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How did the conservative psycho become the prickly teddy bear? Simple: Goldwater lost, and lost big--so big, in fact, that no one could seriously entertain the idea that he would ever become President or again be leader of his party. Declawed, he returned to Capitol Hill, where as one Senator among 100 he was free to make his caustic observations, to the general amusement of adversaries who not long before considered him deranged. Richard Nixon, he said, was "the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life." Bob Dole, Goldwater's leader in the Senate in the 1980s, "doesn't have the leadership qualities that his job as minority leader requires." After Iran-contra, Goldwater said Ronald Reagan must be either "a liar or an incompetent." And Reagan had been the most famous Goldwaterite of all.
But there was no such thing as a Goldwaterite. There was only Goldwater, sui generis. When the conservative movement coalesced around his candidacy, in the early '60s, conservatives still called themselves individualists, and he understood better than they did that a movement of individualists was an oxymoron. He remained an individualist, and the movement passed him by. In his last years his libertarianism hardened. He came out for gay rights, including in the military, and opposed controls on abortion. When Republicans attacked President Clinton about Whitewater, Goldwater told them to "get off his back and let him govern."
Now it was conservatives who thought he was nuts. They spoke darkly of failing mental health, of incipient Alzheimer's, of the sinister influence of the new Mrs. Goldwater--a left-winger! A more likely explanation is that conservatives, like liberals, had always mismeasured him. As a presidential candidate, Goldwater traveled to Memphis, Tenn., to call for eliminating cotton subsidies; he went to Florida to advocate dismantling Social Security; in Tennessee he said he wanted to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority. For such a man, it was not so long a leap to opine 20 years later, during the ascendancy of the religious right, "Every good Christian ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass." Throughout Goldwater's career runs the spirit of Uncle Morris, leaning forward and telling the busybodies, as his nephew would put it, to cut the crap. In his curmudgeon's heart, Barry Goldwater knew he was right, and more often than not he was.