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Tiger Research 65

Nixon's defeat in the California gubernatorial race seemed to rule him out, but he began to make backstage noises about running again in case there was a deadlocked convention. A few Easterners mentioned Henry Cabot Lodge as a possibility, but his acceptance of the ambassadorship to South Vietnam was a big handicap. He had his hands full in a faraway post. Rockefeller still seemed the man to beat. No one appeared likely to defeat him except me. The Draft Goldwater Committee was kept waiting. On November 22 the waiting was over. Within a few days, I knew that the bullet which killed Jack Kennedy had also shot down my chances for the Presidency. I told Kitchel to pass the word: I would not run. Others tried to convince me differently. Kitchel mentioned a news report which said that the last words Kennedy had spoken to Johnson when they left their Dallas' hotel that morning had been, "Well, Lyndon, I guess we can carry Massachusetts and Texas." Obviously, that was just a Kennedy quip. However, we knew from GOP polls that the President's political fortunes were not as bright as Democrats had attempted to portray them. In another move to convince me to run, Clif White sent word that the "Goldwater train is running down the track toward the nomination at 120 miles an hour." Boston's Richard Cardinal Cushing, a friend of the Kennedy family, had been quoted as saying earlier that the President might not win in 1964.

To me, this was now all noise. I would not be a candidate. The idea of running against Lyndon Johnson was abhorrent to me. Walter Cronkite of "CBS News" sealed my decision. When Kennedy was killed, I was escorting my mother-in-law's body from Phoenix to her funeral and burial in Muncie, Indiana. My wife's brother Ray met me in Chicago, where we had to change planes. He asked me if I had heard the news about the President. I hadn't. Ray told me Kennedy had been shot. I was shocked because we had been so personally close. By the time we arrived in Muncie, the President was dead. Cronkite came on the air and, in the course of the "CBS Evening News," said I was off giving a political speech in Indiana and would not be present for the wake and funeral. The inference was clear. I wasn't showing the proper respect to the slain President and the office. I was never so angry in my life, and I phoned Cronkite to say, "Mr. Cronkite, I don't know you. I've always respected you. But you just told CBS viewers a blatant lie. I'm not here in Indiana to make a political speech, but to help bury my mother-in-law."

Later he apologized on CBS. Experience has shown that these corrections never undo the damage they cause. Some CBS spokesmen talked about a scrap of paper from the United Press International wire floating around Cronkite's desk, and it had somehow gotten on the air. They never offered a credible explanation. This was the first in a series of major errors made by "CBS News" over the course of my candidacy for the Presidency. I accepted Cronkite's apology and, to this day, hold no rancor against him. He's a personable and honorable man. At the time, however, I turned to Peggy and said, "That does it. I'm definitely not going to run!" For the first time since her mother's death, the faint glow of a smile creased her face. The overwhelming reason for the decision was my personal and political contempt for Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was a master of manipulation. He solved tough public issues through private plotting. His answer to almost everything was a deal—an air base here, a welfare project there.

If conservatives were to plead their case before the American people, the air had to be clear and clean. There had to be a line of battle where principles and beliefs clashed openly for the public to see. Johnson was the epitome of the unprincipled politician. He would assume the Kennedy legacy and be consumed by the sorrow of Jack's martyrdom. I couldn't and wouldn't run against a man like that. I made none of these thoughts public, although there was speculation in the media about my desire to run against Kennedy. I spoke well of Johnson in public for one reason: to help unite the entire country behind the new President at a time of sorrow and crisis. I was an American first, a Republican second. I also was convinced that the American people were not ready for three presidents in little more than a year. They were not likely to support Johnson-Kennedy opponents. That would be the Democratic ticket in 1964, no matter who Johnson chose as Vice President. The so-called radical right was being blamed for assassinating Kennedy. The Draft Goldwater Committee closed its Washington headquarters because of threats. Senator John Tower and his family moved out of their home to a hotel room because of phone callers who threatened their lives. Conservatives around the nation reported similar incidents. Lee Harvey Oswald's Soviet, Cuban, and other Communist connections soon surfaced, but that did not deter some liberals. There were quotes on television interviews and elsewhere that Texas had right-wing kooks who didn't like Kennedy and might have shot him. Some of the silly conclusions drove me nuts. There was clearly genuine sorrow among conservatives at the time, and some of the liberal sniping at us was unworthy.

December opened quietly. Mercifully, a turbulent year would soon close. It would be great to be with all the family at Christmas. I wanted to go home to Arizona. Within a month, I made a complete turnaround. Under tremendous pressure, I agreed to run against Johnson. On December 8, at Kitchel's insistence, there was a small meeting of some GOP leaders in my Washington apartment. I was very uncomfortable as the group assembled in the living room. They were Republican Senators Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, Carl Curtis of Nebraska, and Bill Knowland of California. Bill Baroody, Jay Gordon Hall, a veteran Washington lobbyist who had long been regarded as one of the savviest political analysts in the capital, and Kitchel were also there. One by one, as casually as if we were talking about a Sunday afternoon pro football game, they brought up the GOP Presidential nomination. Each maintained that I had to reconsider my decision to drop out of the race. I got damned mad at all of them. Jack Kennedy was dead. It was over. There would never be a battle of issues. No battle about the liberal agenda. Johnson was a dirty fighter. Any campaign with him in it would involve a lot of innuendo and lies. Johnson was a wheeler-dealer. Neither he nor anyone else could change that. That's what he was. And Johnson was treacherous to boot. He'd slap you on the back today and stab you in the back tomorrow.

Moreover, LBJ was dull. He was a lousy public speaker. 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. He wouldn't do it. LBJ never believed in either. His only political dogma was expediency. Things were never right or wrong. Most problems in the country could be fixed with cunning and craftiness. He never cleaned that crap off his boots. It trailed him from the Senate to the vice presidency and into the Oval Office itself. There's an old saying out in Arizona: If you get down in the manure, you come up smelling like it. The room was silent after I finished. Finally, one by one, each of the senators spoke. It was like an echo chamber: "This is the conservative hour—it's now or never.... The party needs you. Rockefeller, Nixon, Romney, Scranton, and Lodge are not the answer.... Think of those hundreds of thousands of young Republicans out there—the YAFs, the college crowd, all those young people who came to hear you speak over the last nine years or so.... You gotta do it, Barry. It's too late. You can't back out now. The Draft Goldwater Committee and too many other people have gone too far for you to walk away from them..."

All of this set the scene for Cotton. The New Englander was as eloquent as a modern Thoreau or Emerson. Cotton compared me with former French President Charles DeGaulle. He spoke of the decline of wartime France and its rebirth in postwar Europe under the general's guidance. America was getting soft. It needed a new commander. The nation's direction must be changed in slow, reasonable steps. That's the conservative mission. That's what we're all about. No one in the party has your mass appeal—the vision, the character, the will to turn America in a conservative direction. This is the hour. This is destiny. If only you'll give the command! Cotton's emotion and eloquence overwhelmed us. Tears welled up in our eyes. Everyone was silent, looking at me, waiting. I needed time to think—to sleep on it. We should all sleep on it, I felt. Quietly, one by one, each shook hands with me and walked out into the fading afternoon. I asked Kitchel to remain. Neither of us spoke. We sat alone for a long time. I finally stood and watched the darkness descend across Rock Creek Park and up along Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue. Neither of us turned on a light although the living room was now almost dark.

It meant leaving the Senate if I ran. I could never be like Johnson, who ran for the Senate while campaigning for the vice presidency. Lord, I really didn't want to run. I turned on a lamp, walked over to the liquor cabinet, and poured Denny a bourbon and water, a plain bourbon for myself. Finally, sitting down after pacing up and down the living room, I asked Denny, "What do you think?" He retorted, "What do _you_ think?" I replied, "Well, I'm impressed by the sincerity of those fellows. They've obviously gone out on a limb for me. I think they're great guys. But, Denny, this isn't the time for a conservative Republican to run. The country doesn't want three different presidents in a year's time. I can't win. In the process, we could harm the conservative cause. I'm not inclined to do it—for all those reasons and the simple fact that I don't like or trust Lyndon Johnson." Denny sipped his drink calmly. I edged closer to him. He was my friend—low-key, cool, thoughtful. Denny would never mislead me, never lie to me. He finally turned, looked directly at me, and said, "Barry, I don't think you can back down."

The words were like the shot at Concord Bridge, like the start of a revolution. Denny was talking war. It would be an all-out, bitter battle in any campaign against LBJ. Denny explained that perhaps we had been wrong in setting up our little campaign office here in Washington. Sure, we were thinking Kennedy, but all that had changed. But nothing was now different to the others. They thought we were going to go. So they had gone a long way down the road. All of them were good friends. They would feel that Barry Goldwater had left them holding the bag if he decided not to run. I had expected a lawyer's approach from Denny. He was viewing the decision more on a personal basis. I said, "But everything has changed. Jack Kennedy is dead." "Yes," Denny responded, "but they didn't know your thinking on that." He pointed out that they saw my running as the conservative answer to what was going on in the country—period. Kennedy was only a part of that, not the whole Democratic Party and its philosophy. Cotton and many others were thinking only of the conservatives—where were _we_ going? What would _we_ do?

He talked of millions of conservatives around the country who had made a stand in favor of Barry Goldwater and concluded: "You could lead this country. You've got to try it." Instinctively, intuitively, I knew that the commitment—the bond I had made to so many conservatives and they to me—was virtually unbreakable at this point. It was all over. I said, "All right, damn it, I'll do it." The fateful words came out in a flash. I told Denny to tell no one but the three senators. "I don't care how you do it, but no one else must know!" Kitchel phoned them the following day. The decision seemed final. It wasn't. There was one more river to cross, but I kept that to myself. Christmas was wonderful—Peggy, all the children, old friends. In the background, several private meetings with Arizona Republicans followed. These included Representative John Rhodes, former Senator Paul Fannin, Burch, Kleindienst, and others. I asked Peggy, as a special favor, to do something she never did—sit in on some of the talks.

Then I spoke with her privately. She had not changed her mind. Peggy did not want me to run. She repeated many of the reasons she had not wished me to run for the Senate twelve years before—that I was too open and would be savagely attacked in a national campaign, much more than running for the Senate in Arizona; that our family privacy would be invaded and she was a very private person; and, finally, that she didn't want to see me get hurt. I told Peggy something I've never—to this moment—told anyone else in my life. I said I didn't want to run. In my gut, there was never a burning desire to be President. I just wanted the conservatives to have a real voice in the country. Many of us were damn tired of the Democrats. They'd eventually wreck the economy and bring the whole country down with them. Someone had to rally the conservatives, take over the Republican Party, and turn the direction of the GOP around. There was no one to do it but me. We'd lose the election but win the party. It was only after making that confession to Peggy that I firmly and finally decided to run. Also, out of respect for my family and native state, I wanted that decision to be announced at my home in Arizona.

For the past twenty-five years, people have speculated that I ran unwillingly. That's all it was—pure speculation. I never said that to a single soul—only Peggy. She kept my secret, and how much it pained her. Only she could understand what was in my mind and heart as 1964 began. 6 The Road to San Francisco Jack Bell, the white-haired correspondent of the Associated Press—tough, fair, taciturn—was a model of the Washington press veteran. He leaned back comfortably in a chair in my living room, sipped a drink, and said, "I came here in the 1930s of President Roosevelt. Barry, I've covered everything in this town. In all these years, there's only one man I never understood—Bob Taft. I never understood a word he said. In fact, I don't understand you guys most of the time—all you conservatives." The conversation took place about thirty years ago, long before a conservative from Arizona considered running for the Presidency. Both of us lived in Washington's Westchester Apartments. We'd met at the elevator, and I'd invited him to our place for a drink. Bell added, "I listened to you today in the Senate, and I didn't understand you either."

That conversation made a lasting impression on me. Bell was saying something most conservatives had not grasped. We had long thought the media were unfair to us, but we had not sufficiently understood the reasons. Bell was spelling out one of them. We were simply not being understood. Why? Was it that many, like himself, were either too steeped in Roosevelt's New Deal to appreciate what we were trying to explain, or was it our own fault—for whatever reasons—that we weren't getting our message across? On January 3, 1964, as I slipped into an old shirt, a pair of blue jeans, and slippers to greet the national media, I remembered that chat with Bell. The message of our campaign had to be crystal clear. It could not be misunderstood. Still in pain from surgery, carrying crutches, my right foot in a walking cast, I announced my candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination from our home in Phoenix. These words spelled out our campaign as simply as we could: "We'll offer a choice, not an echo."

I would not be a "Me Too" Republican, an echo of the Democrats' liberal agenda. I would offer the nation a new national direction. We were going to explain to the American people the meaning and the opportunities of conservatism. That, as events have turned out, has been the mission of my entire political career. It's important to recall our basic principles—greater national respect for and support of individual initiative, fiscal responsibility by the federal and other governments, more power in the hands of local citizens, and a strong national defense. The 1964 campaign was to be a beginning. My first objective was realistic: to create an understanding of conservative beliefs among more Americans—millions more. However, that hope was dampened almost immediately. My announcement created two storms in the East. In the first, the media pros said Goldwater was a fool to hold such a conference in Phoenix. They argued that any such statements should be made in Washington or New York, where the candidate would receive greater news coverage. The media were right, from their point of view.

We made the decision against all advice. It was a sentimental gesture to the state where I was born and which I loved. The announcement also sent a message to the Republican Party, to my fellow conservatives, and to the country: I was going to be my own man, not packaged for the voters by Madison Avenue and a lot of other slick professionals who made me very uncomfortable. The announcement also had a deeper, much more significant implication. No one except Kitchel, Baroody, and I knew it at the time, but we had already made a crucial decision: For better or worse, I would be myself—a straight-shooting, down-the-line conservative—for the entire campaign. The second storm was much larger. The nation's political pros described my choice of top campaign staff as a disaster. All were political unknowns from Arizona—Denison Kitchel, general director; Dean Burch, assistant director; Mrs. Emory Johnson, director of the women's campaign; and Richard Kleindienst, director of field operations. They were soon called the Arizona Mafia. The media attacked them as amateurs. Political pros were not any kinder. None of the top members of the Draft Goldwater Committee, all experienced campaign veterans, had been chosen.

All these years, the media and others have speculated about the group. They said the candidate wanted to be comfortable with friends around him. He feared being manipulated or controlled by outside political pros. Both observations were true but were not the major reason for my decision. The reason was my own conviction that, barring a political miracle, I'd lose the race against Johnson. The American people would not accept three different presidents in little more than a year, and the certain conservative-liberal fight for control of the GOP would leave the party on the ropes in the national election campaign. I could honorably ask friends to walk down a dead-end road with me because I'd do the same for them. They would benefit because the campaign would be a big challenge and an unforgettable experience. It would be unrealistic and perhaps unfair to ask outsiders to accept a large responsibility in a doomed campaign. I didn't hide these feelings from my friends. I finally confirmed what I had told Peggy. Before the announcement, scores of them had gathered in our living room. It was bedlam. The media had taken over the house and patio with camera cables, lights, and sound equipment plugged into every available electric socket. A dozen friends had gathered around me, and we chatted. Turning to Arizona Governor Paul Fannin, who would run for my vacated Senate seat, I said, "It's a damn shame things turned out like this, Paul. I don't think we're going anyplace at all. Frankly, I don't know why I'm doing this. I'll be damned if I want to run against Lyndon Johnson. I wanted to run against Jack Kennedy. I want all of you to know from the start that I believe it's a lost cause."

It was the closest I ever came to telling anyone, apart from Peggy, that I was running unwillingly. I wanted them to know the plain truth—that the odds against us were overwhelming. I wanted that to be crystal clear. In all these years, neither Fannin nor any of those standing with me ever revealed that conversation. It was somewhat sad to be that frank, but I was upbeat from another viewpoint. I added, "There are a lot of young people out there. We can't let them down. Someday they're going to pick up where we leave off. Others are relying on us too. First let's take over the party. Then we'll go from there." We were going down a road together as few men ever do. We never viewed ourselves as victors, a new White House team, but as people who believed in one another and the same cause. To outsiders, it might seem incredible, even now, but to us, good friends, the campaign was as natural as tackling a big community project. The likelihood of defeat didn't come up again until six months later, when some of us were writing my acceptance speech to the San Francisco convention. With bittersweet humor, I told the staff that we were going to lose.

The Arizona Mafia were soon joined by others, none from our state—Bill Baroody, Ed McCabe, and speechwriter Karl Hess. They were part of the team for one reason: I trusted them. Not long ago, nearly twenty-five years after the campaign, Denny Kitchel and I looked back on the role of the Arizona staff. He said, "Barry, I don't think the staff knew what we were doing. I blame myself a lot. I had no background, no expertise. A great deal of my performance was inadequate. We didn't play according to the rules because we didn't know the rules. But you know, I don't think the pros would have done much better." Denny confessed he never understood why I had chosen him as the general director since he had virtually no understanding of a political campaign. He was my friend, and I trusted him. The pros never would have done it our way—putting the conservative cause before winning the nomination or the election. So who needed them? We weren't going to compromise. We were going to conduct a campaign such as America had never seen before—or would again.

We made a lot of mistakes. It was my decision to discuss the selling of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville and Social Security's financial crunch in Florida. We made other strategic and tactical errors from the shortsighted viewpoint of an election victory. I never blamed anyone. Nor did I ever believe the media were the major reason for my defeat, although in my opinion they were unfair to us at times. Denny accepted some blame: "I think the criticism of the Arizona Mafia was absolutely valid. Our ineptitude made us different from most campaigns. How much more ridiculous can you get than taking guys like Kitchel, Burch, Kleindienst, and others with virtually no background whatever? Then, you stick them in a campaign. But that's Goldwater, the real Barry. And that's what the country saw in the campaign." There was never a hidden agenda in our campaign. The staff and I sat down as friends, and I gave them hell about overscheduling me, or they told me to stop the off-the-cuff remarks. We just sat down and chewed the fat. Motorcades and hoopla were a big headache, a necessary but tiresome activity. As for the Goldwater people in those limousines and shiny cars, we were simply a bunch of people who liked one another, believed in one another, were united in the same cause, and were willing to give up part of our lives in an unforgettable adventure.

Dick Kleindienst, a Tucson attorney who had been chairman of the Arizona GOP, had another view of the campaign. He called it "the screwiest experience of my life." He may not have been entirely wrong. Dick and his wife, Marnie, were returning home from the 1964 Rose Bowl game in California. We had a statewide police bulletin put out on his vehicle. An Arizona highway patrolman spotted their license number at a border inspection station and stopped them. He told Kleindienst to drive straight to my house. That's all Dick knew. When he arrived, Kleindienst saw the mob scene. It was a little more than an hour before I would announce my candidacy. We went into a back bedroom with Kitchel and Burch. Dick's jaw dropped when we told him he was going to be the national director of field operations for the campaign. We all laughed when he said, "What the hell's that?" We told him he had to get 665 delegates to vote for me on the first ballot. "Barry, you've got to be crazy!" he replied, very reasonably.

"You're right, Dick. If I weren't nuts, I wouldn't be doing this!" Kleindienst talked about the criticism we would receive from having so many Arizonans at the top of the staff. I shot back, "Get this straight. I'm not going to turn my life over to people I don't know and trust. The three of you have to agree to do this thing, or I'm not going through with it." It was a wild, magnificent, screwy, splendid undertaking. These words about my 1964 campaign are an examination of conscience in the twilight of my life when excuses are neither necessary nor particularly becoming to a tough old guy like me. The record speaks pretty much for itself. But I want to make it complete. I didn't want to run for the presidency. That's God's truth. To my knowledge, no individual who has run the race has ever made such a statement. It's also true that I knew, and said privately from the start, that I would lose to President Johnson. Also, as best as I can determine, no presidential candidate has ever said that on the eve of his campaign. From my perspective, the race itself—explaining the conservative viewpoint—had greater historical value and meaning than winning. That was a very tough concept for me to handle. You don't go to war to lose. The first order of battle is victory. As we shall see, ours was a different victory.

Not long ago, in a chat about this book, George Reedy, press secretary to President Johnson, penetratingly described our campaign: "The Goldwater campaign was right out of the Old Testament—the blood of the sacrificial lamb—Barry and the true believers. I never believed Barry Goldwater wanted to become President. Instead, he was on a modern crusade—blood shed in what he and the conservatives believed was a sacred cause." The New Hampshire primary was a lesson in how not to run a campaign. For more than three weeks, from dawn to dusk, I sloshed through the snow for as long as eighteen hours a day. We flew up and down the state in random leaps that made no sense, sometimes spending more time in planes and cars than campaigning. I often spoke to as few as a dozen people. I fell into bed most nights completely exhausted. There was no agenda of issues, the crux of our campaign. Just about everything we did was extemporaneous. State Republicans were divided. Senator Norris Cotton and New Hampshire House Speaker Stuart Lamprey did not agree on how to run the race. Kleindienst, who was supposed to be out helping run the campaign, was busy trying to mediate the differences between our two most important supporters.

In Concord the campaign exploded. Responding to a reporter's question, I said that the Social Security system might be improved if we made changes in it, including making some contributions voluntary. The system was actuarially unsound. It had been sold to the American public as a kind of retirement insurance when its real purpose was only to prevent starvation. Every single statement I made was accurate. The next day, the Concord _Monitor_ headlined: GOLDWATER SETS GOALS: END SOCIAL SECURITY. The headline was a complete distortion of my views. To this day, my statement stands as accurate. Democrats and Republicans alike have made the point for me in recent years by declaring that the system was in danger of bankruptcy and that changes had to be made to salvage it. They also admit that Social Security is not a retirement fund. If someone wishes to provide for his or her retirement, he should do so privately. Many members of Congress have finally admitted publicly what they have long known. Private retirement plans wouldn't wreck the system. I did not say the Social Security system should be immediately junked, as Rockefeller, Scranton, and my Democratic opponents were to suggest. It had to be changed over time.

Other controversial issues also emerged in New Hampshire. I said the commander of NATO should have the discretion to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of an enemy attack on Western Europe. The fact is, my statement represented official American policy under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Some reporters said I used the plural "commanders," which changed my entire meaning. None confirmed that with me before writing front page stories of their own version the following morning. Later, some did put the question of number to me, but it was too late. Whose fault were these two incidents? Everybody's, including my own. Did I shoot from the hip? A more accurate way of putting it was that I should have used more precise language, qualifying what I said. The media also were at fault. The financial problems of Social Security and the NATO policy on nuclear strike potential had already been established. Neither was a secret. My views were neither eccentric nor irresponsible. The conservative views of fiscal integrity and the like were rarely headlined in New Hampshire. The media had either dismissed or ignored my challenge to the New Deal and the failed welfare state.

Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to Saigon, won the primary by some 12,000 votes over the second-place finisher, Barry Goldwater. Nelson Rockefeller was third. A somber and wiser group of Arizonans returned to Washington. We had lost but were not defeated. We'd come back. We had some experience now, even if we still had a lot to learn. We would ask for help from more pros. Rockefeller would be rough. His staff had reproduced the Concord Social Security headline. A "Stop Goldwater" movement was already under way among the other candidates. Each viewed the New Hampshire result the same way: Barry's bandwagon had lost a wheel. One theme was shaping up among the media—fear. Fear of Goldwater. It was too early to calculate whether a deliberate campaign of fear was being orchestrated, but it was difficult to ignore the warnings. I made two personal conclusions in New Hampshire. Pushing myself at people to shake hands for a vote just wasn't me—we'd do it only when it seemed natural—and the backbreaking daily schedules of the Granite State could not continue.

Candor, or "imprecise frankness," as one of our more erudite staffers corrected me, hurt us in New Hampshire. But it also helped us at the end. After coming in second, I concluded on national television, "I goofed." We received thousands of letters, telegrams, and phone calls saying that this public admission had been refreshingly frank. Clif White played a sweeping role in all of this. He and Bill Rusher had organized the Draft Goldwater Committee. White had traveled across the country for some two years, winning many delegates to the national convention for us. In San Francisco he, together with Nick Volcheff, an Arizonan, set up the most sophisticated communications system in convention history. I probably would not have won the nomination without the work of White. It's a somewhat sad story, but one of the most important and gripping aspects of the campaign. The role of White, Rusher, Peter O'Donnell of Texas, and others was critical in elevating the conservative movement and ultimately moving the American people in a new political direction. To capture White and the breadth of what was taking place, I have to go back to before the Draft Goldwater Committee began.

White had worked in four Republican campaigns before 1964, starting with Tom Dewey in 1948, Ike's two campaigns in the fifties, and Nixon in 1960. White had been a city chairman, country chairman, and state executive committee director. He understood the complexities of how delegates were chosen from state to state. He was a grass roots guy, someone who hit the road and learned the hard way. White and Bill Rusher were working out of New York when they organized the Draft Goldwater group. They had two aims: to broaden the base of the party and to change its structure along conservative philosophical lines. The White-Rusher goal was simple: to control the Republican nominating convention in 1964. Without my knowledge, White began canvassing the country in 1962. There was no reason to advise me. I hadn't made up my mind to be a candidate and had distanced myself from both White and Rusher. Their operation was quietly being financed by conservatives. White worked with a secretary out of a small Manhattan office.

Not many Republicans paid attention, but White was adding to the twenty-two conservatives who had first met in Chicago to form the Draft Goldwater Committee. He eventually formed conservative cadres in all fifty states. White's approach in the state of Washington was typical. First he made two visits to determine who the GOP conservatives were, made contact with them, and asked if they would organize a meeting of state conservatives; he'd return later to address them. The original meeting was planned for twenty-five people in a hotel room. Before the organizing was over, a large meeting room was rented, and the place overflowed. White always began his speech the same way: "We're going to take over the Republican Party and make it the conservative instrument of American politics." He organized volunteers by precincts and often found that from one third to one half of the GOP precinct committeeperson posts were vacant. Conservatives filled these posts and contested those already occupied. They thus had an inside track on becoming delegates to the state, and eventually national, convention. White began a political file on each state. These meetings began in 1963 and continued in most states throughout most of 1964.

At this point, White approached Mort Frame, who was the GOP state chairman in Washington and Rockefeller's Western states campaign manager. He said, "I'm here to get delegates for Barry Goldwater. I hope we can work together. If not, we'll fight it out, and I'll defeat you." The state chairman, of course, got a chuckle out of the brash challenge from this lone New York outsider. Frame was so busy electing Rocky in the Western states that the conservatives beat him in his home precinct by ten votes. Frame never even made it as a delegate to the county convention. Why and how were Frame and many other old-line committeepersons beaten? They had gotten fat and lazy. When asked to call on a hundred people, many said they knew them already. The Goldwater volunteers hit the bricks. What they lacked in political experience, they made up for in shoe leather, phone calls, long hours, and dedication. They didn't know enough to quit. Word on White's work filtered back to me. During a trip to San Francisco in 1962, I learned there was a Draft Goldwater headquarters near my hotel. So I walked down the street and paid a visit. Surprised, perhaps even stunned, they mobbed me. I was as astonished as they were. Two full years before the convention, here were these unpaid housewives, kids in their teens, the college crowd, and the proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes licking envelopes and making phone calls. None had ever met Barry Goldwater. They didn't even know if he was going to run. Their enthusiasm touched me. Needless to say, we became friends—once they let me up from the floor.

Those were the beginnings of the first genuine draft in the history of presidential politics. Eventually more than 500,000 volunteers joined in what became a conservative crusade. There was no secret to White's success. As he put it, "We didn't stack anything, as some candidates claimed at the convention. There was no lunatic fringe of fanatics. We beat 'em fair and square with work and people. Good people. Ordinary people. People who cared. They loved Barry Goldwater. They loved America. And they were proud to be called conservatives." White wanted the campaign job of director of field operations, but I had named Kleindienst to the post. The two met in Kleindienst's room at the Mayflower Hotel. Dick later described the scene to me: "Never in my life did I have a more sympathetic feeling for anyone in politics than I had for Clif that morning. Before me was a man who had worked long and hard, and he was literally crushed. Looking at me was a person of vast political experience, a national reputation, on the verge of tears. I told him that I had not asked for the job, but, as long as you had asked me, I was going to give it my best shot. I told Clif that I desperately needed his help and friendship."

Kleindienst offered White the job of codirector of field operations, and White accepted. However, this arrangement weakened Kleindienst's authority. Many of the party's longtime leaders, from senators to state chairmen, privately urged Kleindienst to step aside in the hunt for delegates in favor of White. The relationship between the two during the primaries was delicate. In politics, there is always considerable jockeying for power, especially at the top. This networking covers a vast array of political and personal relationships, often conflicting and sometimes deadly. I wanted, above all, a campaign above reproach. Nothing would so violate the conservative cause as politics as usual. This was an extremely sensitive point with me. It was not so much that I could not trust Clif White in a top job. I just didn't know him well. He was an excellent professional, and both of us accepted that. He never tried to ingratiate himself with me. Clif never spoke one word of complaint or criticism about me, nor I about him.

To the credit of both White and Kleindienst, as events unfolded they worked effectively together. Yet White was dissatisfied with the way the campaign was run. He has since become one of the sharpest critics of our staff operation of those days. White made a tremendous contribution to our efforts in 1964 and deserves the opportunity to reflect on those events. He has never been franker than in a recent conversation: "Do you want to know why I didn't walk out on the campaign? Because every one of those little old ladies and others out there in the hinterlands, who had been bleeding and dying for two years for you, would have lost their voices near the top of the operation. Because Denny Kitchel and Dick Kleindienst didn't know them. I couldn't leave them voiceless." White felt that Kitchel knew nothing of politics. He had no problem with my appointing Kitchel as my liaison with everyone else—none at all. White knew I had a right to a confidant in the campaign. The problem came when White saw Kitchel and others, because of their inexperience, as jeopardizing what he and others had worked so hard for. As White later put it to me, "The Arizona Mafia was inept."

White also told me I never had the fire in the belly to be President of the United States. He talked about my "humility" and added, "I believe you would go to your hotel room at night during the campaign and ask yourself, 'Would I make a good President? Do I really have the ability?' " White is right. I did go to bed at night asking myself whether I had the ability to be President of our nation. That's the truth. Barry Goldwater never felt he had all the answers. He believed, however, that conservatives had a lot more than the liberals. We appointed White to run our national convention apparatus. As Lyndon Johnson began to move into his campaign, some political pros and the media dropped broad hints that the President would be facing conservative neophytes who didn't know what they were doing. The pros said we didn't know which end was up—as if they did. The message from the smart political money was that we should have learned how to play the game with the big boys. To tell voters what they wanted to hear—that American GIs would not fight the war in Vietnam; that we could have both guns and butter; that the NATO commander had no authority to use tactical nuclear weapons if the Russians attacked Western Europe because the President's finger alone was on the button; that the Tennessee Valley Authority was a vast benefit to the American taxpayer; that civil rights were a wide new social order that limited states' rights; that a Great Society would flow with milk and honey to our vast multitudes in a new era of federal abundance.

That was Lyndon Johnson's platform, packaged in the White House and on Madison Avenue by the President's minister-in-residence, Bill Moyers. Moyers portrayed himself as a poor preacher boy, but he was actually involved in the dirtiest work of the Johnson campaign. We knew what we were doing, all right. We knew exactly where we were going—to defeat at the polls and victory in the party. The real tragedy is that Johnson, Moyers, and company also knew what they were doing, knew precisely where they were going, and still behaved with paranoia and cold deceit. The battle for the nomination climaxed in California. The Golden State was bigger than life and more volatile than a Chinese firecracker factory. California, the largest political battleground in the country, would split the GOP wide open. There was already a division between left and right factions in California. Senator William F. Knowland was on the right, with Governor Goodwin Knight leading the left. While these two Republicans struggled to defeat each other, the Democrats walloped both. Their division foreshadowed the events in San Francisco.

The primary was to take place on June 2. By mid-May, we had more than five hundred national delegates. If we could win in the Golden State, our total would soar to nearly six hundred. A total of 655 national delegate votes were needed to win the nomination. Since we were already certain of obtaining virtually all the delegates in four remaining Western states, the nomination would be locked up if we captured California. The Who's Who of state GOP politics were for Rockefeller. Rocky also hired Spencer-Roberts and Associates, considered by many to be the top GOP political consulting firm in the state. The firm, in turn, hired other professional organizations. Rocky went all out. We estimated he spent $3.5 million in the primary—almost enough money to buy a house in California! Our efforts in California were drowning in confusion. Kleindienst was sent there to see if he could make peace in the state party, organize our large volunteer groups into an effective force, and offer some direction to the campaign. After two weeks on the scene, Dick reported in mid-May that we'd lose by 200,000 votes if we didn't make drastic changes. I asked Dean Burch to meet me in Los Angeles, where we were campaigning.

Burch was waiting for me when we arrived. I was madder than a hornet. The schedule had been fouled up. We'd gotten stuck in an elevator for fifteen minutes, then in various traffic jams. Everything was late—not good for a guy with an obsession for being on time. To top it all off, Kleindienst's report that we were trailing Rockefeller had raised my temperature about twenty degrees. I told Dean that everything was screwed up. We didn't seem to be doing anything right, from scheduling to getting television ads ready. he was, from that moment, in charge of the California campaign. Dean had understood me but seemed to hesitate, so I asked, "What do you need?" "Money," he replied. "I didn't know I'd be staying. All I have are the clothes on my back—this seersucker jacket and pair of slacks—and only a few bucks. Knowing you, I guess you've got no dough." Then I remembered a fellow in a reception receiving line in Texas—Dallas or Houston. He had put a bill in my hand and said, "Here's a Lyndon Johnson dollar for your campaign."

I reached into my pants pocket to see if it was still there. Sure enough, it was—all folded up in a tiny square. I handed it to Dean. He unfolded the square. It was a new $1,000 bill. Burch set up shop, and we began our battle. If either one of us ever thought about whether using that money was illegal or not, neither has ever mentioned it. The fellow never gave me his name. One of the first decisions we made was not to overschedule ourselves—no working eighteen to twenty hours a day, as Bill Knowland had planned for me. We gave more set speeches, limiting our remarks, because Rocky was spoiling for a public fight to put more life into his campaign. We also heard that Spencer-Roberts was about to hit us with a blitz of TV commercials depicting me as a nuclear hawk. Most of our efforts went to organize an army of Goldwater volunteers throughout the state. We were soon being hit from all sides. On May 24 and 25, two separate bombshells exploded. The first occurred during an interview on ABC with Howard K. Smith. We were discussing the possibility of the U.S. military cutting off communist supply lines in North Vietnam. That subject had come up at a recent meeting I and other members of the Senate Armed Services Committee had had at the Pentagon with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They mentioned the possibility of using an atomic "device" or low-yield weapon—not a nuclear bomb or large-scale weapon—to defoliate forests hiding the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Our military leaders consider various options, and such distinctions, in contingency planning. In that sense, the Pentagon is no different from any corporation or other organization in the country. It would be a dereliction of duty if the military—or anyone else in a position of public responsibility—did not engage in planning.

Smith said he understood I favored interdicting communist supply routes from mainland China to South Vietnam. I replied, "Well, it's not as easy as it sounds because these aren't trails that are out in the open.... There have been several suggestions made. I don't think we would use any of them. But defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done. When you remove the foliage, you remove the cover..." The Associated Press, United Press International, and other news media reported that I had advocated using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Those reports were then and are now manifestly false. There was then and is today not the slightest room for doubt about what I was discussing—merely a possibility. Indeed, I said, " _I don't think we would ever use any of them,_ "—playing down even the _possibility._ UPI later retracted its story, and the AP finally issued a correction. So far as I know, others ignored their error. Howard K. Smith said recently for the record, "Barry Goldwater never suggested or recommended the use of nuclear weapons in that broadcast. A precise reading of what he said never backed up those stories. I don't believe the reporters were trying to get him. The phrase 'nuclear weapons' may have triggered an effect. Use of the term was inflammatory. I think those reporters just thought they had latched on to something. But it wasn't there."

Smith interviewed me after the election and told me after the broadcast, "The media were not completely fair to you." The record clearly shows that I've never advocated the use of nuclear weapons. I would not have used nuclear weapons in Vietnam. However, neither a President nor a candidate for the office should rule out the option of using nuclear weapons. He cannot offer an enemy—or a potential enemy—the security of knowing it can launch a war or other attacks without the possibility of the United States retaliating in kind, perhaps quickly and overwhelmingly. Peace is maintained through strength. I learned that at about the age of seven, had it reinforced as a pilot in the Air Force, and have maintained the belief for more than seventy years. The second bombshell exploded the following day on the front page of the New York _Herald Tribune._ The newspaper had long been an organ of the Republican Eastern establishment. It sought to hold off any new ideas from Republicans west of the Alleghenies. The _Tribune_ ran an article, signed by former President Eisenhower, describing the type of candidate Ike believed the Republicans should nominate. The article mentioned no names.

The newspaper ran an accompanying column by Roscoe Drummond which interpreted Ike's comments as anti-Goldwater. Eisenhower had been mousetrapped by his brother, Milton, and by friends who preferred Rockefeller but would accept Scranton. Ike later made it clear that he did not oppose me and endorsed no one for the nomination. He said, referring directly to the _Tribune_ and others in the media, "You people tried to read Goldwater out of the party; I didn't." Meantime, we sent the _Tribune_ and Ike's associates a message. It was a photo which made the front pages around the world—Goldwater at California's Shasta College with an arrow in his back. Actually, it was stuck under my arm. We thought it humorous under the circumstances, and so did Ike. At the same time as the TV interview and _Tribune_ article, we noticed considerable political movement by Richard Nixon. Rocky had defeated me in the Oregon primary. We hadn't campaigned there because the nomination would be won or lost in California. Nixon was speaking out on the issues all across the country, clearly hoping to win wide conservative support and the nomination if I stumbled in California. We learned that Nixon and some of his political cronies had met secretly in New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel over the Memorial Day weekend. Here was a guy who had just lost the California governor's race and, blaming the media, had told them they wouldn't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. Now he was plotting behind closed doors to take over the convention and give all the current candidates the boot. Yet we had the power to block anyone's nomination. But Nixon had a trump card—he always expected me and others to be fair and square with him.

If I dropped out because of a loss in California, we wouldn't have supported Nixon. There wasn't a conservative in the country who had forgotten his sellout to Rockefeller in the 1960 campaign. Nixon had broken his word of honor to me by meeting Rocky privately in New York. He had agreed to a more liberal party platform as well as to having Henry Cabot Lodge on his ticket. I leaned toward dropping out if defeated in California, but it was still a big if for two reasons: we wanted to preserve conservative unity then and in the future, and there was a large personal problem between Nixon and me. That problem became even larger when we learned of Nixon's secret meeting in Manhattan. I hadn't seen Nixon in four years. He had tried in various ways to make peace with me but never did. Nixon had lied to me. If we failed completely, I planned to support Scranton. He was not a conservative, and it would have washed away years of work. The Pennsylvania governor had one thing going for him—he had not assailed the conservative movement. We could live with him and fight another day. It was a very painful consideration, but politics is often an extremely agonizing process.

We were the underdog in California, but Dean Burch was doing a tremendous job in reorganizing our campaign from top to bottom. We began an advertising blitz of our own. There was a large undecided vote, but Rocky was heavily favored as we entered the last week of the campaign. Then, as someone later jokingly said to me, God entered the campaign. To be honest, I tried to keep Him out, as we shall see. Rockefeller was to address the students at Loyola University, a Roman Catholic institution. Cardinal James F. McIntyre of Los Angeles withdrew the university's invitation. McIntyre said he and the archdiocese didn't wish to leave the impression that the Catholic Church blessed the candidacy of anyone who had been divorced and later remarried. Soon afterward, a group of Protestant ministers issued a statement suggesting the New York governor should withdraw from the race. Then, three days before the primary, Happy Rockefeller gave birth to a son. That resurrected the divorce and remarriage issue.

We won the primary by about 59,000 votes of 2.1 million cast. It was a narrow victory, but, considering the all-out effort made by Rocky and our comeback from a disorganized start, we felt the victory was deserved. Indeed, if anyone won the California primary, it was the Goldwater volunteers, who performed herculean labor, especially in the last few weeks of the race. Some have maintained that the resurgence of the divorce-remarriage issue harmed Rockefeller in California. That's quite possible but hard to prove. I was, however, certain of one thing. We had not, in any way, raised the issue. 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. That was something that the media, and perhaps Rocky, never learned. Rocky never seemed to be himself during the California campaign. He turned over too much of his campaign to the professionals, instead of just being himself. We never thought much of the Spencer-Roberts team. They ran a rotten, underhanded campaign against me in California. In a final act of desperation, knowing the vote would be close, Spencer-Roberts mailed to the state's 2 million registered Republicans a pamphlet entitled "Who Do You Want in the Room with the H Bomb?" It contained a series of quotes from me, taken out of context, trying to show I would blow up the world. The media described the attack as savage.

Later, when he was Vice President under Gerald Ford, Rocky and I flew home together from Taiwan after the funeral of Chiang Kai-shek. We talked politics most of the way. Neither of us brought up the "extremism" and "radical right" charges that had poisoned 1964. It was clearer than ever that Rocky had a banker's analytical mind. He wanted to talk about where the chips were in politics. It gnawed at Rockefeller that he hadn't gone all the way to the Oval Office, although he never directly referred to the White House or the presidency. He asked indirectly, delicately, why he hadn't hit the top. With typical Goldwater tact, I said, "It had nothing to do with anyone else. It had everything to do with you. You could have whipped my butt in 1964, but I went out and worked a helluva lot harder than you did over the years. As a result, a lot of people worked for me. You thought that, because you were a Rockefeller, you were owed the presidency. You weren't. It's one of the beauties of America."

Just two weeks after the California primary, the racial issue thundered across the political scene. Few events in the campaign created more headlines, some fair and many false, than my vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. I cast the lone Senate vote against the measure and was quickly branded a racist by various liberal and civil rights groups. They claimed I was appealing to the Southern "redneck" vote. Some asserted the GOP was now the "white man's party." However, no man, woman, or child who knew me—black or white, Indian or Hispanic, of any color or creed—has ever accused me of such views—never, not to this day. During the Senate debate, I questioned the constitutionality of Titles II and VII of the proposal. These sections were devoted to fair employment and public accommodation practices. It's important to recall precisely what I said about parts of the bill on the Senate floor, referring to the Tenth Amendment, before voting: "I am unalterably opposed to discrimination of any sort. 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...

"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..." I had expressed these constitutional views in layman's language for more than a decade in the Senate. The debate went far beyond race. Rather, it referred to a central principle of conservatism, clear limits on the central power of Washington. States have all the rights not specifically reserved to the federal government by the Constitution. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan agreed with me. He said the racial controversy was "a clash of competing constitutional aims of high order: liberty and equality." I believed then and still believe today that more can be accomplished for civil liberties at the local level than by faraway federal fiat. I had voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. That was because they sought to end government discrimination against its citizens. Later, in 1963, I offered four amendments to the Youth Employment Act, which forbade discrimination because of race, color, creed, or national origin.

Never in my life had I ever advocated, suggested, or implied any form of racism. Nor, contrary to the repeated claim of various civil rights organizations, had I ever believed I was contributing to a "racial holocaust" by my vote. Indeed, I later promised, as the Republican Presidential nominee, to withdraw from the campaign if my presence caused racial unrest. In organizing the Arizona Air National Guard in 1946, I acted alone to provide a desegregated unit. That was before President Truman's desegregation order and nearly two decades before the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. My friend Harry Rosenzweig and I were the leaders in desegregating the lunch counters of Phoenix more than a decade before the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. I had long supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's campaign to test segregation laws in Phoenix. The 1964 act was debated on the Senate floor for nearly 740 hours over 83 days. It filled almost 2,900 pages of the _Congressional Record._ During that entire time, the senator from Arizona made it abundantly clear that he wanted to vote for the measure. Being branded a "racist" and "segregationist" in national headlines was appalling enough, but some in the media went even further. They asserted that candidate Goldwater was motivated by a "Southern strategy," whereby the GOP would sweep the electoral votes among the Democrats' old solid South. That was demonstrably false. Jack Kennedy wouldn't be my opponent; a Southerner, Lyndon Johnson, would be. Was I out to out-Southern Johnson? Hardly. Apart from the constitutional and moral debate, it made no political sense for me, as a candidate for the Presidency, to be the only senator in the U.S. Congress to vote against the bill. Why risk losing the general election on one issue?

Civil rights was a political issue from the start. I became a little sick of the hypocrisy connected with it. Everyone told me that, as a candidate, I had to vote for every civil rights bill. Various people, black and white, wanted the 1964 Act passed for their own ends. This was not a moral crusade in America. This was hard-nosed politics based on self-interest. I found Title VII of the bill, the so-called Mrs. Murphy clause, particularly repellent. Simply put, this said you couldn't refuse to rent your home to anybody. The fact is, I would not rent my home to a lot of whites for many reasons. That aspect of the bill was unconstitutional, and still is, in my opinion. Columnist James Reston, hardly a Goldwater supporter, wrote in the New York _Times_ that the Senate speech I had given in defense of my vote was one of the most courageous addresses he had heard in the nation's capital. The final judgment is for history to make. My approach is still legitimate, and the history of civil rights bears it out. Each separate twist and turn along the road toward equality has either had to be settled on constitutional grounds in the courts or at the local level in the hearts of individual Americans. We also have a long way to go before settling the larger issue—the civil liberties of every American as distinct from the civil rights of minorities. We're witnessing that today in work seniority and other disputes.

The media played a peculiar role in the racial issue. As a matter of record, I had supported civil rights proposals while Lyndon Johnson had voted against them or eased away from the issue during most of his Senate career. Yet much of the media saw me as a segregationist throughout the campaign, while Johnson's public record was virtually ignored. More reflective of the actual record was the following passage in Theodore White's book _The Making of the President, 1964:_ "It was Barry Goldwater who, on his own initiative, approached the President... and volunteered to eliminate entirely any appeal to passion of race in the fall campaign, to which the President agreed in private compact." I would never appeal to race, not for any reason. Despite the tribulations on the road to San Francisco, the convention, we still hoped, would be a happy triumph. Instead, it was a bloody Republican civil war. Nixon, Rocky, Scranton, and Romney united in a Stop Goldwater movement. They launched the most savage attack that I had witnessed in my political career.

In these quiet days, as I seek a peaceful close to my life, these reflections hurt. At times I close my eyes to the world around me because it behooves an old man to forgive others while seeking forgiveness for his own transgressions. Yet the purpose of these reflections is truth, and what we may use of it to fashion a better society. The truth is that power often drives good people mad. It's now time to review such madness—and the powerful lessons learned at San Francisco—so Americans will not condemn themselves to such errors in the future. Reversing the conservative image he had projected in the two previous months, Nixon attacked just about everything I had said and done since announcing my candidacy. He concluded, "Looking to the future of the party, it would be a tragedy if Senator Goldwater's views, as previously stated, were not challenged—and repudiated." There were many battles at the convention, and they've been reported so extensively that few new and meaningful details can be added. What is pertinent today, and still difficult to understand, is why my opponents allowed their views and ambitions to degenerate into such personal attacks. Those accusations became a public indictment that was later to be used almost word for word against me by Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats. More important, however, was the fact that the many issues we conservatives had longed for decades to bring before the American people were ignored in favor of assaults on me: that I was a trigger-happy mad bomber, a racist, and a right-wing kook who should never be allowed to become President.

In my dozen years in the Senate, despite deep political differences with many of my peers, I had never once attacked a colleague personally. I was deeply hurt by the accusations of fellow Republicans, especially the harshness of their language. The convention opened in an uproar after a series of major, unexpected developments involving "CBS News." These events culminated in a crucial broadcast by Daniel Schorr from Germany. The first was the false Cronkite report that I would not be attending the Kennedy funeral because I'd be in Indiana giving a political speech. Second, "CBS News" chief Fred Friendly and CBS commentator Eric Sevareid told me in 1963 that they wanted to produce an hour-long documentary on the conservative revolution in America. They even mentioned a title, _The Conservative Revival._ Frankly, we didn't want to do it because "CBS News" had a liberal bias. Those fellows, however, appeared to be gentlemen and men of their word, and such a program could help the conservative cause greatly. So I agreed.

Sevareid interviewed me in my office for two and a half hours. Tony Smith was present. The interview went downhill shortly after the start, when Sevareid asked in these general terms: Senator, you don't have a college degree; do you regard this as an impediment to your ambition? I replied that I wasn't a Phi Beta Kappa but had extensive military, business, and political experience that rounded out my general knowledge. The questions got meaner and nastier as we went along. They suggested I was an accomplice of the John Birch Society and similar groups. Tony stood up at one point and was about to ask if the interview should be halted. He was very angry. I shook my head and he sat down. I'd given them my word, and I would keep it. I expected them to do the same. A CBS camera crew followed me around for a month or so and took what seemed to be several hundred thousand feet of film. One day CBS called our office to alert us that the long-awaited documentary was about to appear. It was to be called _Thunder on the Right_ and would report on the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and other far-right activists. The program turned out to be an attack on these groups, not a documentary on the conservative revival. The only part of my long interview with Sevareid that was used was a single answer on the John Birch Society. The selection and editing of the film attempted to link me directly with the group. After the narration blasted the Birchers, Barry Goldwater suddenly appeared saying the society was not violating the Constitution. Yet we had long opposed the views of the Birchers and similar groups. In view of their conduct, I would never again accept the word of Friendly or Sevareid.

CBS had called two strikes on me. We didn't want them to call a third. But they did in Schorr's broadcast from Munich: "It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, center of Germany's right wing. "Goldwater has accepted an invitation to visit, immediately after the convention, Lieutenant General William Quinn, commander of the Seventh Army, at Berchtesgaden, Hitler's onetime stamping ground but now an American Army recreational area. "In addition, I learned today, Goldwater has given his tentative agreement to speak next weekend at the annual roundtable of the Evangelical Academy at Tutzing, on Bavaria's Lake Starnberg, where Chancellor Adenauer spoke last year. "It is now clear that Senator Goldwater's interview with _Der Spiegel,_ with its hard line appealing to right-wing elements in Germany, was only the start of a move to link up with his opposite numbers in Germany, and this has added an element of confusion in German politics. "The Bavarian Christian Social Party, led by ex-Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss, opened its annual convention here today preparing for a showdown with Chancellor Erhard over his so-called 'soft line' and refusal to unite with DeGaulle.

"Erhard, close to President Johnson, showed no interest in meeting Senator Goldwater during his recent trips to Washington. Now Goldwater plans to come to Munich, but not to Bonn to see Erhard. "Thus, there are signs that the American and German right wings are joining up, and the election campaign is taking on a new dimension." The CBS broadcast was false, and Schorr's was the most irresponsible reporting I've witnessed in my life. The New York _Times_ followed with an untrue account of its own. CBS violated the most elementary rule of reporting by not checking with me—the accused—on a series of very serious charges. The Schorr story did not name a single responsible individual or group as the source or sources for the allegations. Even if the network did not check with me, it had an indisputable journalistic obligation to show beyond Schorr's personal conjecture that the report was accurate. CBS compounded its unfairness with a report whose critical timing could affect not only the GOP Presidential nomination but the outcome of the national election campaign as well.

Schorr now recalls that the story was requested by Av Westin, then the CBS Saturday evening news producer. Schorr says, "My recollection is that he [Westin] called, asking for something that would give a German angle on Goldwater for the weekend before the San Francisco convention." That's quite a coincidence. CBS New York calls Schorr in Munich for a story on Goldwater at the GOP convention in San Francisco. Westin didn't respond to my requests for an interview to clarify this point. Schorr now claims, "As it turned out, a man who worked for Goldwater had tentatively accepted an invitation [to address the seminar] in his name." Who was the member of my staff who gave that tentative acceptance? Schorr didn't name that person. Why? Schorr's suggestion that the Evangelical Academy was a breeding ground of neo-Nazism with which I was somehow trying to link up was, to say the least, farfetched. To be precise, he didn't provide the slightest proof of any relationship. I knew nothing of the academy and would have said that to CBS if they had asked me about it.

The New York _Times,_ in a story by Arthur J. Olsen from Germany, headlined similar allegations—that I had been in "frequent and friendly correspondence for some time" with academy officials and others on the right, that I had agreed to speak at the academy but later canceled the address, and that I had given an interview to "an extreme rightist weekly." The extreme right referred, of course, to the neo-Nazis. The _Times_ story obviously had not been checked out. Schorr later admitted that the _Der Spiegel_ interview had never occurred. Schorr now says he was "guilty of sloppy writing, writing that could be construed to mean that there was some volition on Goldwater's part instead of saying what was true—that the German right wing was all excited about the idea of Goldwater. That's the one phase of the story which was the most lethal." "The most lethal"? That was Schorr's precise expression. He had written earlier that his broadcast detonated a "megatonnage" in San Francisco. Schorr recalls that "the Scranton people" transcribed his broadcast and distributed it under the door of every delegate.

Three aspects of the broadcast are critical: First, neither anyone on my staff nor I ever agreed—in any manner—that I would address any right-wing (neo-Nazi) group in West Germany; second, no plans were made by General Quinn or anyone else for me to visit Berchtesgaden, and, finally, my wife and I had only considered a European vacation after the convention, and it was by no means firm. That and all which followed in Schorr's report were untrue. It was a classic caper—not only guilt by association, but guilt by false association. Robert Pierpoint was the "CBS News" correspondent covering me in San Francisco. He now says that Schorr's reporting was unfair, and that it was harmful to me and our campaign. He adds, "He also hurt 'CBS News' and hurt Dan Schorr." The relations between Pierpoint and me prior to the Schorr broadcast were good. He recently told me what had followed: "I woke up in San Francisco and here was Dan Schorr's broadcast under my hotel door. Apparently, it was under everyone's door. I think they were put there by the Scranton people.

"I was absolutely astounded, just as you and everyone else were. I read this thing and felt that somehow there must have been some kind of misunderstanding. To me, even though Senator Goldwater was a conservative, he was certainly no neo-Nazi or any other kind of cult figure." Pierpoint contacted his office, saying he expected problems as a result of the report. He was barred from our briefing that day. I made the decision not against Bob, but to protest the CBS broadcast and the network's consistently questionable coverage. Pierpoint now says, "The Goldwater people, Kitchel and Burch in particular, told me to cool it. They realized the broadcast wasn't my fault, but everyone on Goldwater's staff was angry at CBS and Schorr." Pierpoint now reveals he was summoned to a meeting with CBS board chairman William Paley and Friendly. He recalls: "They had one question: Was CBS going to be shut out from covering the Republican presidential nominee? I told them I didn't think so, but the senator was very angry. I also said I understood why he was angry. Paley and Friendly also were upset with Schorr's broadcast. I said I'd like to know where the hell Schorr's stuff came from? I just didn't think it was accurate or fair. They said they were looking into that." The two asked Pierpoint to try to restore coverage for CBS. The meeting ended.

"To this day, I can't blame Barry Goldwater and his people," Pierpoint told me recently. "I'm not going to defend Schorr and really have trouble defending CBS for putting his report on the air. I don't think it should have been put on the air. I was the conduit, the correspondent covering Goldwater, and nobody ever contacted me about that story. You had better check a story like that. I don't blame the senator for being upset at the time. I don't blame him a bit." Pierpoint was in an outer office when Dean Burch and I came out of a meeting. He said, "I'm sorry about what happened." I replied, "Bob, it's not your fault. It's Schorr's and CBS's. None of this is personal on my part. But those fellows have to be taught a lesson." Pierpoint was back covering the story that day. Schorr never contacted General Quinn about any details of his report. He had to know the broadcast would put the Seventh Army commander in the political frying pan. The least he should have done was phone Quinn and ask whether, indeed, we were coming to Germany and under what circumstances.

Quinn recalls that General Johnny Johnson, the U.S. Army chief of staff and a classmate at West Point, had sent him a message which questioned the Seventh Army commander about the CBS report. Quinn replied that there had been no contact between us in more than a year. If the Goldwaters, who had been family friends for many years, were coming to Germany, it was news to him. He reported that no one had advised him or his Stuttgart headquarters of any such visit, official or otherwise. Before the Schorr broadcast, I had mentioned to a Washington _Post_ society writer, Betty Beale, at a reception that my wife and I might tour Europe, whether I won or lost the nomination. I had also mentioned that we might visit the Quinns in Germany. There were, however, no firm plans. It was a casual remark. Quinn said that the White House had leaked two reports involving him. The first came to him from colleagues in the Pentagon. It said that Lyndon Johnson had passed the word that Quinn would never receive a fourth star as long as he, Johnson, was President. That effectively blocked Quinn, generally considered a candidate, from ever becoming U.S. Army chief of staff.

The second leak was to the New York _Herald Tribune,_ the same GOP newspaper that had printed the Eisenhower article, which implied I was not Ike's choice as the Republican presidential nominee. The story, written by Douglas Kiker, said that Johnson had invited me to an intelligence briefing in the White House, but I had declined. The White House official indicated that the reason for my refusal was that I had been receiving such briefings from Quinn, former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The story was totally false. As I had told my staff, "I'm not going over to meet with that bastard Johnson. He'll just talk about his ranch, start pouring bourbon, and try to get me drunk. I'll leave, and the next day he'll say he told me everything." The truth is, Quinn and I hadn't been in personal contact for more than a year. We hadn't even exchanged a postcard. Peggy and I were thinking about getting away to some place where no one would recognize us—where we could walk down a street, have dinner in a restaurant, or take a boat trip without public attention. We had talked about Europe—Switzerland, France, Spain, England, and Germany. But no firm plans were ever made. We eventually did decide to tour the continent, and did so the following spring.

Johnson's decision to wipe out any possibility that Quinn might become Army chief of staff was reported by respected senior officers. It was blatantly political and mean-spirited. Quinn had a very distinguished military record as the intelligence officer of Generals Patton and Patch's Seventh Army in World War II, the director of the Office of Strategic Services before it became the CIA, a front-line commander of the 17th Infantry Regiment, 7th Division, in Korea, and other top military posts. Despite personal pleas from former President Eisenhower, General Lyman Lemnitzer, the NATO commander, General Creighton Abrams, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others to hang tough, Quinn decided to retire from the Army. It was a bitter ending to a brilliant military career and a sad time for both families. Our friendship somehow survived the ordeal, and we're still friends today. A letter to me from Bill Scranton landed like a bomb just before the convention opened. It was an act of political desperation. The letter's intemperateness was to affect not only my campaign against Johnson but the conservative movement to this day. It should be remembered, in reading the contents, that Bill had urged me to run for the nomination. The letter, addressed to "Senator Goldwater," said, in part: "Will the convention choose a candidate overwhelmingly favored by the Republican voters, or will it choose you... you are a minority candidate.... They [your organization] have bought, beaten, and compromised enough delegate support to make the result a foregone conclusion."

I read those words with total disbelief—that we had bought and beaten our delegates, who didn't represent Republican voters. The letter continued: "You have too often prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world. "You have too often allowed the radical extremists to use you. "You have too often stood for irresponsibility in the serious question of racial holocaust. "You have too often read Taft and Eisenhower and Lincoln out of the Republican Party. "Goldwaterism has come to stand for being afraid to condemn right-wing extremists..." The letter continued on the same level and concluded with a challenge from Scranton that we debate before the entire convention. My wife, Peggy, was dressing to attend the formal Republican Gala, a normally pleasant reception that preceded the convention opening. It was also a fund-raiser for the campaign. Peggy was happy. Her face was radiant. She loved to meet people in a pleasant atmosphere. It would be a wonderful evening. I looked at her, the sparkle in her eyes, the lightness in her step. How she had sacrificed, suffered for these fleeting hours. She had warned me so many, many times to stay away: "Barry, you'll be hurt. National politics is not you—and not for you."

I hid the letter from her. Tom Dunlavey was standing watch in the hall outside our hotel suite. We'd met at the 1960 convention in Chicago. The redheaded Irishman had volunteered to be my driver. We had become friends and something more—fellow conservatives. Tom had accepted the letter from a member of the Scranton staff. I asked him if he was certain the young man was with Scranton. He was sure. I requested he call Kitchel, Burch, Baroody, and Karl Hess, our speechwriter, to a conference—quick. He rushed off. Peggy was humming in the bedroom. She hummed when she was happy. My mind couldn't focus. A surge of bitter disappointment welled up inside. "... Minority candidate... nuclear war... radical extremists... racial holocaust..." It was incomprehensible. Kitchel and the others arrived. It was soon clear we were going to have a long meeting. Peggy and Naomi Kitchel had to go to the gala alone. I still remember the pain in Peggy's eyes when I told her. It was the lowest moment of the entire convention for us.

"Have a good time," I said to her, but the words rang hollow. Once again, at a time when we should have been together, politics pulled us apart. It was really sad. As soon as we began the discussion, I told the group I didn't believe my old friend, Bill Scranton, had written the letter. He was a gentleman. This couldn't be true. We'd suffered a lot of adversity since the campaign had begun. This was among the lowest blows of all, especially on the eve of the convention. But this was not Scranton. Some other candidate had to be using him. He hadn't signed the letter. His name was only typewritten at the bottom. We agreed that the contents were deliberately insulting, perhaps an attempt to provoke a rash response. We'd be conciliatory. Kitchel proposed that we send a copy of the letter immediately to every delegate. We'd say nothing. Let them decide. I agreed. We also returned the original letter to Scranton. The contents had not been written or read by Scranton, although he had agreed to send a letter challenging my views and calling for a debate. It had been composed by his staff and sent without his seeing the wording.

Most of those in the room were aware that Scranton was my personal choice to become our vice presidential candidate. Several now interjected that the letter had finished him. The truth is, it had not. It was necessary to see Bill, to speak with him, to find out what the hell had happened. What had I or anyone on our staff done to him? Was someone trying to use him? Unfortunately, such a meeting became impossible. I never, however, changed my high opinion of Bill. You don't turn your back on someone until you know the facts. Somehow, we would work it out. He'd be on the ticket. The episode was, however, never clarified. When we later met to discuss the vice presidential nominee, the entire staff ruled Bill out. I agreed. I still believe Bill is a decent individual and have never inquired further about the incident. Nevertheless, the letter did two things. It shocked and angered conservatives. Also, it handed the Democrats their campaign slogans and strategy on a platter—only Lyndon Johnson and Bill Moyers were to exceed the vulgar indecencies of Scranton's staff.

As the convention unfolded, Rockefeller led the attacks on so-called extremists as he dissected the party platform. He stood before the delegates and claimed that extremists had threatened to bomb his headquarters a hundred times or more, that he and his campaign workers had been frightened by threats, and a host of similar charges. The governor then said, "We repudiate the efforts of irresponsible extremist groups—such as the Communists, Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, and others to discredit our party by their efforts to infiltrate positions of responsibility in the party or attach themselves to its candidates." The attack on extremists was an attempt to include conservatives among the worst elements of American society. As the governor spoke, a chorus of boos began to swell from the audience. Rockefeller encouraged the crowd to attack him, frequently pausing to allow them more time. His address was interrupted twenty-two times in five minutes. It was as if each series of yells from the crowd had been written into a script.

The scene, carried on national television, brought into millions of homes and public places across the nation the almost barbaric atmosphere that had come to characterize the convention. I was appalled at the spectacle. We contacted White at our communications command post and requested that our delegates halt the booing. White and the regional directors assisting him in the trailer quickly contacted delegation leaders and returned to us with this report: Most of the booing was coming from spectators in the galleries. The majority of our delegates were sitting on their hands, ignoring Rocky. We were convinced then and throughout the convention that our opponents were trying to create an incident—a smoking pistol—to show that we were "extremists." There was antagonism on our side, no question about it. If the old party leadership had tried to exclude the conservatives from power, the "true believers" on the right were not ready to make peace with the liberals. Some of our supporters did boo and shout at Rocky. Kleindienst had met with the Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma delegations, among others, and they were in no mood for compromises of any kind with GOP liberals. Dick had to warn them, for example, that we would publicly repudiate them if they weren't more reasonable about who would be seated and voting on the convention floor. If there was little or no accommodation on the left, the same was true on the right. Republicans had alienated one another in the struggle for the party's soul.

My major difference with GOP liberals was simply this: I wanted more alternatives to what was going on in the country. That seemed a reasonable position. The harshness of their attacks on us, however, exploded the unity we so desperately needed to wage an effective campaign. Conservatives were convinced that the party's more liberal elements were prepared to wreck the GOP's presidential chances in 1964 rather than turn over leadership to the conservatives. They recognized as well as we that this struggle would affect party direction for decades to come. This was the feeling on both sides as the balloting for the Presidential nominee began in the Cow Palace on Wednesday night, July 15, after almost seven hours of nominating and seconding speeches. Senator Dirksen nominated me in a stirring address. He lifted up his rich baritone voice to the galleries and television cameras carrying it across the country. The Wizard of Ooze threw back his head, rolled his eyes, and talked of "the peddler's grandson."

It seemed fitting that South Carolina, which had offered my name as a candidate in 1960, would be the state to assure the nomination by topping the magic number of 655 in the roll call vote. The final tally was 883 out of 1,308 votes, still one of the largest such majorities in history. The dramatic moment of nomination was, in many ways, an anticlimax. Several of us were watching television in my hotel suite. There were a few cheers. Somebody uncorked champagne. Kitchel and my brother, Bob, were the first to shake my hand. Bob and I phoned our mother. She was enjoying the hoopla but was very calm. Baroody, Ed McCabe, and Tony Smith also were there. Peggy was at the Cow Palace, enjoying the excitement of the crowd. The celebration had a somber note. It was already clear that the possibility of my being elected President was now dead. Most of the party leadership had deserted us. I would have to go it alone. It was a deeply agonizing realization. Going it alone was not quite accurate. I personally put in a phone call to Bill Miller, asking him to be our Vice Presidential candidate. The former Republican National Committee chairman accepted with the good humor that characterized him throughout the campaign. The upstate New Yorker, a fast-talking quipster with a biting wit, had driven Lyndon Johnson nuts in the past with his sharp tongue. We'd need a bit of such humor in the campaign to keep LBJ at bay. If Lyndon felt he could get away with his Texas-size promises, we would be buried—to use his favorite expression—in bullshit.

Miller was the most logical of the choices available after Kitchel, Baroody, and the rest of the staff had unanimously ruled out Scranton. Miller, with his experience as national committee chairman, could return the party to some semblance of unity. Today, some people wonder whether Miller contributed as much to the ticket as we had anticipated. Bill did everything we asked of him. He maintained his good humor and enthusiasm throughout the campaign. Our personal relationship couldn't have been better. Bill was a good trooper, fought the good fight, and went home to Lockport, New York, with a smile and good grace, after which he renewed his law practice in nearby Buffalo. Miller liked to joke about his obscurity after 1964—as he did in a famous American Express commercial—but he was far from being an anonymous American. Bill had been one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in Germany after World War II. He gave fourteen good years in public service. Bill died in Buffalo's Millard Fillmore Hospital in 1983 at the age of sixty-nine. It was an irony from which he would have gotten a great laugh. Fillmore, a U.S. President, is far more obscure than Bill, an unsuccessful vice presidential candidate.

My acceptance speech before the convention was already written. While putting it together, we received the latest poll from Opinion Research in Princeton, New Jersey. One of their representatives was flipping charts to show that President Johnson had an 80–20 percent lead over me. I said to Hess and others in the room, "Instead of writing an acceptance speech, we should be putting together a rejection speech and tell them all to go to hell." Everybody laughed, but it wasn't really funny. There was some truth in the remark, and I knew it. Hess wrote the first draft of the speech, but Kitchel and Baroody took it over. Neither was in a conciliatory mood. Kitchel recently recalled his feeling: "There was no use trying to conciliate with guys as adamant as the Rockefeller, Romney, and other groups. I think it would have been wrong to try to heal those wounds before taking on Lyndon Johnson in that speech. We wanted to get the party on a new track. I agreed a hundred percent with Barry attacking his critics and Johnson."

We went over every word carefully. The most important point we wanted to make was this: The conservative movement aimed to take the country in a new direction. It seemed politically illogical and personally contradictory for us to offer olive branches to Rocky and the others. If I walked out on that convention dais and embraced Rockefeller, conservatives in the Cow Palace and across the country would have thought it was some political ad paid for by the Democratic National Committee. We'd just been through a bloody war on a host of issues. The libs had called me just about every dirty name in politics. The address had to make clear that this was a historic break. That's exactly what we were doing, breaking with history—taking over the party from the Republican National Committee on down and setting a new course in GOP national politics. Frankly, I never expected our critics and the media would focus on the now famous phrase, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

The reference came from Harry Jaffa, a professor of political science at Claremont Men's College in California. As was explained to me at the time, the words were first used by Marcus Tullius Cicero in the Roman Senate while speaking in defense of the state's rule and honor against Lucius Sergius Catilina, a patrician considered dangerous to Rome. The quotation was: "I must remind you—Lords, Senators—that extreme patriotism in defense of freedom is no crime, and let me respectfully remind you that pusillanimity in the pursuit of justice is no virtue in a Roman." An immediate debate erupted in the media over what I was supposed to have meant by the phrase. Some critics claimed it was a counterattack on Rockefeller and other GOP liberals for branding some conservatives as extremists. Others asserted it was a call for conservatives to exercise extreme action in the national election campaign. The truth is, no reference was meant to either. Nor was there any sinister meaning in the word "extremism." All of us were merely saying there was nothing wrong in being strong in the defense of freedom and no particular good in being weak toward justice. If any single word has expressed my political philosophy since entering public life—and to this day—it is "freedom." I wanted freedom to be the theme of the speech and our entire campaign.

Perhaps I was carried away by the eloquence of the statement. Maybe the address should have quoted Cicero directly. However, I didn't think so then, nor do I now believe it would have made a great deal of difference. Dean Burch put it this way: "Barry Goldwater could have recited the Lord's Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm as his acceptance speech. He still would have been attacked." I've never personally met anyone who ever accused me of being Machiavellian. Yet that was precisely the accusation made against me in one editorial after another regarding the extremism statement—that I was somehow assailing the liberals in my own party and, at the same time, urging conservatives to radical, if not violent, action during the campaign. Both views are pure baloney. Ben Bradlee and others who are certainly not conservatives have often said to me that Jack Kennedy, with his urbane charm and wit, would have gotten away with that statement. In fact, they argue, many editorial writers would have praised it.

Whether that's true or not, I still believe our acceptance speech, including the remark on extremism, was a good one. In fact, I set out to prove it twenty years later when asked to address the 1984 GOP national convention. Word got out that I was going to use the extremism quote. Some of my Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill said I'd be dredging up the acrimony of the past. One dear friend of mine, Paul Laxalt, implored me not to do it. I told Paul and others, "If you fellows give me any more trouble on this speech, I'm going back to Arizona. You can find yourself another speaker." I gave the speech and the line on extremism, delivered tongue in cheek, drew a burst of laughter from the delegates. It was all in fun, and they understood it immediately. A hundred or two hundred years from now, if a historian reads that speech, he will find an entirely new meaning in it. None of us is now in a position to guess what that will be. I haven't met any conservatives who believe in instant analysis.

The greatest of American spectacles was about to begin—the indescribable merry-go-round we call a presidential campaign. My longtime Democratic colleague, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia has described my campaign style in great good humor: "Barry Goldwater's motto has never changed: Ready! Fire! Aim!" 7 The Presidential Campaign The campaign took on new dimensions after my acceptance speech—it became a drama of personal power. Three people were central—Clif White, Bill Baroody, and Ralph Cordiner—but no one more than White. He had worked nearly three years in the hope of becoming chairman of the Republican National Committee under a conservative banner. Clif deserved the honor, and I put his name on the table when Kitchel, Baroody, and other advisers met. The job would become much more significant because we had decided the campaign would be run by the chairman. Baroody strongly opposed White. He viewed him as somehow standing in for those at _National Review_ —Bill Buckley, Bill Rusher, Brent Bozell, and James Burnham. That was false. Baroody saw himself as the head of a new brain trust around me. He would gather the research, direct the speechwriters, and be our resident intellectual with a team of his own bright young assistants. Baroody was a classicist, almost an ancient Greek or Roman. He was also a man who enjoyed power.

Kleindienst had the highest praise for White's political savvy and organizational ability. But he warned that White was not a team player but rather an independent, single-minded individual who might go his own way. Everyone in the room opposed White. Reluctantly, I said, "All right, let's take Dean Burch. Kitchel will remain campaign manager—do liaison work and travel a lot with me." All present immediately agreed. White deserved the post because his Draft Goldwater Committee had given us the political muscle to assure the nomination. When he wasn't appointed chairman, it caused dismay among Buckley, Rusher, and others whose intelligence and active help would have been very valuable in the campaign. They backed off after White was not chosen. Many other people across the country assumed Clif would get the job, and when he didn't, they were upset. Not selecting White was a mistake. I should have insisted on him and tried to mediate any inside tug-of-war that would have followed. Buckley, Rusher, and others should have been aboard working with us. They would have brought back some Easterners to the fold, added some professionalism to our ranks, and perhaps accelerated the political change that was taking place.

Despite continued criticism of the Arizona Mafia, they actually became a minority among our top staff. Kleindienst left to return to Arizona politics. Kitchel, Burch, and Mrs. Emory Johnson, although in key posts, were surrounded by a score of others in major jobs who weren't from Arizona. In any event, we would have lost even if Abraham Lincoln had come back and campaigned with us. As the new leadership of the national committee was being confirmed, a personal crisis was taking place. Most of us were unaware of it. White, his wife, and his two children were scheduled to fly to Hawaii for a restful vacation. White was unable to pack. He simply lay down and stared blankly at his family and friends. The turn of events had almost broken him. The Whites flew home to New York. Clif remained motionless on his couch for about two and a half hours. He couldn't believe what had happened. Numbly, he asked himself: "What did I do wrong? What was it? "I knew, deep down in my mind and heart, that I'd helped change the direction of American politics. I got a kick in the teeth for all that I had done, but we'd won. The conservatives had taken over the party, and that was truly joyous.

"Yet it really threw me. My wife wouldn't let anyone talk to me—or me speak with anybody else. "I seriously considered not taking part in the campaign. That was ego talking. I was still a man of faith. I'd told so many people that the conservative cause was worth fighting for. What the hell, I got up off the couch and ran Citizens for Goldwater-Miller. I never had any regrets." White now says he would have opposed some of Baroody's speech and other political decisions if he had been named national chairman. He maintains Baroody was a person who dealt less in political realities and more in philosophical theory. White and Baroody met before the research foundation leader passed away. They spoke of their disagreements. In the end, however, like most things in politics, all was forgiven and forgotten. Another behind-the-scenes drama had been going on for months and would continue through the campaign. It illustrates once again the most volatile part of politics—people. Baroody played a major role in our campaign. He was the chief of our so-called brain trust. Kitchel, his closest friend during the race, and Dean Burch now say that the _National Review_ people were "squeezed out" of the campaign by Baroody.

Kitchel told me recently that Baroody was very jealous of his own prerogatives, that Baroody was an intricate man, a conniver. There was never any effort on Kitchel's part—and certainly not on mine—to keep Buckley or the others out of the campaign. Baroody wanted to hold control and keep them out. Kitchel now sees Bill as a Svengali. Paul Wagner, our press secretary on the campaign, remembers Baroody as writing our ideological speeches with the help of others. Hess wrote the daily material. Wagner says, "I thought Baroody and his group wrote lousy speeches. They were exceptionally good as classical documents, but not as political speeches to the American people." White and Baroody represent some of the unseen strains and stresses of the campaign. Another man put an indelible stamp on our race. Ralph Cordiner, former chairman of the board of General Electric, became our finance chairman. Cordiner knew nothing about campaign financing, but he had a brilliant economic mind. Kitchel was sent to ask him if he'd take the job after the convention. Ralph accepted it on one condition—there would be no deficit financing. We'd run the campaign on a balanced budget and end it in the black. I agreed. That was a political mistake.

We were broke, as most campaigns are, as the race began in late August. Cordiner insisted that we cancel the television spots booked for the last ten days of the campaign, when we needed them most, until we had money to pay for them. Of course, when we received those funds, it was too late to obtain the commercial time. The networks refused us the time because they were afraid that the Johnson administration would get back at them if they created some for us. The President was notorious for his vindictiveness. Cordiner and a fellow by the name of Frank Kovac made political fund-raising history. Kovac assembled massive mailing lists that sought funds from millions of grass roots Americans—the real conservative constituency, who were tired of Big Brother in all his forms. More than 1.5 million people contributed to our campaign through various mailing lists. We created a vast volunteer army of more than a half million people who solicited funds and gave their time to the campaign in other ways. The national political scene had never seen anything like it. Americans contributed more than $13 million to our campaign. We finished about $1 million in the black. Kovac, who was from Washington, D.C., seemed to come out of nowhere several months before the campaign began and disappeared once it was over. We always wondered what had happened to him. In his own way, he was a genius.

Cordiner and Kovac were to have a more profound effect on the Republican Party than they—or any of us—ever dreamed. We began to see this several years after the campaign ended, when Richard Viguerie and others leapfrogged the Democrats in the use of large mailing lists and other technical innovations. White, Baroody, Cordiner—these names stand out in the campaign. But only one man runs for President. He alone must inspire and lead. He wins or loses the race. Barry Goldwater was a free spirit, short on a grand election strategy and shorter on a surrounding court of establishment intellectuals. We were a bunch of Westerners, outsiders, with the guts to challenge not only the entire Eastern establishment—Republican and Democratic alike—but the vast federal apparatus, the great majority of the country's academics, big business and big unions, and a man with an ego larger than his native state of Texas, Lyndon Johnson. The hundred-day journey took us to more than a hundred cities and towns—nearly 100,000 miles. I addressed millions of my fellow citizens and ate more lousy cheeseburgers than I care to remember.

I was fired up when it began—a considerable change in outlook since the convention. I was chomping at the bit to address the American people. A new spirit also buoyed those around me. We'd make a fight of it. No one would ever know my feeling about the inevitability of defeat. It would be the greatest adventure of my life, more exciting than flying, rafting down the Colorado, or climbing Navajo Mountain. We were going to give the Democrats, all those liberals, and Lyndon Johnson hell. We kicked off our stumping from the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott. Conservatives were rising across the country. It was finally our hour. We were the new wagon trains—from West to East. And others would follow in the trails we blazed. Two concerns began to nag at me—that neither the racial debate nor the Vietnam War should become issues in the campaign. No momentary political gain should be allowed to cause bloodshed at home or hinder the war effort in Asia. In late August, I phoned President Johnson and requested a private meeting of "mutual concern." Johnson agreed but quickly sent his White House scouts around Washington to "find out what Goldwater is up to." He never learned, since no one but me even knew that I wanted a meeting. Some White House aides guessed, however, that I might bring up civil rights. They were half right.

The meeting took place a few days before Labor Day. Johnson shook hands warmly. He put his hand on my shoulder. In the Senate, we called that the "half-Johnson." You were in a bit of trouble, but it wasn't serious. When he stretched his long arm completely around your back to the other shoulder, that was the "full-Johnson." It meant you weren't cooperating, and he was going to squeeze you on some project you needed back home until you voted for his latest pet bill. Then, there was "skinny-dip Johnson," who invited you to the White House pool and insisted you swim in the raw with him. Some fellows got embarrassed when Johnson began leading them around the basement without a towel. A few would agree to almost anything to keep their shorts on. Not me. I've been swimming in the nude since I was a kid, and I still do. When Johnson negotiated, and it was clear he felt some deal would be proposed, his eyes began to narrow. He was taking a bead on you, like he would on a squirrel. It was his intimidation routine. I began by saying that both of us had been around Washington a long time, that we were divided by philosophy and party, but that we shared a love of country.

"That's right, Barry," he said. "You and I are not like some people around the country. We're Americans first." He appeared to refer to the antiwar protesters. It was a perfect opening, and I took it, telling the President that there was already too much division in the nation over the war. We should not contribute to it by making Vietnam an issue in the campaign. Johnson took a deep breath and sighed in relief. He jumped into his Sam-Houston-at-the-Alamo defense with a do-or-die pitch about his difficulties in Vietnam. Finally, out of ammunition, he thanked me for the pledge. I interpreted that to mean he agreed. I said the same about civil rights—that if we attacked each other, the country would be divided into different camps and we could witness bloodshed. The President solemnly nodded. He said events were moving too quickly, and we should try to calm the country. We shook hands. Both of us honored the spirit of that private pact throughout the campaign. After I left the Oval Office, the White House issued a statement which didn't refer directly to our meeting but was an attempt to put a Johnson spin on it. The first half declassified a new plane to show that the President was strong on defense. Johnson evidently believed we might try to mousetrap him with a new charge that he wasn't offering enough help to the military. The second part said that Americans had the right to know where each candidate stood on every issue, including civil rights. The statement, which had been written before our agreement, indicated that Johnson planned to speak out on the subject. I don't know why he issued that part, because he maintained our overall agreement throughout the campaign.

On civil rights, perhaps it may now finally be clear that I didn't seek the so-called redneck vote in the campaign. We repudiated such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and were forced to repeat that we were unalterably opposed to discrimination of any kind. I did agree with nine articles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Again and again, it was inferred that I was a racist. No criticism of my record was so false and demeaning, however, as that of Walter Lippmann in _Newsweek_ of June 22, 1963, in which he said: "In his extreme views on states' rights, (Goldwater) is in fact one who would dissolve the Federal union into a mere confederation of the states... he would nullify if he could the central purpose of the Civil War amendments, and would take from the children of the emancipated slaves the protection of the national union." Never in the political arena, not in the darkest hours of the Presidential campaign, had any critic challenged my respect for the Constitution. The attack came from one of the most honored men in American journalism. He was wrong and untruthful and caused us unending criticism during the race. As the record clearly shows, I voted against the Civil Rights Act because it contained "no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority" in the areas of employment and public accomodations.

Civil rights was a big problem for me in the campaign—no question about it. Looking back today, we took a bum rap on the issue from many in the media, some minorities, and others. A discussion of the issues was crucial to conservatives. That was why I ran. It was the cornerstone of the years of political building that we saw ahead. We had to break the liberal monopoly on communication to the American people. As far as I was concerned, communicating the issues was the make-or-break point of the entire campaign. In desperation, we finally challenged Johnson to a debate. He refused because he never was good with the heat on in public. I had had plenty of experience under fire. Johnson liked closed doors and, if possible, closed windows. And sometimes closed minds. I never understood the media's judgment. They virtually ignored some of my proposals while reacting in a vituperative way to others. This didn't contribute to public understanding of our campaign as a whole. Let's look at the three issues that hurt me most—Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and nuclear weapons.

In 1964 about 21 million Americans were receiving Social Security. My opponents, from Rockefeller to Johnson, claimed that a voluntary plan, which we suggested, would bankrupt the system or require a big boost in payments by the 55 million Americans then paying into the plan. At the same time, as many of us in Congress were aware, the Social Security trust fund of about $22 billion was in those days in the form of U.S. securities, not cash. The government had borrowed the money from the system and spent it in other ways. How would any employee like to be part of a pension fund that had spent their contributions for other purposes? When Social Security began, it had about thirty-five workers for each retiree. Today, it's three to one retiree. By the time the Yuppies retire, it will be two to one. There were various projections that attempted to show that making the system voluntary would bankrupt it. These were given wide attention in the media. Instead, we were proposing that the worker be given a choice from the beginning, opting out of the system and never making a claim on it. We also stressed that any changeover to a voluntary system would have to be made over time so as not to disrupt the program.

My point was that the federal government was playing games with the money and that the system was financially overextended. That's precisely what has been made public in recent years and caused Congress to bail out the plan. In 1977, some thirteen years after our warning, Congress passed the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history to give a massive financial transfusion to Social Security. The system was propped up again in 1983. The program faces massive problems in the future, as the ratio of workers to retirees is expected to fall to two to one about the year 2020. Our explanation got little attention in the media. Nor did the fact that I had voted to increase Social Security benefits in 1956, 1958, and 1964. This isn't to make a blanket claim that the press was unfair. It's to call attention to problems inherent in daily news management and formats, not reporters. When we went to Tampa, Florida, and discussed Social Security again, the media once more exploded with headlines that we were threatening the system. The daily news business—newspapers, radio, and TV—is geared to quick, easy, black-or-white answers. That's the problem. It's easier to say that Goldwater is threatening Social Security in a few words than to explain in depth precisely what he's proposing. Daily newspapers excuse themselves by saying readers are bored with such detail. The answer to that is obvious. If being fair means reporting the entire story, then responsible newspapers as well as radio and television stations should change their formats. Instead, all of them are now compressing individual stories even more. There's an increasing danger of unfairness in such a policy.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was a big fat sacred New Deal cow. It was a mammoth, multimillion-dollar federal water and power-dispensing development on the Tennessee River water that served Southeastern states. I told Joseph Alsop, the columnist, "I think we ought to sell TVA." You would have thought I had just shot Santa Claus. Democrats and Republicans, senior citizens and schoolchildren—all wrote letters defending their empire. The Tennessee Valley was Goldwater Country, but from a conservative viewpoint the statement had to be made. Otherwise, we'd be just an echo of the Democrats—and some fellow Republicans. My case against the TVA had already been made in _The Conscience of a Conservative._ The book took issue with large government developments which invaded the private sector of the economy. The TVA was a sweeping network of different business activities which were not directly related to its three original purposes of generating electrical energy, navigation, and flood control. These other activities included its fertilizer production program, steam generating plants, and other enterprises.

The issue involved a clear conservative principle: Washington shouldn't intrude in the private sector and begin competing with companies and citizens who already support it through taxation. Government should do for its citizens only what they cannot do for themselves—period. Private firms would not only put TVA on the tax rolls but operate it more effectively than the bureaucrats could. Because of cheaper nuclear power, the TVA is now close to bankruptcy. Among our staff there was a lot of confusion on the issue, with various statements being released at different times. But I still believe that the utility should be sold—if anyone would buy it. As a matter of fact, Democrats and Republicans alike have since offered variations of my proposal for TVA and other large federal utilities. No one is saying the entire TVA should be sold at once, but various satellites could be put on the market over time. We now have a fancy name for all this. It's discussed regularly on the front pages of daily newspapers and is called privatization. President Reagan is selling more federal land in the West to put it on the tax rolls. Democrats want to market hydro-power from Hoover Dam to the highest bidder. There are numerous examples of all this today in the name of fair market value pricing and the free market system.

If anything, the change in attitudes shows that conservatives have made some progress. I'm proud of my stand on TVA and would say it all again. On nuclear weapons, one of the most disturbing aspects of the issue was never really discussed. Why was it that so many high government officials, military analysts, think tank types, and others could dissect the subject among themselves, but it was taboo for a candidate for the presidency to bring its sweeping dimensions before the American voter? We brought the whole question out in the open to debate it. Lyndon Johnson refused to discuss it publicly with me. Today the horrors of nuclear war are not only discussed on the front pages but featured in left-wing movies, television productions, and, above all, on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Reflecting on the campaign now, perhaps the Vietnam War should also have become a matter of public debate. I suggested to and agreed with President Johnson not to make a partisan political issue out of it to avoid further division on the home front. In retrospect, had Johnson and I squared off on the issue, the President might have revealed his intention to escalate the conflict without a military plan or diplomatic policy to win it. We might have saved many American lives.

During 1964 I discussed the theoretical possibility that some day the American military might use tactical—not strategic—nuclear weapons. Tactical weapons are used against enemy military forces on the battlefield or directed at operations and supplies supporting those troops. Strategic nuclear weapons are used against enemy countries and their war-making capacity. In discussing the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I was talking about a theoretical option—the U.S. military had included in its wide-ranging contingency planning the possibility of using small tactical nuclear weapons there. "Small" meant causing a narrowly defined area of destruction. The distinction between tactical and strategic weapons became even more significant when the potential use of nuclear weapons by NATO became an issue in the campaign. I had long been on record as favoring a "special safeguard"—that only one person apart from the President, the supreme commander of NATO, could approve the use of "conventional" nuclear weapons. Tactical weapons came to be called "conventional" as they became available in large numbers in NATO's defensive arsenal.

It became "nuclear madness" to discuss the subject. The possible use of any nuclear devices was talked about only in terms of doomsday, not limited destruction. Yet, in a New York _Times_ article as early as October 7, 1958, General Earl E. Partridge, a former commander of NORAD (North American Air Defense) said that his command had been authorized to fire a nuclear weapon in combat. Partridge further said he could order the firing of nuclear weapons without the specific approval of the President. Most Americans, with the exception of certain attentive readers of the _Times,_ knew nothing of this. They were unaware that President Eisenhower had agreed that if Western Europe were attacked, the NATO commander could fire the weapons in certain defined circumstances. Today, NATO's defense is based on the possible use of nuclear weapons. As a candidate, I had brought to the attention of the American people an issue of the gravest importance and was castigated for it. Never once did I advocate the use of such weapons.

Yet Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers, and others in the White House waged a campaign of fear against me in what came to be known as the "card" and "bomb" ads. The pair portrayed me as a destroyer of Social Security and a mad nuclear bomber in their campaign television commercials. I was depicted as a grotesque public monster. They converted my campaign slogan from "In your heart, you know he's right" to "In your guts, you know he's nuts." Their "card" ad showed two hands—meant to be mine—tearing apart a Social Security card. That was what Barry Goldwater would do if he became President, the commercial threatened, so save the system and elect President Johnson. The ad was a repellent lie. Moyers knew it yet approved the ad, and it was shown throughout the campaign. Moyers ordered two "bomb" commercials from the New York advertising firm of Doyle Dane Bernbach. He oversaw and approved their production. The first was a one-minute film which appeared during prime time on NBC. It showed a little girl in a sunny field of daisies. She begins plucking petals from a daisy. As she plucks the flower a male voice in the background starts a countdown... ten... nine... eight... becoming constantly stronger. The screen suddenly explodes, and the child disappears in a mushroom cloud. The voice concludes by urging voters to elect President Johnson, saying, "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."

There was no doubt as to the meaning: Barry Goldwater would blow up the world if he became President of the United States. The White House exploded its second bomb about a week later, again on network television. Another little girl was licking an ice cream cone. A soft, motherly voice explained in the background that radioactive fallout had killed many children. A treaty had been signed to prevent such destruction. The gloomy voice said a man—Barry Goldwater—had voted against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. A Geiger counter rose to a crescendo as a male voice concluded, "Vote for President Johnson on November third... the stakes are too high for you to stay home." The commercials completely misrepresented my position, which called for treaty guarantees and other safeguards for the United States. Dean Burch filed a protest about the commercials with the toothless Federal Campaign Practices Committee. The committee requested that the Democratic National Committee drop the ads, which Johnson and Moyers were forced to do. They later claimed the ads would have been canceled anyway.

Moyers, in a revealing interview with Merle Miller, who later wrote a biography of President Johnson, admitted he was responsible for the advertising campaign. Moyers pronounced the ads a "success." He said, "Johnson called me not too long after [the daisy commercial], and said he'd been swamped with calls... I could tell the moment he answered the phone that he was having a wonderful time putting on an act. He said: " 'What in the hell do you mean putting on that ad that just ran? I've been swamped with calls, and the Goldwater people are calling it a low blow, and on and on and on—typical, wonderful, Lyndon Johnson fashion. His voice was chuckling all the time. He said, 'You'd better come over here and tell me what you're going to do about this.' "So I went over at ten o'clock, and he said, 'Don't you think that was pretty tough?' I said, 'Mr. President, we were just reminding people that, at this time, it might be a good idea to have an experienced hand on the button.' I said I had only ordered that it be run once.

"I turned and went back to the elevator... and heard, 'Bill, Bill, just a minute!' He got up out of his chair and came down to the alcove with his back to the group [of dinner guests]. He said, 'You sure we ought to run it just once?' I said, 'Yes, Mr. President.' " Why just once? Why not a dozen times? The answer is that if you stab a man in the back deeply enough once, you can murder him. Moyers, an individual who professes his religious righteousness publicly, apparently believes it's moral to do that. But it's apparently immoral if you get caught stabbing someone five or ten times. Those bomb commercials were the start of dirty political ads on television. It was the beginning of what I call "electronic dirt." Moyers and the New York firm will long be remembered for helping to launch this ugly development in our political history. Over the years, I've watched Moyers appear on "CBS News" and the Public Broadcasting Service. He has lectured us on truth, the public trust, a fairer and finer America. He portrays himself as an honorable, decent American. Everytime I see him, I get sick to my stomach and want to throw up.

While writing this book, I tried to speak with Moyers about these ads, to allow him to discuss the commercials in his own words. He declined to return about a half dozen phone calls made by my researcher. Moyers' successor as White House press secretary, George Reedy, did. He said he was "bored and sick" at Moyers' dirty tricks operation. Reedy confirmed that Johnson and Moyers had had a "spy" inside our campaign organization who had fed them advance texts of my speeches, announcements, and scheduling information. He said, "I felt this espionage operation was silliness because we had the race won. However, some around the White House reveled in dirty tricks. I was out of step with them. That was one of the major reasons why LBJ and I drifted apart. I really like Barry Goldwater. He has always been a decent, honorable man." Hal Pachios, deputy White House press secretary under Johnson, tells of an interesting sidelight. Johnson detested anti-LBJ or pro-Goldwater signs at his rallies. He ordered that they somehow be removed. Marvin Watson, an LBJ aide, had people sprinkle itching powder behind the necks of people holding those signs.