Useful Notes / Barry Goldwater

In your heart, you know he's right.^note His 1964 presidential campaign slogan. Infamously countered by Democrats with: "In your guts, you know he's nuts" or "In your heart you know he might" — a reference to the possibility of Goldwater using nuclear weapons.

"Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. […] 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!"

— From his acceptance speech as the 1964 Republican presidential candidate

Barry Morris Goldwater (January 2, 1909 – May 29, 1998) was an American politician, statesman, businessman, US Air Force officer, and author from Arizona, representing that state in the U.S. Senate from 1953 to 1965, then again from 1969 to 1987; he held each of the state's two seats in the Senate at different times. He previously served in the US Army and Air Force during World War II and The Korean War.

Goldwater is the politician most often credited with having sparked the resurgence of the American conservative political movement in the 1960s, after he became the Republican Party's nominee for president of the United States in 1964; he was literally nicknamed "Mister Conservative" for his outspoken opposition to the New Deal consensus. Although he was raised as an Episcopalian and worshiped at churches in that denomination, Goldwater was the first ethnically Jewish candidate (his father was Jewish) to be nominated for president by a major American party. Despite his loss to President Lyndon Johnson in the general election in a landslide,^note To wit, Johnson won 486 votes in the Electoral College to Goldwater's 52 and beat him in the popular vote by 22.6 percentage points nationwide. In an ironic reversal of how the national presidential map had usually looked for over eight decades before, five Deep South states — Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina — were the only states to vote Republican besides Goldwater's native Arizona (and he was the first GOP presidential nominee ever to carry Georgia, as well as the first to carry Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War). Meanwhile, Johnson swept the Northeast, where Goldwater was deeply unpopular; he (Johnson) even became the first Democrat to carry Vermont in a presidential election. many political pundits and historians believe he laid the foundation for the conservative revolution to follow, as the grassroots organization and conservative takeover of the Republican Party began a long-term realignment in American politics helped to bring about the victory of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election^note In a curious irony, Goldwater barely held on to his Senate seat when he ran for re-election the same year, as he faced a much tougher than expected challenge from Democratic businessman Bill Schulz and only secured victory when the absentee ballots were counted. and the "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s. Appropriately, Reagan first became known in national politics with his "A Time for Choosing" speech, in which he endorsed Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. The Washington Post columnist George Will would write: "We […] who voted for him in 1964 believe he won, it just took 16 years to count the votes." He retired from the Senate in 1987 and was succeeded by Congressman John McCain, who praised his predecessor as the man who "transformed the Republican Party from an Eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan." However, towards the end of his life, Goldwater moved towards the center on many issues and feuded with the conservative establishment. He supported environmental protection, marijuana legalization, abortion rights, and gay rights, unlike most of his party. At one point, he quipped "You don't need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight." He noted the irony of this situation to Bob Dole, stating incredulously that the two of them were the new liberals of the Republican party.

He was married to Margaret Johnson and Susan Shaffer Wechsler, and had four children, including Barry Goldwater Jr., who served in the House of Representatives from California from 1969 to 1983.

Goldwater died in 1998 after complications of a stroke; he was also suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

---

Books

• The Conscience of a Conservative^note Actually ghostwritten by Leo Brent Bozell, a lawyer working as one of Goldwater's speechwriters. (1960)
• Why Not Victory? A Fresh Look at American Policy (1963)
• Where I Stand (1964)
• Conscience of a Majority (1971)
• The Coming Breakpoint (1976)
• Arizona (1977, text; photography by David Muench)
• With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs of Senator Barry M. Goldwater (1980)
• Goldwater (1988)

In Media

Films — Live-Action

• In the 1965 film The Bedford Incident, actor Richard Widmark plays the film's antagonist, Captain Eric Finlander of the fictional destroyer USS Bedford, who modelled his character's mannerisms and rhetorical style after Goldwater. At one point, Finlander even uses thick-rimmed glasses like those which had become a trademark of Goldwater.
• Goldwater appears As Himself in the 1964 documentary Four Days in November. Visibly subdued, he observes, in reference to his having been ready to run against John F. Kennedy in 1964, that "He was the sort of antagonist I've always enjoyed", because JFK didn't make it personal. (Incidentally, on the subject of how LBJ trounced him, Goldwater later said he thought he lost because Americans weren't ready for a third new president in fourteen months.)

Literature

• In Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis, Peter still has an "AuH2O-4-USA" bumper sticker years after Goldwater's presidential campaign. He amuses himself when he thinks about driving to an anti-Vietnam War protest in that car.

Live-Action Television

• He appears as a character in Mrs. America, played by Peter MacNeill.

Music

• In his song "I Shall Be Free No. 10", Bob Dylan refers to Goldwater:
  "Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree
  I want everybody to be free
  But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
  Move in next door and marry my daughter
  You must think I'm crazy!
  I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba."

Theatre

• All the Way presents him as The Ghost and implies that he is a segregationist.^note This is something of a Historical Villain Upgrade. Goldwater did not support segregation — having voted for two civil rights acts in 1957 and 1960, which were also early landmarks, as well as founding the Arizona chapter of the NAACP and voluntarily desegregating his family business — but opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he believed that Titles II and VII were unconstitutional. This got him a lot of bad press and permanently soured him with the Civil Rights Movement, and the image of him as an opponent of civil rights stuck to him from then on.