The first presidential contest I can recall was that of 1964 when I was seven years old. The tradition of Democrats attempting to paint Republicans as Fascists is an old one and Senator Barry Goldwater got the full treatment. Almost all of the media was on the side of Lyndon Johnson, along with Hollywood. An exception was actor Raymond Massey. Massey was a true star of the Golden Age of Hollywood, often playing figures from history like Abraham Lincoln, John Brown and Nathan the Prophet. A naturalized American citizen, Massey saw combat service in the Canadian Army in both World Wars.
Perhaps it was this combat service that added passion to the above television endorsement of Goldwater which still attracts attention fifty-six years later. Massey is alarmed about the no win American policy in Vietnam. Ironically the Johnson administration was secretly planning a mammoth build up of American troops in Vietnam after the election. Alas this build up did not come with any semblance of a strategy to win the war. Goldwater supporters would note wryly in the coming years that they were warned that if they voted for Goldwater that the US would be involved in a full scale war in Vietnam, and, son of a gun, that is precisely what happened!
That’s intense.
There’s a great deal about mid-century starboard discourse that I don’t much care for, but they did have a habit of identifying the downstream consequences of notions that seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. What we’ve been learning in the last 7 years is that those notions were and are adhered to for reasons which make the proponents immune to the data on practical effects. Remember that babble you used to hear 15 years ago about ‘epistemic closure’ and ‘the reality-based community’. Well, the reality-based community is now yammering about replacing police departments with squads of rude social workers. This should discredit their politician-cat’s paws with the general public, but, by and large, the public is pretending what’s happening isn’t happening.
On something of a side note, lest we forget, it was that degenerate lickspittle Bill Moyer who greenlighted the “Daisy Ad.” Moyer is also the reprobate who coined the anti-Goldwater slogan “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”
Anytime someone holds that despicable twerp up as some kind of “moral authority”, I throw up a little in my mouth. And then I go write yet another denunciation of him.
http://proecclesia.blogspot.com/2009/12/lefties-cry-over-departure-of-pbss.html
My once-ardent admiration for Barry Goldwater cooled to liquid nitrogen levels, but it’s hard to argue he would have done worse than Johnson.
People will identify Kennedy’s “Borking” speech as the point where the culture wars started. I’d say it was the response to the Goldwater campaign that was the preview of coming attractions.
Wow… my dad is retired, now, and on social security, and the only job that guy had OK’d that thing is only just now retiring, having last had a job besides commentator before my dad was a legal adult?
Jeeze.
People will identify Kennedy’s “Borking” speech as the point where the culture wars started. I’d say it was the response to the Goldwater campaign that was the preview of coming attractions.
Mel and Norma Gabler came under the cross-hairs of the national media by around 1975 (though they’d been working on their projects for more than a decade previous). Anita Bryant began organizing in Miami in 1977. Liberals thought it was illegitimate for them to organize and petition the government, of course.
Art, thanks for bring attention to the Gablers. I was unaware of them or their crusade. I do remember Anita Bryant. I suppose she could be recognized as being one the first to be “cancelled”.