2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Clinton: "I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with" [View all]HassleCat
(6,409 posts)Clinton joins most Americans in wishing to return to a time that did not exist. Goldwater seemed to be a nice man, but he was a dangerous crackpot. I read a book, intended to be a hagiography, of Goldwater's comments on several subjects, and I was horrified by his weird racism and his primitive world view. I remember a nicer, "kinder gentler" Republican Party, as represented by Dwight Eisenhower, with whom I share a birth date, but Eisenhower was not a real Republican, and nostalgia for the Eisenhower years is misguided. Nostalgia for "moderate" Republicans like Goldwater is typical of all nostalgia, based on selective memory, but a universal human flaw.
On edit: The book is called Pure Goldwater, a collection of the late senator's journals, letters and speeches compiled by his son Barry M. Goldwater and John W. Dean.