against segregation. Although he tolerated the presence, knowingly or not, of racial and religious bigots at campaign events in the South, he never spent a night in a hotel that refused to provide service to blacks.27
But in his public life Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and anti–poll tax legislation in 1960 and 1962. Now he opposed the civil rights bill on the stated grounds of property rights and states’ rights. With the assistance of ghostwriter L. Brent Bozell, Jr., the brother-in-law of National Review publisher William F. Buckley, he wrote Conscience of a Conservative. In the best seller, which sold more than three million copies, Goldwater objected to forced integration and stated that he was not willing to impose his racial views on “the people of Mississippi or South Carolina…. That is their business and not mine. I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned.”28
In Goldwater’s mind, legislation in general—and laws imposed by Congress in particular—had little chance of changing people’s hearts, especially on a matter as personal as race. In Goldwater’s heart, he most feared an expansive and intrusive federal government: the United States would become a police state where the executive branch promoted a minority’s rights at the expense of the majority’s freedoms. That Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia were already police states for African Americans was seemingly lost on the Arizona senator.
Goldwater instead worried that property owners would no longer have the right to rent or sell to whomever they wanted. Small businesses would no longer have the right to offer or deny service to whomever they wanted. States would no longer have the right to pass or enforce laws that reflected local values or customs, and employers would no longer have the right to hire or fire whomever they wanted. Free association would become subject to governmental regulation. The Founding Fathers’ dream of limited government and local control would become a constitutional nightmare.
Across the nation, tens of millions of white Americans agreed with Goldwater. But could he harness their support and use it to capture the Republican nomination in the face of strong opposition from New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a prominent supporter of civil rights? Was the “white backlash” against the freedom movement strong enough to sweep him into the White House? By 1963 conservatives were hard at work trying to convince Goldwater to pursue the presidency. But the senator was playing coy and keeping his cards close to his chest. When he met with supporters in January, Goldwater was firm: “Draft, nothin’. I told you I’m not going to run. And I’m telling you now, don’t paint me into a corner. It’s my political neck and I intend to have something to say about what happens to it.”29
But in fact he was already considering possibilities and weighing options. In May he received an unexpected political gift when the front-runner Rockefeller, who had divorced his wife the previous December, announced that he was remarrying. His bride was Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, a campaign volunteer and young mother who only a month earlier had divorced her husband. Most shockingly, she had also surrendered custody of their four small children, who ranged in age from eleven years to eighteen months.
The news generated outrage in conservative circles. “A man who has broken up two homes is not the kind we want for high public office,” declared Phyllis Schlafly, an Illinois activist whose self-published book about the Goldwater campaign, A Choice Not an Echo, became a sudden and surprise best seller. “The party is not so hard up that it can’t find somebody who stuck by his own family.” Overnight, the polls reversed and Goldwater surged into the lead among Republicans, despite gaffes such as his comment on an ABC-TV news program that the United States could block the flow of weapons from North Vietnam to the Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam by using low-grade atomic weapons to defoliate the dense jungles and expose the supply routes to aerial bombardment.30
Although reluctant to declare his candidacy openly, Goldwater was looking forward to running against Kennedy, a political foe and personal friend whom he had come to know and like during their years in the Senate together. But on November 22, 1963, the assassination of the president may also have killed Goldwater’s hopes for the White House. Suddenly, he was faced with a race for which he had no zest and in which he had little chance, since his opponent, Lyndon Johnson, could now campaign as the torch bearer for his mourned predecessor.
Goldwater despised Johnson, whom he saw as a “treacherous” opportunist and blatant “hypocrite” who had never “cleaned that crap off his boots.” Moreover, conservatives had to endure harsh criticism from the national media, which claimed that right-wing elements in Dallas were responsible for the “climate of extremism” that had somehow contributed to the assassination. Goldwater nevertheless announced his candidacy from his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, in January 1964. “I will not change my beliefs to win votes,” he pledged. “I will offer a choice, not an echo.”31 It was a promise he would keep—to his detriment after the nomination.
The campaign got off to a rocky start in New Hampshire in March, when Goldwater lost to former Massachusetts senator and New England favorite son Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Nixon’s running mate in 1960 and by then the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. Of greater significance than the primary defeat was Goldwater’s decision to make law and order a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. It was a momentous choice by the candidate, who had guaranteed voters a clear alternative.
The issue of law and order would help Goldwater win the Republican nomination, but in 1964 he could not ride it into the White House because of his reputation as a racist and extremist who might trigger a nuclear war. Public fear over “crime in the streets” also had not yet reached a critical level. Law and order would nonetheless become a powerful tool for conservative candidates for decades. And it would help make public support for punitive measures by the police and the courts an enduring foundation of the coming crusades against crime and drugs.
Goldwater was not the inventor or originator of law and order. Since Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s southern whites had blamed black criminality on the end of slavery and the beginning of integration. By the 1920s, the Great Migration of African Americans had led to similar fears among northern whites. In the 1940s and 1950s, the rise of the modern civil rights movement led conservatives in Congress to warn repeatedly of the great threat racial integration supposedly posed to public safety. In the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1960, for example, Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina declared that it would lead to a “wave of terror, crime, and juvenile delinquency” in the South as earlier state laws had in the North. Democratic Senator James Eastland of Mississippi likewise asserted that “law enforcement is breaking down because of racial integration” and claimed that the unsafe streets of New York were clear evidence.32
But it was Goldwater who introduced law and order to presidential politics in March 1964, when he charged that crime and riots—which conservatives continually if inexactly conflated—ran rampant in America’s streets. He refused, however, to place the blame on racial integration, unlike Thurmond, Eastland, and Wallace, who made law and order the focus of his presidential campaign when he entered Democratic primaries later in the spring. Goldwater instead asserted that the fault lay with the widespread practice of nonviolent protest, which in turn had led to disrespect for authority. The Arizona senator also ascribed guilt to white liberals like President Johnson, who in a crass and cynical bid for black votes had condoned and even applauded demonstrators when they violated what they viewed as unjust and immoral laws.
“Many of our citizens—citizens of all races—accept as normal the use of riots, demonstrations, boycotts, violence, pressures, civil disorder, and disobedience as an approach to serious national problems,” thundered Goldwater at the University of New Hampshire, where he promised to restore law and order. Passage of civil rights legislation, he predicted, would not lead to lower tensions and less crime—as white and black liberals had asserted for decades—but only to more bloodshed and fewer restraints on individual behavior. Like most conservatives, he saw black criminality as a result of immorality, not prejudice.33
Goldwater used law and order to blend concern over the rising number of traditional crimes—robberies and rapes, muggings and murders—with unease about civil rights,