WHEN the cheering stopped, the loser of the 1964 election held up better than the winner. Our last images of Lyndon Johnson, who would also have been 89 this year, are of a spent force, a wreck of a man who had lost interest in a world he couldn’t bully or manipulate, and met death racked by fears of how history would judge him. Barry Goldwater went on to another three terms in the Senate, and in 1986 came back here to contented retirement and all those hobbies he had pursued since boyhood—the ham radio, flying, camping, photography, astronomy. The last few years found him absorbed in building little model airplanes, and if he ever worried about his place in history the moment went unrecorded. Whatever Goldwater had that LBJ didn’t, it cost him a few million votes but it sure seemed to make for a happier life.
After his death on May 29 the Arizona papers ran special editions and long retrospectives filled with quotes. My favorite was an excerpt from a diary he kept on a 1940 expedition down the Colorado River. “Up there on the wall,” Goldwater wrote one night, encamped near a mountain called Bright Angel, “I see a face created by moonlight and shadows that looks like an old bewigged English judge. It reminds me to judge my life gently, for life has dealt with me in that manner and has been generous, besides. First with my mother, whom I would have had in mind had I been the one to name Bright Angel, then my father, then Carolyn and Bob, and now Peggy with her trio of blessings. My opinion, after a careful review of my case, compels me to judge myself as possessor of a full and happy past, a future more rosy than our sunset tonight, with a present more clear and sparkling than the sky that now becomes my blanket. Good night.”
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