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 nigger-nigger-nigger."
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."
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
Pingback| 4.11.10 @ 4:41AM
Inside the Mind of David Toyne » Blog Archive » Turning Point links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
|5.19.10 @ 11:31PM|#
It's good to see that you carried your childhood thinking forward and are applying it to your adult thinking.
nfl jerseys|11.13.10 @ 3:06AM|#
cyhjg