Rightist Indignation

"He was hiding who he really was," Gold says. "He was waiting for an opportunity."

In many ways, Gold's tale of disillusionment is a familiar one. There are plenty of veterans of Reagan and Bush 41 around town who believe Bush and Cheney trashed the institutions and party they helped build from the wreckage of the Goldwater campaign.

But there aren't many who have been on a first-name basis with those they believe are doing the trashing. There aren't many like Vic Gold.

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One of the first things friends say of Gold, who has the small, athletic frame of a bantamweight boxer, is that he can occasionally blow his stack. David A. Keene, the veteran conservative political activist, recalls first meeting him when the two worked for Vice President Spiro Agnew in the early 1970s. "This madman comes into the office, screaming and yelling," Keene says. "All of a sudden he comes back and says, 'I am Vic Gold.' "

Keene told how Gold later briefly quit the 1980 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, for whom he served as a traveling aide-de-camp, over a slight involving a speech. Keene, a senior official on the campaign, and campaign head James A. Baker III persuaded the candidate to call Gold and apologize. Bush did so grudgingly -- only to come back and complain to his handlers that the idea had backfired: When Bush reached Gold, the combustible campaign aide told him off.

Keene said he and Baker found the incident greatly amusing, and the Bush-Gold relationship survived. Gold came back to work on the campaign, and the two have remained friendly ever since; Gold helped write his 1987 autobiography, "Looking Forward." He says he still talks to the former president a couple of times a year.

For his part, the former president indicated continuing affection for his former aide. "Vic Gold is a friend and always will be," Bush said in a statement relayed through his spokesman. "I have not read the book, but if it is as critical of the president as I have heard, I am sure I wouldn't like it."

The path that took Gold from the Goldwater campaign to open revolt with the current Bush administration is a colorful one. After growing up in New Orleans, Gold went to law school in Alabama before moving to Washington in the late 1950s to work for a public relations firm. He voted for Kennedy in 1960 but "fell off the wagon" with the Bay of Pigs. He was attracted to Goldwater, he says, because he saw him as a contrarian and liked his tough anti-communism and libertarian streak.

In his classic narrative of the 1964 campaign, Teddy White described Gold's work as deputy press secretary as critical to helping Goldwater get through to a hostile press corps. Gold "carried their bags, got them to the trains on time, out-shouted policemen on their behalf, bedded them down and woke them up, and before they knew it, the correspondents, about 95 percent anti-Goldwater by conviction, had been won to a friendship with the diminutive intellectual which spilled over onto his hero," White wrote.

Gold went to work for Agnew on the "nattering nabobs" campaign of 1970, in which the vice president barnstormed the country attacking incumbent Democratic senators. His association with Agnew helped expand a circle of exotic friends that have over the years included Frank Sinatra, Alabama football coach Bear Bryant and baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial.