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Tiger Research 66

The Defense Department spends as much time on its annual budget as it does planning to defend the country. It is a race involving next year's dollars rather than long-term military efficiency. Similarly, the JCS takes care of the needs of its individual services and calls that strategic planning. They have become more like business managers than military officers. All of this can be summed up in a single sentence. We have failed to coordinate the efficient use of resources with clear military strategy. With large federal deficits and growing reluctance in Congress to accept higher defense outlays, it's obvious that defense spending must be more effective and efficient. Like all other national problems, this one will not be solved by throwing money at it. The services simply must have joint hardware programs when possible, and a new two-year budget cycle should lessen much of the incoherent scrambling for funds. There is an inherent budgetary conflict between the generals and admirals in Washington on the one hand, and commanders in the field on the other. The Pentagon favors investment in big hardware, research and development, and military construction. Commanders in Europe and the Pacific are much more concerned about their state of readiness—what is needed most if they have to go into action tomorrow. There is a multibillion-dollar question: Do we have a balance between these two concerns? If our plan means anything, it gives field commanders a greater voice in the budget process to mandate that balance.

The act establishes a new under secretary of defense for acquisition. He is the Pentagon's top procurement official. Almost 18,000 workers, some 10 percent of the staff, are being cut from the Pentagon. The number of Defense Department reports to Congress is being reduced by about 265, or two thirds. Considerable savings may be made through joint purchases and other means. Obviously, we acted in response to multibillion-dollar cost overruns on military weapons programs and in answer to charges of waste and corruption among defense contractors. It was also an attempt to come to grips with large hardware requests, such as a multiyear appropriation for $130 billion to build two new military aircraft and a helicopter. The $659 ashtrays, $640 toilet seats, and $436 hammers only added insult to injury. Single-source contracting would come under greater scrutiny. The $300-billion-a-year defense budget represents about 30 percent of our annual U.S. expenditures. Ten percent of America's work force is employed in defense. As one of the few controllable budget items, it will always be a target for reduction.

The buildup of our defenses under President Reagan was unparalleled in peacetime. He added about $400 billion in real Pentagon growth. There's now a debate as to whether we got our money's worth. I believe we did for the simple reason that the Soviet Union has steadily become a more formidable foe. Those who assume that Nunn and I turned on the military and tried to challenge its power and trample on its traditions have not understood our intent or motivation. One of the central reasons for our reorganization act was to renew the military's financial and functional integrity. Both of us are committed to the constitutional principle of civilian control of the military and to curbing harmful interservice politics. Nothing is more sacred in public life to either of us than the defense of the nation's freedom. To suggest that our words or actions are an indictment of military performance misses the point entirely. On May 7, 1986, the Senate passed the reorganization act by a vote of 95 to 0. The House approved it by a vote of 406 to 4. Seldom in its history has Congress spoken so clearly. I did too: "It's the only goddamn thing I've done in the Senate that's worth a damn. I can go home happy, sit on my hill, and shoot jackrabbits."

Sam was much more subdued. He thought it was a pretty good day. The Presidential Packard Commission, headed by industrialist David Packard, a former deputy secretary of the Defense Department, did much of the spadework for all of us. Contrary to some published reports, Cap Weinberger and the President did not try to cut us off at the pass. They supported us once we made our objectives clear. Both also knew they could not defeat the measure. Another reason we were successful was the absence of major media attention. If TV news in particular had been able to make this into a dramatic, personal confrontation between the JCS and us, we might have failed. However, Nunn and I tried to keep the battle low-key and objective. Most in the media did not understand the subject well. It was very complex and therefore a story which the evening TV news could not easily tell. So they ignored us for the most part. To a large degree, the media—especially television—missed one of the most momentous stories of the past decade on Capitol Hill. We are still grateful for it.

We can now reveal that hundreds of military officers privately helped us in off-the-record and other briefings. Some risked their careers to do so. We also ran scared much of the time. The Pentagon loomed out there, and it is extremely powerful. It can do many things, including influencing the President. We proceeded, but usually holding our breath. We interviewed about five hundred people in doing our research for the plan. The majority of the military men with whom we spoke, both active and retired, were highly supportive. Contrary to letters, statements, and other claims of our opponents, most active military saw the need for change. I believe the JCS now does as well. Our plan is now the law of the land, and public opinion is behind it. The JCS now clearly understands that the roles and missions of the services—unchanged since 1948—have been transformed by tremendous technological change; and, especially important, a hound dog is watching. That watchful dog is Sam Nunn. He will hound everybody involved and not let go. I know Sam. Unless he is elected President and has too many other duties or his life is somehow shortened, Nunn will eventually corner those who stray from the law. He won't bite but will surely bark. Sam will long outlast those now in the JCS and will probably be in the Senate for at least another thirty years. Nunn is only turning fifty, and there's really no way he can be whupped.

Nunn and I talked long and hard about the outcome. We're convinced the legislative fight is largely over. Some adjustments to the law will be needed. Sam and others must monitor the details closely. They will have to hold further hearings and go out into the field to monitor various commands. Implementation is only beginning. The statutory authority is strong and clear. It's as carefully written a piece of legislation as either of us has ever seen in the Senate. After the measure was approved by Congress, the two major concerns of the military were how the flow of officers to and from joint assignments will work and the precise role of the vice chairman, especially his power in presiding for the chairman. We believe both will stand up well over time. On a practical, day-to-day basis, it's up to Admiral Crowe to make the legislation work. Crowe is an intelligent, reasonable man. He must now prove he's also courageous and can rise above traditional parochial interests. If Crowe and the JCS try to drag their feet, they may win the next Grenada, but perhaps not more crucial battles.

Neither Sam Nunn nor I ever said the act is perfect. There will be some disappointments and problems. Nevertheless, we believe it can be fine-tuned and fully implemented in three to five years. We expect to see future opposition from some of the services, depending on whose ox is being gored during the changeover. There's no doubt about that. But the big, furious fight is over. Nunn, a modest man, gave me too damn much credit in saying, "This law would never have been passed without Barry Goldwater. He was the point man, the guy with the guts. He never minded standing alone." The truth is, I never stood alone. Nunn was always by my side. He took all the flak I did. We were a team, creating close bipartisan cooperation between a chairman and the ranking minority member to an unprecedented degree. I hope our experience will serve as a model for Republicans and Democrats in foreign policy, intelligence, and other areas. At 10 A.M. on December 10, 1986, an Air Force staff car picked me up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I had been at the hospital for treatment of a skin virus. It had rained in Washington the previous day, and the weather was damp as the driver headed across the Potomac River.

When we arrived at the east entrance of the Pentagon, the rain had stopped but the wind was sharp and chill. Secretary Weinberger opened the car door. I looked out, and the sun was trying to peek through the clouds. My right knee hurt, but with the help of my cane I got out of the car and stood straight. Admiral Crowe joined us, and with the Secretary and the chairman of the JCS on either side, I walked down a ramp to the parade ground. The four service chiefs fell in behind us. We were escorted to our seats by young officers from each service. The seating was divided into four sections behind us. The two to the left were for members of Congress and retired military officers, including members of the Armed Services Committee and staff, my personal staff, and my son, Barry, Jr. The two sections to the right were filled with service chiefs, other active military personnel, and Defense Department personnel. We sat and faced the parade ground. The Marine band had already played several marches. The band stood on the field with the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Drill teams. A ceremonial color guard also stood at attention nearby.

The ceremony began with the four service artillery groups firing a sequential seventeen-gun salute across the river toward the Capitol. The smoke quickly disappeared in the stiff breeze. The guard presented the colors, and the Marine band slowly eased into the national anthem. As we stood at attention with our hands over our hearts and the military saluting, a dull roar slowly rose into thunder behind us. It seemed a new storm might be kicking up. But it was not the weather. Four F-15 fighter planes were now streaking toward our backs. They swept in low and fast, dipping their wings slightly as they passed over us. The quartet peeled off high and left to avoid the skyscrapers in nearby Rosslyn. A tiny silver drop trickled down my right cheek. Secretary Weinberger stood and read the citation for the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service. He said that Barry Goldwater was a man of courage, conscience, and patriotism. He suddenly called out, "Extremism in the praise of Barry Goldwater is no vice because it's true." He said I had taught the country three lessons:

• Do not become involved in a war unless you intend to win. • Government regulation of our lives becomes regimentation of liberty. • Despite all her faults and shortcomings, it's perfectly all right to love America. I stood and faced halfway toward the two hundred guests. Weinberger pinned the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal on my lapel. The secretaries of the four services then pinned their distinguished civilian service medals on me. John Lehman was next to last. The Navy Secretary wore a big smile. He showed real class. Tears were now streaming down my face. The Marine band played "America the Beautiful." Admiral Crowe then spoke. He said I had helped resurrect the American spirit after Vietnam and the national doubt of the 1970s. I didn't know what to say. I mentioned my mother and Sandy Patch. I recalled putting on a military uniform for the first time more than sixty years before at Staunton Military Academy. The most important words I'd ever learned tumbled out—that each and every American owes a debt of service to the country, whether in the military, politics, or community service.

I looked out over the officers and troops and began to cry, choking out, "Never in my life have I known such a high quality of enlisted men and officers as we have now." I couldn't continue. Fortunately, the noise of air traffic from National Airport drowned out some of my words. I said, "I love those damn things, but I wish they'd quit for a while." I reminded the gathering of our responsibility to uphold and defend the Constitution and closed with these words: "I admire you. I respect you. And I salute you." 12 The Last Race It was about nine o'clock in the evening when we rang the doorbell to young Peggy's home in Newport Beach, California. I was wearing a red-and-white nightshirt, red knee socks, and red tennis shoes, and had a red-and-white nightcap on my head. My wife, Peggy, always the lady, wore a dark cocktail dress. "Haaaapy New Year!" we chorused when our younger daughter opened the door. Her husband and their three sons, hearing our voices, soon rushed to greet us. The grandchildren shouted, "It's Grandpa and Grandma!"

I wore a different costume each year to get our reunion off to a merry start. For about a decade, the entire family had gathered each New Year's at young Peggy's home to celebrate my birthday and that of Joanne, our eldest child. Our two sons, Barry Jr. and Michael, with his wife, Connie, completed the crew. These reunions were always boisterous—poking fun at one another, laughing and shouting, singing, hugging, and devouring mountains of food. But this year, our get-together had a second, more serious purpose. We had gathered to make a very important family decision—whether I would run for a fifth term in the Senate. I had made a solemn promise in writing to my wife more than a year before that I would not return to Washington. The four children were well aware of that pledge. After our many years of separation, Peggy and I would finally be together. We would be alone, away from the crowds, to share one another more closely. I would be seventy-one years old on New Year's Day. It was time for us to enjoy some of the freedom I had always talked about—to catch some last glimpses of faraway places before we were too old to travel, laugh and cry at the antics of our ten grandchildren, and watch the twilight fade across the Arizona desert.

None of us was certain what decision would be made in the morning. Peggy did not want me to run again. She had never liked politics. Her health was not good. She wanted me near her. Each of our children is quite different. It was almost impossible to know how they would vote. Joanne and Barry are very independent and strong-willed. Both had children but were divorced. Young Peggy was happily married and devoted to her mother. She also ran a food business. Michael had a wonderful wife and children and a good job in the construction industry. We were a family, but a very diverse clan. Together, we were the third, fourth, and fifth generations of Arizona Goldwaters. As casually as possible, I watched each of the children individually. I reflected on our marriage, how Peggy and I had done as parents. Whether each child, now an adult, had reached his or her potential, who and what we were as a family. The answers would be reflected in tomorrow's fateful decision. My wife was always pleased when the family was together. Every laugh from our children and grandchildren brought a smile to her face. I was pleased she was so happy. In looking at her, my mind wandered back through the years. There was much to remember.

Peggy had brought up the children virtually alone for many years. Joanne had been born in 1936, and the others soon followed. Just five years after Joanne's birth, I left, except for infrequent liberty, for four and a half years of military service during World War II. Little Peggy was born while I was in India during the war. Even after I came home, the hours at the store were long, and local politics took more time away from the family. I had tried to make up for this by taking Peggy and the children on camping, rafting, and photography trips. But Peg and I were happiest alone—or maybe only with another couple that had been close to us over the years. Our fifteenth wedding anniversary, September 22, 1949, perhaps tells more about Peggy than almost any other time or place in our marriage. We rode mules to the top of Navajo Mountain on the Indian reservation in northern Arizona. There was a winding trail to the 11,000-foot peak. It took us about six hours to reach the summit. Two longtime friends, Toni and Bert Holloway, and a cowboy called "Whitey" climbed with us.

Darkness was falling by the time we reached the top. It was cold. Peggy was exhausted but said nothing. I got a fire going and cooked steaks. We began drinking the first of four bottles of champagne that I had brought along in celebration of our anniversary. I told Indian tales, including one about the mountain being the home of the Navajo war god. We sang a few old songs. The wind whistled across the mountaintop as we chewed on the steaks. I surprised everyone with a big chocolate cake. I had packed it in a tin box. We ate it, our teeth chattering as the wind whipped more sharply, and night covered us. Peg slipped into her bedroll—not a whimper—and slept on the ground. It got down to freezing during the night. As the temperature plunged, I kicked myself for bringing her up the mountain. Yet she never complained. That was Peggy all her life—soft, sweet, private. She healed quietly from life's injuries. The separation of war and politics left scars on her soul, but she said nothing. After many years, I began to understand how deep these wounds were. Now, in 1980, the ache of that same loneliness caused me to wake nights and wonder whether it was all worth it—whether I should go home to her in Arizona or plow ahead in Washington to help strengthen the conservative movement.

I tried to guess what Peggy would say in front of the children tomorrow. My best was behind me now. A younger man could do the job in the Senate just as well. I had been ill a lot in the last several years—hip operations, heart bypass, painfully bad knees—and missed many votes. Despite that, Arizona Republicans had told me privately, if I didn't run, the state party would collapse. It wasn't sufficiently unified. Well, I thought to myself, if they haven't got their act together by now, they deserve to lose. Peggy was smiling at me. It was a young smile, shedding the years and the pain. I saw her in some of the snapshots I had taken of her through the years. There she was, standing in front of the Royal Palms Apartments in downtown Phoenix, where we'd made our first home—a small two-bedroom place which we rented for $50 a month. Peggy had talked of designing clothes for Goldwaters. She had studied designing at Washington's Mount Vernon Junior College, a finishing school. Eventually our two daughters would go there. We would become a twosome at the store. It never happened. Yet not a whimper from her.

Suddenly we were rafting on the Salmon River up in Idaho. She got soaking wet from the spray. This roughing it, Peggy said, was for the birds. Next year, she laughed, we'd vacation in a California beach house. Instead we went to Monument Valley on the Navajo Indian Reservation, where we slept in bedrolls in a shed for storing wool. But not a word of distress from her. We eventually rented a summer place at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach. We bought a fifty-four-foot Hatteras, and I spent most of my time up to my elbows in grease and grime, working on the boat's engine. Peggy made some good friends, but I never really liked the place, and said so. Later, Peggy got a big laugh on me in London, shopping with her friend, Dorothy Yardley. She bought me a nightshirt that had "Newport" scrawled across the front. Peg thought the reminder was very funny. For that reason, I wore it often. She had a terrific sense of humor. That was one of her inner strengths. Peggy always laughed in recalling an incident in Portugal in the late 1960s. The two of us had taken a trolley from Lisbon out to the beach community of Estoril. We were walking down a narrow old road when a towheaded youngster of about twelve darted across the street toward us.

"Aren't you Senator Goldwater?" he asked. I nodded yes. "Don't you remember me?" he inquired again. "Well—" I stammered. "Of course," he blurted. "How could you forget? I'm the kid who was riding with you on a plane going to Houston. I came out of the rest room and couldn't get my zipper up. You zipped up my pants!" With that introduction, we met his mother. The four of us had an interesting chat about the ways and wonders of travel. She directed us to a fine restaurant that we would have missed. I told Peg over lunch, "As I've always said, if you pull your pants up, you stay out of trouble. If you pull 'em down, only God knows what'll happen!" We went on to Paris and met Colonel James H. "Trapper" Drum, and his wife, Betty, two old and very dear friends. I quietly told Trapper that we had to give the girls the slip for a while. He made up an excuse, and we were off. Trapper, now retired from the Army, was very mystified about it all. I guess he thought we were sneaking away to one of those famous Paris girlie shows. I said, "Hell no, Trapper, I want to get a tattoo."

He seemed shocked but knew that I had a tattoo on my left hand. I had received it as a member of the Smoki People in Prescott, Arizona. The Smokis, formed in 1921, are a "tribe" of non-Indian business and professional men living in Prescott who recreate age-old Indian dances and ceremonials to help pay for the town's spectacular Fourth of July celebration. Their tattoo consists of dots on the outer side of the small finger of the left hand. I wanted to place an arc above the dots. We had to ditch some reporters who were following us. Finally, we got the name and address of a tattoo artist in Montmartre. With a good taxi driver and a healthy tip, we dodged them. The artist, who insisted on being addressed as "professor," showed us a wide array of his work. These photos included a full-rigged ship which the professor claimed to have placed on the chest of the King of Denmark. He showed us many other notable works, including some interesting but unmentionable tattoos on ladies. When I mentioned that all I wanted was a simple arc on one small finger, the professor ballooned up to his full height and looked down on me as if I were a Left Bank maggot. This was well below his artistic standards. This was Paris, the art capital of the world. Didn't we know where we were?

His French pique finally simmered down when Trapper pulled out a roll of francs. The professor sighed, "Okay," but scowled during most of the work. A drunken Frenchman roared into the shop in the middle of the arc. The professor slowly got up, screwed up his face, and pitched the drunk bodily across the street. Trapper paid, I meekly thanked the professor, and we hopped a taxi back to our hotel. I made it up to him by buying dinner for everyone. For years I've had to answer questions about that tattoo at the most unusual times and places. Trapper still thinks we should have gone to the girlie show. The annual highlight of Peggy's social year in Arizona arrived during the last week of January. The Grand Canyon Hiking, Singing and Loving Club, which we had founded in 1948 with three other couples, set out to do just that. The eight of us, longtime friends, drove our cars up to the canyon. We rented cabins at Bright Angel Lodge and later moved to nearby Thunderbird Lodge at the south rim for three days of merriment and relaxation. Eventually we had to hire a bus because more than thirty couples had joined the group. We rode up from Phoenix, with me as tour guide.

Everybody was required to take over the bus mike and tell at least one joke. Some were pretty risqué. Peg often turned off her hearing aid, which she had begun to wear in the late 1960s, but she thoroughly enjoyed watching everyone else laugh. Ollie Carey was the life of the party every year. Peggy loved Ollie, yet no two people were more different. Ollie was the wife of Harry Carey, the late actor. A big woman, Ollie could cuss the toughest truck driver on the road under the table. And, I think, drink him there, too. Peggy and I met her at a drive-in cafe in La Jolla, California, late one night in July 1948. We were having hamburgers and Cokes when I heard this tough, coarse voice holler at me, "Hey there! You with the big silver-turquoise belt buckle! Wanna sell it?" I saw this old gal in baggy pants and a worn shirt and hollered back, "Who the hell are you?" "Ollie Carey!" she boomed. "Wife of Harry, the actor. I been up to see some friends of mine—Greg Peck, Mel Ferrer, and Dorothy McGuire—at rehearsal. They're over at the La Jolla summer theater. Who the hell are you?"

"I'm Barry Goldwater." "Well, goddamn, Barry. Lemme sit down with you and the missus. I hope she is!" Peggy introduced herself to Ollie, who tried to take my belt off. She said she wanted it for her son. I told her to get the hell away from me. She was laughing and poking me in the ribs. Ollie told me she was a Democrat, but I forgave her. On each of these Grand Canyon visits, Ollie and I became gin rummy opponents. I beat the pants off her. The only things we ever agreed on were the beauty of sunrise over the canyon and Mexican food. We loved both. Ollie is over ninety now. She was born in New York on January 31, 1896. I like her because she's older than I am and is a truly eloquent cusser. She lives in northern California on a farm outside Carpinteria. Ollie says she wants to live to be ninety-nine. Why ninety-nine? She hates round numbers! Our eighteenth trip to the canyon in 1966 was a memorable one. Peggy and I had gone to bed at 10 P.M. About 2:30 in the morning, I heard somebody blowing taps over and over again outside on the rim of the canyon. It was driving me nuts, so I got up and staggered downstairs half asleep. I wandered outside and found my friend, Bill Bailey, still blowing taps. Bill was about half lit and wouldn't let go of the notes, so I pushed him back inside.

Fred Boynton, who couldn't read a note of music, was still pounding out whorehouse piano. Ollie was spread-eagled on the floor, passed out with a stale cigarette butt between her lips. A few other couples staggered around singing. I was standing in the middle of the room in my nightshirt. I've worn one all my life. The last celebrators were laughing at a United States senator who apparently looked to them like Rip Van Winkle. I finally hollered, "All right, you've finished the hiking and singing. Now, go to bed and make love!" I went to bed, asking myself whether Peggy and I should admit that these crazy people were our best friends! It was the last time we went to the canyon because of the rarified air. We used up six bottles of oxygen on that trip. We moved down to Sedona and lower flights of fancy. These were wonderful, relaxing excursions. Once, on getting off the bus, somebody handed me a poster which I later hung in my Senate office: "STRESS: That confusion created when one's mind overrides the body's basic desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole who desperately needs it."

Peggy never accepted the bad language, nor many of the awful jokes. But I rarely saw her happier than when we were renewing our long relationship with these close friends. She thrived on the excitement and the good-natured kidding. But when these trips were over, she returned home and closed out strangers who would intrude on the sanctity of her family privacy. Reflecting on this today, I remember her interview with "CBS News" after the 1964 convention. As Bob Pierpoint interviewed her, the camera roamed through our hilltop home. Watching the program later, Peggy cringed as it entered our bedroom. She didn't like it at all. She said it was dreadful. They were invading our privacy. The camera panned to our Indian and other Western art, into our two sitting rooms and library. It was intruding into thirty sacred years of marriage. She wanted to shout. Pierpoint asked Peggy about us. She said the wife of a politician led a lonely life. Her husband was swallowed up by strangers. She said softly, "You get used to it, but you never accept it."

Peggy was uncharacteristically blunt. She described many newspaper cartoons of me as cruel. She said they bothered her. Peg detested any form of harshness. Asked why I ran, she said, "He couldn't let them down." Besides husband and family, Peggy's major interest was Planned Parenthood. She was a charter member and onetime president of the Arizona group. She didn't believe people should bring children into the world unless they could properly care for them. If they could afford it, however, she believed in large families. I recalled Peggy when the Reagan administration eliminated federal funding of Planned Parenthood because of its massive involvement with abortions. I am against abortion in principle and do not believe the government should intrude in the private lives of its citizens. But Peggy probably would have seen the cutoff as a mistake insofar as the poor were concerned. When I returned to the Senate in 1969, Peggy came less and less to Washington. She liked to attend White House receptions and Air Force balls. She enjoyed formal night life. I hated it, and even when we went out, I insisted on getting to bed early. Peggy talked easily with strangers, even though she was very shy. I have never been good at small talk and saw most of these parties as a waste of time.

Peggy surprised all of us by keeping a faithful diary of these social events. She even recalled what people wore. But she never liked Washington. Perhaps it was the constant political gossip. Peggy was the most gracious, generous woman I ever met. She despised gossip and the Washington rumor mill. One of the reasons she didn't return to Washington was her worsened hearing. I still don't accept that, but my children, staff, and others insist it was a major factor. Dean Burch and Ellen Thrasher have described receptions at which Peggy seemed embarrassed because she couldn't hear properly. The problem began in 1953. The family went to Nassau in the Bahamas for Christmas. Peggy woke up and couldn't hear well. We tried warm oil and every family remedy we could think of and finally saw a doctor. He said it was temporary. It was not. After the presidential campaign, we were in New York. Peggy slipped on some ice on a sidewalk. After that accident her hearing steadily deteriorated. We saw different medical specialists. The problem was finally diagnosed as Ménière's syndrome. It's a malfunctioning of the semicircular canal of the inner ear which causes dizziness and a buzzing in the ear. At times, she appeared to lose her balance. The children and I had to raise our voices for her to hear. She began lip-reading lessons.

Beginning in 1979, Peggy rarely came to Washington. A longtime smoker, she had developed emphysema. The doctors scared the hell out of her, and she finally quit smoking that year. Peggy's general health, her desire for privacy, and the fact that politics had become a kind of mistress to me caused her to withdraw to our hilltop. She was convinced I was coming home at the end of 1980. Tomorrow she would cast her vote on that decision. Joanne sat across from me, sipping a glass of wine. She would be forty-four years old tomorrow. We were very much alike—stubborn and hardheaded. Before I died, we'd both agreed, we'd sit down and resolve whatever it was that separated us. We hadn't been able to do so. She was boisterous and independent, I thought too much so. And I didn't care for many of her friends, who seemed like a fast crowd. Joanne said I demanded too much of her. It was never that. I didn't accept her rebellious nature. Joanne often complained that I didn't show her enough love, personally or publicly. Yet she'd always say, "Daddy, I know you love me absolutely—more than anything."

I did, from the day she was born. No father ever took his children on more outdoor trips when home. And when away, through all the years, I wrote Joanne and the other children hundreds of letters. They have saved most of them. One was written to them in June 1943, when I was stationed in India. They had broken a large limb from an old tree at our summer place in La Jolla, and I lectured them: I was walking down the street today, and saw a very pretty garden in a beautiful front yard. Daddy walked over to that garden, and sat down by a long row of sweet-looking flowers. Well, a bird suddenly landed by the flowers. He was tired. The bird had flown all the way from La Jolla, thousands of miles away. When the bird got his breath, he started to talk to the flowers and I couldn't help but hear what he said: "Say, fellows, you've heard me talk about that pretty patio in La Jolla with the big tree in the middle of it, which shades all of your cousins. Well, last week, someone broke a limb off that tree, and you ought to see your cousins now. They are all wrinkled and old-looking, and they don't smile anymore."

With that, all the flowers started to cry. Their colors ran and they drooped. Even the old tree above me sighed and moaned at the plight of those poor California flowers... Daddy wants you to know that God placed everything on this earth for a purpose. He put the ground there for us to walk on, and the flowers to grow in. He put trees in the ground to shade us, the grass and the flowers. He put rain in the sky to water the trees and the flowers so they would all grow and be pretty—and we could be happy looking at them. When we break a tree down, or walk on the flowers, or hurt little birds, we are doing things that will make people unhappy—just like the crying flowers made Daddy unhappy. Everything in this world has been put there by God for some good reason.... Remember that we love everything that grows. We will not break up the lives of trees—or flowers, or men, or anything. Of course, except those things that are bad. I'll tell you about them one day. Give Mommy a big kiss for Daddy. Love,

Daddy I wrote to them of starving children in war-torn countries and how lucky they were. On July 10, 1944, I wrote to Joanne: I want you to try your best at everything. If your best won't win, don't squawk about it. I don't ever want to hear you make an excuse for being beaten, other than your opponent was better. Love, Daddy She now wants to throw her arms around me. I want that, too. But she's not a kid anymore. She's an adult. I want important talks the old-style way—a sit-down at home with mutual understanding and respect, dignity, not chumminess at some public gathering. That's Joanne's word—chummy. Love is not being chummy. Love is honesty, truth, and generosity of spirit. Joanne and I chatted, and I wanted to hug her. I had no idea how she would vote tomorrow. Barry Jr. was speaking with his mother. He had as strong a personality as Joanne. He often talked of taking the clothes off emperors and showing the real stuff of men. Barry considered himself a leader in the tell-it-like-it-is generation. He had long told me that I spent too much time on politics and my hobbies and not enough on him. He said I wasn't home to help him with schoolwork, nor to advise him in untangling some of his problems and aims. Yet I had often said and written him: "Always be who and what you really are. Never be false. Be honest, God-fearing, dedicated to your fellow man. Whatever you do in life, give it a full day, a full week, a full year's work."

I never tried to influence Barry to enter politics or walk any particular path. That was his choice. He saw my reluctance to do that as forcing him to deal with his problems alone. Barry said he had never understood his mother. She was obviously loving and had tremendous feeling about her family. But she wouldn't open up, he complained, and tell him her most sensitive inner feelings. He and Joanne demanded that we let it all hang out with them. They wanted to explore the innermost, most delicate aspects of human behavior. Peggy was too shy for that. And while we explained the facts of life to our children, neither of us had any interest in discussing every part of the human anatomy or conduct. Nor did either of us feel such chumminess had many redeeming qualities. Joanne and Barry saw us as loving parents but unable—if we would not share our innermost secrets and discuss some of theirs—to express our affection for them. Barry served on Capitol Hill as a California congressman for fourteen years. He did a good job. His name came up in connection with a drug investigation. The year-long study finally exonerated him, but the ordeal for the family, especially his mother, was devastating. He ran for the Senate and lost. Barry is now back in California, working in financial management. He seems much happier being out of politics. Of all our children, his views on my retiring from the Senate were the least predictable.

I've thought long and hard about my relationships with Joanne and Barry. Both are stubborn and headstrong, just like their father. Both are outspoken. Yet none of that explains the distance that had increased between us over the years. It has taken me a long time to figure out why, and I'm still not entirely certain. But it's clear that the values of their generation and mine are very different. The greatest difference between us is our attitudes toward money or material things. I have always viewed money as a necessity, no more and no less. The two of them see owning money as an accomplishment in itself, an end. I've not given them all the money they wanted—although they have received a lot from Peggy and me—simply because I feel it should be earned. I've never believed our giving them money was a sign of our love. All that I possess, the four children will eventually have. But I'm fed up with money talk. Young Peggy saw her parents in a different light: "When people saw them together, they knew my parents were very much in love. But in the house they were very private with their love."

When young Peggy was about twelve years old, she was very mature for her age. One day she experimented with peroxide and bleached her hair a bright orange. When her mother saw it, she banished young Peggy to her room and later admonished her, "How dare you! Who do you think you are, Marilyn Monroe?" My wife shared her feelings more with young Peggy than any of the other children. She confided in her about the increasing loss of her hearing and explained why she wouldn't return to Washington: "I can't be just a drone there. When someone speaks to me, I just can't pick out many of the words. It's very frustrating." Young Peggy, reflecting on her brother's leaving Congress, said perceptively, "Perhaps it's a good thing. He's always lived in Dad's shadow. One thing about Dad: He always knew who and what he was. He never had an identity crisis. His problem was that he was hyperactive. He just couldn't sit still." I was certain one thing would happen the following day. Young Peggy would lead the discussion.

Michael was somewhat shy, like his mother. He and Barry Jr. had graduated from Staunton Military Academy. Neither had chosen a military career. Barry went on to graduate from Arizona State University in Tempe, while Mike was graduated from the University of Arizona at Tucson. Mike and I shared a secret about tomorrow's meeting. On the previous July 21, I had written him a letter. I told him the question of whether to run for a fifth term was "driving me up the wall" and making me "a little bit crazy." The letter spelled out the pressures—from Republicans across the country, from the military, and from friends everywhere. The dilemma was summed up in a few sentences: "I promised your mother not to run, and have a very clear idea about the sanctity of promises. The question I have in my mind is whether she would be mentally or physically able to stand another six years of my being in Washington, and she hating it. But, if I give up this job of being a senator, I can't stay at home day after day. I'd fly to the moon. At the same time, I don't believe any man is absolutely essential to the future of this country. If I felt that way, I'd get myself a cross, and nail myself to it."

Mike responded to my letter. He wrote one that I might have penned. It was blunt: "You got yourself into this mess; now get yourself out." Mike also hit me where many colleagues in the Senate did: "Don't discount your lawmaking ability and seniority." He emphasized that the fate of Arizona's GOP should not enter into my decision. "Your allegiance is to the country first, the state second. You said that in 1964." Then, Mike came to the nitty-gritty—Mom. This is a summary of the final part of his letter, much of it word for word: There's not a more loved person I can think of than Mom. Her charm, wit, and intelligence are renowned. I like to think a little of them has sunk into each of your thickheaded children. God knows, she tried to impart them to you. She is sick and tired of politics, but I don't think that is the problem. She is very lonely a lot of the time because you can be inconsiderate about her hearing problem. She is alone in a crowd. She doesn't want her family and friends to have to speak loudly. Instead, she hears yelling and fighting. You have to take the time to understand the reasons for her not wanting you to run again—not what she says but why she says it. Only then will you make your being in politics easier for her.

Mike concluded: "I see it [whether to run] as a choice between living and dying. Make your peace with Mom however you can. She's a lot stronger physically and mentally than you think she is. You'll be no good to anyone if you're dead. Not to God; not to country; not to state; not to your children; not to mother, and especially not to your loving son." It was time to go to bed. I decided not to do my New Year's Eve dance. It was too reflective an evening. I usually put on a silly grin, different nightcaps and hats, and did a hop, skip, and jump to the laughter of our grandchildren. For a finale, I would bend over, flip up my nightshirt, and show my bare bottom. The grandchildren always cheered wildly and called for an encore. Instead, subdued and thoughtful, I quietly slipped away to bed. After a big breakfast, I lounged in the living room reading the morning newspaper. Young Peggy suddenly appeared and said, "Dad, we'd like to see you in my bedroom." She took my hand, led me to her bedroom, and closed the door, saying we wanted a place away from the grandchildren. My wife and our children were waiting. Some sat on the bed. Others were gathered on chairs around it. Young Peggy opened, "Happy birthday, Dad!"

The others chorused the same as my wife kissed me. We repeated the same to Joanne. Then the room became quiet. After a pause, young Peggy said, "Dad, we want you to know that whatever you and Mom decide, we're behind you. We've decided not to interfere. It's your decision—the two of you—yours alone." Peggy's last word strung out like an echo—alone, alone. No one spoke. I didn't know what to say. It was still. Finally my wife turned, looked at me, and said, "I won't hold you to your promise, Barry. Whatever you decide is all right with me. I want you to be happy." Tears welled up in my eyes. My wife began to cry. Soon everyone was weeping. Joanne put her hand on my wrist. Barry cried on my shoulder. Mike was shaking his head as tears streamed down his face. Young Peggy wiped her cheeks with a handkerchief. My wife finally said, "It's all right, Barry. I understand. I love you." It was done. She knew that in my heart of hearts I wanted to run. That I could not come home and die. Washington was too much a part of me. Arizona was my home, but the Senate had become my life. I couldn't give it up. Not because I didn't love my wife and children. Not because I loved Arizona less. But because the Senate and Washington had become me. Yes, Washington had changed me, chipped at me, and marked me. I was one of them—not the young Arizonan who had arrived on the Senate floor so long ago. It was only now—in the fears and tears of my family—that all of us saw it so clearly. Peggy had recognized it better than I. It was she—not I or the children—who made the decision. She was reconciled to who and what I was and, because she surrendered so much, accepted me more than I ever understood. I was more than a husband, more than a father. I was a man—a political animal. I could not climb down from Capitol Hill. She saw it all. There was too much adventure up there for me, too much personal freedom. I had become old in the Senate, yet not old enough to descend from my mountain to the desert of Arizona.

Young Peggy stood, still wiping her cheeks, and said, "But there's one condition, Dad." I looked at her silently, too emotionally drained to speak. She said, "You must give Mom your quality time. Not time, but quality time. You must come home more weekends. And you must stay for not just two days but three or four. You have to promise us that." Barry Jr., Joanne, and Mike chorused their agreement. I nodded and took my wife's hand. Young Peggy opened the bedroom door, and we walked together into her living room, perhaps more of a family at that moment than we had ever been in our lives. From the beginning, the 1980 campaign did not go well. I almost did not survive it, physically or politically. The physical aspect has never been disclosed. On June 19 I awoke a few minutes after midnight. My right hip was paining severely. I was in bed at our Washington apartment. Two days earlier, I had had the wires removed from the artificial hip that had been inserted there in 1976. The wires had been causing me recurrent pain, and it was decided they should go. I reached down to the hip, and my hand came up wet. I turned on the bedside lamp. The hand was covered with blood.

I tried to pull back the bed covers and see how much blood had been lost. I felt dizzy and weak. I lay back and took a long series of deep breaths. The pain intensified. I wiped the blood on my right hand across the sheet. Pushing on my left side, I tried to get up. Somehow I would make it to the elevator, take it down to the garage, hold on to the basement wall, get to my car, and drive to a hospital. I was thinking it out, step by step. My mind was very calm. I had had some much rougher plane flights. I tried again to raise myself. It was no use. I didn't have the strength. I looked at my wristwatch on the bedstand. It was already nearly 1 A.M. I didn't want to awaken anyone. I'd sweat it out. My mind seemed to fade in and out. Peggy was talking to me. But she wasn't there. I seemed to hear voices, but no one was in the dark room with me. It was now nearly 2:30 A.M. The pain would not relent. The only way to relieve it was to take deep breaths, hold them, and blow the air out slowly. I reached down to the hip again. The blood had spread across the sheet and mattress. I pulled up my hand. It was covered in red. The clock showed a few minutes after 4 A.M. My hip was now throbbing, like a dull but heavy hammer. It was much more intense. I passed out.

At 5 A.M., my alarm clock rang. The room, my hands, the clock—all were unsteady. I struggled to reach the bedside phone. Then I passed out again. Someone was pounding on the front door of the apartment. It sounded as though they were crashing against it. I could hear voices, but I was semidelirious. It was Earl Eisenhower, Judy's husband. He had smashed open the door and had had to slice through the inside chain with a heavy cutter borrowed from the downstairs night clerk. I could see Judy and Earl standing above me. Somehow, in my delirium, I had phoned them. They were talking, but I couldn't understand or answer. They saw the blood on the sheets and soon discovered my hip was a bloody mess. I saw the two ambulance men arrive. They lifted me onto the stretcher. A fierce argument broke out between Judy and one of the drivers. They began shouting at one another. I finally got the general drift. The ambulance would take me only to the District of Columbia–Maryland line. It was not allowed to cross and carry me to Malcolm Grow Hospital at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Someone would have to arrange for a Maryland ambulance to meet them at the line. Judy was screaming. She shouted at the driver that he would be held responsible, because of the delay, if I died. I passed out again wondering what the neighbors would say about all the commotion.

I woke up in the middle of being given a blood transfusion in Malcolm Grow Hospital. I never discovered how much blood I had lost but later learned that the Washington ambulance service had made the entire trip. Peggy flew out from Arizona, although I asked Judy not to tell her what had happened. I had developed a staphylococcus infection after the hip wires had been removed. The gauze packing, which filled a ten-inch cut along my right side and was stuffed inside to the bone, had also broken loose. The doctors said I was lucky to be alive. I was hospitalized and laid up in our Washington apartment for all of July and most of August. Hobbled by painful knees, two aching arthritic hips, and other physical ailments, I had become weak. On returning to Arizona to face the Senate race, I couldn't get keyed up for it. Steve Shadegg, my campaign manager, told me that I was far ahead and would easily win. He was dead wrong. Fewer than 900,000 votes were expected to be cast. About 400,000 new voters had moved into Arizona since my last race in 1974. A good number of them, when asked whether they would vote for Goldwater, had replied, "Goldwater? Who the hell is that?"

Our television publicity was dull and defensive. My Democratic opponent, Bill Schulz, a multimillionaire real estate developer, was running commercials which showed me old, tired, and ill. Jay Taylor, a Tucson advertising executive whom we had used in the past but who had not been rehired by Shadegg, described our TV ads in this way: "One showed Barry Goldwater sitting in a parlor, talking with a group of elderly ladies with blue hairdos, discussing Social Security. Schulz was right. He looked old, weak, and sick." Our billboards were no better. It was a ho-hum, complacent campaign because I had won in a walk in 1974 against Scottsdale newspaper publisher Jonathan Marshall. Shadegg had underestimated Schulz, who ran the most professional campaign ever waged against me. I was still trying to regain my normal strength. Schulz had some of the slickest TV ads any of us had ever seen. He worked hard and was well organized. He emphasized three issues: I wasn't giving full horsepower to my job in the Senate; I was out of contact with the people of the state; and the United States was paying a disproportionately large amount of the free world's defense costs while Japan and Western Europe were having to pay less. Schulz hit hard on pro-choice regarding abortion. He also took on the military-industrial complex. The suggestion was that I was too close to the military, perhaps even to defense contractors.

It became apparent in early October that the race would be very tight. New Arizonans under thirty-five years of age responded very favorably to Schulz. From May to October, there was a big shift to Schulz. More than 20 percent of the voters switched to him. My hip was still healing, but the doctors warned me to go easy on campaigning. Go easy, hell, I was in a real fight. I phoned Dick Wirthlin, who was Ronald Reagan's pollster, despite the fact that he was heavily engaged in the presidential campaign. Wirthlin had always done my polling, and, in fact, I had introduced him to Reagan. As a personal favor, I asked him to conduct a statewide poll between October 10 and 13. He did it, and the poll showed that Schulz had surged ahead of me by two percentage points—46 to 44 percent, with 10 percent undecided. Wirthlin phoned me and said, "Barry, you're in trouble." Wirthlin said bluntly that Shadegg, my longtime campaign manager, was blowing the election. He had not identified me sufficiently with the state—the land, the desert, the people. He stressed that our TV ads were dreadful.

The Senate Republican Campaign Committee also saw what was happening and asked pollster Lance Tarrance to find out what was wrong. The committee was concerned because the GOP hoped to win control of the Senate, and each seat was important. Tarrance agreed with Wirthlin—we were in deep trouble. He said that one of the main reasons was that we had not kept up with the latest election technology that would have identified me more with the people and places of Arizona while projecting a better future for the state with me, an old hand, in Washington. New ads should stress my knowledge of the state and my experience and clout in handling its problems in Washington. We completely revamped the campaign with less than three weeks to go. Ron Crawford, a longtime Washington friend and political strategist, and Judy Eisenhower, my administrative assistant, rushed to Arizona and took charge of the campaign. They immediately called in Jay Taylor, who had worked with us in the past but who, for some reason, had not been engaged by Shadegg this time. Working all night, Taylor came up with an entirely new radio-TV campaign by morning. He hired helicopters and had me in the desert within another twenty-four hours. I was talking Arizona problems and how an experienced hand like Goldwater was needed in the Senate to solve them. We dumped all the old commercials. In the closing weeks we spent nearly $370,000, most of it on new TV clips showing candidate Goldwater wearing a cowboy hat and talking to Indians beside a pickup truck. I reestablished my long ties to Arizona, something my opponent lacked.

All this represented increased professional packaging. In this case, the package was me, and I didn't like it one bit. Yet the commercials were real—not baloney—since I had given my life to the state. Arizona and I were a couple of old mules still hanging around with a lot of new neon lights and buildings changing the landscape. Since I was physically unable to campaign twenty hours a day as I had in the past, the commercials traveled where I couldn't. Still, I was determined to campaign as much as I could, no matter what the physical consequences were. Crawford and Judy, backed by Wirthlin and Tarrance, were concerned about an ironic twist—that I might lose while the man I had helped get started in politics, Ronald Reagan, would probably capture the White House. If I were defeated, the GOP might lose its first chance since 1954 to become the majority in the Senate. I had to win. Old-time Democrats, blue-collar workers, high school graduates, those living in outlying areas, and many younger newcomers to the state hung in with Schulz. Republicans, senior citizens, the retired, Phoenix area residents, college graduates, and white collar workers favored me, but I had lost support among them.

Ralph Watkins, Jr., an Arizona native, longtime business leader, and strong Democrat, suddenly stood up when Schulz attacked my voting record. The Democratic candidate, who had never held public office, stressed my absences from the Senate but never mentioned that I had spent two months in the hospital after hip surgery. Hammering away with the slogan "Energy for the '80s," Schulz was convinced he could win by portraying me as too old and weak. Watkins and others viewed that as a personal attack and founded "Democrats for Goldwater." Their help put timely new fire into our campaign. In the last three weeks of the race, I threw myself into a tough schedule. It was a painful, last-ditch fight, but I'd go down swinging. Schulz and I raced for the wire with everything we had. My schedule was packed. And every day, a nurse or Judy packed the gauze in my side. I just closed my eyes and gritted my teeth between every plane stop. The pain was almost paralyzing me. I told myself I would win or die trying. We said nothing of the pain and physical problems to the media because my normal strength would eventually return. But the campaign was killing. All I had to do was hang tough for three weeks. Hell, I told myself, Big Mike and Uncle Morris hung tough most of their lives.

Schulz spent nearly $2 million, including about $1.7 million of his own money, on the campaign. We spent more than a million, including national GOP funding. After voting on election day, Peggy and I went home, and I collapsed in bed. I was exhausted and worried. Peggy was serene. Either way, one of us would win. The vote was nip-and-tuck. When I went to bed that night, Schulz was ahead by 12,000 votes. However, 30,000 absentee ballots were yet to be counted. The tally went on all night. Amid the first streaks of dawn, Tom Dunlavey of our Phoenix office rang our front doorbell and pounded on the door. I rose as the racket grew louder and opened the door. He shouted, "You did it! We won!" But only by a whisker. Of the 874,238 votes cast, the margin of victory was only 9,399 votes. Schulz felt he had lost because he had criticized me in what some had viewed as a personal attack. He said, "There's something emotionally powerful about Barry. People admire him. You can't take him on personally. It was a mistake to challenge him that way. I didn't mean it to be personal. In the end, I also have to say that Ronald Reagan's big win helped Barry. It was kind of providential because Barry had helped him."

That evening, over dinner, I turned to Peggy and said, "Peg, that was my last campaign, and I'll sign this promise in blood." She smiled and said, "One day, Barry, we'll retire from all this. It'll be so wonderful. Just the two of us." More and more, I could see that Peggy's health was slowly but steadily deteriorating. Her emphysema and arthritis were getting worse. Her heart started giving her trouble. She wasn't getting enough exercise. Her back and bones pained, and the doctor was giving her cortisone. She stayed home and became almost a hermit. We had never in our lives had a serious argument, but I got upset at her inactivity. I tried to get her to take walks and swim in the pool. She wouldn't. She just wanted to talk with me. I talked a lot with her—that she had been the perfect wife and mother. How much she had meant to me. These were very open, frank moments. I told Peg of my regrets about not being a better father. She had had to carry so much of the load. God, Barry Goldwater was far from perfect.

We also talked about Newport Beach, of all places. Of our summers there and different boats we had once owned. We would get another boat and cruise up to Alaska during the very first summer of our retirement. Then we'd motor down to Panama and the Caribbean. We'd live on the boat, just the two of us. Peggy would smile. She loved to talk about plans for these trips. In the fall of 1985 her health slipped dramatically. Peggy was in a coma and unable to speak for the last two weeks of her life. The doctors finally told us they had no hope that she would ever come out of the coma. I asked for their advice, and they told me it was time to withdraw the artificial life supports. Our children nodded in agreement. About five o'clock on the morning of December 11, 1985, Peggy died in her hospital bed as she had lived—quietly, softly, without complaint. The four children and I kissed her. For months I wandered between disbelief and recrimination, bewilderment and depression. The grief of separation after fifty-one years of marriage rose and fell in long, slow waves that rolled across my mind every day. At times Peggy would rise, visibly present in my memory. I phoned her four or five times every day for months after returning to Washington. The phone would ring and ring. Then, her memory would fall away and my face would collapse into my hands. The healing process has been slow and painful.

I recently found among her papers a note I wrote to Peggy on September 22, 1941, our seventeenth wedding anniversary. It reads, in part: I arose this morning while you still slept to see the sun come up. It's a symbol not only of warmth and light for the world, but as full as your love and constant companionship have been for me. Through times of deepest darkness, your love has lighted the path for me. In nights of cold lonesomeness, the warmth of your affection has been my blanket.... The gratefulness I feel in my heart can never be shown by material things. The happiness that has been mine for these years cannot be expressed by words or even by a caress, kiss, or hand that feels hopefully for yours. The thrill and pride that is mine, given me by you in our children, cannot be sufficiently shown by any action or thought on my part. The only one in the universe who fully knows the things that dwell in my heart is God. I have thanked Him from a thousand canyon bottoms, from beneath a million trees, from the heights of His heavens in the cathedral of His clouds.

As I grow older in the warmth of your love, I will pray that, one day, I will meet Him face to face so that I might shake His hand and thank Him for giving me you. I love you, Barry Yet politics pulled us apart. I don't know what the good Lord is going to say to me about that when we meet. But now that my political life is over and Peggy is not here to share our dreams of retirement, the sunset over the desert seems to fade more quickly and I find myself alone. The crowds and cheers are gone. The children and grandchildren come to see me once in a while. They lift my spirit but do not fill it. It will not rise to fulfillment until Peggy and I are together again. My greatest triumphs in the Senate—as chairman of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees—followed the 1980 victory. These were not my conquests. The laurels belonged in great part to Peggy. The Defense Reorganization Act should not bear my name. It could just as well be the Peggy Goldwater Act. She neither claimed nor wished for public accolades. In reality, Peggy spent her life so that I might be a public figure. Her personal heights were hidden, but they were actually a lot higher than mine. I still have a long climb before I reach her.

13 The Future The modern Republican Party can now be viewed from the vantage point of three generations. The first emerged in the 1950s—small, searching for its own identity, swimming against waves of expanding government power. The second generation grew almost unnoticed as counterculture movements raged through the 1960s and 1970s. These new young Republicans with a more established and respected conservative philosophy and sense of identity swelled in number. They cut a clear direction of their own despite the angry mood of those explosive years. The third sprang up in the 1980s with the election of President Reagan. It was a massive outpouring of millions of articulate young people. They seized the ideological offensive from the liberals and began a strong effort to change the direction of the country. These changes have been enormous—from relatively few Republicans to many, from stale old principles to the philosophical and political offensive, from long-suffering conservative defeat to the vitality of victory with new ideas and movement for the nation.

Other transformations also took place within the party. The term conservative took on a broader meaning. Traditionalists like me emphasized individual freedom, the superiority of free enterprise, limited government, and stronger national defense. We stressed custom, rule of law, religious principles, and basic belief in the constitutional process. The newer party included neoconservatives, new right conservatives, and libertarians. Neoconservatives had become disenchanted with the Democratic Party, especially with policies they felt had led to a breakdown of law and order. The neoconservatives emphasized institutional stability and shared with us a more traditional view of the nation than did the new left. Irving Kristol defined neoconservatives as "liberals who have been mugged by reality." New right conservatives have identified themselves mostly with the moral aspects of social issues. These include support of voluntary school prayer, a pro-life agenda opposing abortion, various options in education (e.g., tuition tax credits through a voucher system), and opposition to such policies as job quotas, busing, and the tolerance or promotion of pornography.

Libertarians stress freedom, especially in economic enterprise, with as few government constraints as possible. The free market and individual beliefs are supreme. Drugs, pornography, and even national defense are completely open questions. These views reflect change in the party and define its factions. The clearest such differences pit traditionalist values against those of the libertarians. There is a dramatic contrast between the socially liberal young professionals who are attracted to Reagan's economic policies on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the often affluent but religiously oriented social conservatives who are in step with his traditional values. These differences could become very divisive. There are also divisions among traditionalists, especially among some old-timers like myself and the Moral Majority. I once said that the Reverend Jerry Falwell needed a swift kick in the ass. That's shorthand for my reservations about various Moral Majority preachings and practices, including their emphasis on money. Although Falwell is no longer the formal leader of the Moral Majority, he is still the real force behind it.

Falwell, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, and other TV evangelists are not the only or necessarily the best representatives of the moral America in which most of us believe. Some of these checkbook clergy are too busy collecting money, Rolls-Royces, and private jets. Their lives are clothed in the materialist ethic. Worse, some have mocked God. Oral Roberts suggested that the Almighty would "call him home" unless listeners contributed millions of dollars by his deadline. There is talk of raising people from the dead, miraculous cures, and other larger-than-life powers. Such antics border on blasphemy. The greatest threats to the present harmonious but hands-off relationship between church and state are the political preachers—both conservative and liberal—and the far-left National Council of Churches—the Jerry Falwells and Jesse Jacksons. Also the council members who support the radical left here and Communist causes around the world I am concerned about clergy engaged in a heavy-handed, continuing attempt to use political means to obtain moral ends—and vice versa. It is one of the most dangerous trends in this country. They are attempting to institutionalize politics in their churches. Ironically, they may ultimately bring their own empires crashing down by dividing their congregations along political lines. This may not happen today but will certainly occur in the future.

There are already signs of this in the Catholic Church. The war-and-peace and economic pastorals issued by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops spite the constitutional spirit of our government and people by merging religion and politics. In historical terms, I believe we will eventually see that too much prominence and influence have been attributed to the party's New Right—Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Morton Blackwell, the Dolans, and others. Don't get me wrong. I like each of them, and despite our differences we have a lot in common. Every one of them got into politics during my campaign for the presidency, and they have been a driving force among conservatives ever since. We began walking separate roads, however, when the New Right began pushing special social agendas involving legitimate legal, religious, and other differences. I support much of what they say, but not at the risk of compromising constitutional rights. Nor do I believe Republicans should splinter into a wrecking crew of special interests as the Democrats have done. And that is where these narrow but gifted men have been leading us.

For years, the New Right preached little or no spirit of compromise—political give-and-take. Viguerie, Weyrich, and others failed to appreciate that politics is the ordinary stuff of daily living, while the spiritual life represents eternal values and goals. Public business—that's all politics is—is often making the best of a mixed bargain. Instead, the New Right stresses the politics of absolute moral right and wrong. And, of course, they are convinced of their absolute rightness. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, once wrote, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." But men are not angels, and government is necessary. We settle our daily battles by reason and law, not on the basis of narrow interests or individual religious beliefs. Madison said the great paradox of representative government is this: How does a nation control its factions without violating people's basic freedoms? Our Constitution seeks to allow freedom for everyone, not merely those professing certain moral or religious views of ultimate right.

We don't have to look back centuries to see such dangers. Look at the carnage in the name of religious righteousness in Iran. The long and bloody division of Northern Ireland. The Christian-Moslem and Moslem-Moslem "holy war" in Lebanon. The Moral Majority and most in the New Right oppose abortion. I oppose abortion. Yet in a pluralistic society the issue is not ours to decide alone. If abortion is both a political and moral issue, as the Moral Majority indicates in pursuing both levels of activity, then it has already lost the political battle and perhaps the national religious fight as well. There is too wide and complex a range of opinion for us to reach a national consensus on issues of morality. The truth is—and no one in the country appears to have the courage to say it—that the American people want it both ways on abortion. Most people are privately horrified by it, but they are either victims of peer pressure or favor it only in limited circumstances. The Moral Majority has no more right to dictate its moral and political beliefs to the country than does any other group, political or religious. The same is true of pro-choice abortion and other groups. They are free to persuade us because this land is blessed with liberty, but not to assign religious or political absolutes—complete right or wrong.

My wife believed that each woman had the moral and legal right to choose for herself whether she was capable of continuing her pregnancy and then raising the child. I disagreed with her. That's as it is, and must be, in a free and pluralistic America. If pro- and antiabortion groups each accept the other's right to disagree with them, legally, morally, or both—and some do in certain cases that are carefully spelled out—then the question can be resolved by the usual democratic means. But if either side insists on legislating morality in absolute terms, then the challenge to democratic society is too great. It's simply unworkable. For a democracy to function, there has to be give-and-take, some room for compromise. The great danger in the new conservative movement is that, instead of broadening its base, the movement may tear itself and the GOP apart. Its real challenge in the years ahead is to broaden the Republican base and accommodate many new aims without weakening the party's foundations and pulling the whole house down.

There is a note of hope. Weyrich and some of the others are becoming more interested in taxes, labor policy, and other fundamentally political issues. They are working at the state level. Hooray! Some observers already see cracks in the solidity of the new GOP and conservative cause. It's often summed up in a simple question: After Reagan, what? Ronald Reagan is not the Republican Party any more than he is the conservative revolution. I always got angry at people who attributed such powers to me. In fact, I still get mad at people who say I was Reagan's political godfather or his prophet opening up the wilderness for him. Both of us are and have been our own men. We are merely symbols of a deeper political movement. I don't believe that either Reagan or I started a conservative revolution because for most of our history the majority of Americans have considered themselves conservatives. They have often not voted that way because they were offered no clear choice. I began to tap, and Reagan reached to the bottom of, a deep reservoir that already existed. He came along at the right time and in just the right circumstances to lead a real surge in conservative thought and action.

Nor do I accept the idea that his presidency represents a permanent political realignment. Politics runs in cycles. The Democrats will come back strong about the year 2000 or shortly thereafter. But it will be a new Democratic Party largely because of Reagan. The nation's agenda has now been pulled to the right. Contrary to what many indicate, it's not difficult to answer the question: After Reagan, what? The question must be put in perspective. What Reagan did was pull the trigger. He had the ammunition—clear and compelling evidence that much of the spending of the Great Society and earlier liberal programs had failed miserably. Most Americans also became convinced that government was beginning to get completely out of control, harming our overall economic and social well-being. Reagan also has a gift of eloquence and generosity of spirit that demonstrates the concerns and compassion of Republicans and others. We had long been hurt by the charge of being driven by cold, calculated economic policies which favored the rich. That was not true. Republicans simply believed—and still do—that the private sector, not the government, is the driving force behind national economic growth and jobs.

The Democrats had perpetuated the myth of salvation-by-government for too long. Americans by the millions suddenly discovered one of the biggest political lies of the last half century—that Big Brother in Washington knew best. And Reagan had the firepower—a Republican Party with intellectual respect, numbers, and a mastery of political technology. I got a good laugh out of Tip O'Neill's good-old-boy definition of the Democratic Party's contribution to America. O'Neill concluded his memoirs by boasting of his longtime support for higher taxes: "It's those taxes that made possible the tremendous progress we've seen." I hope every Republican candidate for the next twenty-five years will quote Tip. It's the best proof I've seen in recent times that the Democrats will never learn. He also repeats the pious platitude of onetime Boston mayor James Michael Curley, one of the biggest political crooks this country has ever seen: "Every American family deserves the opportunity to earn an income, own a home, educate their children, and afford medical care."

Federal, state, and local governments have never created a single job in this country. Nor does one American owe his home, education, or medical care to government. The fiscal advances and overwhelming advantages of this country have come from private enterprise. Government has never earned a dime. Tip, Curley, and the rest of their crowd would like us to believe government is a holy calling and they are its anointed. Instead, the Democrats have been this century's bagmen. Now they are fifty years behind the times. One of the major challenges to Republicans is that our party, which has become larger, now has more disparate elements in it than at any time in the last twenty years. We don't have to become more centrist, but it's certain the GOP has to accommodate and balance a wider variety of opinions and political options. We must become more a party of inclusion—not exclusion—especially among blue-collar workers and Hispanics. I am not excluding blacks, but GOP opportunities there are unfortunately limited. Blacks seem rockbound to the Democrats. That will change as they gain more insight into the fact that their disadvantaged place in society was partly caused by the Big Brother syndrome of the Democrats. When blacks understand that, they will seek out more educational and economic opportunity, which is the basis for uplifting their lives. That will take more time, and the Republican Party must be patient while this change takes place.

Yet the GOP will be weakened if it adopts the exclusionary views of the religious right. This will scare off moderates and others of the country's swing vote. The scandals among the TV evangelists, who are closely identified with the Moral Majority, have caused considerable disillusionment among a good number of the faithful. Some of these will no longer follow the political lead of fundamentalist preachers nor contribute to their causes. The more the Republicans embrace the fundamentalists or some of their self-anointed leaders, the more voters will be lost to the GOP. The West and South—the Sunbelt—have lifted the GOP to victory in four of the past five presidential elections. Despite Democratic claims that this support is weakening, I find little or no evidence of that. On the contrary, more people in the West and South are becoming middle-class, urban technocrats and breaking away from their traditional agricultural base and historic bias. That's a mouthful, but, in simple language, the more educated and upwardly mobile tend to vote Republican.

It should be remembered that the West and South helped me lead the drive to overthrow the Eastern wing that controlled the GOP presidential nominating process. The urban middle class was just being born in those regions when I ran for the White House. Both regions were beginning to lose their agricultural orientation and becoming urban. That middle class has now become suburban. This internal economic and social explosion has been augmented by migration to the two regions from the Northeast and Midwest. These newcomers and many native Southerners—fewer in the West—have deserted the Democratic Party in droves and will not easily return. The Southern GOP no longer consists of a small number of upper-middle-class voters but has become a genuinely broad-based political movement. About as many Westerners and Southerners now call themselves Republicans as describe themselves as Democrats. Both parties today are searching for a balance between the general good and special interests. The Democrats, badly shaken by Reagan's landslide victory over Walter Mondale, have been trying to project an almost completely different image ever since. They are paying the Republicans the sincerest form of flattery—imitation. The Democratic presidential candidates began appealing as early as mid-1987 to moral concerns and family values. At the same time, the Democratic Policy Commission placed "strengthening the family" as its highest priority. That came straight out of the New Right agenda of a decade ago.

No one should be deceived. The New Right is critical to the GOP victory coalition. Whether or not it includes 75 million evangelical Christians, as some claim, is not the central consideration. The real question is whether the New Right will defeat the party by splitting off and neutralizing part of its vote. Who and what are in the GOP coalition? There are actually about a dozen different such coalitions, both formal and informal. The most basic Reagan coalition is composed of traditional Republicans, an increasing national strength in the West and South, a strong appeal to fundamentalist Protestants and many Catholics, big inroads among blue-collar workers, and a magnetic appeal to voters under thirty-five years of age. The others represent a range of issues and interest groups—from privatization (moving the private sector into services now monopolized by the government, such as selling public housing to take it off government rolls), to education (choice through tuition tax credits), to the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) in defense and foreign policy, to expanding Individual Retirement Accounts (making Social Security a smaller component of retirement benefits). The list is long and complex. Conservative Democrats agree with much of this.

The particular groups range across a broad spectrum of interests, from youth leadership to congressional watchdogs. The GOP now flows with many ideas from such think tanks as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute which are pushing it to the forefront of national change. Reagan will be missed. I will miss him. We fought for the conservative cause and were good friends to boot. Reagan also will be missed by Republicans because he was able to keep the party united. I am not certain that unity will prevail. I have been critical of the President, especially his Iranian arms sale. It was the biggest mistake of his presidency to have traded with the most notorious terrorist gang in the world. But whatever mistakes he may have made, Reagan has managed to do something that no one in the nation has accomplished since Teddy Roosevelt. He has projected a Republican populism—indeed, a conservative populism. He is a man of populist words and style. His themes of family, hard work, patriotism, and opportunity are in marked contrast to the Democrats' adoption of gay rights and other permissive behavior, new welfare schemes, affirmative action, and whatever greater "entitlements" the government may create.

Reagan represents the spirit of the modern Republican Party, which is about 75 percent conservative and 25 percent moderate to liberal. He's a social and national defense conservative. There is, however, a big difference between Reagan and other Republican leaders of this century. He's not a man who is tied to the economic status quo. Reagan is an economic progressive, an advocate of change. This is true not only in terms of broad supply side economics but also in various other aspects of the economy that relate to growth and job creation. The Democrats would have us believe they will reverse the Reagan era. That's not likely. For openers, no administration can launch a new free-spending New Deal or Great Society because of the enormous federal budget deficits. Nor can any President stop Reagan's increased defense spending without jeopardizing big weapons systems, sharply curtailing the military's combat effectiveness, and wiping out tens of thousands of jobs. Amid such a sea of red ink, it would not be easy for the Democrats to justify big new spending. Their only weapon would be huge tax increases, which would make such an administration highly unpopular. The massive deficits cannot be brought under control in a short span, so their promises would have to be realistic.

When historians judge Reagan's eight years as President, they will probably decide that he left his greatest mark on the nation's judiciary—from overhauling the federal bench at the district and circuit levels to the U.S. Supreme Court. Reagan has now appointed more than half of the country's federal judges, most of them conservatives. His appointment of more conservatives to the Supreme Court will influence the nation's social and other directions into the next century. In the two years since I left the Senate, I have mulled over my previous assessments of the eight Presidents during my tenure on Capitol Hill. Truman was unquestionably the finest President in terms of pure decision-making leadership. Eisenhower, contrary to many political pundits then and now, was our best all-around chief executive. He was helped by choosing extremely able men to be around him, but that does not diminish his own excellence. Finally, and this is a tough call, I believe Reagan is the most inspirational President that I have seen. Kennedy inspired the nation but did not face the troubled aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and the economic malaise of the Carter years. Both had a similar quality, a spongelike mind. Both Kennedy and Reagan could walk in a room and not know their rear end from a hot rock. They wouldn't say a word for five minutes. Then, slowly, each would join the conversation in a way that made you believe they knew what they were talking about. I watched both do it at various times and came away amazed. It will be a long time before we see another President of their wit and charm. But I believe Reagan had the better of Kennedy in one crucial character ingredient—humility. That's an important quality for anyone holding the highest office in the land.

The most important long-range question before the GOP is how to keep the conservative flame alive in the future. There are many answers and strategies, ranging from solidifying the present coalition to broadening the party base to include more minorities. I don't quarrel with any of them because if one ingredient is crucial in politics, it is flexibility. In my own view, the two most important factors in the future success of the GOP are young people and principle. I'm convinced that millions of young men and women have joined the Republican Party because they wanted something in which to believe. This is particularly true of working class youth. Many have been turned off by some of the social and moral values in today's permissive liberal outlook. We are also the party of opportunity. In public opinion polls, only 20 percent of the country's young people identify with the Democrats. Yet, as everyone in politics knows, nothing can be taken for granted. There will forever be a fight for the hearts and minds of younger voters. Their importance to the GOP's future is reflected in these Census Bureau statistics from the national election of 1984. Some 11.4 million voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four cast ballots that year, with more than 60 percent for Reagan. The total was 11.2 percent of the entire vote. Yet the entire population of the same age group was nearly 28 million voters. Less than 40 percent of those eligible to vote actually cast ballots! So the GOP must work to win and keep the young.

Republicans have become the country's political innovators. Even Democrats privately concede they have lost their initiative in the past decade. But ingenuity is not enough. I cannot sufficiently stress that principle is the rock-bottom foundation of any great movement. This is reflected not only in our Constitution, laws, religion, and traditions, but in some of the social changes of the past thirty years. The Weathermen and Woodstock are now blips on the American sociopolitical screen. They have been replaced by the wonders of the computer and other technological advances that have offered young people a natural high based on individual opportunity. And more of today's young people are seeking higher social and moral values. Republicans must, above all, be a party of principle. Compromise is necessary in politics, but there can be no dilution of traditional conservative principles—individual freedom, free enterprise economics, limiting government, and bolstering our national defense. We cannot become a party so splintered by special interests that we have confused and lost our roots, not even to broaden our electoral base. Whether it be the Moral Majority insistence on certain religious stands or minority interests in quotas and similar special considerations, principle cannot be abandoned for momentary electoral advantage. Otherwise we will no longer attract the young and idealistic.

I am optimistic about the outcome. Those now under the Republican umbrella clearly see the Democratic alternative—pandering to a wide variety of interests whose social and moral values are often confused, even contradictory or personally degrading. Also, the old Democratic Big Labor–political patronage coalition has been severely weakened by its failures. The Democrats, now in transition, are groping for a new centrism that they've been unable to define or articulate. They are further hampered by a lack of leadership. There are no real domestic or foreign policy spokesmen for the party. The Democrats are rethinking the fundamental meaning of liberalism and simply have no new direction or programs to use in redirecting their energies. Even Democrats admit that government has become too big and intrusive. They are trying to untie themselves from their own past, and this cannot be done easily. Their economic and social permissiveness is so discredited that many liberals now want to be known as neoliberals or progressives.

The GOP has an excellent future if it remains the party of opportunity and optimism. It must retain its conservative traditions and not become extreme. We must fight at the grass roots level, and this will improve the quality of our candidates. Our success in attracting young people to help in the 1964 campaign must be repeated in 1992, 1996, and 2000. These years will coincide with a sharp increase in the number of young voters. The post–World War II baby boom generation, born between 1945 and 1960, has been producing what population experts call an echo effect, a sharp rise in births. The U.S. birthrate has not increased, but the number of births has risen because of the number of women now in their childbearing years. In my life I've personally spoken to and shaken hands with about 20 million Americans. The one question I've been asked more than any other is this: Should a young person go into politics? Unhesitatingly, I've always answered yes. But... You must have the courage to accept considerable criticism, much of it unjustified. You must feel it in your guts and have the courage to accept defeat and continue toward your goals. Finally, you must believe in yourself, in your principles, and in people. Of all this, I considered my belief in people to be my greatest strength. I genuinely liked people and still do. If you don't love people, don't go into politics.

There are a good number of unhappy men and women in politics today. The reason is that they have recognized the selfishness of their lives. They don't really care much for people. It has taken years for some to discover that, yet they find it difficult to admit it, even to themselves. They don't want to surrender the prestige and power they have accumulated. So they play two roles, the false image of the person who cares and the reality of the individual whose only aims are personal. That's one reason I believe Congress should meet only four to six months a year, five to six days a week. They would then go home. Members would be people again instead of power brokers. Like and trust the people. No better advice could ever be given to a young person interested in politics. And no more reasonable counsel could be given those who now serve in public office. That, if anything, is my political legacy. In all parts of the world today, America is under fire economically, politically, and militarily. Yet the roots of most of these problems are here at home. No nation can shape and solidify a successful foreign policy unless its domestic affairs are in order. The secret to our international strength in the year 2000 and beyond is whether the United States can reverse its failures at home on three fronts:

(1) The material and personal cost of government (2) The idea that forced equality of results can replace equality of opportunity (3) The steady increase of a massive, uncontrolled bureaucracy. Government can no longer be allowed to pose as the "honest broker" and manager of our problems. This country is spending one third of its gross national product on government. It's estimated that regulatory agencies add about $150 billion a year to the cost of American products. Our budget deficit is more than $150 billion a year. We are the world's number one debtor nation. This cannot continue. Nor can government still play political games with minorities—promising giant strides in eliminating poverty and creating educational advancement and then failing. Blacks and others have been duped for far too long by their own politicians, who could not deliver on the false expectations they created. One of the great challenges of the next generation will be to come to an understanding of what is meant by equality of opportunity. Instead of opportunity, many in the nation now demand that the law enforce equality of results.

It's nonsense to suggest that a government can guarantee a college degree, a good job, or the "good life." The mental, physical, and other basic characteristics of each individual are all different. Affirmative action quota systems are an attempt at such guarantees. This is Washington-managed social engineering at its most hypocritical because no country can deliver on such promises. Even dictatorships can't do it. No aspect of life operates on the theory of equal results. We have different capacities, whether we practice medicine or hit home runs. Congress must reassert itself. The unelected bureaucracy has effectively replaced Congress in much of our governing process. The bureaucrats speed up or drag their feet, depending on their own views. The Department of Education and the Legal Services Corporation are notorious examples of independent states within the state. Big business is entering into more and more alliances with the bureaucracy and is even protected by some agencies which are supposed to oversee their operations. This is true of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which is deeply involved with ranchers and others, as well as other agencies. The original purpose of regulation and all its red tape was to protect the public from massive corporations. Now, all too often, the large corporation is being protected from the public.

Let us get big business out of government and vice versa. More and more, corporations are calling for centralized federal planning. This is most evident in international competition. The domestic free marketplace is also being replaced by regulation and other corporate-bureaucratic sweetheart relationships that limit competition. We must cut back on the vast federal bureaucracy. It is out of control. Unlike corporations, federal agencies have no financial bottom line. Inefficiency and just plain stalling are often rewarded. Many live by the old bureaucratic axiom: "Wait the bastards out." Bureaucrats often sit on their hands until their politically appointed leadership, Congress and the President, see things their way. This is so pervasive in dozens of agencies that a new administration often simply bypasses an agency entirely in order to accomplish its objectives. I do not delude myself, nor am I trying to deceive anyone. These are the same problems that faced the nation when I arrived in the Senate. Am I and other conservatives total failures? Perhaps not. We have begun to turn the country around. It may take the entire next century to accomplish these goals.

The domestic divisions I have outlined are reflected on the world scene. Today the United States is often a nation at war with itself. Little by little, we Americans are withdrawing into ourselves. We do not have the will to meet global challenges as we once did. Our adversaries, even our allies, are on the offensive—economically, diplomatically, militarily. We have assumed a defensive, reactionary posture. There are reasons for our withdrawal. The experiences of Watergate and Vietnam, especially the war, have cost our national leadership dearly, making it much less powerful—and the whole world knows it. Congress has stepped into this partial vacuum of the executive branch and tried to make foreign policy itself. Friend and foe alike have concluded, as a result of the battle for dominance between our legislative and executive branches, that in future we may not be able to honor our international obligations. Meanwhile, U.S. corporate executives are in the process of creating a new international order. It is primarily economic but has profound political and military implications. Their mergers and extensive working agreements with foreign firms have formed new international alliances and allegiances. This massive new movement among corporations threatens American economic leadership of the world.

By definition, these new conglomerates have no special loyalty to American workers, products, production plants, or nearby communities—not even to the U.S. government. Profits, international stock prices, and market share are the new order and give rise to new allegiances. The competitive edge has been placed above country and profit above values. International strength and survival come before being a good U.S. corporate citizen. Corporations are fleeing higher U.S. labor costs and tougher work rules. Their profits increase in the short run, but eventually it will cost the United States and these firms dearly in their abilities to produce and innovate. Yet they expect America to help bail them out—even with U.S. troops—if their creations run into trouble. Instead of increasing the number of international joint ventures, Americans should be stressing how U.S. companies can strengthen themselves to better compete in the world market. The answer is not simple. It's clear that the U.S. economy has slipped badly since the early 1970s, and all of us are to blame.

As a nation, we are now consuming about $150 billion more a year than we are producing. Our annual trade deficit is about $170 billion. The servicing of our $2.5 trillion national debt, combined with our trade deficit, eats up whatever slight gains we make in our gross national product. If we are to extricate ourselves from this swamp, it means that Americans may have to consume less in the foreseeable future. It also indicates that Congress and the Administration must readjust our economic policies to invite more saving and investment instead of consumption. Both Washington and American business must respond to the problems created by the new international order, which threaten our social, economic, and political future. So must U.S. labor, because if unions continue to resist change, more American jobs will drift overseas. Finally, some way must be found to have more U.S. companies move their investments in research and development into production instead of selling off their innovations to foreign firms. We are now losing part of our most powerful tool—Yankee ingenuity.

Our adversaries have sought to exploit this new international economic order and our internal differences. As a matter of policy, they regularly probe for weaknesses in U.S. leadership. This is particularly true of our military alliances. Only our nuclear deterrent prevents Soviet forces from overrunning Western Europe in a conventional war. The Soviet Navy, especially its submarine force, now rivals that of the United States in virtually all the sea lanes of the world. This is particularly true in the Mediterranean gateway to Mideast oil. If détente is to be the central thrust of our relations with the Soviet Union, I believe we must be much more precise in spelling out to all our adversaries what the United States regards as its legitimate international interests and what we will do to protect them. We must, for example, draw clearer lines around our interests in Central America. It's obvious that U.S. foreign policy must become more bipartisan. We cannot afford to be torpedoed by having the President and Congress engaged in a jurisdictional war. There must be a clear-eyed understanding of the constitutional powers of each branch and greater consultation between them. Specifically, Congress and the President must agree on the meaning of the War Powers Resolution and the precise role of Congress in shaping foreign policy. That is one of the major lessons of the Iran-Contra hearings of summer 1987. Our foreign power will be bolstered by unified domestic strength.

I am not optimistic that we can achieve such national unity. Many of our political leaders appear much more interested in debating foreign policy than in reaching bipartisan agreement. In looking back at the twentieth century, the most important event of our times has not been the atom bomb, communications advances, or the advent of computers. Rather, it has been the rise and international development of communism. Today the term communism represents a number of philosophies embraced by China and Cuba, Romania and Poland, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It is in the process of great change. There is more nationalism among many of these regimes, as well as revisions in economics and other areas in the Soviet Union. These changes are a mixture of good and bad. Communism is not retreating or withdrawing. It still rules by armed repression. The movement appears, however, to have reached a political plateau with considerable internal ferment about its future directions. Top-level confrontations between the old and new leadership in both the Soviet Union and China have created problems. Such divisions are dangerous because they could spill over to the rest of the world. There could well be economic and political rebellion in Poland and elsewhere.

Despite the uncertainty of grappling with these policy and other problems, the Communists continue to foment troubles around the globe. Juggling turmoil at home and abroad, they are going through a period of high risk. Their troubles create a long-term problem for the entire free world because the Reds may not be able to control the changes they have set in motion. From our point of view, these risks are worthwhile because the Communists may improve life behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere. Nevertheless, such changes may lead to unpredictable developments affecting all of us—even war. Others argue that population, hunger, and disease—such as an AIDS epidemic—are more threatening. I do not entirely believe that, because, among other developments, food production is rising dramatically around the world and medicine has always ultimately managed to meet man's most severe health challenges. AIDS is a health terror, but it is a war which science will win because it must. Communism is the world's greatest danger because it threatens much more massive human destruction through armed force.

Communism has long and defiantly denied human freedom. Yet millions of men and women are prepared to die for liberty. The seeds of future global conflict have unmistakably already been sown. A Third World War is not unthinkable. It is, indeed, most thinkable if the Soviet Union and China cannot make a peaceful transition from their present uncertainty. It is thinkable because men do not always control events. In politics, events often control men. Man's greatest weapon against totalitarianism is freedom. I'm reminded of the meaning of freedom every morning. As I sit at my desk, robins and other birds flit back and forth on a ledge outside my study window. Often I watch them for long periods. We have come to know one another since they will sometimes stop and acknowledge my presence. Freedom has been the watchword of my political life. I rose from a dusty little frontier town and preached freedom across this land all my days. It is democracy's ultimate power and assures its eventual triumph over communism. I believe in faith, hope, and charity. But none of these is possible without freedom.

Epilogue On September 24, 1987, I received the Sylvanus Thayer Award at West Point. The U.S. Military Academy's Association of Graduates presents the award annually to a U.S. citizen whose service and accomplishments in the national interest exemplify personal devotion to the ideals expressed in the West Point motto, "Duty—Honor—Country." The award is named in honor of Sylvanus Thayer, class of 1808, who later became an outstanding superintendent at the academy. I stood on the Plain and reviewed the Corps of Cadets on that bleak, gray autumn afternoon. It seemed that my entire life was passing in review. Later, after dinner, I told the more than four thousand cadets that their honor code had influenced me more than any other thought except that of freedom itself. Only my father's illness prevented me from accepting an appointment to West Point and becoming a brother officer in the Army. In accepting the medal, I never stood taller. My life had come full circle. I was finally home, where I'd always belonged.

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Grandma Gatewood's Walk - Ben Montgomery ISBN 978–1–61374–718–6 (cloth) 1. Gatewood, Emma Rowena Caldwell, –1973. 2. Hikers—Appalachian Trail—Biography. 3. Women conservationists—Appalachian Trail— Biography. 4. Appalachian Trail—History. I. Title. GV199.92.G35M66 2014 796.51092—dc23 [B] 2013037551 Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN Map design: Chris Erichsen Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1For JenniferWe do not go into the woods to rough it; we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home. —GEORGE WASHINGTON SEARS Now or never. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU I get faster as I get older. —EMMA GATEWOOD CONTENTS 1 Pick Up Your Feet 2 Go Home, Grandma 3 Rhododendron and Rattlesnakes 4 Wild Dogs 5 How'd You Get in Here? 6 Our Fight 7 Lady Tramp 8 Attention 9 Good Hard Life 10 Storm 11 Shelter 12 I'll Get There 13 Destruction 14 So Much Behind 15 All by Myself 16 Return to Rainbow Lake 17 Aloneness More Complete than Ever 18 Again 19 Pioneer Woman 20 Blazing 21 Monuments Epilogue Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

1 PICK UP YOUR FEET MAY 2–9, 1955 She packed her things in late spring, when her flowers were in full bloom, and left Gallia County, Ohio, the only place she'd ever really called home. She caught a ride to Charleston, West Virginia, then boarded a bus to the airport, then a plane to Atlanta, then a bus from there to a little picture-postcard spot called Jasper, Georgia, "the First Mountain Town." Now here she was in Dixieland, five hundred miles from her Ohio home, listening to the rattle and ping in the back of a taxicab, finally making her ascent up the mountain called Oglethorpe, her ears popping, the cabbie grumbling about how he wasn't going to make a penny driving her all this way. She sat quiet, still, watching through the window as miles of Georgia blurred past. They hit a steep incline, a narrow gravel road, and made it within a quarter mile of the top of the mountain before the driver killed the engine. She collected her supplies and handed him five dollars, then one extra for his trouble. That cheered him up. And then he was gone, taillights and dust, and Emma Gatewood stood alone, an old woman on a mountain.

Her clothes were stuffed inside a pasteboard box and she lugged it up the road to the summit, a few minutes away by foot. She changed in the woods, slipping on her dungarees and tennis shoes and discarding the simple dress and slippers she'd worn during her travels. She pulled from the box a drawstring sack she'd made back home from a yard of denim, her wrinkled fingers doing the stitching, and opened it wide. She filled the sack with other items from the box: Vienna Sausage, raisins, peanuts, bouillon cubes, powdered milk. She tucked inside a tin of Band-Aids, a bottle of iodine, some bobby pins, and a jar of Vicks salve. She packed the slippers and a gingham dress that she could shake out if she ever needed to look nice. She stuffed in a warm coat, a shower curtain to keep the rain off, some drinking water, a Swiss Army knife, a flashlight, candy mints, and her pen and a little Royal Vernon Line memo book that she had bought for twenty-five cents at Murphy's back home. She threw the pasteboard box into a chicken house nearby, cinched the sack closed, and slung it over one shoulder.

She stood, finally, her canvas Keds tied tight, on May 3, 1955, atop the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world, facing the peaks on the blue-black horizon that stretched toward heaven and unfurled before her for days. Facing a mean landscape of angry rivers and hateful rock she stood, a woman, mother of eleven and grandmother of twenty-three. She had not been able to get the trail out of her mind. She had thought of it constantly back home in Ohio, where she tended her small garden and looked after her grandchildren, biding her time until she could get away. When she finally could, it was 1955, and she was sixty-seven years old. She stood five foot two and weighed 150 pounds and the only survival training she had were lessons learned earning calluses on her farm. She had a mouth full of false teeth and bunions the size of prize marbles. She had no map, no sleeping bag, no tent. She was blind without her glasses, and she was utterly unprepared if she faced the wrath of a snowstorm, not all that rare on the trail. Five years before, a freezing Thanksgiving downpour killed more than three hundred in Appalachia, and most of them had houses. Their bones were buried on these hillsides.

She had prepared for her trek the only way she knew how. The year before, she worked at a nursing home and tucked away what she could of her twenty-five-dollar-a-week paycheck until she finally earned enough quarters to draw the minimum in social security: fifty-two dollars a month. She had started walking in January while living with her son Nelson in Dayton, Ohio. She began walking around the block, and extended it a little more each time until she was satisfied by the burn she felt in her legs. By April she was hiking ten miles a day. Before her, now, grew an amazing sweep of elms, chestnuts, hemlocks, dogwoods, spruces, firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples. She'd see crystal-clear streams and raging rivers and vistas that would steal her breath. Before her stood mountains, more than three hundred of them topping five thousand feet, the ancient remnants of a range that hundreds of millions of years before pierced the clouds and rivaled the Himalayas in their majesty. The Unakas, the Smokies, Cheoahs, Nantahalas. The long, sloping Blue Ridge; the Kittatinny Mountains; the Hudson Highlands. The Taconic Ridge and the Berkshires, the Green Mountains, the White Mountains, the Mahoosuc Range. Saddleback, Bigelow, and finally—five million steps away—Katahdin.

And between here and there: a bouquet of ways to die. Between here and there lurked wild boars, black bears, wolves, bobcats, coyotes, backwater outlaws, and lawless hillbillies. Poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac. Anthills and black flies and deer ticks and rabid skunks, squirrels, and raccoons. And snakes. Black snakes, water moccasins, and copperheads. And rattlers; the young man who hiked the trail four years before told the newspapers he'd killed at least fifteen. There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die. Two people knew Emma Gatewood was here: the cabdriver and her cousin, Myrtle Trowbridge, with whom she had stayed the night before in Atlanta. She had told her children she was going on a walk. That was no lie. She just never finished her sentence, never offered her own offspring the astonishing, impossible particulars. All eleven of them were grown, anyhow, and independent. They had their own children to raise and bills to pay and lawns to mow, the price of participation in the great, immobile American dream.

She was past all that. She'd send a postcard. If she told them what she was attempting to do, she knew they'd ask _Why?_ That's a question she'd face day and night in the coming months, as word of her hike spread like fire through the valleys, as newspaper reporters learned of her mission and intercepted her along the trail. It was a question she'd playfully brush off every time they asked. And _how_ they'd ask. Groucho Marx would ask. Dave Garroway would ask. _Sports Illustrated_ would ask. The Associated Press would ask. The United States Congress would ask. _Why?_ Because it was there, she'd say. Seemed like a good lark, she'd say. She'd never betray the real reason. She'd never show those newspapermen and television cameras her broken teeth or busted ribs, or talk about the town that kept dark secrets, or the night she spent in a jail cell. She'd tell them she was a widow. Yes. She'd tell them she found solace in nature, away from the grit and ash of civilization. She'd tell them that her father always told her, "Pick up your feet," and that, through rain and snow, through the valley of the shadow of death, she was following his instruction.

She walked around the summit of Mount Oglethorpe, studying the horizon, the browns and blues and grays in the distance. She walked to the base of a giant, sky-reaching monument, an obelisk made from Cherokee marble. She read the words etched on one side: IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF JAMES EDWARD OGLETHORPE WHO BY COURAGE, INDUSTRY AND ENDURANCE FOUNDED THE COMMONWEALTH OF GEORGIA IN 1732 She turned her back on the phallic monument and lit off down the trail, a path that split through ferns and last year's leaves and walls of hardwoods sunk deep in the earth. She walked quite a while before she came upon the biggest chicken farm she had ever seen, row upon row of long, rectangular barns, alive with babble and bordered by houses where the laborers slept, immigrants and sons of the miners and blue-collar men and women who made their lives in these mountains. She had walked herself to thirst, so she knocked on one of the doors. The man who answered thought she was a little loony, but he gave her a cool drink. He told her there was a store nearby, said it was just up the road. She set off, but didn't see one. Night fell, and for the first time, she was alone in the dark.

The trail cut back, but she missed the identifying blaze and kept walking down a gravel road; after two miles, she came upon a farmhouse. Two elderly folks, a Mr. and Mrs. Mealer, were kind enough to let her stay for the night. She would have been forced to sleep in the forest, prone to the unexpected, had she not lost track. She set off early the next morning, as the sun threw a blue haze on the hills, after thanking the Mealers. She knew she had missed the switchback, so she hiked back the way she had come for about two miles and all along the roadside she saw beautiful sweetshrub blooming, smelling of allspice. She caught the trail again and lugged herself back up to the ridge, where she reached a level stretch and pressed down hard on her old bones, foot over foot, going fifteen miles before dark. The pain was no problem, not yet, for a woman reared on farm work. She stumbled upon a little cardboard shack, disassembled it, and set up several of the pieces on one end to block the angry wind. The others she splayed on the ground for a bed. As soon as she lay down, her first night in the woods, the welcoming party came calling. A tiny field mouse, the size of a golf ball, began scratching around her. She tried to scare the creature away, but it was fearless. When she finally found sleep, the mouse climbed upon her chest. She opened her eyes and there he was, standing erect on her breast, just two strange beings, eye to eye, in the woods.

A hundred years before Emma Gatewood stomped through, before there was even a trail, pioneers pushed west over the new country's oldest mountains, through Cherokee land, the determined Irish and Scottish and English families driving toward the sinking sun, and some of them falling behind. Some of them settling. They made these mountains, formed more than a billion years before of metamorphic and igneous rock, their home. Appalachia, it was called, a term derived from a tribe of Muskhogean Indians called the Appalachee, the "people on the other side." The swath was beautiful and rugged, and those who stayed lived by ax and plow and gun. On the rich land they grew beets and tomatoes, pumpkins and squash, field peas and carrots. But mostly they grew corn. By the 1940s, due to the lack of education and rotation, the land was drained of its nutrients and crops began to fail. But the people remained, buckled in by the mountains. Those early settlers were buried on barren hillsides. The threadbare lives of their sons and daughters were set in grooves, a day's drive from 60 percent of the US population but cut off by topography from outside ideas. They wore handmade clothing and ate corn pone, hickory chickens, and fried pies. The pigs they slaughtered in the fall showed up on plates all winter as sausage and bacon and salted ham. They went to work in the mines and mills, risking death each day to light the homes and clothe the children of those better off while their own sons and daughters did schoolwork by candlelight and wore patches upon patches.

Mining towns, mill towns, and small industrial centers bloomed between the mountains, and the dirt roads and railroads soon stitched the little communities together. They were proud people, most of them, the durable offspring of survivors. They lived suspended between heaven and earth, and they knew the call of every bird, the name of every tree, and where the wild herbs grew in the forest. They also knew the songs in the church hymnals without looking, and the difference between predestination and free will, and the recipe for corn likker. They resisted government intervention, and when taxes grew unjust, they struck out with rakes, rebellion, and secrecy. When President Rutherford B. Hayes tried to implement a whiskey tax in the late 1870s, a great fit of violence exploded in Appalachia between the moonshiners and the federal revenuers that lasted well through Prohibition in the 1920s. The lax post-Civil War law and order gave the local clans plenty of leeway to shed blood over a misunderstanding or a misfired bullet. Grudges held tight, like cold tree sap.

When the asphalt was laid through the bottomland, winding rivers of road, it opened the automobile-owning world to new pictures of poverty and hard luck. The rest of America came to bear witness to coal miners and moonshiners, and a region in flux. Poor farming techniques and a loss of mining jobs to machines prompted an exodus from Appalachia in the 1950s. Those who stayed behind were simply rugged enough, or conniving enough, to survive. This was Emma Gatewood's course, a footpath through a misunderstood region stitched together on love and danger, hospitality and venom. The route was someone else's interpretation of the best way to cross a lovely and rugged landscape, and she had accepted the invitation to stalk her predecessors—this civilian army of planners and environmentalists and blazers—and, in a way, to become one of them, a pilgrim herself. She came from the foothills, and while she didn't know exactly what to expect, she wasn't a complete stranger here. Her legs were sore when she set off a few minutes after 9:00 AM on May 5, trying to exit Georgia. She hiked the highlands until she could go no farther. Her feet had swollen. She found a lean-to near a freshwater spring where she washed out her soiled clothes. She filled her sack full of leaves and plopped it on a picnic table for a makeshift bed.

The next morning, she started before the sun peeked over the hills. The trail, through the heart of Cherokee country, was lined by azaleas, and when the sunbeams touched down they became flashes of supernatural pinks and purples in the gray-brown forest. Once in a while, she'd stop mid-step to watch a white-tailed buck bound gracefully across her path and disappear into the woods. Once in a while, she'd spot a copperhead coiled in the leaves and she'd catch her breath and provide the creature a wide berth. That night she drank buttermilk and ate cornbread, the charity of a man in town, and spent the night at the Doublehead Gap Church, in the house of the Lord. That's how it was some places. They'd open their iceboxes and church doors and make you feel at home. Some places, but not all. She was off again the next day, past a military base where soldiers had built dugouts and stretched barbed wire all over the mountains, a surreal juxtaposition of nature and the brutality of man. She pressed on through Woody Gap, approaching the state line. She was joined there by an old, tired-looking mutt, and she didn't mind the company.

She climbed a mountain, cresting after 7:00 PM, the sun falling. She'd have to find a place to stay soon. She followed the bank of a creek down into the valley, where several small houses stood. They were ugly little things, but there was a chance one would yield a bed, or at least a few bales of hay. Anything was better than shaking field mice out of her hair in the morning. In the yard of one of the puny homes, she noticed a woman chopping wood. It looked as if the woman's hair had not been combed in weeks, and her apron was so dirty it could have stood on its own. Her face was covered with grime and she was chewing tobacco, spitting occasionally in the dirt. The woman stopped as Emma approached. _Have you room for a guest tonight?_ Emma asked. _We've never turned anyone away,_ the woman said. Emma followed her onto the porch, where an old man sat in the shade. He wasn't nearly as dirty as the woman, and he looked intelligent—and suspicious. This was the tricky, treacherous part of the trail, scouting for a bed among strangers. She had not prepared for this part of the experience, for she never knew these negotiations would be necessary. There, on the strangers' porch, she wasn't afraid so much as embarrassed. She told the man her name.