Even as Barry Goldwater’s great nephew is running for Governor of Arizona on an anti-immigration platform, Barry’s granddaughter made and produced a film for HBO lauding her late Grandfather “as a kind of liberal.”
The support for this flimsy thesis is Goldwater’s opposition to the Christian right, his libertarian attitudes about homosexuality, and his criticism of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.
Many people think that Goldwater had a change of philosophy to lead him from being a civil rights opponent in the 1960s to a Christian basher in the 1980s. Really, there was nothing inconsistent about Goldwaterisms two decades apart — he was a conservative-libertarian all his political life on virtually all issues, including economics, the role of government in enforcing racial equality, and the role of governments in enforcing morality.
As for his anti-Nixon atttitude during Watergate, even as Goldwater enthusiastically campaigned for Nixon for President in 1968, and considered Nixon a very good friend, most conservatives were anti-Nixon during the Watergate scandal, simply because the fact of the matter was that Nixon actively covered up and destroyed evidence in a criminal investigation. Of course, there were right wingers who were trying to toll the bell about Nixon long before Watergate, John Schmitz being one of them.
Then again, I hardly think Schmitz, a speaker at the 1999 Council of Conservative Citizens National Conference in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, will have a HBO movie made in his honor. About the only thing HBO would care about Schmitz is that he fathered Mary Kay Letourneau.
The New York Times reporter who interviewed C.C. Goldwater calls Barry “a half-Jewish cowboy from Phoenix.” (The “half Jewish” crack is a reference to his Jewish father, but in Judaism, “Jewishness” is matrilineal. So Barry himself couldn’t verily call himself Jewish).
Really, Barry Goldwater was hardly a cowboy. His parents and later he owned and operated the Goldwater’s Department Store chain in Phoenix, and Goldwater himself was proud of the fact that Goldwater’s was the first major business in Phoenix to hire African-Americans (Yes, during the 1940s and 1950s, Mexicans were not the dominant racial minority in Arizona).
This proves that Goldwater’s opposition to Civil Rights legislation during his Senate days was motivated by entirely different reasoning than the opposition put up by Senators from the Deep South; I could ill imagine that if Richard Russell owned a chain of Department Stores in Atlanta, that there would have been any black employees at “Russell’s.” Later, the Goldwater family sold their stores to St. Louis-based May Corporation, and all of May’s properties were recently sold to Federated Department Stores.
