American Experience; 1964; Interview with Richard Viguerie, Conservative Activist, part 2 of 3

That's an interesting thing because, you know, as you say, you make a really good point about the lasting impact of Goldwater. And young people on the right, I mean, but at the time, Goldwater is, you know, he was so open to criticism, like some of the, what were the bumper stickers that would show up. In your heart, you know, he's nuts or something like that. Yeah, because my bumper sticker read and your heart, you know, he's right. And then the left plate on that and twisted it. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think, you know, we understand the two because I found that they were playing off of yours. Yeah. Yeah. Our bumper sticker concert is one of our popular bumper stickers, as I recall was, I stepped on you when I was talking. So one of, we had many conservatives back in those days had many popular bumper stickers. And one of them was that in your heart, you know, he's right or in your heart, you know that Barry Goldwater's right or something such as that. And then the left would twist that

and say in your heart, you know, he's nuts or something similar. So they were dueling bumper stickers going and going back and forth. But Goldwater had an endearing quality about him of just speaking his mind and being, you know, frank and open and not measuring everything. And that was one of the things that endeared him to to concerns and a lot of Americans. And later, when he was no longer a political threat to some of the media and others in politics, they began to find an affection for Goldwater. And they began to see qualities in Goldwater's that they admired that they didn't acknowledge back in the 60s. It's interesting because Jack Kennedy was a good friend and really admired him too. They both like each other a lot. And they talked about traveling around on the same plane. And hanging together when they thought they were going to be running against each other. What were you doing at the convention in San Francisco? Well, I was there in behalf of young Americans of freedom as we're a lot of conservatives.

I don't understand where we are. I'm sorry. Okay. The Republican convention in 1964 was held at the Cal Palace in San Francisco. And it was mecca. I mean, if you were a young conservative, you just had to hitchhike. I was talking to a congressman not too long ago who he and his dad rode the train for two days all the way there and not sleeping, you know, he's up in a sitting up and staying three days going back. It was just something you had to do. You just had to say I was there. And it was just so electrifying. We never dreamed that we could do this so quick. And Goldwater told us in 1960 we could do that when he withdrew his support that people were trying to nominate him for vice president on the Nixon ticket. He said, you know, conservatives, we can take this party over. And we didn't know that we could do it in four years, but we did it. And it was just, we were just a ragtag band of a handful of conservatives here and there. And not a lot of resources.

And we just beat King of the world, Nelson Rockefeller. I mean, it had unlimited resources assets. And we beat him. We beat the entire Republican establishment. It was an electrifying time. And you had no idea, I guess, then. So this was the convention that felt like the revolution. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We as good as it was when when Goldwater was nominated, it got just a little bit better. The next day when when Goldwater selected Bill Miller, the upstate New York Congressman, former head of the Republican National Committee to be his running mate. And Miller was a, you know, just a hard charging, aggressive, articulate conservative. And Goldwater wasn't trying to balance the ticket with, you know, somebody who supported Rockefeller. We had a pure conservative ticket. And it just didn't get any better ness if we thought we'd died and go into heaven politically. And what happened when Rockefeller

woke up to denouncing stood up to denouncing extremism, I can imagine. Well, he did it. I'm, I've read a lot that people think that he did it deliberately. He wanted to bait the conservatives. He wanted to go to us into booing him and giving him a hard time. And we responded. We took the bait. And I was part of it. I was this young kid. And I was in the in the rafters at the Cal Palace. And there were a lot of young conservatives up there. And we, the goldwater people didn't want any response. They didn't want booing, you know, but we didn't get the mess. We didn't get the memo. And so we were, we were responding to, to Rockefeller's taunting of us there. And he got what he wanted. What happened when Barry Goldwater made his acceptance speech? Well, we were just all excited, you know, we just, you know, to this day, I think what he said in terms of extremism,

is, is, is, is right. I mean, you know, if, if a John Kennedy had said that, you know, it would have been applauded by the mainstream media. But because it sounded, you know, like what Barry Goldwater was, it just made people nervous that he's not someone who's going to be a moderate. He's going to have a hard edge to him there. And it just, it just reinforced the image that the media had painted of goldwater. Politically, it was not a smart move to make. Yeah, why do you think the extremism labels stuck to him? We talked about how blunt it spoke anyway. Well, for, for many reasons, number one reason is the media. Conservatives did not have access to the microphones in the 1960s. The, the left controlled all the major networks and the newspapers. We just didn't have access to

the microphones. And the, you know, direct mail that was just beginning to, to be used politically. And it had, you know, very little ability to counteract what the mainstream media was saying. And when Ronald Reagan made his famous speech at Time for Choosing Late in the Campaign, it was one of the few times in the campaign that the Goldwater message got through the filter of the mainstream media. I see. But when people argued that Goldwater was an extremist from the left and when the media picked up on that, what were they arguing? What was it about Goldwater that they said was extreme? What was their argument? As I know, I know there was a kind of rallying argument, but I'm curious what they were saying. Why, why did the people think he was extreme? Well, I'm not sure that they, the political leaders on Republican side and the Democrat thought he was so extreme as so much a threat

to their power. America has basically two political parties for all my life, political life. And that's the end party and the out party. And in many ways, there's not a lot that differentiates between the two. And the big government Republicans, whether Eisenhower or Nixon or any of the other big political Republican leaders, Tom Dewey, et cetera, they had a nice relationship with the Democrats and government grew in our liberties shrank during Republican administration through Democrat administrations. And here comes somebody who's leading a movement, mostly of young people who see it very different. And they felt very threatened. The most important political battle in America, in my opinion, is not between Republicans and Democrats. It's not between conservatives and liberals. It's inside the Republican Party. And this

is a battle that's been going on for over 100 years. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt leaves the Republican Party, runs as a boo moose, and of course takes it that way, enough votes for TAF running for re-election that he allows Woodrow Wilson to get 43% of the vote and become president. And that's a battle that's been going on ever since. Sometimes the candidate looks like Roosevelt. Other times it's Tom Dewey, Al-Flandon, Eisenhower, Ford, Bush, McCain, Romney. And so this is a battle that's been going on in the 1964 campaign that was part of it. It was the establishment of Republicans versus the grassroots traditional conservatives. And yet, in many ways, after the election, people argued that a lot of goldwater's positions were what they would call outside the mainstream, which is exactly where I think he wanted to be. And it's exactly why you and others loved him.

Yeah. But in those positions, what were they? I mean, I'm trying to get a sense. He and now he was opposed, in some cases, to Social Security. I know he felt very strongly about some of these domestic issues. You mentioned his staunch anti-communism, but his willingness to talk about nuclear weapons often made people feel like he was outside the mainstream. What were some of the other things that made him seem to, to the media or to everybody as being? Well, why did people have those bumper stickers? Like, what was it that was under? You know, goldwater and his supporters were a threat to the establishment. And that's the Republican establishment as well as the Democrat establishment. For example, both of the Republican and Democrat establishment believed in Daytona with the Soviet Union. We will accommodate you. We will, you know, leave things as they are from the Soviet Union. With countries you have now, we're not going to take those away. We're not going to try

to bring freedom, liberty to those people there. And goldwater and the conservatives believe we need to roll back communism. We need to free the enslaved people in Europe and Asia. And that was a threat to the governing establishment in this country. And you see it in the domestic sphere. What did you love about his domestic mission? He wanted to, he believed in a balanced budget. He believed in limited government. He believed in not passing moral laws, but reducing the number of laws that we have in increasing liberty and freedom for the individuals. So he was threatening the country's establishment, whether it was big labor, big media, big government, big business. And goldwater was not supported by big business. It was small business. The entrepreneurs that supported goldwater. And the conservatives have always been at war, if you would, with big business and Wall Street. Because they've got a relationship

with government that we think is very harmful to America's best interests. Great, great. So, because we're talking about the philosophy. Do you remember when she published a choice not an echo? Oh, absolutely. What was the secret to that book? And why did it take so long? Well, we had a number of books that came out in the early 60s. Phyllis's book, a choice not an echo. John Stormers, Nunder, called it Treeson. J. Edgar Hoover had a book called Seeds of DeSete. And there were maybe four or five books that were very, very popular there. Because again, that was a way that we could get our ideas out and communicate. Because we didn't have access, again, to the microphones of this country. So when somebody

who was articulate and had an ability to communicate to the grassroots did so, it was very exciting. And it was not just, of course, the Go Water campaign. It was Ronald Reagan's speech in the campaign. It was these books. It was a national view. Let me ask you about Reagan. I mean, what was it about who stood out for Republicans in that year? It was Ronald Reagan. Well, but that was at the end of the campaign. When I'm at the Cal Palace, and I'm not even an alternate delegate, but I got some credentials to walk around the rafters there. And I see a crowd of 25, 30 people. So I say, well, must be somebody famous. So I kind of work my way up there. And there's Ronald Reagan sitting in the rafters, signing autographs, which means he was an alternate delegate. He wasn't a full delegate to the Republican convention. And four years later, he's governor of California. So he was, we knew him,

but he wasn't a rock star. He wasn't Ronald Reagan in the summer of 1964. But what puts him on the map? The speech that he gave at the end of the Go Water campaign in 1964, called a Time for Choosing. And it aired about eight days before the election. And what we called the Arizona Mafia around Go Water. Go Water, put almost exclusively his friends, his longtime Arizona friends, buddies, to in charge of his campaign, which is a serious mistake. And they didn't really know politics. And so they did Barry Go Water, great disservice. And when some conservatives wanted to campaign for Go Water using this Reagan speech, Reagan made a speech for 25, 30 minutes. And they wanted to air this. And the Go Water's age

said, no, somehow no, they got a copy to Go Water and go, what's that? I don't see any problem with this. Let's run it. You know, yeah, exactly. But what was really what pushed it over to the Go Water campaign, deciding to do it, is that the, some Texans, wealthy Texas conservatives were going to put it on the air anyway. So if you're not going to put it on the air, we're going to put it on the air. So Go Water campaign, we landed and put it on. What was so striking about it? Again, and of course, it was Ronald Reagan being Ronald Reagan very articulate. Speaking very different than he did late in his campaign. I've seen it several times since then. He spoke like machine gun, very rapid fire. It's modulated his speech later. But again, he covered the waterfront. He covered the international scene. He covered how the Democratic Party had moved to the left. How we were losing our freedoms. It was not only a call to choose, but a call to arms. And it just, again,

at the end of the campaign, we could see that Go Water was going to lose the election. And here was, you know, the air apparent. Here was the next leader. And again, it was just very electrifying. Did it? Was it striking because it was such a contrast between the two styles of speakers? Very Go Water was not known for his skills on the stunt. That's right. And Ronald Reagan said in about 25 minutes. Actually, his speech was about 25 minutes. He devoted the last five minutes to raising money to run the film again. And he did. So much money came in. They were able to run it almost every night after that. But he was saying in 25 minutes what Go Water had not said. He'd say a little bit here, a little bit there. But his Arizona friends were muscling Go Water. Go Water did not run the type of campaign in the fall that we anticipated in terms of holding the conservative

banner high. His California friends were thought that was, we didn't want to get too extreme. We didn't want to get out on the edge. We wanted to be more mainstream. And so we didn't hear that full, complete conservative message that we thought we were going to have in with Barry Go Water's candidate. Okay. Let's get back for a second. Hey, no. Yeah, you don't have to reference him. No, I won't. Yeah. Okay. So, what is his information about Go Water? In January of 1964, Barry Go Water announces for President of the United States. And he knows then that he's not going to be President of the United States. America is not going to have three Presidents in 14 months time. But he does it for a noble reason. And it turned out to be exactly right. He did it to launch the conservative movement. And it had that exact effect because from his campaign came the modern day conservative movement.

Why did the election, that election in 1964? Why did it represent such a radical fork in the road for people? It was a really serious because of Go Water. It was a real choice, right? Conservatives, because of the campaign and it was, you know, years in the making. We started talking about Go Water, organizing Go Water activities in 1961. By 1962, we're going very strong. We had a big rally in this July 4th, 1963 at the DC Armory, where about 7,000 people there. And we're just getting all kinds of activity. And we're meeting each other. And we're identifying each other. And we're working together in relationships. And friendships are being built and established. And after the election is over with, of course,

we're committed to moving forward. And organizations like the American Conservative Union and many, many, many others came out of the ashes of the Go Water defeat in 1964. And so we were committed not to, you know, pick up our marbles and go back home. We were committed to this was just the first of many, many battles to come in the battle for freedom here in America. What was it about the electoral map that changes so dramatically in 1964? It's a historic shift. Well, the, the, the South and the West began to play a much bigger role in the Republican Party than they had before. And it began to shift politics dramatically in the country because we all know as long as any of us can remember what was called the

solid South, but it was solid for the Democrats. Now it's solid South mostly for the Republicans. And and that changed American politics in a major way, of course, the, in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat, it happened very quickly. And Kevin Phillips wrote a book about the, the emerging power of the South. But the West was also changing and the West was becoming a more libertarian, if you would, and more anti, you know, federal government encroaching upon their, their rights and liberties. But it's it's a...