Reader David F. Kennison’s over-the-top praise of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater (Voice, June 5) lauded his “commitment to the principles of civil liberties and individual rights forged into the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” etc. Really? Time for a reality check.
Is he talking about the same Barry Goldwater who voted against the civil rights bill and thus tried to postpone indefinitely full and equal enjoyment of those “civil liberties and . . . rights” for millions of Americans of color?
And the same Goldwater who then chose to be opportunistic matchmaker between the Republican Party and diehard Southern segregationists gone apoplectic over “liberty and justice for all” finally coming to pass? If so, Mr. Kennison’s notion of the meaning of the Constitution and Bill of Rights seems oddly truncated, or his grasp of history has blind spots.
If we mean to praise Goldwater’s record, let’s credit him for all of it, including his unsung accomplishments: He snookered the nation into calling reactionaries by the euphemistic name “conservatives” and began the process of perverting the meaning of the concept “the party of Lincoln.”
Many would call his trading on racist animosity to achieve Republican ascendancy a devil’s bargain regardless of how he dressed it up in the noble-sounding rhetoric of “states’ rights,” which was the white South’s last-ditch parliamentary battle cry during the civil rights debate in Congress. Or is this an object lesson in how to be painted a hero, post mortem, despite having tried to perpetuate the subversion of particular bedrock principles of civil liberties on which our nation was founded?
