After losing the 1964 presidential election, Barry
Goldwater remarked of his own candidacy, “If I had to go by the
media reports alone, I’d have voted against the sonofabitch,
too.”
John McCain can probably sympathize. In the closing days of the
presidential election, Goldwater’s successor in the Senate faces
a similarly uphill battle for the White House against a crafty
opponent and a compliant media.
Though it was hardly the first negative presidential campaign in
American history, the 1964 presidential contest was
groundbreaking in the sheer ruthlessness of President Lyndon
Johnson and his aides in their ambition to destroy their
opposition at all costs — and the willingness of the press to
play along while giving the president a free pass.
Barry Goldwater was a dedicated public servant, a World War II
pilot, and a patriotic American who fought to end segregation in
Phoenix schools and supported the NAACP. By the time November
1964 had rolled around, he was transformed into a race-baiting
neo-Nazi hell-bent on nuclear war.
This skewed image was the result of Johnson’s campaign tactics,
which ran the gamut from underhanded — the “Daisy” television
spot featuring a young girl interrupted by the detonation of a
nuclear bomb, implying a vote for Goldwater would be a vote for
Armageddon — to unconstitutional — the White House used the CIA
to acquire inside information on Goldwater’s campaign to
circumvent its strategies and tactics.
Johnson’s allies on the American left egged on the image of
Goldwater as an unhinged authoritarian. “We see dangerous signs
of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” remarked Martin Luther
King, in one of his less eloquent moments. George Meany, head of
the AFL-CIO, said a Goldwater victory would place power in “the
hands of union-hating extremists, racial bigots, woolly-minded
seekers after visions of times long past.”
Meanwhile, the American press did its part to frighten the public
into voting for Johnson. Fact magazine ran a story
titled “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the
Mind of Barry Goldwater,” which publicized the results of a bogus
survey of 12,356 psychiatrists on the candidate’s mental
suitability for the presidency. The survey revealed that 1,189
psychiatrists (none of whom ever met Goldwater) believed he was
too unstable to be president.
CBS produced and aired “Thunder on the Right,” a sensational
documentary connecting Goldwater to the extreme John Birch
Society. Though the claims were largely untrue, the show was a
great favor to Johnson.
White House tapes capture Johnson plotting with aide Walter
Jenkins to use the documentary against Goldwater. “Get Stanton
[CBS president Frank Stanton] to send you three or four copies of
that transcript on the [John] Birch Society …and we got to get
some of the editors like Palmer Hoyt [editor and publisher of the
Denver Post] to make AP and UP to write features about
it and ask him questions about it,” said Johnson.
The press, however, did little to investigate the feasibility of
Johnson’s Great Society. Nor did it scrutinize his most notorious
campaign promise: “I’m not going to send American boys nine or
ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to
be doing for themselves” — words said while his advisors
secretly planned to deploy thousands of U.S. soldiers to
Southeast Asia.
Forty-four years later, Barack Obama and his aides — with
considerable help from their friends in the American media —
have turned McCain, a man who made unheard of sacrifices for his
country in Vietnam, into a doddering, warmongering “troll” in
adult diapers who has “lost his bearings.”
Raising the specter of race, Obama approved Spanish language ads
accusing McCain (the man who stuck his political neck out to push
for moderate immigration reform) of being an anti-Mexican bigot.
Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement
and Obama supporter (and a man McCain has publicly expressed
admiration for), believes the Arizona senator’s candidacy is
reminiscent of “another destructive period in American history.”
Lewis even linked the Republican ticket to George Wallace while
accusing McCain of “sowing the seeds of hatred and
division…Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls
were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in
Birmingham, Alabama.”
All this while Congressman Alcee Hastings warned that McCain and
his running mate Sarah Palin “don’t care too much about what they
do with Jews and blacks.”
The American media, from news outlets to Hollywood, have done
their part to foster this image while helping Obama keep his many
skeletons safely in the closet. Any mention of ACORN, Bill Ayers,
Reverend Wright, and the Born Alive Infants Protection Act is
deemed, at best, a distraction from real issues, at worst,
racism.
At the same time, the press, the guardians of the sacred First
Amendment, has been silent while Obama’s truth squads have
pressured federal and state legal agencies to squash dissent
about or criticism of their candidate, while intimidating
reporters who dare investigate Obama’s hazy background and
alarming associations.
The Obama campaign and the media have colluded to sell the
American people a product without giving them the whole story.
Voters seem eager to buy the fabricated image of the Democratic
candidate as a wholesome moderate from Middle America and reject
the Republican as a senile grinch.
The country did not get the whole story in 1964 either. Americans
enthusiastically retained Johnson’s services, giving him a
landslide victory over Goldwater. However, four short years
later, Johnson’s Great Society was a failure — to the tune of a
trillion dollars, thousands were dead in Vietnam, American cities
were going up in smoke, and still lingering questions of
patriotism and American greatness blossomed.
Looking towards Election Day and beyond, Democrats and their
allies in the media have many reasons to be happy; we may see a
repeat of 1964. However, they should keep this in mind: just as
elections sometimes have striking historical synchronicities,
their aftermaths often do as well.
