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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. 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 B. Johnson. He lost to Johnson in a landslide, receiving only 38.4 percent of the popular vote, and winning only five states in the Deep South plus his home state of Arizona (See U.S. presidential election, 1964). 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 more terms and retired in 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.
Goldwater died in Paradise Valley, Arizona from Alzheimer's disease.
Before Goldwater, the Republican Party was not clearly committed to 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 ran 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. Ironically, the ad was run only twice and in small local markets. (Goldwater's own rhetoric on nuclear war was quite uncompromising. On one occasion he remarked, "Let's lob a nuclear bomb into the men's room at the Kremlin." [Lapham 2004])
At the time, Goldwater seemed to many to be far out of step with the then-prevailing Cold-War liberal consensus in U.S. politics. Richard Hofstadter remarked at the time, "When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?" [Lapham 2004] Receiving only 38.4% of the popular vote, and carrying only the South plus his home state of Arizona, Goldwater himself remarked, "We would have lost even if Abraham Lincoln had come back and campaigned with us."
During the 1960s, Goldwater left a controversial record on civil rights. On the one hand, he was a co-founder of the Arizona NAACP and was instrumental in desegregating the Arizona National Guard. As a Senator, he was a supporter of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. Nevertheless he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that it was an inappropriate extension of federal power, which opened him to charges of racism. Although Democrats were the main opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and previous civil rights legislation, opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by so public a figure as Goldwater started the South's slow migration from the Democrats to the GOP. Goldwater's claim that "you can't legislate morality" was echoed later by Ronald Reagan, but the black community countered by stating that such laws ensured protection of minority rights in the face of majority discrimination. 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."
During the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan as president and the growing involvement of the religious right in conservative politics, Goldwater showed an increasing libertarian streak that put him at odds with the Reagan Administration and religious conservative positions. Goldwater was a passionate defender of personal liberty, and saw the religious right's views as an encroachment on personal privacy and individual liberties. In his 1980 U.S. Senate re-election campaign, he won support from religious conservatives but in his final term voted consistently to uphold legalized abortion. In 1987, Goldwater described the conservative Arizona Governor Evan Mecham as "hardheaded" and called on him to resign, and two years later stated the Republican Party had been taken over by a "bunch of kooks", i.e., supporters of TV evangelist Pat Robertson and Mecham. He aggravated so many social conservatives that some in Arizona suggested stripping his name from Republican party headquarters. After his retirement in the 1990s he became a virtual outcast of the GOP leadership, and in 1996 told Bob Dole, who was also under fire from hard-line conservatives in Dole's presidential campaign, "We're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?"
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 became known for the occasionally off-color remark, and once told talk-show host Jay Leno that he planned to get a tattoo 'right on my ass.'
However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism."
- From the Congressional Record, September 16, 1981
Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.
- Response to Jerry Falwell stating he was concerned that Sandra Day O'Connor might be moderate on abortion and other social issues, 1981.
I don't have any respect for the Religious Right. There is no place in this country for practicing religion in politics. That goes for Falwell, Robertson and all the rest of these political preachers. They are a detriment to the country.
- Interview by The Advocate
A lot of so-called conservatives don't know what the word means. They think I've turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That's a decision that's up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right.
- Interview to the Los Angeles Times, 1994
By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars...Can any of us refute the wisdom of Madison and the other framers? Can anyone look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northem Ireland, or the bombs bursting in Lebanon and yet question the dangers of injecting religious issues into the affairs of state?
- Speech to Senate, Sept. 15, 1981
I don't like being called the New Right; I'm an old, old son-of-a-bitch. I'm a conservative.
- Showing his contempt for a new conservative movement focused on Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina, 1992.
Karl Hess, speech writer for the 1964 convention speech.
Goldwater, Barry. 1960. The Conscience of a Conservative (ghostwritten), which has been called the "one great political treatise promulgated by a single man and then used as a campaign platform."
Perlstein, Rick. 2001. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 080902859.
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