Barry Goldwater Recordings

Barry Goldwater
(1909 – 1998)

Born in 1909 in the Arizona Territory before Arizona became the forty—eighth state, Barry Goldwater was raised in a multi religious family where his father was Jewish and he was raised in the Episcopalian Church.  Of Religion, Goldwater said "If a man acts in a religious way, an ethical way, then he's really a religious man and it doesn't have a lot to do with how often he gets inside a church."  

Because of his poor grades in his freshman year of high school, Goldwater's parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia.  As a student there he was involved in varsity football, basketball, track, and swimming.  During his senior year he served as class treasurer and by the time he graduated in 1928, Barry Goldwater had attained the rank of captain.  He was enrolled at the University of Arizona but dropped out after one year not having obtained a college degree.  Instead he went to work in his family's department store and taken over the family business by 1936, although not very enthusiastic about running the business.

As the United States entered World War II, Goldwater had received a reserve commission to the Army Air Force.  Like George McGovern, he would be trained as a pilot.  Goldwater was assigned to the Ferry Command.  This was an outfit that flew aircrafts and supplies to war zones around the world.  One of his most dangerous assignments was flying what was called "The Hump."  He flew directly over the Himalayas to deliver desperately need supplies to the Republic of China.  After the war, Goldwater was one of the proponents in wanting to create the United States Air Force and as Colonel, he founded the Arizona Air National Guard.  In 1946, two years before Harry S Truman ordered the United States military desegregated, Barry Goldwater ordered the Arizona Air National Guard desegregated.  He was a big proponent in pushing the Pentagon to desegregate the military.  By the time he retired from the Arizona Air National Guard in 1967, Barry Goldwater had flown 165 different types of aircrafts including piloting the B-52 Stratofortress.  He retired at the rank of major general.  As a United States Senator, Barry Goldwater had in his office a sign which read, "There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots."

In a state which was largely Democratic at the time, Barry Goldwater adopted a more conservative point of view, particularly when it came to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  He had even befriended Herbert Hoover.  He would enter Phoenix politics in 1949 when he was elected to the city council as part of a team of nonpartisan candidates dedicated to cleaning up prostitution and gambling.  This group of elected officials would win every mayoral and council race for the next two decades.  It was also at this time that Barry Goldwater began rebuilding a weak Republican Party.

Racially, he was very liberal.  Goldwater was a member of the NAACP, and when he took over the family store had desegregated the store.  As mentioned before, as the founder of the Arizona Air National Guard, he had desegregated it two years before President Truman had desegregated the US military in 1948.  Goldwater even worked with the Phoenix public schools to desegregate the schools a year before the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education.  He was a member of the Phoenix Chapter of the Urban League and even covered some of their deficits with his personal funds.

In 1952, Barry Goldwater in the Great Eisenhower Sweep defeated Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland in a seat to the United States Senate.  In the forty years since statehood, Barry Goldwater was only the second Republican to represent Arizona in the United States Senate.  He would gain a reputation while in the Senate as the Grand Old Man of the Republican Party and showing that he was one of the nation's most respected exponents of conservatives.  

Goldwater did have his criticisms of his Party's president during the 1950s.  He felt that Eisenhower was compromising too much with the Democratic Party.  He opposed Eisenhower's $71.8 billion budget stating, "Now, however, I am not so sure.  A $71.8 billion budget not only shocks me, but it weakens my faith."  He also opposed Eisenhower's nomination of Earl Warren to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  As for his stance on civil rights, Goldwater desegregated the Senate cafeteria insisting that his legislative assistant, Katherine Maxwell be served with all of the other Senate employees.  When it came to desegregating the schools in the south, Goldwater supported it, but wanted the individual states to set their own standards and not have the federal government intrude.  He opposed the use of federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine into Central High School in 1957.  He did vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which included an establishment of a commission on civil rights, provided for an additional assistant Attorney General, it strengthened civil rights statutes and other purposes, it further secured and protected the right to vote, and it provided trial by jury and amended the judicial code.  He also supported the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution which states…

Section 1:  The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

However, in 1964, he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the floor of the Senate after supporting it in committee.  Goldwater cited that his disagreed with Title II and Title VII of the bill which dealt with employment.  Goldwater felt that these two sections would allow for the government to tell employers whom to hire and whom to fire, but Republican support in both Houses of Congress, including Representative Bob Dole of Kansas supported the bill.  Only five other Republican senators joined Barry Goldwater in voting no.

As Senator Goldwater's Senate career moved forward he viewed as a political maverick which is interesting is that is what his immediate successor in 1987; John McCain ran as a political maverick in the Presidential Election of 2008.  This was making Goldwater popular among suburban Republicans mainly in the south and west.  In 1960, Goldwater had written CONSCIENCE OF A CONSERVATIVE and its success made him the frontrunner to go up against President John F. Kennedy in 1964.  Like with Richard Nixon in 1947 when he came to the House of Representatives, Kennedy and Goldwater formed a friendship when they came to the Senate together in 1953. 

Kennedy and Goldwater were planning in 1963 to travel around the country together during the Presidential Election of 1964 holding Lincoln-Douglas style debates.  Their goal was to avoid a campaign defined by negative attacks that had been increasingly defining American politics.  But, all of that changed on November 22, 1963 when the President was assassinated in Dallas.  These events made Goldwater severely grief stricken about the murder of his friend.  He was also not happy about having to campaign against Lyndon Johnson because as a Senate Majority Leader, Goldwater said of LBJ, "he used every dirty trick in the bag."  

Goldwater's brand of conservatism that fit the south and the west was feeling rifts among what were referred to as Rockefeller Republicans; which were more moderate to liberal Republicans in the Northeast and the Midwest.  The Primary would see Goldwater running against such moderates such as Nelson Rockefeller (later Vice President under Gerald Ford and the last incumbent Vice President to not seek re-election and being replaced by Senator Bob Dole) of New York, George Romney (his son, Mitt Romney would be the Republican Nominee in 2012 to run against President Barack Obama) of Michigan, and William Scranton of Pennsylvania.  

This wing was scared of Goldwater's rhetoric of Anticommunist speech as well as his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  But after General Eisenhower endorsed him, Goldwater did secure the Nomination along with Representative William Miller of New York as Vice President.  They were set to go up against President Lyndon Johnson and Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in November.  Because of his struggle to emotionally recover from his grief after the Kennedy Assassination, Goldwater's popularity started to wain within the Republican Party.  He would lose the campaign in one of the largest landslides in history.

By 1968, thanks to his popularity, Barry Goldwater would return to the Senate where he would stay until his retirement in 1987.  The most famous story in this time took place in the summer of 1974 when Senator Goldwater was part of a Republican delegation to visit President Richard Nixon as Watergate was heating up where only twelve senators would vote for acquittal in an impeachment trial, telling the President it was time to go.

Barry Goldwater lived out the remainder of his life speaking out more as a libertarian against the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s which Goldwater founded back in 1964, and supporting gays in the military.  He also enjoyed time on his ham radio.

On May 29, 1998, Barry Goldwater died at his home in Arizona.