I spent most of a mid-September week travelling with Senator Goldwater in seven states of the Old Confederacy and in two Border states. Actually, I did not so much travel “with” the Senator as “behind” him. He made his rounds in a Boeing 727, a three-engine jet, flying at very nearly the speed of sound. With him in this plane—the Yai Bi Ken, which is Navajo for “House in the Sky”—were Mrs. Goldwater, five or six campaign advisers, and fifty-odd journalists of one sort or another, most of them representing what some Goldwater enthusiasts call “the rat-fink Eastern press.” (“I’m on a political trip, and the Republican Party is paying for it,” Goldwater said in Tulsa the other day, adding that a lot of President Johnson’s “political” trips are paid for by the taxpayers. He might have gone on to say that while Republican treasurers may be signing the checks, this involves merely a transfer of funds from an account into which newspapers, magazines, and television networks have put thirty-six hundred dollars for each of their representatives travelling with Goldwater.) I was part of the journalistic overflow from the Yai Bi Ken. We travelled about—sometimes as many as twelve of us, sometimes as few as five—in a two-engine propeller plane that cruised at a little better than one-third the speed of the candidate’s plane. In theory, we were “following” Goldwater, but this was almost as hopeless as giving hot pursuit to an Alfa Romeo on a tricycle. We made only about half as many stops as he did, and it was not uncommon to arrive at a Goldwater rally just as the preacher was saying the benediction, or to leave one after only a few words of the invocation. In Missouri, we never saw Goldwater at all. We landed at the Springfield airport, learned that he had left for a meeting in town, stopped in the coffee shop for a quick lunch, and took off for Charleston, West Virginia, where, it had been announced, Goldwater was to make a major speech on the administration’s anti-poverty program. All this had its rewards as well as its frustrations. It takes a powerful constitution to endure attendance at eight or ten political rallies a day, and Goldwater rallies in the Deep South are especially taxing. On the whole, I was relieved by the news that our group would be unable to make Shreveport, Louisiana, where, according to one authority in our entourage, “there are more haters per square mile than anywhere else in the country.” It was, though, disappointing not to be in Knoxville, Tennessee, to hear Goldwater, standing beneath the Confederate flag, say that he still thought the Tennessee Valley Authority ought to be sold to private interests, just as it was disappointing to miss his address to senior citizens in Orlando, Florida, on the iniquities of providing hospital care for the aged under the Social Security system. In any case, the experience, though neither as rich nor as wearing as it might have been, was instructive and, in many ways, novel. I don’t suppose, for example, that anyone before us has ever logged several thousand miles in the South and visited a dozen or so of its great centers of population without seeing any more Negroes than one might expect to encounter on, say, an average winter afternoon in Spitsbergen. In a Negroless Memphis or Atlanta or New Orleans, some of us had the feeling of having lost our bearings. We would peer out beyond the edges of the crowds and down side streets trying to see if we could find a single Negro and, whenever we saw one, telling one another of our rare discovery. There were novel sounds as well as sights. It has been my lot to attend political gatherings of many sorts for many years, but never until I went South with Goldwater had I heard any large number of Americans boo and hoot at the mention of the name of the President of the United States. In Alabama and Louisiana, there were thunderous, stadium-filling boos, all of them cued by a United States senator.
This senator is a man easily surprised and endlessly surprising. One of my favorite stories about him—and one of the more agreeable ones—involves the principal of an all-Negro high school in Phoenix back in the days when segregation was the rule in that city. He once asked Goldwater how it happened that the family department store donated a gold watch as a commencement prize to each of the all-white schools but not to the school he headed. Goldwater explained that he was opposed to segregation and didn’t intend to encourage it by supplying an all-Negro school with a prize. The principal replied that, as he saw the matter, an all-white school was every bit as segregated as an all-Negro one. Goldwater thought this over for a moment or two and then declared, with a delighted grin, that the educator’s reasoning was absolutely unassailable. The school got its gold watch. As an individual, he is elated by illuminations of this kind. It may even have pleased him, the other day, to have Walter Lippmann inform him that it hardly makes sense to accuse the President, as Goldwater did in Charleston, of planning an economy in which “no one is permitted to fall below the average,” since, in Lippmann’s icy words, “there cannot be an ‘average’ if no one is below it.” The Republican nominee’s capacity for astonishment is matched by his capacity for astonishing. He is everlastingly outwitting—if that is the word—those who think they know most about him. For two or three years now, a number of reasonably intelligent people have been studying Goldwater and Goldwaterism as intently—and, in some cases, almost as morbidly—as Cotton Mather ever studied the doings of Satan and the manifestations of witchcraft. But not even the most assiduous and imaginative of Goldwaterologists was prepared for the Senator’s emergence in San Francisco as a candidate for High Sheriff as well as for President. If Goldwater was anything, he was a states’-rights man, and if there is one states’ right, or responsibility, that no one has ever thought of challenging, it is the maintenance of public safety and the enforcement of criminal justice. In his acceptance speech, though, Goldwater said that law and order were in jeopardy almost everywhere and that he proposed to do something “to keep the streets safe from bullies and marauders.” Goldwaterologists in the Cow Palace and across the country were stunned—and stunned again when, in a press conference the following morning, he said, “I think the responsibility for this has to start someplace, and it should start at the federal level.” How on earth did this strictest of Constitutional fundamentalists propose to exercise federal “responsibility” to keep order in the streets? That question was put to Goldwater in Phoenix a day later, and he was vague in response—reassuringly vague from the Goldwaterologists’ point of view. He said a few words about creating an improved “moral climate” by force of Presidential example, and some about bettering the quality of the federal judiciary. Though still a bit unsettled, the Goldwaterologists assumed that this was about the size of it—that the Republican candidate would continue to take a stand against “bullies and marauders” but would not undermine his whole position as a strict Constitutionalist by proposing any specific strategy of intervention. For him, they reasoned, there was more than the Constitution at stake. The autonomy of Southern state troopers and “public-safety” units is a vital element in the defense of the Southern status quo. Moreover, the sight of Goldwater stickers on police cars and motorcycles is by no means unusual along Southern highways.
Until the first day of the Southern tour, it seemed that Goldwater would not go much beyond the rhetoric of the acceptance speech and the amplifying statements he made in the days immediately after the Convention. But on his first evening out, in a baseball park in St. Petersburg, he delivered a speech that went well beyond anything he had said in San Francisco or Phoenix. It was by far the most radical statement he has ever made. In it he not only undermined his position on the Constitution but threw the document itself away, and the Magna Carta with it. He began by reminding his audience of what he had said about crime and violence in San Francisco and by declaring that it was “a tragedy [that] the breakdown of law and order should be an issue in this campaign for the highest office in the land.” But, he went on, “it must be an issue, a major issue,” for “the war against crime [is] the only needed war.” (So much for South Vietnam.) He cited a number of alarming statistics on crime (nationwide, he said, it has climbed “five times faster than the population” during the Kennedy-Johnson administration), and demanded to know how President Johnson can “ignore the six thousand or so major crimes committed in the last twenty-four hours.” (The President was vulnerable enough; like Goldwater, he was in Florida at that very moment, addressing some machinists in Miami Beach and saying not a word about the last twenty-four hours of crime.) Goldwater then put, in his audience’s behalf, the question that had bothered the Goldwaterologists: “How, you will rightly ask, will Bill Miller and I restore domestic tranquillity to this land? Well, let me tell you how we will do it.” In essence, what Bill Miller and he would do to combat lawlessness would be to change the law or ignore it. In the first place, they would appoint officials who understood, as they did, that the important thing about law enforcement and criminal justice was to get offenders off the streets and behind bars. When the law got in the way of prosecutors, the law should be either revised or overlooked. “Something must be done, and done immediately, to swing away from this obsessive concern for the rights of the criminal defendant,” Goldwater said. He gave some examples of this “obsessive concern,” all of which were Supreme Court rulings intended to assure the observance of the “due-process” clause and the rights set forth in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. It was nonsense, Goldwater said, for the Supreme Court to hold a confession inadmissible merely because a defendant did not have his lawyer’s advice at the time he made it; the only point was whether the confession was a recital of the truth. He said that he and Miller would urge upon Congress a statute voiding the Mallory ruling, which, as he summarized it, “holds that any statement made by a defendant to police officers is inadmissible if arraignment is delayed.” If he had said that the Constitution is a lot of ink on paper, he would have described it about as adequately as he described the Mallory ruling in St. Petersburg. The ruling, made by the Supreme Court in 1957, deals at some length with the appropriate limits of pre-arraignment examination of a suspect and with the question of how much time between arrest and arraignment is enough and how much is too much. Most policemen are unhappy with it, and so is Goldwater. About it, and about other manifestations of the “obsessive concern” with the rights of defendants, Goldwater said he would do two things. He would, “in making appointments to the federal judiciary, [consider] the need to redress Constitutional interpretation in favor of the public.” And, as insurance in the event that court-packing didn’t work, he would support a Constitutional amendment to “give back to the states those powers absolutely needed for fair and efficient administration of criminal law.” If the amendment were to embody his present view of what “powers” the states need, it would effectively repeal about half the Bill of Rights. “In your hearts, you know there must be a change,” he said. “And in your hearts you know that Bill Miller and I will be that change.”
The crowd at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg was, like most of Goldwater’s Southern crowds, good-sized, enthusiastic, and more responsive to his presence than to his words. It is axiomatic, of course, that political crowds are more interested in seeing than in listening, and most candidates nowadays give the live audience their material presence and direct their words to radio and television audiences and to readers of newspapers. But in this, as in so many other matters, things have always been a bit different in the South. Its masses have always relished strong, vivid political rhetoric. They will travel long distances to hear it, and—other things being equal, or even a little unequal—will reward eloquence at the polls. Goldwater nowhere attempted to satisfy the Southern appetite for language. The lines he got from his writers were as flat as his delivery of them. Even when the substance was inflammatory, the form was soporific—statistics on crime, discussions of previously unheard-of Supreme Court rulings and internal-security cases, arguments over the relative merits of defense contractors. But this rarely dampened the enthusiasm that the crowds had brought with them to the gatherings. The quality of this enthusiasm, one felt, was essentially non-political. These were not really political rallies—they were revels, they were pageants, they were celebrations. The aim of the revellers was not so much to advance a candidacy or a cause as to dramatize a mood, and the mood was a kind of joyful defiance, or defiant joy. By coming South, Barry Goldwater had made it possible for great numbers of unapologetic white supremacists to hold great carnivals of white supremacy. They were not troubled in the least over whether this would hurt the Republican Party in the rest of the country. They wanted to make—for their own satisfaction, if for no one else’s—a display of the fact that they had found and were enjoying membership in one organization that was secure against integration, because it had made itself secure against Negro aspirations; as long as they could put on shows of this kind, no Negro would ever want in. By far the most memorable of the shows was staged in Cramton Bowl, in Montgomery, Alabama, on the second night of Goldwater’s tour. Some unsung Alabama Republican impresario had hit upon an idea of breathtaking simplicity: to show the country the “lily-white” character of Republicanism in Dixie by planting the bowl with a great field of white lilies—living lilies, in perfect bloom and gorgeously arrayed. The night was soft; the stars and the moon were bright; the grass in the bowl was impossibly green, as if it were growing out of something far richer than dirt; the stadium lights did not destroy the colors and shadows of evening yet illuminated the turf so well that individual blades of grass could be seen. And springing from the turf were seven hundred Alabama girls in long white gowns, all of a whiteness as impossible as the greenness of the green. The girls came, we were told, from every one of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties—from Tallapoosa and Bibb and Etowah and Coffee—as well as from Montgomery, Birmingham, and Mobile. Their dresses were uniform only in color and length; taken all in all, it was a triumph for, among other things, the seamstresses of Alabama. The strewing of the lilies had been done about half an hour before the proceedings were to begin. The girls stood on the turf, each waving a small American flag, while the bands played and the local officials made and announced last-minute arrangements. Then, right on schedule, an especially powerful light was focussed on a stadium gate at about the fifty-yard line, and the candidate of the Republican Party rode in as slowly as a car can be made to go, first past fifty yards or so of choice Southern womanhood and then, after a sharp left at the goal line, past more girls and up to the splendidly draped stand. It was all as solemn and as stylized as a review of troops by some master of the art like General de Gaulle. The girls did not behave like troops; they swayed a bit as Goldwater passed, and sounds came from them—not squeals or shrieks but pleasing and ladylike murmurs. Yet in a sense, of course, they were Goldwater’s troops, as well as representatives of what the rest of his Southern legions—the thousands in the packed stands, the tens of thousands in Memphis and New Orleans and Atlanta and Shreveport and Greenville—passionately believed they were defending. When at last he mounted the platform, the lilies departed the gridiron and arranged themselves on the sidelines. There they listened to what was by far the limpest speech Goldwater delivered anywhere in the South. It wasn’t about anything in particular. He said that big government was bad and that he and Bill Miller proposed to put an end to it, though not right away. (“Because of existing commitments, we cannot do this overnight. But we can gradually replace this undesirable and complex system with a much simpler and more sensible one . . . without making dangerous cuts in national defense or in necessary domestic programs.”) The crowd loved it. It may even have been relieved that the speech was low in key and did not drive out memories of the spectacle that had preceded it.
Though one saw little evidence of it at the Goldwater pageants and picnics, the South has more on its mind than race. Opinion polls show the region as a whole to be just about evenly split between the candidates. Goldwater cannot lose Alabama, where the President will not be on the ballot, and he should have no trouble winning Mississippi, where the Democratic organization has put up a slate of Johnson electors and urged everyone to vote against them. It would surprise most experts if Johnson won Louisiana, where Goldwater has more billboard space than Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors put together; it would also surprise most experts if the President lost Georgia, Arkansas, the Carolinas, and Texas. But in most places the division is expected to be close. There are, plainly, large numbers of Southerners—white Southerners—who will cast their votes on issues other than race. In August, Representative Ross Bass, of Tennessee, one of the two Southern Democrats to vote for the Civil Rights Bill, easily won a nomination for senator against a segregationist. In late September, Representative Harry Wingate, Jr., of Georgia, the one Democrat whom Goldwater endorsed on the Southern tour, lost his seat, in a district said to be full of racists of the most benighted sort, to a man supporting the national administration. A former Goldwater Democrat, Senator Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, made his first appearance as a Goldwater Republican at the candidate’s side in Greenville, and the man who introduced him to the airport picnickers there said that Thurmond’s decision of the day before had been as notable an event in Southern history as Robert E. Lee’s decision to resign his commission in the United States Army for a command in the Army of Northern Virginia. Thurmond’s defection was undoubtedly an event to be noted; it gladdened the party he left and saddened the party he joined, which can no longer boast that it has no racists in high elective office. Southern politicians do not believe that Thurmond joined the Republicans because he thought the Party had a bright future in South Carolina; he crossed over, they think, because he would not, in all probability, have been renominated as a Democrat in 1966, when he was due to be opposed by the incumbent governor, Donald S. Russell.
Still, the Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority, remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and almost nothing else. On his tour, Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned “race” or “Negroes” or “whites” or “segregation” or “civil rights.” But the fact that the words did not cross his lips does not mean that he ignored the realities they describe. He talked about those realities all the time, in an underground, or Aesopian, language—a kind of code that few in his audiences had any trouble deciphering. In the code, “bullies and marauders” means “Negroes.” “Criminal defendants” means negroes. States rights means “opposition to civil rights.” “Women” means “white women.” This much of the code is as easily understood by his Northern audiences as by his Southern ones, but there are also some words that have a more limited and specific meaning for the Southern crowds. Thus, in the Old Confederacy “Lyndon Baines Johnson” and “my opponent” means “integrationist.” “Hubert Horatio” (it somehow amuses Goldwater to drop the “Humphrey”) means “super-integrationist.” “Federal judiciary” means “integrationist judges.” It would be going too far to say that Goldwater touched Southern sensibilities on race when he brought up Bobby Baker, the TFX controversy, fiscal policy, or “Yo-yo” McNamara, and he certainly was not arousing them when he talked of the T.V.A. in Knoxville and Medicare in Orlando. One always had the feeling, though, that the Goldwater Republicans in the South could find a racial or regional angle in almost anything. When the name of Bobby Baker—a Pickens, South Carolina, man who once enjoyed a friendly relationship with Senator Thurmond—was hooted at Goldwater meetings (as it was everywhere except in Greenville, where delicacy prevailed and he was not mentioned), it was not because the speaker was deploring Baker’s activities in business and politics. It was because of his embarrassing connections with the integrationist in the White House. And Goldwater generally played it that way. He would rattle off some figures on murders, rapes, and muggings, explain that “nothing is more clear from history than that the moral decay of a people begins at the top,” and follow this with a quick mention of Bobby Baker, as if Bobby Baker were some kind of hoodlum lieutenant and riot organizer, rather than a conspicuously successful entrepreneur. Among Goldwater Southerners, even thermonuclear warfare gets identified with regional pride, sentiment, and rancor. An Atlanta matron, bedecked with Goldwater-Miller buttons, was asked if she had ever been disturbed by things the candidate had said about war and weaponry. “Certainly not,” she replied. “We’re not cowards down here.”
In the South, as elsewhere, Goldwater attacked the President for having so inadequate an appreciation of the “Communist menace” that he did not once mention it in his Atlantic City acceptance speech. And two or three times he taxed the administration with negligence toward Communist subversion in this country. Up to now, though, internal security and domestic Communism have been distinctly minor themes in the campaign, and this, too, has been a surprise to Goldwaterologists, who were certain that in due time a generous amount of McCarthyism would be stirred into the Goldwater brew. The hard core of Goldwater’s support has always come from people whose alarm centers on Communists in the United States and who tend to relate, and subordinate, all other issues to this one. The only other leader that these people have had in recent times was the late Joseph R. McCarthy, and while McCarthy lived Goldwater followed and championed him. Goldwater voted against McCarthy’s censure by the Senate, and shortly after McCarthy’s death went to Wisconsin to tell a Republican state convention there, “Because Joe McCarthy lived, we are a safer, freer, more vigilant nation to this day. This fact, even though he no longer dwells among us, will never perish.” McCarthy has not been mentioned in the campaign, though, and his strategies have not been employed, except now and then by Congressman Miller, and not even Miller has accused anyone of treason. Pay dirt, it would seem, is being overlooked. The Johnson administration is filled with people whom McCarthy called traitors. Moreover, there seems little doubt that Communists—particularly those whose sympathies are more with Peking than with Moscow—have had a hand in provoking racial disorders in Northern cities and have infiltrated some civil-rights organizations. And in those Northern working-class districts where the “white backlash” is said to be a large fact of political life, there are many people of Eastern European descent who are receptive to the argument that anything evil or distressing must be Communist in origin.
There was a moment during the Southern tour that seemed made to order for a revival of McCarthyism. Early in the morning of his last day in the South, Goldwater flew from New Orleans to Longview, Texas, for an airport rally, where the candidate was to be presented by the Honorable Martin Dies, a former congressman from Texas. Dies was the architect of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which in his day was always called the Dies Committee. He was the John the Baptist of McCarthyism. There was a time, in the late thirties and early forties, when liberals and radicals, and more than a few conservatives, blanched at the mention of his name. His committee once solemnly declared that Shirley Temple, then a recent alumna of a Hollywood kindergarten and a child actress whose performances dampened handkerchiefs all around the world, was a stooge of the Stalinists. Now an attorney in private practice, this lifelong Democrat and scourge of subversives had come out of political retirement to introduce Barry Goldwater in his maiden appearance in Texas as a Presidential candidate. And it was to be an all-star show—not only Goldwater and Dies but Strom Thurmond (once aboard, he seemed impossible to lose; he stayed with Goldwater until the campaign headed North) and “the Little Giant of Texas,” Senator John Tower. The airport crowd—respectable in size, overwhelming in ardor—was ready for a resurgence of McCarthyism. But the men on the platform were not. Senator Thurmond, who introduced Dies, was so out of tune with history that he couldn’t pronounce the great Texan’s name—once a household word—properly. It rhymes with “cries,” but as Thurmond had it, it was “Die-ease.” And then Martin Dies arose and, without a mention of Communist termites, said he was honored to introduce Goldwater, who mumbled a few words about some work of a Paul Revere type that Dies had once done, long ago, and followed these with his basic speech: “When you woke up on a typical morning of this administration, Lyndon’s day of spending was just beginning. And by the evening, when his day of spending was complete, he would have spent ten million dollars more than his predecessor spent. . . . While we talk, every four minutes frugal Lyndon puts another person on the public payroll.” When the meeting was over, I asked Dies if he intended to follow Thurmond’s lead and switch parties. The forerunner of McCarthy looked at me as though I had asked a question of utter madness. “I just introduced Goldwater,” he said. “I’m voting the Democratic ticket.”
Goldwater’s failure to exploit the Communist issue may be a mere oversight—oversights have been numerous in this campaign—or it may be symptomatic of an atmospheric change of some importance. Among Goldwater zealots, what one hears when one expects to hear “Communist” or “subversive” is “Easterner” or “liberal.” Until a few years ago, it would have been difficult—indeed, it would have been impossible—to provoke pungent expressions of disapprobation merely by identifying a critic or an antagonist as an “Eastern liberal.” In some regions, “Eastern” had certain disagreeable associations—of slickness, snobbishness, pretense—but a man was not suspect merely because he lived north of Washington and east of Pittsburgh. In some quarters, the word “liberal” was pejorative, but the overtones were not of wickedness but of softness, gullibility, insufficient reverence. No man exposed himself to contumely simply by acknowledging that he was from the East or by describing himself as liberal by persuasion. Before he could be condemned, it was necessary to implicate him in something inherently diabolical. He had, as a rule, to be called a secret Communist or a dupe of Communists or, in McCarthy’s phrase for any member of the Senate who opposed him, “a handmaiden of Communism.” But in recent years under the tutelage of Goldwater and other rightists, large numbers of Americans have gone far beyond this. In Goldwater circles, an Easterner is guilty until he proves himself innocent. There is no longer any need to identify a liberal with Communism; it is quite bad enough if he is a “liberal,” and doubly bad if he is an “Eastern liberal.” In a sense, it is worse to be a liberal from the East than to be a Communist from anywhere. Communists at least command respect and emulation. A Goldwater political strategist named Stephen Shadegg, who is now running the campaign west of the Rockies, has described himself as a disciple—in strategy, not ideology—of Mao Tse-tung, and has said that the way to win in American politics is to apply Maoist principles on “the tactics of infiltration.” “I would suggest,” Goldwater himself once wrote, “that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.” Goldwaterites do not suggest that the “Eastern press” is Communist in sympathy. It is enough for them that it is Eastern and, in their view, predominantly “liberal.” The code word for it is not “Communists” but “liars.” The “Eastern Establishment” is not held to be a Communist front; it is simply the “Eastern Establishment,” and no more need be said to draw catcalls. Its headquarters, of course, are in New York. I was given, for purposes of identification, a badge on which the name of this publication, minus the definite article, was lettered, large and clear and black. Life would have been far easier among Goldwater crowds in the South if it had said “LEPER.” I declined to wear it after being asked, for the sixth time, how things were in Harlem.
There were times, travelling with Goldwater, when one wondered whether the candidate really thinks of himself as a man seeking the Presidency of the United States. No doubt, the answer is that he does. Most of the time, he seems to be a man serious in intent, with extremely serious followers who feel that they are engaged in extremely serious and important work. It is unlikely that Goldwater would go around the South agitating the most brazen of its racists if he did not think that this means was justified by some noble end. Still, the whole enterprise has the air not of a great political campaign but of a great political caper—a series of pranks and calculated errors. Unless all the rules have been suspended for this year, unless Barry Goldwater knows something that Republican leaders in New York and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Illinois and Ohio and even Georgia and Florida and Texas do not know, the entire strategy is a joke. Goldwater keeps saying that he does know something others don’t know but that he can’t quite tell what it is. In one town after another, beginning long before the Southern tour, he has been telling his audiences that “Bill Miller and I know there is something stirring in this country, something just below the surface.” He goes on to say that “we can’t put our finger on it at the moment, but I think that in a week or ten days we’ll be able to describe it pretty accurately.” Almost four weeks have gone by since he first said this publicly (he was saying it before in off-the-record press conferences), and the puzzle remains unsolved. Presumably, he feels that there are some special conditions that make what his advisers call “the Southern strategy”—using the South’s electoral votes as the foundation of victory—peculiarly valid in 1964. Perhaps he is right, but politicians of far greater experience than his think that “the Southern strategy” was never less valid than in 1964. And, right or wrong, he seemed to be under some compulsion to damage his own cause even in the South. He talked against the T.V.A. in T.V.A. country and against Medicare in Medicare country. He delivered his extraordinary law-and-order speech in St. Petersburg, the most law-abiding of communities. He attacked legislative reapportionment in Atlanta, the city that has maintained the largest reapportionment lobby in Washington, and then went outside Atlanta to attack it again in a brand-new congressional district born of reapportionment. Asked to explain this unusual political behavior, his spokesmen said that the Senator was a man of courage and forthrightness; he would rather be right than popular. Some other explanation, however, would be needed for his reluctance to say anything that would upset the racists.
Goldwater ended his first Southern tour with the rally in Longview, where he cast a bit more light on questions of strategy by saying, “I do not intend to go around the country discussing complicated, twisted issues.” That evening, the Yai Bi Ken—some of its passengers had taken to calling it the Enola Gay—made a Northern reëntry by way of Charleston, West Virginia, where Goldwater said, “The task of the true statesman, said Aristotle, is to see dangers from afar. Now, I do not claim to be a statesman.” There, in the capital of Appalachia, he also unburdened himself of some thoughts on poverty. The President’s program was, he said, “phony.” Poverty was as much a state of mind as anything else. It was also a verbal and statistical trick, put over by economists who simply “redefined the luxuries of yesterday.” He said that the administration was compelling people to think poor: “If someone who ought to feel deprived [for lack of yesterday’s luxuries] doesn’t respond that way, some politician in my opponent’s curious camp—perhaps the leader himself—will drive up to his door to see to it that he feels the way he ought.” He pointed out that people in Pakistan are much poorer than Americans. The living standards of the American “poor”—in the written text of his speeches, the word is always in quotation marks—“represent material well-being beyond the dreams of a vast majority of the people of the world outside these United States.” He conceded that there was some problem in this country about unemployed youth and school dropouts, but the administration’s retraining program, he said, was no fit solution; for one thing, it would “cost ten thousand dollars for each recruit.” He had a money-saving plan for high-school dropouts: “It would be cheaper to give them four years of education in your own fine state university, where they would learn a lot more.” He did not linger on the problems that such a solution might pose for American higher education. In an ad-libbed section on the origins of the capitalist system, he said he thought that it really started when some “smart ape” began setting aside coconuts fallen from trees and selling them to other “apes,” some of whom lacked the spirit of enterprise and became resentful at having to buy what formerly was a bounty of nature. He thought the President’s views on the economy “dreadful,” because they provided “no penalty for failure.” “In your hearts, you know this is so,” he added. I have never seen as grim and uncomprehending a group of politicians as those West Virginia Republicans who sat on the platform with Goldwater in Charleston. They joined in two bursts of applause—once when he mentioned the Ten Commandments, and again when he said, “We will not convert the heathen by losing our own souls.” ♦
