He was right: Looking back at the Goldwater moment. . - Culture and Reviews - Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus - book review

Reason, March, 2002 by Glenn Garvin

To wit: One of the many earthquakes that rocked the campaign was touched off when Goldwater offhandedly said that Minuteman missiles, one of the mainstays of the U.S. nuclear deterrent, were undependable. When stunned reporters asked how undependable, Goldwater airily replied: "That's classified information. But they're not dependable, I can tell you that." In fact, there were a lot of scientists and military men who shared his doubts: Kennedy's nuclear test-ban treaty had gone into effect before the Pentagon got a chance to fire a Minuteman loaded with a nuclear warhead. Nobody really knew if it worked.

Had staffers known Goldwater was going to talk about it, they could have been standing by with fact sheets explaining the background, including names and phone numbers of experts who agreed with him. Moreover, they could have added (as Goldwater had not) that one of his reservations about missiles was that, unlike bombers, they couldn't be called back, making an accidental nuclear exchange much more likely. That point would undoubtedly have played well with the public at a time when the movies Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove were drawing huge audiences. Instead, nobody was prepared, and Goldwater, not for the last time in the campaign, looked mildly loony.

To make matters worse, Goldwater's campaign did attract some boosters who seemed barely tethered to planet Earth, from John Birchers who thought Eisenhower was a communist to hardcore racists who praised the murder of civil rights activists. Their zealotry quickly became the stuff of legends. Among the funniest portions of Perlstein's book is his blow-by-blow account of a Young Republicans convention where the pro-and anti-Goldwater forces began by slashing one another's microphone cords and ended by brawling on the speaker's platform. (It's no coincidence, I suspect, that Hillary Clinton's maiden foray into politics was as a Goldwater Girl.) Sometimes Goldwater almost seemed to be running against his own supporters, scolding them in speeches for latching on to particular issues without understanding the underlying philosophy: "I can't help but wondering, sometimes, if you've asked yourselves why my campaign is the way it is."

Nothing was more problematic than the civil rights issue--particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed most forms of racial discrimination. Goldwater was no racist; early in his career as a Phoenix city council member, he aggressively supported local civil rights ordinances. But as his conservatism deepened, he grew first skeptical and then fearful about the use of government for social engineering. "You cannot pass a law that will make me like you--or you like me," Goldwater told one rally. "That is something that can only happen in our hearts." He understood, too, that government-mandated affirmative action was merely the flip side of segregationist racialism: "It reintroduces through the back door the very principle of allocation by race that makes compulsory segregation morally wrong and offensive to freedom." And, that, to Barry Goldwater, was the bottom line." "Our aim, as I understand it, is neither 10 establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated society," he said. "It is to preserve a free society."