Just watched Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, an HBO documentary about the late senator from Arizona and 1964 presidential candidate. I enjoyed it a lot and would recommend it…in fact, here's a link to a page that tells all about it, including when it airs again.
However, I had the faint sense of maybe (just maybe) witnessing some after-the-fact whitewashing of a man's life; of Barry Goldwater being repackaged for posterity as the somewhat non-partisan elder statesman he became, not as the darling of the extreme right that he was in '64. I suspect, just based on a distant observer's perspective, he would have approved of such refurbishment…and to its credit, the film does give us a good glimpse of the 1964 model Goldwater.
Still, one overwhelming message of the film is that ol' Barry was such an honest, outspoken maverick that even his old enemies loved and respected him. That may be true to some extent — the on-camera interviews praising him are full of Democrats and Liberals — but it's the later Goldwater they loved. They liked the guy who was no longer a force of any note in the Republican party and who said things like "Nixon was no damned good" and that gays should be allowed to serve in the military. They liked him because when he said such things, he couldn't be dismissed by the right as some wacko Liberal. He was, after all, Mr. Conservative, the one-time pin-up boy of the John Birch Society and defender of Joe McCarthy.
In fact, the main theme of the film — apart from the one about Barry being such a swell, candid guy — is that he was Mr. Conservative and those who now represent that movement are not. (This is also the main thesis of the new John W. Dean book, Conservatives Without Conscience, that I just finished. The book, Dean says, started out as a collaboration with Goldwater.) The documentary even offers us testimony from present-day right-wingers like George Will to wish that Conservatism was more like it was in Goldwater's day…though I doubt Will would sign on to every view that Barry voices in the old footage.
My recollections of Goldwater in '64 — and remember, I was twelve at the time — is that he was the poster boy for those who wanted to slow down the advance of Civil Rights (like, to the point of moving backwards) and those who wanted the U.S. to find an excuse to drop serious nuclear explosives on those dirty commies in Russia…or maybe not even to wait for a reason. Those might not have been his views. In fact, they probably were not, but he sure did little to distance himself from that mindset and whatever votes it could bring him.
I also recall thinking his campaign was just plain feeble. There's a skill to running for office…a skill that has nothing to do with whether the candidate is any good or not. It has to do with fund-raising and advertising and presenting the product (the candidate) in a saleable context. Lyndon B. Johnson and his operation were just better at it than the folks marketing Goldwater, especially when L.B.J. was armed with a powerful weapon: A martyred president whose legacy he could claim to be trying to carry forth. (You can hear and read Goldwater's '64 acceptance speech here. It's somewhat less radical now than it was at the time.)
I don't know whether this country would have been better off if it had elected Barry Goldwater that year…probably not if he'd governed as per some of the campaign speeches he made. Once it was clear he'd never get another shot at the presidency, and maybe once it was apparent that Arizona voters would keep him in the Senate as long as he wished to serve, the man changed. He became the iconoclastic, beholden-to-no-one gadfly that the documentary makes him out to be. I wish they'd obtained footage of an appearance he made on The Tonight Show shortly before his death in 1998. Jay Leno was the host then and Goldwater had that wonderful attitude of "I don't care what people think…I'm going to say what I believe." It was a wonderful chat as he bashed Nixon and Jerry Falwell and anyone who opposed gay rights, then turned right around with equally strong words against several prominent Democrats and their efforts. I think that guy might have made a much better president than Johnson.
Alas, I can't think of a single politician today who ever became half as famous and who would absent himself from partisanship that way and just say and do what he thought was right. Which is why I'd like to believe the Barry Goldwater they sell us in Mr. Conservative was the real Barry Goldwater.