Politics as a Noble Calling (F. Clifton White with Jerome Tuccille) and Goldwater (Lee Edwards)
Gold, Victor
C lif White was one of the fathers of professional campaign management, but don't hold it against him. He is no more responsible for the current state of the political art, as practiced by James...
...Along with Bill Buckley and Bill Rusher, he would form the nucleus of the young conservative movement that not only nominated Goldwater but transformed the Republican Party and American politics in the second half of the century...
...For the first time in the history of any culture, a large portion of children—over 30 percent by some estimates—are being raised apart from their natural fathers...
...Or hadn't you noticed...
...But it was the Goldwater campaign—the first, and only, genuine draft in presidential campaign history, for the original anti-Washington candidate—that would give the tall, soft-spoken New Yorker his finest hour as a practitioner of his "noble calling...
...High crime, chronic poverty, miseducation, a degenerate culture—all are fueled by the breakdown of the family and the declining role of mature men...
...Distraught conservatives ask, "What's happened to Barry...
...As David Blankenhorn notes, it isn't just that nearly half the children of this generation will spend some time separated from their fathers...
...Only the Establishment has...
...Meanwhile, it was imperative that a line of communication be maintained between the candidate and his staff and his people on the convention floor...
...that the Goldwater we know today is pretty much the Goldwater we've always known...
...Today, Goldwater backs gays in the military and warns the Republican party not to take an adamant anti-abortion stand...
...He is no more responsible for the current state of the political art, as practiced by James Carville and other modem slash-and-burn "handlers," than the inventor of the internal combustion engine is for highway accidents...
...Victor Gold, The American Spectator's national correspondent, was deputy press secretary for Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign...
...Hoisted up by government programs, women really can support themselves and their children...
...To that extent he was, as Newt Gingrich uses the term, a revolutionary...
...Being himself...
...White, who died in 1993, saw his calling as one that moved the political process out of the smoke-filled room by galvanizing people at the grass roots...
...Fathers are viewed as unnecessary, burdensome, even downright evil and dangerous...
...Are there two Barry Goldwaters—the traditional conservative of 1964 and the radical libertarian of 1994...
...White came to his calling when the politics of big city machines, with its street-smart bosses, was giving way to the politics of polls, demographic studies, and phone banks run by college-trained organization men...
...A book that covers the American political scene from the post-Roosevelt to the post-Reagan years, it offers the AARP set a refresher course on that period, while at the same time shedding light, for younger political junkies, on howwe-got-here-from-there...
...A merica is rapidly becoming a land without fathers...
...Goldwater, he writes, "led a generation of conservatives to understand that theirs was a winning as well as a just cause," his presidential candidacy marking "the true beginning of a fundamental shift in American politics from liberalism to conservatism that continues to this day...
...The only effective means of doing that was to literally hog a telephone line and secure it against all attackers...
...White would be a major participant in other presidential campaigns—Reagan's, Nixon's, Ford's—and the mastermind of James Buckley's upset victory in the 1970 New York race for the U.S...
...No candidate had ever before used this kind of communications set-up...
...He was ever a man who, in the words of a friend, "shot from the heart, not the hip," and as a presidential candidate "always said what he wanted, and . . . did not intend to let anything, not even a national campaign, change him...
...They were once essential as breadwinners, but according to waves of contemporary literature, fathers are not that important in raising healthy children...
...1 ndeed, as Edwards's book shows, Goldwater was an unconventional political leader who seemed to enjoy nothing more than discombobulating his staff and disconcerting his supporters...
...If there is an irony here, it is that the man who engineered Barry Goldwater's conservative takeover of the Republican party had honed his tactical skills as a New York Young Republican working for Tom Dewey, who preceded Nelson Rockefeller as the Eastern establishmentarian the GOP right-wingers most loved to hate...
...With this has come a culture of fatherlessness...
...His self-assigned task is to wade into the cultural swamp of feminist dogma and academic psychology and explore just how our elites have convinced themselves over the past three decades that paternity isn't important...
...Many single mothers say they prefer having complete control of their children, and enjoy making decisions without having to deal with another adult...
...Divorce, illegitimacy, and general cultural breakdown are all taking their toll...
...Not even a national campaign...
...Not to forget Attila the Hun...
...Blankenhom accepts this as a given...
...F. Clifton White's reputation as a serious political player was made...
...No, Goldwater hasn't changed...
...Revealing words there, given the quandary his longtime supporters now seem to be in, searching for the real Barry Goldwater—as if there were a difference between the Goldwater whom Edwards calls "the traditional conservative of 1964" and "the radical libertarian" of today...
...that the icon whose "candidacy for president marked the true beginning of a tectonic shift in American politics" is merely doing in the conservative nineties what he did in the liberal fifties and sixties...
...But White's true bent, as he demonstrated after Dewey's retirement, was toward the heartlanders who supported Bob Taft in 1948 and '52...
...n Goldwater, Lee Edwards, author of a previous book on Ronald Reagan, takes the most comprehensive look to date at the life and legend of the Arizona Republican who, in his prime, was portrayed by the liberal establishment as a combination, in Edwards's words, "of Huey Long, George Lincoln Rockwell, and George Patton...
...It was to answer these questions that Edwards undertook this book, reminding us that even in his "traditional conservative" mode, Goldwater could wade through a crowd of shaggy anti-war protesters to greet his former speechwriter Karl Hess—by then a self-described "anarcho-syndicalist"—and tell him, "You're my friend...
...The whole concept of fatherhood is under cultural attack...
...Indeed, when Gingrich was still a precocious college boy touting Nelson Rockefeller for president, Clif White was leading the charge in the first conservative Republican revolution—the Goldwater nomination of 1964...
...Unconventional, contrarian, anti-Establishment, not so much an icon—he never asked to be—as an iconoclast...
...As Mario Cuomo once put it, "If you take a 15-year-old with a baby, get her an income, supply her with day care, put her back in school or in a job program—what's the problem...
...The title of White's memoir, Politics As a Noble Calling, says as much...
...William Tucker, TAS's New York correspondent, writes frequently about marriage and the family...
...no candidate thereafter would succeed without it...
...After graduating from Cornell in 1940, he became a social science teacher in an upstate New York high school, and shortly thereafter was bitten by the political bug, spending part of his honeymoon observing the Democratic convention in Chicago (where Franklin Roosevelt was re-nominated after a demonstration triggered by the infamous "voice from the sewer...
...After combat duty with the Army Air Corps during World War II,White returned to academic life, teaching at Cornell, and re-entering the political arena, handling communications for Thomas E. Dewey at the 1948 Republican convention in Philadelphia...
...Here is the roster: • The Unnecessary Father...
...0 Murray has detected a rise of white illegitimacy that seems to be mimicking the catastrophic disintegration of the black family since the 1960s...
...Sixteen years later, White would change the way political conventions were run, by placing a 55-foot electronic trailer behind San Francisco's Cow Palace, connecting Barry Goldwater's hotel suite to seventeen strategic locations on the convention floor...
...Senate...
...Surveying the current literature, Blankenhorn extracts several contemporary versions of what fatherhood means...
...In the spring of 1994, he urged Republicans to "get off [Clinton's] back and let him be president...
...POLITICS AS A NOBLE CALLING: THE MEMOIRS OF F. CLIFTON WHITE F. Clifton White (with Jerome Tuccille) Jameson Books / 269 pages / $21.95 GOLDWATER: THE MAN WHO MADE A REVOLUTION Lee Edwards Regnery /542 pages / $29.95 reviewed by VICTOR GOLD 68 The American Spectator August 1995 Though like White a true-believing veteran of the 1964 campaign, Edwards covers Goldwater's career not in iconic but human terms, from the clay feet up...
...In another era, this might be described as "self-centeredness," "immaturity," or "narcissism...
...A jaded national press corps, though busy portraying his candidate as a horse-andbuggy reactionary, was suitably awed...
...So, Yours Truly sat in a telephone boothright off the floor with a mountain of nickels in front of me, which I fed one at a time every three minutes...
...It was, by today's convention standards, a primitive operation: Protocol dictated that the candidate never appeared on the floor of the convention until after he was nominated...
...Single mothers are heroes—even though there has obviously been a large element of female narcissism in the phenomenon...
...Give me a call as soon as you're free...
...Like Charles Murray, Blankenhornfounder and president of a small New York think-tank, the American Institute for Values—believes that fatherlessness and illegitimacy not only are problems in themselves but also drive many of the other major problems of our society...
...That being true, how to explain the Goldwater of recent years, who "seems to change and even contradict what he once stood for...
...But in the contemporary FATHERLESS AMERICA: CONFRONTING OUR MOST URGENT SOCIAL PROBLEM David Blankenhorn BasicBooks / 328 pages / $23 reviewed by WILLIAM TUCKER The American Spectator August 1995 69...
...An American original, "shooting from the heart," giving the Establishment fits...
...to keep a line open to the Dewey suite...
...The view from here, reinforced by this superb biography, is that there isn'tany difference...
Vol. 28 • August 1995 • No. 8
