PS2 for 1/8/87 SO LONG, BARRY GOLDWATER, AND THANKS.
Barry Goldwater won’t be around when the 100th Congress convenes this month. He has retired to his home in Arizona, but his niche in history is secure forever.
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Barry Goldwater to the conservative movement. There wouldn’t have been a Ronald Reagan era if there hadn’t been a Barry Goldwater 20 years before.
In the 1950s, “conservative” was something of an epithet. Only the staunchest of ideologues was willing to accept that label because the connotations were not conducive to political popularity.
Barry Goldwater did not seek the heavy mantle of leadership. He was really drafted by a movement that wanted to honor a leader who stood by his convictions and who refused to compromise with or accommodate the liberals.
In 1959, Dean Clarence Manion, the nationally known constitutional lawyer and former Dean of the Notre Dame Law School, conceived the idea that a book could launch Barry Goldwater as the leader of the then-fragile conservative movement, and its title would be “The Conscience of a Conservative.” Before that book was published, few suspected that a conservative had a conscience.
Dean Manion also had the business and political acumen to devise a way to finance and market the book. He arranged with a small Kentucky printer to print the hardback book for $1, a second dollar was used for distribution costs, and the third dollar of the $3 retail price went into a campaign fund called Americans for Goldwater.
When Barry Goldwater’s name was placed in nomination at the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago, his floor demonstration was spontaneously enthusiastic and genuine. It was a dramatic moment of political history when Barry appeared on the platform and told his followers that 1960 was not their year, and to go home and come back in four years when conservatives would have enough party strength to nominate their candidate.
The eastern liberal establishment had dominated Republican National Conventions and forced the nominations of their hand-picked candidates every four years from 1936 through 1960. They were not about to give up easily to a western conservative whom they did not control.
Following an “anybody but Goldwater” strategy in 1964, the liberal Republican kingmakers trotted out every candidate they could find to oppose Goldwater. After Nelson Rockefeller stumbled in the California primary and they couldn’t nominate their last desperate hope, Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, the liberal establishment set out on the 20th century’s most vicious media campaign to smear and destroy Goldwater and all who supported him.
Writing in the anti-Goldwater Los Angeles Times, an anti-Goldwater columnist described what happened: “An attack upon Goldwater of a ferocity never remotely approached in any of the eight national party conventions previously attended by this columnist was then opened. They, the ‘moderns,’ loosed upon Goldwater a storm of accusation and innuendo. Scranton camp followers spread shocking tales suggesting that Goldwater was perhaps in league with neo-Nazis in Germany—and this about a man whose own father was Jewish. Scranton himself attacked Goldwater in tones plainly implying that Goldwater was not only wrong but actually evil.”
The pollsters cooperated with their contrived surveys of public opinion. The Lou Harris poll falsely described the Goldwater position as favoring “going to war over Cuba,” “using A-bombs in Asia,” and “against Social Security.”
The media, the Lyndon Johnson campaign, the leftwing smearmongers, and the liberal Republican kingmakers whose candidates had been rejected by the Republican National Convention worked in tandem to carry on an orchestrated smear of Barry Goldwater. They gave him the false image of a trigger-happy warmonger. The orchestrated media assault even exceeded Watergate in decibels of intensity, and far exceeded the current “Iran-Contra-gate” binge.
For the first time in 30 years, Barry Goldwater as the 1964 Republican Presidential nominee gave the American voters “a choice, not an echo.”
Unfortunately, the majority of the American voters were bamboozled by vicious media lies, and they elected the echo of the past, Lyndon Johnson. It was truly remarkable that, despite the unprecedented avalanche of invective, 27 million Americans staunchly voted for Barry Goldwater anyway.
That was the painful birthing of the politically active conservative movement. The legacy of Barry Goldwater is the way the 27 million, who braved the vitriol of Big Media in 1964, lived to grow into the 54 million majority that validated the Reagan Revolution in 1984. I’m glad Barry Goldwater was still in the Senate to relish the vindication of everything for which he fought 20 years earlier.
