Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General "Reagan Principles"

Lee Edwards, a conservative intellectual who served as Goldwater's press aide in the 1964 presidential campaign, provides the most complete reconstruction yet of that campaign and reveals much that is new about Goldwater's relationship with other conservatives, including Ronald Reagan.

Running through both books are disturbing revelations about his intellectual abilities and about his independence of mind. These books unwittingly portray him as a good-hearted but stupid and sometimes weak man whose success depended upon his following carefully a script that other people wrote.

Both books depict Goldwater as an abysmal student. After ninth grade, he was advised to leave Phoenix's public high school. Out of desperation, his parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, where he had to repeat the ninth grade and still received Cs and Ds. After graduating from Staunton, Goldwater went to the University of Arizona, but he dropped out after his freshman year because he was having too much difficulty keeping up with the work. Goldwater's sister Carolyn told Edwards that she could not recall his ever reading a book.

As a senator, Goldwater doesn't seem to have displayed any intellectual curiosity. He authored three political books and two autobiographies, but he didn't write them. Other politicians also don't write their own books, but Goldwater didn't seem even to go over them carefully.

Clifton White, who later headed the Draft Goldwater Committee, wrote in his memoir that Goldwater never even saw The Conscience of a Conservative before it was published. Goldwater later claimed that Bozell constructed the book from his speeches, but Bozell wrote those speeches. The truth is that Goldwater had almost nothing to do with the book that made him famous and launched his national political career.

Goldwater became known for his strong, even strident, foreign policy stands, but he devoted little of his first years to foreign policy. He began to take provocative positions in the late '50s when Bozell, whose principal interest was rolling back communism, began to write his speeches.

Until the late '80s, Goldwater was also not known for taking strong stands on abortion or gay rights. As Edwards notes, conservatives ascribe these later stands to the influence of Goldwater's gay grandson and his liberal second wife, Susan.

During most of Goldwater's career, he did and said what others told him to.

Arizonan Stephen Shadegg agreed to run his first Senate campaign in 1952 on the condition that Goldwater not make impromptu speeches or statements and not take positions that he and Shadegg had not reached agreement on.

During the next decades in office, when Goldwater was given the chance to speak off-the-cuff, he displayed a thoughtless bluster more appropriate to a bar stool than a political podium.

He called for taking the Vietnam war to South China. "It would be fairly easy," he declared at a press conference.(sounds like a cakewalk) These statements were not lapses, but revealed that Goldwater did not have the capacity for judgment or reflection required of a president.


In summing up Goldwater's 1964 campaign: "seemed too casual in his judgments, too careless about words and facts, too indifferent to complexity, a man of too little intellectual discipline."

Goldwater simply did not possess the mentality to deal with the enormous challenges posed by the Vietnam War, ghetto riots, growing white unrest in the South, and the erosion of America's economic superiority.

The more puzzling question raised by these books is how a man of such limited gifts managed to find himself atop the conservative movement.

Goldwater looked and acted the part of the new Western conservative.

Dick Cheney's political career began in 1969, as an intern for Congressman William A. Steiger during the Nixon Administration. The intern Cheney then joined the staff of Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969–70.

Deputy Assistant to the President from 1974–1975. It was in this position that Cheney suggested in a memo to Rumsfeld that the Ford White House should use the Justice Department in a variety of legally questionable ways to exact retribution for an article published by New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.[20]

Under President Gerald Ford, Cheney worked as Assistant to the President. Rumsfeld first oversaw Ford's White House "transition team" and then later became Ford's Chief of Staff. Rumsfeld was named Secretary of Defense, and Cheney became Chief of Staff to the President. In addition, Cheney and Rumsfeld successfully pushed for William Colby to be replaced by George H. W. Bush as the Director of Central Intelligence, forging what would become a long-term relationship with the future president.

Cheney was campaign manager for Ford's 1976 Presidential Campaign, while James Baker served as Campaign Chairman.

In 1978, Cheney was elected to represent Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives serving until 1989. He was Chairman of the Republican Policy Committee from 1981 to 1987 when he was elected Chairman of the House Republican Conference. The following year, he was elected House Minority Whip.

Cheney also served as ranking minority member of the Congressional committee investigating Iran-Contra — a scandal involving members of the Reagan Administration who helped to illegally sell arms to Iran, and then used the proceeds to fund, also illegally, the Contras, a guerrilla militia in Nicaragua resisting the elected Sandinista government.[26] In that role he supervised the production of a minority report, which strongly rejected the majority finding[27] that a "cabal of zealots" in the administration who had "disdain for the law" had violated the statute.[28][29]

As a Wyoming Representative, he was also known for his vigorous advocacy of the state's petroleum and coal businesses. The federal building in Casper, a regional center of the oil and coal business

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Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney

House Minority Whip

In December 1988, the House Republicans elected Cheney to the second spot in the leadership, but he only served two and a half months, as he was appointed Secretary of Defense (see below) to replace former Texas Senator John G. Tower, whose nomination had been rejected by the Senate in March 1989.

As it turned out, Cheney won his last term in the House in 1988, when he easily defeated the Democrat Bryan Sharratt, later a member of the Clinton administration defense team.

Secretary of Defense

Cheney served as the Secretary of Defense from March 1989 to January 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. He directed the United States invasion of Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. In 1991 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for "preserving America's defenses at a time of great change around the world."

But then I can already hear people crying, but Goldwater is the father of modern conservatism. Was he really? Just as pundits failed to critique Reagan, the demented puppet, there is a very similar picture to be painted of Goldwater's intellectual prowess.

To learn about Reagan there are three books that are quite helpful. Unfortunately I don't remember the titles of two of them...