The Last Laugh
BARONE, MICHAEL
The Last Laugh By Michael Barone Barry Goldwater was the sort of citizen-politician the Founders originally hoped would lead the republic. No one foresaw how far he would go, when in 1952, the...
...Where there was no good chance of winning, Reagan got out, as in Lebanon...
...Goldwater had it right all along: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...
...To his opponents he seemed literally crazy...
...Respectable opinion was firmly of the belief that history moved leftward, that government grew ineluctably larger and more generous, and that, in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s wonderful phrase, conservatives had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century...
...where there was a good chance of winning, Reagan pursued it—even though, in the crucial instance of his strategy to bring down the Soviet Union, few perceived the soundness of his course...
...1950 population: 106,818), he decided to run for the U.S...
...That lesson was learned by, among others, Ronald Reagan and George Bush...
...When he was elected to the Senate, conservative Republicans were still mostly isolationist...
...In the end, the citizen-politician, with his simplicity, was wiser than the systems analysts, with their sophistication...
...Not in the same way or to the same extent...
...There followed the draft-Goldwater movement and the 1964 nomination of the major-party nominee least ambitious for the presidency since Alton B. Parker in 1904...
...Instead, it was conservatism’s beginning...
...It has long since been apparent that Johnson’s course was folly...
...and he must have recognized that Goldwater would help make the Republican party and the country internationalist for a generation...
...Goldwater helped inspire the brilliant historian Richard Hofstadter to write an essay, then a book, on the paranoid style in American politics...
...Similarly, George Bush understood that the only acceptable result in the Persian Gulf was victory...
...The Republican split on foreign policy was over...
...For he enabled conservatives to capture the Republican party and make it their instrument...
...Democrats, first in Korea, then much more disastrously in Vietnam, forgot this, to the detriment of their party and their country...
...But Goldwater also did something else, which is less often noticed: He made the Republican party solidly internationalist, committed to waging and, in time, winning the Cold War...
...His opponent, Ernest McFarland, was the Senate majority leader, and McFarland’s defeat opened the Democratic leadership post to a young Texas freshman, Lyndon Johnson...
...Long before, Franklin Roosevelt had seen that there is no substitute for it...
...No one foresaw how far he would go, when in 1952, the proprietor of his family’s department store and a second-term member of the city council of Phoenix, Ariz...
...It turned out that history does not inevitably move left, that an over-large government can indeed become incompetent and debilitating...
...His formula for Vietnam—“Win or get out”—was widely derided by Washington insiders, who hailed Lyndon Johnson’s half-war, using force as a negotiating tool, as the quintessence of wisdom...
...He looked very much like a one-term senator...
...Goldwater beat McFarland handsomely, 56 percent to 44 percent, while prominent conservative Republicans were mowed down elsewhere— William Knowland in California, John Bricker in Ohio...
...There were few murmurs of disapproval when magazine editor Ralph Ginzburg surveyed psychiatrists to find out what Goldwater’s problem was...
...He was ridiculed for suggesting that Social Security should be made voluntary...
...No wonder Eisenhower warmly endorsed Goldwater in 1964: The former president had quietly shared Goldwater’s economic conservatism, even while deeming it politically imprudent...
...Senate...
...Would all this have happened without Goldwater...
...He was mocked for urging the sale of the TVA...
...But he didn’t, and when the dominant voices in the Democratic party, sickened by their own administration’s conduct of the Vietnam war, soured on internationalism in the 1970s and 1980s, the Republican party remained its champion...
...Within two years, Goldwater had published The Conscience of a Conservative and come forward as Richard Nixon’s chief challenger from the right at the 1960 convention...
...Two years ago a Democratic president signed the law defederalizing welfare...
...Michael Barone is senior staff editor at Reader’s Digest and coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics...
...Now the Clinton administration’s TVA head seeks privatization...
...The year he came up for reelection, 1958, turned out to be heavily Democratic...
...Wise men proclaimed that Goldwater’s landslide defeat meant the end of conservatism...
...By contrast, the newly elected Dwight Eisenhower’s chief ambition as president, Stephen Ambrose persuasively argues, was to cement the United States to the European alliance, to prevent another world war and stop totalitarian Russia from advancing...
...He won by 6,725 votes...
...But as throngs of young veterans moved to Arizona, the state was moving right...
...Goldwater’s emergence as a national conservative leader was something of an accident...
...The unions targeted him...
...The one Republican besides Goldwater left standing with a big victory was Nelson Rockefeller...
...A committee obtained the signatures of 1,189 psychiatrists to a statement that Goldwater was not “psychologically fit” to be president...
...Now leading Democrats call for radical reform...
...Either of Goldwater’s alternatives— victory or retreat—would have been preferable...
...In the new, now-Republican Senate, majority leader Robert Taft talked Goldwater out of a seat on the Interior Committee— important to Arizona—and gave him one on Labor, where he was bound to arouse the opposition of the unions...
...he seemed to have no ambition for a lifelong career in the Senate, much less any interest in one day running for president...
...He was derided for saying that local governments should take on more responsibility...
...Not bad for a guy who rose to national prominence by happenstance and never wanted to be president...
...Robert Taft had voted against the NATO treaty...
...Goldwater, with his enthusiasm for the Air Force and all things military, was with Ike...
...There was nothing inevitable about this: Goldwater could have followed the line Taft took in the 1940s and that Patrick Buchanan has taken in the 1990s...
...By the time he emerged from the 1958 election as the nation’s leading conservative, the conservative movement was firmly committed to prosecution of the Cold War...
...But Goldwater and his fans have had the last laugh...
...Goldwater made another great contribution to foreign policy...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 39
