Barry Goldwater, and Reagan's speech - 30 December 1994

An old man with a high forehead and a rocklike chin and large horn-rimmed glasses sits in a big comfortable chair and looks out sadly and tolerantly and maybe with the ghost of a smile on the yawning Arizona Desert reaching forever beneath the mountaintop of which he has his house and home. He's a man forgotten in most of the world by certainly two generations that can't be expected to have much interest in the American political scene of 30 years ago. Yet it is just 30 years since he caused a revolution in the theory and practice of American government, a revolution that like many another brief uprising, like Hitler's 1923 Munich Putsch, a revolution whose time had not yet come.

Hitler went to jail and the man we're looking at, one Barry Goldwater went down to what at the time all Democrat's and liberals thought off as laughable defeat, he got 52 electoral votes to the 486 of the last genuine liberal president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Even in the year that he ran for president, in 1964, Goldwater was a new face, a name abroad.

In those days, European television including British paid much less attention to American affairs than it does now. And I remember in going round the country covering as we say this man, I tried out various mental pictures to fix his image for foreign readers. For Americans who at first didn't know him it was easy, get hold of a Jefferson nickel, which shows Monticello, Jefferson's Virginia home on one side and a profile of Jefferson on the other look at the profile, stick a pair of imaginary horned rimmed glasses on it and you had Barry Goldwater to the life.

The excitement of trotting around America covering presidential candidates can be greatly exaggerated. Very soon the man being human repeats the same speech, the same gestures even after a time the crowds looked the same and there's always that noisy little nucleus of fans rounded up by the local or state campaign committee. Worst of all is that even men who in private life or away from the hustings talked like sensible human-beings grow tired and more and more spout clichés and the current political jargon of their party.

Barry Goldwater was different, unique among United States senators, he talked no jargon, had his own sharp ideas about everything maybe he oversimplified problems but it was much pleasanter listening to somebody who was over simple rather than overwrought. Alone among Republicans, 10 years after his defeat, he looked at Richard Nixon struggling through the thickets of Watergate and gave him no quarter, offered no excuses, went to the White House and told him he had to go. The man, he said aloud, "lied to the people and lied to the Congress, I wouldn't trust him round the corner". I don't believe Goldwater ever spoke to Nixon from that day on. In his views, his style, his engaging candour he has changed very little, a little less downright, perhaps he's learnt as Aristotle said old men do, the pain caused by positive men.

But the other day, Goldwater pretty much crippled by arthritis and death mused about the men who made his failed revolution come true, the conserving or conservatising of America. For instance, he thinks the whole roaring debate over allowing prayer in the public schools in the country, which guards with excessive jealousy the separation between church and state, he thinks it's tempest in a tea cup. There's no law he says that forbids people to hold a moment of silence in school and do with it what you will, think piously or think evil thoughts.

How about Senator Dole, the new majority leader, the Republican of the new Congress who everybody thinks is already mobilising his staff to run for the presidency. Goldwater's against it, he says he can do better staying in the Senate and running the party. How's he feel about President Clinton, always a teasing question expecting an explosive or mocking answer these days from any living Republican. A nice fellow, Mr Goldwater says, he does his best with what he has, he's not too smart in foreign policy.

Senator Helms, the smoking firebrand from the tobacco country who stumbled into the shall we say tactless remark that if Mr Clinton went down to North Carolina he'd better have a bodyguard, how about him? Off his rocker, says Mr Goldwater. On two issues, former Senator Goldwater has gone to the opposite poll for most of his party and he's not the least apologetic, he was the great relentless hawk on Vietnam. Indeed, he fought Lyndon Johnson on the thundering question of who was more patriotic, who knew best how to win the war. Today, he thinks the whole involvement was a mistake not a war for us to be in, a useless war.

The other great issue about which the right wing of the Republican Party, the evangelical right more than anybody flaps continuously homosexuality and its rights if any in the military especially. On this issue, Barry Goldwater has enraged his party in his home state of Arizona and beyond to the point of making many of its stalwarts try to write him off the party, because Mr Goldwater thinks and says that a soldier is hired not for how he handles his sex life but how he handles a gun. He thinks homosexuals should have the civil and legal rights that everybody else does and he says so in public so often that many stolid Phoenix Republicans think he's a disgrace to his party. A thought that simply makes him chuckle.

Most of these thoughts except about the character of the new men, he's expressed often since he retired from the Senate seven years ago, but most recently and pithily to a journalist colleague Lynn Rosellini who's just written a salute to a reminder that the massive triumph over the Republicans in November is really the triumph of Barry Goldwater 25 years in the making. Some say 30 years, revelling in the privilege of hindsight they refer you to a speech given over television from Los Angeles, listen to the biography of that speaker.

On 27 October 1964, a washed up 53-year-old movie actor named Ronald Reagan made a speech on behalf of a Republican presidential candidate who had no chance of being elected. Reagan knew that his speech had no chance of changing the outcome; most of his address was standard anti-government boilerplate larded with emotional denunciations of communism and a celebration of individual freedom. His statistics were sweeping and in some cases dubious, he quoted from nearly everybody from Franklin Roosevelt, Karl Marx, Plutarch, you name him.

It was not the speech, but the way it was delivered that made it remembered ruefully by Republicans as the only hit of the entire Republican campaign, it brought in a million dollars for Republican candidates. Far more important and significant for the future of the party, the speech given by John the Baptist Reagan on behalf of the coming saviour Goldwater shifted the spotlight back to the messenger.

The inner circle of Republican bigwigs all round the country in the shambles of the 1964 election forgot Goldwater overnight and talked about the coming man who took 16 years true to come to the White House, but came to the governorship of California only two years after that speech, was re-elected in 1970, missed the Republican nomination by a hair's breadth in '76, but four years later barrelled into the White House in a landslide. At 73, the oldest man ever to be elected president, the rest as the sports writers say after the most recent goal is history.

When it's pointed out to enthusiastic Republican historians that during those 30 years if you like of the gradual steady move of the country towards conservatism, there was the huge interruption of Lyndon Johnson with his Civil Rights Bill and his Medicare and his war on poverty and then there was the strong kick-up of Jimmy Carter's presidency and how about the triumph of Bill Clinton? The answer they give is that November 1992 was a nostalgic backward look to Roosevelt's New Deal, to vast federal spending, to all the goodies of welfare and social security and food stamps and government mainly by and from Washington.

Whether this is true or false, it's the way the incoming Republican government as distinct from the continuing Clinton administration is interpreting the election returns. It may well be the true interpretation, but I keep reminding myself that in the recent congressional election, the verdict was rendered by about 60% of the people who voted. And the people who voted were about a third of the numbers who vote in a presidential election. That means that in November we heard the verdict of about one fifth of the Americans likely to vote in the next presidential election, just a passing thought. If Senator Dole and the House Republican Leader Mr Gingrich and the other incoming Republican big shots are correct in their view that the people are sick of central government and want to leave the handling of crime and education, juvenile delinquency and homelessness and the reform of welfare to the states, then they better show in the next two years that they're right, that less government from Washington is better government.

I hear suddenly again the echo of a speech given long ago to a huge crowd in a stadium in California against a purple sky after the sun had gone down and a lazy wind wafted in the smell of the eucalyptus trees. I have always stood for government that is limited and balanced and against every concentration of government in Washington. The words are the words of Thomas Jefferson, the voice was that of Barry Goldwater. From him and another 86-year-old, I wish you a Happy and, better, a Healthy New Year.

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