Why Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign still matters 60 years later

Republicans gathered in Milwaukee this week to officially nominate Donald Trump for president, a continuation of the GOP’s decadeslong march to the far right.

That hard turn started 60 years ago this week when Republicans nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona at the July 13-16, 1964, Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace near San Francisco.

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. … And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," Goldwater said in a fiery acceptance speech that electrified the faithful inside the convention hall but horrified many Americans around the country who were watching TV and getting a good look at Goldwater for the first time.

The rowdy and at-times angry convention exposed to the national television audience to the deep fault lines between the Goldwater-backing conservative wing of the party — condemned at the time as “extremists” by some fellow Republicans — and the moderate wing that had run it since the 1940s.

New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, the leading GOP moderate who had warned of the rise of the “Radical Right,” made remarks that Goldwater backers buried with catcalls, boos and cries of “We Want Barry!” after he called on Republicans to adopt a platform that repudiated the party's "extremists."

A last-ditch “Stop Goldwater” gambit to snatch the 1964 nomination from Goldwater and give it to moderate Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton didn’t come close to swaying enough convention delegates to derail Goldwater.

A letter from Scranton that was distributed to delegates attacked Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for allowing himself to be used by “radical extremists” and for standing “for irresponsibility in the serious question of racial holocaust.”

“In short, Goldwaterism has come to stand for a whole crazy‐quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions that would be soundly repudiated by the American people in November,” Scranton warned.

The letter wound up further alienating many of the delegates Scranton was trying to court and was later used against Goldwater in a TV commercial for President Lyndon Johnson. And Goldwater was personally offended. But its dire prediction was spot on: Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide in the Nov. 3, 1964, general election that resulted in a national electoral wipeout for Republicans up and down the ticket.

While Goldwater’s presidential ambitions were over, his doomed candidacy put the Republican Party on a rightward trajectory that continues today.

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan won the White House with a candidacy largely inspired by Goldwater’s 16 years earlier.

Sixty years later, Goldwater and Trump may have little in common and the issues that motivate conservatives have changed, but the GOP remains in the grip of the party’s right wing, the descendants of Goldwater’s base.

Liberal Republicans, vanquished in 1964, are all but extinct. And the spirit of ’64 lives on every time MAGA-style conservatives choose to back ideologically pure but often unelectable candidates instead of more centrist Republicans who might compromise but could perform better at the ballot box.

“1964 was the great turning point,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics who worked on "Bombs Away: LBJ, Goldwater and the 1964 Campaign that Changed It All," a 2014 documentary on the 1964 election.

Did Goldwater ever have a chance in 1964?

Even after six decades, the “extremism in defense of liberty” line still packs a punch and defines the 1964 Goldwater campaign.

At the time, the impact of the speech was immediate and seismic.

Lee Edwards was there. He was the 1964 Goldwater campaign’s top communications aide and is the author of the 1995 biography "Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution."

"The press came to me and had this wonderful line. I forget which reporter it was,” Edwards remembered last year in an interview with The Republic. “He said something like, ‘Oh my God, he's going to run like Goldwater.'"

Reporters and other political observers had assumed Goldwater would make the expected outreach to the party’s moderates and liberals to try to unite the fractured party.

“And instead it was Barry Goldwater giving the finger, the middle finger, to the liberals,” recalled Edwards, who said he had misgivings when he heard the words come out of Goldwater's mouth.

"I was concerned about it because I thought there might be a really strong reaction, a negative reaction,” he said.

Goldwater had signaled from the start that he intended to run an uncompromising campaign, consequences be damned.

"I will not change my beliefs to win votes. I will offer a choice, not an echo," Goldwater said in announcing his candidacy at his Paradise Valley home on Jan. 3, 1964. "This will not be an engagement of personalities. It will be an engagement of principles."

60 years ago: Barry Goldwater rocked GOP convention

To Sabato, Goldwater’s hard-nosed rhetoric suggests he knew his candidacy was futile from the start, coming so soon after the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Saddened and shaken Americans coalesced around Johnson, the new president who signaled he would complete the slain Kennedy’s agenda.

"There was no way we were going to have three presidents in a year,” Sabato said. “Look, Kennedy was elevated to secular sainthood. … It was so horrible. People who weren’t alive then don’t understand. No one could imagine this happening, and then when it did, it took the country by the throat.”

As much as anything, Goldwater was making a stand for conservatism in a bid to become the movement's patron saint, Sabato said.

At the Cow Palace, Goldwater’s conservative backers at the convention gave the moderates no quarter.

Besides refusing Rockefeller’s call for the party to repudiate extremists, GOP delegates rejected liberal planks on civil rights and nuclear arms that Republican moderates tried to add to the platform.

Moderates such as Michigan Gov. George Romney, whose son Mitt would become the GOP nominee 48 years later, left San Francisco demoralized and in no mood to work to elect the top of the ticket.

Even if Johnson’s Election Day victory was inevitable, the convention ugliness and the deeply divided Republican Party helped his cause. The Democrats effectively used Goldwater’s words and the attacks on him from his GOP critics such as Scranton, Rockefeller and Romney against Goldwater in the general election.

The open hostility between the conservatives and the moderates at the convention startled a lot of Americans watching the proceedings on TV.

"It was prime-time reality television. People yelling, people screaming," said Brooks Simpson, an ASU Foundation professor of history at Arizona State University and an expert in the presidency.

Goldwater's speech "is really the first time many Americans, Democrat as well as Republican, got to see Barry Goldwater at work," Simpson said. "And the message he delivered, and the stridency with which he delivered it, scared a lot of people and opened the door for Lyndon Johnson to portray Goldwater as a fanatic.

"So I think what happens in that acceptance speech is when you get the nomination, you have to make the pivot from uniting the party to facing the country," he said. "Goldwater didn't make the pivot. He talked to Republicans in the convention hall and forgot he had a national audience."

What happened in the 1964 presidential campaign?

On the campaign trail, Goldwater was an undisciplined and gaffe-prone candidate. His bellicose stance against the Soviet Union fueled American fears of nuclear brinkmanship and made it easy for Johnson to frame him as a reckless warmonger.

Goldwater complained he was misquoted in saying he would give NATO "commanders" authority to use nuclear weapons in the event of an emergency. He also seemed to defend, in theory, the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

“He said the nuclear bomb is just another weapon,” Sabato said. “He talked about dropping nuclear bombs on the supply lines in North Vietnam. He joked about throwing a nuclear bomb into the men’s room at the Kremlin.”

Such comments frightened Americans in the era of nuclear anxiety that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sabato said.

The Democrats mocked the Goldwater campaign slogan of "In your heart, you know he's right" with "In your guts, you know he's nuts."

A Democratic attack ad against Goldwater is still considered one of the most devastating of all time. The 30-second black-and-white TV commercial showed a 3-year-old girl counting the petals she plucks from a daisy. At 10, a chilling nuclear countdown starts. The frame freezes and the camera zooms into a close-up of the child's eye. At zero, a bomb explodes with a mushroom cloud.

A narrator warns voters to cast their ballots for Johnson in the Nov. 3, 1964, election because "the stakes are too high for you to stay home."

Years later, Goldwater remained raw about the commercial's suggestion that his presidency would usher in an atomic holocaust.

The spot aired only once, on Sept. 7, 1964, but generated a lot of news coverage because of its controversial nature.

"Why just once? Why not a dozen times?" Goldwater would write of the "Daisy Girl" ad in his 1988 autobiography. "The answer is that if you stab a man in the back deeply enough once, you can murder him."

Goldwater's choice of a running mate also was a bit of head-scratcher. Once again he ignored the GOP's moderate wing and instead of forging a unified ticket picked William Miller, a little-known conservative member of Congress from New York.

Miller remained so obscure that years later he was featured as part of American Express’ famous “Do You Know Me?” advertising campaign. In the TV commercial, Miller noted that he was never recognized until he showed his charge card, despite once having run for vice president.

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Did Barry Goldwater vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

To many observers, Goldwater’s June 1964 Senate vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forever put him on the wrong side of history. Goldwater had supported anti-discrimination bills in 1957 and 1960, but Goldwater objected to two sections in the 1964 legislation related to employment practices and public accommodation as unconstitutional and as an overreach of federal power.

Goldwater voted against the bill on libertarian and constitutional rather than racist or segregationist grounds. To his credit, he rejected pressure from some on the right to run against civil rights in order to stir up racial resentment and exploit a potential white backlash. Still, his vote nonetheless gave Republicans a cynical political advantage in the then-Democrat-dominated South, which Goldwater carried in 1964 along with his home state of Arizona.

The vote furthered a perception that Goldwater was out of step with where the United States was in the 1960s.

“He was out of tune and out of time,” Sabato said. “He was still conservative on many of these issues — and certainly foreign policy — at a time when Americans were becoming more liberal. So he didn’t have a shot in 1964.”

What happened to Barry Goldwater?

Simpson of ASU noted that former Vice President Richard Nixon’s victorious 1968 presidential campaign was influenced by Goldwater’s 1964 effort.

Republicans learned between 1964 and 1968 there were a lot of votes that could be won in the South, he said.

"What’s interesting is that many people opposed Richard Nixon as the opposite of Barry Goldwater. But in fact, Nixon was able to tap into a lot of the resentment that Goldwater first identified," Simpson said. “But he was much more of an establishment figure, whereas Goldwater could be dismissed as the wacko who wanted to lob bombs all over the place. And, you know, Johnson was able to discredit Goldwater in a way that Nixon evaded in 1968."

For Goldwater’s part, he would return to the Senate in 1969 and represent Arizona for another three terms. But he never again would be the insurgent conservative figurehead that he was in 1964.

In 1974: Goldwater and Rhodes told Nixon he was doomed

Edwards, the Goldwater biographer and former campaign aide, said Goldwater no longer felt the pressure of having to lead the national conservative movement. Other rising GOP stars, most notably former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, were taking up that mantle.

"He always said, 'I just really am happy being the senator from Arizona, so I love that job,'” Edwards said.

Goldwater did play another role on the national stage in 1974, when he, House Minority Leader John Rhodes, R-Ariz., and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, R-Pa., personally informed Nixon that he would not escape impeachment, conviction and removal from office in connection with the Watergate scandal. Nixon resigned instead.

As times changed, Goldwater grew increasingly at odds with the right wing of the party as the Religious Right came to prominence in the 1970s and abortion rights became a major GOP sore spot. In 1976 he would back moderate President Gerald Ford over his conservative challenger Reagan, the Goldwater-style candidate in the race.

Goldwater's trademark saltiness made national news in 1981 after Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell criticized Goldwater's old friend Sandra Day O'Connor, Reagan's first nominee to the Supreme Court.

"Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass," Goldwater said.

Those and other developments eventually led to a national reconsideration of Goldwater.

“As we got to know a different Goldwater in the 1970s and particularly in the 1980s, in his last term, the view of Goldwater changed pretty dramatically,” Sabato said. “Arizonans knew more about Goldwater all along, but to us he was just the ultimate far-right guy. And then the Christian Right took over, and we found out what far-right really was. And then Trump, God knows."

In 1996 Goldwater quipped to his former Senate colleague Bob Dole, who that year was running against President Bill Clinton, that "we're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?"

Goldwater died two years later on May 29, 1998, at age 89.

Coming July 17: In this week's episode of The Gaggle political podcast, Arizona Republic hosts Ron Hansen and Mary Jo Pitzl look back on Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run and discuss why that election was so consequential.

Dan Nowicki is The Arizona Republic's national politics editor. Follow him on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, at @dannowicki.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign paved way for Reagan, Trump