Chapter One EARLY DAYS De l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace, et la patrie sera sauvee. -- Georges Jacques Danton, September 2, 1792 Election night in 1964 found me at the local Goldwater for President headquarters in Catonsville, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. I had done volunteer campaign work there during the summer after the Republican Convention, and on weekends. Having obtained permission to be absent from high school on Election Day to hand out Goldwater leaflets at a nearby precinct, I was in Catonsville when Maryland's polls closed to await the national returns. Although Lyndon Johnson seemed to have a large lead going into the election, I remained optimistic that Barry Goldwater would run well, and might even pull off an upset. So much for the early signs of a promising political career. Goldwater was crushed, in what was then the worst presidential election defeat in American history. At the Catonsville office, which had become quite crowded, many of the adult volunteers (I was just about the only teenager there) were weeping, something I had never seen before in public.

I was somewhat puzzled by this display of emotion, but I was more puzzled by the election results, which were going from bad to worse. Dean Burch, Goldwater's chairman of the Republican National Committee, said, "As the sun sets in the West, the Republican star will rise." I believed that for a while, until it became ever more obvious that "down" was the only direction in which Goldwater was headed. It took weeks for the extent of the defeat to penetrate fully into my befuddled brain. When a few brave souls, just weeks afterward, printed bumper stickers that read "AuH2O '68," I was ready to sign up again. After all, the American people could not really vote in overwhelming numbers for a candidate who said things like, "I want y'all to know that the Democratic Party is in favor of a mighty lot of things, and against mighty few." I had read Goldwater'sWhy Not Victory?andThe Conscience of a Conservative, and fiercely admired the Arizonan's philosophy and candor. He was an individualist, not a collectivist, who said without reservation, "My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.

"1 He was against "the Eastern Establishment," which conservatives saw as a major source of our misguided statist policies at home, and what Barry called "drift, deception, and defeat" in the international struggle against Communism. I cheered when Barry said we should cut off the eastern seaboard and let it drift out to sea, even though my own state of Maryland would have been drifting out there as well. Later, after he returned to the Senate, Goldwater began a letter to the CIA director, "Dear Bill: I am pissed off." (How many times in my own government career did I long to write a letter like that, although I never did.) In my heart, I knew Barry was right. While I thought the 1964 presidential election was a no-brainer, I was obviously part of a distinct minority, even though others would bravely say of Goldwater's popular vote total that "twenty-six million Americans can't be wrong." It would have been entirely logical after 1964 to give up politics as completely hopeless, and go on to a career, say, in the Foreign Service, as I seriously contemplated. Or I might have drifted off to the left in college, as so many of my contemporaries did.

But like many others whose first taste of electoral politics came in the Goldwater campaign, I had exactly the opposite reaction. If the sustained and systematic distortion of a fine man's philosophy could succeed, abetted by every major media outlet in the country, overwhelmingly supported by the elite academic institutions, to the tune of negative advertising like Johnson's famous "daisy commercial," which accused Goldwater of being too casual about nuclear war, and slogans.