Chapter 3 of "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives"

By CS, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press

Barry Goldwater: Bastard Out of Arizona

(Integrity)

Karl Hess, Barry Goldwater's chief speechwriter, said that Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign "was an unbroken series of Goldwater decisions to say unpopular things simply because he thought they needed saying" (D 58). The approach, almost by definition, was bad politics, and Goldwater lost in a landslide. But Goldwater's astounding frankness carried him as far as the nomination of the Republican party: just short of the pinnacle of the American political process. That someone with that much honesty and integrity could be a successful politician is a tribute to Goldwater's personality and character, but also to the fact that voters do occasionally have the capacity to value authenticity as well as pandering. Goldwater's willingness to speak from conviction was one of the features that placed him among the most controversial and - despite the fact that he evaluated his colleagues and his opponents frankly and publicly - one of the most beloved figures in American politics.

By 1975, Hess had moved from the right to left on the American political spectrum: he was a tax resister and a member of Students for a Democratic Society. But even then, he wrote this about Goldwater:

He is a good friend, the sort of person with whom it is pleasant to spend time. He is not pretentious, does not seek or demand deference. He is genuinely interested in ideas, but not stuffy about them. Walking with him on the desert is a special pleasure. He loves that native land, knows it well, relates to it in the best ecological sense. At home in Arizona he feels very much a part of nature and not apart from it. . . . I cannot fully explain and certainly would never apologize for the fact that I cannot imagine not being a friend of Barry Goldwater - although I sharply disagree with many of his latest positions. (D 72-73)

Barry and the Southwest

Barry Goldwater presented himself as an embodiment of the American west, of the self-reliance and hard living and fierce independence of the frontier. Nor was this mere myth-making: Goldwater was born in Arizona in 1909, three years before it became a state, and his great uncle Joe witnessed the shootout at the OK corral. Geronimo died at Fort Sill a month after Barry's birth. His mother liked to take the kids car camping far off the beaten track, and she took her rifle along and picked off animals as she drove. Barry himself was among the first people to make it down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, a 42-day, 700-mile journey. He filmed the event and went on a lecture tour all over the region describing his experiences. "Sleeping in the open under God's own sky is one of the most overrated of all acts of man or woman," he wrote in his diary. "Bugs of all sizes have promenaded over my body from top to bottom. Bugs with only a cursory interest have wandered over me and, with no more than a 'humph,' have let me be. Others, carrying knives, sabers, and broken bottles, have passed my way and left a diverse collection of tools of torture firmly implanted in my being" (G 78). Well before he went into politics, he was a serious photographer of the people and places of Arizona, and though he was no Ansel Adams, he published books of his images and showed them in galleries. His portraits of Navajo and Hopi Indians are particularly forceful: unromantic and clear-eyed but also dignified and poignant.

Barry's father's family were Jewish merchants, and his grandfather emigrated from Poland. In 1852 he set up shop in San Francisco, and then eventually moved into the sparsely-settled Arizona territory. By the time Barry was a young man, the family had assimilated to a mild Christianity, and Goldwater's was the most successful department store in the quickly-expanding city of Phoenix. Goldwater was, hence, always financially secure, and he himself managed the store very successfully before embarking on a political career by running for the Phoenix city council in 1949.

Goldwater was also a distinguished pilot, and in hard winters he ran supplies to the Navajo reservations.

In those days [the late forties], I did a lot of flying up in Navajo country. The tribe had some wicked winters. I'd collect food and hay and drop them to Indian families and cattle cut off by snowdrifts. I've probably spent more time with Arizona's Indians than any other white man. It grew from an innocent boyhood interest in Indians when our family camped on their reservations. I had a trading post at the foot of Navajo Mountain with a partner, Bill Wilson, a great outdoorsman. This offered me the chance to get to know many of the Navajo. All of us liked hiking and hunting. We were kindred spirits. . . . Some of this may seem superficial. It isn't. These are outward signs of how something that began as a simple interest and historical hobby became an inner conviction and commitment. From my first campout in Indian country, the red man always seemed as much - if not more - a part of Arizona and America as any white or black person. No member of the U.S. Congress has worked longer or harder on their problems than I. They'll always be my brothers and sisters. (G 65-66)

His connection to the Navajo and Hopi was also a connection to the land they inhabited.

Goldwater generally flew himself to his own campaign appearances and took a hand at flying even the large planes he used during the 1964 presidential bid. As he says in his memoir With No Apologies, "I have logged more than 12,000 hours of time in 165 different aircraft, helicopters, and gliders. I was the first nonrated test pilot to fly the U-2. I have flown the B-1 bomber, the F-104, the French Mirage, the German-French A-300. I have flown the SR-72 at a speed of Mach 3 at an altitude of 83,000 feet" (W 29). During World War II, he flew the "hump" route from India over the Himalayas to Manchuria in order to resupply Chinese troops who were fighting the Japanese. Literally hundreds of pilots were lost in this mission, which involved flying through some of the worst weather in the world over its highest mountains. Goldwater eventually commanded two resupply airlines. As with Indian affairs, Goldwater's experience drove his work in the Senate: he was the Senate's most eminent expert on and advocate of military air power. When he recommended scrapping a plane, he knew what he was talking about because he'd flown it.

Flying for Goldwater was a spiritual avocation: "Flying often encourages a feeling of closeness and communication with God. Heaven is a slow, endless climb into clear skies." And for Goldwater flying was a profound experience both of connection and of freedom, or perhaps of connection as freedom. Freedom in turn was the concept to which his political career was dedicated. His memoir Goldwater, published in 1988, about two years after his retirement from the Senate, ends as follows:

Man's greatest weapon against totalitarianism is freedom. I'm reminded of the meaning of freedom every morning. As I sit at my desk, robins and other birds flit back and forth on a ledge outside my study window. Often I watch them for long periods. We have come to know one another since they will sometimes stop and acknowledge my presence. Freedom has been the watchword of my political life. I rose from a dusty little frontier town and preached freedom across this land all my days. It is democracy's ultimate power and assured its eventual triumph over communism. I believe in faith, hope, and charity, but none of these are possible without freedom.

And in his earlier memoir With No Apologies, he wrote that "any pilot can describe the mechanics of flying. What it can do for the spirit of man is beyond description. When you are flying at night in a modern jet at 30,000 feet, the skies and the stars are infinite. . . . The heavens endure; men come and go" (G 27).

Perhaps the last couple of quotations sound a bit religious, but Goldwater - though he was certainly among the most right-wing mainstream American political figures of his time - was also opposed to religious intervention in politics. In the early eighties, for example, he pitted himself against Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. "I once said that the Reverend Jerry Falwell needed a swift kick in the ass" (G 385). He believed that freedom was threatened by religious intervention in politics. "The Moral Majority has no more right to dictate its moral and political beliefs to the country than does any other group, political or religious. . . . My wife [Peggy, an active worker for Planned Parenthood] believed that each woman had the moral and legal right to choose for herself whether she was capable of continuing her pregnancy and then raising the child. I disagreed with her. That's as it is, and must be, in a free and pluralistic America. . . . [I]f either side insists on legislating morality in absolute terms, then the challenge to democratic society is simply too great" (G 387).

This visceral rejection of the Christian right led Goldwater in the 1980s to make his libertarianism truly consistent. What signaled the absolute break was his stand on gay rights. Goldwater's grandson, Ty Ross, was gay and HIV-positive, and Goldwater gave an interview to The Advocate in which he said "The Republican party should stand for freedom and only freedom. Don't raise hell about the gays, the blacks, and the Mexicans. Free people have a right to do as they damn well please. To see the party that fought communism and big government now fighting the gays, well, that's just plain dumb" (M 423-24). And in 1994 Goldwater became co-chairman of a drive by gay groups to pass a law preventing employment discrimination against homosexuals. In his speeches and interviews, he connected the proposed legislation to the American tradition of allowing people to create their own ways of achieving "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

With the 1964 election, Goldwater established the conservative wing of the Republican party as a dominant force. Ronald Reagan gave an important fund-raising speech in support of Goldwater's candidacy in 1964; that speech made Reagan as a national political figure. It has often been said with justice that Reagan's nomination and presidency could not have occurred without the conservative revolt in the Republican Party that was led by Goldwater in 1964. Many of the people who played key roles in the Reagan campaigns and administration had gotten their start with Goldwater. Yet in many ways, Goldwater pitted himself against the religious right that also helped bring Ronald Reagan to power in 1980, and which was by then an important element in the conservative coalition that Goldwater had done so much to found. Essentially, Goldwater believed that the function of government was to produce freedom. The sentence that Goldwater used from the beginning of his career to the end to sum up his politics is this: "Any government which can promise you everything you want can take away everything you have." And his spirituality, though in its own way intense, was the Emersonian pantheism of a man who found God in connections to land and sky and people. Because he was not a religious man in the conventional sense of the term, and because he had dedicated his political career to freedom from federal law and bureaucracy, Goldwater despised the elements of the Republican party that sought to legislate religious morality.

And he was himself a proud sinner. Here's an anecdote he delighted in telling, about of events that took place in 1929, when Goldwater was twenty:

Two buddies - Paul Morris and A.J. Bayless - and I crossed the border at Nogales

into Sonora, Mexico. At the time the United States had Prohibition. We decided to beat the law and wash down a few tequilas and beer on the Mexican side of the border.

The three of us were fooling around, sloshing beer out of coffee cans at one another. Somebody aimed too high. Half a can splashed across the mustache, chin, and shirt of a passing Mexican policeman. My pals dashed headlong for the border - and freedom. I had my leg in a cast from an earlier fall and landed in jail.

The Mexican cops saw I had a few bucks in my pockets, so we shot craps. I lost

all my money and most of my clothes. We were getting to be amigos, so I asked them, as one old amigo to another, the price of the bribe to get out. The jailer said twenty-five bucks. With no more money, I asked him if an American check would be all right. They said it was fine among us amigos.

I had a blank check from a Phoenix bank. I knew Bayless had an account there, so I just signed his name to it.

Bayless, who became the owner of one of the state's largest grocery chains, later had the check framed. It hung in his office until he passed away. (G 42)

This story is extremely Barry Goldwater. In his cussed way, he doesn't take law or propriety or sobriety particularly seriously. Even the sheer fact that he would tell this story about himself, and tell it with such verve, separates him from most American politicians.

Barry Goldwater loved to campaign in bars, and he loved to drink while campaigning. And because they thought that he tended to say more controversial things after a shot or two, and because they thought it was bad publicity, his advisors told him to stop. But Goldwater's response was that he'd trust a man who walked openly into a bar and drank more than someone who went home and drank secretly (Nixon, for example). In a way, that was a summary of Goldwater's ethics. You could even be or do wrong, but whatever . . . be true. "A politician learns to take a lot of shots. As the years have passed, I've learned to live and often to laugh with them. Sure, I sometimes still get mad. But that's when an issue is really serious or a person is not telling the truth. It has often been said, 'You don't lie to Barry Goldwater.' I don't like liars - never have. I like stand-up guys who'll say, "Yes, I said it. I'm sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again" (G 206). And this: "Westerners often admire a man more for standing tall than being right. That might not appear to be the most politic thing to say, but it's the truth" (G 90). That's why Barry was a bastard, but that's also why he's my bastard.

Truth in Politics

So it is fair to say that Goldwater was both a unique and an intensely American political figure. And what is most important about his career from my point of view is that he showed that it is possible to be a mainstream political figure and a success at it while also speaking the truth. "I've heard Roosevelt talk. I've heard Truman. I've heard all our state governors and sheriffs and local officials. But they never say what they're really thinking. You see them on the golf course or for a drink and they'll give you a whole different story. I think a guy running for office who says exactly what he really thinks would astound the hell out of a lot of people in this country" (M 39).

The other people discussed in this book were on the fringes of American culture. They were able to be frank or extreme when they deemed it necessary, and their audiences could usually be counted on to remain supportive. But Goldwater was always trying to split the difference: he tried to remain influential in mainstream politics while advocating extremely controversial positions in a completely straightforward way. His wife Peggy didn't want him to enter politics because she didn't think he could hold his tongue. And throughout his career various campaign managers tried to put him on a script or stop him from making unrehearsed remarks or simply tone him down. But none of those things proved possible in the long run. That, taking this approach, he could reach close to the pinnacle of American politics makes him unique.

Current American political discourse sticks close to focus-grouped cliches and avoids saying anything controversial or even clear. Here's an example of the quality of American political discourse: "Not a single child can be left behind as we march boldly into the 21^st century." George W. Bush tried to build a campaign around it in the 2000 election, but it's a sentence that you can imagine almost any politician producing at any time and that many have produced. It is at once false, trivial, and empty. It's false because many children will be left behind no matter who is elected. It's trivial because no one could possibly disagree with the sentiment it expresses. And it's empty because finally it bears no relation to the mind or spirit of the person who mouths it: it's sheer script, and the politician might as well be an android or ventriloquist's dummy. Here is a sample of Al Gore's rhetoric: "We are here at this extraordinary gathering, the very first of its kind, to talk about a subject that lies at the very heart of economic growth and productivity-and even basic political legitimacy-for the 21^st Century: reforming and reinventing government so that it is smaller, smarter, and more responsive to change in this fast-changing information age." I suggest that is this merely a collage of empty mutterings.

That was just not the way Barry Goldwater talked. He was an utterly different sort of politician than Al Gore, because Goldwater was present in his words. Even if you thought he was wrong you knew that he meant what he said. But in part, the emptiness of American rhetoric originates in the '64 campaign. The lesson that the pros drew from it is that plain-speaking gets you beaten. The other key moment in that realization, an ideological mirror image of the 1964 Goldwater campaign, was George McGovern's landslide defeat by Nixon in 1972.

In contrast to the blossoming blank catchphrases with which the professional pol inks the waters like a squid, Goldwater's words were clear and forceful. That's why the congressional Republicans appointed him to tell Richard Nixon that it was time to resign the presidency: because they knew he had the guts to say it and the guts to say it clearly.

If the War in Vietnam taught the American people and their political leaders anything, it is that truth is their strongest weapon. The Watergate scandal taught the same simple but supreme lesson. Without truth there cannot be freedom or justice, wisdom or tolerance, courage or compassion. Truth is the foundation of a stable society. Its absence was the crux of Richard Nixon's failure.

Unfortunately, despite the positive contributions the former President made to

his country, his lies will be remembered longer than his legitimate labors. He was the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life. (G 255)

This is an advocacy of truth, but it is also an application of that advocacy. No other American politician I know is brutally honest enough to say the sort of thing that Goldwater says about Nixon. Keep in mind that Nixon was a president from Goldwater's own beloved Republican party. But Goldwater's assessments of Bob Dole, Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and his fellow senators were equally withering.

Of Johnson, his opponent in the 1964 presidential race, he says "The man didn't believe half of what he said. He was a hypocrite, and it came through in the hollowness of his speech. LBJ made me sick. The last thing Lyndon Johnson wanted to do in life was talk political principles or beliefs. LBJ never believed in either. His only political dogma was expediency" (G 151-52). Now it is hardly surprising that after his retirement from the Senate, Goldwater could attack the man who beat him for the presidency. But, first of all, the attack is absolutely plainspoken and straightforward. It sounds like anyone but a politician. In fact, almost no one who participates in American public discourse, from pols to pundits, would press the attack that plainly and clearly and vigorously. And second, Goldwater was just as straight with his praise as with his abuse: he has nothing but good things to say about Lady Bird Johnson, for example. But after John F. Kennedy was shot, Goldwater wanted to drop out of the race because he knew that Johnson would stop at nothing and would fight dirty. And, too, he had a premonition that Johnson would win, that Americans would not accept three presidents in a year.

It is perhaps a kind of moral blindness as well as a moral sensitivity on Goldwater's part that he could forgive almost anything except lies. That colleagues of his were drinkers or womanizers or (in the case of Joseph McCarthy) demagogues, hardly seemed to bother him, or quite the reverse was met with a wink and a laugh. And Goldwater himself was quite the tippler, though there is no indication that he was ever unfaithful to his wife.

But Goldwater's basic moral insight was sound. The pervasive moral failing of the political system he lived in was its lies. In fact, one of the reasons that the drinking and womanizing were a problem was precisely because of the separation they induced between the public image of Washington and its tawdry reality. For Goldwater, though, the '64 election was frustrating because in some sense he wasn't running against anyone: just a set of media images crafted by Johnson and Bill Moyers. The election turned into a landslide in part because the more false and fantastic the Johnson campaign became, the more brutally honest and controversial Goldwater got. In one way this was political suicide: Goldwater ran as if he were pointedly intent on alienating various groups of voters and as if he wanted to lose by the greatest possible margin. But he also was attempting to make the election an extremely clear choice: not primarily a choice between parties or policies, but a choice between reality and hallucination. I deeply respect Goldwater's conduct of the '64 election. It is in many ways the best campaign for national office that has been run in my lifetime, because Goldwater ran in a continual rebellion against bull.

His acceptance speech at the Republican convention, crafted by Hess and Harry Jaffa, was a true act of defiance. The basic attack on Goldwater was that he was a right-wing extremist. If he had been intent on winning the election, he would have shown himself in the most moderate light possible, and there were elements of his record and rhetoric that would have made such a move plausible. Instead he reacted rebelliously, extolling "extremism in defense of liberty" and condemning "moderation in the pursuit of justice." And though the speech was in one way colossally bad - he probably lost the election then and there if it was not a hopeless cause from the start - it was also in its way a masterpiece of political rhetoric: utterly straightforward and utterly clean. It was quite general and consisted of a set of inspiring ideas rather than a set of concrete policy proposals. But as an articulation of a political philosophy it is noteworthy for its clarity and punch. And it was an act of rebellion and defiance, against the Republican party and what Goldwater called "the eastern establishment" (above all Nelson Rockefeller), against the American political establishment, and against the Johnson administration. It is not too much to say that it was a rebellion against the American political system.

That speech was certainly the culminating moment of Goldwater's public life, and he had a chance to make his election likelier and back down on his fundamental positions, or even more, on his identity as a public figure and as a man. He pointedly refused. In a typical statement at the beginning of Goldwater, he says "A man stands up, says his piece, then sits down." That is a quintessentially American sentence in its plain words and plain sense. And the speech was a good example of that.

Almost uniquely among convention acceptance speeches of the twentieth century, Goldwater and his writers attempt in that speech to articulate a coherent philosophy of government rather than run down a laundry list of promises and programs. In doing that, Goldwater conspicuously refuses to placate moderate and liberal elements of the Republican party. And in fact the NBC film of the speech includes crown reaction shots which are notable for the fact that many delegates are sitting on their hands or actively scowling. It is hard not to believe, whatever Goldwater himself might have said, that he is not intentionally alienating supporters of Rockefeller, Scranton, and Romney.

Most politicians would have gone in precisely the opposite direction, and have. Convention speeches are notorious for their wooliness. They are designed to widen the campaign from the activists who drove it to the nomination to the electorate as a whole. Goldwater had early on decided that he was not going to do that. He was resolved to win or lose on his actual beliefs. The speech does indeed consist mostly of generalities rather than concrete proposals. But they are controversial generalities which entail specific new directions in policy. Perhaps the sharpest moment is reserved for Johnson's policy in Vietnam, with Goldwater taking an opportunity to air his dispute with McNamara in an explicit way. "Yesterday it was Korea; tonight it is Vietnam. Make no bones of this. Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the president, who is the commander in chief of our forces, refuses to say - refuses to say, mind you - whether or not the objective over there is victory, and his secretary of defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people." It is obvious from this distance that Vietnam was the fatal problem and the greatest moral failing of the Johnson administration.

Goldwater was the candidate of truth, not because the positions he endorsed were truer than Johnson's, but because he gave the voters an absolutely clear choice between a man and a media image. He cared more about providing that choice than he did about winning, and that is heroic. As it turned out, that was one the last gasps of reality in national American political life, which has by now become utterly fictional, a novel in which flimsily-conceived stock characters mutter their empty dialogue. (One anomolous sign of life was the 2000 campaign of John McCain for the Republican nomination. McCain occupies Goldwater's senate seat, and was his hand-picked successor. And when McCain, a few days before the Virginia primary, went to Virginia Beach, headquarters of the Christian Coalition, and attacked the religious right, he was taking up Goldwater's legacy.)

The other contrast between the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns was that Johnson fought dirty. In his memoirs, Goldwater lays most of this at the feet of Johnson's political advisor Bill Moyers. Goldwater says, for example that the Johnson campaign planted spies in the Goldwater operation. And Goldwater certainly felt soiled and slandered by what is perhaps the most famous political advertisement in American history - though it ran only once - in which a little girl plucking petals from a daisy seems to be vaporized in a nuclear holocaust. Here is the concluding voiceover: "These are the stakes: To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die. Vote for President Johnson on November third. The stakes are too high for you to stay home." Johnson made Goldwater out to be an advocate of nuclear holocaust. As we shall see, Goldwater said some things that, at least under certain interpretations, lent some plausibility to that claim. And yet the implication was vicious and false. To his credit, Goldwater never fired back in kind. During the race for the Republican nomination, Goldwater had been attacked pointedly and personally by GOP moderates, especially Nelson Rockefeller and Bill Scranton. Rockefeller perhaps cost himself the nomination when he divorced a remarried in rapid succession. Goldwater writes: "Our staff had been ordered never, under any circumstances, to mention Rockefeller's personal or family life. If anyone had, I would have fired that individual immediately" (G 171).

During the general election campaign, Johnson's aide Walter Jenkins was arrested for homosexual acts in a Washington YMCA. Goldwater says that "the White House anxiously awaited what we were going to say about the matter. It drove them crazy when I refused comment. Here was the cowboy who shot from the hip, the Scrooge who would put the penniless in the street with no Social Security, the maniac who would blow us and our little children into the next kingdom in a nuclear Armageddon. If he would kill a million men and women, why wouldn't he destroy one individual?" Goldwater's advisors wanted him to press on the point of Johnson's and the nation's "moral failings," a card that would be played relentlessly by the right in the eighties and nineties. His reply:

It was a sad time for Jenkins' wife and children, and I was not about to add to their private sorrow. . . . This reality never got through to Johnson and Moyers - that winning, even by a landslide, isn't everything. Some things, like loyalty to friends or lasting principle, are more important. Any cause will go on if it's a good one. . . . It reminded me of the great Western writer Willa Cather, who spoke so profoundly of our relationship to the land around us: "We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while." (G 203-4)

In a way, the quote from Cather is oddly placed in this passage. It does not directly address questions of "loyalty to lasting principle." But it is relevant in its context because it does express Goldwater's deepest spiritual beliefs and shows us something about the source of his public ethics. His notion of public service, or rather of the identity of public servants, was based on a relation to the land and to the people that one could describe as loyalty or perhaps unity. The man emerges from the land and lives in a connection to it. The governance emerges from the principle and lives in that connection. Goldwater would insult you to your face, but he wouldn't stab you in the back, even to win the greatest prize in American politics. Goldwater met privately with Johnson as the general election campaign began and suggested that they not make race relations or the Vietnam conflict issues in the campaign. Goldwater was afraid that a polarizing debate about civil rights could lead to race riots and that criticism of the war effort could hurt military morale. Johnson immediately agreed, especially because his muddled approach to Vietnam left him widely vulnerable (and of course ended his presidency four years later).

Truth and Virtue

"Without truth there cannot be freedom or justice, wisdom or tolerance, courage or compassion." What is most interesting about that sentence is that it makes truth the foundation of the virtues. Goldwater often said that his mother was permissive and essentially only disciplined her children for one thing: lying. And throughout his career Goldwater reserved his greatest scorn for liars. Nixon was dishonest not only because he told Goldwater and the American people things that were false, but because, as the Watergate tapes of Oval Office conversations showed, he lived an double life. His political identity was false. Nixon's dishonesty was not a matter of a few lies, or was not only a matter of a few lies. The lies revealed Nixon's underlying character, and that character was fundamentally false and dishonest. But virtue of any sort is a kind of sensitivity to situation, a response of the character to truth. If you don't know the truth, you are not free, because in freedom what is in play is choice between real options, and in order to know what the options are you have to know the truth about the situation you are in. And to the extent you are not free, your acts fail to be clear expressions of your character. Knowing the truth is required in order to be free, which is to say that knowing the truth is necessary to the virtues. And saying the truth is hence a moral imperative, because it makes it possible for the people around you to cultivate and express their moral character. When you lie to people you attempt directly to control their actions, to deprive them of freedom. And hence you reduce the moral content of their responses, or even narrow the scope of their personalities.

Hence the concepts of truth, freedom, virtue, and goodness though conceptually distinct, are mutually dependent in the actual moral lives of persons. And that relation was the foundation of Goldwater's conservative politics and indeed of the American political system as envisioned in the Constitution. The direction of cultivation runs from truth to freedom to virtue: you must know the truth in order to make free choices, and you must make free choices of what is good in order to be virtuous. But the direction of conceptual dependence runs the other way: each concept has the previous as a necessary condition of its realization. You cannot be good or know what is good without displaying virtue; you cannot display virtue without being free; you cannot be free unless you know the truth. Thus public officials must be true if the people are to be free and if there is to be the possibility of civic virtue. And it would follow from this as well that it is conceptually impossible to force people to be good: if people are good, it is as a result of their free choices. In other words, this set of conceptual connections is an argument for freedom and democracy as well as a description of its necessary conditions. So the particular set of moral predilections that Goldwater displayed was not peculiar or eccentric in relation to American democracy: his obsession with integrity and freedom are absolutely central to any possibility of civic virtue in a republic. For that reason, Goldwater is a paradigmatic American, a figure who showed us and told us who we were and how we needed to live. In his own way, he was the conscience of the Senate, and when he was lied to, whether by an ally or an enemy, he responded with a total visceral rejection.

So the rhetorical gruel dished out by politicians such as the George Bushes or Bill Clinton and Al Gore is more than just an irritation we have to tolerate or a meaningless white noise. It is a deep and pervasive moral failing that fundamentally compromises the possibility of democracy. Their deep untruth, indeed their contempt for the truth - for plain-spokenness, clarity, and forceful assertion - is a vice that makes leadership impossible for them and democracy impossible for the nation. They systematically conceal themselves and their opinions; the whole huge machinery of polling and focus groups replaces their consciences, their beliefs, indeed their minds. They cease to be moral actors and became passive vessels of the deepest vices that public personae can display. Politicians such as this need to read Goldwater's writings and to study his speeches. And whether or not they agree with Goldwater's politics, they need above all to get a sense of who Goldwater was, of the relation of identity between the public and private man, of the possibility of being an important politician and also a person of deep integrity. The failure of integrity in contemporary politics is a global failure of moral personality that ramifies into the culture as a whole. It is the greatest danger to democracy even in the simple sense that citizens have no idea at all who they're voting for. And it compromises finally even the idea of citizenship itself because it manifests and encourages a concealed absence from public life..

When Johnson and McNamara lied about the war effort in Vietnam - lies that practically drove Goldwater to apoplexy - they deprived Congress and the citizenry of the ability to make choices about the conduct of the war, because they obscured or precluded the knowledge on the basis of which such choices could have been made. They made it impossible for legislators and for the people to make informed choices and thus made it impossible for legislators and the people to act out of virtue or to express their moral character in their choices. Goldwater never forgave the Johnson administration for lying about the supposed attack on American ships by the North Vietnamese that it used as an occasion for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the war a patina of constitutional legitimacy. "In fact, the attack . . . never took place. . . . There was no doubt about one thing, though: McNamara misled Congress and the American people, particularly by not revealing the critical fact that the Maddox was on a secret mission. I later learned that the operation involved U-2 spy flights over North Vietnam, kidnapping North Vietnamese for intelligence interrogation, commando raids from the sea, and parachuting psychological warfare teams into North Vietnam. This was an example of Johnson-MacNamara duplicity - to act and then hide it. We voted on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with critical aspects of the situation witheld from us" (G 232). In relation both to Congress and the American people, Johnson and McNamara's duplicity was manipulative: it was an attempt to reduce the proper scope of choice. It remains, of course, hard to determine what would have happened had Goldwater been president at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. But it is fair to say this: the war effort would either have been straightforwardly scrapped or straightforwardly prosecuted with extreme prejudice, and the decade-long string of slavish lies and incremental escalations would never have occurred. Goldwater often deplored the rejection by young people of that period of the American government and the idea of service to it or with it. But he also understood that the government had squandered the trust of the people and that the cynicism and hostility with which people regarded their government had been well-earned by Johnson, Nixon, and their lieutenants.

"Without truth there cannot be freedom or justice, wisdom or tolerance, courage or compassion." That sentence is Goldwater's creed as a public man. The reason that, during the presidential campaign, he went to Knoxville and suggested that the government should sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority, or to Florida to talk about making the Social Security system voluntary, was precisely because his deepest respect was for the truth. He had made a conscious decision that the presidency was not worth having if it required lies, obfuscation, or retreat from fundamental beliefs. "For better or worse, I would be myself - a straight-shooting, down-the-line conservative - for the entire campaign" (G 156). Without truth there is nothing to be wise about, tolerant of, compassionate about, or courageous in the face of. And it is above all cowardice that fuels falsity: one must be willing at every moment to risk one's political career for the truth as one sees it. What's astonishing about Goldwater is that he took that risk (and he paid a high price) but that he remained in the Senate from 1952 to 1987 (with a gap from '64-'66) as a sort of spokesman for reality. Not that everything he said was true, but that you knew he himself believed what he said.

Iris Murdoch has argued that virtue is a kind of responsiveness to reality. She writes that the self with its ambitions and its obsessions, blocks us from an encounter with the truth of other people. Virtue is found in letting that self-centeredness go and so genuinely making contact with the world and other people beyond the self. The lies of Nixon and Johnson and the empty mutterings of Al Gore and George W. Bush emerge precisely out of the self-centered obsession that for Murdoch is the fundamental source of vice. Virtue, then, entails a kind of keeping faith with the world that is true talking and a kind of keeping faith with oneself that is authenticity. These are qualities that Goldwater possessed more strongly than any other politician of his era, and that is what gave him the status of an icon whom people respected or even loved even as they disagreed with his basic positions. When asked a question, Goldwater would simply answer it directly, and in fact the very definiteness of his positions doomed him in his race for presidency. In the middle of the campaign, he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; that vote, even if it was wrong, was an act of political courage in the sense that there was nothing to be gained by it politically (or at least, even if it did gain him some votes in the deep South, it cost him many more votes elsewhere. He knew it would.)

Civil Rights and McCarthyism

Barry Goldwater was, however, a deeply problematic political figure. This is most obvious in his support of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the latter's witch hunts against supposed Communists, and in the aid and comfort he gave to segregationists. Let us, then, examine these failures - and I do regard them as serious failures - in the light of Goldwater's character.

When Goldwater entered into his first Senate race in 1952, he was up against Ernest McFarland, who was the majority leader of the Senate. Arizona was a predominantly Democratic state. Few people gave him a chance to win, but he was aided by two factors. First of all, Dwight Eisenhower won a decisive victory in the presidential race, and he had coattails all over the country. He carried Arizona by a much wider margin than did Goldwater. And second, one of the most popular and controversial American public figures - Senator Joseph McCarthy - campaigned for Goldwater, making two trips to Arizona in his support. "McCarthyism" was already in full swing, as the senator carried on "investigations" and made various wild accusations about communist infiltration of the U.S. government and of various American industries. Goldwater, during the race and afterwards, aligned himself with McCarthy's anti-communism and his tactics.

Even when Eisenhower, as president, said that he would never get into the gutter with McCarthy, Goldwater joined the most conservative wing of the party in supporting him. This was in part because the two men were similar in many ways: rough-hewn, plain-spoken, hard-drinking, proud bastards. "Joe McCarthy was the most contentious, controversial, and stubbornly cussed character that I ever met in my life" (G 129), Goldwater wrote, and many people said much the same about Goldwater, though such remarks were, with regard to Barry, almost always tinged with great affection. McCarthy and Goldwater became close friends. "Do I stick up for McCarthy? Yes, I always have and I will continue to do so. . . . The people who want to get rid of McCarthy are people who coddle communists" (B 106). In his memoirs, Goldwater points out that there was genuine communist espionage occurring at the time; he mentions the Rosenbergs and the famous British spies Guy Burgess and Kim Philby. "For all his personal problems and excesses, McCarthy's central idea was on target - that not only was world communism a threat to this country and the free world, but its bloody repressions in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere could not go unanswered by civilized men and women" (G 129). Goldwater was aware of the problems with many of McCarthy's accusations, however, and when McCarthy asserted that there were communists in the State Department, Goldwater challenged him privately to produce names. When McCarthy could not, Goldwater told him that he was likely to get caught and should be careful. But he never publicly attacked or repudiated the accusations.

McCarthy was an alcoholic, and died of cirrhosis at 47, three years after leaving the Senate in disgrace in 1954. "Few people knew how sick he really was," Goldwater wrote. "He used to invite me over to his house near the Capitol. He'd go out into the kitchen with the excuse of making me a drink and would have four or five shots, then return with our drinks" (G 129). Goldwater many times tried to help McCarthy sober up, discussing his case with Francis Cardinal Spellman, taking him to hospitals, even flying him to the Bahamas to get him away from the booze. But McCarthy just kept right on, and the more he drank, the more erratic and irresponsible his actions became. When McCarthy's lies were exposed and the Senate voted to censure him in 1954, Goldwater was one of 22 senators to vote against the censure, and he hinted darkly that McCarthy was himself the victim of a Congressional communist conspiracy. Of those who supported the censure, Goldwater said that "Their motives are a criss-cross of spite, of fear of his political possibilities, and of the ever present and haunting dread that his ranging investigations might lead him to certain dark places in the Washington scene which the desperately want to keep covered up" (B 108). And when McCarthy died, Goldwater entered a eulogy into the Congressional Record in which he made the ludicrous claim that, "Because he lived, America is a brighter, safer, more vigilant land today" (B 108). But later, Goldwater could write that "I was probably wrong in defending him. . . . McCarthy went overboard in his investigations because of his inability to handle power and alcohol. Joe became enamored of power. That's really what made him sick and changed him into such a drinker. He was off in an unreal world of self-importance and self-indulgence" (B 130).

It is fair, then, to say that in a mild way, Goldwater came to regret his support of McCarthy. He ought to have regretted it deeply. Extreme anti-communism was of course deeply compatible with Goldwater's basic political philosophy, and he was certainly right to decry communist tyranny all over the world. And he was right also to worry about Russian spying during the cold war. But his support of McCarthy shows very clearly the problem with "extremism." McCarthyism was no more compatible with Goldwater's fundamental political commitments than was communism. In fact, had McCarthy gotten his way, he would have instituted a repression of expression that mirrored that of the system he despised. Goldwater allowed his deepest beliefs to be compromised precisely in their own defense. As he continued to defend McCarthy even after McCarthy's death he demonstrated the most admirable aspects of his character: Goldwater always placed great value on loyalty and friendship, and his support of McCarthy did not change at all with the public perception of McCarthy. Goldwater was willing to be associated with McCarthy when McCarthy was popular and powerful, and willing still when McCarthy was disgraced and dead. Few American politicians of any era have that kind of guts. But all that loyalty and courage in this case simply trapped Goldwater in a betrayal of himself.

Goldwater's vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, surely one of the most important measures to emerge from Congress in the twentieth century, was a huge political risk, though it perhaps also constituted a political strategy. Governor George Wallace of Alabama had done surprisingly well in the Democratic primaries, especially surprisingly well in northern states, with his undisguised message of apartheid. He received 34 percent of the vote in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, and 43 percent in Maryland. The civil rights bill came up for consideration just as the California primary campaign was in full swing. Goldwater won the primary and that victory was decisive in his run for the nomination. As I have mentioned, Goldwater carried only five southern states and Arizona in the general election, and it is certainly true that the perception that he was a segregationist had an effect on the vote in the south. Many analysts have asserted that Goldwater was pursuing a southern strategy, and that his vote on the civil rights bill was an attempt to win over the most rabidly racist elements of the electorate. That claim utterly enraged Goldwater, and he called it "demonstrably false." And despite some considerations on the other side, Goldwater surely suffered rather than gained politically by his vote.

Goldwater's record on race was a mixed bag. He declared himself many times to be opposed to Jim Crow laws, limitations on voting rights, and even simply de facto segregation. He voted for two civil rights bills passed by the Senate during the Eisenhower administration. Goldwater's store in Phoenix had a multi-racial staff. When Goldwater became commander of the Arizona Air National Guard after World War II, his very first command was that the unit be integrated. He was for many years a member of and a financial supporter of the NAACP. And yet it is fair to say that the segregationists in Congress and in the public regarded him as an ally, and that they had very good reasons to do so. He never repudiated his opposition to the Civil Rights Bill.

Goldwater consulted a 75-page critique of the 1964 bill written by Yale Law professor Robert Bork. He objected to Titles II and VII of the bill, which dealt with fair employment practices and public accommodations. These were the provisions of the bill that put paid to American apartheid, but Goldwater held that they were unconstitutional; in particular they were violations of the rights of the states and of the people as set out in the 10^th Amendment.

They infringed on the rights of states and localities to set their own policies in local matters and on the rights of businesses to select their own customers. With regard to employment, he also held that the bill would inevitably lead to what has come to be called "affirmative action," which Goldwater held to be a form of discrimination. In his speech in the Senate, he said that "I am unalterably opposed to discrimination of any sort, and I believe that though the problem is fundamentally one of the heart, some law can help, but not law that embodies features like these, provisions which fly in the face of the Constitution, and which require for their effective execution the creation of a police state. . . . If my vote is misconstrued, let it be, and let me suffer the consequences. My concern extends beyond any single group in our society. My concern is for the entire nation, for the freedom of all who live in it and for all who were born in it. This is my concern and this is where I stand" (G 172). It is evident that Goldwater regarded his vote as a courageous and principled stand.

And when Goldwater argued that racial prejudice was a matter of heart rather than law, he had a point. It is fair to say that the legacy of the civil rights movement and integration by force of law has been mixed. The discourse about race in American culture has detached itself in a pretty thoroughgoing way from reality. In many ways, progress has been slow, as will be evident to anyone who examines differences in educational achievement, imprisonment rates, and income in the white and black communities. But the progress of rhetoric has been rapid, and now there is almost no one who talks like a racist might have talked in the early sixties. Even white supremacists have learned to use code. And so white America has reached a point at which almost no one is a racist, or presents himself as a racist, or thinks of himself as a racist. And yet the structure of racism and even to a large extent of racial apartheid, continues.

So Goldwater had something right. If you change the laws without changing people's hearts, you not only don't accomplish the end of racism, you as it were make it more elusive. But what he didn't understand was precisely the role of the fight for such laws in the changing of people's hearts. The people, white and black, who were inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. were key in moving the legislation through Congress, as they came together for the massive 1963 March on Washington at which King gave his "I have a dream" speech. And the debate about that legislation changed the national mood with regard to race. It made white people acutely aware of the problem and called to their hearts to do something about it. The resolution to integrate various institutions likewise had an effect on many hearts, and if almost no one now explicitly endorses discrimination in housing and employment, that has happened not only by a change in heart but by a change in law. And hearts have then been changed by the concrete situation of integration. Much of this shift started with the movement for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That Goldwater could so sincerely declare himself opposed to segregation, yet also oppose measures to end it by force of law strikes me as a moral failure. And though Goldwater did oppose segregation, one reason that he could take the position that he did was because he consistently minimized the barriers to the exercise of basic constitutional rights and economic opportunity that African Americans faced. He never understood the power of race and of racism in this country, and he did less than nothing in his political career to help reduce that power.

It is appropriate to have serious reservations about a Goldwater presidency. Goldwater's candidacy, as we have seen, was the subject of one of the most vicious and negative propaganda campaigns in the history of American politics. Goldwater's view that we should continue to accumulate nuclear arms and threaten to use them was in fact very much compatible with defense policy and the national consensus at the time, yet the Johnson campaign was able to make it seem that a Goldwater presidency would lead to nuclear annihilation. Even today when you mention Goldwater, people will say that he would have blown up the world. The other basic accusation, perhaps even more scurrilous though also less dramatic, was that Goldwater intended to destroy the Social Security system. Though he had reservations about the system, as did and do many American politicians, he pledged to keep it functioning. But as I consider what might have happened in a Goldwater administration, it is race that gives me the most pause, and that makes me grateful (with qualifications) that Johnson was elected. Goldwater's opposition to civil rights legislation and his view (reflected in the convention speech) that racial protestors should be dealt with harshly, constituted a formula for disaster. The race riots of 1968 were bad enough; we might have had a virtual race war on our hands had Jim Crow been preserved. And Goldwater's constitutional argument is hardly sound. That the concrete violations of the basic rights of commerce and expression of individuals ought to trump the rights of states and individuals to enforce discrimination should have been clear to Goldwater and was the only position, finally, compatible with his commitment to freedom.

And yet Goldwater's claim that his vote was an act of political courage is not wholly inaccurate. The very qualities of character that made Goldwater a great and unique politician allowed him to stand up and be counted on the wrong side of several issues. Goldwater was one of 27 senators who voted against the civil rights bill, but in Goldwater he misremembers and says that his was the only 'no' vote. Goldwater was indeed the lone naysayer on several bills. What emerges from his mistake is that he would have voted against the bill alone if no one else rejected it. That is plausible given the rest of his career. That Goldwater, even in the midst of the presidential campaign could vote against this popular and historically significant bill, demonstrated his courage, commitment, and fortitude. And his attack on the bill was extremely direct and straightforward, quite characteristic of the best of Goldwater's political rhetoric. So it is precisely the qualities that made Goldwater great and unique that allowed him to take and defend this deeply wrong position.

One aspect of his failure on this occasion was a failure, we might say, of intellect, a failure ultimately to apply his own principles consistently. For though some people would have their freedom limited by this bill, those limitations were relatively minor. But the abrogation of the freedom of those whom the bill was designed to protect and liberate was pervasive and destructive of the basic opportunity that Goldwater always said he regarded as fundamental to the American way of life. In his basic arsenal of principles, Goldwater had the equipment to join liberals in trying to end the American nightmare of racism. Indeed, in some ways his principles were clearer on that than the liberals' own. He failed to see the ways that his actions violated his own deepest beliefs. But the greatest moral failure of Barry Goldwater with regard to race was not a failure of consistency, but a failure of empathy and compassion. There is no sense in any of Goldwater's speeches or writings that he ever tried to look at racism from the point of view of its victims. Because he himself owned a business, he looked at the matter from the point of view of a wealthy businessman operating under federal regulation. Because he was an official, he looked at race from the point of view of the powerful. Because he wasn't raised as a Jew, he didn't thematize his own minority status. And finally, because he was white in a racist culture, he didn't look at the issue from the point of view of African Americans.

Of course, there are limits of empathy, limits on the extent to which a white person can enter into the experience of a black person in the context of a culture in which race is an identity-defining difference. There is mirror-image derangement in which white liberals believe they have entered into such an intense empathy with black people that they are qualified to pronounce on and to control the experience of black people. That derangement is one of the factors in the failures of the civil rights movement. And it can lead to a kind of cultural annihilation in which the empathy consists of an implicit declaration that there is no difference between black and white cultures, that we are all potentially white people. That is a form of racism. So there are ersatz forms of connectedness that in fact reproduce dominations. Goldwater had the opposite problem: a failure perhaps even to attempt to enter into the experience of black people, a detachment from their experience that also constitutes a form of racism. In fact, it takes up a perfectly familiar place in the most hidebound tradition of American prejudice, because it implicitly rules black folks out of the realm of the fully human. A moral agent relative to a given person is a person who calls forth empathy, or into whose experience we can try to enter. Goldwater's failure of connection was, hence, a failure to treat black people as full-fledged moral agents, and as such it is a dangerous moral mistake and a form of bigotry.

If you start with that failure of connection - a failure that is a mild form of the disconnection that calls forth the horror of Nazism or the Killing Fields - then the qualities which make you otherwise a good man get twisted toward evil purposes. Goldwater's guts, determination, frankness, capability served his country well in many ways. He was the signal leader of the American conservative movement, a movement responsible for a reinvigoration of basic American values and especially of freedom. But when it came to the question of race, Goldwater's guts, determination, and frankness only made him dangerous. The problem is that you can't get one without the other: you can't take a gutty, determined person and expect him to back down on an issue about which he is passionate. It's extremely important to remember that whatever his failures of connection, Goldwater was absolutely no Nazi. Voting wrongly on the civil rights bill was not an advocacy of fascism or genocide. His failure of connection was not total, as we can see in his deep empathy for the Hopi, for example.

A Couple of Stories

"One evening in Wichita Falls, Texas, I was winding up a serious speech on the meaning of freedom and was dead tired. The sun was slipping behind the Texas plains, making me even drowsier. I was almost asleep on my feet, ad-libbing at the close of the address. If you can make out what I said, be my guest: "There are no heights to which our people can't go. There is no limit to the heights, no limits to their expanse if we go as a free people. I say, as a great man once said, 'Let my people go.' Thank you" (G 207). It is revealing that Goldwater tells this story; there is a gentle sort of self-ridicule involved which shows a power of reflection sorely lacking in most American politicians. And in fact for George W. Bush, say, those sentences would mark a high point of lucidity. Goldwater didn't take himself too seriously, though he took the freedom he defended with the greatest seriousness possible. In fact, his two memoirs are full of self-deprecating jokes which show Goldwater at his most admirable and disarming. He takes ideology seriously; he takes virtue and truth and freedom seriously, but he wears his self and even his own advocacy of virtue, truth, and freedom lightly. And even as the right wing tried to make him out to be a hero and a martyr, he saw himself as just a plain-spoken man from Phoenix doing the best he could but screwing up as much as anyone else. That's a symptom of what Murdoch calls "unselfing": a letting go of the obsession with self that allows one to see the world and even oneself with greater clarity and hence brings you toward truth and toward virtue.

I'll let Barry leave you with this: "[On] the large, locked door of my old office in the Russell Senate Office Building, I have left [a] message for . . . my successors. In the last months of my tenure, I fired my pellet gun a number of times, notching my remembrance into that door. The notches are Goldwater's mark that he was there - a way of carving my initials for my long love, the U.S. Senate. The marks also speak more eloquently than I ever could of my long frustration with the Washington bureaucracy" (G 38-39).

References

Lee Edwards, Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution (M) (D.C.: Regnery, 1995). An extremely tendentious work by a man who worked on Goldwater's '64 campaign; an attempt to exonerate Goldwater for everything except his late-life support of abortion and gay rights.

Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (B) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Solid scholarly biography.

Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, Ky: Victor 1960). This book, written by L. Brent Bozell, William Buckley's brother-in-law and an editor at National Review, using Goldwater's ideas and speeches, was a kind of conservative manifesto. It sold several million copies, and it is an extremely clear and quite compelling formulation of conservative principle.

Barry Goldwater, With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry Goldwater (W) (New York: William Morrow, 1979).

Barry Goldwater with Jack Casserly, Goldwater (G) (New York: Doubleday, 1988). If you want to read one book by or about Goldwater, this should be it. The crusty old bastard at his hilarious best. Better than (W), perhaps because Goldwater was out of the Senate and had leisure and no reason to be politic, though he was never very politic.

Karl Hess, Dear America (D) (New York: William Morrow, 1975).

This is the autobiography and polemic of Goldwater's speechwriter in the '64 election. Hess also wrote the 1964 Republican Platform, and speeches for Nixon, Ford, and many others. By the time this book was published, however, he considered himself a radical leftist and an anarchist. Hess's wrriting is extremely uneven: hectoring and unstructured at worst and beautifully aphoristic at best.

Karl Hess, In a Cause that Will Triumph (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967).

Hess's account of the '64 campaign, written immediately after it.