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Tiger Research 65

I never believed that anything I said publicly about the conservative philosophy was particularly inspired. I was born and raised a conservative. I didn't know any other way to think. As I grew up, I began to read and discuss new conservative literature. These "conservative doctrines" seemed to me to be as much a part of life as walking down the street or watering your horse. I never understood people who described such beliefs as unique or novel. But then, I never bought FDR. My wife and mother witnessed the ceremony—simple, brief, but inspiring—for the second Republican senator from Arizona since it had become a state. On February 18 I spoke for the first time as a senator. My speech, which was not much longer than my oath of office, was against federal price supports for the cattle industry. On May 12, four months after assuming office, I delivered my first major speech on the Senate floor. It was a long attack on federal price controls. President Eisenhower sent me a three-word accolade through a White House aide, "Atta boy, Barry."

I had hoped to be named to the Senate Armed Services Committee, but as a freshman I was named instead to Labor and Public Welfare and to Commerce and Banking. There were few conservatives in Congress during those days. Although Dwight D. Eisenhower had become the first Republican president in twenty years, the nation was still moving left. Liberalism dominated not only the country's political and educational lives but the media. It was extremely difficult for a conservative to be heard, much less understood. From those early days in the Senate, I never accepted the notion that conservatism was a primer for the past—that we did not have a vision of or faith in the future. We saw tomorrow in the hands of the many, not the self-anointed few. For forty years, the nation's liberals had conjured up false conservative, capitalistic stereotypes—of selfish people with inordinate wealth, intellectually rooted in a dead yesterday, a contradiction to the challenges of the new atomic age. Instead, liberals would plan our lives for us under the banner of Democratic administrations and the ever greater flow of federal largesse. They would build the Great Societies of the future.

Behind all the promises of the planners lay a cynical contempt for the individual freedoms which make Americans different from most of their contemporaries around the world. My political mission was to restore the emphasis on those individual freedoms despite the welfare state. It was also a private promise to one man—Barry Goldwater. And maybe to those beleaguered souls who shared another vision of America—not the New Dealers who would legalize their direction of our lives under the guise of economic grants and other giveaways, but conservatives who would free us from the grip of federal bureaucracy and inspire us to control more of our own destiny. I sought no less than a new order and direction for American society. It seemed at the time like a cry in the wilderness. My aim was to make it a national cause. In a phrase, conservatives wanted to free the country from Roosevelt's economic, social, and political engineers. In 1988 these are respectable political views. In 1953 they were revolutionary rhetoric.

Despite the hopes of the freshman senator from Arizona, these high-minded thoughts quickly floated down from the political clouds to reality. Ohio's Senator Bob Taft, the GOP minority leader, wanted a businessman—citizen Goldwater—on the Labor and Commerce committees. It was that simple. The decision was a stroke of fortune. In 1955 the labor issue would propel me into national attention. I began attacking big labor's sweeping influence in Congress. The rank-and-file membership of unions was being forced to contribute to Democratic Party candidates. I criticized the political slush funds of the bosses, not the trade union movement or its membership. Various kickbacks and other abuses of union welfare funds began to surface in Congress and elsewhere. Union leadership tried hard to keep the lid on, but Congress launched the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. The media later dubbed it the McClellan Rackets Committee after our Democratic chairman, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas. Senator John F. Kennedy was on the committee. His brother Robert became chief counsel.

The national television networks began broadcasting the hearings live after dramatic confrontations erupted between the eight-member committee and union bosses Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa. The hearings disclosed how Beck, the West Coast chief of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from the union. They also revealed his kickbacks to certain large companies and other similar maneuvers. Beck was later sentenced to prison on graft and corruption charges. The Kennedys took on Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster kingpin himself. They attempted to link him with beatings, intimidation, even killings. I questioned both Beck and Hoffa at length, but the Kennedy-Hoffa fight was merciless. It was a battle of ruthless tactics, mutual threats and bitter personal exchanges. Bobby Kennedy had every top enforcement weapon of the federal government at his command, from the FBI to the Senate's own investigators, and he used them without mercy. Bobby and Jimmy Hoffa didn't like one another. They exploded in sharp exchanges inside and outside the committee—in corridor confrontations and phone calls and through emissaries. The personal vendetta would have made some legendary Western gunfights seem like children's bedtime stories.

Bobby was right in seeing that Hoffa was giving the entire labor movement a black eye. Hoffa ruled the union by muscle and employers by threats—and acts—of violence. Bobby was doing the labor movement's dirty work, cleaning up its house for them. It was only after Bobby beat Hoffa at his own game—the bully on the block—that Hoffa and his men were expelled from the AFL-CIO. I and other GOP members of the committee tried to fire up a similar investigation of Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers. The Kennedys, because of Reuther's strong financial and other support of Democrats, backed away from investigating the UAW in depth. It fell to me to do it. I went into Detroit, the UAW's home territory, and made two speeches assailing how unions in general and the UAW in particular were abusing the workingman's trust. Reuther blasted back by calling me a "fanatic" and the country's "number one anti-labor baiter." The battle made national headlines for a year. The hearings, with more than 1,500 witnesses filling forty volumes of testimony, outraged millions of Americans. In 1958, when I came up for reelection, organized labor named me its number one enemy. They poured men and money into an all-out fight but failed to defeat me. Their funds and manpower had little or no effect because organized labor had long been viewed with suspicion in Arizona. Convictions for corruption among its leaders and a growing number of criminal charges against them also hurt their campaign against me.

In 1959 President Eisenhower and most senators supported a labor reform bill written by Senators John Kennedy and Sam Ervin, both Democrats. The bill passed, ninety-five to one. I was the lone opponent, calling the measure ineffective. That was the most significant vote of my first term in the Senate. President Eisenhower took me aside at a White House reception and asked why I had voted against the bill. His aides had advised him it was a reasonable compromise. I told Ike the measure was a fraud for three reasons: It did little to reverse the control of unions by organized crime; it was too weak and ineffective to deal with union corruption; and, finally, it provided no real protection against secondary boycotts. Unions not involved would battle employers to aid their colleagues and would expect similar help when they wanted it. The President asked his staff to check out the proposal more thoroughly. They did and agreed with my conclusion. To his credit, Ike went on national television and attacked the Kennedy-Ervin bill as weak and inadequate.

The Senate took up the measure again and did a flip-flop, voting ninety-five to two against the Kennedy-Ervin bill—one of the most stunning reversals I ever saw in the Senate. The Landrum-Griffin bill—a still inadequate but tougher version that had been adopted by the House—was finally approved. I voted for it as something better than nothing. I learned a lot about the Kennedys during the maneuvering on those bills. I kicked myself for not having recognized what they were doing earlier. They had backed away from delving into Reuther's questionable use of UAW funds and similar activities because the nation's top labor boss could hurt them politically. None of us on the committee knew it at the time, but the Kennedys were already laying the groundwork for Jack's run for the White House in 1960. Reuther had to be let alone at all costs. That is one reason why I eventually considered running against Kennedy for the presidency. One big battle would be over the changing role of organized labor in American society. The broad corruption of union leadership was masked by a self-serving loyalty to Democratic candidates. Union bosses were bribing the Democrats with millions of votes so they could not only hold up employers but steal from their own members. Events have justified my concerns, but I was hit with a lot of personal and political abuse at the time.

In the years that have passed, unions have increased their financial help to the Democrats. They have every right to do so, but the pervasive influence of such money is making reelection to Congress even more of a spoils system. Another development appears even more significant. Union leadership has manipulated the union apparatus so that it has taken on more and more of the operations of a political party. This is not merely peer pressure to vote Democratic but phoning voters, driving them to the polls, and other work that is constantly increasing. Unions are always prepared to offer campaign funds and receive support as an organized, militant constituency. They still strike fear and foreboding into politicians because they have effectively been the third most powerful political party in this country for the past half century. The power of unions has clearly diminished and continues to fall; membership is smaller and its political muscle weaker. To a significant degree, the effectiveness of union leadership pressure on members to vote Democratic has lessened. So, too, has the unions' ability to hide how they spend their money.

I was convinced it was necessary to fight unions in the trenches—no surrender and no negotiated peace. In those days, unions were tough. When they fought, they went to war. I respected that. I did the same. My fights with unions have never ceased. Various union leaders have accused me of all kinds of nefarious deeds over the years, the most notorious being the claim that I was personally involved with union racketeers. On the morning of November 4, 1955, a man by the name of William Nelson started his truck, and it exploded outside his Phoenix home. It was soon discovered that Nelson was really Willie Bioff, a convicted labor racketeer. He had previously turned state's evidence and sent other underworld figures to prison. Bioff had been a muscle man for unions in Chicago, New York, and Hollywood. He began to receive national attention when some film studios accused him of forcing payoffs under threat of union trouble. Bioff later admitted he had extorted more than $1 million from movie producers alone.

My acquaintance with Bioff began during my senatorial campaign in 1952. My wife's uncle Paul Davies brought a man named Bill Nelson by our store to meet me. The two apparently knew one another fairly well. After I was elected, Nelson returned and asked if I remembered him. I said that I did and recalled he had sent a check for $1,300 to my campaign headquarters. Nelson said, "My real name is Willie Bioff." I knew the name vaguely from the newspapers but didn't connect it with any illegal union activities. Bioff seemed a pleasant individual and asked me out golfing and to his home. My wife and I saw nothing wrong in it, although we didn't know him well. Her uncle had mentioned that Bioff often played golf with members of the FBI, and that at least one judge went to his home. I met Bioff several times over the next few years. After we got to know each other socially, he began to explain how unions used enforcers to get what they wanted from their membership and various businesses. That's when the red flag went up. I asked him how he knew all this. Bioff said he had worked for various unions, but he didn't reveal his background. Needless to say, with all the battles I was having with union leadership, I found these discussions more than interesting. I didn't break off the talks but decided to find out more about him. Peggy and I didn't see Bioff and his wife again until a chance encounter one night at the Las Vegas airport.

We had gone there since I was a speaker at a convention of the American Mining Congress. When we met, Bioff mentioned they were having trouble getting back to Phoenix since their commercial flight had been delayed by mechanical problems. He asked how we were returning. I said we had rented a plane, and I was flying it back. They asked to hitch a ride, and we said okay. I realized how it might look—here was the crusader against union abuses chauffeuring a union racketeer out of Las Vegas. So I phoned columnist Westbrook Pegler, who had written a lot about Bioff, and explained what had happened. Pegler dismissed the incident as unimportant. As best as I can recall, he never wrote a word about it. A book _(The Green Felt Jungle)_ later attempted to establish a close link between me, my friend Harry Rosenzweig, Bioff, and Gus Greenbaum, a Las Vegas racketeer. Greenbaum was stabbed to death with his wife at their Phoenix home in 1958. The fact is, as major Phoenix store owners and political figures, Harry and I knew many people in the city. Greenbaum had operated a Phoenix grocery store before taking over a Las Vegas casino. We'd met him at various civic functions. He was, after all, a local resident.

In 1976, after Phoenix newspaper reporter Don Bolles was killed when his car blew up, out-of-town newsmen dug into my "association" with Bioff and Greenbaum. Bolles had been investigating organized crime just before he died. My brother, Bob, and Rosenzweig had often gone to Las Vegas to gamble. Both knew reputed mob figures there. Neither has ever denied it. However, _The Green Felt Jungle_ and subsequent newspaper articles tried to link me to these figures simply because my brother and a friend knew them. Presumably, I might be guilty of something. In all these years, despite the book and similar innuendos in the press, the media have been careful to avoid a specific charge that I have obtained any favors from Nevada gambling operations. They write by suggestion. Some have even suggested I may have chased Las Vegas showgirls. Again, innuendo and implication, never a charge. That is one of the rotten aspects of journalism, publishing rumor and then burying corrections in a few lines of type or seconds of broadcast time that rarely receive equal prominence. I believe the media should live by a more honorable code. They should publicly apologize for errors that reflect adversely on anyone, explain how or why they made the error, and offer that retraction in a position of equal prominence in the print media or the same time slot for radio and television. They should be forced to live by the same accountability as do all public figures.

Other union allegations in the book and other media were a crude attempt to embarrass me as a Jew. It was claimed that Phoenix had a Jewish Mafia that was closely linked to the Nevada underworld and other vice. My family and other Jews who came to Arizona established a long, clear record of hard work and exceptional public service in the state, far beyond their small number. Jews began arriving here in 1854, at the time of the Gadsden Purchase, when the United States bought some thirty thousand square miles of Arizona and New Mexico for $10 million from Mexico. They came to Arizona from New York and Philadelphia, Illinois and Kansas, as well as Colorado and California, like my grandfather and uncle. They became cattlemen and timbermen. Some traded with the Indians. Many forgot their heritage—their Jewishness—because they were more concerned with hitching up their wagons and gunbelts in the raw territory. There was never a Jewish group of any kind in the state until the Tombstone Hebrew Association was formed in 1861. Only about five hundred Jews lived in Arizona in 1907. By 1920, when I was eleven years old, there were fewer than 1,200 Jews here.

Jews were elected to leadership posts throughout the state without any real alliance among themselves or a single report of anti-Semitism among those early settlers. In addition to my family, other Jews elected to public office in those days were Emil Ganz, twice elected mayor of Phoenix, and A. Leonard Meyer, who served in the same post. Jews were also elected to top offices in Tucson and other towns. Harry and Newton Rosenzweig have held virtually every public service post in the Valley of the Sun over the past fifty years. Jews always mixed in the community. There was never a Jewish ghetto in Phoenix or any other Arizona city. The Valley of the Sun has been remarkably free of anti-Semitism or similar intolerance, although there have been a few exceptions. When I came home from World War II, there were about three thousand Jews in the Phoenix area. They had two temples with one rabbi at each. The valley now has about 45,000 Jews with eighteen synagogues and twenty-four rabbis. The Phoenix metro area ranks nineteenth in the country in Jewish population. Nearly half the Jewish residents have arrived in the past decade. Jews now settle in Phoenix in larger numbers than any other group.

Neither my father nor any of our family ever took any part in the Jewish community. We never felt or talked about being half Jewish since my mother took us to the Episcopal church. It was only on entering the power circles of Washington that I was reminded I was a Jew. I never got used to being singled out in that way. My answer was always the same. I'm proud of my ancestors and heritage. I've simply never practiced the Jewish faith or seen myself or our family as primarily of the Jewish culture. In the jargon of today's sociologists, we've been assimilated. We're Americans. The allegations about Jews were part of a larger political war. If even a vague rumor could be floated that I, my family, or some Jewish friends might be enriching ourselves through the underworld, union bosses might be able to put a leash on the old bulldog from Arizona because he'd be compromised. It's one of the oldest political tricks in the book. I'm surprised that some reporters were that gullible. I haven't enriched myself either in the U.S. Senate or in private life. I have never taken a dime of payola. I don't know how to be any clearer than that. In fact, odd as it may seem, money has never had any particular attraction for me.

Peggy and I were unable to make ends meet on my Senate salary. Over the years, we spent about $1 million of my and her savings to pay our bills. Part of that came from my share in the sale of the three Goldwaters stores to the Associated Dry Goods Company of New York in 1962. We had been grossing some $7 million a year since the early 1960s and had about six hundred employees. The new owners kept the name Goldwaters, so we were pleased. Neither of us ever viewed spending these savings as a personal loss, nor did we discuss it outside the family. The two of us simply chose to live our lives as we did. We built a big home in Phoenix because we had a large family. We collected some fine Western art. Also, we purchased an apartment in Washington. The money involved was relatively little by today's standards. The property has increased in value over some thirty-five years to perhaps $3 million today. All of that will go to our four children and ten grandchildren. If I've made money from organized crime, or even from a legitimate business investment, such as real estate, I'd like some prospector to come up on my hill and find it for me. I can put the funds to good use.

I believe the old union bosses and the Mafia, wherever they may be, would consider me a financial flop. I wouldn't argue the point with them. I look back on my battles with the country's union leadership as worthwhile. There have been major changes in union operations, from the handling of pension funds to greater accountability by their officials. My fight was never with rank-and-file membership. I am not and have never been antiunion and indeed have been a union member myself. I'm against some of their crooked officials and the manipulation of their membership for the leadership's own purposes, particularly political regimentation. Organized labor has lost some 3 million members in the past decade. The sharp decline occurred while the total number of American workers increased. The downward spiral actually began in the late 1950s. There are many reasons for the drop in membership, from the decline of U.S. smokestack industries to the rise of nonunion firms when the transportation industry was deregulated. Foreign imports are a big factor, as is the increase of less well organized service industries. In my view, the corruption and arrogance of union leadership have also played a role.

Friends have asked me why I waged some of the wars. Many of the senators around me were so much more seasoned and capable of taking on powerful opponents—established leaders like Walter George and Richard Russell of Georgia, Everett Dirksen and Paul Douglas of Illinois, John Stennis and James Eastland of Mississippi, Homer Capehart and William Jenner of Indiana, Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson of Washington—to say nothing of standouts like Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, John Sparkman of Alabama, Mike Mansfield of Montana, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, Harry Byrd, Sr., of Virginia, and George Aiken of Vermont. This is not to suggest they didn't wage major battles too. They did. But the young senator from Arizona was an upstart. I wasn't in their class. Many of my colleagues considered me a wild Westerner. I simply felt I was right. I was to learn that integrity and fairness wear no party label. Hubert Humphrey, with whom I disagreed across the entire political spectrum, was one of the most honorable men I have met in my life. We respected one another in the common realm of human decency, so much so that each of us often joked about the other in public.

The day of Humphrey's funeral I was barely able to walk because of an operation, but I would not have stayed home even if I had to crawl. Hubert was a clean fighter. One of the big question marks in my early Senate life was my relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower. I was grateful to Ike from my first day on Capitol Hill because I had ridden into the Senate on his coattails in 1952. I genuinely liked Ike and saw him as the leader of new and big change in the country. However, my unwavering support of his leadership changed on April 8, 1957. It was a promising day. Weeks earlier, I had been invited to the White House not only for lunch but also cocktails to discuss my 1958 reelection campaign. It was also the day I attacked Ike's new federal spending plan. I was shocked by Eisenhower's proposed $71.8 billion annual federal budget. It was the largest peacetime budget in history. Like President Reagan, Ike was immensely popular with the American people. My speech on the Senate floor attacking the proposal was a big risk. I also had mixed emotions about the remarks because they criticized a friend.

Some of my GOP colleagues in the Senate passed the word that they couldn't figure out me or the speech, but there was nothing mysterious about what I had said. I had declared that Ike's budget "weakens my faith in the constant assurances we have received from this administration that its goal is to cut spending, balance the budget, reduce the national debt, cut taxes—in short, to live within our means and give our citizens the maximum personal benefits from their endeavors." I just didn't understand Ike. During the 1952 campaign he had said, in the clearest terms agreeing with Ohio Senator Robert Taft, that he'd reduce federal outlays to $60 billion by fiscal 1955. Yet he proposed to spend nearly $11 billion more than that in 1957. We were not at war, nor did the country face any national emergency necessitating such spending. I mentioned giving the address "with the deepest sorrow." Headlines proclaimed that Goldwater had broken with Eisenhower. That wasn't true. I wasn't about to pass up a White House lunch and cocktail party, and didn't. The word over the hors d'oeuvres was that Ike was upset with me.

We conservatives were determined to reverse the policies of "moderate" Republicans who were little more than "Me Too" Democrats. Eventually, frustrated because Ike and the "moderates" would not cut back their spending policies, I called the Eisenhower administration a "dime store New Deal" because of its expanding programs. It was quotable stuff and made more headlines. My fiscal policy differences with Ike were important. This was the start of a long public debate and the eventual conservative break with the party's so-called moderate wing, which was headed by New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Senator Jacob Javits, and others. Rocky and Javits, the "Me Too" Twins, claimed I was "alienating" liberal Republicans and was outside the American political mainstream—as defined by them. I waved a political good-bye to Javits and his fellow liberals by suggesting that Jake "go straight" and join the Democrats. Rockefeller was more circumspect in his attack. I knew we would eventually clash head on. He was only biding his time.

That dispute with Ike and fight with the moderates led to three significant developments over the next thirty-year period—my presidential nomination, the movement of Republican Party power from the Eastern seaboard to west of the Mississippi River, and finally the full flowering of the conservative movement during the two terms of President Reagan. The GOP is now undergoing further change. I have been, and am still, a traditional conservative, focusing on three general freedoms—economic, social, and political. My crucial difference with the Moral Majority is this: they are dividing Republicans, separating them into a host of single-issue groups that will ultimately do more to split than unite the party. That's precisely how the Democrats have wounded themselves. One of the enjoyable aspects of being a Republican, from the time I entered the Senate in 1953 to today, has been the fact that the conservative movement has constantly expanded its intellectual base. During my early years in the Senate, I was much influenced by the work of Professor F. A. Hayek, author of _The Road to Serfdom._

Russell Kirk's _The Conservative Mind,_ published the year I entered the Senate, was also important to me. Kirk gave the conservative viewpoint an intellectual foundation and respectability it had not attained in modern society. He assailed the planning mentality of the times. Kirk rightly said it undermined the role of the family and community. He declared that religion, family, and private property and its yield, as well as law and order, were the foundations of a conservative society. Kirk emphasized that social planning reduced the preeminence of the family and community. He also saw such planning as undercutting the rightful role of religion in attempting to solve many human problems. It substituted a humanistic, impermanent set of rules and aims that would, inevitably, make society unstable. I had long been disgusted with the liberal belief that earning a profit meant abusing workers. That employing a thousand workers was a form of exploitation, while planning the economic and other aspects of the lives of the same people was somehow a new holy calling. Hayek said it well: "Whoever controls economic activity controls the means for all our ends and must therefore decide which are to be satisfied and which are not. Economic control is not merely control of the sector of human life which can be separated from the rest. It is the control of the means for all our ends."

Of course, liberals do not admit these stark terms. They disguise their state-controlled plans and programs with vague promises. That was the high-flown rhetoric of all the New Dealers from Roosevelt to Truman, from Kennedy to Johnson and Carter. The aim of every one was the same—they would take your money and freedom to save you from yourself. In the 1950s my criticism of the New Deal was political heresy, despite President Eisenhower's being in the White House. The Democrats even claimed Ike was not really a Republican. They saw his election as the triumph of a war hero. In other words, the Republicans were still out of mainstream America. Conservatism was more than a cause. It was my creed, my life. Victory—control of both houses of Congress and the White House, which the Democrats had enjoyed for so long—was a distant trumpet, perhaps to be heard only in my dreams. Yet conservatives were making progress. _National Review_ was begun by William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955. The lively, intellectual, often irreverent magazine burst on us like a spring shower, proclaiming that the liberals were all wet.

World-class economists like Milton Friedman and writers like Ayn Rand opened a new conservative horizon. The weekly newspaper _Human Events_ and the monthly magazine _The Freeman_ lifted conservatives from the doldrums of defeat to new hopes of recapturing some of the nation's political high ground. We were sowing the seeds for the breakup of the Republican Eastern establishment, which included most of the Wall Street crowd and corporate executives, as well as their old boy network, which extended throughout much of the Midwest. Conservatives no longer accepted being sent up and down the corporate elevator while the board chairmen and presidents decided whom to run on the party ticket. It was an incredible feeling. We had a voice, a chorus of articulate new voices challenging not only the Democratic Party but also what had become a GOP political dynasty. It has always been difficult for me to comprehend why the media never understood the conservative groundswell in the decade from 1953 to 1963. Some have suggested that reporters centered their attention on Eisenhower's "moderation" and saw no conservative undercurrents. I believe the media simply blew the real story, primarily because they had become lazy in covering the GOP and biased toward the Democratic Party, which had held power for so long.

But the signs of change in the GOP were evident. Governor Rockefeller, after announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, was the principal speaker at the Western Republican Conference in Los Angeles. He delivered a "Me Too" speech—more of the New and Fair Deals—to polite applause. I took the stage with an all-out attack on the liberal voting record of the Democrats and "Me Too" Republicans. The Democrats were still dispensing their old "something for nothing" syrup, the patent medicine of the past. The speech was important because I made no concessions to the Republicans who had joined the Democratic parade to the public trough. The attack on Rocky and his so-called moderates could not have been clearer: "My kind of Republican Party is committed to a free state, limited central power, a reduction in bureaucracy, and a balanced budget." I sat down, and the crowd stood up. The ovation was thunderous. We were sending a message: Conservatives were going to fight the liberals and moderates for the soul of the party. The revolt on the right had begun.

5 Revolt on the Right Five simple words tell it all—no one wanted the job. So in 1955 my GOP colleagues chose me—with only two years' experience in the Senate—to be the new chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. The post opened the way to the GOP presidential nomination. I had no idea of what was being set in motion—which turned out to be perhaps the most turbulent clash in Republican Party history. We were living in an era of enormous expectations. There was no end in sight to building America and reconstructing the free world. Some called it the new Industrial Revolution. Others referred to it as the atomic age. The world was witnessing the birth of new nations faster than it could spell their names. But the Iron Curtain was now a permanent wall separating East and West. Much of the East was still in ashes. Part of the Soviet Union had been destroyed. The new heirs of Stalin were bent on further destruction, suppressing freedom in Russia and among her neighbors. China's leaders had unbound the feet of millions of women but bound the masses—hundreds of millions—to communism through threats and terror.

The Communists launched the Korean war in 1950 to test the American and free world's staying power in Asia. That faraway battlefield left more than 50,000 Americans dead and political bitterness here at home. We did not try to win the war in Korea. It was the first time in U.S. history that an American President sent men into battle and tied their hands. The open, expansive American character began questioning itself and its motives: Why had we gone to Korea? Was it only a "conflict," or was it really a war? Why hadn't we won—or at least tried to win? If America's age of innocence ended with the War in Vietnam, it began disintegrating with disillusionment in Korea. America was riding the crest of sweeping change. A baby boom exploded. Millions of Americans left rural areas and migrated to the big cities. Millions more moved from the Northeast and Midwest to the West and South, changing the population and political patterns of the country. GOP conservatives slowly began to emerge as a voice in the party and country. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the ultraconservative John Birch Society caused party feuds and other divisions. Ultimately, they became an excuse for many liberal Republicans to split from the GOP. President Truman's no-win policies in Korea spilled over into Vietnam. Finally, conservatives and liberals fought a fierce party battle for control of the GOP. Now, looking back more than three decades, the memory of that beginning still makes the old ticker pump faster.

No wonder my colleagues ducked the senatorial campaign chairmanship. It was a grueling, unrewarding, unglamorous job. The exhausting two-year responsibility was spread across the country—raising funds, rallying the party faithful, exhorting conservatives in particular to remain steadfast in the hope of better days, and blasting the Democrats in a GOP bid to retake control of the Senate and House. Eisenhower carried us to power in the Senate—the GOP already held the House—as a result of his sweeping 1952 presidential victory over Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. Unfortunately, we lost control of both houses in the 1954 elections. My aim was to strengthen the party in general and our Senate chances in particular. It was also a good opportunity to get to know our grass roots leaders, our problems and strengths, and see if we could move the party in a more conservative direction. It would be foolish for me to suggest that my own fate wasn't tied to strengthening the conservatives. I was paying my dues to the party—paying rent for my space—and the future would take care of itself. As the old saying goes, "You play the cards dealt you."

The thought of taking names of or notes on people who might later be personally helpful never occurred to me. To my knowledge, no previous chairman had used the post as a political launching pad to higher office. It would also have been wrong. Goldwater was sent around the country to blow not his own horn but that of his colleagues and the party in general. However, the Senatorial Campaign Committee chairmanship in both parties was to become more important as a result of my upgrading the post. The travel and hours were incredibly long. An iron man would barely have had enough strength to keep going. I'd sometimes wake up not knowing what city I was in or whom I was speaking to that morning, noon, or night. At times, my greatest hope was that my stomach and weary bones would survive the endless travel, tasteless meals, and lonely hotel rooms. My strength and spirit were sometimes so low that I questioned whether the party in general and we conservatives in particular were making any progress at all. There were few of us in those days. Republican liberals had accepted many of the New Deal's reforms of the 1930s and 1940s as permanent. We conservatives agreed that there were major differences with the Democrats, but we were disappointed that there was not more emphasis on big cutbacks in liberal spending programs. For the GOP, the issues were the threat of communism at home and abroad, corruption within the administration of President Harry Truman, and Truman's no-win policies in Korea.

Despite Eisenhower capturing the White House and the GOP controlling Congress, many Eastern Republicans continued to concede the New Deal changes of bigger, wider government. The Eastern GOP establishment was a pale imitation of the Democratic Party. It's important to understand who and what constituted this network. The establishment was centered in the boardrooms of virtually all major companies and businesses—banks, insurance firms, financial institutions, steel and auto companies, the works. If you were a chief executive officer, trustee, or board member of one of these companies, it was generally assumed you were a Republican. The biggest movers and shakers were an East Coast elite. Those from the heartland who rose in Republican circles—Tom Dewey from Michigan and Wendell Willkie from Indiana—did so only when they went East. Dewey became identified with big business and most of the New York establishment, while Willkie was a Wall Street lawyer. Dwight D. Eisenhower of Kansas became president of New York's Columbia University, but he didn't rise through party ranks.

On the social side, Republicans were club members—country clubs and other exclusive private groups. In those days you could not climb the heights if you were not from an Ivy League university or a member of some exclusive set. Other analysts of the political scene, such as Theodore White, saw the Eastern establishment in more specific terms—Wall Street, international finance, Madison Avenue, Harvard, the New York _Times,_ the Bankers Club, and Ivy League prep schools. These observers set the Easterners apart in three ways: wealth, executive ability, and professional responsibilities. White and others claimed we conservatives living beyond the Allegheny Mountains misunderstood these leaders—that they were men from all parts of the nation who had worked hard and had not changed their basic beliefs after ascending to the pinnacle of U.S. corporate and financial power. White and others were dead wrong. These men had changed—drastically. They represented big business, not our new populist movement.

White argued with me face to face that these bankers and other Eastern interests could no longer command the GOP because the Eastern establishment was not centralized. It was true that these men were divided in their competitive business world, but they were united in their politics—and their large campaign funding. They wanted a GOP nominee who focused on big business interests, not someone like Barry Goldwater, who was taking the party in an entirely new direction. Many of these establishment types had planted their feet in both camps—Democratic and Republican. They would, for example, support federal white collar welfare while condemning welfare waste among the poor. More and more, they were joining the Democrats and bigger government for a larger slice of the federal pie. They called themselves Republicans but sought a GOP-run government not to lessen its intrusion on all our lives but to control more of how the federal establishment spent its funds. These old-line Republicans were abandoning the middle class and vast majority of Americans, especially the growing West and South. They wanted the big to get bigger and had abandoned the rest of us.

I could not have cared less about their country clubs. My message was, if you work harder, you deserve more than the other guy. The test was not whether you were Ivy League or a corporate officer, but whether you cared deeply about individual initiative and individual rights. The double standards and selfishness of the Eastern establishment excluded most of the nation. These had to go if conservatives were to rebuild the GOP from the grass roots up and broaden our base into mainstream America. That is precisely what I intended to do—remake the party. In 1953 and 1954 there seemed to be little or no movement of the country in a more conservative direction despite GOP control of both the executive and legislative branches of government. This seemed outrageous to us. Liberals still dominated broad national thinking as well as a majority of local and state governments, not to mention the media and academia. This was to continue, to a large extent, until Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.

The mid-1950s were very tough days for a conservative. What kept me going? Mostly the young people I met along those highways and byways. I saw myself in them, with their hunger for new ideas instead of the old handouts in social thinking and public programs. If there was one sentence which inspired these young people, it was this: Any government which can promise you everything you want can also take away everything you have. I traveled hundreds of thousands of miles. It seemed I always had one eye on the audience and another on my airline schedule. One ear was cocked for news of any important Senate vote that would make me hurry back to Washington. Another listened for my wife and children. There were times when, if anybody asked me much more than my name, I would have blabbered to please call the fellows in the white coats because it was time to get back inside for a rest. I wasn't anxious to take on the job for another two-year term, despite another upset victory over Ernest McFarland in Arizona in 1958. Frankly, all the travel was very tiring, and it was time to give more of myself to my family. But friends conned me by saying Senator Jacob Javits, a liberal New York Republican, wanted the post. Javits was everything in a Republican that I was not—he opposed President Eisenhower and his own party at virtually every turn and flaunted his liberalism at the struggling conservative movement. He was a provincial New Yorker, mesmerized by Israel, who tried to pass as a great internationalist.

Rockefeller operated with the same double standard toward conservatives. It was only a matter of time before we fought one another. These intraparty differences wouldn't strengthen us in Congress or in a run for the White House. Rockefeller sensed that the Eastern establishment might be losing some of its grip on the GOP, but he was not sure what to do about it. His intuition was right for two reasons: The country itself was changing, with major population shifts away from the East and Midwest to the West and South, and a new conservative movement was beginning to emerge. In those fifteen years, the population living west of the Mississippi River rose from about 32 million to 45 million. Many GIs who had seen the West from military training bases during the war flocked back to new jobs as Western industry and other work expanded, especially in the electronics and aerospace fields. Unlike the Midwestern farmers who had dominated previous migrations West, many of the new workers were well educated and highly skilled. Most of the retirees were relatively well off. The biggest increases in population were in California and the Southwest, including my home state of Arizona.

Liberalism and its rhetoric had dominated American politics for most of this century. But the political winds were almost imperceptibly beginning to change. So was the Republican Party. More Republicans were calling themselves conservatives. The right had begun to stir. William Rusher, a New York attorney and political activist who later became publisher of _National Review,_ invited me to address the state's young Republicans. His colleagues were not impressed, but Rusher threatened to resign if I were not invited. They finally agreed, but Jake Javits, the liberal New York state attorney general, also was asked to speak in a trade-off. This was a firsthand manifestation of the growing split among New York Republicans. After a two-year layoff in 1957–58, I again accepted the senatorial campaign chairmanship for the two-year term of 1959–60. It was against my better judgment and tough for Peggy and the kids. We had hoped to retake the Senate on a conservative upswing. It would be a political miracle, but Barry Goldwater's two Senate victories in Arizona had also been miracles.

Without fully realizing it, I was tapping into a growing conservative reservoir across the country. In the late fifties and early sixties, none of us could see the bottom of that reservoir. Nor did I comprehend how much it would affect me. If anyone had said in those days that I was the symbol for a massive new conservative movement, I would have asked for a thermometer to measure their fever. Tony Smith, a former newspaperman who became my press secretary in 1960, said to me, "There's more at work out there than Barry Goldwater's enunciation of conservative doctrine. It's also his personality—speaking frankly. This is good for conservatives. We've been dull for too long. Goldwater being Goldwater—unpretentious and unpredictable—is hot news." To which I replied, "Baloney!" One unexpected incident at the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago created a strong bond among GOP conservatives. We were angry because Vice President Richard Nixon had met secretly with Rockefeller in the governor's New York City apartment before the convention opened. The meeting had taken place despite a personal promise to me by Nixon that he would not ally himself with Rocky and other liberals in the party. In what was later called "the Treaty of Fifth Avenue," Nixon agreed to make the party platform more liberal in return for Rockefeller support. I called it "an American Munich," a surrender by Nixon to appease the GOP left. South Carolina placed my name in nomination for the presidency. It was seconded. However, 1960 was premature for a fight. We would have lost; the party would have been divided, and the resulting bitterness would have weakened the GOP chances of beating Kennedy.

I went before the convention, withdrew my name from nomination, and suggested that those who would support me cast their votes for Nixon. Those impromptu remarks, spoken from the heart, have been called the "Grow up, conservatives; we'll be back" speech. This is what I said: "We've had our chance, and I think the conservatives have made a splendid showing at this convention. We've fought our battle. Now let's put our shoulders to the wheels of Dick Nixon and push him across the line. Let's not stand back. This country is too important for anyone's feelings; this country in its majesty is too great for any man, be he conservative or liberal, to stay home and not work just because he doesn't wholly agree. Let's grow up, conservatives. Let's, if we want to, take this party back—and I think we can someday. Let's get to work." I lived up to my word, giving more than 125 speeches in twenty-six states for the Nixon-Henry Cabot Lodge ticket. They lost, but the conservatives won. We were now determined to take over the party.

Representative Morris Udall, an Arizona Democrat and my longtime sidekick in Congress, said it was the finest speech I ever made. He believes those few simple words were the beginning of the nation's conservative upsurge. Others suggested it might have started with a book. In 1960 a thin 123-page publication with a red, white, and bluejacket slipped quietly out of the sleepy little town of Shepherdsville, Kentucky. It blew a fresh breeze across the American political landscape. _The Conscience of a Conservative_ (Victor Publishing Company) was an attempt to explain the conservative philosophy in practical political terms. It spelled out conservative principles in everyday language—from states' rights to the U.S. Supreme Court, from labor to education, from the cold war to foreign aid. The work was adapted by Brent Bozell, an editor at _National Review_ and longtime Republican activist, based on speeches I'd given and his own research. Sales of the book soared beyond our wildest hopes. The book became a symbol of a new political consciousness.

_The Conscience of a Conservative_ was the college student underground book of the times. It was virtually ignored by the media, most college professors, and other liberals, who had long held a monopoly on the information flowing to the American people. That first printing was ten thousand copies at three dollars each. Eventually, more than 4 million hardcover and paperback copies were sold. The book is still in print. The book was an unpretentious introduction to conservative thought, not a dissertation. Nevertheless, it became a rallying cry of the right against three decades of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the liberal agenda. In the book I said that the liberal agenda for the country was not working. I criticized increasing state paternalism at the expense of individual self-reliance. With new decentralized government, individual liberty and economic initiative could flourish. Collectivism and the welfare state were our greatest enemies at home, while communism had become our foremost enemy around the world. Either could destroy us. Some of my other conclusions were:

• The basic difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives account for the whole man while liberals tend to stress the material man. Liberals tend to regard economic satisfaction as the dominant mission of society. • Conservatism puts material things in their proper place, subsidiary to the spiritual side of man's nature. The primary concern of conservative political philosophy is the enhancement of man's spiritual nature. • The most sacred possession of a man is his soul. Only a philosophy providing different potentialities for each person is in accord with natural law. • No man or woman, if politically enslaved, can be economically free and efficient. People are responsible for their own spiritual and material development, and these should not be dictated by outside forces such as government. • The conscience of a conservative opposes all who would debase the dignity of the individual. Freedom requires the establishment of order, but political power is limited and must be kept within its proper bounds.

In its simplest terms, conservatism is economic, social, and political practices based on the successes of the past. It rejects socialism, fascism, and other ideologies of failure. These principles have a long history, adapted and refined with the passage of centuries. Conservatism was an intellectual movement with few organizational roots. After Richard Nixon lost the 1960 presidential race to John F. Kennedy, it seemed to many of us that we were ready to become not just an intellectual but a political movement. We were still several years away from creating a structure that could organize a movement and take over the party. This new movement would be composed not of members of the board and Eastern old boy networks, but average Americans with strong beliefs in conservative principles, people with a cause, a creed: crusaders. They would be mainstream Americans—the farmer in North Carolina, the rancher in Colorado, the oil prospector in Texas, the housewife in California, and the small businessman from as far away as Alaska. The new party would include people from an emerging new America—the Sunbelt, the South, the West, the Middle West, and some of the East, but there only the people who were willing to cast off the party's narrow-minded, short-sighted past.

My office was deluged with letters—from two thousand to, eventually, as many as eight thousand a week. We were also receiving more phone calls and mail from the media than we could handle. I had worked directly with the media since arriving in the Senate. As a concession to the times, I hired Tony Smith to be my press secretary in 1960. The reaction of some people to _The Conscience of a Conservative_ was extraordinary. Many said I must carry its message across the country. I began writing a syndicated newspaper column, directly addressing specific public issues. Our staff of thirteen people was in turmoil because of the volume of mail as a result of the book and some later speeches. Tony selectively read letters, discovering some from the president of U.S. Steel and other large companies. I also received requests from state and national GOP officials to speak at Republican fund-raising rallies and dinners. Other important letters, which we had not answered in the past, came to our attention. There was no way we could answer all the mail. It was left entirely up to Tony and the staff. If they found some letters that I should answer, that was fine. If not, forget it. There was only one rule: Answer all correspondence from constituents in Arizona.

Despite my promises to myself and my family to spend less time on the road, I was still giving many speeches around the country in 1960. It was a merry-go-round. Tony kept slipping into my office, showing me letters from people saying I should run for the presidency. I pooh-poohed the whole thing. Answer the Arizona letters, I would say, and, "Tony, we're doing all right just pooping along." At staff meetings, Tony would mention the continuing volume of mail and media requests for interviews, saying, "We've got to get some organization into all this. We've got to answer these people. We just can't poop along any longer." The mail and interview requests were just unnecessary noise as far as I was concerned. It would all begin to disappear next week or a month from now. I passed up the interviews because they would take time away from Senate participation and party work. We were still not answering most of the mail. Tony was a quiet bulldog. He'd return from lunch and say his desk was covered with messages to return calls from the media. Thirteen different magazines were doing cover stories on me at one time—all without an interview. These included _Time, Newsweek,_ and even _Popular Mechanics,_ which had heard I was a gadgeteer.

Finally I agreed to some interviews. _Time_ came, and they interviewed me for hours, asking all kinds of silly questions, like how it felt being the golfing partner of Sammy Snead in the 1940 Phoenix Pro-Amateur match. They wanted to make a big deal out of the fact that I played in army boots and a beaten-up T-shirt while Snead was his fashionable self. The boots helped cushion the force that shot up to my wobbly knees when I hit the ball, and the T-shirt got dirty while I was working. I told the reporter I'd only given a damn about one thing: winning the tournament. That was the truth—and we won. That _Time_ photographer must have shot everything in my office. The whole thing was worse than an afternoon at the dentist. It seemed a senseless, depressing waste of time. We never heard a word for six weeks, and I needled Tony, "I told you so. This is all smoke." I was wrong. _Time_ finally came out with a cover story on June 23, 1961—a big splash. But the article wasn't at all what I thought it would be—a typical _Time_ takeout about an Arizona cowboy in the Senate. Instead, it was a big trial balloon about my running for the White House in 1964 as "the hottest political figure this side of Jack Kennedy."

It was a very unpleasant, unhappy experience. The senator from Arizona didn't want _Time_ or anyone else floating his name as a candidate for the White House. What would friends and the folks back home think? Had Barry Goldwater become an arrogant, strutting peacock in Washington? And people around the country—wouldn't they think the article made me look like some country bumpkin whose head was swollen by sitting in Washington? I detested the implication that I was jockeying to become a front-runner for the GOP nomination. I was angry. This was worse than smoke. This was fire. I was a salesman. That's all. That's what my people were. Goldwater wasn't the big enchilada. Just a guy with a smile and a speech about freedom, opportunity, hard work, and hope. Hell, I was out there to wipe away the conservative stereotype—stuffed shirts in celluloid collars and cuff links who combed their hair the wrong way. Some conservatives had another view. At a Chicago meeting in 1961, Bill Rusher, F. Clifton White, the upstate New York public relations man, John Ashbrook, an Ohio congressman, and others began secretly building a Draft Goldwater Committee. They did it with no approval and no help from me. The whole bunch refused to take no for an answer.

White was a pro, much more than a mere political public relations man or college instructor in political science. He had been a GOP party worker since his twenties and was a very experienced technician. No one in the Republican Party knew more about the mechanics of putting a political machine together. He was now taking on the role of a tactician, winning delegates on the basis of issues and ideological commitment. White was a likable, studious gentleman. I never viewed him as a man of deep conservative conviction. He was a professional political organizer, and an extremely good one. Rusher was well known to me—an unswerving conservative, dedicated, highly intelligent, a fine writer, a real mover and shaker. I was 100 percent against a draft and was never coy about it. The White House was far from any of my plans, personal or political. In 1962 Rusher and White asked to see me privately. The two came to my Senate office and said they wanted to change the Republican Party into an instrument of conservative politics. No conservative could disagree with that. I'd been trying to do it for more than six years. They began describing me as the party's conservative leader and symbol. The meeting became uneasy for everyone. It smelled like the start of something I'd not be able to control, much less want. The two left with one clear idea: I wanted no part of what they were launching.

Few people have ever understood my fierce resistance in those days to seeking higher office. I got damned mad about it because the whole idea was so silly. Not only did it seem preposterous, but I had never even jokingly considered the matter. And, to dismiss the notion entirely, I stressed that Arizona was a very small state with little or no political muscle. Tony Smith insisted it was important that he become an informal liaison with the draft group, in order to know what they were up to and to offer reasonable replies to questions from the press. I kept putting off an answer. He kept telling me about the letters, the pile of speaking invitations sitting on his desk, the phone calls from reporters asking for interviews and other information. Tony said, "Someday we'll have to deal with it." I replied, "Baloney. Don't con me, Tony. We don't need any publicity in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, or Miami. We want it in Tucson, Flagstaff, and Kingman, Arizona. How are we doing there?" Tony was no yes man. He'd reply that sooner or later we'd have to face up to the fact that I was becoming the country's leading conservative spokesman—that it looked as if I would give 250 speeches during each of the next four years, through 1963. He warned that I would have to start watching every word I said.

Tony was well aware that I sometimes said things for immediate effect, to get people on my side by making them listen or laugh. And I made too many joking references, like "lobbing one into the men's room of the Kremlin." (Boy, did I pay for that offhand quip!) It wasn't funny anymore. Tony was right. I'd have to watch the quips. It wasn't like back home in Arizona. A lot of these reporters had no sense of humor. And many didn't like conservative Republicans. Tony and others wanted me to read more speeches, but I never liked speaking from a piece of paper. A text is sometimes necessary for precise meaning, but to this day I'm not comfortable with one. It always seemed more natural to me to share my immediate feelings with the people sitting nearby. An unwritten speech based on a clear outline is usually much closer to an individual's true convictions. But some of my off-the-cuff quips hit the evening television news or national headlines the following morning. I had to be more careful. Reporters began to pay attention to my speeches, not because they had developed an interest in conservative principles but because they were looking for some colorful quote or incident. I responded to their questions with no rigid set of memorized answers. That was because I always tried to answer the specific question. Some politicians today—indeed, many members of Congress—spend considerable time memorizing twenty- to thirty-second answers to the diverse and often most difficult questions. Senators like Ted Kennedy, Pat Moynihan, and Alan Cranston have large staffs which grind out answers for them on almost every issue facing the country.

With these snappy, twenty-second answers, members of Congress aim to do two things at one time—twist their response to meet almost any question on a given subject and grab a quick headline on network radio and television news. It's now obvious that too many members of Congress are victims of the network syndrome—one quick burst to fit into the brief segments of news programming. I've never stage-managed myself this way. What you saw was what you got—quips, jokes, cussing, and all. To me, however, the important part of any speech or interview is its central or overall message, not humor or a throwaway line taken out of context. Unfortunately, many editors in all media think otherwise. This isn't to say I didn't shoot from the hip—or lip. I did. In rapid-fire exchanges with newsmen on perhaps a dozen or more subjects, I would even wind up saying some question was asinine. I wasn't the most patient politician in the world. It was always my feeling, and still is, that a man's main message should be headlined—not the fact that he may have fallen off a horse at the county fair. Any damn fool can do that.

Paul Healy, of the New York _Daily News,_ was the first Washington correspondent to "discover" and brand me. Healy wrote an anecdotal piece that made me into a rootin', tootin', shootin' Westerner who spoke his mind as few politicians in generations had. That was quite a mouthful because we've had a lot of colorful characters in Congress. Healy put me right up there with some of America's top guns, from Teddy Roosevelt to Harry Truman. Editors and reporters were apparently looking for a maverick. That's news. These newsmen were liberals to a large extent and uninterested in exploring conservative beliefs. Many of them ignored Senator Bob Taft as much as they could. Yet Taft may have been the most intelligent individual ever to have served in the U.S. Senate. He actually read every bill introduced in Congress. He was the Henry Clay of his time. But Taft was—by their odd measurement—dry, dull copy. By their same odd view of what was significant, Goldwater was hot stuff. At the same time, conservatives wanted somebody who would talk back to the liberals, to all the media. Someone with moxie.

I plead guilty to firing back at some of our liberal critics. My aim was to win loyal converts to conservatism based on our principles. Contrary to any other perception, that was always my goal. Despite some national attention and more speaking invitations, I was never personally convinced I had started a bonfire to light a national conservative movement. That was still my hope, but it seemed years away. I was being pounded mercilessly by the media and even members of my own party—the liberal wing—who suggested I was allied with the "fanatical right." Liberals often described the John Birch Society in such terms. Our critics began a concerted effort to link all conservatives with the Birchers and other extreme right-wing groups. The linkage was, to say the least, weak. Most conservatives didn't agree with the strong opinions of Robert Welch, founder of the society. Welch had come to see me in Phoenix when he was writing _The Politician,_ a book accusing Dwight D. Eisenhower of being either a dupe or a conscious agent of worldwide communism. I knew little of Welch but saw him as a favor to his brother, who lived in Phoenix. Welch pulled a copy of his manuscript from a brown paper wrapper and asked me to read it. The encounter seemed innocuous at the time. Views of all types constantly flow into the offices of most politicians.

After reading part of the manuscript, I returned it to Welch, saying his conjecture about Eisenhower and other matters was inaccurate. I suggested he not print the work because he could harm not only himself but the anticommunist cause. Welch never sought my advice again. Throughout the early 1950s, both the John Birch Society and Senator Joseph McCarthy carried charges of Communists in government and other places to extremes. Our opponents, both Democrats and, eventually, liberal Republicans, tried to use this to thwart the rise of conservatism. The Birchers numbered at most some 60,000 members. Their actual membership, mostly in the South and West, may have been much lower. The total was never made public. The overwhelming majority of conservatives were not members and knew little of the organization or Welch's private beliefs about a national Communist conspiracy. In time, by simply ignoring them, we shook the Birchers from our coattails. I disagreed with some of their statements but refused to engage in any wholesale condemnation of them. The last thing conservatives needed was to begin a factional war by reading small minorities or individuals out of our ranks. We were struggling to strengthen ourselves, if not merely to survive. Our efforts would be better spent on strengthening U.S. defenses and those of our allies against the totalitarian threat rather than attacking small groups of fellow Americans.

Liberals blamed conservatives for years for the most extreme statements of both Welch and McCarthy. We became "the radical right," yet the overwhelming number of conservatives could hardly be considered radical. I said publicly in a letter to _National Review_ that Welch's views were "irresponsible" and did not represent those of most members of the society. The letter called on Welch to resign. Despite this well-publicized statement, the left still linked me and conservatives with the "radical right." It was a tactic the liberals had long publicly scorned—guilt by association and slander, better known as McCarthyism. In historical terms, Democrats in Congress had, as powerful committee chairmen, been investigating U.S. communism since the late 1930s. Such hearings peaked with the disclosure that Alger Hiss, a former member of the U.S. State Department, had engaged in espionage activities. This was revealed before McCarthy was elected to the Senate. The sellout of freedom at Yalta was on our minds. Hiss had been on the U.S. delegation at Yalta. We were also concerned about the fall of Chiang Kai-shek. Despite his faults, Chiang was surely more faithful to the cause of liberty than Mao Tse-tung. Some Americans, however, saw Mao as a brighter hope for China.

We were disturbed by the long liberal lock on the White House, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. The Eisenhower administration broke the lock momentarily, but it was mostly made up of passive Republicans, not a conservative majority dedicated to major changes. We hoped to curb the concentration of power in the hands of the few and spread it out among the states. For the most part, the liberals ignored what Bill Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and other conservatives were saying. Rather, Bill and Barry were guilty of consorting with all those extremists out there. The truth is that liberals did not relish direct combat with us in speaking arenas across the country. They had long grown fat in government, academia, and the media by monopoly. The left, which controlled most of the nation's large Eastern media, had monopolized public thinking for so long that it saw any challenge as heresy, if not ideological fanaticism; in a word, fascism. This was symptomatic of the liberals' greatest fault. They had never learned, as the Republicans had had to, how to lose. They feared us—the challenge and the combat. One day we would prove that fear justified.

In examining Joe McCarthy, it's important to place him in the temper of his times as well as the perspective of today. The Wisconsin Republican did not act alone. He was backed by many respected people, including Joseph P. Kennedy. I supported some of McCarthy's investigations after arriving in the Senate in 1953. There was, for example, considerable evidence to back his charges that the Institute of Pacific Relations and _Amerasia_ magazine were Communist front organizations. McCarthy found others to be either active members of the Communist Party or sympathetic to the cause. These included some leaders and advisers of the Electrical Workers and Steelworkers unions. Similar evidence concerning other groups was produced in various parts of the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. U.S. atomic spies like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and British spies like Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and others were clear examples of Soviet attempts to steal the highest secrets of Western democracies.

For all his personal problems and excesses, McCarthy's central idea was on target—that not only was world communism a threat to this country and the free world, but its bloody repressions in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere could not go unanswered by civilized men and women. Those murders, purges, repressions, and jailings of tens of thousands persist today in Communist countries. From the Soviet Union to Poland, from China to Vietnam, from Castro's Cuba to Nicaragua and elsewhere, we're dealing with the perpetual persecution of freedom. McCarthy's personal weaknesses—drinking, exaggeration, and unwillingness to compromise—washed him up. Even so, I tried, in a compromise move, to save McCarthy from Senate censure. Several Southern senators approached me during the censure debate on the floor in 1954. They said the South would vote against censure if McCarthy would apologize to two senators who felt he had publicly insulted them. I drove out to suburban Bethesda Naval Hospital with McCarthy's attorney, Edward Bennett Williams. We explained to McCarthy what had happened and handed him two letters of apology drafted by Williams. Both were brief, mild expressions of regret about discourtesy to fellow senators. Neither admitted any serious guilt.

McCarthy cursed and threw the pen at us. The outburst caused the nurses to come running, and we were ordered to leave the hospital for disturbing a patient and not return without permission, or we would be arrested by the Shore Patrol. I voted against censuring McCarthy for several reasons. Liberals themselves were guilty of excess in their sweeping castigation of conservatives. There was, in fact, some limited liberal involvement with communism. Both McCarthy and the conservatives had the right to challenge that involvement. A number of media attacks and other charges against the senator were just as crude and cruel as some of McCarthy's own statements. Joe McCarthy was the most contentious, controversial, and stub-bornly cussed character that I ever met in my life. He also was a very sick man physically and needed treatment. Few people knew how sick Joe really was. He used to invite me over to his house near the Capitol. He'd go out in the kitchen with the excuse of making me a drink and would have four or five shots, then return with our drinks. Unfortunately, Joe became a real booze hound—the worst. Without telling anyone, including Joe, I went up to see Francis Cardinal Spellman in New York and told him that someone had to have a fatherly talk with McCarthy. The cardinal did, but McCarthy never changed.

No one but I knew why Joe was admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He had invited me up to Milwaukee to make a speech for him. When I arrived at his hotel room, Joe was gassed. He fell and hit his elbow on a glass tabletop. It later became infected. Once Indiana Senator Bill Jenner, several other senators, and I tried to help him. We took McCarthy to Spanish Key, an island in the Bahamas owned by a Texas family, to try to talk some sense into him and get him to quit the booze. We had made strict arrangements that no liquor would be available where we stayed. When I got there, Joe was already bombed and had a storehouse of the stuff. Everything went downhill, and we came home. Knowing his illness—and many senators did—I wanted to offer McCarthy mercy. Some disagreed with that. But I said you pray for people who need the prayers—good or bad. If the Lord is willing to give him a hand, let us give him a hand. Other senators said he deserved the same as he'd given others. I didn't blame them for that view. However, I believe a man can be put out of action without a public lynching. The mood among Senate liberals was to lynch McCarthy. I was probably wrong in defending him, but I didn't want any part of it, especially in the respectful setting of the Senate. It was ruthless behavior in both cases. After the censure, Joe drank himself to death.

I've never spoken this candidly about McCarthy before because it's not part of my character to harpoon people. However, McCarthy was a very important part of our generation, good and bad. And that's just how I felt about him—very mixed feelings. He recognized the Communist menace, as many of us did, and conservatives recognize him for that. But McCarthy went overboard in his investigations because of his inability to handle power and alcohol. Joe became enamored of power. That's what really made him sick and changed him into such a drinker. He was off in an unreal world of self-importance and self-indulgence. Joe retaught us a very old lesson: Power corrupts. As 1961 began, my good friend John F. Kennedy became President of the United States. His personal charm and eloquence lifted the spirits of millions of Americans. Conservatives were not, however, happy with what we saw and heard. Communism had solidified itself around the world. Most Americans were ignoring the danger in a headlong national rush for money and the material rewards of the postwar economic upsurge. We conservatives were saying that power was too important to be left to the politicians. Too great to be held by the big corporations and big unions. Too costly to be wielded by an enormous and growing federal bureaucracy.

That was my message in those days, mounting an intellectual and spiritual challenge to a society whose goals seemed only to be more and more of everything. In my long travels, I'd often wonder whether I was relating to the young people who had come to hear and ask questions. It seemed self-serving and presumptuous that I should pretend to speak for them. It was more important for me to hear how and why they were motivated to learn more about the conservative movement. I listened a lot to what the young conservatives of those early years had to say. Lance Tarrance, based in Houston, is now one of the best-known Republican pollsters in the country. He was attending Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, when _The Conscience of a Conservative_ was published. The book was passed around as campus underground reading. Tarrance was a senior, majoring in European history. He recalls, "It was one of the few times that I read a book that did not have a liberal direction. I became so fascinated by it that I missed a Friday night beer bust for the first time since going to college. Granted, it was a basic, simplified expression of what the conservatives were all about. I began to get a much clearer picture of how government worked, especially the nearby federal establishment in Washington."

Tarrance had never been active in politics. On graduation in 1962, he went home to Texas and began inquiring about what he might do in the GOP. The young Texan was disappointed by what the old-timers said, that his only role would be to lick envelopes and help at rallies. That was all right with him, but he wanted more than the spirit of politics. He wanted to discuss the substance. Tarrance didn't join the Texas Republicans. He kept talking with other young conservatives and reading, especially the writings of Ayn Rand on the concept of individual liberty. In 1964, after I announced my candidacy for the presidency, Tarrance joined the Republican Party. He became a volunteer in Texas for the Goldwater-Miller ticket. Vic Gold was an Alabama Democrat. In the mid-1950s, he heard about this fellow Barry Goldwater. Gold was having doubts about his political beliefs. He asked a lot of questions, listened to me and other conservatives, and read _National Review_ and other literature. In 1964 he became my assistant press secretary on the campaign trail, saying, "I discovered a political identity that I never knew existed."

Gold had grown up in the era of the New Deal. Americans didn't have the opportunity they have today, with a more balanced presentation of viewpoints, to discover their own political identities. That was one reason why we adopted our slogan in 1964: "A Choice—Not an Echo." Vic worked in public relations and later became press secretary for Vice Presidents Spiro Agnew and George Bush. He still writes extensively on political and social issues. Dr. Edward J. Feulner, Jr., is now president of the Heritage Foundation, a public policy research institute in Washington. In the early 1960s he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Feulner supported the Goldwater-Miller ticket. On an Eastern campus in those days, that was treason. He became a real traitor—a volunteer working for the GOP ticket in 1964. Pat Buchanan was a student at Georgetown University in the nation's capital in 1961. One of his fellow students asked Pat about his politics, and Buchanan made his first public confession—but only after the other student made his. They both liked "this guy Goldwater."

Pat is one of those who committed a good part of his life—and a salty dash of journalism—to politics, as a speechwriter for President Nixon and communications director for President Reagan. In 1962, while a graduate student at Columbia University's journalism school, he led a contingent of friends to hear me and other conservatives speak at a rally of Young Americans for Freedom in Madison Square Garden. Conservatives packed the place. It was an emotional evening and, in terms of numbers, a rousing success—especially as we did it in an off year and charged for tickets. The program ran late. My talk was moved back into the morning hours. No one left. I gave 'em hell, and the thunder rattled the Garden and a few in the liberal media. They reported that something was brewing among young Republicans. None except conservative publications took the time to understand what was happening, that the growing numbers and increasing commitment of conservatives might be a force to be reckoned with in 1964. The story of the rise of the right would prove to be a classic example of journalistic failure. Even today, many in the media still don't understand how badly they missed the significance of events that unfolded right before their eyes. Their failure ranks with Washington reporters' general ineptitude in unraveling the major events behind the Watergate mess. Congress and a single newspaper, the Washington _Post,_ did most of the real work. Pat later said, "Barry Goldwater just reached in and touched our minds and hearts. He brought whole new classes and groups of people into the GOP. He was the wedge—the man who brought the South and West, the young and energetic into Republican circles."

Tarrance, Gold, Feulner, and Buchanan—four names representing several hundred thousand young people who joined the ranks of conservatives in the late fifties and early sixties. Not Republicans—conservatives. More than a half million Americans would participate as volunteers and in other ways in the 1964 GOP campaign for the White House. Unlike many of their liberal counterparts in the later sixties and early seventies, most of these young conservatives did not tune in, turn on, and drop out of the political process. They stayed active in the GOP. After 1960, the party was in complete disarray. We had no national leaders. Ike had retired, Nixon was a defeated man, and Rockefeller's liberalism had alienated many conservative Republicans. Although I didn't view myself at the time as leader of the conservatives, my name began to be mentioned around the country as a possible conservative presidential candidate. The 1960 GOP convention had left a sour taste in our mouths. Nixon and Rockefeller felt they could outmaneuver the conservatives, whom they looked on as political amateurs. The Eastern establishment still appeared to dominate the party.

Conservatives and many younger Republicans, especially those just out of college, were furious at the way we were being brushed aside by the old-line leadership. Bill Buckley and Bill Rusher had formed and helped build a new national conservative youth organization, Young Americans for Freedom. The YAFs were to transform conservative ideas into political action. In that unsettled background, Rusher and F. Clifton White convened nineteen of their onetime Young Republican crowd—distinct from the YAFs—and three others in Chicago in October 1961. That was the beginning of the national Draft Goldwater Committee. Their goal was simple: conservative control of the GOP. But their plan was unconventional: to achieve victory by aligning the East Central states—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin—with the South and West. They conceded only fourteen states to Kennedy and figured we would sweep the solid South. We yielded the traditional battlegrounds of presidential politics—New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and possibly California.

Such a coalition had never defeated the liberal East and its allies—New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, plus smaller states in the East, Middle West, and Northwest. The GOP had already cracked the solid South in Eisenhower's campaigns. The increasing shift of population to the West had made the old Republican combination and Democratic coalitions highly vulnerable. The Young Republicans' convention of 1959 had already demonstrated that. Rockefeller had sent his representatives to the Denver meeting, and a coalition of the West and South had defeated his moves. Rusher and White saw that the old Eastern establishment GOP was now only a shadow group—Rockefeller, his staff, and his personal fortune. It was a good time to move. I wasn't aware of their meetings, nor did I authorize them or any other group to work for my nomination. In reality, a Goldwater draft was under way. This was a genuine draft, perhaps the only true one in American political history. As Rusher put it, "We were like a roving band of samurai that emerged from the forest and said: 'Hey you! You are our candidate!' "

Another group of samurai were about to capture the nation's attention. On a chill April morning in 1961 I was adjusting my straps in the cockpit of an F-86 fighter plane at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. It was April 15, Uncle Sam's Christmas. I was about to fly to Luke Air Force Base outside Phoenix to maintain my proficiency rating as a member of the active reserve. A sergeant climbed onto the wing and said the President wanted to see me as soon as possible. I changed into my regular clothes and drove to the White House. It was a busy Saturday shopping day in the Maryland suburbs. Families crowded malls and supermarkets. The streets of federal Washington seemed almost deserted by comparison, except for buses filled with tourists. In driving across the city, I had a foreboding about the meeting. I began to suspect the reason for the President's summons was the invasion of Cuba. The coming mission was known on Capitol Hill, and there was already speculation about it in the media. Why would he call me unless there was trouble? There was only one reason he needed me—to support him publicly.

There might not be much time with Kennedy. My views had to be clear, concise, firm. The longer I thought, the clearer my position became. It was one word: will—political and moral will. Truman's no-win in Korea policy had been wrong. We could not adopt a no-win policy now that we were involved in a military operation against Cuba. The White House seemed quiet, even somber. That seemed to be the President's mood when he entered. He seemed preoccupied, although he walked briskly. We were relaxed in one another's company because of years of private chats in the Senate. He bantered, "So you want this fucking job, eh?" I laughed and replied, "You must be reading some of those conservative right wing newspapers." Kennedy grinned but quickly came to the point. He said grimly that the first phase of the invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro Cuban forces had not gone as well as expected. Fidel Castro's air force had not, as planned, been completely demolished on the ground. Eight B-26s flown by Cuban exile pilots had made their surprise attack but had destroyed only half of the Cuban Air Force. Three planes flown by the exiles had been lost.

Sixteen bombers were to have made the run, but this number had been slashed in half. The State Department wanted to be able to officially deny our support of the exiles. The United States had furnished the planes. The State Department had told Kennedy it would be easier to defend the cover story that anti-Castro forces had obtained eight B-26s. However, it would be much more difficult to explain how and where they had gotten sixteen such bombers. The United States would certainly be blamed. Kennedy was clearly having second thoughts about U.S. participation in the action. He was questioning the planning for the invasion and further involvement. The President finally said he thought the whole operation might fail. He turned, sitting on the edge of his desk, and faced me directly. Kennedy then asked what I would do in the situation. I was stunned. The President was not a profile in courage, as portrayed in his best-selling book. He projected little of the confidence and lofty resolve of his eloquent speeches. Kennedy was another man now that we were, in effect, on the shores of Cuba. He did not seem to have the old-fashioned guts to go on.

Kennedy could see the shock on my face. There could be no turning back now. Nearly 1,500 men would soon be on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. We had helped put them where they were. The commander does not abandon men he has sent to fight. The President had a professional and moral responsibility to those men. I grimaced when Kennedy recalled a statement he had made at his news conference a few days before—that no American forces would be used to invade Cuba. Kennedy now said nervously that the mission would fail unless the freedom fighters received U.S. air support. Slowly, so the words would sink in, I reminded the President that our Navy and its fighter planes were standing ready in nearby waters. They could be launched to protect the next attack of B-26s. We must destroy all of Castro's planes on the ground. Then the exiles could fight their way from the beaches and spread out across the terrain. I told Kennedy that our action was moral and legal and would be understandable to the entire free world. The United States could not tolerate Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Every great nation must be willing to use its strength. Otherwise, it's a paper tiger. Whether we agree or not, power belongs to those who use it.

Kennedy still seemed to equivocate. I didn't understand how the President could, or why he would, abandon these men. They would be killed or captured without a chance of accomplishing their mission or even defending themselves. I remember the moment well. Kennedy continued to search my face and eyes for an answer. This was also a crucial moment for me. For the first time, I saw clearly that I had the toughness of mind and will to lead the country. Others might be more educated or possess greater speaking and social skills, but I had something that individuals of greater talent did not have. I had an unshakable belief in, and willingness to defend, the fundamental interests of my country. My heart was pounding now as my mind became more convinced. I had the will—once the options were considered and a reasonable plan was agreed on, as in this instance—to carry out such a mission. It was not a boast. It was simply a matter of personal principle. If world opinion were was so important to the President now, why hadn't he stopped the operation in the first place? The State Department be damned. I told him we didn't have to deny anything. And if, as the President said to me, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had phoned him that morning threatening to tell the entire United Nations that we were behind the invasion, let that two-time loser tell them. Then I'd fire him so fast he'd barely have time to get his coat and leave the U.N.

I didn't have to remind the President that the American people had twice turned Stevenson down for the job that Kennedy now held. What made Stevenson think he could now go over the head of the President to the United Nations? Neither world opinion, nor the United Nations had stopped the Soviet tanks in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe. The self-interest of the United States, including the protection of the American people, was above the United Nations, above world opinion, and above Stevenson. I told the President, "I would do whatever is necessary to assure the invasion is a success." I repeated, "Whatever is necessary." I never suggested that the President drop a nuclear bomb or use such a device on anyone. We had conventional air power, and I felt he should use it to help the Cuban exiles advance from the beaches and take on the Castro forces. I finally told Kennedy that the American people and every free nation would thank him for ridding the world of Castro. The President seemed to relax. My voice had risen. It was clear and emphatic. Kennedy replied, "You're right."

I left the Oval Office fairly sure that the B-26s, escorted by U.S. Navy fighters, would soon blow holes to lead those freedom fighters off the beaches toward Havana. I was wrong. The brigade left Guatemala. The B-26s were first to destroy Castro's air force on the ground and then support the landing group with air cover. Kennedy gave the go-ahead for the first air strike with the B-26 bombers launching from Central America. Then, for reasons he never explained, the President canceled the follow-up air attacks. U.S. Navy jet fighters, ready to support the B-26s from the nearby U.S.S. _Boxer,_ never launched their attack. Kennedy clearly had lost his nerve. The brigade was routed. Some three hundred were killed, and the rest were imprisoned. The President backed away from the counsel of all his top advisers when he refused to support an all-out attack and invasion of Cuba. Kennedy allowed the Russians to remain on the island on condition that they withdraw their nuclear missiles. The fact is, instead of the eyeball-to-eyeball victory the Kennedy administration claimed over Nikita Khrushchev, the President actually made concessions to the Soviet leader. These included removing U.S. missiles from Turkey. The decision not to attack Cuba was disastrous. We are still paying for it.

In the end, Kennedy's big lie in the 1960 campaign, that the Soviets enjoyed a large missile superiority over the United States, had returned to haunt him. The Bay of Pigs ultimately allowed the influence of Castro and the Soviet Union to rise in the region. It was to spread to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other parts of the hemisphere. It's important to reflect on the political results of Kennedy's failure. Conservatives were convinced that the American people were genuinely shocked and dismayed by their leader's lack of political and moral will, especially in view of his rhetoric. The President's ability to lead the country had clearly become a political issue, not only at home but among the leaders of the Soviet Union. Kennedy's indecisiveness in our private meeting caused me to begin reevaluating my unwillingness to run for the presidency. I did not, however, mention this to anyone. Kennedy was a strong commander in chief publicly, yet equivocated privately not only regarding Cuba but in other crucial matters as well. Vietnam is a case in point.

The President sent a total of 17,000 American troops to Vietnam—with orders not to shoot back. Kennedy told me that Eisenhower had first sent troops there. In shifting blame for the U.S. presence there, he was technically correct. Ike had, however, sent only five hundred military advisers there. Kennedy was engaged in semantics to cover his rear end in the event of serious trouble. The real thrust into Vietnam was made by Kennedy. He equivocated again on Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam. The President allowed Diem and his brother to be murdered in a military coup by South Vietnamese officers. Kennedy's people had approved the coup. The President's continuing pattern of vacillation again stirred my private musings on whether to seek the GOP presidential nomination. I was convinced, because of his wavering on foreign policy and his worn-out domestic spending programs, that Kennedy was vulnerable and could be defeated in his bid for reelection. Many people say today—and said then—that Kennedy would have defeated me. I'm not so sure. _Time_ magazine and some of the polls clearly indicated he was slipping in national support. Kennedy himself admitted that. It was a major reason he went to Dallas in November 1963.

A Kennedy-Goldwater clash would have been quite different from my campaign against Lyndon Johnson. It would have been a direct and continuing attack on Kennedy policies, with much less time spent on irrelevancies. Kennedy and I informally agreed—it seems a pipe dream in looking at some of today's negative campaigning—that we would ride the same plane or train to several stops and debate face to face on the same platform. I was convinced I would do well because of my deep commitment to the conservative cause. Kennedy was a Democrat by accident of birth; he was more a pragmatist than a Democrat. Kennedy spouted the liberal line but was cynical about much of it. I was a conservative by personal conviction. Issues were important, but more than that was at stake. I wanted to talk about a national will and direction that would replace Kennedy's vacillation and weak pragmatism. It was my hope that our direct confrontation would make it clear to the American people that genuine commitment and principles are necessary to sustain all great countries. Even if I lost, the race would have been well worth it for another reason. The conservative cause would gain because of the American people's exposure to our beliefs.

It was not until 1963 that I privately decided to oppose Kennedy by seeking the Republican nomination. The decision came quietly, matter-of-factly, in talking with my wife and a few friends. I said nothing publicly but sat back and waited. Earlier, in 1962, it had seemed certain that Rockefeller intended to become a presidential candidate. The tip-off came when he gave several speeches stressing Republican orthodoxy, abandoning his penchant for New Deal phrases and policies. Perhaps, I said to myself, there is hope for Rocky yet. We began to discuss party and policy problems on the phone and during breakfast and several dinner meetings at his palatial house on Foxhall Road in Washington. We had more in common than we had realized—a distrust of Nixon as a politician, general agreement on greater fiscal restraint by the federal government, (although Rockefeller was far from a fiscal conservative), and a tough stand against communism. Rockefeller left little doubt in my mind: He had moved to the right.

By the early fall of 1962, it appeared likely that Rockefeller, Michigan Governor George Romney, and perhaps Nixon—depending on how his race for the California governorship came out—would run for the 1964 GOP nomination. I preferred Rockefeller. It was obvious that the vast majority of conservatives didn't share my views about the governor. Many were downright hostile to him, but I did my best to keep my mouth shut. Nixon was to lose the 1962 governor's race against incumbent Democrat Pat Brown in California, apparently excluding himself from the presidential sweepstakes. The media and many top members of the party made Rockefeller the front-runner for the nomination. He had been reelected governor. One potential problem—the fact that Rocky had divorced his wife—seemed to have disappeared from public consciousness. There wasn't much public support for other GOP candidates, except speculation about Barry Goldwater among conservatives. Rocky's lieutenants crisscrossed the country, extolling his newfound conservative virtues. The Rockefeller bandwagon was rolling.

Meantime, I told anyone who would listen that I wasn't seeking the nomination. The door wasn't closed. I simply hadn't made up my mind about whether to run. I told a persistent reporter, "A man would be a damn fool to predict with finality what he would do in this unpredictable world." Peggy did not want me to run. However, she enjoyed the political jockeying and other antics. She often joked about them. On a breezy Saturday in May 1963, the telephone in our Washington apartment rang. Peggy answered it because her old television repairman was up to his old fix-it tricks on the roof of the building. Unhappy with our television reception, I was fiddling with the antenna. A man's voice said, "Hello, this is Nelson Rockefeller." "Hello yourself," Peg answered. "This is Mamie Eisenhower." Peggy loved to tell that story and, in later versions, said she told Rocky she was Dinah Shore. Rockefeller finally convinced my wife he was the genuine article, not some prankster like me. She hailed me down from the roof, and I picked up the phone. Rocky's dead-earnest tone cut through the miles of line separating us.

The governor said he had been married that afternoon to Mrs. Margaretta "Happy" Murphy. He wanted to tell a few friends and close associates about the wedding before it broke in the national media. The message was clear but the meaning confusing. Why call me? I asked myself. Finally I wished him happiness, put the receiver down, looked at Peggy, and asked, "What the hell's going on?" She joked, "You tell me." "Rockefeller just got married," I said with a touch of wonderment. "Bully for him!" she laughed. This was no laughing matter. Rockefeller was not a man who made idle phone calls around the country. He was telling me something, but I couldn't figure out what. Rumors had floated in and out of gossip columns for months about Rocky dating a married New York woman. There also was some talk in political circles. Many of us had never paid any attention to it. I detest such gossip. In fact, it makes me a little sick to my stomach. I never sniped at anyone behind his back. If the time came that it was needed, I let them have both barrels between the eyes from a few feet away.

The mail hit Capitol Hill and Rockefeller's office like a May snowstorm, totally unexpected. The writers were mostly women and some clergy. There were two complaints—that Rocky had been dating a married woman and that her husband, a physician, wanted their four children. The governor had been leading me nearly two to one in the Gallup presidential poll. That was reversed within a month. I rose from 26 to 40 percent while Rocky fell from 43 percent to 29 percent. This was a delicate moment for conservatives. It bolstered their view that Rockefeller could—and should—be beaten. The sudden reversal pushed me into a spotlight and put new pressure on me to make a firm decision about running. The pros of both parties said the remarriage had been poorly timed. They claimed Rocky should have waited at least until after the GOP nomination and more likely the presidential election. Yet there hadn't been a ripple of dissatisfaction when the governor was divorced, so it had been impossible to anticipate the uproar about the marriage.

I was very uneasy about these developments. In fact, I was genuinely unhappy about them. The country needed a campaign of national and international issues, not personalities and moralizing about private lives. Many conservatives saw the matter as a victory of sorts over the GOP's leading liberal. I didn't view it that way at all. The campaign was getting out of focus. We had to get it back on the issues. The names of a half dozen viable new GOP presidential candidates began to surface. The media were saying there was a vacuum in GOP party leadership for the first time in a generation. There were rumors that Eisenhower, contemplating at his Gettysburg farm, might endorse Pennsylvania Governor Bill Scranton for the nomination. Of the four candidates most prominently mentioned—Rocky, Romney, Scranton, and myself—three had the blessing of the liberal Eastern GOP establishment. I was the only conservative. Two questions were raised: Who would the liberals choose, and would the conservatives try to veto him?

Tony Smith then showed me a poll done by _Congressional Quarterly_ among delegates to the 1960 Republican National Convention. The questionnaire had been distributed both before and after the Rockefeller marriage. The before-the-wedding poll reported that nearly 65 percent of those questioned thought Rockefeller would be the nominee, with about 26 percent voting for me. However, the after-marriage poll said that 46 percent of the delegates preferred me, compared to the governor's 34.5 percent. The pressure on me to become a candidate intensified. I was still not absolutely firm about running and played down the possibility. Meantime, the political rumor mill was still grinding away. Word filtered out from Rockefeller and his people that I might somehow be involved in the public heat he was taking over his remarriage. I brushed it off. My relations with Rocky were better than they had ever been. It would have been a low tactic to turn on him for such a reason. This was dirty stuff, not my style.

Still, I tried to determine how he could possibly have come to such an opinion. I thought back to the phone call on his wedding day. Would he really call me because he thought I was the type of guy who might lead a conservative moral crusade against his remarriage? That was ridiculous, I concluded. I had never uttered a single word, not a hint of disapproval, about his personal life. To this day, I still have no idea who might have spilled such poison. But Rockefeller had apparently concluded that I and other conservatives were the source of some of the personal nastiness in the media and the cause of his fall at the polls. Frustrated and angry, Rockefeller dropped a political bombshell. In a speech billed as his Declaration of July 14, he bitterly condemned the party's "radical right." The governor declared the conservatives were guilty of "subversion" by undermining Republican articles of faith—equal opportunity for all, freedom of speech and information, home rule under the federal system of government, fiscal integrity, and the free enterprise system. He referred to a "real danger" from "extremist elements" in the GOP and said they were engaged in a "ruthless" effort to take over the party.

Rockefeller described these "extremists" as being involved in "threatening letters, smear and hate literature, strong-arm and goon tactics, bomb threats and bombings, infiltration and takeover of established political organizations by Communist and Nazi methods." There was absolutely no doubt about those he was referring to—Goldwater supporters. The governor spoke of the danger of a coup led by a band of well-financed young people who had attended the recent Young Republican convention in San Francisco. He referred to "tactics of totalitarianism" that were being used in the campaign by "Birchers and others of the radical right lunatic fringe." Rockefeller also said the right was abandoning blacks and other minorities and trying to build political power through immoral segregation. He said the right was walking away from the nation's big industrial states in favor of electoral votes in the West and South to create a racist sectionalism in the nation. The governor concluded that real Republicans must save the party from the radicals.

I was shocked and saddened by the declaration, especially since I had received no advance warning from Rockefeller. It had seemed that we had developed a reasonably good relationship, maybe even the beginning of a personal friendship. The memory of those breakfasts and dinners at his Washington home was still warm. He had spoken of Republicans once again running the nation in an atmosphere of unity and fellowship. It turned out that Rockefeller had airmailed a copy of his speech to my office over the weekend. It did not arrive until our Monday mail—after the remarks had been made. My hands began to tremble as I read the full text of the address. It was particularly upsetting to realize that the party would inevitably be weakened by a split. Astonishingly, that seemed to be Rockefeller's intention. Rather than digging the wounds deeper with a detailed reply, I merely said that the speech seemed to be Rockefeller's declaration of candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination. Rocky no longer invited me to his home. I would not have accepted anyway. Our staffs broke contact.

Well, I consoled myself, at least he had spared me personally by not implying I might be an extremist. Wrong again. A few days later, Rockefeller came very close to calling me just that in saying I was a dupe and a puppet of sinister right-wing forces. That was too much. I fired back, saying we should be more concerned about the radical left inside government than anyone outside it. However, it was no time for him, me, or anyone else to start kicking people out of the party. Indeed, I had no power to do so. During the first week of August 1963, Rocky threw a knockout punch at me. The governor said he would not support me as the GOP nominee against President Kennedy if I were "a captive of the radical right." It was now time to decide on whether to run. Rocky had declared war on conservatives in general and me in particular. It was now a question not only of breaking up the old boy network of the party, but of honor and principle. I had never walked away from a fight in my life. There was no backing away this time either. We'd seize control from Rocky and the liberals and take on Jack Kennedy.

From the historical perspective of an Arizonan and Westerner, there was another element in the battle to win control of the GOP. I had no qualms about taking on the Eastern establishment, whether it was Rockefeller, the banks, or the large corporations, because we had long been dominated by these interests. For a century, the West had been a colony of big Eastern money—a boom when they had invested and a bust when they had pulled out of various mining and other operations. We had been left with ghost towns and holes in the ground where gold, silver, and large mineral deposits had been discovered. It had begun with the gold rushes of 1849 in California and elsewhere in the 1860s and 1870s. Then they petered out. Silver later rose but came tumbling down in 1893. Copper prices hit rock bottom in 1921 and again during the Great Depression. Eastern companies, syndicates, and banks bled the region of these natural resources, then abandoned us as soon as the riches ran out. Easterners did help open up the region with investment and jobs—as well as federal tax money—but they reinvested little or nothing in the West. Instead, they built libraries and other monuments to their charity in the East.

Washington still holds half the spread in the West—hundreds of millions of acres—and often dictates how such land may be used. Individual states are not trusted to manage it well environmentally. That is because some states historically have not done a good job of land management. Times have changed. Nevertheless, the feds still want a grip on our reach into the future. My father, Baron, and I in 1912. Mom (Josephine Williams) arrives in Phoenix. Bob, Carolyn, and I with Mom at a party in 1938. Camping out on one of our annual treks to California in the late twenties. With my kids at the end of World War II. Peggy is in my arms, and Joanne, Michael, and Barry Jr. surround me. This is me alongside my P-37, _Peggy-G._ At the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco. At the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Postelection sailing off the California coast. In the cockpit of a TAV-8A Harrier jet at Quantico, Virginia, in 1979. Preparing to take off. At home in my radio shack. With Senator Hugh Scott and Representative John J. Rhodes about to enter the Oval Office to tell President Nixon that he does not have enough votes to avoid impeachment.

With Mike Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey. The last formal portrait with Peggy. Today we are still under pressure from national companies and the Washington bureaucracy as to how we may use our land and other natural resources from copper to tungsten, uranium, oil, coal, shale, and forests. The federal government and large corporations tried to wipe away state and local laws as late as the 1970s, when big oil and other companies came West in the name of saving the United States from an energy crisis caused by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and later Iranian oil embargos. The companies wished to use our scarce water—vast amounts were needed to develop shale and other energy—while Eastern members of Congress argued to halt many Western reclamation projects. I wanted not only a new GOP but an Administration more representative of its people and a Congress more attuned to demographic shifts and changing political winds. In the late summer of 1963 I quietly asked Denison Kitchel, a Phoenix lawyer and close friend, to open a campaign office at the Carroll Arms Hotel, a few blocks from the Capitol. Kitchel, who still looked like a choirboy despite a sprinkling of gray hair, amiably told inquirers he was handling my 1964 reelection run for the Senate. He said we needed time together for planning purposes. Few people believed that, but the answer was accurate—as far as it went. Denny had officially become head of my Senate campaign several months earlier.

Kitchel had no political background. I had chosen him through a twist of fate. In the spring of 1963, at a meeting of Arizona Republican leaders in Phoenix, Dick Kleindienst had stepped down as state party chairman: he was considering running for governor. The party leaders had informally selected Denny, who had been our general counsel for years, to take over as state chairman. I had flown to Phoenix for the meeting. Denny had come to my home the evening before the meeting for a private chat. He'd said, "Barry, I don't want this job. They told me that I had to take it. Everybody says he's behind me. But I don't like the work. I wouldn't be any good at it. I've never been much good with politicians. Think of something—anything—but get me the hell out of it." All of us had lunch the next day, and the Kitchel decision came up. Everyone said Denny would have to become state chairman. No arguments. I said, "Wait a minute, fellows. You've got to find somebody else. Denny's going to handle my senatorial campaign."

Everybody asked, "Is that so?" I replied, "Certainly." Everyone then looked at Denny, who showed a bit of surprise but quickly responded, "Yes, yes. That's right." Timing was a factor in the choice, but there were many more important reasons to bring Denny on as my right hand. We were old and very close friends. I totally trusted him. He was reserved and cautious. As a corporation lawyer, he was studious, intelligent, and conservative. Born in Bronxville, New York, Kitchel was graduated from Yale and later Harvard Law School. As a student, he worked on ranches in the West, and he came to Arizona after completing his studies. Denny was a longtime Arizonan. Our understanding was very simple. He'd come to Washington, keep his powder dry, and listen—to everybody. We'd take until the end of 1963 to evaluate the political situation. Denny made it clear he was no politician. He knew no one on the national political scene. Nor was he known in conservative intellectual circles. While I was the outspoken voice of a growing rebellion in the Republican Party, he was, in many ways, my antithesis.

Denny listened. It seemed that everyone in the party was soon bending his ear—congressional representatives, my GOP colleagues in the Senate, leaders of the Draft Goldwater Committee, and political veterans like Ed McCabe, a Washington lawyer and longtime White House aide to President Eisenhower, and William J. Baroody, Sr., head of the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit think tank he founded in the nation's capital. The Draft Goldwater Committee, which had moved from New York City to new headquarters on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, continued its relentless hunt for convention delegates across the country, not only at state meetings and conventions but at the county and even precinct level. Clif White and his people seemed to be everywhere. They had already garnered delegates in some forty states. They did not yet have a steamroller under way, but they certainly had a grass roots fire burning. Peter O'Donnell, an aggressive young Texan, turned up the heat from the draft committee. He argued with Kitchel over strategy and other moves to win the nomination. Denny politely but firmly rebuffed him, as I had instructed him. We weren't ready to make a formal announcement. The committee was eager to have such a commitment so it could pass the word in the hunt for more delegates.

The pressure from conservatives in Congress mounted with letters and phone calls. Eight hundred to a thousand letters a day poured into my Senate office from conservatives around the country, all urging me to run. Conservative intellectuals said that the right had found a new respectability and that we deserved a chance at major responsibility in the country. Bill Buckley and Brent Bozell, of _National Review,_ wanted to organize a committee of college professors as intellectual support for a Goldwater campaign. They discussed it at dinner with Kitchel, Baroody, and Dr. Charles Kelley, who was doing research work for Denny. All agreed to think further about the proposal. The New York _Times_ soon revealed the meeting but inaccurately described what happened. The _Times_ said that Goldwater advisers had "repelled a boarding party" of the "far right"—referring to Buckley and Bozell—which wanted to join his organization on a policy planning level. All of us knew the story was false, but it raised a serious question. Who had leaked it to the _Times?_ The question was extremely important because it had a major repercussion on my presidential campaign. The _National Review_ crowd felt excluded from the workings of the campaign.

I'm convinced today that Baroody leaked the report. So are Kitchel and others. Bill has since passed away, so it's impossible to know with absolute certainty. The record is, however, important. None of the others present at the dinner spoke with the _Times_ about the conversation. If that is true, why would Baroody divulge a slanted version of what occurred? Bill had become the dominant figure among a small group of advisers around Kitchel—Dr. Kelley, Mike Bernstein, who had worked with me on labor law in the Senate, and McCabe, Ike's former aide. This small group was to grow and become an informal brain trust during my run for the White House. Baroody dominated these advisers for the entire campaign. I was simply too busy to keep track of who was saying what to whom in these issues and strategy sessions. Since Denny was neither a political tactician nor a hard-nosed issues man, he depended heavily on Baroody. Bill saw the Buckley-Bozell gesture as a bid to gain access to the inner circle. Kitchel and I are now convinced that Baroody quickly slammed the door because he saw a possibility that he might have to share power with the two men, both of whom were highly intelligent and very political. In any event, neither Buckley nor Bozell could take a full-time job with us. They simply wanted to be helpful from time to time.

Buckley and Bozell, who married one of Buckley's sisters, saw the _Times_ leak as a rebuff by the inner circle and perhaps by me. They were offended. The truth is, I would have welcomed both into the campaign with open arms. It had been impossible to do so earlier, for this reason: _National Review_ supported the Draft Goldwater Committee at a time when I wanted to remain distant from that group. The entire situation was confused by the _Times_ story, and both groups drifted apart. Buckley, Bozell, and Bill Rusher were virtually shut out from any significant campaign assistance. It was an undeserved, unconscionable act on our part. All are men of the highest integrity and solid conservative views. They should have been on board, talking with me and others and offering feedback on issues, strategy, the media, our opposition, everything. Later, realizing what had happened, I was heartsick about the matter. But what could I say? What could I do? It was too late. Dean Burch, my former administrative assistant and a Tucson lawyer, joined Kitchel as his administrative assistant. I knew Dean well and liked and trusted him.

On November 2, 1963, the Associated Press took a poll of GOP state and county leaders. An overwhelming majority, more than 85 percent, chose me as the "strongest candidate" against Kennedy. Rockefeller had less than 4 percent; Nixon about 3 percent. More than 64 percent believed I would receive the nomination. As the November winds cracked across the Capitol a year before the 1964 Presidential election, the GOP Presidential sweepstakes lined up as follows: George Romney rolled up his sleeves and climbed into the Presidential ring. The Michigan governor had proved to be an exciting, surprising, unorthodox politician. But Romney was a liberal spender, and that didn't wash with conservatives. Pennsylvania Governor Bill Scranton eased inside and outside the presidential ropes. Few people knew whether to take him seriously or not. The Pennsylvania governor leaned toward the conservatives on fiscal matters but embraced the left on many social issues. His Eisenhower connection was important. The Scranton family also were long and traditional Republicans, and he could not be dismissed, at least as a vice presidential possibility.