With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater
Goldwater, Barry M.
and when better data were made available and b e t t e r s t a t i s t i c a l methods were suggested, he used them unflinchingly. His new results show, I think, that better data and careful...
...What shall be said, at last, of Barry Goldwater...
...Odd--and uncharitable...
...He didn't mention resignation . . . . The President knew what he must do...
...But it was too late...
...If there is one disappointment-in .reading Who Gets Ahead?, it is that Jencks limited himself to cleaning up his scientific results and forewent advancing the provocative political positions in Inequality...
...Of course, political importance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder...
...and I will be heard...
...Kennedy's assassination that November, putting a conservative Texas Democrat in the White House, made the prospect of Goldwater's actual election still more remote...
...Bur it wasn't to be quite that easy...
...In this we were mistaken...
...Goldwater believed he knew, far better than we did, how unlikely it was that he could be elected...
...assumes that income inequality is inherently suspect and that finding what determines that inequality is important social research...
...Its longtime Eastern leadership (Willkie-Dewey-Rockefeller) was brusquely overthrown and replaced by a more conservative coalition of the South and West that has dominated the party ever since...
...It seems safe to say that when social research properly addresses large social issues it usually finds that "people's long-held notions" (a favorite pejoration) are nearly correct, and when the results differ from popular notions the differences are so subtle that they become politically unimportant (although they remain scientifically interesting...
...Those who do not accept that assumption will have a much different view of Jencks' work...
...When we left, he was smiling...
...So his bandwagon rolled on, to-and through--the convention...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 33...
...Goldwater was only one of a number of senators outspokenly sympathetic to the conservative cause...
...His new results show, I think, that better data and careful methods usually make "startling" social science findings much less shocking...
...In the light of all that has happened since, it is understandable why Goldwater might want to minimize, even to himself, his critical role in Nixon's 1968 nomination --and for that matter in Ford's, eight years later...
...and the man it picked to succeed him was beaten by Republican Richard Nixon...
...By characterizing "conservative" and "elitist" positions as claiming that the United States is a perfect meritocracy (as measured by imperfect test scores and educational attainment), they set up the reader to conclude that "we have a long way to go...
...Dubious and deeply reluctant, he must have felt rather like Hamlet: "The time is out of joint...
...Nevertheless, the bandwagon started to roll, and by mid-1963 it was apparent that Goldwater would very probably be nominated whether he liked it or not...
...Goidwater's career has at various William A. Rusher is publisher of National Review...
...In his Arizona colleague Carl Hayden's division of senators into "show horses" and "work horses," Goldwater has always tended to fall into the former category...
...In addition, forgivably, he valued more highly than we the third term...
...This depends, as one reviewer of Inequality pointed out, On whether we say the glass is half full or half empty...
...He hasn't forgiven--why should he?--his liberal fellow Republicans who distorted his record, cut his reputation to ribbons, and all but publicly repudiated his candidacy in 1964...
...Once again, in 1976, Goldwater's endorsement--in this case of Ford-probably was enough to tip the scales against Reagan in that closely divided convention...
...Lyndon Johnson's great victory proved evanescent even by ordinary political standards: Less than four years later he dared not ask his own party for renomination...
...As Goldwater proudly notes, "I received more votes than any candidate in either party had ever achieved on the first ballot of a contested convention where the roll call was permitted to continue to conclusion without allowing any state to change its votes: 883 out of 1,308--more than twice as many as the combined first-ballot votes of all other candidates...
...So Nixon it was...
...This time Reagan's candidacy was out in the open, and Goldwater therefore cannot avoid offering, in his memoirs, some explanation for his astonishing support of Ford...
...I had seen some in-depth polls done by an organization which in the past has always been right...
...But nobody who knows him has ever doubted his sincerity, his simple honesty, his devotion to-his country and his duty, or the rocklike integrity of his character...
...The problem, of course, is that no one seems to want to redistribute income, and until Americans are convinced by socialists like Jencks that the idea of income equality is politically important, books like this will remain slightly irrelevant...
...bo Gets Ahead...
...Conservative delegates who distrusted Nixon--and they were legion--were confronted with the perfect riposte: Were they trying to be more royalist than the king...
...Instead, in these memoirs Goldwater merely lists those members of his 1964 team who were individually signing on with Nixon in 1965 and 1966, implying that they more or less dragged him along...
...Who Gets Ahead?, dealing with the same ideologically charged issues, closes with the rather weak statement that " i f we want to redistribute income, the most effective strategy is probably still to redistribute income...
...and his brilliant Conscience of a Conservative, which was the product of several pens, gave him an early reputation as a profound conservative theoretician that he would probably be the first to admit was undeserved...
...Pole, in his recent, well-received book, The Pursuit of Equality In American History, argues that while the idea of equality has played an increasingly important role in our history, equality of income has never caught on...
...It wasn't the majority view, but its proponents had almost the messianic fervor of William Lloyd Garrison: "I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch...
...Once away from the delicate subject of Reagan, however, Goldwater has much that is fascinating to say about the men and events be has watched and influenced...
...But Goldwater's 1964 convention victory changed the GOP fundamentally and forever...
...And thereby hangs a tale...
...Goldwater doe~not even mention, for example, that he publicly endorsed Nixon for the 1968 nomination on January 22, 1965...
...Marc Platmer has suggested, in a recent issue of the Public Interest, that the ideological basis of a welfare state is radically different from that of a redistributive state, and that the former does not naturally transform itself into the latter...
...Like Herbert Hoover, who was also inundated politically by a flood of billingsgate, Barry Goldwater has lived long enough to see his detractors regret and largely withdraw their rabid attacks on him and even come to recognize his many good qualities...
...In 1968, when Johnson prudently did not even attend the Democratic convention, Goldwater was probably more responsible than any other single individual for Nixon's victory in the Republican convention over the forces that wanted Ronald Reagan...
...Nixon knew very well what they were there to say, yet "He was serene, confident, cheerful . . . . I had never seen him so relaxed...
...As for Reagan, he solemnly treats him as a noncandidate--though of course Reagan knew all about, and thoroughly approved, the fifth-floor office at 47 Kearny Street in San Francisco from which Tom Reed was quietly promoting a drive to nominate him...
...In a legislative body with a full complement of evil geniuses, accomplished thieves, and falling-down drunks, he will be remembered-long and fondly--as a man who stood tall...
...But the tone and views are unmistakably Barry Goldwater's, and the result is a book that belongs in every library, public and personal, concerned with American politics in the third quarter of the twentieth century...
...The men in charge of the Reagan campaign had never impressed me as possessing any degree of political skill...
...is probably: "Who cares...
...Clifton White, William A. Rusher, and John Ashbrook of Ohio launched the Draft Goldwater for President movement at a meeting in Chicago on October 8, 1961...
...George McGovern's extremely mild form of guaranteed income, as well as Richard Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, were both hooted off the stage because they smelled strongly of income redistribution...
...The authors of Inequality seemed so confident of their results that they thought it should be used to convince the public (which needs much convincing) that income inequality is indeed a grave problem...
...Lastly, though a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, he bore no trace of the ideologue, and as a professional Republican politician he instinctively distrusted the hot-eyed polysyllabicists who were soon clambering all over his unauthorized bandwagon...
...A wel...
...Thoughtless people, remembering only that defeat, fail utterly to understand the true significance of what Barry Goldwater accomplished in 1964...
...He thereupon promptly sidelined the ~2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 team, led by Clifton White, that had engineered that triumph, installed in its stead what was inevitably dubbed his "Arizona mafia," and sailed on to the defeat he knew was inevitable in November...
...There was abroad in the land during the 1950s a restless new conservative mood that urgently demanded political expression...
...as senator that running for the White House in 1964 would force him to forego...
...most of them were on the team that had brought about Goldwater's own overwhelming nomination back in 1964...
...By the time the convention in Miami began, Goldwater admits, "the Nixon forces were nervous...
...Indeed, the appropriate response to the way Jencks frames the question, "Who gets ahead...
...The welfare state grows by taking over portions of the private economic sphere one issue at a time, not by pursuing the nebulous goals of income or, more broadly, social equality...
...O cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right...
...It is time for his memoirs--and here they are: dictated, as is his custom, into a recording machine, with the helpful stimulus of gleanings from his "Alpha File," itself consisting largely of contemporary memoranda about important people and events in his life...
...He became agreeably entangled with the GOP in his native Arizona back in the late 1940s, and undoubtedly wouldn't have objected if it had simply carried him, as in fact it did, to the United States Senate, there to serve, loyally and patriotically, until honorable retirement was indicated...
...He put his feet on the desk and talked...
...times followed two quite distinct though related trajectories: the rise of the modern conservative movement, and the ongoing progress (if that's the word for it) of the Republican Party...
...I was as deep as it was possible to get in the plot to coopt Barry Goldwater for conservatism's purposes (as he well knows: "F...
...but something--let's take the easy way out and call it Fate--decreed that it would be Gotdwater, rather than Knowland or Jenner or Curtis, who would carry the conservative banner to smashing victory in the Republican convention of 1964...
...The growth of the American welfare state has undoubtedly changed the distribution of income (mostly at the lower end of the scale), but that seems quite beside the point...
...But facts are facts, and they deserve to be recorded...
...He gives us an unforgettable last glimpse of Nixon when Hugh Scott, John Rhodes, and Goldwater went to tell him, on August 7, 1974, that impeachment and removal were inevitable if he stayed on...
...Even though he has decided to run for re-election as senator in 1980, his role in the great political events of our era has long since been fixed and targely played...
...It is just as easy to maintain that by explaining at least one-half of inequality (and here I think Jencks interprets his data conservatively) with scientific methods and data that are rudimentary by the standards of the natural sciences, we have done quite well...
...Thank God he did not require us to spell out the message we carried...
...Did Nixon',~ subtly self-destructive personality, having at last contrived its own downfall, perhaps know a weird, brief moment of peace...
...The ideological excesses of Inequality were clearly a product of the early seventies, but at least the book made an argument for the political importance of its results...
...That is undoubtedly why he pleaded Nixon's cause so eloquently with his former s e n a t o r i a l colleagues and many others during the ensuing three years, and why Reagan's election as governor of California in November 1966 failed to thrill him as it thrilled so many other conservatives...
...fare state is one in which people decide (for better or worse) that there are a certain number of economic areas in which money should matter less and where a "social net" should be in place...
...If Goldwater was for Nixon, what conservative could rationally be against him...
...Somebody--perhaps Steve Shadegg--has worked over this rambling and discursive body of material, pulling it into shape and chronological order and adding, here and there, bits of connective tissue or exposition...
...Goldwater is ordinarily the most forthright of men, but in describing his attitude toward Reagan over the years he is, in this book, less than wholly candid...
...but on December 8, 1963, at a meeting of his closest cronies (not a single member of the Draft Committee, significantly, was there), Goldwater decided--correctly, in my opini o n - t h a t he "bad planted the flag on the hilltop...
...The result is so dry and unpersuasive that I quote it in full: "I believed the incumbent would be a stronger candidate...
...But he neglects to include a description of his own repeated assurances to wavering conservative delegates pledged to Nixon that "Ron will accept the vice presidency"--assurances so damaging to Reagan's hopes that he was finally forced to phone Goldwater and ask him to stop giving them, and then followed that up with a telegram to every delegation chairman denying that he would do any such thing...
...It was not his smashing defeat in November, but his overwhelming triumph at the July convention, that had the really enduring consequences - - a s those of us who drafted him had hoped it would...
...J.R...
...If this is true, and I think it is, then it is clear that the American "creed" is much more consistent with a welfare state than a redistributive one...
...We didn't have, or ask, his permission, but his Conscience of a Conservative had made him by far the best known political spokesman for our cause, and it simply didn't occur to us that he might actually feel uneasy with a group whose only crime was that it earnestly wanted to nominate him for President...
...now I must defend that flag...
...Jencks and his new collaborators have removed much of the rhetoric but the theme remains the same...
Vol. 13 • March 1980 • No. 3
