AuH20 in '64
FREEMAN, NEAL B.
AuH2O in '64 How the Keystone GOPs changed the Republican party. by Neal B. Freeman There's much to like about J. William Middendorf II's new book. First, of course, is the title—A Glorious...
...Goldwater evinced mixed emotions about the book...
...Bozell was also a master of chiliastic prose...
...First, of course, is the title—A Glorious Disaster —which is dead on and may finally help to strip away the Velcro long stuck between the name "Goldwater" and the noun "debacle...
...While Middendorf gives only brief attention to matters of policy and program, he is careful not to confuse the politics of Barry Goldwater with those of Brent Bozell...
...Wise enough to know that he could never impose lasting order on the chaos of politics, White was still determined to control as much of the process as he possibly could...
...He remembers who said what, and when, and then how they tried to tidy up the after-action reports...
...I never knew, or had forgotten, that J. Edgar Hoover, on LBJ's orders, was bugging Goldwater headquarters...
...By Labor Day—in those days the traditional start of the campaign—it was all over but the shouting...
...What Middendorf brings to the grand old party is those damn notes...
...Partial disclosure: I managed Bozell's Maryland congressional campaign to a brilliant second-place finish...
...The reader benefits here from Middendorf's encyclopedic files...
...The essential Barry responded, "Well, I read the book...
...Middendorf is particularly good on the ouster of the Draft Goldwater crew—White and company, as well as William F Buckley Jr...
...Then there's the author, Bill Middendorf, who bolts into politics with typical businessman swagger and, atypically, stays to create his own space, develop survival skills, and do much good...
...On the bridge the tension is palpable...
...Goldwater would have been a charter member of the Leave Us Alone coalition—if he had believed in coalitions...
...A political intimate of the fusionist Frank Meyer, Bozell had woven strands of Milton Friedman's free-market programs in with Russell Kirk's traditionalist philosophy to produce a seemingly seamlesss text...
...Is there still room for Barry Goldwater...
...With no need for ideological infusions from the policy wonks, he was free to focus on operational details: the governing regs, the people who could get things done, the sources of funds and the fine art of campaign bill-paying...
...What, then, were Goldwater's politics, if not elegantly Bozellian...
...The story of how Clif White's crew drafted Goldwater and took over the GOP has been told elsewhere, including in White's own memoir, Suite 3505...
...It is noteworthy as well that the man who inherited Goldwater's Senate seat, John McCain, has made his mark in politics by abridging speech freedoms in the name of campaign finance reform...
...The just-nominated Goldwater, with his political life flashing before his eyes, decided to bring in three old friends from home—Arizona lawyers Denison Kitchel, Dean Burch, and Richard Kleindienst—to run his general-election campaign...
...Middendorf, by then the indispensable fundraiser, was the only Clif White man to survive the purge, and he provides a peer's-eye view of the incoming "Arizona mafia...
...Historians would later note, of course, that it was precisely the shouting that was much the best part of the campaign...
...None of the three had any experience in national politics, and a campaign against an incumbent president was not the best place to start...
...Born only a few years after the birth of his beloved Arizona, he shared the frontiersman's sleepless wariness, the bone-deep distrust of large, remote, and power-grabbing governments...
...Or that the CIA man running traps on the Goldwater staff was our old friend E. Howard Hunt...
...Late in his life, when we had reconnected as colleagues on a corporate board, I asked Goldwater for his final reckoning on Conscience...
...The residual value of the campaign— the themes developed, the troops bloodied, the lists compiled, the organizations framed—redeems Barry's decision to do it his way...
...I even agreed with parts of it...
...and the dreaded "intellectuals"— just as Goldwater secured the GOP nomination...
...When Barry, in West Virginia, launched an attack on the War on Poverty, there was an eerie quiet as the audience searched his remarks for subsurface meaning...
...Middendorf felt a sense of order, comfort, and shared purpose...
...It's a measure of how far we have come that there is today in Congress perhaps only a single heir to Goldwa-ter's minimalism—Ron Paul of Texas—and that he is regarded within his own Republican caucus as somewhere between a curiosity and a kook...
...The story of the "first genuine draft" is a great yarn, and not just for lovers of the political yarn...
...Middendorf is undoubtedly correct when he laments the departure of White's battle-hardened team and the takeover by Barry's well-meaning rookies...
...My lingering campaign image is of a mid-sized cutter headed through rough seas toward a looming iceberg...
...And he became that most feared of all meeting-attenders: the note-taker...
...His first reaction to almost any initiative on the fuzzy border of constitutional authority would have been—"It's none of the government's damn business...
...All choice, no echo...
...Or that brand-name pols really thought that the selection of William Miller as the vice presidential nominee might lock up the electoral votes of New York...
...He went to Tennessee and told the rent-seekers packed in around the federal trough that the Tennessee Valley Authority was a waste of public money...
...One of the few professional A Glorious Disaster Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement byJ...
...Goldwater, it will be remembered, was propelled to leadership of the nascent "movement" after publication of his huge bestseller, The Conscience of a Conservative...
...It seems almost inevitable that Mid-dendorf would become a close associate and warm admirer of the Draft Gold-water Committee leader, F. Clifton White...
...He reminded effete Eastern audiences that an efficient way to uncover North Vietnamese trails was to tactical-nuke 'em...
...He was grateful for its success, of course, but always a bit awkward in accepting praise for work not really his own...
...Early on he adopted the formulation that Bozell had been the "guiding hand" in preparation of the book, and over the years, Goldwater made little effort to hold Bozell close to the inner circle...
...He might as well have brought in Larry, Curly, and Moe...
...Not everybody found the candor refreshing...
...Glorious is the memoir of a working executive, not a philosopher-king...
...The captain replies, "Good thinking, lieutenant," and guns the engine full forward...
...A young officer breaks the strained silence, shouting into the gale, "Skip, let's see what this baby can do...
...Among the other key figures were National Review publisher William Rusher, who set the ideological compass for the group, and John Ashbrook, a young congressman who emboldened and energized the effort...
...William Middendorf II Basic Books, 290 pp., $26.95 politicians of his era—someone, that is, who devoted his full working life to the practice of campaign management— Clif White was a man of schedules and timetables, agendas and reviews...
...Barry traveled to terminal sun colonies and informed oxygen-gulping oldsters that Social Security ought to be voluntary...
...The subjects of those files benefit only intermittently, which adds seasoning to this most unusual campaign book...
...He became an expert in political money, which saved him a place at every meeting he chose to attend...
...Ash-brook, no son of 1994, seemed to harden in his views once he was elected and moved inside the Beltway...
...Perhaps they can best be described as western ornery...
...Along with his mentor Jeremiah Milbank Jr., he signed on with White to be the money men for the Draft Committee...
...Clif White would have run a better campaign and the race would have been closer...
...As a storyteller he's not going to make anybody forget Alexandre Dumas, but for political junkies, there's a fix waiting here...
...Which seems to beg this question: Is there still room in the movement for a smaller-the-better-govern-ment conservative, a national modesty conservative...
...And finally, there's the candidate, Barry Morris Goldwater, without whom there would have been no campaign and no movement and maybe no magazine quite like this one...
...But Goldwater would have lost even so, and the ultimate victory of conservatism might possibly have been compromised, the paradigmatic character of the campaign somehow sacrificed...
...The campaign was a lab lesson in gratification deferred, or as George Will has written: "We . . . who voted for him in 1964 believe he won, it just took 16 years to count the votes...
...dorf already knew what he believed— he was a Goldwater Republican—and he concentrated his considerable energies on the political process and how it worked...
...The book was a call to arms, and the first generation of movement types fled the plow for the armory...
...Arrived on the political scene from early success on Wall Street, MiddenNeal B. Freeman is chairman of the Blackwell Corporation...
...Bozell, who had ghosted the book, was a brilliant lawyer and a skilled ideologist (and yes, the father of the magisterial media-basher of the same name...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 11
