Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  I mentioned some of Welch’s gambits: infiltrating school boards and library boards, getting “mean and dirty” with known liberals, encouraging students to spy on teachers.

  Goldwater interrupted. No, he didn’t like that, of course. “In fact, I’ve always been in favor of teaching Communism in schools. Show the kids what we’re up against. Naturally I’d want a good course in American history to balance it. After all, the only way you’re going to beat Communism is with a better idea, like Nero and the Christians…you know? He couldn’t stamp ’em out, because there was that idea they had. Well, that’s what we’ve got to have.”

  Goldwater had been against Federal aid to education. First, he is not convinced any aid is needed. Second, he feels that to give money to the states is an invasion of states’ rights. Recently he testified before a House Education subcommittee in the interests of a bill of his own which he said would solve the whole problem. He proposed giving property owners a rebate on their Federal income tax up to one hundred dollars, the amount to represent what the property owner had paid in local school taxes. Even Goldwater’s admirers found this solution baffling. His exchange with Representative John Brademas in committee had a good deal of unconscious humor in it.

  Brademas asked Goldwater why he had proposed a bill to answer a problem which he did not believe existed. Soon both men were lost in a maze of: “I said ‘if.’ Well, if there is a problem, which I don’t believe, then here’s the answer….All right, but if there is not a problem, then why propose…?”

  In the course of his testimony, Goldwater unexpectedly came out for minimum academic standards to be set by the Federal government for the entire country. Brademas pointed out the contradiction: to set such standards and requirements would mean government intervention of the most extreme sort. Goldwater saw no contradiction: the government’s minimum standards would not be compulsory; they would be “guide lines.” He felt, too, that although Federal aid to education was unconstitutional, if there was to be such aid parochial and private schools should be included.

  I teased Goldwater about his exchange with Brademas. He laughed. He then repeated his position: There was no problem, and it was growing less. He quoted statistics….Neither of us listened. I had touched a familiar button. He was responding as he had many times before.

  I was amused during the Nixon-Kennedy debates by those who were astonished at the wide range of knowledge displayed by the two men, at their “mastery” of detail. Actually, neither was asked a question he had not already answered on an average of a dozen times a day for months. After such rehearsal any politician can discuss a number of subjects with what seems encyclopedic detail. It is a trick of the trade but a dangerous one, for answering the same questions over and over interferes with thought. Goldwater finished his statistics and waited for me to press the next button.

  Not wanting to get him on a familiar track, I thought quickly, a little desperately. I wanted a general subject. The idea of the presidency occurred to me. What would he do if he were president? Goldwater had once said to a journalist that, all in all, he preferred the Senate to the White House because as a Senator he could speak his mind, “where if you’re president you can’t. You got to be cautious and watch what you say.” When the journalist asked Goldwater what he had been saying as a Senator that he would not feel free to say as president, he had looked baffled and finally said, “Well, damned if I know.”

  On the word “president” I noticed a faint flush of the fever. His eyes glittered. He sat back in his chair. “If I was president,” he began with a new weight and authority, “I’d move slowly, cautiously at first. You’d have to feel your pathway. Not that my ideas are new ideas. No, they’re old, old ideas.”

  Then he talked of government farm supports. In the campaign, he had demanded “prompt and final termination of all subsidy.” But he has changed. He would still eliminate supports, but gradually. I mentioned that only about half of the nation’s farmers are needed to grow most of our food. Without supports a lot of people would be thrown on the labor market—in addition to the five million already unemployed. This, I suggested, was a real crisis. He agreed. They would have to be absorbed gradually. But how? Well, management and labor would get together (without the government) and set up a joint program to retrain and reallocate displaced people, “Not just farmers either, anybody who’s been displaced by mechanization, and so on,” and to sponsor “basic research for new gadgets—you know, for a lot of things like that we need.”

  Could labor and management be relied upon to do the job without some urging from the government? He thought they could. “Of course back in the 1920’s management was pretty stupid, but I think they’ve come of age now, lot of fine new people at the top. The day of those self-made men, the founders, all that’s over. In fact, labor’s at the same place today management was in the 1920’s. All those labor leaders, they’re the same type of self-made man ran big business in the old days.”

  I asked him about his quarrel with Reuther. (“I would rather have Jimmy Hoffa stealing my money than Walter Reuther stealing my freedom.”) He shook his head. “It’s not personal. I just don’t believe labor should be in politics.” I was about to ask him what he thought of management in politics (the N.A.M., the Chamber of Commerce) when we were interrupted. A visiting lawyer was outside. He would like to shake the Senator’s hand. He was ushered in.

  The lawyer was a pleasant-looking, somewhat tense young man who was in Washington for the American Bar Association’s antitrust conference. Goldwater came around from behind his desk. He smiled warmly. They shook hands. The young lawyer said in a voice shaking with emotion, “I just wanted you to know, Senator, there are a lot of people over in that Justice Department who better get off their fud and realize we’ve got some states that can do the job.” Goldwater was sympathetic. I turned away, embarrassed. Two conservatives had met and I felt their intensity, their oneness. They spoke in their own shorthand and they knew the enemy.

  I made notes while they talked. I wondered idly if I should ask Goldwater what he liked to eat and whether or not he wore pajamas and if he liked movies. I have always enjoyed reading those interviews which are made up of an incredible amount of minutiae; like coral islands they rise bit by bit out of the sea of personality, formed of dead facts. Absently, with what I hoped was the eye of a naturalist-novelist, I began to record the objects on his desk: a large transparent plastic duck mysteriously containing a small metal elephant, all mounted rather disagreeably on a penholder. Next to the duck was a clipping from a Hartford newspaper whose editorial began, Well, What About Goldwater? On the wall behind the desk hung a number of small photographs. There was one of Nixon, smiling, with a long inscription which I was too far away to read. There was a similar photograph of Eisenhower, also smiling, also inscribed. Why are politicians so happy when on view? “Always smiling,” I wrote neatly on the pad. Then the young lawyer shook hands again. Goldwater smiled. I smiled The photographs smiled. Only the young lawyer did not smile. He knew the Republic was in danger. He left. Goldwater and I put our smiles away and resumed the interview.

  I had been told that the one question which made him uncha­racte­risti­cally edgy was: Who wrote his book, The Conscience of a Conservative? I asked it. He frowned. “That’s what wrote it,” he said, somewhat irrelevantly. He ran his hand across the row of leather-bound books. “My speeches. The book’s nothing but a selection from speeches, from a lot of the things I’ve been saying for years. After all, I’ve written four books, a lot of magazine articles, my column.”

  I had been told that among his literary ghosts were Steve Shadegg and L. Brent Bozell. I started to ask him about them but decided not to. It was cruel. It was pointless. We live in an age of ghosts: singers whose high notes are ghosted by others; writers whose works are created by editors; actors whose performances are made out of film by directors. Why should one harry politicians for not writing their own books a
nd speeches? Few have the time or the talent. In any case the work published must necessarily reflect the views of its “author.”

  I was ready to drop the subject, but Goldwater was not. He told me he was planning another book. He was going on a cruise with his wife in the fall. While traveling, he would write the first draft. Then he would go over it carefully for “improvement in expression. Then after that I’ll submit it to an author…I mean publisher.” I suspect that Goldwater knows even less about Freud than I do, which is little, but we both know a Freudian slip when we hear one. The dark eyes darted anxiously in my direction. Had I caught the slip? I had.

  He talked about conservatism. “Bunch of us got together after the convention and we all agreed we’d never heard such conservative speeches get so much applause, and then they go and accept that platform which 95 per cent of them were against.” He sighed. “I don’t know. What’s wrong with the word ‘conservative’ anyway? Must be something.” He said he had been impressed by the British Conservatives’ comeback in 1951. They had got out and sold the party to the young people. This was his own plan. He would sell conservatism wherever he could, preferably to the young and uncommitted. “Of course the Conservative Party in England is about like the New Deal was here.”

  I asked him his impression of Kennedy. “Well, I guess I know him about as well as anybody around here. I like him. Of course we disagree on a lot of things. He thinks the government should do a lot more for people than I do.” He mused about the campaign. He had advised against Nixon’s television debates with Kennedy. “Funny, when my sister saw the first one, she said, ‘Why, that Kennedy isn’t so young!’ And I knew then and there that was it. Of course, on sheer debating points Nixon took Kennedy every time. Anybody who knows about these things could see that. Especially on Quemoy and Matsu. Boy, if I had been debating Kennedy, I sure would have jazzed him all over the lot—Berlin, Laos, everything!”

  I commented that Nixon had been a victim of his own legend. He had been pictured by both admirers and enemies as a rough infighter, a merciless debater, a ruthless killer, yet in the campaign and in the television debates it was quite clear that of the two, Kennedy was by far the tougher fighter. Goldwater nodded. “I warned Nixon about that a long time ago when the real mistake was made, ’way back there in California in that Senate election. You see, Nixon was sold by these people on putting himself over as a real gut fighter. They figured it would do him good against Helen Gahagan Douglas. So they built him up tough and mean, when of course he wasn’t, when all he ever did was just tell the truth about that woman. The whole thing about him being so mean was nothing but publicity. So I told him: ‘You wait and see, when you get to running for President and you start getting rough, the way you got to, they’ll jump on you and say it’s the old Nixon.’ And they did. And then he’d pussyfoot.” Goldwater shook his head sadly.

  We talked about medical care for the aged to be paid through Social Security. The Senator was against it. He said that at the Arizona hospital of which he was a director, only one elderly person had been unable to pay. He had also seen a poll from western Florida where the elderly people had voted firmly against Federal aid. I suggested that those who could afford to retire to Arizona and Florida might be comfortably off. He said no, their average income was about $300 a month. Anyway, people ought to look after themselves either through their own foresight or through help from their families. Failing that, indigence should be handled the way it has always been: at the local level, by charities and so on.

  I suggested that with taxes as high as they are, and longer life expectancies, there would be more rather than fewer programs for state and Federal aid in the coming years. He agreed. That was why he felt the whole tax structure had to be overhauled. And though he no longer favors repealing the graduated income tax, as he suggested in his book, he did feel that taxes on business should be reduced and greater allowance made for depreciation. “I told Jack Kennedy: you could be President for life if you’d just lift some of those taxes so that businessmen—and I know hundreds of ’em—would have some incentive to get new machinery, to overhaul their plants, to really start producing.”

  Publicly, no American politician can admit that we have anything to learn from the experiments of any other society. The ritual dialogue between office seeker and electorate is one of mutual congratulation, and to suggest that perfection has another home is treasonable. But privately our more conscientious legislators do ponder other countries’ penal reforms, medical programs, educational methods. From his book and speeches I suspected Goldwater had done little or no homework. He was firmly against socialized medicine, but he seemed to know nothing about how it worked in Scandinavia, West Germany, England.

  Goldwater was honest. No, he didn’t know much about European socialism. “But I did meet this Norwegian doctor, matter of fact her name was Goldwater, which is how she happened to get in touch with me. She said the thing seemed to work all right, but that being assured of a certain income every month from the government kept her from feeling any real urge to study harder—you know, keep up at her profession. There was no incentive.” I asked him if he thought that the desire to be good was entirely economic in origin. He said of course it was. I then asked him to explain how it was that two people as different as ourselves worked hard, though in neither case was money the spur. He was startled. Then he murmured vaguely and slipped away from the subject.

  I asked him what he felt about some of his more oddball admirers. Goldwater became suddenly cautious. The quick, easy responses were replaced by a slow, careful measuring of words. He knew, he said, of some 250 organizations either conservative or anti-Communist. He admitted it was often difficult to figure out who was what. “Every invitation I get to speak, I have to check it for this and check it for that, make absolutely sure they’re O.K. You never know what you may be getting into. Some are first-rate, like this fellow in New Orleans, Ken Courtney. He publishes a magazine down there. He’s quite a guy.” He asked on the phone for the magazine’s name. I mentioned the Young Americans for Freedom, an organization founded by those who had been involved in the Youth for Goldwater movement at the Chicago convention. He approved of them highly, especially of “What’s his name—Gaddy? Caddy, that’s right. Nice kid, a real savvy guy with a lot on the ball.”

  Mrs. Coerver entered. “The magazine’s called Independent American, and his name is Kent, not Ken, Courtney.” She left.

  More than once, Goldwater has complained that though the Republican Party’s leaders are conservative they invariably choose liberal or moderate candidates to run for president on the false (to him) premise that a true conservative could never win. I asked him, Why not start a third party?

  Goldwater sat up briskly. “If I thought it would work, I might. But I don’t know…third parties never get off the ground in this country. There was Teddy Roosevelt, and there was…” He shook his head. “No, I don’t see it. For one thing, conservatism is pretty divided. Suppose I started a party. Then somebody would come along and say, ‘Well, look here, you’re not my kind of conservative,’ and then he’d go off and start his party and you’d end up like France. That’s the trouble with the conservatives. They’ve got this all-or-nothing attitude.” He sighed. “Why, I got booed in New York when I said if it was between Rockefeller and Harriman I’d be for Rockefeller. I tried to explain how at least Rockefeller was a Republican and you got your foot in the door….No. A political party can only start around a strong individual.” He looked past me at the bust on the mantelpiece; his jaw had set. “Like Lincoln. The people were there looking for a party, looking for this strong individual. And there he was and that’s how the Republican Party started. A strong individual.”

  The next question was obvious. Was Goldwater that “strong individual”? Could he lead his people out of the wilderness? Were there enough of them to allow him to re-create that dream of Eden which conservatives evoke whenever they recall the brigh
t simple days of our old agrarian Republic? But I let it go. Neither of us knew the answer. He had his hopes, and that was enough.

  I rose to go. He walked me to the door. We exchanged impieties, each about his own political party, then said good-by.

  “Ignorant but shrewd” was the verdict of one colleague of Goldwater. “He’s read very little. He has no knowledge of economics. He’s completely outside the world of ideas. Even his passion for the Constitution is based upon a misunderstanding of its nature.” I am not sure I would agree that Goldwater’s ignorance of ideas is necessarily relevant to his ability or his capacity for growth.

  I was impressed by his charm, which, even for a politician, is considerable. More than that, in his simplifying of great issues Goldwater has a real appeal for a nation which is not at all certain about its future either as a society or as a world power. Up and down the land there are storm warnings. Many look nervously for shelter, and Goldwater, in the name of old-time virtue and ruggedness and self-reliance, offers them refuge beneath the venerable great roof of the Constitution. True or not, his simplifications are enormously appealing and, who knows, in a time of crisis he might seize the prize.

  But I make no predictions. I would only recommend to Goldwater Cicero’s warning to a fellow political adventurer, in a falling year of the Roman Republic: “I am sure you understand the political situation into which you have…no, not stumbled, but stepped; for it was by deliberate choice and by no accident that you flung your tribunate into the very crisis of things; and I doubt not that you reflect how potent in politics is opportunity, how shifting the phases, how incalculable the issues of events, how easily swayed are men’s predilections, what pitfalls there are and what insincerity in life.”

  Life, June 9, 1961

  This interview received a great deal of attention. Henry Luce complimented the editor, adding that he never again wanted to see a piece like that in Life.