GOLDWATER: A Tribute to a Twentieth-Century Political Icon
By Bill Rentschler
Contemporary Books, 238 pages, $18.95
BACK TO BASICS FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
By Michael Zak,
237 pages, $16.95
Two books exploring the Republican Party’s past arrived just after the much-delayed climax of the 2000 presidential election, which is about to write a new chapter on the GOP’s future. “Back to Basics for the Republican Party,” by Michael Zak, and “Goldwater,” by Bill Rentschler, are different enterprises but similar in their unabashed, sometimes unsound, praise for the GOP and, in the case of Rentschler’s book, one of the party’s leading characters of the last half-century.
Rentschler, a publisher-journalist who twice failed to win GOP nominations for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, admits his tribute to the late Barry Goldwater is not intended to be a full biography but rather a personal memoir. Although Rentschler shares many conversations and snatches of correspondence with the late Arizona senator and 1964 presidential candidate, there are not enough of them to qualify this as a memoir; but he mixes enough of his own reminiscences and those from others to compile what is certainly a tribute.
When Goldwater died in 1998, he had evolved from the somewhat fearful extremist who lost a landslide election in 1964 to a venerable, five-term senator whose principles, convictions and blunt speech made him one of the Republican Party’s most endearing members. The media that had ridiculed his conservative positions a generation earlier doted on his declarations that marijuana should be legalized, that gays should serve in the military, that Bill Clinton would be a good president.
Rentschler provides personal anecdotes about these and other matters, such as Goldwater’s absolute distaste for Richard Nixon, who lied to him about Watergate and his damning of Ronald Reagan’s role in the Iran-contra affair.
But many of the personal insights Rentschler offers are nothing more than sheer praise for Goldwater’s principles, convictions and courage to defy conventional opinion and political expediency. And it is done too often.
Rentschler argues that Goldwater’s unfortunate phrase “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” was a strong patriotic statement that his GOP opponents and the liberal media turned into a metaphor for nuclear madness, that Goldwater’s vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act was unfairly used to characterize him as a racist, and that he was the victim of a vicious campaign waged by the “crafty, ruthless, and power hungry” Lyndon Johnson. He suggests that had John Kennedy lived to run against Goldwater, the campaign would have had a much higher, gentler tone.
It would have helped the book’s credibility if Rentschler had touched on the political reality that nothing Goldwater or any other GOP candidate might have said or done in 1964 would have deprived LBJ of the huge sympathy vote following Kennedy’s assassination.
To buttress his personal praise, Rentschler includes quotations from a variety of political figures and writers, including Sen. Edward Kennedy, Bob Dole, Walter Cronkite, the late John Knight, and others. But better editing could have avoided the use of the same quotes two or three times.
There are nice touches, including the afterword, by Hillary Clinton, who, as a teenage daughter of a Park Ridge Republican, was a “Goldwater Girl” in 1964.
Goldwater does not fare as well in the assessment of Zak, whose work is a highly partisan exhortation to the Republican Party to reclaim the black vote that he argues with some credibility is the birthright of the GOP.
Zak recounts the GOP’s history from its beginnings in the 1850s as the party that supported abolition of slavery and the subsequent civil rights amendments to the Constitution. He trots through each of the presidencies from Lincoln to Clinton, detailing how the Republican Party tried throughout Reconstruction and the late 1800s to pass civil rights legislation and how the Southern-dominated Democratic Party thwarted every effort to halt segregation.
Zak, who describes himself as a former foreign service officer, tries to be even-handed when praising such GOP leaders as Theodore Roosevelt for inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House, and damning Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge for doing nothing to change the racism in the federal government that Zak blames on Woodrow Wilson.
When he reaches the New Deal, Zak shifts gears from race to policy. He blames Republicans for not realizing that much of Franklin Roosevelt’s policy was traditional GOP policy and should have been embraced rather than denounced.
Although he exaggerates Republican nobility and ignores any traces of Democratic Party morality in the matter of black issues, Zak hovers near historical fact until he proclaims that the black loyalties to the Democratic Party began in 1964 with the Goldwater candidacy, which he labels racist and and ugly.
That ignores the great political shift of the 1920s and 1930s, when blacks migrating to Northern industrial cities were sucked into the big-city Democratic machines that provided jobs and local forms of welfare that antedated the New Deal.
Since the New Deal, black voters have been solidly Democratic, although rarely as enthusiastic as they were in the recent election, when Al Gore got more than 90 percent of their vote.
Zak does not disguise his work as objective, using such phrases as “our Republican Party” and “we Republicans” throughout the book. It’s as though he didn’t intend for anyone who is not a Republican to read it, and that may turn out to be the case.
