REMEMBERING BARRY GOLDWATER
Basic Books, $25.95, 208 pages
REVIEWED BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
Conservative scholar Lee Edwards once wrote that the three key voices at the dawn of America’s 20th-century conservative movement were: first, the man of ideas, Russell Kirk; followed by the articulator of conservatism to the masses, William F. Buckley Jr.; who was in turn followed by the man of action, Barry Goldwater.
All three of these individuals take the stage in “Flying High,” the late Mr. Buckley’s final work, a memoir of his conversations and meetings with Mr. Goldwater from the time of his political classic, “The Conscience of a Conservative” (1960) until the Arizona senator’s death in 1998.
When Mr. Goldwater is remembered today, it is for a jumble of sound bites and jarring memories. During the run-up to the 1964 presidential election, the bespectacled, silver-haired Republican nominee was accused by his opponents and by the press of being a trigger-happy Dr. Strangelove.
And admittedly, as Russell Kirk noted in his own memoir, “The Sword of Imagination” (1995), Mr. Goldwater sometimes evidenced a lack of prudence in his speech and decisions during his presidential campaign, heedless of how his words would resonate during an era in which Americans had already gone once to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
It’s one thing to say, in effect, “We will stand our ground and defend our interests against all who would threaten us.” It’s entirely another thing for a presidential candidate to claim, as Mr. Goldwater did during an unguarded moment, that he’d like to lob a nuclear bomb into the men’s room at the Kremlin.
The portrait that emerges from Mr. Buckley’s memoir is largely favorable, revealing Mr. Goldwater as kindly, generous, irascible, sometimes profane, quirky, and a man who learned from his mistakes. It is plain that the author felt great affection toward Mr. Goldwater, especially in that their lives intertwined during the early 1960s when the Arizonan was convinced reluctantly to run for president.
During this time, “The Conscience of a Conservative” was ghostwritten for Mr. Goldwater by Mr. Buckley’s brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. Meanwhile, Mr. Buckley’s upstart magazine, National Review, promoted the policies and possible candidacy of “AuH2O” (as a clever bumper sticker called the senator), while Mr. Buckley and a small circle of conservative friends met with the senator to convince him to throw his hat in the ring.
Convinced to run for the presidency, Mr. Goldwater for a time was guided by Mr. Buckley and his circle, much to the disgruntlement of the Republican mainstream. Then, as the author records, the Goldwater candidacy went off the rails-when the senator’s Buckleyite supporters were shouldered aside by another group of would-be handlers, who convinced Mr. Goldwater that Mr. Buckley and his ilk were to be avoided.
While National Review continued to support Mr. Goldwater as the 1964 election approached, a rift had been opened between Mr. Buckley and Mr. Goldwater that took several years to fully heal. Long after Mr. Goldwater went down to defeat at the hands of “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson, the senator ruefully told National Review’s editor that if he ever again ran for president, he would only do so with the backing and direction of Mr. Buckley.
But it is in his recollections of the 1964 campaign, and especially the nominating convention in San Francisco, that a glow of intense interest and excitement permeates Mr. Buckley’s otherwise somewhat-rambling memoir. His prose catches fire when he describes Mr. Goldwater awaiting his moment on the convention floor: “Although the spirit of defiance was not fully aroused in Goldwater in the days leading to his nomination, the spirit was alive in his mind, and it was bursting for air. He was careful not to appear like a Randian superego, strutting his individualism by scaling local skyscrapers. In San Francisco Barry appeared, mostly, as a complaint organization man in Sunday dress, the tiger properly dormant.”
Mr. Buckley thinks that Mr. Goldwater was irked by “the diapasonal opposition,” members of his own party - New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton and their allies - who sought to undermine the prospect of his nomination by portraying him as a dangerous nut or (at the very least) a man outside the Republican Party’s moderate go-along-to-get-along mainstream.
Mr. Buckley notes that in the face of these attacks, “Goldwater’s appetite increased for a scorching comeback. He looked hungrily for an opportunity to go the whole hog-an expression of contempt for and defiance of the critics. By Thursday night, he had found the means to do this. In a single passage. One passage in his acceptance speech, in which he fired out the most notorious rhetorical couplet in modern political history.”
This passage ran as follows: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Along with Democratic Party’s infamous televised “Daisy ad” - depicting a little girl picking petals off a daisy while an ominous voice counts down to a nuclear explosion - this statement went far toward sinking Mr. Goldwater’s chances of election, though Johnson was certainly aided as well by his status as the martyred John F. Kennedy’s successor. Mr. Buckley attempts to place Mr. Goldwater’s words within the context of a rhetorical tradition in American politics, but not convincingly.
Given the tenor of the times - an era of the idiotic John Birch Society and its reckless claims, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and nuclear brinkmanship with the Soviets-any words affirming the virtues of “extremism” would likely be viewed askance by a significant portion of the American public, which prefers to stick with the devil it knows.
While “Flying High” has its flaws - a certain unfocused looseness being pre-eminent, uncharacteristic of Mr. Buckley’s best work - it contains much value as an insider’s look at the machinations and events that led to a major disaster for the young conservative movement in America, one that served ironically as a stepping stone for the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It is also a gracious, generous and forgiving testament of one friend to another.
m James E. Person Jr. is the author of “Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow” (Cumberland House) and is at work on a novel.
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