Seeing what made Barry run

IN an era of political and cultural division so intense that people feel compelled to declare a position on Christmas, it’s hard to recall just how novel and polarizing a personality Barry M. Goldwater was when the Republicans nominated him for the presidency in 1964.

J. William Middendorf II was one of the idealistic young conservatives who were fired up by reading Goldwater’s bestselling manifesto, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” and mounted the insurgency that overthrew the GOP establishment and “drafted” the Arizona senator as the party’s presidential candidate. Middendorf, a successful investment banker who founded the American Conservative Union along with William F. Buckley Jr., stayed on to run the Goldwater campaign’s finances -- and to endure the frustrations of trying to manage a headstrong candidate who never really thought he’d win.

In the years since, the author has served three Republican presidents -- Nixon, Ford and Reagan -- as secretary of the Navy, ambassador to the Netherlands and representative to the Organization of American States and the European Community. He also has remained active in electoral politics, most recently as part of the campaign to discredit Sen. John F. Kerry’s military service.

“A Glorious Disaster” is his episodic, insider’s account of the 1964 campaign. As memoir, it’s a fascinating period piece, rich in the kind of detail on which historians and old political writers dote. There’s interesting insight into why Goldwater purged the conservative intellectuals and ardent true believers from his campaign staff in favor of familiar fellow Arizonans. (It was because he never expected to win.)

Middendorf has a sense of humor, as when he recounts how he went from being a two-pack-a-day smoker to quitting cold turkey “at 3 a.m., Thursday, July 16, 1964” at the end of a long night in a small, smoke-filled bathroom of the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, where Goldwater’s potential running mates were screened. There was also the author’s personal campaign to get Goldwater’s media people to adopt his term “freedomism” as part of the candidate’s slogan. Somehow, they preferred “In your heart, you know he’s right.”

The author has an irritating way of glancingly -- and repeatedly -- reintroducing his pedigree: He knew President George H.W. Bush as “Poppy” and there are lots of references to guys from prep school and the jolly way their connections persisted onto Wall Street and, later, into politics. Still, Middendorf also has a discrete, old-school stiletto when it comes to personalities and his capsule sketch of his subsequent dealings with President Nixon is politely withering.

What’s frustratingly missing from this account is any analysis or even rumination on his subtitle’s implications for the conservative movement that has burgeoned in the years since. By indirection, Middendorf suggests some of the internal tensions that are at work among conservatives even now. Goldwater, for example, did not write “Conscience of a Conservative.” The author was L. Brent Bozell Jr., father of the now ubiquitous media critic. Bozell was a deeply conservative Catholic who ultimately fell under the influence of Spanish Carlists, decided that Francisco Franco was insufficiently orthodox and founded a magazine, Triumph, on the lacier fringes of the traditionalist movement.

In later years, Goldwater told associates that he agreed with only some of what Bozell wrote for him. The senator was, at heart, not a traditionalist so much as a rugged just-leave-me-the-hell-alone Western libertarian. He was, in other words, a proponent of what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty” rather than of the “politics of virtue” that have come to dominate so much conservative discourse. It’s hard to imagine what he would have made of a hall filled with what today are called “values voters.”

Similarly, Middendorf is unconsciously revealing in his discussion of the fight over a civil rights plank for the 1964 Republican platform. Goldwater, who disdained racism of every sort, opposed the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds and his supporters insisted that the platform take that into account. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were building the edifice that one day would propel Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and shift the GOP’s balance of power into the historic Confederacy. Just as what James McPherson has called “the myth of the lost cause” allowed Southern apologists to insist that the Civil War was over states’ rights rather than slavery, the constitutional opposition to legislating civil-rights enforcement provided cover for racial die-hards to enter the Republican Party.

As a young editor, I worked at various times with Karl Hess, the speechwriter who crafted the Goldwater campaign addresses that, in retrospect, brought an authentic eloquence to the conservative cause. By the time we met, Hess had followed the Goldwater movement’s libertarian streak to a logical but consistent extreme and had become an advocate for radical self-sufficiency, living as they say, “off the grid.” He was still, as those speeches suggested, intellectually audacious and a muscular writer -- and a lot of fun.

Before his retirement from the U.S. Senate in 1987, I also dealt several times with Goldwater himself and always found him unpretentious, impatient with nonsense and likable -- a gruff, profane, recognizably “salty” character to a fellow Westerner. Once, I rather reluctantly approached him about participating in a ridiculous discussion that had been dreamed up by one of my superiors. (As a class, editors are given to spasms of inexplicable enthusiasm and extravagant whim, which they routinely mistake for ideas.) In any event, when I finally spoke to Goldwater about it, he quite understandably took my head off. Then, sensing my embarrassment, he said, “Aw, forget it buddy. I know how those damn things get thought up. You’re just doing your damn job.”

In the epilogue to his campaign narrative, Middendorf lists 13 “observations” he wrote down immediately after Goldwater’s crushing defeat in 1964. One reads: “Beware the impractical, even if ideologically correct, candidate. Or the candidate motivated only by ideology. Either one will be trouble-prone, will embarrass you.... “

It’s unfortunate that Middendorf, who was present at the creation of the current conservative movement, never comes to grips with -- or, for that matter, even considers -- what sort of place people like Hess and Goldwater might now find in it. Goldwater was not particularly religious and was skeptical of piety. I would pity the reporter who tried to interrogate him about his “relationship with God.” He believed that a woman’s choice of abortion was a personal one, and in equal rights for homosexuals.

The truth is that modern conservatism’s founding father would be unlikely to win a single Republican primary in the coming general election.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com