Karl Hess; Goldwater’s Speech Writer in 1964

Karl Hess, a Republican speech writer who worked as U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign phrasemaker in 1964, has died. He was 70.

A resident of Kearneysville, W. Va., Hess died Friday in a Charlottesville, Va., hospital of an undisclosed illness.

Hess was probably best known for coining Goldwater’s famous campaign slogan: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

“It is a sad loss,” Goldwater said Monday. “He was a very dear and valued friend, one of the finest writers I have ever known. I am going to miss him.”

Hess was a speech writer for the Republican National Committee, and briefly for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon and various Republican senators and congressmen.

He helped write the Republican Party’s platforms in 1960 and 1964, and later wrote several books on politics, including “In a Cause That Will Triumph: The Goldwater Campaign and the Future of Conservatism,” published in 1967.

A member of Goldwater’s “Arizona Mafia,” Hess was described during the presidential campaign as “a round, cheerful man . . . a dedicated right-wing ideologue who is even more conservative than the senator.” As he sat in San Francisco hammering out the party’s platform that year, Hess was described by The Times as “intense in his devotion to the cause of conservatism in politics.”

After Goldwater’s defeat, Hess appeared to bolt across the political spectrum to become a Libertarian. He believed, however, that conservative and libertarian thinking were similar.

“I moved in a direction which the FBI chooses to call ‘leftward,’ ” he once said. “What I actually did was go to work as a commercial welder, get arrested for demonstrating against the Indochina War, work with Black Panthers and teach a course on anarchism.”

Hess ran for governor of West Virginia as a Libertarian in 1992, but failed to get the required number of signatures to make the ballot.

“I don’t really expect to get the job,” he said. “I am running for the right of people to be represented on the ballot, which is so fundamental to our form of government.”

He is survived by his second wife, Therese Machotka Hess of Kearneysville, and two sons, Karl Hess IV and Eric Hess.