"...Goldwater had made it possible for great numbers
of unapologetic white supremacists to hold great carnivals of white
supremacy."
Thanks Sylvie, for this stroll down memory lane. Unlike Hillary
Clinton, I never door belled for Barry Goldwater. In fact, I listened
to a couple of his initial speeches and then turned off the radio/TV
and contemplated the prevailing Elitist position that there are few
men capable of leading our nation.
It was obvious to me that Barry Goldwater was in over his conservative
head. Because he was the darling of the White Supremacists, many of
whom were also high in our Ruling Class, Barry Goldwater appeared to
be running a tight race. My dad looked up from his reading one
evening and said, "Goldwater will be lucky if he can win the South".
And here we are again, with a mass media even more owned, if possible,
by the Ruling Class, trying to make believe that there is a close race
between Clinton and this Donald Trump person, the last hope of these
fading White Supremacist Neanderthals.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/7/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The Campaign: Goldwater
BY RICHARD H. ROVERE
The New Yorker, October 3, 1964
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/10/03/the-campaign-goldwater?mbid=nl_Sunday%20Longreads%20(38)&CNDID=42301087&spMailingID=8955679&spUserID=MTM0Njk3NDMwNjU3S0&spJobID=922155003&spReportId=OTIyMTU1MDAzS0
I spent most of a mid-September week travelling with Senator Goldwater in
seven states of the Old Confederacy and in two Border states. Actually, I
did not so much travel "with" the Senator as "behind" him. He made his
rounds in a Boeing 727, a three-engine jet, flying at very nearly the speed
of sound. With him in this plane--the Yai Bi Ken, which is Navajo for "House
in the Sky"--were Mrs. Goldwater, five or six campaign advisers, and
fifty-odd journalists of one sort or another, most of them representing what
some Goldwater enthusiasts call "the rat-fink Eastern press." ("I’m on a
political trip, and the Republican Party is paying for it," Goldwater said
in Tulsa the other day, adding that a lot of President Johnson’s "political"
trips are paid for by the taxpayers. He might have gone on to say that while
Republican treasurers may be signing the checks, this involves merely a
transfer of funds from an account into which newspapers, magazines, and
television networks have put thirty-six hundred dollars for each of their
representatives travelling with Goldwater.) I was part of the journalistic
overflow from the Yai Bi Ken. We travelled about--sometimes as many as
twelve of us, sometimes as few as five--in a two-engine propeller plane that
cruised at a little better than one-third the speed of the candidate’s
plane. In theory, we were "following" Goldwater, but this was almost as
hopeless as giving hot pursuit to an Alfa Romeo on a tricycle. We made only
about half as many stops as he did, and it was not uncommon to arrive at a
Goldwater rally just as the preacher was saying the benediction, or to leave
one after only a few words of the invocation. In Missouri, we never saw
Goldwater at all. We landed at the Springfield airport, learned that he had
left for a meeting in town, stopped in the coffee shop for a quick lunch,
and took off for Charleston, West Virginia, where, it had been announced,
Goldwater was to make a major speech on the administration’s anti-poverty
program. All this had its rewards as well as its frustrations. It takes a
powerful constitution to endure attendance at eight or ten political rallies
a day, and Goldwater rallies in the Deep South are especially taxing. On the
whole, I was relieved by the news that our group would be unable to make
Shreveport, Louisiana, where, according to one authority in our entourage,
"there are more haters per square mile than anywhere else in the country."
It was, though, disappointing not to be in Knoxville, Tennessee, to hear
Goldwater, standing beneath the Confederate flag, say that he still thought
the Tennessee Valley Authority ought to be sold to private interests, just
as it was disappointing to miss his address to senior citizens in Orlando,
Florida, on the iniquities of providing hospital care for the aged under the
Social Security system. In any case, the experience, though neither as rich
nor as wearing as it might have been, was instructive and, in many ways,
novel. I don’t suppose, for example, that anyone before us has ever logged
several thousand miles in the South and visited a dozen or so of its great
centers of population without seeing any more Negroes than one might expect
to encounter on, say, an average winter afternoon in Spitsbergen. In a
Negroless Memphis or Atlanta or New Orleans, some of us had the feeling of
having lost our bearings. We would peer out beyond the edges of the crowds
and down side streets trying to see if we could find a single Negro and,
whenever we saw one, telling one another of our rare discovery. There were
novel sounds as well as sights. It has been my lot to attend political
gatherings of many sorts for many years, but never until I went South with
Goldwater had I heard any large number of Americans boo and hoot at the
mention of the name of the President of the United States. In Alabama and
Louisiana, there were thunderous, stadium-filling boos, all of them cued by
a United States senator.
This senator is a man easily surprised and endlessly surprising. One of my
favorite stories about him--and one of the more agreeable ones--involves the
principal of an all-Negro high school in Phoenix back in the days when
segregation was the rule in that city. He once asked Goldwater how it
happened that the family department store donated a gold watch as a
commencement prize to each of the all-white schools but not to the school he
headed. Goldwater explained that he was opposed to segregation and didn’t
intend to encourage it by supplying an all-Negro school with a prize. The
principal replied that, as he saw the matter, an all-white school was every
bit as segregated as an all-Negro one. Goldwater thought this over for a
moment or two and then declared, with a delighted grin, that the educator’s
reasoning was absolutely unassailable. The school got its gold watch. As an
individual, he is elated by illuminations of this kind. It may even have
pleased him, the other day, to have Walter Lippmann inform him that it
hardly makes sense to accuse the President, as Goldwater did in Charleston,
of planning an economy in which "no one is permitted to fall below the
average," since, in Lippmann’s icy words, "there cannot be an ‘average’ if
no one is below it." The Republican nominee’s capacity for astonishment is
matched by his capacity for astonishing. He is everlastingly outwitting--if
that is the word--those who think they know most about him. For two or three
years now, a number of reasonably intelligent people have been studying
Goldwater and Goldwaterism as intently--and, in some cases, almost as
morbidly--as Cotton Mather ever studied the doings of Satan and the
manifestations of witchcraft. But not even the most assiduous and
imaginative of Goldwaterologists was prepared for the Senator’s emergence in
San Francisco as a candidate for High Sheriff as well as for President. If
Goldwater was anything, he was a states’-rights man, and if there is one
states’ right, or responsibility, that no one has ever thought of
challenging, it is the maintenance of public safety and the enforcement of
criminal justice. In his acceptance speech, though, Goldwater said that law
and order were in jeopardy almost everywhere and that he proposed to do
something "to keep the streets safe from bullies and marauders."
Goldwaterologists in the Cow Palace and across the country were stunned--and
stunned again when, in a press conference the following morning, he said, "I
think the responsibility for this has to start someplace, and it should
start at the federal level." How on earth did this strictest of
Constitutional fundamentalists propose to exercise federal "responsibility"
to keep order in the streets? That question was put to Goldwater in Phoenix
a day later, and he was vague in response--reassuringly vague from the
Goldwaterologists’ point of view. He said a few words about creating an
improved "moral climate" by force of Presidential example, and some about
bettering the quality of the federal judiciary. Though still a bit
unsettled, the Goldwaterologists assumed that this was about the size of
it--that the Republican candidate would continue to take a stand against
"bullies and marauders" but would not undermine his whole position as a
strict Constitutionalist by proposing any specific strategy of intervention.
For him, they reasoned, there was more than the Constitution at stake. The
autonomy of Southern state troopers and "public-safety" units is a vital
element in the defense of the Southern status quo. Moreover, the sight of
Goldwater stickers on police cars and motorcycles is by no means unusual
along Southern highways.
Until the first day of the Southern tour, it seemed that Goldwater would not
go much beyond the rhetoric of the acceptance speech and the amplifying
statements he made in the days immediately after the Convention. But on his
first evening out, in a baseball park in St. Petersburg, he delivered a
speech that went well beyond anything he had said in San Francisco or
Phoenix. It was by far the most radical statement he has ever made. In it he
not only undermined his position on the Constitution but threw the document
itself away, and the Magna Carta with it. He began by reminding his audience
of what he had said about crime and violence in San Francisco and by
declaring that it was "a tragedy [that] the breakdown of law and order
should be an issue in this campaign for the highest office in the land."
But, he went on, "it must be an issue, a major issue," for "the war against
crime [is] the only needed war." (So much for South Vietnam.) He cited a
number of alarming statistics on crime (nationwide, he said, it has climbed
"five times faster than the population" during the Kennedy-Johnson
administration), and demanded to know how President Johnson can "ignore the
six thousand or so major crimes committed in the last twenty-four hours."
(The President was vulnerable enough; like Goldwater, he was in Florida at
that very moment, addressing some machinists in Miami Beach and saying not a
word about the last twenty-four hours of crime.) Goldwater then put, in his
audience’s behalf, the question that had bothered the Goldwaterologists:
"How, you will rightly ask, will Bill Miller and I restore domestic
tranquillity to this land? Well, let me tell you how we will do it." In
essence, what Bill Miller and he would do to combat lawlessness would be to
change the law or ignore it. In the first place, they would appoint
officials who understood, as they did, that the important thing about law
enforcement and criminal justice was to get offenders off the streets and
behind bars. When the law got in the way of prosecutors, the law should be
either revised or overlooked. "Something must be done, and done immediately,
to swing away from this obsessive concern for the rights of the criminal
defendant," Goldwater said. He gave some examples of this "obsessive
concern," all of which were Supreme Court rulings intended to assure the
observance of the "due-process" clause and the rights set forth in the
Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. It
was nonsense, Goldwater said, for the Supreme Court to hold a confession
inadmissible merely because a defendant did not have his lawyer’s advice at
the time he made it; the only point was whether the confession was a recital
of the truth. He said that he and Miller would urge upon Congress a statute
voiding the Mallory ruling, which, as he summarized it, "holds that any
statement made by a defendant to police officers is inadmissible if
arraignment is delayed." If he had said that the Constitution is a lot of
ink on paper, he would have described it about as adequately as he described
the Mallory ruling in St. Petersburg. The ruling, made by the Supreme Court
in 1957, deals at some length with the appropriate limits of pre-arraignment
examination of a suspect and with the question of how much time between
arrest and arraignment is enough and how much is too much. Most policemen
are unhappy with it, and so is Goldwater. About it, and about other
manifestations of the "obsessive concern" with the rights of defendants,
Goldwater said he would do two things. He would, "in making appointments to
the federal judiciary, [consider] the need to redress Constitutional
interpretation in favor of the public." And, as insurance in the event that
court-packing didn’t work, he would support a Constitutional amendment to
"give back to the states those powers absolutely needed for fair and
efficient administration of criminal law." If the amendment were to embody
his present view of what "powers" the states need, it would effectively
repeal about half the Bill of Rights. "In your hearts, you know there must
be a change," he said. "And in your hearts you know that Bill Miller and I
will be that change."
The crowd at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg was, like most of Goldwater’s
Southern crowds, good-sized, enthusiastic, and more responsive to his
presence than to his words. It is axiomatic, of course, that political
crowds are more interested in seeing than in listening, and most candidates
nowadays give the live audience their material presence and direct their
words to radio and television audiences and to readers of newspapers. But in
this, as in so many other matters, things have always been a bit different
in the South. Its masses have always relished strong, vivid political
rhetoric. They will travel long distances to hear it, and--other things
being equal, or even a little unequal--will reward eloquence at the polls.
Goldwater nowhere attempted to satisfy the Southern appetite for language.
The lines he got from his writers were as flat as his delivery of them. Even
when the substance was inflammatory, the form was soporific--statistics on
crime, discussions of previously unheard-of Supreme Court rulings and
internal-security cases, arguments over the relative merits of defense
contractors. But this rarely dampened the enthusiasm that the crowds had
brought with them to the gatherings. The quality of this enthusiasm, one
felt, was essentially non-political. These were not really political
rallies--they were revels, they were pageants, they were celebrations. The
aim of the revellers was not so much to advance a candidacy or a cause as to
dramatize a mood, and the mood was a kind of joyful defiance, or defiant
joy. By coming South, Barry Goldwater had made it possible for great numbers
of unapologetic white supremacists to hold great carnivals of white
supremacy. They were not troubled in the least over whether this would hurt
the Republican Party in the rest of the country. They wanted to make--for
their own satisfaction, if for no one else’s--a display of the fact that
they had found and were enjoying membership in one organization that was
secure against integration, because it had made itself secure against Negro
aspirations; as long as they could put on shows of this kind, no Negro would
ever want in. By far the most memorable of the shows was staged in Cramton
Bowl, in Montgomery, Alabama, on the second night of Goldwater’s tour. Some
unsung Alabama Republican impresario had hit upon an idea of breathtaking
simplicity: to show the country the "lily-white" character of Republicanism
in Dixie by planting the bowl with a great field of white lilies--living
lilies, in perfect bloom and gorgeously arrayed. The night was soft; the
stars and the moon were bright; the grass in the bowl was impossibly green,
as if it were growing out of something far richer than dirt; the stadium
lights did not destroy the colors and shadows of evening yet illuminated the
turf so well that individual blades of grass could be seen. And springing
from the turf were seven hundred Alabama girls in long white gowns, all of a
whiteness as impossible as the greenness of the green. The girls came, we
were told, from every one of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties--from Tallapoosa
and Bibb and Etowah and Coffee--as well as from Montgomery, Birmingham, and
Mobile. Their dresses were uniform only in color and length; taken all in
all, it was a triumph for, among other things, the seamstresses of Alabama.
The strewing of the lilies had been done about half an hour before the
proceedings were to begin. The girls stood on the turf, each waving a small
American flag, while the bands played and the local officials made and
announced last-minute arrangements. Then, right on schedule, an especially
powerful light was focussed on a stadium gate at about the fifty-yard line,
and the candidate of the Republican Party rode in as slowly as a car can be
made to go, first past fifty yards or so of choice Southern womanhood and
then, after a sharp left at the goal line, past more girls and up to the
splendidly draped stand. It was all as solemn and as stylized as a review of
troops by some master of the art like General de Gaulle. The girls did not
behave like troops; they swayed a bit as Goldwater passed, and sounds came
from them--not squeals or shrieks but pleasing and ladylike murmurs. Yet in
a sense, of course, they were Goldwater’s troops, as well as representatives
of what the rest of his Southern legions--the thousands in the packed
stands, the tens of thousands in Memphis and New Orleans and Atlanta and
Shreveport and Greenville--passionately believed they were defending. When
at last he mounted the platform, the lilies departed the gridiron and
arranged themselves on the sidelines. There they listened to what was by far
the limpest speech Goldwater delivered anywhere in the South. It wasn’t
about anything in particular. He said that big government was bad and that
he and Bill Miller proposed to put an end to it, though not right away.
("Because of existing commitments, we cannot do this overnight. But we can
gradually replace this undesirable and complex system with a much simpler
and more sensible one... without making dangerous cuts in national defense
or in necessary domestic programs.") The crowd loved it. It may even have
been relieved that the speech was low in key and did not drive out memories
of the spectacle that had preceded it.
Though one saw little evidence of it at the Goldwater pageants and picnics,
the South has more on its mind than race. Opinion polls show the region as a
whole to be just about evenly split between the candidates. Goldwater cannot
lose Alabama, where the President will not be on the ballot, and he should
have no trouble winning Mississippi, where the Democratic organization has
put up a slate of Johnson electors and urged everyone to vote against them.
It would surprise most experts if Johnson won Louisiana, where Goldwater has
more billboard space than Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors put together;
it would also surprise most experts if the President lost Georgia, Arkansas,
the Carolinas, and Texas. But in most places the division is expected to be
close. There are, plainly, large numbers of Southerners--white
Southerners--who will cast their votes on issues other than race. In August,
Representative Ross Bass, of Tennessee, one of the two Southern Democrats to
vote for the Civil Rights Bill, easily won a nomination for senator against
a segregationist. In late September, Representative Harry Wingate, Jr., of
Georgia, the one Democrat whom Goldwater endorsed on the Southern tour, lost
his seat, in a district said to be full of racists of the most benighted
sort, to a man supporting the national administration. A former Goldwater
Democrat, Senator Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, made his first
appearance as a Goldwater Republican at the candidate’s side in Greenville,
and the man who introduced him to the airport picnickers there said that
Thurmond’s decision of the day before had been as notable an event in
Southern history as Robert E. Lee’s decision to resign his commission in the
United States Army for a command in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Thurmond’s
defection was undoubtedly an event to be noted; it gladdened the party he
left and saddened the party he joined, which can no longer boast that it has
no racists in high elective office. Southern politicians do not believe that
Thurmond joined the Republicans because he thought the Party had a bright
future in South Carolina; he crossed over, they think, because he would not,
in all probability, have been renominated as a Democrat in 1966, when he was
due to be opposed by the incumbent governor, Donald S. Russell.
Still, the Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority,
remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and
almost nothing else. On his tour, Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and
not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist
appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned
"race" or "Negroes" or "whites" or "segregation" or "civil rights." But the
fact that the words did not cross his lips does not mean that he ignored the
realities they describe. He talked about those realities all the time, in an
underground, or Aesopian, language--a kind of code that few in his audiences
had any trouble deciphering. In the code, "bullies and marauders" means
"Negroes." "Criminal defendants" means negroes. States rights means
"opposition to civil rights." "Women" means "white women." This much of the
code is as easily understood by his Northern audiences as by his Southern
ones, but there are also some words that have a more limited and specific
meaning for the Southern crowds. Thus, in the Old Confederacy "Lyndon Baines
Johnson" and "my opponent" means "integrationist." "Hubert Horatio" (it
somehow amuses Goldwater to drop the "Humphrey") means
"super-integrationist." "Federal judiciary" means "integrationist judges."
It would be going too far to say that Goldwater touched Southern
sensibilities on race when he brought up Bobby Baker, the TFX controversy,
fiscal policy, or "Yo-yo" McNamara, and he certainly was not arousing them
when he talked of the T.V.A. in Knoxville and Medicare in Orlando. One
always had the feeling, though, that the Goldwater Republicans in the South
could find a racial or regional angle in almost anything. When the name of
Bobby Baker--a Pickens, South Carolina, man who once enjoyed a friendly
relationship with Senator Thurmond--was hooted at Goldwater meetings (as it
was everywhere except in Greenville, where delicacy prevailed and he was not
mentioned), it was not because the speaker was deploring Baker’s activities
in business and politics. It was because of his embarrassing connections
with the integrationist in the White House. And Goldwater generally played
it that way. He would rattle off some figures on murders, rapes, and
muggings, explain that "nothing is more clear from history than that the
moral decay of a people begins at the top," and follow this with a quick
mention of Bobby Baker, as if Bobby Baker were some kind of hoodlum
lieutenant and riot organizer, rather than a conspicuously successful
entrepreneur. Among Goldwater Southerners, even thermonuclear warfare gets
identified with regional pride, sentiment, and rancor. An Atlanta matron,
bedecked with Goldwater-Miller buttons, was asked if she had ever been
disturbed by things the candidate had said about war and weaponry.
"Certainly not," she replied. "We’re not cowards down here."
In the South, as elsewhere, Goldwater attacked the President for having so
inadequate an appreciation of the "Communist menace" that he did not once
mention it in his Atlantic City acceptance speech. And two or three times he
taxed the administration with negligence toward Communist subversion in this
country. Up to now, though, internal security and domestic Communism have
been distinctly minor themes in the campaign, and this, too, has been a
surprise to Goldwaterologists, who were certain that in due time a generous
amount of McCarthyism would be stirred into the Goldwater brew. The hard
core of Goldwater’s support has always come from people whose alarm centers
on Communists in the United States and who tend to relate, and subordinate,
all other issues to this one. The only other leader that these people have
had in recent times was the late Joseph R. McCarthy, and while McCarthy
lived Goldwater followed and championed him. Goldwater voted against
McCarthy’s censure by the Senate, and shortly after McCarthy’s death went to
Wisconsin to tell a Republican state convention there, "Because Joe McCarthy
lived, we are a safer, freer, more vigilant nation to this day. This fact,
even though he no longer dwells among us, will never perish." McCarthy has
not been mentioned in the campaign, though, and his strategies have not been
employed, except now and then by Congressman Miller, and not even Miller has
accused anyone of treason. Pay dirt, it would seem, is being overlooked. The
Johnson administration is filled with people whom McCarthy called traitors.
Moreover, there seems little doubt that Communists--particularly those whose
sympathies are more with Peking than with Moscow--have had a hand in
provoking racial disorders in Northern cities and have infiltrated some
civil-rights organizations. And in those Northern working-class districts
where the "white backlash" is said to be a large fact of political life,
there are many people of Eastern European descent who are receptive to the
argument that anything evil or distressing must be Communist in origin.
There was a moment during the Southern tour that seemed made to order for a
revival of McCarthyism. Early in the morning of his last day in the South,
Goldwater flew from New Orleans to Longview, Texas, for an airport rally,
where the candidate was to be presented by the Honorable Martin Dies, a
former congressman from Texas. Dies was the architect of the House Committee
on Un-American Activities, which in his day was always called the Dies
Committee. He was the John the Baptist of McCarthyism. There was a time, in
the late thirties and early forties, when liberals and radicals, and more
than a few conservatives, blanched at the mention of his name. His committee
once solemnly declared that Shirley Temple, then a recent alumna of a
Hollywood kindergarten and a child actress whose performances dampened
handkerchiefs all around the world, was a stooge of the Stalinists. Now an
attorney in private practice, this lifelong Democrat and scourge of
subversives had come out of political retirement to introduce Barry
Goldwater in his maiden appearance in Texas as a Presidential candidate. And
it was to be an all-star show--not only Goldwater and Dies but Strom
Thurmond (once aboard, he seemed impossible to lose; he stayed with
Goldwater until the campaign headed North) and "the Little Giant of Texas,"
Senator John Tower. The airport crowd--respectable in size, overwhelming in
ardor--was ready for a resurgence of McCarthyism. But the men on the
platform were not. Senator Thurmond, who introduced Dies, was so out of tune
with history that he couldn’t pronounce the great Texan’s name--once a
household word--properly. It rhymes with "cries," but as Thurmond had it, it
was "Die-ease." And then Martin Dies arose and, without a mention of
Communist termites, said he was honored to introduce Goldwater, who mumbled
a few words about some work of a Paul Revere type that Dies had once done,
long ago, and followed these with his basic speech: "When you woke up on a
typical morning of this administration, Lyndon’s day of spending was just
beginning. And by the evening, when his day of spending was complete, he
would have spent ten million dollars more than his predecessor spent....
While we talk, every four minutes frugal Lyndon puts another person on the
public payroll." When the meeting was over, I asked Dies if he intended to
follow Thurmond’s lead and switch parties. The forerunner of McCarthy looked
at me as though I had asked a question of utter madness. "I just introduced
Goldwater," he said. "I’m voting the Democratic ticket."
Goldwater’s failure to exploit the Communist issue may be a mere
oversight--oversights have been numerous in this campaign--or it may be
symptomatic of an atmospheric change of some importance. Among Goldwater
zealots, what one hears when one expects to hear "Communist" or "subversive"
is "Easterner" or "liberal." Until a few years ago, it would have been
difficult--indeed, it would have been impossible--to provoke pungent
expressions of disapprobation merely by identifying a critic or an
antagonist as an "Eastern liberal." In some regions, "Eastern" had certain
disagreeable associations--of slickness, snobbishness, pretense--but a man
was not suspect merely because he lived north of Washington and east of
Pittsburgh. In some quarters, the word "liberal" was pejorative, but the
overtones were not of wickedness but of softness, gullibility, insufficient
reverence. No man exposed himself to contumely simply by acknowledging that
he was from the East or by describing himself as liberal by persuasion.
Before he could be condemned, it was necessary to implicate him in something
inherently diabolical. He had, as a rule, to be called a secret Communist or
a dupe of Communists or, in McCarthy’s phrase for any member of the Senate
who opposed him, "a handmaiden of Communism." But in recent years under the
tutelage of Goldwater and other rightists, large numbers of Americans have
gone far beyond this. In Goldwater circles, an Easterner is guilty until he
proves himself innocent. There is no longer any need to identify a liberal
with Communism; it is quite bad enough if he is a "liberal," and doubly bad
if he is an "Eastern liberal." In a sense, it is worse to be a liberal from
the East than to be a Communist from anywhere. Communists at least command
respect and emulation. A Goldwater political strategist named Stephen
Shadegg, who is now running the campaign west of the Rockies, has described
himself as a disciple--in strategy, not ideology--of Mao Tse-tung, and has
said that the way to win in American politics is to apply Maoist principles
on "the tactics of infiltration." "I would suggest," Goldwater himself once
wrote, "that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has
worked and ours has not." Goldwaterites do not suggest that the "Eastern
press" is Communist in sympathy. It is enough for them that it is Eastern
and, in their view, predominantly "liberal." The code word for it is not
"Communists" but "liars." The "Eastern Establishment" is not held to be a
Communist front; it is simply the "Eastern Establishment," and no more need
be said to draw catcalls. Its headquarters, of course, are in New York. I
was given, for purposes of identification, a badge on which the name of this
publication, minus the definite article, was lettered, large and clear and
black. Life would have been far easier among Goldwater crowds in the South
if it had said "LEPER." I declined to wear it after being asked, for the
sixth time, how things were in Harlem.
There were times, travelling with Goldwater, when one wondered whether the
candidate really thinks of himself as a man seeking the Presidency of the
United States. No doubt, the answer is that he does. Most of the time, he
seems to be a man serious in intent, with extremely serious followers who
feel that they are engaged in extremely serious and important work. It is
unlikely that Goldwater would go around the South agitating the most brazen
of its racists if he did not think that this means was justified by some
noble end. Still, the whole enterprise has the air not of a great political
campaign but of a great political caper--a series of pranks and calculated
errors. Unless all the rules have been suspended for this year, unless Barry
Goldwater knows something that Republican leaders in New York and
Pennsylvania and Michigan and Illinois and Ohio and even Georgia and Florida
and Texas do not know, the entire strategy is a joke. Goldwater keeps saying
that he does know something others don’t know but that he can’t quite tell
what it is. In one town after another, beginning long before the Southern
tour, he has been telling his audiences that "Bill Miller and I know there
is something stirring in this country, something just below the surface." He
goes on to say that "we can’t put our finger on it at the moment, but I
think that in a week or ten days we’ll be able to describe it pretty
accurately." Almost four weeks have gone by since he first said this
publicly (he was saying it before in off-the-record press conferences), and
the puzzle remains unsolved. Presumably, he feels that there are some
special conditions that make what his advisers call "the Southern
strategy"--using the South’s electoral votes as the foundation of
victory--peculiarly valid in 1964. Perhaps he is right, but politicians of
far greater experience than his think that "the Southern strategy" was never
less valid than in 1964. And, right or wrong, he seemed to be under some
compulsion to damage his own cause even in the South. He talked against the
T.V.A. in T.V.A. country and against Medicare in Medicare country. He
delivered his extraordinary law-and-order speech in St. Petersburg, the most
law-abiding of communities. He attacked legislative re-apportionment in
Atlanta, the city that has maintained the largest re-apportionment lobby in
Washington, and then went outside Atlanta to attack it again in a brand-new
congressional district born of re-apportionment. Asked to explain this
unusual political behavior, his spokesmen said that the Senator was a man of
courage and forthrightness; he would rather be right than popular. Some
other explanation, however, would be needed for his reluctance to say
anything that would upset the racists.
Goldwater ended his first Southern tour with the rally in Longview, where he
cast a bit more light on questions of strategy by saying, "I do not intend
to go around the country discussing complicated, twisted issues." That
evening, the Yai Bi Ken--some of its passengers had taken to calling it the
Enola Gay--made a Northern reëntry by way of Charleston, West Virginia,
where Goldwater said, "The task of the true statesman, said Aristotle, is to
see dangers from afar. Now, I do not claim to be a statesman." There, in the
capital of Appalachia, he also unburdened himself of some thoughts on
poverty. The President’s program was, he said, "phony." Poverty was as much
a state of mind as anything else. It was also a verbal and statistical
trick, put over by economists who simply "redefined the luxuries of
yesterday." He said that the administration was compelling people to think
poor: "If someone who ought to feel deprived [for lack of yesterday’s
luxuries] doesn’t respond that way, some politician in my opponent’s curious
camp--perhaps the leader himself--will drive up to his door to see to it
that he feels the way he ought." He pointed out that people in Pakistan are
much poorer than Americans. The living standards of the American "poor"--in
the written text of his speeches, the word is always in quotation
marks--"represent material well-being beyond the dreams of a vast majority
of the people of the world outside these United States." He conceded that
there was some problem in this country about unemployed youth and school
dropouts, but the administration’s retraining program, he said, was no fit
solution; for one thing, it would "cost ten thousand dollars for each
recruit." He had a money-saving plan for high-school dropouts: "It would be
cheaper to give them four years of education in your own fine state
university, where they would learn a lot more." He did not linger on the
problems that such a solution might pose for American higher education. In
an ad-libbed section on the origins of the capitalist system, he said he
thought that it really started when some "smart ape" began setting aside
coconuts fallen from trees and selling them to other "apes," some of whom
lacked the spirit of enterprise and became resentful at having to buy what
formerly was a bounty of nature. He thought the President’s views on the
economy "dreadful," because they provided "no penalty for failure." "In your
hearts, you know this is so," he added. I have never seen as grim and
uncomprehending a group of politicians as those West Virginia Republicans
who sat on the platform with Goldwater in Charleston. They joined in two
bursts of applause--once when he mentioned the Ten Commandments, and again
when he said, "We will not convert the heathen by losing our own souls."
