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A Choice, Not an Echo |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Edward S. Shapiro |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1996 |
| Size: 2,136 Words, 13,676 Characters |
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GOLDWATER
The Man Who Made a Revolution
Lee Edwards
Washington: Regnery, 1995
572 pp., $29.95
During the 1960s, a majority of Americans considered Barry Goldwater a political extremist. While his supporters at the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, where he was nominated for president, proclaimed, "In Your Heart You Know He's Right," his detractors at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City declared, "In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts." During the campaign, nearly twelve hundred psychiatrists responded in the negative to a questionnaire asking them whether Goldwater was "psychologically fit to be president of the United States." Some compared the Arizona senator with Hitler and Stalin, saying that he was paranoid, megalomaniacal, unstable, dangerous, and a mass murderer at heart. All this demonization, needless to say, was done without any personal examination of the senator. Goldwater's partisans were also smeared. Sam Donaldson referred to them as the "Bund."
Goldwater was partially to blame for this image of himself and his followers. In his acceptance address in San Francisco, he defended himself against the charge of extremism not by denying the accusation but by defending extremism. "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," he said, "and let me remind you also that mo...
Read Full Article
... this respect, he has been something of a Republican Harry Truman. And just as Truman's popularity soared once he left office, so has Goldwater's reputation increased since he left the Senate. And just like Truman, Goldwater set an example by not hanging around Washington as a high-priced lobbyist. As he said to a friend, "I'm too old to be a pimp." Washington's loss was the country's gain. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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