes, about 35 percent of the total vote. Goldwater trailed with 21,775 votes, 23 percent, and Rockefeller was third with 19,496 votes, about 21 percent. Nixon got 15,752 write-in votes, or 17 percent. Goldwater’s 23 percent was embarrassing: one-third of his approval rating the previous October and far less than the 33 percent he had mentioned as a worst-case scenario in February.
What happened? Citizens were literally terrified of Goldwater. Typical was the seventy-two-year-old resident of Concord who told her surprised neighbor she was going to support President Johnson. “But you’ve voted solid Republican for fifty years,” her friend protested. The woman explained that she was “afraid” to vote for Goldwater because “he will take away my TV.” “No, no,” her friend reassured her, “Goldwater’s against the TVA, not TV.” “Well,” said the concerned woman, “that’s good to know … but I don’t want to take any chances.”57
With any other candidate, Goldwater’s dismal New Hampshire showing would have seriously, even fatally, damaged him. But in 1964, the county and state conventions rather than the primaries were king of the Republican nominating process. Because of the groundwork done by Clif White and the Draft Goldwater Committee, for example, Goldwater picked up forty-eight delegates at conventions in Oklahoma and North Carolina and six delegates at district meetings in Tennessee and Kansas on the same day he lost New Hampshire. White reminded the news media that New Hampshire was only one primary and confidently predicted that the senator would go on to win the nomination in San Francisco.58
Most journalists dismissed his remarks as predictable rhetoric (an early version of political “spin”) and declared that Lodge was the all-but-certain Republican nominee, harking back to Eisenhower’s defeat of Taft in 1952. But Lodge was no war hero, Goldwater was not a senator with only regional appeal and strength, and the conservative movement had come a long way in twelve years.
After admitting over national television, “I goofed,” Goldwater reorganized his campaign. He elevated Clif White to codirector of field operations, along with Richard Kleindienst, one of the few members of the Arizona “mafia” with significant political experience. Although they came from far different political worlds, the two professionals shared one objective: nominating Barry Goldwater for president.
A chastened Goldwater returned to his original strategy of focusing on a few selected primaries, particularly California, making major addresses in key cities around the country, and letting the professionals hunt for delegates at state and district conventions. But he did not retreat from his stated intention to offer the American electorate a staunchly conservative platform, although he knew the fury and scorn that liberals would pour on him. He said bluntly, for example, that if the United Nations admitted Red China, the United States should get out. And he reiterated his wish to introduce a voluntary element into the social security system. As National Review commented, Goldwater’s words and ideas, “the words and ideas of the conservative movement for which he becomes the most conspicuous public spokesman, cannot be ignored or dismissed.” His voice would open “many otherwise closed ears and minds.”59
The California primary between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller was the most consequential one in the history of the American conservative movement. It was an epic battle between Goldwater volunteers and Rockefeller mercenaries, the New Right and the old California establishment, the middle class of Los Angeles and the upper class of San Francisco, the man who did not want to be president and the man who wanted only to be president.
Rockefeller gave his campaign organization more than $3 million and carte blanche to win the state and secure the nomination, which now seemed tantalizingly close. Following his solid victory in the Oregon primary (where Goldwater placed third), Rockefeller surged to a 47 to 36 percent lead over Goldwater among California voters, according to Lou Harris’s polls.
With less than three weeks remaining before primary day, a fifteen-man Goldwater team headed by Dean Burch accomplished what veteran strategist Steve Shadegg described as “a political miracle” by reversing the Goldwater slide and producing a historic victory, albeit by the slimmest of margins.60
Working around the clock, the Goldwater team produced a series of television and radio spots, newspaper ads, and brochures. Heavy emphasis was placed on the photogenic Goldwater family—Barry, Peggy, and their four poised, handsome children—Joanne, Barry, Jr., Michael, and “little” Peggy. The Goldwaters contrasted sharply with the recently divorced Rockefeller and his new, and very pregnant, wife, Happy.
Meanwhile, a Goldwater army of fifty thousand volunteers (the largest number of volunteer workers ever assembled for any primary before or since) was distributing literature, canvassing neighborhoods, and preparing a mammoth effort to get Goldwater voters to the polls. Rockefeller manager Stu Spencer recalled with awe “the number of bodies they kept throwing at us.”61 One of the most effective pieces of literature, according to Rus Walton, head of the conservative United Republicans of California (UROC), was Phyllis Schlafly’s antiestablishment book, A Choice Not an Echo. An estimated half-million copies of the Schlafly tract were distributed throughout the state.62
Sensing that the momentum was shifting, the Rockefeller organization began swinging harder and lower. As Spencer put it, “We had to destroy Barry Goldwater as a member of the human race.” A tabloid newspaper was mailed to several hundred thousand California voters linking GOP leaders Lodge, Nixon, Governor George Romney of Michigan, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and even Harold Stassen to Rockefeller’s candidacy. “Which Do You Want,” a headline blared. “A Leader? Or a Loner?”63 But Rockefeller’s disinformation ploy backfired: Romney, Nixon, and Scranton all quickly denied being part of any anti-Goldwater or pro-Rockefeller effort.
A final anti-Goldwater bomb was dropped—by Goldwater. Appearing on ABC’s Issues and Answers nine days before the voting, the senator was asked how communist supply lines along the Laotian border into South Vietnam might be interdicted. In an instant, the candidate who had curbed his tongue since New Hampshire became the careless Goldwater of old and replied:
There have been several suggestions made. I don’t think we would use any of them. But defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done.64
Goldwater paid heavily for his speculative comment. Both AP and UPI immediately released stories suggesting that the senator had “called” for the “use” of nuclear weapons. Goldwater protested, and the wire services sent out a correction that never caught up with the initial story. An elated Rockefeller branded his opponent a nuclear extremist and approved the mailing of a poisonous brochure entitled “Who Do You Want in the Room with the H-Bomb?” to 3 million registered Republicans in California. But the pamphlet’s shrill tone backfired among many California Republicans who knew and admired Goldwater from his many appearances in their state.
Happy was now so close to delivery that Rocky flew home to New York every weekend. When aides pointed out that he was calling attention to an issue that could defeat him, the governor waved their caution aside and wisecracked, “I have a show opening on both sides of the continent the same weekend.”65
This was too much for the Christian Right of the day. On Thursday, May 28, sixteen Protestant ministers, representing a wide segment of the Christian community in southern California, held a news conference and suggested that Nelson Rockefeller should withdraw from the race because of his demonstrated inability to handle his own domestic affairs.
The same week, Rockefeller was to appear at Loyola University of Los Angeles at the invitation of its students. R. L. “Dick” Herman, a prominent Roman Catholic layman in Nebraska, was dispatched by the Goldwater team to visit Francis Cardinal McIntyre. The cardinal listened carefully to Herman’s argument that Rockefeller’s appearance at a prominent Catholic university might be interpreted as a church endorsement but made no promises. However, six hours before Rockefeller was scheduled to speak, Loyola suddenly withdrew its invitation, explaining that the governor’s appearance was being “generally interpreted” as an official endorsement of his candidacy. Cardinal McIntyre personally commented that he did not want anyone to think the Catholic church was giving its blessing to a candidate who had been divorced and remarried.66
The denouement came at 4:15 P.M., Saturday, May 30, less than three days before the primary polls opened in California, when Happy gave birth to a baby boy in New York Hospital. She named him Nelson Rockefeller, Jr., and gave already critical ministers and pastors throughout California the subject for their Sunday sermon.
On Tuesday, June 2, a red-letter day in the history of the modern conservative movement, tens of thousands of volunteers spread across the state with lists of known Goldwater supporters and made certain they went to the polls. The final count was 1,120,403 votes for Goldwater, 1,052,053 for Rockefeller, a popular margin of 68,350 votes, 51.6 percent of the total. It was not a runaway, but it was enough. The senator received all eighty-six of California’s delegates and now had, according to Clif White’s private calculations, more than the 655 needed for nomination.
If Goldwater had lost California, he might well have withdrawn from the race. The liberal Republican establishment would have united behind a victorious Rockefeller and done whatever had to be done to defeat conservatives at the national convention (as it had in 1952, 1948, and 1940). But because he won California, Goldwater could assert, justifiably, that he had demonstrated his popular as well as electoral appeal. His nomination was now inevitable.
Barry Goldwater hoped, and wanted, to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as he had voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. As biographer Edwin McDowell wrote, “Few men not deliberately courting minority bloc votes have expressed their sympathy for [blacks]—verbally and through action—more often than Goldwater.”67 As chief of staff for the Arizona Air National Guard, he had pushed for desegregation of the guard two years before President Truman desegregated the U.S. armed forces. He and his brother Robert had hired blacks and served blacks at their Goldwater department store without reservation. He had contributed generously to the Arizona branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Phoenix branch of the Urban League. His first legislative assistant on his Senate staff was a black woman lawyer.
But Goldwater had problems with two sections of the proposed civil rights law: Title II dealing with public accommodations and Title VII on equal employment opportunity. He felt they were unconstitutional and unenforceable. Like Robert Taft, he opposed the idea of a federal Fair Employment Practices Commission, favoring state and local action.
The issue was not job discrimination, Goldwater argued, which was “morally wrong,” but the proper role of the federal government in eliminating it. Goldwater argued that if the government “can forbid such discrimination, it is a real possibility that sometime in the future the same government can require people to discriminate in hiring on the basis of color or race or religion.”68 Rarely has a politician uttered more prophetic words.
Goldwater explained that he, and all other true conservatives, were for equal opportunity, by which individuals are judged on their qualifications without regard to race, sex, or religion. But he, and all other true conservatives, were opposed to preferential treatment that required individuals to be judged (and hired) on the basis of their race, sex, and religion. “Preferential treatment,” of course, is what has come to be known as affirmative action.
Goldwater stated his position on the proposed legislation forthrightly and honestly. Not so the bill’s proponents. Senator Hubert Humphrey assured the Senate that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “does not require an employer to achieve any kind of racial balance in his work force by giving preferential treatment to any individual or group.” Democratic senator Harrison Williams of New Jersey insisted that an employer could continue to hire “only the best qualified persons even if they were all white.” As black economist Thomas Sowell summed up, “Congress declared itself in favor of equal opportunity and opposed to affirmative action.”69
But Goldwater and other conservatives were convinced that regardless of the reassuring rhetoric, Title VII would inevitably lead to affirmative action. They were correct. President Johnson quickly formed the Office of Federal Contract Compliance in the U.S. Department of Labor, which by 1968 was referring to “goals and timetables for the prompt achievement of full and equal employment opportunity.” But it was under President Nixon that “goals and guidelines” were expressly used to “increase materially the utilization of minorities and women” in jobs. Furthermore, the burden of proof, and remedy, was shifted to the employer rather than the employee. Just eight years after Humphrey and other liberals were adamantly denying any intent to force preferential treatment on the employer, affirmative action in the workforce became the official policy of the federal government.70
Goldwater also found serious fault with Title II, because it stated that a landlord could not refuse to rent to anybody. This was absurd to Goldwater, who protested, “I would not rent my home to a lot of whites for many reasons.” But he supported the Civil Rights Act’s other major provisions that empowered the attorney general to initiate suits or intervene on behalf of complainants in school desegregation and other discrimination cases, and permitted halting funds to federal programs where racial discrimination persisted.71
When repeated attempts to remove or modify Titles II and VII failed, Goldwater voted, reluctantly, on June 18 against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of twenty-seven senators to do so. Stating that discrimination was “fundamentally a matter of the heart,” he argued that it could never be cured by laws alone. Laws, he conceded, could help if they were the right laws—“laws carefully considered and weighed in an atmosphere of dispassion, in the absence of political demagoguery, and in the light of fundamental constitutional principles.”72
Goldwater did not flinch from the political consequences of his vote. His concern was not with himself or any group but with the nation and “the freedom of all who live in it and all who will be born in it.”73 Goldwater would not surrender to the passion of the moment, no matter how powerful or appropriate it seemed, if it broached the Constitution and endangered freedom.
A quarter of a century later, Goldwater was still defending his vote as consistent with his belief that “more can be accomplished for civil liberties at the local level than by faraway federal fiat.” He asserted that many people, black and white, “wanted the 1964 Act passed for their own ends…. This was hard-nosed politics based on self-interest.”74
But it was also a defining moment in American history. Because the leader of the conservative movement voted against major civil rights legislation, albeit for constitutional reasons, conservatives have been tarred ever since as racists and bigots. Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, and others have worked hard to build bridges to blacks, whose beliefs in family, church, and community are essentially conservative. In his pre-House Speaker days, for example, Gingrich supported the designation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday and supported economic sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa.
But the memory of the Goldwater vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is etched deeply in the minds of most older African Americans. For them, the debate was simple: either you wanted to end segregated luncheon counters and restaurants and boardinghouses and motels or you did not. Either you wanted to enable blacks to move out of the back rooms into the front rooms of factories and businesses or you did not. For African Americans, it was literally a black-and-white issue.
In the six weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, the Hamlet of the GOP, finally announced his candidacy, declaring the party could not allow “an exclusion-minded minority [to] dominate our platform and choose our candidates.”75
But his fruitless challenge served only to divide Republicans and gave Democrats the theme of extremism they would use so effectively in the fall.76 For its part, the Republican establishment thought it could employ the same bully-boy tactics it had in the past and retain its hold on the party. It did not understand that 1964 was not a repeat of 1952. The Goldwater forces had accumulated their rich harvest of delegates as a result of a carefully planned, three-year-long grassroots campaign. They had not stolen them but earned them the old-fashioned way—one at a time. Nor was Goldwater a latter-day Taft. Republicans had respected Taft and thought he had earned the nomination for his many years of service to the party. But conservatives worshiped Goldwater. They were convinced that America, facing socialism, and the world, facing communism, urgently needed Barry Goldwater to stop the former and defeat the latter. As Clif White put it, “Our delegates were a brand-new breed. Nothing could shake them.”77
When Eisenhower expressed his approval of the Republican platform, adding that if Goldwater campaigned on it, “I don’t see how he can go far wrong,” the by-now frantic anti-Goldwater cabal produced the “Scranton letter.” Addressed to Goldwater and signed by Scranton (who neither saw nor personally signed it before its delivery), the twelve-hundred-word letter called the senator the leader of radical extremists and “Goldwaterism” a collection of “absurd and dangerous positions.” The letter summarized the senator’s positions as irresponsible, right-wing, extremist, racist, and a “crazy-quilt collection” that would be “soundly repudiated by the American people in November.”78
The letter failed to shake the steady resolve of an overwhelming majority of the delegates at the 1964 Republican National Convention to nominate Barry Goldwater for president. But it did destroy any possibility of a Goldwater-Scranton ticket (preferred until the last moment by the senator), and it provided Democrats with a ready-made theme for the fall campaign. What Rockefeller had begun in New Hampshire, Theodore White wrote, Scranton finished in San Francisco: the “painting for the American people of a half-crazy leader indifferent to the needs of American society at home and eager to plunge the nation into war abroad.”79
It also provoked Goldwater into delivering the most quoted and controversial acceptance speech in the history of national conventions. The Goldwater team decided to offer no olive branches to the liberals. They saw Goldwater’s nomination as a historic break with the past, an opportunity to signal that conservatives intended to set “a new course in GOP national politics.”80 (The designated speechwriter was Harry Jaffa, a Lincoln scholar and professor of political science at Ohio State University, whose memorandum on extremism, written for the platform hearings, had impressed Goldwater.)81
In his speech, Goldwater borrowed from the Old Testament, warning the American people they had been following “false prophets” and exhorting them to return to “proven ways—not because they are old but because they are true.” He stated that Americans “must, and we shall, set the tide running again in the cause of freedom.”82
Eschewing specific policy proposals, Goldwater dedicated his campaign to two basic conservative ideas: (1) individual responsibility and constitutional government are the best guarantors of a free, dynamic society, and (2) peace is possible only through strength, vigilance, and the defeat of those who threaten it. Far more of an active internationalist than Taft, Goldwater argued that “we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to its extension tomorrow.”83
The content of the speech was eloquent and often moving, but the speaker’s tone was frequently harsh and accusing. In truth, Goldwater was still smarting from the Scranton letter and revealing his unhappiness at being a candidate.
As he neared the conclusion of his acceptance address, Goldwater called for a “focused” and “dedicated” Republicanism that rejected “unthinking and stupid labels.” The next lines are underlined in the original text:
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!84
As conservatives roared their approval, liberals turned red in the face, moderates blanched, and a reporter blurted, “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater.”85
Indeed he was, knowing that he had as much chance of defeating President Johnson as Billy Graham had of being elected pope. The night before, Goldwater had been given a national survey by his own pollster showing LBJ leading him by nearly three to one, a margin that realistically no politician could be expected to reverse.
But regardless of the outcome in November, everyone now understood that control of the Republican party had passed to the conservatives.