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Barry Goldwater: A Political Portrait
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14636 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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5 / 1988 |
4,168 Words |
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John B. Judis
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For at least a decade after the 1964 presidential election, Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency was considered a curious historical accident--one whose recurrence the Republican Party had been careful to prevent in 1968 and would continue to prevent in the future.
Ronald Regan's landslide victories in 1980 and 1984 have transformed Goldwater from a crank to a prophet and elevated his campaign for the presidency to a historic event that paved the way for the conservative realignment of the 1980s. The past is a reflection of the present.
But just as the shadow of defeat minimized Goldwater's achievement, the bright sun of Reagan's victory has tended to exaggerate it. There is by no means a straight line from the 1964 to the 1980 campaign. Like another crucial political event, Franklin D. Roosevelt's "balance the budget" campaign in 1932, Goldwater's campaign achieved its larger impact almost in spite of the candidate's and campaign's intentions.
From the vantage of the Reagan years, one imagines a determined, rockjawed Goldwater, flanked by the militant conservatives of the 1950s, leading the charge against the regnant liberalism. But in 1964, Goldwater was an extremely reluctant candidate, probably the least ambitious man to seek the presidency in the twentieth century. (Calvin Coolidge is the only other contender.) And he was far from comfortable as the leader of the new conservative movement that had spring up in the 1950s.
In spite of Goldwater's explosive statement in his acceptance speech that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," Goldwater and his campaign consistently distanced themselves from the editors of National Review, the major conservative publication of the day, and from the conservative leadership of the Draft Goldwater campaign. In 1967 and 1968, centrist Richard Nixon would be far more friendly to National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., than were Goldwater or his campaign.
And the major demographic achievement of Goldwater's campaign--the Republican inroads in the South against a southern Democratic opponent--did not stem from a conscious design on the hearts of white southern Democrats, then bedeviled by the civil rights movement, but from Goldwater's almost inadvertent and abstract opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
By 1960 Goldwater, who described the Eisenhower domestic program as a "dimestore New Deal," had become the political leader of the conservatives who read Human Events and National Review and who chafed under Eisenhower's spirit of Geneva. Goldwater's book Conscience of a Conservative, ghostwritten by aide and National Review editor Brent Bozell, had become a national bestseller. South Carolina and Arizona Republicans, stung by Nixon's pact with Nelson Rockefeller (the "Betrayal in Babylon"), had nominated Goldwater for president at the 1960 convention in Chicago. And in withdrawing his name, Goldwater had offered a challenge for the future. "Let's grow up conservatives!" he had said. "If we want to take this Party back, and I think we can some day, let's get to work."
By these words, Goldwater appeared to commit himself to a run for the presidency in 1964, but repeated attempts by conservatives to secure Goldwater's pledge failed abysmally. At a
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