Barry Goldwater

Barry Goldwater struggled through ordinary schooling before his parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, where discipline finally took and he graduated in 1928. College lasted one year; he left the University of Arizona for the family department store, the Phoenix business his grandfather had built after emigrating from Poland by way of London. He learned retail from the sales floor up, married Margaret Johnson in 1934, and spent World War II as an Army Air Forces pilot flying supply routes over the Himalayan 'Hump' into China. Back home he founded the Arizona Air National Guard in 1946 and desegregated it two years before Harry Truman desegregated the rest of the military.

Goldwater won an upset Senate seat in 1952, built a national following as the Republican Party's most outspoken conservative critic of the Eisenhower consensus, and in 1964 won his party's presidential nomination on the strength of it. His acceptance speech declared that 'extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,' a line his opponents used against him for the rest of the campaign, while the Lyndon Johnson campaign's 'Daisy' ad implied he would start a nuclear war. He lost 44 states and the popular vote by 16 points, carrying only Arizona and five Deep South states. He returned to the Senate in 1969, chaired the Intelligence Committee, told Richard Nixon in 1974 that Watergate had cost him his Senate support, and co-authored the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act reorganizing the military's chain of command.

The man remembered as the father of modern conservatism spent his last two decades breaking with the movement he had started. Goldwater backed abortion rights as a private choice, supported gay Americans serving openly in the military, and told the religious activists then taking over his party, 'do not associate my name with anything you do.' He warned that 'these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise,' and when Christian conservatives attacked Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court nomination, he told Jerry Falwell exactly where to put his objection. His 1964 vote against the Civil Rights Act, cast on constitutional grounds he insisted were not racial, followed him for the rest of his life; he later called it one of his biggest regrets.

Goldwater's 1964 landslide loss is remembered now as a founding defeat rather than a repudiation — it built the activist infrastructure and Sun Belt coalition that carried Ronald Reagan into the White House 16 years later, and historians generally credit Goldwater with converting the Republican Party from an Eastern establishment club into the conservative movement's vehicle. He suffered a stroke in 1996, developed Alzheimer's disease, and died at his home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, on May 29, 1998, at 89. The party he helped remake went on to embrace positions on religion and government he had explicitly disavowed in his own final years.

Barry Goldwater's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Arizona Air National Guard company
  Founded and desegregated it ahead of federal military integration 1946
• The Conscience of a Conservative book
  Ghostwritten with Brent Bozell; became the movement's founding text 1960
• 1964 Republican presidential campaign other
  Lost 44 states but reshaped the party's coalition 1964
• Goldwater-Nichols Act law
  Reorganized the US military's chain of command 1986

• January 2, 1909 aged 0 Born in Phoenix, Arizona
• 1928 aged ~19 Graduates Staunton Military Academy
• 1946 aged ~37 Founds the Arizona Air National Guard and orders it desegregated
• 1952 aged ~43 Wins an upset election to the US Senate
• 1960 aged ~51 Publishes The Conscience of a Conservative
• July 16, 1964 aged 55 Accepts the Republican presidential nomination 'Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.'
• November 3, 1964 aged 55 Loses the presidential election to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide Carried only Arizona and five Deep South states.
• August 1974 aged 65 Tells Richard Nixon he has lost Senate support over Watergate
• May 29, 1998 aged 89 Dies in Paradise Valley, Arizona, at 89

• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. defeated by
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. paved the way for
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. urged to resign
• William Rehnquist 1924–2005
  Chief justice who led the Court’s conservative shift toward federalism and limits on congressional power. early political ally
• Strom Thurmond 1902–2003
  Long-serving South Carolina senator who ran as a segregationist Dixiecrat and later joined the Republican Party. 1964 Deep South ally