The Man Who Knew Too Little
By John B. Judis
Sunday, September 24, 1995
Sometimes the authors of books reveal facts that suggest an
entirely different interpretation of their subjects from the one they
provide. That is the case with two recent biographies of former Arizona
Sen. Barry Goldwater. Both books are extremely well-researched and
well-written, but they both include details about their subject that are
inconsistent with their own assessments of him.
Lee Edwards, a conservative intellectual who served as Goldwater's
press aide in the 1964 presidential campaign, provides the most complete
reconstruction yet of that campaign and reveals much that is new about
Goldwater's relationship with other conservatives, including Ronald
Reagan. While Edwards does not hesitate to vent his views, he does not
allow them to dictate what he reveals about Goldwater. Robert Alan
Goldberg, a professor of history at the University of Utah, describes
himself as being on the left but, like Edwards, is meticulously
even-handed in recounting Goldwater's life. While Edwards is at his best
in describing intra-conservative politics, Goldberg, who grew up in the
Southwest, is at his best in portraying Goldwater's early years and his
Arizona background.
Although the biographers differ politically, they are equally
admiring of Goldwater. Goldwater, Edwards writes, "laid the foundation
for a political revolution and led a generation of conservatives to
understand that theirs was a winning as well as a just cause." Edwards
describes him as an "Old Testament Jeremiah"; Goldberg calls him a
"prophetic figure." Edwards quotes with approval the opinion of
conservatives that Goldwater would have made a better president than
Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater, Goldberg argues, "stands well in comparison
with politicians like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald
Reagan."
The reader of these books will find something to buttress these
opinions but will also discover evidence for a contrary view of
Goldwater. Running through both books are disturbing revelations about
his intellectual abilities and about his independence of mind. These
books unwittingly portray him as a good-hearted but stupid and sometimes
weak man whose success depended upon his following carefully a script
that other people wrote.
Both books depict Goldwater as an abysmal student. After ninth
grade, he was advised to leave Phoenix's public high school. Out of
desperation, his parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in
Virginia, where he had to repeat the ninth grade and still received Cs
and Ds. After graduating from Staunton, Goldwater went to the University
of Arizona, but he dropped out after his freshman year because he was
having too much difficulty keeping up with the work. Still, other
politicians have had little interest or success in school and have led
an intellectual life of their own. But Goldwater's sister Carolyn told
Edwards that she could not recall his ever reading a book.
As a senator, Goldwater doesn't seem to have displayed any
intellectual curiosity, except in how machines work. He authored three
political books and two autobiographies, but he didn't write them. Other
politicians also don't write their own books, but Goldwater didn't seem
even to go over them carefully. Edwards relates how former National
Review editor Brent Bozell wrote the bestselling Conscience of a
Conservative for Goldwater at the behest of several conservatives who
wanted to promote the Arizonan as a presidential candidate in 1960. When
Bozell brought the manuscript to Goldwater, Edwards recounts, "The
senator read quickly the less than 200 pages, pausing here and there,
and then handed it back to Bozell, saying Looks fine to me. Let's go
with it.' " (Clifton White, who later headed the Draft Goldwater
Committee, wrote in his memoir that Goldwater never even saw The
Conscience of a Conservative before it was published.) Goldwater later
claimed that Bozell constructed the book from his speeches, but Bozell
wrote those speeches. The truth is that Goldwater had almost nothing to
do with the book that made him famous and launched his national
political career.
Goldwater certainly had an underlying political philosophy that
combined frontier individualism and patriotism, but it was instinctive
rather than the product of any reflection. He allowed others to fill in
many of the details for him. When he came to Washington as a senator in
1952, Edwards relates, Jay Gordon Hall, General Motors chief lobbyist in
Washington, took Goldwater under his wing, even writing speeches for
him. Under Hall's guidance, Goldwater, a member of the Senator Labor
Committee, led an eight-year crusade against Walter Reuther, the
president of the United Auto Workers, even though the UAW was hardly a
factor in Arizona politics. Goldwater was following Hall's script.
Goldwater became known for his strong, even strident, foreign
policy stands, but he devoted little of his first years to foreign
policy. He began to take provocative positions in the late '50s when
Bozell, whose principal interest was rolling back communism, began to
write his speeches. Bozell devoted about two-thirds of Conscience of a
Conservative to foreign policy. Until the late '80s, Goldwater was also
not known for taking strong stands on abortion or gay rights. As Edwards
notes, conservatives ascribe these later stands to the influence of
Goldwater's gay grandson and his liberal second wife, Susan.
During most of Goldwater's career, he did and said what others told
him to. Arizonan Stephen Shadegg agreed to run his first Senate campaign
in 1952 on the condition that Goldwater not make impromptu speeches or
statements and not take positions that he and Shadegg had not reached
agreement on. During the next decades in office, when Goldwater was
given the chance to speak off-the-cuff, he displayed a thoughtless
bluster more appropriate to a bar stool than a political podium. In
1958, when his prepared radio text ran short, he ad libbed that Reuther
was a "more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia
might do to America." During the 1964 campaign, he advocated "one
change" in social security, making it "voluntary" for individuals, as if
one could maintain an insurance system on this basis. He proclaimed
American missiles "undependable" and then added, "I can't tell you --
it's classified." He called for taking the Vietnam war to South China.
"It would be fairly easy," he declared at a press conference. These
statements were not lapses, but revealed that Goldwater did not have the
capacity for judgment or reflection required of a president.
Other high officials make up for their weaknesses by surrounding
themselves with advisors who possess the knowledge or judgment that they
lack, but Goldwater did not choose his advisors wisely. In 1964 he
rejected two experienced and willing operatives -- Shadegg and White --
and surrounded himself instead with incompetent cronies who had no
experience in conducting a national presidential campaign and who
reinforced his weaknesses. His only legislative achievement in 40 years
was the passage in 1986 of the Goldwater-Nichols military reform bill,
but the bill got through Congress largely through the efforts of
Goldwater's Democratic colleague, Sen. Sam Nunn, and Nunn's able staff.
In summing up Goldwater's 1964 campaign, Edwards quotes approvingly
journalist Robert MacNeil's change of heart about Goldwater. When
MacNeil covered Goldwater in 1964 for NBC-TV, he believed that he would
not have made a good president because he "seemed too casual in his
judgments, too careless about words and facts, too indifferent to
complexity, a man of too little intellectual discipline." Later, in his
autobiography, MacNeil speculated that Goldwater might have made a
better president than Johnson because of his "decency and common sense."
Anyone reading these two biographies would have to concur with MacNeil's
first and not his second judgment. Goldwater simply did not possess the
mentality to deal with the enormous challenges posed by the Vietnam War,
ghetto riots, growing white unrest in the South, and the erosion of
America's economic superiority. He might have had a successful
presidency, but only through sheer luck.
The more puzzling question raised by these books is how a man of
such limited gifts managed to find himself atop the conservative
movement. Certainly, Goldwater possessed fundamental decency and
integrity -- evidenced in his refusal during the 1964 campaign to
exploit the ghetto riots -- but these are not qualities that ensure
political success. One reason for Goldwater's success is that (in
contrast, say, to Texas Sen. John Tower) Goldwater looked and acted the
part of the new Western conservative. He also knew how to project his
own image. When he ran Goldwater's Department Store during the '30s, he
was a mediocre administrator and bookkeeper but excellent at marketing
and advertising.
The other reason for Goldwater's success is that he was carried
along by a movement that was much more powerful than he was. In both
1960 and 1964, conservative activists drafted him for national office
over his objections and misgivings. Commentator Jack Bell wrote in 1962,
"The Arizona Senator was like a small cut of timber caught in a long run
floating downstream. Now and then he could extract himself long enough
to whirl rather fruitlessly in the current before the jam bore on him
again."
Edwards and Goldberg not only fail to take account of Goldwater's
weaknesses and failings in their overall assessment of him. They seem
schizophrenic in the way they deal with his books and speeches. Goldberg
analyzes Goldwater's ideas in Conscience in a Conservative in the same
respectful way he might have dissected Russell Kirk's The Conservative
Mind. Edwards notes inconsistencies between Goldwater's earlier and
later speeches without acknowledging that these might have reflected the
different views of Goldwater's speechwriters rather than of Goldwater
himself.
How did authors who knew their subject so well fail to integrate
the uncomfortable facts into their interpretation? Edwards and Goldberg
were probably unwilling to cast Goldwater, whom they liked and admired,
in a decidedly unfavorable, even cruel, light. They may have also been
reluctant to diminish the importance of their subject. It is one thing
to unearth scandal and intrigue in a politician's past; it is quite
another to demonstrate that he was a mediocrity whose fame was largely
the product of others' efforts. But if these authors are accurate in
what they reveal about Goldwater's life, that is exactly the conclusion
that an impartial reader will come to.
John B. Judis is a senior editor of the New Republic and author of
"William F. Buckley: Patron Saint of the Conservatives."
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
Back to top
