Barry and Me
NOVAK, ROBERT D.
Barry and Me By Robert D. Novak Ifirst met Barry Goldwater in 1957, when I was a 26-year-old reporter for the Associated Press helping cover the Senate Rackets Committee’s investigation of...
...No more amendments...
...In 1959, my first full year as Senate correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, the committee’s revelations had made labor reform a popular cause...
...Like millions of other registered Republicans that day, I voted for Lyndon Johnson...
...For the first time, I entertained the possibility that Goldwater was not entirely serious about politics or government...
...With Goldwater’s approval, I revealed the plan (calling it the Goldwater Manifesto) in a Wall Street Journal front-page exclusive...
...But Goldwater’s detailed explanations of these amendments would accomplish several things...
...Seated in the press gallery, I was stunned, and I rushed down to call the senator off the floor...
...During the long years that followed 1964, I never tried to interview Goldwater, despite having spent so much time with him the previous five years...
...It took only a few vitriolic conservative attacks on Goldwater for abandoning the true cause before he turned away from the plan—and from Bernstein...
...Goldwater was the first to admit that he was no legislative strategist...
...I barely made it to the campaign plane the next morning, but it didn’t matter because the senator—as hungover as I—was late...
...When he was nominated that summer in San Francisco, he declined to see me...
...Barry was in high spirits, and we had a lot of fun gossiping about the Senate and politics, telling jokes and drinking—a lot of drinking...
...Bernstein and the senator explained it all to me, and I had a big exclusive on the back page of the Journal...
...Our separation was punctuated during platformcommittee hearings at the St...
...They would highlight the need for basic reform legislation to fight corruption and ensure union democracy...
...I liked him immensely...
...He liked the Journal, trusted me, and bestowed on me inside information about his strategy...
...One of Goldwater’s strongest political views, oddly, was contempt for Dwight Eisenhower, then the only Republican elected president since Herbert Hoover...
...Bernstein could only shrug...
...The senator spotted me and asked me to join him later in his suite at the old Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles...
...That night in Los Angeles turned out to be our last intimacy...
...John F. Kennedy’s bill, none of which would have a chance in the overwhelmingly Democratic Senate...
...Conservative...
...Since then, I have decided it is the better part of wisdom to vote for the presidential candidate I most agree with and forget about measuring his skills...
...The place was filled not with politicians but with friends from Phoenix and southern California...
...A few days before the 1960 election, from somewhere on the road, I telephoned Goldwater at his home in Phoenix...
...During the crucial California primary campaign, I covered a Goldwater rally in Long Beach...
...Over the last three decades, I have felt that I betrayed Goldwater—not in my columns but in the vote I cast on November 3, 1964...
...What about your plans...
...But after just two or three amendments lost, Goldwater called it a day...
...Goldwater, as ranking minority member of the Labor Committee, was the Republican senator in charge of the issue...
...A few months after Kennedy’s victory, Mike Bernstein prepared an ingenious document outlining how Goldwater could run for president as neither a stereotypical conservative nor a me-too moderate, but pointing to government schemes to appeal to “that dragooned and ignored individual, The Forgotten American...
...Bernstein’s plan was to draft 100 amendments to Sen...
...He loved ribald jokes, political gossip, and gabbing about his ham radio...
...I never heard him describe himself as anything other than a conservative, and certainly never as a libertarian...
...He was a reporter’s dream: friendly, funny, and oh so helpful, telling just about everything he knew, particularly if it might embarrass the Kennedy brothers—Jack, a member of the committee, and Bobby, its chief counsel...
...I became sure of it over the next five years, as we occasionally shared the bottle of Old Crow he kept in his office...
...Oh,” Barry told me, “it’s just too much trouble...
...The Journal covered the great fight over labor legislation as the Sporting News covered baseball, so my relationship with Goldwater prospered...
...Barry and Me By Robert D. Novak Ifirst met Barry Goldwater in 1957, when I was a 26-year-old reporter for the Associated Press helping cover the Senate Rackets Committee’s investigation of organized labor...
...It reminded me of a longdivorced couple’s meeting after years of separation...
...What about my exclusive...
...Wonder of wonders, by the 1980s I felt I had moved to the right of a Barry Goldwater who deplored religious conservatives and had changed his mind about abortion...
...He often indicated to me that he didn’t really want to be president or even to run...
...We talked just once more, briefly but cordially, during his second hitch in the Senate, at a Hay-Adams Hotel dinner party given by Clare Boothe Luce...
...I thought that Goldwater would be as disorganized a president as he had been a senator, while Johnson I knew to be one of the greatest Senate majority leaders of all time...
...He resented union power, but wasn’t particularly interested in blocking it...
...He called the Eisenhower administration “the dime-store New Deal...
...In addition, for all his failings, his patriotism was such that he would not have made LBJ’s deadly blunders in Vietnam and probably would have spared America much grief...
...He delegated that to Michael J. Bernstein, Republican chief counsel on the Labor Committee, who liked to quote Hannah Arendt and Schumpeter and approached labor reform as a chess game...
...I suspect he thought that the column I had started writing in 1963 with Rowland Evans was too tough on him and too sympathetic to the hated eastern liberals...
...And he wasn’t at all interested in economics...
...An Air National Guard major general, he showed greater commitment to taking the offensive in the Cold War, but he involved himself in the nuts and bolts of military preparedness rather than in grand strategy...
...Once in 1963, when I told him he actually could be nominated, he replied, sincerely I think, “Oh, please don’t say that...
...disaffected from their ancestral home in the Democratic party...
...He made clear he thought Richard Nixon would lose because he had gone too far in courting the black vote and liberals, forfeiting a golden opportunity to sweep the South...
...But of course, as I first saw back in 1959, he never could have been elected...
...They would slow down Kennedy’s bill, intended to help carry him to the Democratic presidential nomination...
...And they would burnish Barry Goldwater’s credentials as the emerging Mr...
...Anyway, I made my point...
...In the end, he ran because a grass-roots movement had built up in support of him, because he was angry about Nelson Rockefeller’s attack on him, and because he harbored genuine hostility toward the eastern Republican establishment...
...Francis Hotel, when I slugged an obnoxious California Young Republican who called me “slimy” for allegedly misquoting him a year earlier (luckily for me, bystanders separated us before my younger, more robust adversary could retaliate...
...He meant Catholics, old-age pensioners, and labor-union members—all Robert D. Novak is the author of a syndicated column and several books...
...He was a most unusual candidate...
...By that standard, Goldwater clearly won the contest, so I regret denying him my vote...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 39
