The Greatest President We Never Had
By David F. Nolan
[email protected]
Special to The Libertarian Enterprise
Barry Goldwater was the first and only Republican Presidential
candidate I ever supported. In 1960, the Kennedy-Nixon match-up had
moved me to concoct a button that said "Robert Heinlein for
President" ... but Goldwater was different.
I attended a Goldwater for President Rally in Washington, DC on
the 4th of July, 1963, and was inspired to start a Students for
Goldwater chapter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that
September. Within weeks, it had grown to become the largest
organization of its kind in New England. (This was the heart of
Kennedy territory!) Throughout the fall of '64 I campaigned
tirelessly for Barry, wearing my AuH2O pin as a badge of honor.
He lost, of course. Big-time. Ganged up on by the East Coast
"establishment" media and all but deserted by the big-name politicians
in his own Party, Goldwater went down to a crashing defeat in
November. He received only 38.5% of the popular vote and carried only
six states, including his native Arizona. Among major-party
candidates, only George McGovern has fared worse in modern times.
But in a longer-term sense, Goldwater won. The "omnipotent
government" ideology represented by Lyndon Johnson was already on its
way to the trash bin of history. Its undoing began with the futile
war in Vietnam, which led to riots in the streets at the Democratic
national convention in '68 and the victory of Richard Nixon that same
year. (I firmly believe that a President Goldwater would have heeded
the words of Douglas MacArthur, and would not have been drawn into a
land war in Asia.)
Nixon, alas, proved to be no better than Johnson. Lacking
Goldwater's firm commitment to individualist principles, Nixon made no
attempt to rein in the monster that government had become. He became
the only President ever to impose wage and price controls in the
absence of a declared war. His paranoid style -- enemies lists,
wiretaps, break-ins, fancy uniforms for White House guards -- was more
suited to a banana republic than to a free society. And while the GOP
has continued to drift ever-further from principles of liberty, Barry
Goldwater always stood firm.
Goldwater never hesitated to lock horns with those who saw
government as the appropriate instrument for imposing their personal
beliefs on others. His disdain for the Jerry Falwells of the world
was every bit as sincere as his opposition to the nanny-state schemes
of Teddy Kennedy and the socialist left. (And in an odd bit of
historic irony, it was Barry Goldwater who was chosen by his
Republican colleagues in the Senate to go to Nixon in August, 1974 to
urge him to resign the Presidency. This was ten years, almost to the
day, after Goldwater received the GOP nomination in 1964.)
Today, Goldwater's spirit lives on in the political arena ... but
not in the Republican Party. In 1998, the party that represents
Goldwater's ideals is the Libertarian Party, founded in 1971 as a
reaction to what the GOP had become under Nixon and still remains
today: the party of socially conservative big government. If the
Republican party had remained true to the principles of Barry
Goldwater, the Libertarian Party probably would not exist, because it
would be unnecessary.
Barry Goldwater was my political hero ... and the greatest
President we never had.
David F. Nolan is best-known as the principal founder of the
Libertarian Party, and as the originator of the two-dimensional
political map often called the "Nolan Chart". Presently he is
involved in the development of FlickPicks, an interactive Website for
moviegoers, where you rate the movies you've seen and can read
comments by others. The Libertarian Enterprise readers are
cordially invited to participate: http://www.flickpicks.com