Getting It Right

by William F. Buckley

  And then there was the dangling matter of Ayn Rand.

  Goldwater had read Atlas Shrugged and had written to Rand to compliment her on it. She had been copiously grateful, Goldwater remembered. In her acknowledgment she had spoken of the possibility of a meeting with him, offering to travel to Washington for that purpose. Goldwater had not followed up on her offer, in part because he felt that if she traveled from New York to Washington just to see him, he would need to give her several hours of his time. He had heard that she was a difficult woman; he did not court a visit.

  On the eve of the primary campaign in February, his aide Judy Eisenhower (unrelated to the former president) had reviewed Goldwater’s files, intending to give him to read over anything that might prove useful in the primary season. On one letter, written several years before, Judy had underlined the sentence “I regard you as the only hope of the anticollectivist side on today’s political scene, and I have defended your position at every opportunity.”

  The attached note from Judy said, “Senator: This lady is not only the author of the novel you liked so much, Atlas Shrugged. She is the active and absolute boss of the movement called ‘Objectivism.’ She and associate Nathaniel Branden operate what they call ‘Objectivist’ seminars and they are sprouting up all over the country. She’s a highbrow type, but they also vote, and capitalism is her thing.”

  Goldwater had noticed Judy’s memorandum just weeks before the critical California primary fight against Nelson Rockefeller. It would not hurt at all if Ayn Rand used whatever influence she had there, which Goldwater assumed would be considerable. California had been her home for many years and all cult figures in California had a following. He sent her an inscribed copy of The Conscience of a Conservative.

  She had replied with a four-page letter analyzing the book. On receiving the letter, he had run his eyes over it and concluded that it had no bearing on the work he needed to do immediately. But he did owe her the courtesy of a thoughtful response, admiring her as he did as a novelist and thinker.

  Accordingly, on the fifth day of his brainstorming sessions in Phoenix, his agenda for that morning included “DISCUSS RAND LETTER, Hess, Burch.”

  He sat back in his chair behind the desk, his hands clasped behind his head, his bolo tie loose under the collar of his bleached blue shirt. Dean Burch, tall and slight of build, sat behind his makeshift desk at the left, facing Goldwater. Karl Hess, age forty-one, jovial as always, his dark hair full, framing his new steel-rimmed glasses, sat at the other corner behind a table with mounds of paper scattered about.

  “Okay,” Goldwater said, “let’s go on the Rand letter.”

  Hess looked up. At that moment the morning sun streamed in from the window at one side, illuminating Goldwater’s graying hair and his rugged profile.

  Hess said, “Barry, you know, you’ve got to be the handsomest man in the whole world. That’s probably the real reason Ayn Rand said you were the only hope of the anticollectivist side. You remind her of Howard Roark and John Galt.”

  “Cut the bullshit. Remind me, Karl, who are they?”

  “They’re the heroes of her books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. You got to understand this, Barry. Rand sees herself, and so do a lot of others—I’m tempted myself—as coming up with the central philosophical justification for capitalism, which is self-interest. She thinks she has a claim on the thinking of the GOP and I, well, I think she’s right.”

  “We were talking about her heroes, Karl.”

  “Yes. Well, Rand’s heroes have to be tall, handsome, determined, heroic, and unbribable.”

  “I don’t know whether I’m unbribable. Nobody ever tried. Isn’t that right, Dean?”

  “That’s right, Barry. But we did try to do a little bribing in New Hampshire.”

  “Much good that did. And anyway, as I told you back then, you can’t outbribe Nelson Rockefeller, so there’s no use trying. Okay, Karl, so she read my book. What didn’t she like?”

  “Well, she was being a polite lady, Barry, so she said that your most screwed-up chapter had to have been written not by you but by a ghostwriter.”

  “The whole book was written by my ghostwriter.”

  “And she says no insult intended, because—she says—she’s of course a writer and she knows that people in public life, people unlike her, have to have ghostwriters just to get everything done.”

  “She’s right on that point. You’re here, and you’ve been with me through the campaign. Only we don’t call you a ghostwriter, but press chief, and now I’ll call you anything you want, as long as you write good speeches.”

  “Like Brent Bozell’s.”

  “Yes, but Brent’s living in Spain, and he writes now mostly about God.”

  “Ah. Well, that’s one of Miss Rand’s principal complaints, God. But let me start with the beginning of her letter. She says you were wrong in saying that you hoped your book would contribute to the conservative philosophy because”—Hess reached for his notes—“because ‘there is no such thing as a conservative philosophy.’ She also says that the philosophy of the Founding Fathers wasn’t the putting together of old ideas. ‘It is dangerously misleading to call these principles ancient and tested truths. They were new, untested, and unprecedented.’ She says that was ‘the great achievement of the Founding Fathers, the fact that they created a political system fundamentally’—that word is in italics—‘different from any that had ever existed before in the whole of human history.’”

  “Well, that’s true, in a way.”

  “Right. She says that American conservatives have to stand for capitalism and that if they don’t, they’re done for.”

  “I agree.”

  “But wait. To subscribe to capitalism, Rand says, requires a complete acceptance of it, and you made a fundamental mistake because you wrote that people had to have faith in capitalism. Not so, she says, there’s only one reason for capitalism and that’s reason. She has a good way of formulating this part of her argument. She says that socialism is a faith—because people are taken in by it, thinking it will produce idealistic things when in fact it produces nothing but poverty and restrictions on freedom.”

  “We certainly buy that, don’t we, Dean?”

  Burch nodded his head.

  “Now she starts to bite. She says that any appeal to faith has the effect of subtracting from the appeal to reason. And when you do that, you dilute the understanding of capitalism.” He paused. “It’s this simple, Barry. She thinks faith is for the birds. She doesn’t mind if you have it, as long as you don’t ever suggest that freedom and capitalism are related to faith.”

  “Have you got my acceptance speech handy?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “The passage about our Maker.”

  “I liked it a lot,” Karl chuckled. “That’s why I wrote it. You said, ‘The Good Lord raised this mighty republic to be a home for the brave and to flourish as the land of the free—not to stagnate in the swampland of collectivism, not to cringe before the bully of Communism.’ You laid it on the line about the failures of Communism, and Rand is certainly enthusiastic about your anti-Communist positions. She quotes, in this letter, what you wrote about the Berlin crisis. Want to hear it?”

  “Provided it’s not too long.”

  “It’s just a paragraph. Here it is—she exactly identifies it as paragraph 2, page 101, The Conscience of a Conservative. ‘When the Soviets challenged our rights in West Berlin, we handed them a victory by the mere act of sitting down at the conference table. By agreeing to negotiate on that subject, we agreed that our rights in Berlin were “negotiable,” something they never were before. Our answer to Khrushchev’s ultimatum should have been that the status of West Berlin is not a matter that we are prepared to discuss with the Soviet Union. That would have been the end of the Berlin “crisis.”’

  “She liked that? Good for her.”

  “Wait, she liked it but then said, ‘I find it difficult to believe that th
at same man would advocate the tenet that material production belongs to man’s lower animal nature, without realizing what principle he is establishing and what monstrous moral consequences that principle implies.’”

  “What does she mean by all that stuff?”

  “What she’s saying is that you are capable of thinking very straight—for instance, by analyzing the Berlin crisis the way you did. But that when you wrote that man has an animal nature and that that nature is partly responsible for his productivity, you missed the whole thing, because what is responsible for productivity is the free use of man’s reason.”

  “Hmm. Well, Karl, there isn’t anything there we need to implant in our speeches. Let’s just write her a nice letter—”

  “Hang on, Barry. She’s sore as hell at National Review. You remember, they published the famous review of Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers. She says in her letter that she never herself deigned to read it, but was told about it. Then she says NR wrote two essays about her, one of them favorable, one of them unfavorable, but both misrepresenting her”—he picked up his folder—“ ‘misrepresenting my position in a manner I have not seen outside The Daily Worker or The Nation. What was significant was their second article. It denounced me for advocating capitalism.’”

  “That doesn’t sound like our magazine.”

  “No. Must have been some angle of objectivism the writer was objecting to. But she signs off on NR this way, putting it all together: ‘This leads me to the subject of the National Review. I am profoundly opposed to it—not because it is a religious magazine, but because it pretends that it is not. There are religious magazines which one can respect, even while disagreeing with their views. But the fact that the National Review poses as a secular political magazine, while following a strictly religious “party line,” can have but one purpose, to slip religious goals by stealth on those who would not accept them openly, to “bore from within,” to tie conservatism to religion, and thus to take over the American conservatives. This attempt comes from a pressure group wider than the National Review, but the National Review is one of its manifestations.’”

  Dean Burch said he was surprised, he had read the magazine since its founding and had never thought it a “religious” journal.

  “I have too,” Goldwater said. “And I was the guest speaker at their last anniversary party. Karl, you’re an associate editor, aren’t you?”

  “Sort of. Right. And I’m a Catholic, so is Buckley, so is Bozell. But Burnham isn’t—at least, he isn’t now. He lapsed back in his Trotsky days. Though come to think of it, Max Eastman resigned from the editorial board a couple of years ago because of an editorial they published at Christmastime. It was written by Garry Wills and made some reference to Christ as ‘the Son.’ Eastman said he didn’t want to be on the masthead of a magazine that was ‘religious.’ I think what Rand is saying is that if you believe in God, then your sense of hierarchy, your advocacy of freedom and reason, is . . . upset. Deranged.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes, she said she was willing to write a speech for you to give. Funny, she said either you or General Eisenhower could give it.”

  Goldwater looked down at his desk for a moment. Then he said, “Let’s not get involved. Write and tell her I think there is such a thing as a conservative philosophy, and that I am an advocate of both religious faith and natural laws. And say hello.”

  “Wilco.”

  “What’s next?”

  “You ran into Woodroe Raynor in San Francisco. He was working in the office and running errands.”

  “Sure. Woody. Tall, good-looking young guy. A Yaffer. Sharp. Peggy specially likes him. He’s still with us, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, sure. He’s working full-time at campaign headquarters in Washington. Anyway, he gave me”—Hess drew the letter out—“a brief memo. It’s from a retired historian at Princeton. I gather from Woody that he’s somebody who hides his political views, but who’s privately very emphatic about them. He is hot on anti-Communist foreign policy and for hedging against welfarism at home. For a while he was a member of the John Birch Society—get this, using an assumed name. But he pulled out of the Society a couple of years ago. Professor Romney is a libertarian and he knows that the fight between Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard—”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s a young, academic type. Total individualist, like maybe an anarchist.”

  “What did he and Rand fight about?”

  “Whether there’s any life left in the Republican Party.”

  “Who won? The person who said yes, I hope.”

  Karl laughed. “Ayn Rand is in favor of backing your campaign. Rothbard is against it, because he says political action doesn’t work in a ‘statist society’—”

  “What’s the professor want?”

  “He wants to send you a memo every week or two, giving special attention to the long-term prospects of the Republican Party.”

  “What’s so special about that?”

  “He doesn’t want to write the letters unless you agree to read them.”

  “Fair enough. You read it first, Karl. Underline the parts you want me to read. What’s next?”

  “Our thoughts on federal deregulation.” Karl looked down on the agenda sheet. “Dean, you’ve done a memo on that?”

  Goldwater turned to Dean Burch, who nodded. “Milton Friedman thinks we should whack away real hard on federal regulations—growing every day, it seems. For instance, how many permits do you need to fly your airplane?”

  They moved on to the next item. “What can we offer Bill Scranton?”

  45

  “Holy Moses!” Woodroe cried out in the Elect Goldwater office in Washington.

  Olivia Spratt, doing volunteer work at the campaign office, looked up from her typewriter. “What’s up, Woody?”

  “Be right back.” He walked, almost ran, across the hall to the office of Denison Kitchel, national campaign manager. He went through the motions of knocking but in his haste opened the door without waiting to be admitted.

  Kitchel was there—and so was Candidate Goldwater, all dressed up to give his dinner speech to the American Legion convention.

  Woodroe excused himself hastily. “Sorry, Denny. Sorry, Senator. But I’ve got big news. I was on the phone with Senator Tower—he’ll be introducing you tonight, Senator. He cut off the line for a second, then came back on and said, ‘Johnson’s bombed North Vietnam!’ Senator Tower got the bulletin from an Armed Forces Committee clerk—”

  “I’ll be damned. I’m a member of that committee. You got any more details? Denny, turn on the television.” Goldwater noticed Woodroe standing irresolute by the door. “Sit down, Woody. We don’t need to hog the television, do we, Denny?”

  The news came flooding in. The North Vietnamese patrol boats had loosed torpedoes against two U.S. destroyers. . . . President Johnson had ordered retaliation.... American warplanes had bombed targets on the North Vietnamese coast for five hours.

  Kitchel finally turned the set off. “We’ve got to decide what to do to your speech.”

  Goldwater nodded. “I’m wondering: Is Lyndon really deciding to fight back?”

  Woodroe discreetly left the room. He went to the public telephone and reached Lee, giving her the news excitedly. “I think maybe we’re going to say no to a Communist-backed civil war. This may be a big day, a turning point.”

  “Provided he sticks with it.”

  “Yes. But what a day this must be in Saigon! The actual engagement of U.S. military on their side. We have to hope they do it right. Maybe this will stop the whole North Vietnamese offensive.... Did you remember to feed the cat?”

  “What cat?”

  “Oh! I thought you were Emily. She and I keep a cat.”

  “Cut it out, Woodikins.”

  “We’ll talk later. Love.”

  46

  GOLDWATER, AFTER THE VOTE, was both disappointed about some features of his campaign, and mad. Not so muc
h the humiliating enormity of the loss (he won only six states and lost 43 million to 27 million in the popular vote)—he had expected that. He was mad at Johnson for imputing to Goldwater secret thoughts on policy which he simply didn’t have, and never harbored—for instance, an alleged indifference to racial equality and to the dangers of nuclear war. He was unforgivingly sore about the famous Democratic television spot featuring a six-year-old girl pulling petals from a daisy, the incremental petal setting off a nuclear blast. The only thing that had been missing on the screen was a depiction of Goldwater grinning at the nuclear cloud.

  He knew that the extremism charge against him was bound to go on and on. A week or two after the San Francisco speech, he had had what he privately described as “a kissing conference” with General Eisenhower. That was at Gettysburg, after which Goldwater had faced the press and denounced radicals of the Left and the Right. He said that if he had to do a paraphrase of his famous sentences at San Francisco, “I would do it by saying that wholehearted devotion to liberty is unassailable and that halfhearted devotion to justice is indefensible.” That had got him a pretty straight endorsement from Ike and a formalistic one from Rockefeller, though you could see Rockefeller’s teeth gritted when he said it. But the John Birch stigma stuck, and Goldwater was sick and tired of it.

  Goldwater had charged three times in the campaign that Lyndon Johnson was “lying” in the matter of Vietnam, that in fact the president had not devised a winning policy on Vietnam. This Goldwater profoundly believed. But of course, in August, responding to the rogue North Vietnam patrol boat attack on U.S. destroyers, Johnson had pulled his masterstroke: he had gone to Congress and said, Give me the authority to do anything I want to do against the Communists in Vietnam.

  They called it the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and Johnson carried a copy of its text around in his back pocket for years, pulling it out to display to any critic who thought he had done not enough—or was doing too much without congressional approval.

  “He never did say what his policy in Vietnam is,” Goldwater insisted, late in the afternoon, to Dean Burch and Karl Hess at one of the postmortems a week before Christmas.