‘We want Barry! We want Barry!’ cheered the crowd as Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater entered the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco. ‘The band blared the crusaders’ song of American politics, Glory Glory Hallelujah’, writes Theodore H White in the Observer Magazine on 20 September 1964, with Goldwater’s 89-year-old mother on the cover.
In his speech accepting the presidential nomination, the far-right Arizona senator, with his deep tan and ‘silvery white hair’, aroused both ‘fervour and fear… Then he swung into his theme: “The Good Lord raised this mighty republic, not to stagnate in the swamplands of collectivism, not to cringe before the bully of Communism.”’
America had followed ‘false prophets’. For his adversaries in the party, he required submission – ‘or he bade them farewell.’
Who was this man, ‘a jest to his enemies in the Senate,’ who had somehow ‘seized one of America’s two great parties’? There were many Goldwaters. When the public Goldwater speaks, he ‘throws off an exhalation of sincerity, certainty – and fury.’ In private, he ‘is a man of warmth and kindliness’. He is also a major-general of the US Air Force Reserve, accepts atomic weapons – and is willing to use them.
Political Goldwater is here to challenge the dogma of American liberal thinking and replace it with ‘the old dogmas of the Old Frontier’. He ‘has challenged all the beliefs that have guided America in this generation. This Goldwater has the simplest of messages: Americans have been betrayed.’
Socialism is one culprit, foreign policy another: ‘courage has been replaced by a craven and fuzzy desire to coexist.’ It is time for ‘the American people [to] return to the fundamentals that made them great’. His commitment to fighting Communism is his biggest gamble: Eastern Europe must be liberated; war preparations must begin. It is a gamble of ‘peace-through-might’.
