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COLD WAR: 1953-60 (15 of 18)

Senator Goldwater of Arizona, 1962

In Washington, some conservative Republicans still saw their party as controlled by East Coast establishment moderates. Attracting attention among the conservatives was Barry Goldwater from Arizona -- a senator since 1953.  Goldwater described Eisenhower as a "dime store New Dealer." He was anything but a racist, but his belief in states' rights pleased southerners trying to maintain segregation.

Goldwater differed from Eisenhower's cautious abstention during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Goldwater believed that the U.S. should have intervened with a force that possessed tactical nuclear weapons.

Goldwater was opposed to "big government." He advocated states' right-to-work laws, a reduction of public ownership of utilities, and decreases in welfare and foreign aid appropriations. Welfare he described as socialistic. He attacked subversive activities and had opposed the Senate's censure of Joseph R. MacArthur. Goldwater criticized Eisenhower for his willingness to talk to Khrushchev. He and his admirers were the counterpart of those in France who were charging Charles de Gaule with being soft on communism while de Gaulle was hoping to defuse hostilities and misunderstandings between the West and the Soviet Union.

Goldwater's aid, Brent Bozwell, wrote a book for Goldwater called Conscience of a Conservative -- the best selling political book since Tom Paine's Common Sense. In this and another book drawn from the writings of Bozwell, Why Not Victory?, Goldwater carried the torch for those supporting an uncompromisingly anti-communist policy. Not only was Goldwater for an undiluted conservatism in domestic policy, he wrote of the communists as having the will and the capacity "to dominate absolutely every square mile of the globe." The communist threat, he wrote, was "growing day by day" and some Americans leaders, political and intellectual, he added, were "searching desperately for means of 'appeasing' or 'accommodating' the Soviet Union as the price of national survival." Goldwater declared that the U.S. was at war with "an enemy who has never hidden his objective of destroying us and all other people who cherish freedom." Goldwater declared that "Victory is the key to the whole problem" and that the only alternative was defeat. Goldwater added that "our strategy must be primarily offensive in nature." We should, he wrote, "declare the world Communist movement an outlaw in the community of civilized nations. Accordingly, we should withdraw diplomatic recognition from all Communist governments including that of the Soviet Union." And he wrote, "We must -- ourselves -- be prepared to undertake military operations against vulnerable Communist regimes."