Many that voted for LBJ over Barry Goldwater regretted their vote for the rest of their lives.
Two years after Barry Goldwater's defeat, a sad joke made the rounds, and with apologies to Bob Newhart it went something
like this:
They told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we'd have a war in Southeast Asia, civil and racial unrest, and a ruined economy. I
went ahead and voted for him anyway, and it turned out they were absolutely right.And Barry was the wrong extremist after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Stupid candidate for the time. Stupid primary voters. Stupid party.
It's not much remembered now, but Barry Goldwater practically had to be dragged kicking and screaming to run for the White House in
1964. He'd entertained the idea a year earlier, of course, even to the point of listening hard when, over one of their more-frequent-than-
you-know lunches (they became personally friendly), John F. Kennedy---in a moment Goldwater quoted in his memoir
With No Apologies---offered the Arizona senator a piece of advice, since Kennedy had an assumption that Goldwater would indeed be his 1964 opponent:
Don't announce too soon, Barry. The minute you do, you'll become the target. You give them eighteen months to shoot you down,
they'll do it.Goldwater also kept his faith in a promise he believed Kennedy made to him regarding a 1964 campaign, that they'd run an issue campaign
without personalities or personal grievances. (He was sure that running against Kennedy wouldn't be that difficult, considering that Kennedy's
ratings had fallen rather drastically from 1961 and that one of the reasons for Kennedy's fatal trip to Texas was to shore up a fight among
Texas Democrats regarding whether to back the incumbent in 1964 or throw their support to another candidate.) He kept that faith right up
to the minute JFK was assassinated:
When that assassin's bullet took the life of John F. Kennedy, it was for me a great personal loss. How reluctant a 1964 candidate did Goldwater turn out to be?
Goldwater had to be convinced, sometimes kicking and screaming, to get involved in politics in the first place. That's how he became
part of a reform ticket that swept onto the Phoenix City Council in the late 1940s. Either that, or he was convinced to do someone
a small favour, as happened in 1952 when he ran for the Senate in the first place: at that time, Arizona's Republican Party was about
as big as a neighbourhood coffee klatsch, figuratively speaking. The Republicans needed a kind of sacrificial lamb against incumbent
---and, while he was at it, Senate Majority Leader---Ernest McFarland. Figuring he had as much chance of winning as the New York
Yankees had of losing the World Series, Goldwater agreed to do the party a favour. The party figured they had the way to survive
the unwinnable race and plan for the next one.
Leave it to McFarland to screw Goldwater's: McFarland was so convinced he'd make lamb chops out of this Republican nobody
that he almost never set as much as a toenail back in Arizona during the campaign. Big mistake. People like to see their
elected representatives among the home folk even once in awhile, few more so than Arizonans. It's no exaggeration to say
Goldwater and the Republicans were stunned by the outcome: Goldwater buried McFarland, including and especially in
McFarland's home county (Mariposa), where Goldwater landed twice as many votes as the incumbent.
(Oh, the ironies, because guess who succeeded McFarland as what would now be Senate Minority Leader, with the Republicans
winning the Senate that year---you guessed it: Lyndon Johnson, who'd become Senate Majority Leader in 1955.)
Basically, Goldwater won a victory he didn't bargain for and wouldn't have regretted losing. You could almost argue how little
he cared for politicking by the way he was in his first Senate term, especially in his re-election campaign year 1958. During
Senate hearings on mob influence in organised labour, Goldwater expressed outrage over the mob's influence on the Teamsters
---and deeper outrage over United Auto Workers/AFL-CIO leader Walter Reuther's apparent plan to join the Democratic Party
in bringing about a controlled American economy. Linking that to the issues of closed shops and union dues funneled to
political activities without the consent of the dues payers, Goldwater said,
I would rather have Jimmy Hoffa stealing my money than
Walter Reuther stealing my freedom.
It got even more prickly when Goldwater---who needed, theoretically, President Eisenhower's support in any re-election bid
---hit the Senate floor the same year to denounce Eisenhower's 1958 budget as "a dime store New Deal" showing the president
"succumbing to the siren song of socialism." (You thought Spiro Agnew---the words put in his mouth by then-Nixon speechwriter
William Safire---was a functional alliterative?)
Kennedy's assassination, so far as Goldwater was concerned, was the end of any Goldwater presidential bid. Other than
what he suspected of the country's mood after the assassination, and contrary to Kennedy's personal promise to him to run a
campaign of ideas and policies and not personalities, Goldwater felt he knew one thing about Lyndon Johnson:
Everything
told me he would be incapable of campaigning without hate.Goldwater may have taken himself out of the picture, but then he came close to nailing down the 655 delegates then needed to
secure the nomination
before he even knew he was a candidate at all. The delegation came to him courtesy of the so-called
Draft Goldwater movement, who'd been working ever since Richard Nixon lost the 1962 California gubernatorial contest (and
were itching to avoid a repeat of 1960, when Nixon picked liberal Republican Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate) and were
hell bent on getting Goldwater to run.
So what kind of "extremist"
was Goldwater, really? Above and beyond his famous graft of Cicero's maxim, "I would remind
you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. I would also remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is
no virtue."
I'll hand off to the
Miami Herald's television critic, Glenn Carvin, reviewing a Goldwater biography (Rick Perlstein's
Before
the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of an American Consensus) in
Reason a few years ago:
Soon after [his rip at Eisenhower's "dime store New Deal" budget], he ripped the farm subsidies so dear to the hearts
of Midwestern Republicans. He sneered at the passion of both parties for technocratic reformers: "I have little interest in streamlining
government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size."
Nor was Goldwater's philosophy purely political. He stressed both personal liberty and personal responsibility, and warned against the
propensity of modern liberalism to see society as a collection of groups: "The conservative knows that to regard men as part of an
undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery....Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is
responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices he must make; they cannot be made by any other
human being."
Goldwater, in short, was a politician of ideas, not knee-jerk reaction or pork-barrel plenitude. His ideas appealed to a large segment
of the population (Goldwater called them "the forgotten Americans") -- instinctively wary of the growing power in Washington and the elite
class that wielded it -- that had long been without a political voice. Their elation at the end of their isolation showed in their wild response
to Goldwater's speeches, though he was generally a humdrum speaker who only occasionally drifted up into the oratorical jetstream
where Ronald Reagan would later cruise.
He appealed not only to traditional conservatives but to young Americans harboring quiet worries that their lives were being put
together on a social assembly line over which they had no control. Goldwater's cry against conformity struck a chord, loudly, with them.
Later, as he ran for president, the news media would delight in caricaturing Goldwater as a reactionary loon trying to rub out an entire
century of American history. (Editorial cartoons frequently showed his supporters carrying signs reading "Goldwater in 1864."*) But his
fears about the loss of individuality to the madding crowd were on the razor edge of the social debate on America's restless college
campuses, and shared much with the early manifestos of Students for a Democratic Society.
Every coffee-house folksinger in the country was droning Malvina Reynolds' song "Little Boxes" about a cookie-cutter society in which
suburban commuters and their houses, wives, children, and martinis were indistinguishable from one another: "And they're all made
out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." No dorm room's bookshelf could be without David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd,
William H. Whyte's The Organization Man, along with Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Ayn Rand.
It was fertile ground for the Arizonan's message, and the initial boomlet for a national Goldwater candidacy -- as Richard Nixon's vice-
presidential candidate in 1960 -- owed much to a spontaneously formed Youth for Goldwater group.
But the GOP establishment would have none of Goldwater in 1960. Nixon chose as his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, a prototype
of the liberal Northeastern Republicans. When Nixon lost, conservatives were determined to take matters into their own hands. When
Goldwater was reluctant to run, they formed a secret draft committee that went about organizing for the 1964 GOP convention . . .
The nomination, unfortunately, was followed by a truly catastrophic general election campaign in which Goldwater won only six states.
Goldwater was doomed even before he started, his fate settled by the bullets in Dealey Plaza. In the fall of 1963, Kennedy's erratic foreign
policy and public uneasiness over his support for the civil rights movement made him look vulnerable. His approval rating had dropped
from the 70s to 57 percent. An anti-Kennedy book by conservative hatchet man Victor Lasky soared to the top of The New York Times
bestseller list, and Look magazine ran a feature headlined "JFK Could Lose."
But the bullets that cut down Kennedy that November ricocheted crazily through the ranks of his political enemies. Though the assassin
was a lifelong Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union and was seeking a visa to Cuba only weeks before the shooting, the blame,
unaccountably, settled on the American right. Goldwater's popularity plunged 16 percentage points in a matter of weeks, never to recover.
And even Americans who didn't hold him responsible for Kennedy's death were queasy about casting a vote that might result in the
seating of the third president in 14 months.
Their apprehensions were fed at every opportunity by journalists who barely tried to conceal their shilling for Lyndon Johnson. Walter
Cronkite falsely reported that Goldwater snapped "no comment" when asked about Kennedy's assassination. His CBS colleague Daniel
Schorr managed to top that, claiming that Goldwater would officially open his campaign in "Hitler's stomping ground...Bavaria, the
center of Germany's right wing." (Actually Goldwater had accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army base in Germany from his buddy
Lt. Gen. William Quinn, father of the well-known Hitler Youth leader Sally Quinn, who would later run the secret bund at the Washington
Post Style section.)
Late in the campaign, Johnson told the reporters covering his campaign that Goldwater was already beaten, and asked them which
Republican congressmen most deserved to be purged: "Give me some names and either Hubert or I will try to get into their districts
in the next few days and talk against 'em." The reporters helpfully suggested that Bob Dole of Kansas would make a good target.
But anti-Goldwater journalists got a good bit of help from the candidate himself, whose tendency to shoot from the lip often undercut
his own message. Goldwater often unveiled startlingly new policies and ideas in response to a reporter's casual question, inevitably
catching his staff unprepared. Sometimes this resulted in potentially attractive proposals (like the volunteer army, a Goldwater
suggestion that went virtually unnoticed) getting lost in the background noise of the campaign. Other times, the candidate wound
up looking like a nut case.
To wit: One of the many earthquakes that rocked the campaign was touched off when Goldwater offhandedly said that Minuteman
missiles, one of the mainstays of the U.S. nuclear deterrent, were undependable. When stunned reporters asked how undependable,
Goldwater airily replied: "That's classified information. But they're not dependable, I can tell you that." In fact, there were a lot of
scientists and military men who shared his doubts: Kennedy's nuclear test-ban treaty had gone into effect before the Pentagon
got a chance to fire a Minuteman loaded with a nuclear warhead. Nobody really knew if it worked.
Had staffers known Goldwater was going to talk about it, they could have been standing by with fact sheets explaining the background,
including names and phone numbers of experts who agreed with him. Moreover, they could have added (as Goldwater had not) that
one of his reservations about missiles was that, unlike bombers, they couldn't be called back, making an accidental nuclear exchange
much more likely. That point would undoubtedly have played well with the public at a time when the movies Fail-Safe and Dr.
Strangelove were drawing huge audiences. Instead, nobody was prepared, and Goldwater, not for the last time in the campaign,
looked mildly loony.
To make matters worse, Goldwater's campaign did attract some boosters who seemed barely tethered to planet Earth, from John
Birchers who thought Eisenhower was a communist to hardcore racists who praised the murder of civil rights activists. Their zealotry
quickly became the stuff of legends. Among the funniest portions of Perlstein's book is his blow-by-blow account of a Young
Republicans convention where the pro- and anti-Goldwater forces began by slashing one another's microphone cords and ended
by brawling on the speaker's platform. (It's no coincidence, I suspect, that Hillary Clinton's maiden foray into politics was as a Goldwater
Girl.) Sometimes Goldwater almost seemed to be running against his own supporters, scolding them in speeches for latching on
to particular issues without understanding the underlying philosophy: "I can't help but wondering, sometimes, if you've asked
yourselves why my campaign is the way it is."
Nothing was more problematic than the civil rights issue -- particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed most forms of racial
discrimination. Goldwater was no racist; early in his career as a Phoenix city council member, he aggressively supported local civil
rights ordinances. But as his conservatism deepened, he grew first skeptical and then fearful about the use of government for social
engineering. "You cannot pass a law that will make me like you -- or you like me," Goldwater told one rally. "That is something that
can only happen in our hearts." He understood, too, that government-mandated affirmative action was merely the flip side of
segregationist racialism: "It reintroduces through the back door the very principle of allocation by race that makes compulsory
segregation morally wrong and offensive to freedom." And, that, to Barry Goldwater, was the bottom line. "Our aim, as I understand
it, is neither to establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated society," he said. "It is to preserve a free society."
Goldwater was privately appalled to discover that his opposition to the Civil Rights Act rallied to his side not only libertarians but
racists who detested and feared not state power but black people. He was horrified when Alabama's racist Gov. George Wallace
offered to switch parties and run as his vice president. Goldwater eventually became so paranoid about the influx of racists to his
campaign that he worried that a summer riot in Harlem had been secretly instigated by his supporters in hopes of generating a
white backlash vote.
In recounting the role that the civil rights controversy played in the election, Perlstein is at his worst. Perlstein, personally charmed
by Goldwater (as even many of his deadliest political enemies were), acknowledges that his opposition to the law was based on
genuine principle rather than racism or political expediency. But he is unable to bring himself to say the same for any of the millions
of people who supported Goldwater. He sympathetically describes Lyndon Johnson shaking his head, wondering how it could be
that Goldwater voters "seemed willing to turn back the clock on every social gain of the past 30 years -- just for the chance to
vote bleep-bleep-bleep."
Perlstein's disdain for Goldwater's supporters extends well past the civil rights issue. If middle-aged, they're described as balding
and paunchy; if young, pimply; but always as kooks and cranks "for whom Goldwater was the answer to every question and every
conspiracy." In one unwitting aside, Perlstein offers perhaps the most telling critique of modern liberalism I've ever seen. He
ridicules a Goldwater supporter whose Boston neighborhood is targeted for destruction by an urban renewal campaign. To Perlstein's
smirking amusement, the man has erected a sign in his yard that says, WE SHALL DEFEND OUR HOMES WITH OUR LIVES. It seems
that the right of black people to eat at a Woolworth's lunch counter is sacred, while the right of a white working-class man to not
have his home torn down by Harvard-trained social engineers is comic-opera buffoonery.
If Perlstein is tone deaf when it comes to the concerns of Americans outside of liberalism's favored classes, he's surprisingly
evenhanded when it comes to the issue that haunted Goldwater's campaign more than any other: his supposedly quick trigger
finger on foreign policy. Perhaps the most memorable moment of the campaign was the infamous "daisy" commercial produced
by Johnson's hardball TV people. The ad opened with a little girl in a field, counting aloud as she picked petals from a daisy.
Suddenly the girl looks up, startled; the frame freezes; a man's voice picks up the count, reversing it, three-two-one; the freeze-
frame cuts away to film of an atomic explosion, the mushroom cloud spreading malignantly across the screen. "Vote for President
Johnson on November 3," an announcer intones. "The stakes are too high for you to stay home."
The ad -- which ran only once before it was pulled, but lived on endlessly in the resulting controversy -- was the subject of bitter
complaint by the Goldwater forces, who called it a dirty low blow. The ad was indeed unfair, not so much in implying Goldwater
was frighteningly bloodthirsty, but in implying that Democrats were not.
Goldwater had surely earned his reputation as a gunslinger with his proposal to use tactical nukes to defoliate Vietnam, his
repeated calls to give NATO armies the right to use atomic weapons on their own, and his constant refrain that U.S. strategists
shouldn't let fear of nuclear war keep them from standing up to the Soviet Union. But, as Perlstein notes, Goldwater in this
case was a mere echo of the mainstream foreign policy thinking in the Democratic Party. When it came to the Cold War, the
two parties were both unremittingly hawkish. Goldwater's decree that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" was
merely the Reader's Digest version of Kennedy's Inaugural Day promise that "we shall pay any price, bear any burden,
meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
The most white-knuckle act of nuclear brinkmanship in American history was Kennedy's blockade of Cuba during the missile
crisis. A close second was his nationally televised 1961 speech in which he bluntly threatened to go to war with the Soviets
over Berlin, putting long-range bombers on 15 minutes' alert and warning Americans to start building fallout shelters. Perlstein
calls the speech "the most terrifying of the Cold War" and adds: "Later Barry Goldwater would say the same kinds of things
during the 1964 presidential campaign, and people would call him a madman."
Perlstein is equally merciless when it comes to Vietnam. Goldwater, he notes, insistently and correctly argued that Kennedy
and Johnson had gotten the United States far more deeply involved than anyone realized, that we were sliding into an impossible
"defensive war" that neither Congress nor the American public had ever authorized. Johnson replied, straight-faced, with the
most notorious lie in the history of American politics: "We are not going to send American boys nine or 10 thousand miles
away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." As he spoke, his best and brightest advisors were
putting the finishing touches on a deployment plan that would have nearly 200,000 American soldiers in Vietnam within a
year.
Of course, on Election Day in 1964, Johnson won 43 million votes to Goldwater's 27 million. Perlstein takes unholy delight in
quoting the post-mortems in which the usual gang of Washington idiots, from Scotty Reston to Arthur Schlesinger, pronounced
the Republican Party officially dead and the Goldwaterites banished to the wilderness. They were absurdly, comically wrong. It
didn't take long for Americans to recognize that Goldwater had been right about Vietnam (it was a war) and civil rights (you really
couldn't make people like each other by passing a law). The GOP made a strong showing in the 1966 congressional elections
and retook the presidency in 1968. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, who first emerged as a national political figure with a wildly popular
nationally televised pro-Goldwater speech in the final days of the '64 campaign, would be elected president.
There was one strain of the Republican Party banished into the wilderness after 1964 -- the patrician Eastern liberals that Goldwater
so despised. (Though the controversy over the martyr act of Vermont Sen. James Jeffords . . . show[ed] that a few tattered
survivors still remain, like Japanese soldiers holed up in the caves of the Philippines.) The two currents that Goldwater brought
into the party, the libertarians and the Southerners, coexist uneasily. If there were any doubt in which of them Goldwater himself
felt more at home, it was resolved when he famously suggested that Republicans ought to "kick Jerry Falwell right in the ass."
Perlstein, surveying all this nearly four decades later, concludes: "Here is one time, at least, in which history was written by the
losers." If only. It's fair to say that Goldwater won a permanent place in America's political debate for libertarian ideas. But few of
them have triumphed. Taxes consume a higher percentage of national income than ever, and George W. Bush managed to pass a
tax cut . . . only with the Keynesian argument that it would stimulate a lagging economy, not because hundreds of congressmen
started sporting TAXATION IS THEFT buttons.
The drug war has become the new Vietnam, consuming an ever-larger share of resources and lives. New groups demanding
entitlements disguised as civil rights, from non-smokers to the handicapped, pop up with depressing regularity. Even the Reagan
Revolution was mostly imaginary. The Energy and Education Departments are still standing, and federal expenditures and the federal
deficit climbed steadily throughout his administration. Even the much-ballyhooed reductions in force in the Washington bureaucracy
during Reagan's first year in office amounted to less than four-tenths of a percent of the federal workforce and were quickly swallowed
up by new hiring.
(* - I have to admit my very favourite zap at Goldwater '64 was the one, I forget who delivered it, that proclaimed he was really
bucking to get into the movies by becoming the president of 19th Century Fox . . . )
What Jack Kennedy forgot to tell Barry Goldwater was, never mind that they'll shoot you down if you give them eighteen months to
do it, he forgot to tell Goldwater what the unscrupulous in politics or the press can do to your reputation---whether you shoot from
the lip or work according to any script.
More to the point of the current discussion: For all the actual or alleged mistakes he did or didn't make, Barry Goldwater didn't
formulate his ideas, his policy proposals, or his political principles on the fly while tripping over himself to put his foot in his mouth.
He wasn't like a Groucho Marx character who said, "Those are my principles. If you don't like those, I have others." (Remind you
of anyone we know? ;) )
