AuH2O in ’64

There’s much to like about J. William Middendorf II’s new book. First, of course, is the title–A Glorious Disaster–which is dead on and may finally help to strip away the Velcro long stuck between the name “Goldwater” and the noun “debacle.” Then there’s the author, Bill Middendorf, who bolts into politics with typical businessman swagger and, atypically, stays to create his own space, develop survival skills, and do much good. And finally, there’s the candidate, Barry Morris Goldwater, without whom there would have been no campaign and no movement and maybe no magazine quite like this one.

Glorious is the memoir of a working executive, not a philosopher-king. Arrived on the political scene from early success on Wall Street, Middendorf already knew what he believed–he was a Goldwater Republican–and he concentrated his considerable energies on the political process and how it worked. With no need for ideological infusions from the policy wonks, he was free to focus on operational details: the governing regs, the people who could get things done, the sources of funds and the fine art of campaign bill-paying. He became an expert in political money, which saved him a place at every meeting he chose to attend. And he became that most feared of all meeting-attenders: the note-taker. The reader benefits here from Middendorf’s encyclopedic files. The subjects of those files benefit only intermittently, which adds seasoning to this most unusual campaign book.

It seems almost inevitable that Middendorf would become a close associate and warm admirer of the Draft Goldwater Committee leader, F. Clifton White. One of the few professional politicians of his era–someone, that is, who devoted his full working life to the practice of campaign management–Clif White was a man of schedules and time tables, agendas and reviews. Wise enough to know that he could never impose lasting order on the chaos of politics, White was still determined to control as much of the process as he possibly could.

Middendorf felt a sense of order, comfort, and shared purpose. Along with his mentor Jeremiah Milbank Jr., he signed on with White to be the money men for the Draft Committee. (Among the other key figures were National Review publisher William Rusher, who set the ideological compass for the group, and John Ashbrook, a young congressman who emboldened and energized the effort. Ashbrook, no son of 1994, seemed to harden in his views once he was elected and moved inside the Beltway.)

The story of how Clif White’s crew drafted Goldwater and took over the GOP has been told elsewhere, including in White’s own memoir, Suite 3505. The story of the “first genuine draft” is a great yarn, and not just for lovers of the political yarn. What Middendorf brings to the grand old party is those damn notes. He remembers who said what, and when, and then how they tried to tidy up the after-action reports. As a storyteller he’s not going to make anybody forget Alexandre Dumas, but for political junkies, there’s a fix waiting here.

I never knew, or had forgotten, that J. Edgar Hoover, on LBJ’s orders, was bugging Goldwater headquarters. Or that the CIA man running traps on the Goldwater staff was our old friend E. Howard Hunt. Or that brand-name pols really thought that the selection of William Miller as the vice presidential nominee might lock up the electoral votes of New York. Middendorf is particularly good on the ouster of the Draft Goldwater crew–White and company, as well as William F. Buckley Jr. and the dreaded “intellectuals”–just as Goldwater secured the GOP nomination.

Middendorf, by then the indispensable fundraiser, was the only Clif White man to survive the purge, and he provides a peer’s-eye view of the incoming “Arizona mafia.” The just-nominated Goldwater, with his political life flashing before his eyes, decided to bring in three old friends from home–Arizona lawyers Denison Kitchel, Dean Burch, and Richard Kleindienst–to run his general-election campaign. He might as well have brought in Larry, Curly, and Moe. None of the three had any experience in national politics, and a campaign against an incumbent president was not the best place to start.

By Labor Day–in those days the traditional start of the campaign–it was all over but the shouting. Historians would later note, of course, that it was precisely the shouting that was much the best part of the campaign. Barry traveled to terminal sun colonies and informed oxygen-gulping oldsters that Social Security ought to be voluntary. He went to Tennessee and told the rent-seekers packed in around the federal trough that the Tennessee Valley Authority was a waste of public money. He reminded effete Eastern audiences that an efficient way to uncover North Vietnamese trails was to tactical-nuke ’em.

Not everybody found the candor refreshing. When Barry, in West Virginia, launched an attack on the War on Poverty, there was an eerie quiet as the audience searched his remarks for subsurface meaning. (My lingering campaign image is of a mid-sized cutter headed through rough seas toward a looming iceberg. On the bridge the tension is palpable. A young officer breaks the strained silence, shouting into the gale, “Skip, let’s see what this baby can do.” The captain replies, “Good thinking, lieutenant,” and guns the engine full forward.)

Middendorf is undoubtedly correct when he laments the departure of White’s battle-hardened team and the takeover by Barry’s well-meaning rookies. Clif White would have run a better campaign and the race would have been closer. But Goldwater would have lost even so, and the ultimate victory of conservatism might possibly have been compromised, the paradigmatic character of the campaign somehow sacrificed. The residual value of the campaign–the themes developed, the troops bloodied, the lists compiled, the organizations framed–redeems Barry’s decision to do it his way. All choice, no echo. The campaign was a lab lesson in gratification deferred, or as George Will has written: “We . . . who voted for him in 1964 believe he won, it just took 16 years to count the votes.”

While Middendorf gives only brief attention to matters of policy and program, he is careful not to confuse the politics of Barry Goldwater with those of Brent Bozell. Goldwater, it will be remembered, was propelled to leadership of the nascent “movement” after publication of his huge bestseller, The Conscience of a Conservative. Bozell, who had ghosted the book, was a brilliant lawyer and a skilled ideologist (and yes, the father of the magisterial media-basher of the same name). A political intimate of the fusionist Frank Meyer, Bozell had woven strands of Milton Friedman’s free-market programs in with Russell Kirk’s traditionalist philosophy to produce a seemingly seamlesss text. Bozell was also a master of chiliastic prose. The book was a call to arms, and the first generation of movement types fled the plow for the armory. (Partial disclosure: I managed Bozell’s Maryland congressional campaign to a brilliant second-place finish.)

Goldwater evinced mixed emotions about the book. He was grateful for its success, of course, but always a bit awkward in accepting praise for work not really his own. Early on he adopted the formulation that Bozell had been the “guiding hand” in preparation of the book, and over the years, Goldwater made little effort to hold Bozell close to the inner circle. Late in his life, when we had reconnected as colleagues on a corporate board, I asked Goldwater for his final reckoning on Conscience. The essential Barry responded, “Well, I read the book. I even agreed with parts of it.”

What, then, were Goldwater’s politics, if not elegantly Bozellian? Perhaps they can best be described as western ornery. Goldwater would have been a charter member of the Leave Us Alone coalition–if he had believed in coalitions. Born only a few years after the birth of his beloved Arizona, he shared the frontiersman’s sleepless wariness, the bone-deep distrust of large, remote, and power-grabbing governments. His first reaction to almost any initiative on the fuzzy border of constitutional authority would have been–“It’s none of the government’s damn business.”

It’s a measure of how far we have come that there is today in Congress perhaps only a single heir to Goldwater’s minimalism–Ron Paul of Texas–and that he is regarded within his own Republican caucus as somewhere between a curiosity and a kook. It is noteworthy as well that the man who inherited Goldwater’s Senate seat, John McCain, has made his mark in politics by abridging speech freedoms in the name of campaign finance reform. Which seems to beg this question: Is there still room in the movement for a smaller-the-better-government conservative, a national modesty conservative? Is there still room for Barry Goldwater?

Neal B. Freeman is chairman of the Blackwell Corporation.