Almost President (30 page)

At other times, Goldwater claimed to have been unaware that Arizona had any racial problems, even though his own African-American butler said that Phoenix in the 1940s and 1950s was as segregated as any city in the South, and another local African-American businessman said Phoenix in the 1950s was “just like Mississippi.”

Adding a layer of complexity to Goldwater's views on prejudice was his Jewish ancestry on his father's side. Raised an Episcopalian in a prominent family, he claimed never to have experienced anti-Semitism in Arizona. His best friend, a practicing Jew, did, however. Yet, when his friend was barred from the University of Arizona fraternity where Goldwater was a member, Goldwater neither left the fraternity nor made an effort to get his friend admitted. Later in life, when that same friend was prevented from joining the restricted Phoenix Country Club where Goldwater served as president, he forced the other members to admit his friend—but made no effort to get the club to lift its anti-Semitic restriction and no other Jew joined the club for another decade.

Goldwater could empathize with an individual who experienced prejudice and could be moved to do something about it personally, if it was within his power. But he had, in the words of his biographer, Robert Alan Goldberg, “an inability to conceptualize prejudice and discrimination beyond the individual experience to institutional or societal conditions.”

This view was certainly shaped by Goldwater's own privileged background. The man who became the epitome of the politics of self-reliance guilelessly noted, “You might say I was a success by being born into a successful family.”

Equally incongruous for the man who despised government handouts, Goldwater's family dry goods business struggled on the Arizona frontier until the government moved to aggressively subdue the local Apache tribe, which proved to be a tenacious adversary. By the 1880s, a full 20 percent of the U.S. Army's soldiers were stationed in Arizona and the Goldwater's store provided a large share of their food and clothing. Later, federally funded dam and reclamation projects created the booming state's agricultural industry. By the 1920s, 15 percent of Arizona's gross domestic product was from federal spending. Yet, later in life, Goldwater was in no way being intentionally ironic when he said, “We didn't know the federal government. Everything that was done, we did it ourselves.”

Goldwater said his motto for employee relations was, “Treat people right and they will treat you right.” Goldwater provided his workers with good wages, a forty-hour week, health insurance, paid sick leave, profit sharing, a pension, and a host of other perks that included use of a Goldwater-owned recreation area just outside of town. This had the intended result of discouraging his employees to unionize. Goldwater believed unions were in league with racketeers and infringed on his rights as a businessman. It was apparently the New Deal's promotion of organized labor that led Goldwater to conclude he was a conservative Republican when his parents had been Democrats.

Goldwater had little interest in business, though he had a flair for merchandising, starting a national fad when he designed and sold men's underwear printed with red ants and marketed under the slogan: “You'll rant and dance with ants in your pants!” Goldwater preferred to pursue his primary interests: photography and flying. Goldwater was such a fine photographer, with Arizona's Native American culture a particularly favored subject, that he was elected to the Royal Photographic Society of London. He was an even more avid flyer, owning a multitude of planes throughout his life. When war came in 1941, poor eyesight kept Goldwater from becoming a fighter pilot, but he later flew dangerous supply missions in South Asia over the Himalayas. He remained in the Air Force Reserve until he retired as a major general in 1967.

He cut a dashing figure in Arizona, and his place in Phoenix's business community ensured he would become active in civic affairs. He had a tremendous aptitude for politics. He managed local campaigns and served on the Phoenix City Council before emerging as a national figure because of his stunning upset victory over Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland in 1952.
18
By 1955, most leaders of the conservative GOP old guard had departed, and Goldwater was already a leading national spokesman for the conservative cause. General Douglas MacArthur had retired from public life, Ohio senator Robert Taft had died in 1953, and Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy had been censured and discredited in 1954. Most other party leaders were following the Thomas Dewey–inspired “Modern Republicanism” of the Eisenhower administration, which Goldwater derided as “a dime store New Deal.”

But it was not just by default that Goldwater became the nation's leading conservative, it was also the Goldwater persona, the “tanned, square-jawed, ex-Army Air Corps pilot with horn-rim glasses, straight talk, and sardonic humor,” that set conservative hearts aflutter. In a period when Westerns represented virtually all of the top-rated shows on television, Goldwater, sans glasses, wearing a cowboy hat and sometimes holding a rifle, seemed to embody the mythic West that enthralled the rest of the nation. His emergence as a national personality coincided neatly with the growing conservative intellectual movement, which included William F. Buckley's founding of the
National Review
in 1955. Buckley, too, was smitten with Goldwater, later recalling that he “brought a supernal charm and utterly American savoir-faire into twentieth-century politics.”

When Goldwater made such pronouncements as, “I would rather see the Republicans lose in 1960 fighting on principle, than I would care to see us win standing on grounds we know are wrong and on which we will ultimately destroy ourselves,” conservatives knew they had found their man. Clarence Manion, the former dean of the law school at the University of Notre Dame and a wildly popular conservative commentator on radio, was one of those most strongly urging Goldwater to become a presidential candidate in 1960. While flattered by Manion's attentions, Goldwater thought Nixon was a near shoo-in for the nomination. He told Manion he would do nothing to encourage or discourage a “draft Goldwater” effort but would actively campaign for the nomination only if it appeared that Rockefeller was poised to take the nomination from Nixon. Privately, Goldwater expressed doubt that Americans would elect a candidate of Jewish descent.

Goldwater, however, did like Manion's idea that he write a book. He approached L. Brent Bozell, Buckley's brother-in-law, to serve as his ghostwriter because, he acknowledged with charming humility, “my complete incapacity to be an author is well known to everybody.” Goldwater provided Bozell with some general thoughts and a rough outline, and Bozell did most of the rest of the work. Goldwater did not even come up with the title. He was fine with Manion's suggestion:
The Conscience of a Conservative
.

The slim, 124-page book was a publishing sensation. Even though Manion had it published through a small “vanity house,” by November 1960 it had sold a half-million copies (with the help of bulk purchases by various conservative groups), and it would go on to sell three million more copies over time, making it one of the most successful political treatises in American history. The book's slimness emphasized its theme, encapsulated by the following excerpt:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

Popular scholarship in the post-war period had been insisting that America had finally reached a liberal consensus and that there were no conservative ideas in circulation worthy of serious consideration. Now, here came Goldwater with a conservative creed that seemed both fresh and defiant. As such, it had a near electric appeal to young conservatives. Largely ignored while the media lavished attention in the 1960s on the youth movement from the left, the kids on the right represented a counterculture to the counterculture. Many young Goldwater supporters would later report that they felt a “thrill” in being part of what seemed almost a conspiracy against the prevailing liberal mindset. Goldwater's campaign became “a Woodstock of the right” that attracted a host of clean-cut young people, among them a seventeen-year-old “Goldwater girl” in Park Ridge, Illinois, named Hillary Rodham who attended rallies wearing cowboy boots, a red, white, and blue sash, and an “AuH
2
O” button. Eight years later, she worked on the George McGovern campaign with her future husband, Bill Clinton.

The Conscience of a Conservative
also directly addressed the issue of civil rights, tipping Goldwater's hand on where he would stand on future legislation. Goldwater would note elsewhere that he had voted in favor of civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960 because, he said, those bills were narrowly focused on protecting the right of African Americans to vote and the guarantee of the right to vote could be found in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But nowhere in the Constitution, Goldwater argued, was there anything that mandated integration, most particularly in the public schools, where jurisdiction was strictly a local, not a federal, affair.
19

It might be “wise and just” to have black children attend the same schools as white children, Goldwater acknowledged. “I am not prepared, however, to impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina, or to tell them what methods should be adopted and what pace should be kept in striving toward that goal. That's their business, not mine.” Goldwater even questioned whether the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in
Brown vs. the Board of Education,
desegregating the nation's public schools, “is the law of the land.” For Goldwater, states' rights trumped even the right of black children to receive an equal education.

While
The Conscience of a Conservative
was a runaway best seller and dramatically increased Goldwater's national profile, Nixon was, as Goldwater predicted, the Republican nominee in 1960. Of conservatives, Nixon said, “They don't like me, but they tolerate me.” Goldwater allowed his name to be put in nomination at the Republican National Convention and then withdrew with a challenge to his followers: “Let's grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let's get to work.”

Goldwater was already hard at work, particularly as the chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, the person designated by the Republican Senate caucus to help elect more Republican senators. The chair of the complementary National Republican Congressional Committee was Goldwater's future running mate, William Miller, and together they poured money into a Republican initiative that was called “Operation Dixie,” whose goal was to build a Republican Party worthy of the name in the South.

Operation Dixie showed results in 1962. In South Carolina, William D. Workman Jr., a recent GOP convert who was a popular columnist and television commentator, astonished observers by receiving 44 percent of the vote, an extraordinary total for a Republican in South Carolina. Workman had argued that his opponent, three-term Democratic senator Olin D. Johnston, was a “fine segregationist,” but Johnston was hindered in those views by his allegiance to a national Democratic administration that was becoming increasingly pro–civil rights. In Alabama, another Republican recruit, oil distributor James Martin, did even better, losing to thirty-seven-year congressional veteran Lister Hill by less than a single percentage point. Goldwater could see that his theories were correct: Gains could be made in the South if Republicans accommodated the segregationist sympathies that dominated the region.

Despite these successes, Goldwater was not the front-runner to win the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. Nixon had eliminated himself from a potential rematch with Kennedy by virtue of his 1962 loss in the California governor's race. Rockefeller, therefore, seemed the likely GOP nominee, and he continued to support a strong civil rights plank in the Republican platform. But Rockefeller critically wounded his prospects when, in the spring of 1963, he divorced his wife of thirty years and a month later married Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, a family friend nearly twenty years his junior who was also a recent divorcée with four small children. No divorced man had been elected president, and Rockefeller was not only divorced but accused of breaking up another man's marriage.

Goldwater had believed he would be a stronger candidate against Kennedy than Rockefeller anyway. Kennedy's weaknesses played to the strengths of a conservative opponent, thought Goldwater, not a liberal one. Further, he saw Kennedy's particular weakness in the South as an opening to unseat the young president.

Kennedy's martyrdom has obscured the reality that he was once a flesh and blood politician, facing a host of political challenges in late 1963. Since Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide in 1964, the conventional assumption is that Kennedy would have done the same had he lived. But Kennedy had felt politically vulnerable going into the 1964 campaign. He had not forgotten that his margin of victory over Nixon was razor-thin and fell short of an outright majority.
20
Beginning with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, his first two years in office had been blighted by an amazing string of foreign policy mishaps and disasters. The uneasy coalition of Southern conservatives and liberal Northerners that had made him president was rapidly deteriorating over the civil rights issue. His tepid response to the civil rights challenge was eroding support among his liberal base, while most Southern whites fervently concluded he was moving too fast on the issue.