Vintage Goldwater

The Conscience of a Majority By Barry Goldwater Prentice-Hall, 248 pp., $7.95 It is probably safe to say that Barry Goldwater’s best-selling book, The Conscience of a Conservative, published in 1960, was the factor principally responsible for putting him on the national map as the chief political spokesman for the New Wave of conservatism then about to crest. Profound yet lucid, beautifully written, it probed deeply into the origins of conservative thought, and applied its insights to contemporary problems with a skill and success that impressed far more people than cared to admit it. There were those who charged that Goldwater was only nominally the author; but, after all, using ghost-writers is not a crime when it is done by liberals. There are men alive today who can visit the Kennedy gravesite in Arlington and read, carved in imperishable marble, their own sentences, adopted by and now quite properly attributed to the late President. And if the megaliths containing samples of FDR’s immortal prose ever do rise by the Potomac, surely Sam Rosenman will deserve to have his initials inscribed unobtrusively on several of them.

A lot has happened since 1960, to Barry Goldwater and to America. He became his party’s Presidential candidate in 1964, at a convention whose significance as a turning-point in the nation’s history is only now becoming apparent. He lost the ensuing election by a margin that seemed to many to write finis to the cause of conservatism. Yet he was back in the Senate within four years; his son, Barry Jr., is a member of the House; and Richard Nixon, whom Goldwater endorsed for the 1968 nomination early in 1965, is now firmly ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is with a measure of poetic justice, therefore, that Senator Goldwater taunts his foes by titling his latest book The Conscience of a Majority.

WA

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William A. Rusher

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Presidential Election

The Conscience of a Majority By Barry Goldwater Prentice-Hall, 248 pp., $7.95 It is probably safe to say that Barry Goldwater’s best-selling book, The Conscience of a Conservative, published in 1960, was the factor principally responsible for putting him on the national map as the chief political spokesman for the New Wave of conservatism then about to crest. Profound yet lucid, beautifully written, it probed deeply into the origins of conservative thought, and applied its insights to contemporary problems with a skill and success that impressed far more people than cared to admit it. There were those who charged that Goldwater was only nominally the author; but, after all, using ghost-writers is not a crime when it is done by liberals. There are men alive today who can visit the Kennedy gravesite in Arlington and read, carved in imperishable marble, their own sentences, adopted by and now quite properly attributed to the late President. And if the megaliths containing samples of FDR’s immortal prose ever do rise by the Potomac, surely Sam Rosenman will deserve to have his initials inscribed unobtrusively on several of them.

A lot has happened since 1960, to Barry Goldwater and to America. He became his party’s Presidential candidate in 1964, at a convention whose significance as a turning-point in the nation’s history is only now becoming apparent. He lost the ensuing election by a margin that seemed to many to write finis to the cause of conservatism. Yet he was back in the Senate within four years; his son, Barry Jr., is a member of the House; and Richard Nixon, whom Goldwater endorsed for the 1968 nomination early in 1965, is now firmly ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is with a measure of poetic justice, therefore, that Senator Goldwater taunts his foes by titling his latest book The Conscience of a Majority.