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Barry Morris Goldwater was a U.S. senator from Arizona from 1953 to 1965 and again from 1969 to 1987. Leading into the hiatus, he made an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1964, as the candidate of the Republican Party. At the time of his presidential campaign, Goldwater represented the far right wing of his party, and although he did not succeed in becoming president, he reshaped the Republican Party as a conservative institution and laid the foundation for its dominance of presidential politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.

Goldwater's great rival, Lyndon B. Johnson, who defeated him to gain the presidency in 1964, often characterized the senator from Arizona as a child in private conversations a seemingly strange description for such a tough-minded politician. But Johnson meant that he viewed Goldwater as primarily acting on principles, even ideals, and having little use for compromise or negotiation, rather than using the realpolitik approach that characterized Johnson's own style. Indeed, Goldwater was perfectly capable of holding political views and opinions that might well seem like unresolved mutual contradictions and did not necessarily base his ideas on rational analysis, favoring other sources of inspiration. He was more concerned with holding the "right" views, trusting that they would lead to beneficial outcomes. Goldwater expressed such a notion about himself in his 1964 campaign slogan: "In your heart you know he's right." He appealed to voters' moral sense rather than their reason.

One major theme of Goldwater's conservative ideology was opposition to Communism and Socialism. This meant not only a strong emphasis on defense against the cold war enemy of the Soviet bloc but also vigilance against Socialism in American political life. Though he himself never engaged in ideological investigations of government officials or others, Goldwater was one of the staunchest supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who used the investigative power of Congress to help create a paranoid fear of Communist infiltration and subversion in the United States, ruining the lives or careers of many innocent individuals.

Goldwater was one of the few not to vote to censure McCarthy after the press exposed his bullying tactics and demagoguery. Goldwater equally opposed what he viewed as socialistic government intervention in the economy through such programs as Social Security and Medicare. While he denounced such programs as early as his speech announcing his first candidacy for the Senate, in the same speech he promised not to actually cut the very same programs from which voters directly benefited. His practical position throughout his career was simply to attempt to slow the growth of the welfare state.

Although he was an experienced pilot by the time World War II broke out, Goldwater's poor vision debarred him from combat duty. Instead, he acted as a flight instructor and eventually as an air-ferry pilot, flying aircraft from the United States to frontline combat units around the world. He also flew supplies from India over the difficult Himalayan route to Chinese troops fighting the Japanese.

With this background, national defense was one of his primary concerns. Although he supported the peacetime expansion of the army during the cold war, he opposed the actual combat operations in Korea and Vietnam, considering them ill-advised wars entered into by Democratic administrations. He also opposed the space program and its original goal of landing on the moon as a purely scientific venture. He would have preferred to have the space program be run by the military for purely defensive purposes. Goldwater considered his lasting legacy to be two pieces of legislation passed during his last Senate term: the Goldwater- Nichols Act, reforming the command structure of the military to prevent underserviced rivalry, and legislation requiring the nascent cable-television industry to allow free access to citizens so that political and other views could be voiced in an unfettered matter.

References:

1. Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.

2. Lokos, Lionel. Hysteria 1964: The Fear Campaign against Barry Goldwater. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1967.

3. Middendorf, J. William. A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

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