The Losers: End of The Road

THE LOSERS

Just ten months before, Barry Goldwater had stood on the patio of his desert house near Phoenix and declared himself a candidate for the presidency. It would be “a long and lonely road.” This week he was back at that house and at the end of the road. On election morn, Barry was up at 5. padding about his darkened den and twiddling the dials of his ham set because “I couldn’t find anyone to make a speech to.” Before breakfast he had raised 25 operators. At midmorning he drove over to the Phoenix Country Day School to vote, stood in line with Wife Peggy and his two sons for one hour and 20 minutes in bright sunlight, joking with schoolchildren. At one point he playfully marked a ticktacktoe square on his wife’s neck, refused to “look left” for a photographer, exclaiming in mock horror, “We don’t have such directions around here.” He even managed to startle reporters when he emerged from the polling booth, saying, “I split my ticket—I always split it” (presumably for Democrats for local office). As far as anyone could see, Barry Goldwater was the most relaxed man in Arizona. “Oh, it’s a horse race,” he said mildly. “You win it or you lose it. Whatever the Lord wants—I’ll live with it.”.

Issues That Baclclashed. Barry Goldwater carried his home precinct—the 23rd—by better than 3 to 1, but his neighbors’ approval was cold comfort against the avalanche of rejection that roared across the nation. Why was it that the truths that seemed so self-evi-dent in the clear desert air—that the growth of big government would result “in the ultimate destruction of American freedom”—had backlashed into disastrous defeat?

Almost every issue Goldwater had laid his hand on seemed to turn into a sorcerer’s-apprentice broom, mastering Goldwater before he could make his position clear.

He tried to defend “extremism.” In arguing for a stronger national defense, he got himself indelibly branded as someone who had an itchy finger on the nuclear trigger. A vote against civil rights legislation, which Goldwater cast on narrow constitutional grounds, hurt him everywhere except in the Deepest South. The one issue Goldwater had going for him all the way—the lack of probity in public life—blurred as Barry himself dipped into the barrel to hurl epithets of “fascist” and “soft on Communism” against his opponents. Even Goldwater’s proof positive, with the addition of Walter Jenkins to the trio of Billie Sol Estes, Bobby Baker and Matt McCloskey, was somehow buried by momentous world events from the ad-vent of a socialist government in Britain and change in the Kremlin to atom bombs in China. As a result, the candidate too powerful to need to conciliate in San Francisco became by campaign’s end a kind of pariah to be kept at arm’s length for many Republican candidates who wanted to survive the holocaust.

Lulled Partisans. Perhaps the compounding error his fellow professionals were least likely to forgive Goldwater was the utter lack of coordination of his campaign. He could boast that he had put the G.O.P.. which in August was some $600,000 in the red, back in the black. The more pertinent fact was that the organization that had maneuvered the conservative wing into power in San Francisco had turned into a bumbling, disorganized wreck when faced with conducting a full-fledged campaign on a national scale. And the greatest humbler of them all was Barry, who repeatedly took audiences of superheated partisans and all but lulled them to sleep, who chose to attack public power in the TVA heartland, social security before audiences of oldsters.

“You know we conservatives are great believers in the fact that human nature doesn’t change,” Barry explained at the beginning of the campaign. “The only thing you can do about history is try to make it better the twelfth or 20th time around.” But for the vast majority of voters, one time around was enough. On election night, Barry Goldwater went to bed early, his message unheeded.