Time Capsule – The Real Barry Goldwater

 

Barry Goldwater.

The name brings different actions to different people, depending on their political ideology. To CC Goldwater, successful writer and a PR executive, he was her loving grandfather and a man whose character prided in honesty as being the primary virtue. In an interview by AARP Magazine, she stated: “Well, I knew him as a grandfather – loving, caring, and really instilling in me the principle of being honest. I didn’t know his political platforms.” So, in order to explain to others and to understand him herself, she began to sift through photo albums and home movies, she researched what he wrote and viewed news archives of his speeches and events surrounding him. What resulted will be a documentary film entitled Mr. Conservative which will air on HBO on September 18^th. CC Goldwater, having been a college student through the golden age of liberalism in the 1960s/1970s sets the record straight concerning her grandfather’s public view. As she began to create the documentary she found out many things about her grandfather. He distrusted Richard Nixon, which means he didn’t hold the party line when it came between his character and the actions of its members. He was a close friend of John F. Kennedy, but distrusted Edward “Ted” Kennedy. In the plan for the presidential run of 1964, JFK and Goldwater discussed flying together in their presidential campaign and go over their speeches together making their cases to get elected. Now that is something – a Democrat and Republican flying together to make their case as why the American people should vote for them.

Goldwater was a champion in Arizona for civil rights, a key issue in the 1960s, but voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it gave the government too much power – not because he was against the Civil Rights Act itself. He had been a supporter for the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960, however. At that time homosexuals were still in the closet and homosexuals in the military , yet he was once quoted as saying that “Gays have served honorably since Julius Caesar.” On women’s rights to choose, he was against abortion, but believed the government should keep their nose out of it. Goldwater made it clear that he was for limited government, reasonable taxation, and guarding the people’s rights and liberties. He was a man before his time, and until Ronald Reagan, seemingly alone in a political community that was headed for creating a public dependent upon social programs and looking to the government to provide them with a false security from cradle to grave.

CC Goldwater, in commenting about her documentary, she told Bill Newcott in an interview: “Originally, I just wanted to make this movie that would convince all those people that maybe he just wasn’t such a jerk. At the end of the film he says, ‘I just want to be known as a guy who tried.’”

Barry Morris Goldwater was born on January 1^st 1909 and died on May 29^th 1998 and was instrumental in the resurgence of the American conservative movement and grassroot politics. He spent five terms in the United States Senate representing Arizona from 1953-1965 and 1869-1987. As mentioned, he was the Republican candidate for the presidency in the 1964 election, but lost to Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was against President Johnson’s “New Deal” which merely increased the social programs and continuing the practice of creating a welfare state that was on the Democrats agenda. Goldwater even fought against those inside his political party membership who went along with the New Deal Coalition. In 1964 he was pictured as a “radical reactionary”, yet he energized what would become the conservative grass roots movement that helped get Ronald Reagan elected later in 1980. In 1981, he began to take on libertarian ideology and criticized the influence (and rightly so) of the Christian Right members of the Republican Party.

When Goldwater was born in Phoenix in 1909, Arizona was a territory, not a state. His grandfather was an immigrant from Poland and founded a department store in Phoenix called Goldwater’s Department Store. His father, Baron Goldwater, converted to the Episcopal Church from Judaism when he married his fiancée, Josephine Williams. The family name had been changed from Goldwasser to Goldwater as recorded in the 1860 Census in Los Angeles, California. The family department stores made the Goldwater family wealthy. Barry Goldwater graduated from Staunton Military Academy and attended the University of Arizona for one year.

After the death of his father, Barry took over the family business in 1930. His business ideas were progressive, but was against unions. Business dealings brought about nervous breakdowns in 1937 and 1939 and he began to drink heavily, a problem he never completely overcame. Yet he lived a long life.

When World War II began, Barry Goldwater was commissioned in the Air Force. He became a pilot assigned to the Ferry Command, a newly formed unit that delivered aircraft and supplies to war zones all over the world. He spend most of the war flying between the United States and India across the Azores and into North Africa, South America, Nigeria and Central Africa and was promoted to the rank of Major General after a time. He flew 165 different types of aircraft.

After World War II, Goldwater was behind the building of the United States Air Force Academy, and later served on the Academy’s Board of Visitors. The Visitor Center at the Academy is named in his honor.

In 1949, Goldwater entered politics. He first won a U.S. Senate seat in 1952. He defeated Senate majority leader Ernest McFarland in 1958. His major issues were labor unions and anti-Communism and were an active supporter of the Conservative Coalition in Congress. His campaign on labor issues led to major reforms that passed Congress in 1957, and when he spent his time in an effort against AFL-CIO, he was defeated in his pursuit for reelection in 1958. He voted against the censure of Senator McCarthy in 1954 and emphasized his strong opposition to the spreading of communism in his 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative, which became a must read in the circle of conservatism.

As mentioned above, he had a controversial record concerning civil rights, but was misunderstood thanks to the efforts of the Democrat Party to discredit him. He was a danger for their plan to extend FDR’s concept of Americans being dependent upon government that started with the Social Security program. Goldwater was favored by the Southern Democrats who were the main opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other civil rights legislation when he went against the bill, but he was not against civil rights in itself, just the way the bill was written because of his idea that it gave too much power to the government, which he believed should be limited in order to protect the liberties of Americans and retain their individual freedom of choice.

In 1964 he won the GOP presidential nomination after a bitter fight against fellow Republicans. His main challenger was New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, whom he defeated in the California primary. He lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide election, and the Republican Party lost many seats in both houses of Congress. He remained popular in the southern states as well as his home state of Arizona. He was re-elected as senator three more terms until he retired in 1987, serving on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee in his final term of office. Despite his fiery speeches, he became a stabilizing influence within the Senate and was respected by members of both political parties. He was behind the fight against ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty in the 1970s, which ended up ceding the canal to the government of Panama, despite being built and maintained by the United States. His most important legislative achievement was the Goldwater-Nichols Act which reorganized senior command structure in the military.

Goldwater was a supporter of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy (see Time Capsule, LPJ, July 23^rd) and was one of only 22 Senators who voted against the McCarthy censure. As mentioned previously, he disliked Lyndon Johnson, but was good friends with John F. Kennedy. Goldwater said that Johnson was shady and “used every dirty trick in the bag.” He called Richard Nixon “the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life.” Goldwater did not stick to political party lines when it came to honesty and integrity.

Off and on within the pages of Lighthouse Patriot Journal, you will find quotes from Barry Goldwater, and so will readers in the future book of quotation collections along with others like Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and other political greats to the founding fathers of our nation. Barry Goldwater was not appreciated, like Ronald Reagan, during his prime political career, but history has shown that he was a man of principal, belief in following constitutional law, limited government and protection of the rights and liberties of the American people.

This September 18^th you can view a documentary that finally reveals Barry the way he was, and it is appropriate that his granddaughter was the one who initiated and produced it. George Bush, who is now the president was a strong supporter of Goldwater, as was his father. Unfortunately, President Bush has forgotten the principles established by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in the matter of limited government and the protection of the rights, liberties, security and freedom of choice for the American people.

Historian Rick Perlstein in his book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, explained his impact upon the American political scene in his analogy:

“Think of a senator winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations—and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. He would lose in a landslide. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. But if the precedent of 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. And not many decades later, Republicans would have to proclaim softer versions of those positions to get taken seriously for their party’s nomination.”

And from Barry’s own words, collected over the many years he served America:

“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. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. … 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! … My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn’t first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century. … When you say ‘radical right’ today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye. …Most Americans have no real understanding of the operations of the international moneylenders … the accounts of the Federal Reserve have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and … manipulates the credit of the United States. … A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. … A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. …And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse – the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist. …For the past twenty-five years the apostles of the welfare state, some Republicans, some Democrat, have been busy transforming that stern old gentleman with the top hat, the cutaway coat, the red, white, and blue trousers, from a symbol of dignity and freedom and justice for all men, into a national wet nurse, dispensing a cockeyed kind of patent medicine labeled ‘something for nothing,’ passing out the soothing syrup and rattles and pacifiers for grateful voters on election day. … 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 our 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 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 groups 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.’ … I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell’s ass. … I became convinced the isolationist mood of the country after World War I, not the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, had made World War II inevitable. If we had maintained our military superiority throughout the twenties and thirties, President Roosevelt could have warned Hitler not to invade any neutral countries, and that warning would have been heeded. … I don’t think there was any Reagan revolution. This country is based; its economy is based, on free enterprise. The government’s based on a constitutional democracy. And all Reagan did was to continue what Harry Truman did and George Washington started. … 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 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 that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can. … I wouldn’t trust Nixon from here to that phone. … It’s a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president – except me. … Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order. … Sex and politics are a lot alike. You don’t have to be good at them to enjoy them. … The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government. … The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they’re gay, you don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. … You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight. … Throughout history civilian populations and political rulers have talked of peace. We have never been free of war. The soldier, whose profession is war, understands that peace must be enforced by superior military might. The certainty of defeat is the only effective deterrent we can use to maintain peace. Furthermore, we can be strong without being aggressive. … To insist on strength is not war-mongering. It is peace-mongering. When I’m not a politician, I’ll be dead.”

Barry Goldwater died one year after he retired from politics. His word, his character, was honest to the end. He was a man of insight into the future and possiblities.

Barry Goldwater believed there are other life forms in the universe, and openly believed that the U.S. government has been and continued to suppress UFO evidence. He had down-to-earth humor, when he said to Jay Leno as a guest on the Tonight Show: “I’m getting a tattoo of lipstick pucker right on my ass.” Colorful, clever, insight of the future and a great American – Senator Barry Goldwater.