page_title: Barry Goldwater
section_title: Policies
hierarchical_section_title: Barry Goldwater / Policies
caption_attribution_description: English: Informal press conference following a meeting between Congressmen and the President to discuss Watergate matters. Pictured: Hugh Scott, Barry Goldwater, John J. Rhodes. Last Day.
context_page_description: Barry Morris Goldwater was an American politician, businessman, and author who was a five-term Senator from Arizona and the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States in 1964. Despite his loss of the 1964 presidential election in a landslide, Goldwater is the politician most often credited with having sparked the resurgence of the American conservative political movement in the 1960s. He also had a substantial impact on the libertarian movement.
  Goldwater rejected the legacy of the New Deal and, along with the conservative coalition, fought against the New Deal coalition. A member of the N.A.A.C.P. and active supporter of desegregation in Phoenix, Goldwater voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, believing it to be an overreach by the federal government - a decision that considerably anguished him. In 1964, Goldwater mobilized a large conservative constituency to win the hard-fought Republican presidential primaries.
context_section_description: Goldwater became most associated with labor-union reform and anti-communism; he was a supporter of the conservative coalition in Congress. His work on labor issues led to Congress passing major anti-corruption reforms in 1957, and an all-out campaign by the AFL-CIO to defeat his 1958 reelection bid. He voted against the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, but he never actually charged any individual with being a communist/Soviet agent. Goldwater emphasized his strong opposition to the worldwide spread of communism in his 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative. The book became an important reference text in conservative political circles.
  In 1964, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that emphasized states' rights.  Goldwater's 1964 campaign was a magnet for conservatives since he opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs. Goldwater voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but did not vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Though Goldwater had supported the original Senate version of the bill, Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that Article II and Article VII of the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do or not to do business with whomever they chose, and believed that the private employment provisions of the Act would lead to racial quotas. In the segregated city of Phoenix in the 1950s, he had quietly supported civil rights for blacks, but would not let his name be used.
  All this appealed to white Southern Democrats, and Goldwater was the first Republican to win the electoral votes of all of the Deep South states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana) since Reconstruction (although Dwight Eisenhower did carry Louisiana in 1956). However, Goldwater's vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign everywhere outside the South (besides Dixie, Goldwater won only in Arizona, his home state), contributing to his landslide defeat in 1964.
  While Goldwater had been depicted by his opponents in the Republican primaries as a representative of a conservative philosophy that was extreme and alien, his voting records show that his positions were in harmony with those of his fellow Republicans in the Congress. According to Hans J. Morgenthau, what distinguished him from his predecessors was his firmness of principle and determination, which did not allow him to be content with mere rhetoric.
  Goldwater fought in 1971 to stop U.S. funding of the United Nations after the People's Republic of China was admitted to the organization. He said:
   I suggested on the floor of the Senate today that we stop all funds for the United Nations. Now, what that'll do to the United Nations, I don't know. I have a hunch it would cause them to fold up, which would make me very happy at this particular point. I think if this happens, they can well move their headquarters to Peking or Moscow and get 'em out of this country.
caption: Informal press conference August 7, 1974 (one day before Nixon announced his resignation) following a meeting between Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Scott, House Minority Leader Rhodes and the President to discuss the Watergate scandal and impeachment process
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