Since this is basically political, let’s move it to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Since U.S. Navy ships routinely carry nuclear weapons and the U.S. Navy has a significant presence there I’m not sure how this would not have been an inevitability.
Notably with the “Daisy Girl” commercial, one of the most famous - and probably effective - political ads ever made.
Johnson’s campaign was so effective, in the “Daisy Girl” ad and in his slogans, it has essentially ‘won’ the battle for the historical narrative. If Goldwater is remembered in the popular conciousness, is is as a dangerous cold warrior - a would-be presidential Colonel Ripper.
I guess the real issue is this: how fair a portrait of the man is this?
Johnson was famous for his “pig-fucking” of political foes (the legend [which may not be literally true 
] goes that, early in his career, Johnson had his aides spread a story that a rival of his liked to have sex with pigs - an aide responded “Christ, Lyndon, we can’t call the guy a pigfucker. It isn’t true.” To which LBJ supposedly replied “Of course it ain’t true, but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it.”)
Is this reputation of Goldwater an example of that - or is it, essentially, true? I know he made comments about using nukes in Vietnam, which definitely adds weight to the “nuts” camp!
Amazingly effective. It literally only ran once, but it’s about the most well-known political television ad in American political history.
I recall seeing it during the campaign, but it must have been being discussed on another program rather than being shown as a commercial.
Yes. The campaign only ran it once. Every other time anybody saw it was on the news or discussion panel shows. There’s still some uncertainty whether pulling the ad was a strategy of the Johnson campaign to GET it onto the news and discussion shows or whether the campaign really was prompted by the widespread shock at the bluntness of the ad to pull it.
At the time, the Republican party had a moderate and even progressive wing - delegates famously walked out of the Republican convention during the 1964 convention.
Nixon had received 32 percent of the black vote in 1960 and blacks made up 1% of the delegates in 1964. They were appalled by Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and his Southern strategy - remember this is the party of Lincoln that we’re talking about.
From Geoffrey Kabaservice’s Rule or Ruin. The Republican Senator from New York, Kenneth Keating, denounced Goldwater but did not bolt the party: he said, “The Republican party is bigger than one man or one Convention… In the past, Republicanism has been almost synonymous with moderation. Senator Goldwater cannot expect to win the support of a broad cross-section of Republicans by his attacks on moderation and his defense of extremism, whether in our foreign or domestic policies.” Over the long haul of course, Keating’s wing disappeared.
Let’s be clear about something. Goldwater didn’t merely vote against the Civil Rights Act. He campaigned against it vociferously, making inflammatory charges that it would lead to a, “Federal police state of mammoth proportions”, and create an “Informer psychology”. The NAACP had a response of course, Mississippi at the time already was a police state after all.
Moderates supported late entrant Bill Scranton, Governor of Pennsylvania. Scranton’s campaign, “…lambasted Goldwater’s calls to make Social Security voluntary, drop atomic bombs in Asia, break diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and repeal income tax laws.” In Atlanta he drew crowds hailing the New South and attacked those, “…who would reopen old wounds by phony invocation of the Constitution or by comparison of the Federal Government of the United States with a police state dictatorship.”
Scranton received his bump in the polls, but he was too late. Goldwater was nominated and modern conservatism was born at the national level.
Even back in 1964, Goldwater was seen as someone with intelligence and personal integrity – but whose ideas were outside the mainstream.
Here’s a Goldwater campaign brochure from 1964.
Naturally, most of what it says is long on rhetoric and short on specifics. But he does get very specific on a couple of points when it gets to Civil Rights.
Ironically, Goldwater was a longtime member of the Urban League and had been a member of the NAACP until “they began calling me an S.O.B.”
Goldwater was one of a number of Republicans whoopposed Medicare.
Here’s a 1963 profile on Goldwaterwhich talks about some of his more noted stances, including selling the Tennessee Valley Authority and “effete Easterners.”
Goldwater got into a heated exchange with Defense Secretary McNamara over the effectiveness of missiles. Goldwater favored bomber airplanes and attacked McNamara’s support for missiles as the “stupidest statement” a Defense Secretary had ever made.
He called for the US to drop out of the UN.
During the Republican primary campaign, he referred to Nelson Rockefeller as the candidate of the “radical left”, and criticized him for doing business with China.
He voted against the Civil Rights Act, calling it unconstitutional.
He wanted Social Security to be optional.
He wanted to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority.
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn’t belong.
Goldwater’s insistence on civil rights being a matter for individual states was not only wrong-headed but political suicide as well. Public opinion had swung heavily in favour of the civil rights movement that year, especially after the deaths of the Mississippi Three. Since some of the violence against the protestors was either state-sanctioned or the state turned a blind eye, Goldwater was, in effect, supporting the violence. Voters didn’t care about states’ rights in the matter; they just wanted the violence to stop.
(PBS aired a great documentary a few weeks ago on the events of the year 1964 and how they set the stage for American political and social life in the decades to come. The presidential campaign is a key pivoting point. Link, but I think it’s only available in the U.S.)
Let me get this straight. If you and I both support Political Cause X, and I go out and kill someone who doesn’t, you’re supporting violence against the political opposition? Or are you only doing so “in effect”, which means… what?
Assuming I’m parsing this correctly, I’ll just point out that you can support Cause X without using the sort of inflammatory apocalyptic dog-whistling rhetoric that tends to inspire violence. Like oh say, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” which pissed off enough Republicans to encourage some of them to walk out of the Republican convention hall. Sure, it’s a cliche now. It wasn’t then. Then there’s the talk of the Civil Rights Act turning the US into a police state. Sorta encourages the lawless, ya?
If your father thought that Goldwater was a fascist, then however, measured and intelligent and educated he might have been, he was just wrong on this one.
Goldwater said things that no-one else on the political scene was saying. He was in favor of very limited government, especially the federal government. That does not make a fascist, that is the opposite of a fascist. I can’t find a quote directly on the topic, but I think he would have also opposed the kind of corporate welfare that we have devolved into. Some of his views may have been naive or ill-considered, but they were not (this part is my opinion) motivated by anything underhanded or evil, like the kind of lust for power that motivates fascism.
On the military side, he was viewed as a dangerous hawk, and I would probably have opposed him if I could have voted at the time on those grounds, since he didn’t do much to effectively deny it. And yet look what we got from the man who was elected - a vicious, brutal, useless war that tore our country apart (not to mention the one where the fighting took place). I wonder if Goldwater would have had more sense, or at least would not have lied his way into it like Johnson did.
Roddy
I partially agree with Roderick Femm: Goldwater was certainly saying things that nobody else was saying. Like advocating the use of nuclear weapons in Asia, which besides from being a really bad idea is arguably a war crime given the context. Propping up white supremacy in the south with coded and not so coded language was also unique in its own way. And yet people called him a fascist, at a time when the racial and militaristic policies of Nazi Germany were within living memory of most adults. Imagine!
When Goldwater warned of a police state he assumed something that didn’t happen: effective enforcement of the Civil Rights act against ordinary people. In order for that to actually happen, you would need a police state.
This thread is the first time that I’ve heard “in your guts, you know he’s nuts” and I’m a student of political history.
I can’t find any evidence that Johnson was the one who parodied Goldwater’s slogan with the slogan “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that anyone associated with a political campaign would come up with, let alone the politician himself. It sounds like a comedian’s flippant offhand statement.