Of Mushroom Clouds and Old Bastards
by Randall Auxier
These are famous images from the infamous “Daisy” TV ad created for the Lyndon Johnson campaign of 1964. The little girl picks petals from a daisy, counting upward to ten. Being so very young, she makes mistakes. As she reaches ten a booming, disembodied voice counts backward from ten to one. At zero we have the mushroom cloud in all its ominous sublimity. A message flashes that we should vote; then a voiceover of Lyndon Johnson saying that we either have to learn to love each other or die (he is quoting W.H. Auden).
The ad was conceived by Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary. However kindly and spiritual he has become in the popular mind today, he was once a political shark on the order of Karl Rove. The decline into mere scare tactics in American political advertising can be dated to this commercial. The ad ran only once, but that was enough –back in the day when there were only three channels and watching TV was the principal family activity for evenings at home. It was a turning point.
But did this ad cost Goldwater the 1964 election? That debate will go on forever. It seems doubtful to me that this ad had much to do with the outcome –which makes the later legacy of negative campaign ads all the more regrettable. The Goldwater campaign responded, having Ronald Reagan go on live during prime time to defend Goldwater against the charge that he would blow up the world. The effect of the message probably just amplified and legitimated the original assertion. Yet, even at that, I think the ad wasn’t the key to the election. From a distance of 50 years, we can see that other things were probably at least as important.
The first was Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The tide of public opinion had turned against Southern segregationism after the Birmingham campaign of spring 1963, MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and the famous March on Washington in August of that year, culminating in one of the three greatest speeches in American history –the other two both belong to Lincoln. Timing and mood were very much in Johnson’s favor by November of that next year, since the events of the previous year had enough time to settle into the mainstream.
Goldwater’s reason for voting against the bill was, principally, that a government that has the power to protect your civil rights also has thereby claimed the power over civil rights generally. Civil rights reside with the people, and they are not within the government’s power in any sense, the old bastard insisted. But the argument rang hollow. It still does. It is no accident that the only states Goldwater carried, apart from his native Arizona, were in the deep south, and they went for Goldwater because he voted against the Civil Rights Act. (These were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.)
Second, there was his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in August of that year –the high water mark of his political career, and the moment when he could have changed the mood and affected the outcome. The phrase most people remember ran, approximately, “extremism in defense of freedom is no vice, moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Here he essentially accepted the charge that was put on him by the Johnson strategists of “extremism,” to see if he could turn a weakness to a strength. Tactical blunder? Perhaps.
But if you examine the full speech, you will see that Goldwater alienated a fair part of his Republican base. He prophesied an Atlantic civilization with free trade and open borders, a democratic, open Europe, and a new day for freedom. It all came to pass some thirty years after he described it. This was too far-seeing, even if very, very Republican. It made his isolationists and non-interventionists and America-firsters squirm in their seats. Goldwater said that seeking this new civilization was far more important then a moon shot, which cost him a fair chunk of those wavering undecideds, people who had taken heart and found their hope boosted by the success of the space program.
And finally, Goldwater made it abundantly clear throughout the campaign that Republicans should not be allying themselves with racists, bigots, and religious fanatics. In short, his speech turned out to be prophetic, both for good and for ill (if you’re a Republican), so it is good to remember that they threw Jeremiah into a pit and left him to die, no matter how right he was. The Republicans did that to Goldwater, too. I would suppose they might like to have him back now.
Finally, and this is the most important consideration: It is likely that Goldwater already knew that the country would not accept three different presidents in the space of one year. This is a point made by Crispin Sartwell in his book Extreme Virtue, and he speculates as to whether Goldwater might have done the other things he did because he knew he couldn’t win. Having his moment in the public spotlight, Goldwater decided to use it for prophecy and principle, as he saw them, and to accept the blows that inevitably would be dealt. No Republican could have won that election at that historical moment, the speculation goes, and thus, any candidate from that party could seize the moment and make it count.
It reminds me of another moment, more recently, when a different maverick from Arizona failed to grasp his moment and instead caved in to party hacks who pushed him away from his genuine strength –which was his integrity and his believability. After the disastrous Bush administration of 2001-2008, it was unlikely that a Republican could win. Yet, if John McCain had behaved like himself and not like a dishonest politician, in short, had he behaved like Goldwater, he might have won. The ironies multiply. But I remember a moment when some crazy woman in Minnesota was trembling about Obama being an Arab at a town hall meeting and McCain finally had enough. “No,” he said, Barack Obama is a decent man –no reason to fear his becoming president. McCain was booed. By his own supporters. Yet, had he said that sort of thing, and then emphasized his advantage in experience, he might have won. But truthfully, Bill Moyers won an unexpected battle here. The Daisy ad lives in current Republican strategy and tactics.
So, instead of being John McCain, he went for the 2008 equivalent of the mushroom cloud because people a lot stupider than he was told him to do that. It rang hollow. That wasn’t John McCain. Collectively, we were more afraid of Republicans than of imagined MWDs and Islamic terrorists. That attitude seems amplified sevenfold in 2016. In the time since that election, the fears of the middle have been borne out. We have met the scary people, and they are controlling one of our political parties. Even Goldwater might call them “extremists.” It is good to remember, however, that until the Civil Rights Act, those same people had been Democrats, since the Civil War. It isn’t about political parties, it’s about people.
Bill Moyers tells the story that he went into the Oval Office right after the signing ceremony for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and President Johnson was sitting at his desk and very obviously glum. Moyers said something like “Mr. President, you have just signed one of the most important laws in American history, why are you so sad?” To which Johnson answered something like: “I just gave the South to the Republicans for the next fifty years.”
Indeed. We have not come as far in creating a post-racial society as many people think. The sickness at the very heart of this nation that gives us our current strife is less about small government and heavy taxes than about racism. Barry Goldwater was a committed, explicit, even vehement anti-racist. He had been all of his life and he had the creds to prove it long before he entered politics. I wonder whether his anti-racism might have cost him the election too, had he been more explicit about it during the race. I think he might have been able to afford to lose those deep South states too, by putting his anti-racism out front. Yet, the one concession he seems to have made to the Republican strategists and tacticians was to remain quiet about his own views on race. The mushroom cloud that is destroying the Republicans to this day is hate, and that is what scares people about them.
Well, here is the moon shot, unimportant compared to the European Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, but still pretty interesting.
