Barry Goldwater
Barry Morris Goldwater (January 1, 1909 - May 29, 1998) was a United States politician and spearhead and ideologue of the modern conservative movement in the USA. Goldwater personified the shift in balance in American culture from the Northeast to the West. An original thinker, fearlessly outspoken, he built the political machine that was inherited by Ronald Reagan. A five-term United States Senator from Arizona, he was the Republican Party candidate for the Presidency in 1964.
Goldwater was born in Phoenix, Arizona Territory. His father was originally Jewish, but converted to Episcopalianism to marry his fiancee, Barry's mother. Once, at a golf course in Maryland, Senator Goldwater was told "You can't play here, this is a restricted course", to which he responded "I'm only half Jewish...is it all right if I only play nine holes?" The family's department store made the Goldwaters comfortably rich.
Goldwater entered politics in 1949. He first won a Senate seat in 1953, when he upset veteran Democratic Senate majority leader Ernest McFarland. He served two full terms. In 1964, less than one year after the assassination of John Kennedy, he declined to run for re-election and was nominated by his party to run against incumbent president Lyndon Johnson. He lost to Johnson in a landslide, winning only thirty-nine percent of the popular vote, and only five states in the Deep South and Arizona (electoral map). Despite the magnitude of his defeat, however, his capture of previously Democratic stronghold states in the South foreshadowed a larger shift in electoral trends in the coming decades that would make the South a Republican bastion. Goldwater maintained later in life that he would have won the election if the country had not been in a state of extended grief, and that it was simply not ready for its third president in fourteen months.
He remained popular in his home state, and in 1968, he was elected again to the United States Senate. He served three terms and retired 1987. Despite his reputation as firebrand in the 1960s, by the end of his career he was considered a stabilizing influence in the Senate, and one of its most respected members by both parties.
Before Goldwater, the Republican Party was not clearly committed to political conservatism. He alarmed even some of his fellow partisans with his brand of staunch fiscal conservatism and militant anti-Communism. After boldly declaring in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention 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" ...", Goldwater was painted as a dangerous figure by the incumbent Johnson administration, which countered Goldwater's slogan "In your heart, you know he's right" with the line "In your guts, you know he's nuts."
As part of its advertising, the Johnson campaign created a television commercial showing a scene in which a young girl gathering daisies is interrupted by the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Dubbed Daisy, it was meant to imply that Goldwater would start a nuclear war if elected. The commercial, which featured only a few spoken words of narrative and relied on imagery for its emotional impact, was one of the most provocative moments in American campaign history and is credited by many as being the birth of the modern style of negative television advertising.
During the 1960s, Goldwater left a controversial record on civil rights. On the one hand, he was instrumental in desegregating the Arizona National Guard. He nevertheless opposed federal civil rights legislation on the grounds that it was an inappropriate extension of federal power, a result that led to mistaken charges of racism. This opposition to civil rights legislation, plus his anti-communism, started the South's slow migration from the Democrats to the GOP. Until the end of the campaign, when he was embittered by what he thought were unfair attacks, Goldwater was reluctant to harness the growing white backlash.
Hard to pigeonhole, he began as a reform Democrat, served as a friend and colleague of Joseph McCarthy to the bitter end (one of only 22 Senators who voted against McCarthy's censure), developed a deep friendship with President John F. Kennedy and a lasting dislike for Presidents Johnson (he voted against Johnson's Anti-Poverty Act of 1964) and Richard Nixon, whom he later called "the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life."
He urged Republicans to lay off Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and criticized the military's ban on homosexuals: "Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar." He had a low opinion of the religious right. He told talk-show host Jay Leno that he planned to get a tattoo 'right on my ass.'
Goldwater died in Paradise Valley, Arizona. He moderated his positions in later years, and opposed legislation against abortion.
Related Material
Karl Hess speech writer for the 1964 convention speech.
Further reading
Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, 1960 (ghostwritten), which has been called the 'one great political treatise promulgated by a single man and then used as a campaign platform.'
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American ConsensusExternal links