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Barry Goldwater: A Political Portrait
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14636 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
4,168 Words |
| Author
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John B. Judis
John B. Judis just completed a voluminous biography of William
F. Buckley, Jr. (Doubleday, 1988). |
For at least a decade after the 1964 presidential election, Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency was considered a curious historical accident--one whose recurrence the Republican Party had been careful to prevent in 1968 and would continue to prevent in the future.
Ronald Regan's landslide victories in 1980 and 1984 have transformed Goldwater from a crank to a prophet and elevated his campaign for the presidency to a historic event that paved the way for the conservative realignment of the 1980s. The past is a reflection of the present.
But just as the shadow of defeat minimized Goldwater's achievement, the bright sun of Reagan's victory has tended to exaggerate it. There is by no means a straight line from the 1964 to the 1980 campaign. Like another crucial political event, Franklin D. Roosevelt's "balance the budget" campaign in 1932, Goldwater's campaign achieved its larger impact almost in spite of the candidate's and campaign's intentions.
From the vantage of the Reagan years, one imagines a determined, rockjawed Goldwater, flanked by the militant conservatives of the 1950s, leading the charge against the regnant liberalism. But in 1964, Goldwater was an extremely reluctant candidate, probably the least ambitious man to seek the presidency in the twentieth century. (Calvin Coolidge is the only other contender.) And he was far from comfortable as the leader of the new conservative movement that had spring up in the 1950s.
In spite of Goldwater's explosive statement in his acceptance speech that "extremism in the defense of
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