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Nicholas Buccola, "One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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I'm Caleb Zakrin, Editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Buccola, the doctor Jules K. Whitehill professor of Humanism and Ethics in the Department of government at Claremont McKenna College. We're discussing Nick's latest book, One Man's Goldwater King and the Struggle over an American Ideal. When we think of the dominant figures of post war American life, it does not take long for us to conjure the names Martin Luther King Jr. And Barry Goldwater. Both men were leaders in their respective movements and despite never meeting, they engaged in a long running debate about the future of the nation they each called their own. A lively and engaging work. One man's freedom gets at the heart of an idea so important to the American ethos. Nick, thanks for joining me today on the Princeton University Press Ideas podcast.
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Thanks Caleb. I'm happy to be here.
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This is a timely book. Beyond the fact that Martin Luther King and his message are always timely. In a way, I find putting MLK and Goldwater into conversation and the way you do to be really fascinating because, you know, through, through my entire life I've. I've learned about this, this period, whether in school, you know, when I first heard about mlk, maybe when I was in kindergarten, I suppose, to when I maybe first heard about Goldwater in high school and then in college taking history classes, hearing about them. And I knew about these different movements, the civil rights movement and also the conservative movement, but I really never knew how they related actually. And I think that the way in which you put them together as these kind of twin movements happening in parallel, and these are the figures that are really spearheading them. I just found it, found it really engaging. And the book itself, you know, you really hone in on these different scenes, really makes it engaging and enjoyable. It's not like your typical work by an academic. It really is, you know, a mix, a great mix of both, something that I think, you know, any reader would find interesting and people that are interested in history. But before jumping into the book, I was wondering if you just tell us a little about yourself and your background.
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Yeah, Caleb, thank you for saying all those nice things. So I am a political theorist by training, so I've sort of spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, big ultimate questions in politics as a teacher and as a scholar. And so my sort of like last two projects have been an attempt to do that work, but in a different way like that you described. So my last book, the Fires Upon Us is about this debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. Some of these leading writers of the civil rights and conservative movements, respectively. And so that kind of gave me the excuse to think about the civil rights and conservative movements together. And so out of that project, I knew as I worked on that I'm like, this is like the tip of an iceberg. I feel like there's a lot more to do here. And so I was interested in writing a book about freedom. I teach a class called what Is Freedom? I thought it's really interesting that these two movements are both foregrounding this idea of freedom and yet mean such radically different things by it and view each other with mutual suspicion and even hostility. So I had this idea to write this big freedom book with these two movements. And I had King and Goldwater and activists and intellectuals, a bunch of people in there. And my excellent editor at Princeton University Press, Rob Tempio, said, there are limits to book bindery technology. There's way too much going on here. You need to come up with a narrow idea. And so this Goldwater King book emerged out of that original freedom proposal, and maybe is sort of the second in a trilogy of thinking about these movements together. But, yeah, so I'm just kind of. I teach political theory by day and do this sort of writing. And now I'm really committed to. I mean, the kind of writing that I'm really enjoying doing is this sort of political theory by way of compelling narratives. And so that's the kind of approach that I've been taking lately. And, yeah, it's a lot more fun for me to write that way and hopefully more engaging for people to read that sort of work.
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One of the things that I noticed when watching both the RNC and the DNC this past election is that if you were to almost create a cloud map of words, the one word that really seems to be in common between both parties is the word freedom. Both parties use freedom. They use it in different ways. Of course, there are other terms that might be more unique to one party. Diversity on one hand, maybe capitalism or economic freedom in the other. And depending what adjective you want to append to freedom, which obviously is, you know, part of. Part of what you're looking at in this book, too. But, you know, when you're teaching freedom to your students, how do you first bring up this idea?
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You know, what.
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What sort of ideas do you find that people have about freedom? And how might you. How might those ideas help us frame this discussion that you end up looking at in this book?
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Yeah, I think that, you know, freedom is. Is, you know, one of those words, certainly in American political culture and many other political cultures, that is central. And yet, as you indicate, essentially contested. Like, different people mean different things by it. And so in my classes, I've taught a wide variety of texts in a class, the what is Freedom? Class. And often the texts themselves will have freedom centrally located in the sort of what the author's writing about. So, for example, you know, John Stuart Mills, On Liberty, sort of a classic text that is dealing with freedom and thinking about, you know, freedom of thought and discussion, and what does it mean to live in a sort of diverse, pluralistic society, you know, and so sometimes I'll. I'll teach texts that are, you know, much more directly on the concept, and sometimes a little bit, you know, it's less, you know, foregrounded. So, like the last time, one of the last times I taught that class, I actually taught J.D. vance's Hillbilly Elegy and sort of like, thinking about what is. What kind of conceptions of freedom do we see going on with this autobiographical work? And so what I try to do is get the students to think about the ways in which freedom is understood by a particular author and the ways in which, how the author what they perceive as the primary threats to freedom in the world, and what do they think has to be done to make people more free. And so I think I tend to take that approach with that class and also with other classes. Like right now, I'm teaching African American political thought. And freedom is among the many concepts that we're looking at, but we're looking actually at a lot of. There's so many wonderful autobiographies in the African American tradition. So we're kind of foregrounding those and sort of asking these questions about what freedom and other concepts might be. And so I really want the students to try to engage those ideas. And one of the things I point out to people, and I think it comes through a little bit in this book, is that I had a really wonderful moment in one of my classes in my previous institution when we were about halfway through the semester, and a student raised her hand and said, this is in the what is freedom? Class. And she said, we're always spending so much time in here thinking about what freedom is as a kind of rational matter, but I think we should spend more time kind of considering what freedom feels like. And I thought it was a really profound moment, which was there, I guess, throughout the class, but just her saying that I think really altered the way we approached a lot of the text going forward. And so I feel like that moment within that class is really, as I thought about this book, I really wanted to try to capture this kind of intellectually, what are King and Goldwater saying? How do we understand what they're saying in the broader political context, all that sort of thing. But I also wanted to kind of get at that feeling. Sense of what might it have felt like to be in a room where King and Goldwater. King or Goldwater was, you know, kind of advancing their. Their philosophy of freedom or their, you know, their kind of, you know, almost theology of freedom and kind of like, what did that feel like? So I think that. And that sort of. I feel like that's a really important insight, you know, both for us to, you know, just to think about and to feel, you know, in our own way, both in terms of historical text, but also as we're watching something like the RNC or dnc, like, trying to capture that sort of affective sense of freedom as well. Right.
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The book begins in the year 1955. These aren't biographies of these men. They're very, you know, they're not narrow snapshots because, of course, they deal in many ways with, you know, the public, very important parts of these. These men's life. Lives. But could you. Could you kind of bring us up to speed? You know, where were they, you know, who were they each in the year 1955 when they kind of. It both respectively burst onto the public scene.
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Yeah. So with this story, you know, the Buckley Baldwin story that I told in the last book was, you know, sort of like just right there, you know, in terms of the structure was sort of like, I kept saying to people, why hasn't anybody written a book about this? There's a book here and eventually wrote the book. But, you know, in that case, you had two, you know, primary subjects that were, you know, 15 years apart in age, and they kind of are just like this parallel lives approach kind of was right there for the taking, as it were. And so with this book, it was a little bit more complicated. Goldwater's about 20 years older. The kind of rhythms of their political lives were different, especially later in the story. But one thing that became clear as I really dug into the archive and got into the research was the kind of major narrative was going to begin in 55, when Goldwater has been elected to the Senate in 1952. So he's just a couple years into his service in the Senate. He's starting to rise at that moment on the national scene mostly as a kind of antagonist of big labor. So Goldwater is this sort of figure who gets into politics kind of by accident. He's a businessman, runs Goldwater department stores and he runs for Phoenix City Council. And he's this dark horse bid for the Senate in 1952, running against the then Senate majority leader in a heavily Democratic state. So I don't think anybody, including Goldwater Water really thought he was going to win, but he won. And he sort of runs on a platform of sort of like a skepticism of the New Deal. He wants to kind of bring a certain kind of conservative politics to Washington that is not just a me too. Republicanism is the way he describes it is I'm not just going to be kind of New Deal light. I'm going to be sort of challenge, quote, unquote, big government and big labor. And so he doesn't really. He gets to Washington, though, he doesn't quite feel comfortable there. He doesn't really have much interest in legislating or building coalitions. He really just likes to talk about these ideas. So they make him the Senate campaign chair during his first term and just send him out on the road. So the first chapter in the book is called Profits with a Ph Rising. So I'm looking at Goldwater as he's going out speaking to civic groups, speaking to young Republican groups, speaking to anywhere where they'll give him a platform just sort of promoting his gospel of freedom. And so right as that's happening, Martin Luther King, 26 years old, mostly a kind of intellectual theologian type. He spent most of the previous few years studying ideas about theology. And he's been in Montgomery, Alabama for less than a year. And this bus boycott really takes hold and begins in earnest in December 1955. A lot of things were happening leading up to it, but this sort of big moment, the Rosa Parks moment that is, you know, we all know about, from, from history class is December 1955. And essentially King is, you know, he hasn't been in Montgomery very long. He has, he's. He's sort of like at a church, you know, in sort of where he has a more kind of professional class, you know, sort of congregation, you know, dominant congregation. And this, this where the bus boycott really begins. Holstree Baptist Church. This is a much more working class Montgomery, working class African American Montgomery. And he's sort of part of this group that's going to become the Montgomery Improvement association. And he's made the head of it. Most historians Say he's made the head of it because he hadn't been in town long enough to make enemies. So he comes there and he's thrust into this position of political leadership. And so it's this really remarkable moment, trying to capture, you know, many people who've written about King have written about this sort of like this moment of, like, this guy getting, you know, thrust in this position. He's only 26 years old. He's not really, you know, necessary. You know, he has a sense of like a kind of social justice kind of Christianity that's central to his theological identity. But he's not quite. This wasn't the plan, right, to become, you know, a leader of a movement. And so, you know, one of the things I tried to get at in the book is, you know, like, trying to give the reader a sense of kind of what that felt like to be King in that moment in December 55. And the ways in which I see what he's doing there is, in many ways, it ends up really crucial to the story I'm telling about freedom. And the King really tries to capture the ways in which he views himself as a sort of voice for this radically democratic movement. And so part of what I try to get at in the book is the ways in which King kind of tries to capture a radically democratic, communitarian, in some ways, philosophy of freedom through that bus boycott. And then that ends up being sort of central to his philosophy of freedom all the way through.
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Right. And in terms of, you know, kind of teasing apart their various ideas of freedom, you know, there are these different. Different forces at play. There's, you know, in Goldwater's mind, there's this big labor that is, you know, impacting or harming the rights of businessmen or the rights of entrepreneurs there. You know, then there's also issues around states rights about to what extent can states create their own laws? You know, especially around. Regarding segregation. You know, to what extent can federal government actually go in and enforce laws or enforce, you know, essentially. Essentially. You know, especially with the case of Little Rock as you talk about in the book, could you. Could you dig into a little bit about their various ideas about what the role of federal government should be when it comes to various. Various issues regarding segregation or regarding labor?
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Yeah, yeah. And this is really, you know, a crucial, crucial part of the story. I mean, you know, Goldwater, he first, you know, begins to sort of dip his toe into politics, you know, when he's, you know, just. He's working in his family business. The Goldwater department stores, where he's starting to write kind of letters to the editor that are skeptical of the expansions of federal power, the New Deal sort of worries, concerns about the federal government getting too strong and too powerful. And that is really central to his identity, really throughout his career and certainly throughout the story that I'm telling in the book. And so part of why Goldwater is his general, you know, kind of attitude is one of a sort of like, you know, frontier individualism. You know, I mean, I. I say in the book, and this is, you know, something that other folks who've written about Goldwater have emphasized is that, you know, he was never especially bookish. You know, he ends up dropping out of college to. To. To help run the family business after his father passed away. And he, you know, he wasn't somebody who was like, you know, devoting a lot of time to, like, thinking through his philosophy of government, but his kind of instincts were very much in keeping with the sense of his understanding of his kind of pioneer ancestors and this kind of rugged individualism and building this life on the frontier is kind of the way that he often would describe his kind of relatively libertarian philosophy. And so for him, this sort of sense of the threat to freedom was this kind of overly active. This overly active federal government that's intervening in the lives of people, and they don't need to have that sort of interference with their lives. So it's a kind of political philosophers think of it as this kind of negative, what we call negative liberty of kind of the sort of major threat to liberty being the interference with one's freedom, the coercion with one's freedom. And especially the major threat in terms of negative liberty is usually framed in terms of what the. The government might do in terms of coercing us. So Goldwater definitely has that as kind of a central part of his philosophy. And so when he gets to Washington, it's not like that runs all the way through. I mean, certainly he comes up with plenty of loopholes where he wants the federal government to be more active in this realm or that, but he does generally have this disposition of a kind of western frontier libertarianism. And so when King is arriving on the scene and starting to engage these questions in a political way, you know, originally, you know, when he sort of. That first year of his kind of political. His sort of political leadership, you know, he's obviously, the Montgomery bus boycott is central to what he's doing, and he is beginning to engage insofar as he can get access to engage you know, writing, you know, sort of open telegrams, you know, to the president, the vice president, the attorney general, you know, Eisenhower, Nixon and so on, trying to get them to take seriously what's happening in the South. I mean, they're not only the bus boycott really gets going in December 55, but the previous year, 1954, of course, we have the Brown v. Board School desegregation decision. We have this massive backlash against that decision in a variety of different ways throughout the country. And so one of the things that's all happening right, in this period, right. So King and his allies are trying to make the case that, you know, this idea of states rights, right, which is central. So part of this kind of. One of the things that was often being said, right, by Southerners and others like Goldwater was that this idea of the states rights, this idea of the federal government having a particular role to play authorized by the Constitution, and that those rights not, you know, those powers not given to the federal government or reserved to the states, that sort of thing philosophically, was central to what Goldwater and a lot of these segregationists were arguing. And King is there to say, well, okay, this idea of states rights, like, I understand it philosophically, I might even find, you know, King would say, I find, like the idea of dividing the power of government, you know, horizontally and vertically. Like, I get that. That sounds like a reasonable enough idea, and it might even be conducive to protecting freedom in a lot of different ways structurally. But he said, you know, this is, you know, we have this issue right before us now, like in this. Whether it's the sort of question of enforc. The Brown v. Board decision, or it's a question of what is the federal government's role when states and localities are violating people's freedom. King is there, along with so many other of his allies, to bring that question to the fore and to say to Eisenhower and to anybody who will listen, it doesn't seem to me that states rights is really protecting the freedom of these individuals here. And so I want to challenge you to come up with an explanation of why it is this concept of states rights should trump human rights, is what King would often say. And so I think in the very early parts of this story, in the mid-50s, the first chapter, covering sort of late 55 through late 56, I guess, is like, this is already. Even though King and Goldwater aren't necessarily on each other's radars yet, in a serious way, we're already beginning to see the ways in which they're going to clash eventually as these questions of civil rights become more and more urgent. And then one of the things that's central to the book is civil rights is at the forefront of the story that I'm telling, for sure, but there's so much more to it. The philosophy of government, the sort of philosophy of freedom that each individual is advancing, brings them into conflict on a variety of different questions beyond civil rights. Right.
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And while they are both emerging on the political scene, the president is Eisenhower, a Republican, but not really a Republican, a very different type of Republican, as you said, maybe a New Deal, light Republican going along with the order that FDR helped to establish. I was wondering if you could talk about Eisenhower role in this and also just the difference between him in Goldwater in this kind of new emergent form of conservative Republicanism.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The political time in which this is all happening is fascinating in a lot of different ways. And Goldwater, he's obviously part of this eisenhower wave in 1952 and has, I think, a decent relationship with Eisenhower for his. When Goldwater's first few years in the Senate. But he's, you know, Goldwater is sort of not, you know, he sees in Eisenhower maybe somebody who's effective in terms of getting electorally, certainly very effective, popular. But, you know, like a lot of conservatives, Goldwater didn't see a lot of there there in terms of ideology or vision. And so Goldwater, you know, I think from the get go, is a little bit skeptical of Eisenhower as a serious, you know, kind of leader of a movement for sure. And over time, he'll become more and more convinced that maybe this is the role for him to play as a kind of as somebody who might be able to move the Republican Party in a conservative direction. So one of the things that Goldwater really early, like in the first few months of his Senate service, he's keeping this journal. And I've been saying to audiences like, you know, like, all of us can look back at journals or diaries, and when those first few days, first few weeks, we're like, really keeping a lot of notes about all these things happening in our lives, and then it kind of trails off. Goldwater was like that. I mean, fortunately for us, he had a pretty robust journal in those early days in the Senate, and then it trails off. But in those early days, one of the things that's fascinating is that he wrote in his journal, he says, I sense a realignment, and it's the money line from this piece. So when it's excerpted it's often given that title. I sense a realignment. And what he says is, I sense a realignment. And the realignment is there's on one side, kind of new. What he calls New Dealers and Fair Dealers of both parties are kind of on one side who are sort of at peace with the growth of the federal government and have a kind of sense that the welfare state that's been growing is here to stay, and it's going to grow even more over the years to respond to various social problems. And then he says the other side is what he sees as a potential coalition of Midwestern and Western conservatives and Southern segregationists. Southern states. Right. And he wouldn't say segregation, but Southern Southerners committed to states rights is the way he would put it in his journal. And he says, I think that is the kind of coalition of the future. So he says that in early. I think it's like March 1953, when he writes that in his journal. And so there's a sense in which he knows there's a kind of, you know, he's kind of, you know, not that this was unique to Goldwater, but he certainly saw it. He had the sort of. That that was something that could happen in the future and that there could be a kind of electoral realignment that would happen as a result. And so one thing that, you know, kind of I track in the book and. And try to really capture, I mean, others have written really great, I think, political histories of the Goldwater movement. And what I try to get at in the book, though, is like looking at tracking the kind of growth of the Goldwater movement on the kind of intellectual side of trying to get a sense of Goldwater. The speeches he's giving out on the road, the speeches he's giving in the Senate, how is he developing this philosophy of freedom? And sort of like, how does that track with what's happening in this kind of political movement that's growing at the same time? And so one of the big moments, one of the early chapters is called Declarations of Independence. And Goldwater goes on the floor of the Senate and gives this speech in critiquing Eisenhower's proposed 1958 budget. And it's a speech that guys want. Eisenhower himself was not pleased with Goldwater for giving this speech, but basically Goldwater in that speech says, like, you know, I've. You know, I've. I've been a supporter of Eisenhower. I supported him in 1956 in his reelection campaign, even though some conservatives were abandoning him. But I'm now going to stake, you know, state my claim and say, I'm not willing to go along with this. You know, you call it dime store New Deal. Like, basically, Eisenhower has not been a conservative leader in a lot of different ways on a lot of these fiscal questions. And he's definitely skeptical of Eisenhower's interventions when Eisenhower eventually, you know, reluctantly makes them on the civil rights questions, including the sort of little. The integration crisis in Little Rock, among other situations that Goldwater had a sort of a negative reaction to. So it's really interesting, I think, that part of the story is, you know, is Goldwater's trying to carve out a space for himself, you know, politically and intellectually, that's really important. I mean, on the other side of the story, you know, King is looking at somebody like Eisenhower and, you know, mostly finding Eisenhower, as you said, is like. Is kind of like relative, is like, relatively receptive to some claims that are being made by the sort of growing civil rights movement. But he's, you know, he's not, you know, he's certainly not fully engaged. So King is, like, encouraged by Gold, by Eisenhower's intervention in Little Rock, for example, but he finds Eisenhower mostly lukewarm on a lot of these questions. He keeps imploring Eisenhower to make a strong kind of moral claim about the urgency of what the civil rights movement, the growing civil rights movement, is advocating. And Eisenhower doesn't seem to have any interest in that. And so eventually, when civil rights legislation is coming through Congress in 1957, Eisenhower is supporting it, but it ends up being very, very watered down through the process. It gets through the Senate, and he eventually signs it, but it's so watered down by the time it reaches Eisenhower's desk, King considers urging him to veto it because he's like, this is almost a meaningless bill. And so other civil rights leaders make the case to King that it's still worth signing, even though it's been watered down so much. It's a step towards something better, hopefully in the future. But, yeah, that's all happening. And so what I try to capture, I try to capture that in the book of how Goldwater is sort of steadily rising with a certain group of conservative activists and intellectuals who are dissatisfied with Eisenhower. And so the stage is sort of getting set for Goldwater to sort of make his move onto the national scene. And that's happening in the late 50s, and it's happening in a serious way, obviously, in the early 1960s and eventually culminates in the Goldwater nomination in 64.
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Right. In 1960 Goldwater publishes the Conscience of a Conservative. And it's funny, as I think think about it, there are very few books written by presidential candidates or soon to be presidential candidates or politicians that I feel like, you know, have broken through or been as widely read like I've read sections of it. Maybe the only other book written by presidential candidate that I've read is Dreams for My Father. And I was wondering if you could talk about the ideas that are outlined in this book. You know, the conceptions of freedom that he outlines and, you know, maybe even just comparing it to some of the other things that, you know, obviously there's.
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A book is going to be a.
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Bit more of a polished, you know, display of one's ideas as opposed to maybe, you know, what might appear in a person's journal. So could you talk about this book, the Conscience of a Conservative?
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Yeah, Caleb. So the Conscience of a Conservative is a funny story. I mean, it's. So the book itself really is sort of the plan for the book is hatched by one of the leaders of the sort of draft Goldwater movement, people who were identifying Goldwater as a potential vehicle for a national campaign to sort of either retake the Republican Party or there was ideas of sort of third parties, all these sorts of things. So this guy, Clarence Mannion, former dean of Notre Dame Law School, is, I think, sort of one of the prime movers in this conscience of a conservative idea. So basically what they wanted to do was get Goldwater to write a short book that would be, we would distill his philosophy to a broad audience. They wanted to get it out before the Republican Convention in 1960. I mean, some of them had sort of designs on somehow getting Goldwater either nominated in 1960, which was highly unlikely given Vice President Nixon being the kind of heir apparent to the Eisenhower sort of legacy or possibly making a run at getting Goldwater the vice presidential nomination. But anyway, they sort of hatch this plan, and it's kind of a. Goldwater doesn't seem especially interested in it. It's sort of like a book that comes together in this kind of stumbling sort of way. They eventually hired this guy, El Brent Bozell, who was associate editor at National Review magazine, the sort of leading conservative journal of opinion at the time, the brother in law of William F. Buckley, Jr. The founder of that magazine. And Bozell had been a speechwriter for first senator Joseph McCarthy, had written some speeches for Goldwater. So essentially, the plan they came up with, Goldwater didn't have the time or the inclination to write a book so essentially, they hire Bozell as a kind of ghostwriter. He writes the book based on Goldwater's speeches. Now, who wrote the speeches originally? Those are mostly written by committee or by this guy. Stephen Shaddag was kind of the Goldwater speechwriter. So it's kind of like a Frankenstein of a book, but it basically pulls together. But I argue in this book, in my book, you know, it does capture what Goldwater thought about these things. So when some people say, well, Goldwater didn't even write that book, I kind of. I don't think that's quite true. I think he didn't maybe write it, but he approved of what was said in it in the form of the speeches. And then eventually he approved of the final manuscript. But, yeah, it's this weird thing where you have this short book, it's 120 pages or something like that. And it is meant to sort of capture Goldwater's views of various issues, so as a little bit about kind of his philosophy of government in the introduction. But then it has these chapters on various subjects, you know, and it starts with, you know, states rights and civil rights are the first couple substantive chapters. And then it's got, you know, a long chapter on the, you know, sort of the. The Soviet Union and. And chapters on foreign policy and labor and taxes and all these sorts of things. And. Yeah, so it's the kind of thing where, you know, somehow it becomes this, you know, huge hit. I mean, some of that had to do with, like, it was. There was a kind of movement already in place to sort of to make this book a hit. But it's, you know, it becomes a kind of book that a lot of young conservatives, you know, college students would get their hands on you wasn't being assigned in their classes, but they'd get their hands on it one. One form or another. And it was, you know, just little. Little thing you could have in your pocket and you could open it up and see what Goldwater thought of issue X, X, Y or Z. And I mean, one of the things that's fascinating about Goldwater is In the early 1960s, he's like the most in demand college speaker. He's on college campuses, he's traveling around the country. He's on the road practically every week of the year. In the early. I think it's 61, 62. The most in demand college speakers are Barry Goldwater number one, Malcolm X number two, and Martin Luther King number three. So it's like this really interesting list. And so, yeah, so it's an interesting text. And it does end up being, I think, really crucial in terms of Goldwater. He had been on the road talking to so many audiences throughout the 50s. He says, as he's beginning to get mentioned as a national candidate, he's like, I really do have the. I've really set the stage for myself by being out on the road as much as I have. And the book really helps him because then, you know, that book gets out there and even, you know, whatever number of copies, 3 million copies or whatever it sells, you have people who are, you know, maybe reading it and then they're telling their friends about it. They're telling, you know, the, you know, at the water cooler or whatever, at the. Or the, you know, the Elks. You know, Elks Lodge or whatever. You know, people are talking about it. And so he kind of becomes. It kind of has a viral effect, I guess the equivalent of a viral effect in those days. And so it's. It's an really important and political book. I mean, it's hard to think of, as you said, like, in other political books like that, that have the same kind of effect.
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B
Right. And, you know, in many ways, it feels like it's. It's a sort of a blueprint or, you know, the early sketchings of what will eventually become the Reagan revolution, too, like Goldwater. That's part of. It's hard for me not to almost, you know, read about Goldwater and learn about Goldwater without feeling in many ways like he was just the, you know, the test. The test run before the Reagan revolution in many way, and honing this language of freedom, this conservative language of freedom that could effectively kind of maneuver around maybe some of the more extremist rhetoric that was being deployed by segregationists. And this is one of the parts of Goldwater that. The way that he navigated the extremists on the John Birch Society, the people attacking Freedom Riders, et cetera. How did he navigate these. These far right people, you know, that he was simultaneously courting and also simultaneously trying to not necessarily be overly associated with.
- [35:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. So that. That, that's really. I think a central part of this story is I. I wanted to try to, you know, kind of get a sense of, you know, by way of the archive, by way of Goldwater's speeches, by way of the way Goldwater is being covered by various media sources of that. Of how did he navigate that really treacherous terrain? And it's one of these things that runs through the book is this kind of like Goldwater is a paradoxical figure. I mean, he has a lot of just on the questions of race for a moment. I mean, he does have, in his record as a businessman and as an Arizonan, like a relatively progressive record on race. He's sort of seems to, in many moments, had pretty good instincts on questions of racial justice, but he's never really kind of out front. He's never doing things in a really loud way. So, for example, in his role in the Air Force, he would often say, I played a role in desegregating the Arizona National Guard. Not something he had a big press conference about, but apparently does that. He's on the Phoenix City Council. He's supportive of desegregating spaces in the Phoenix airport, and then it's mildly supportive of desegregating schools in Phoenix as well. But he gets the Senate. And one of the things that I find really fascinating, just another sort of thing to say in Goldwater's favor on these questions, is he hires an African American woman to be a legislative aide in 1950 when he's elected in 52. She starts work in 1953, and she's only the second African American staffer in the Senate at that time. And so that's interesting, right? Just as a fact about Goldwater, while at the same time, Goldwater is almost immediately cozying up to people like Strom Thurmond, who is going to be the author of the Southern Manifesto, famously, ardently segregationist, segregationist candidate for president in 1948, among, among other things. And so, I mean, I think part of what I wanted to try to get at in the book is how do we make sense of these things together? Like, how do we make sense of Goldwater having this kind of personal record on some of these things and yet also being very closely aligned with people like Thurmond? And I get into some of these stories of Thurman's famous filibuster, the Civil Rights act of 1957. He gives this very long speech, and Goldwater kind of helps him along the way. Even though he votes opposite Thurmond on the bill, in the end, he's like demonstrating his kind of that he's still Thurman's ally in a longer, a longer war. So Goldwater is kind of like, you know, on these particular questions, his major kind of strategy seems to be a strategy of silence. Like, he tries to avoid talking about civil rights, you know, and he's sort of forced at many moments throughout his career. And obviously, as he gets closer to the, you know, to running for president he's actually running for president. He can no longer avoid these questions as much as he did. And he would say, like he says during the campaign, the best thing we could do for civil rights is not talk about it is one of the things that Goldwater Sundays during the 64 campaign. But yeah, so he has all these moments throughout. I mean, one of the major stories of the book is the story of silence. So when Goldwater is traveling throughout the country, when he's in spaces not very far from where a direct action, direct civil rights action is happening, he's not saying much of anything about race and civil rights. So as he's on the road giving all these commencement speeches, as the student sit in protests are happening that spring, he's making the theme of his commencement address is freedom. He's not mentioning anything about these sit in protesters. And if he is mentioning anything about civil rights in the late 50s and early 1960s, he's only saying he usually will include a line or two about race that is a part of his critique of the left. And he says the left is magnifying our differences in order to make political gain. And I'm not willing to do that. So it's like kind of part of this strategy of silence. And so that puts him obviously deeply at odds. And that kind of runs through the early 1960s. And so Goldwater will do this thing that I try to capture in the book where he will be selectively supportive of things that he thinks are, you know, authorized by the Constitution. So he'll, you know, he'll be like, more sympathetic to claims being made by the civil rights movement on questions of voting rights, for example, because he thinks the 15th Amendment authorizes the federal government to be involved in that, in that area. But he's, but he's increasing, you know, he's very skeptical and even hostile to a lot of other, other aspects of civil rights movement, including school desegregation. He's opposed to the federal government being involved in that. He's opposed to the Brown v. Board decision. He makes that clear in conscience of a conservative. It makes that clear throughout the, the, the period after, after the Brown v. Board decision. So, yeah, it's, it's really, I mean, so he's kind of like he's trying to, you know, figure out how to. He sees this kind of the Southern segregationist as potential allies and even political supporters. And he makes arguments like, we need to go hunting where the ducks are, as he, you know, famously or infamously says. He says, but the Republican Party has Basically lost the. The African American vote. And we have an opportunity to gain some of these Southern segregationists who were formerly solidly Democratic, but they're increasingly attracted to conservative candidates like me, Goldwater would say. And so he's trying to figure that out. And then, as you mentioned, the John Birch Society is sort of part of that, but maybe a different, you know, the Birch Society certainly had things to say about questions of race and civil rights, but as a, you know, their primary thing being this sort of, you know, this anti communism and seeing a communist behind every corner. Goldwater was in a tricky spot with them because, you know, as he said that some of the most, my most, you know, prominent supporters in Arizona are members of the Birch Society. So he was very careful to not step on the toes of, like, the rank and file Bircher. But he, you know, he sort of like, hatches a strategy with other conservatives like William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk and others to sort of figure out ways to maybe distance themselves from the leader of the Birch Society, Robert Welch, but not. But try to do so in a way that wouldn't offend the rank and file Bircher. But that proves to be a really tricky thing. It turns out when there's like a cult of personality and you attack the personality, the people in the cult get really upset. But, yeah, but Goldwater definitely is trying to navigate those waters, and that's something that happens, you know, the 64 convention. The two big issues really are civil rights and extremism. And that's obviously a huge part of the story in this book.
- [41:59]
B
The other text that I think is really important in exploring these ideas of freedom that both Goldwater and King are advocating for is King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which is after the I have a Dream speech, probably his most well known text. It's. I, you know, I find it to be one of the most, you know, unbelievably incredible, you know, things ever written. It's. It really is just such an incredible essay. Like it, you know, it feels like it's like in line with, you know, Plato's Apology and other works. And I was wondering if you could just explain a little bit for those who aren't familiar with Letter from Birmingham Jail, you know, what ideas King is exploring and why you. Why it's, you know, such a resonant text, you know, since it was written.
- [42:50]
A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, the letter is, yeah, as you said, is just sort of like this iconic document in American history, in political history, period, I guess. And, yeah, I mean, so King this is a letter that he ends up. It's dated in April 1963. Or. I'm sorry, but maybe I took that back. It's dated in. I think it's dated. Well, it's during the Birmingham, King. I think it's May 1963, maybe. Or maybe it's April. I'll say it both ways.
- [43:21]
B
Sometime in 1963. Yeah. Listeners, you should look it up anyways, if you haven't read it or haven't.
- [43:27]
A
Read in a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure it's April. I want to say April 16, 1963, but. Yeah. So this document is one in which King is in Birmingham, Alabama. So the Birmingham campaign was really the first campaign that I think he felt really like. He had obviously been part of other civil rights campaigns prior to this one, but this is one that there was much more deliberate planning, and he felt like he was sort of part of it from the beginning in the planning and was working with local activists there to try to figure out what his proper role was in supporting a campaign. And they really went into Birmingham for a few reasons, but really as this deeply segregated place. And they went in there in part because they knew that the sort of head of public safety there, this guy Eugene Bull Connor, would react in a way to their civil rights activities that would be very harsh. I mean, Connor had this long history in politics and in law enforcement of devoting himself to all sorts of tactics and supporting white supremacy. And so they knew that Conor was going to react in this really harsh way to what they were doing. And that was part of the idea, was that we're going to engage in nonviolent direct action, and Conor is going to react in a violent way. And so King knew going in that this is an enormously risky campaign, but it was something where they wanted to bring just the brutality of the system of segregation and those supporting it into the light in a very powerful and dramatic way. And so part of the point was the spectacle of it was going to be that they didn't know exactly what Conor was going to do, but they knew that he would do some things that eventually he ends up doing some of those iconic photography that we see that comes out of that campaign, or Conor subjecting protesters to the police dogs and the fire hoses and trying to lock up as many people as he possibly can. And so one of the questions was, would King himself put him, you know, put himself on the front line and get arrested? And there was, you know, different strategic considerations that they had in mind. As they considered this. And they have this, like, kind of debate in the Gaston Motel. King is there with his advisors after the campaign's begun. And, you know, King listens to them go back and forth about the sort of possible, you know, benefits and the dangers of King himself getting arrested. And so King listens to them. Then he goes into his room to reflect and pray and think about what he ought to do. Comes out and decides after a while that he says, I think it's important that I put myself on the front line, and then I get arrested. And he eventually does, and he goes into the jail and begins writing the first draft of the famous letter from Birmingham jail on the margins of a newspaper. And it's really remarkable, the sort of recall that King has. He's quoting St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and, you know, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Buber, all these different people. And he's thinking about. It's really a moment when he's trying to capture how his philosophy that he's developed this philosophy of nonviolent direct action applies to this moment in time. And when I think about the letter, I sort of tend to emphasize three things. One is, like, the letter has really important reflections to offer about how one's point of view has an impact on how one relates to time itself. So King talks about time in this piece. And a lot of these themes are all themes that are absolutely at the core of his dispute with Goldwater, is that King says that part of the purpose of the letter, the primary audience for the letter is really moderates. Moderates who, in one way or another, might be sympathetic to the civil rights movement or apathetic. And King is trying to say that you are. You know, a lot of people are saying. A lot of moderates are saying that we are acting too quickly. We shouldn't be in Birmingham now. We should wait and allow the new administration to kind of do its thing before we protest and so on. But King says this idea of waiting is one that we've heard for a really long time. Indeed, we've heard it for hundreds of years. And so, you know, he says, like, this idea of waiting, one is able to say that, you know, be patient. One is able to say, give them more time. One's ability to say that, King argues, is really depends a lot on one's own experience and one's point of view and where one is situated in the society. So he says it's really easy for a kind of white moderate to say, you should Wait, slow down. You're going too fast. But King says, if I think about the hundreds of years that we've been waiting, I think we've been waiting long enough. And so that's one, I think, really important theme. The second really important theme in the essay is law. King. King offers a kind of philosophy of law in the piece in which he tries to address the question of, like, you know, how is it that you're able to say, you know, he sort of imagines a counterargument or doesn't have to imagine it. He's been presented with it many times over the years of, how is it that you're able to say we ought to obey the law when it comes to the Supreme Court holding in Brown v. Board, saying that, you know, the schools need to be desegregated on the one hand, and on the other hand, you're willing to say that nonviolent direct action, civil disobedience is justified when it comes to various segregation laws. And so King develops in this essay, he draws on this tradition of thinking about law. He really situates himself in a kind of natural law tradition and says, there are. I'm going to make an argument there are some laws that we have an obligation to obey that are just laws and other laws that are unjust and inconsistent with. Like, what uplifts the human personality is the way King puts it, that we are justified in resisting them and accepting the consequences for our resistance. So King makes this kind of argument for resisting the law, and then he concludes. The last piece I'd emphasize is that he concludes the essay with reflections on extremism. So again, this ends up being a big theme for Goldwater. Goldwater kind of famously or infamously embraces a certain kind of extremism a little over a year later in his Republican acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in 1964, King himself embraces a kind of extremism. In the letter from Birmingham Jail, he says, I am an extremist. I'm an extremist for love. And he talks about the ways in which he thinks a certain kind of extremism is morally preferable to a kind of moderation that is at peace with injustice. And so King talks about a kind of extremism of love that is an extremism, a creative, nonviolent extremism that is attempting to bring to light the injustice we see around us and then calling on everyone to take responsibility for rectifying those injustices.
- [50:27]
B
One of the places where we really clearly see the distinction between their various competing Ideas of Freedom is with the Civil Rights act of 1964, something, you know, king political star really rising here, and Goldwater, of course, voting against it. You know, I think it's. We know why King supported it, or if you could get into King's support for it, but why did Goldwater vote against it? And what was the rational argument that he was making to vote against it?
- [50:56]
A
Yeah, and the Civil Rights act of 1964, you know, is. Is like I. I wasn't sure how this book ended, you know, the Buckley Baldwin story. I had this dramatic debate they had, and I kind of had a sense of the climactic moment in that story with this one, I wasn't quite sure. And as over time, as the book was getting longer and longer, I thought I'd probably. I had an original vision of going all the way till 1968, but that I knew that wasn't going to happen at some point. But really, 64, so much happens. I knew that 64 was, you know, as I got into it, I was like, this is going to be where the book, the kind of major narrative of the book ends at the end of 64. But, yeah, sort of right in the middle of 64, you have the vote on the Civil Rights Act. I mean, a lot of, you know, obviously the debate over the Civil Rights act for many, many months before that. But, yeah, for me, this is one of the real climactic moments in the book is that you have the first really meaningful civil rights legislation, like really robust civil rights legislation in many ways since the Reconstruction era. So you have this legislation that originally, John F. Kennedy had sort of introduced the idea back in June 1963. Of course, Kennedy is killed in November 1963, and then the sort of mantle is picked up by Lyndon Johnson and really the sort of central pieces. I mean, it's a long and complicated piece of legislation. But the two bits that are most controversial, especially for figures like Goldwater, are Section 2 and Section 7, Section 2 having to do with public accommodation. So the idea that the federal government will have some role to play in challenging and hopefully stopping discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, businesses open to the public, that is the public accommodations clause is one of the major. One of the reasons that Goldwater's opposition to that is one of the major reasons he votes against it. And then Section seven having to do with employment discrimination. So in both cases, you have the federal government proposing to take on a more robust role in dealing with discrimination in kind of private spaces, quote, unquote, private spaces, or Spaces that are not explicitly political, but are somewhere in between their social spaces or their economic spaces. And so Goldwater ends up saying that if it weren't for those two sections, I could vote for this bill, but I can't vote for this bill because those two sections are, first, Goldwater argues, unconstitutional. And I think also, as I got into the archive and really looked at what Goldwater was saying in his public statements about this legislation, I mean, the constitutional argument is central, but he also. I mean, he makes the argument that it's also unwise and in some sense immoral from his point of view. I mean, he sort of emphasizes that he's against segregation, that he doesn't believe that businesses should exclude people on the basis of race and so on. But he also argues that he says things like, the law can't make us love one another, so the law can't make you and I be friends. He'll say things like that. And he'll say, really, the best way to approach this is not through legislation. It's through moral suasion. It's through convincing people that they shouldn't be racist, is the kind of argument that he makes. So I think it's really important. I think that there's a real easy way to let Goldwater off the hook, or at least a way to let Goldwater off the hook by saying he had a principled constitutional position on this and that's why he voted the way he did. That is part of the story, but I think it's really important to know that's not the whole story. And I try to really emphasize that in the book. And that'll be central to one of the reasons the King will come after Goldwater in such a serious way and call him the most dangerous man in America eventually. And so that ends up being, I mean, one of the moments for me that really captures this in terms of the contrast. I mean, as you said, it's sort of like we can imagine all the reasons why King, as opposed to. Or, sorry, King, is supporting. We can imagine all the reasons why King is supporting the Civil Rights act of 1964. But, yeah, on the day that Goldwater will go before the Senate and announce his opposition, King is in St. Augustine, Florida, this place that's deeply segregated, and he's involved in various direct actions at this motor lodge where they deny African Americans the right to eat in the restaurant or to stay in the motel. And so on that day, the same day Goldwater speaks in the floor of the Senate, you have a direct action at the motel where you have a group of rabbis who come to the door and. And pray in front of the motel. And that sort of distracts the proprietor and the law enforcement from what's happening at the pool where some white guests of the hotel who were undercover civil rights activists invite some African American activists into the pool with them and they have a wait in, sort of a sit in or a wait in the pool. And that sort of leads to this melee at the motel that day, and the law enforcement get involved and the activists get arrested, and the proprietor of the motel pours acid in the pool to try to harm the activists. So all that's happening, you know, the same day Goldwater is giving this speech in which he's making the case that it's an affront to freedom to, to force people like the proprietor of that motel to, you know, to. To force him to allow people in regardless, you know, of their race. And so, I mean, to me, it's like it brings into relief, like, these conceptions of freedom. Like, you know, King is there to say, like, really, like, is it really the case that we can say that African Americans traveling through St. Augustine or living in St. Augustine, Florida, are as free or are free in a meaningful way if they cannot act and sort of enter into places of business, if they cannot conduct themselves in economic life in a meaningful way and social life in a meaningful way, because you have this regime of segregation. And so King is saying, to me, a free society would be one in which we say, no, that's not okay. We actually want people to be able to move freely in economic and social spaces. And so I think that brings this kind of battle between the two of them, in many ways, like I said, into relief. And it gives the reader a sense of like, okay, here's the visions of freedom. It's not a theoretical matter. Right. It's right there before our eyes. And so again, that's why one of the reasons why Goldwater's vote against that bill was sort of exhibit A for King and sort of the reasons why he thought Goldwater was so dangerous. But there was a lot of other reasons as well that I get into in the book.
- [57:38]
B
This leads us to the peak of Goldwater's career. He's the nominee for the Republican Party in that election in the 1964 election. Could you, could you just give a little bit of an overview of this election, some of the stakes. I mean, obviously a lot of the issues at hand are some things that you've. That we've already been Discussing. It's. It's obviously, you know, for those who know Gold, it was a pretty big blowout. Goldwater, God, got crushed. Do you talk about this election a little bit?
- [58:12]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Goldwater, you know, as we discussed before, I mean, Goldwater, the Goldwater movement, you know, sort of like this attempt to bring Goldwater into, you know, the conversation as a potential Republican nominee had been going on for quite some time. Goldwater himself was relatively reluctant to take on that role. I mean, he sort of said, you know, more or less got reached an agreement with the activists who were trying to recruit him that you can do your thing, but I'm not going to actively participate. And he would, depending on his mood, he would say, either I have no interest in being a presidential candidate, or he might just be a little more neutral about it and say, well, you do your thing and I'll just continue to be a senator and we'll see what happens. But, yeah, Goldwater, over time, it becomes more and more clear that if there's going to be a conservative nominee of the Republican Party for president, it's going to be him. And he sort of sees some of the alternatives emerging at the time are kind of a part of the liberal wing of the party, Nelson Rockefeller being kind of the major figure that a lot of the conservatives are really worried will eventually take over the party and turn the party into something that would just really be a kind of, from their point of view, a kind of Democratic Party with another name. And so they really want Goldwater to run. And eventually he kind of begins to warm to the idea in the second half of 1963, in part because he sort of looked forward to running against John F. Kennedy, somebody he served in the Senate with, had a pretty good relationship with personally, even though they didn't always agree politically. And so he kind of liked the idea of running against Kennedy, and they could actually have meaningful debates about the issues, and Goldwater would sort of champion his conservative ideas and Kennedy would champion his, you know, his liberal or progressive ideas. And then, of course, Kennedy's killed in November 63. And then Johnson, Lyndon Johnson was somebody who Goldwater did not like. They were. They didn't like each other. I mean, they were so different in so many different ways. I mean, they were. They. They couldn't be more different, you know, in a lot of different ways. And so Goldwater did not want to run against Johnson. He also knew that the likelihood of the. The country, if the country were to elect somebody other than Johnson in 64 you have three, you'd have Kennedy, Johnson and potentially Goldwater. Three different presidents over a very short span of time. And so Goldwater knew that the political time was what he was sort of running against the ghost of John F. Kennedy in some ways and Lyndon Johnson. But anyway, long story short, Goldwater eventually gives in and the movement to nominate him was so strong that he really couldn't stop them. And he just sort of says, okay, I'll do it, knowing that it's probably not going to work out. But he's worried mostly. I mean, in many ways his sense of what he's doing. As you said earlier, it's hard not to think about Reagan when we think about Goldwater and Goldwater's role in American history. Goldwater, I think, in many ways goes into that campaign thinking about the long game. I mean, he's thinking about one of the reasons he didn't want to run was he worried that him getting. If he thought, if I lose dramatically, I mean, first, if I lose the nomination to Rockefeller or if I get the nomination, I lose dramatically in the general election, am I going to set back conservatism or am I going to advance conservatism? And so I think especially once he feels like he has an obligation to maybe win the nomination so it doesn't go to Rockefeller. That kind of gets his, the fires going a little bit. And then it gets into the campaign, he has a couple moments, I think, where he imagines maybe I can, maybe this can be competitive. But for the most part, I think he's pretty realistic about it. But he wants to try to advance the conservative cause. He wants to try to get the kind of conservatives in a position where they can take over the party in a meaningful way. So that down the road there might be electoral successes. He obviously couldn't quite imagine what would come later, but he had some inkling of it. And Reagan himself ends up a part of the campaign, delivers a speech on Goldwater's behalf that ends up being kind of a hit, a half an hour network TV speech in defending Goldwater's candidacy that in many ways causes Reagan's star to rise politically. So, yeah, so it's a strange, it's a strange campaign. Goldwater gives this speech that I alluded to earlier, the convention acceptance speech, the most famous line, the line, really the only line, the lines that people remember. Goldwater says, extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue. And so that little couplet ends up being the defining moment in the speech, in many ways, it sort of made clear that Goldwater, as one journalist said at the time, go, oh my God, Goldwater is going to run as Goldwater. Like, he's going to actually stay committed to these views that seem out of step with the, you know, the vast majority of the country and that that's the way he's going to run. And it made all the more likely that he was going to get, you know, obliterated electorally in November. And indeed he did by, you know, seems like 61% to 39% overwhelming electoral college victory for Johnson. Goldwater only wins his native Arizona by a very slim margin. And then he wins dramatically in the Deep South. Right. He wins four states in the Deep south and that's it. And so it's a really, as others have argued, he's a really important loser and that he sets the stage for later things and in many ways contributes to a kind of realignment of the parties and sort of what was the solidly Democratic south is going to sort of not the shift doesn't happen overnight, but it ends up. He sort of lays the groundwork for this shift that will happen over time to what we now see as a solidly Republican Deep South.
- [64:15]
B
Yeah, certainly for the contemporary Republican Party. Goldwater's legacy seems in many ways alive and well. His ideas, his even approach, his brand of extremism, I think, is much more in vogue than maybe the moderation of an Eisenhower or Rockefeller, as you point out. There's this kind of, this interesting. Your epilogue, the most Dangerous men in America. You have J. Edgar Hoover called MLK the most dangerous men in America. MLK calls Goldwater the most dangerous man in America. Could you sort of bring us home a little bit in your narrative, tell us where this sort of ends? Obviously, Martin Luther King is, is, you know, is tragically assassinated. You know, what do you, what do you see as. As the sort of the legacy of their competing visions of freedom. And, and also, you know, what, what ends up becoming of Goldwater. His, you know, his life is post, his post presidential run life. And then also, you know, his legacy as well.
- [65:31]
A
Yeah, yeah. So the, the book, the kind of narrative proper wraps up in late 1964. So after Goldwater's defeated in November of 64, King is very excited about that. He's helped build a coalition that defeated Goldwater. He didn't like to endorse candidates or anything like that, but he was very active in that campaign because he viewed Goldwater, as you said, is the most dangerous man in America. And so there's. And then King himself wins the Nobel Peace Prize. And so, like, the end of December 64, it seems like a moment of kind of triumph for King and defeat for Goldwater. But there's, you know, I say in the book that, you know, like King at that moment, you know, he was really depressed. You know, he was feeling like a young J. Edgar Hoover had basically declared war on him, the director of the FBI. King is, you know, I think, sort of happy with the accomplishments of the civil rights movement at that moment, but he also feels like there's so much more work to be done, and he's feeling, you know, personally exhausted and beleaguered and just feels like there's so much more work to do. And so, yeah, so what I try to do at the end is just kind of give a sense of that. I mean, I ended up feeling like the moment that, for me, felt like the right moment to sort of wrap up the narrative is this. King is participating in this strike. He's supporting strikers at this factory called Scripto in Atlanta, in his hometown of Atlanta. And it's kind of made a nice bookend that he starts out in Montgomery with this sort of supporting this group of rebellious women that led the Montgomery bus boycott. And he ends up, I end this story with this group of hundreds of women who are striking in Atlanta. And it's this moment where you have things coming together. King is. The story of civil rights is obviously crucial to what I'm doing in the book, but the story of economic injustice and the interrelated stories of racial and economic injustice are really at the heart of this. And part of King's indictment of Goldwater is his seeming insensitivity from King's point of view to economic injustice. So I kind of tell the story of King participating in this strike and the ways in which so much of this battle between King and Goldwater over the idea of freedom, again, are sort of really captured, I think, so powerfully by the story of these factory workers who are just trying to, you know, they're making $1.25 an hour, and they're trying to get just a little bit more recognition of the dignity of their work. And so, yeah, the book. In the epilogue, the Most Dangerous Men in America. I do try to get a little bit at the kind of legacy question, trying to make sense of this story as a whole. King, in the aftermath of the battle with Goldwater, really, the shift that's taking place with King, and it was not a dramatic shift. It's Often the story is told that King has this dramatic shift kind of late in life with more concentration on certain issues like economic issues and, of course, his opposition to the war in Vietnam. I think there's kind of the Vietnam story definitely becomes more central in the period after I'm covering the book. But the economic thing, I think, really was there from the beginning in King's career. It does take on a greater role. And King sort of moves. Moves north with the campaign in the later 60s in important ways. There's a new book called King of the north that I'll plug that everybody should check out that talks about King in the north and some of the things he does after the period I'm covering in this book. But, yeah, so he's sort of drawing attention to these sort of economic questions and the ways in which he thinks economic empowerment is central to any promise of freedom in this country has to foreground economic empowerment. So he's in the mid-60s, he's pushing this idea of an economic bill of rights. A bill of rights for the disadvantaged, he called it. That would really sort of mobilize the federal government in all sorts of different ways to try to empower people economically. And meanwhile, Goldwater's out of office. He doesn't leave the public scene. He's still active as a speaker and engaged. He's still writing in that sort of period in the mid-60s after he's defeated. And then he ends up running for the senate again in 1968 and is elected again. And he serves for decades after that. And kind of Goldwater's Post, the Post 1964 story is an interesting one. I don't really get into a lot of the details in this book, but Goldwater is this, I think, fascinating character politically. He's remembered in many ways for what happens in the 64 campaign, obviously, but also as a kind of maverick, as this kind of, like, person who would stand up to his party when he thought they were wrong. And there are these moments that he had, like eventually playing some role in helping convince Nixon to resign is a kind of moment that some people identify as a really a shining moment for Goldwater. He later ends up being opposed to some developments in the conservative movement, like the rise of the religious right. Goldwater is quite hostile to figures like Jerry Falwell, which sort of make him, you know, this interesting character to think about in terms of our contemporary politics. So, yeah, I mean, the story of Goldwater and where he fits and, like, you know, how do we situate him and what we're seeing now, we probably need a whole nother episode, you know, to get into that. But it's. I mean, I think there's a lot to say about that, and he does. I think the story cuts in both ways. I don't think it's like a clear. You know, certainly it's not a book that says, you know, like Goldwater, therefore Trump, or anything like that, but there's elements of what Goldwater's campaign, the things he did in the campaign, the things that he allowed to be done in his name in the campaign that I think, certainly we can see some of the sort of seeds planted then manifesting in our politics today. And then there's other ways in which Goldwater. I think I would sort of push back against certain claims about Goldwater. And then I think that, you know, I don't know, it's hard to say how these figures would react to what we're seeing around us today. But I do think there's, you know, there's elements of Goldwater's politics that I think, you know, I think that he would react, you know, quite negatively to some of the things that are happening on the contemporary American right. But I really want. In the book, what I wanted to do was give people, you know, give Goldwater a chance to speak for himself, give, you know, the readers a sense of what he did, when he did it, how, you know, my sense of why he did it. And then, you know, I really think that it's not. I don't want the book to be perceived as like a takedown of very good Goldwater, as much as I want the historical, you know, the story that I'm telling in the book, I hope will be a kind of mirror, you know, that we can look into the mirror and see things about ourselves and things about our own politics that will help us, you know, understand our own responsibility in the present is kind of the way I. The way I conceive of the work I'm trying to do. And so hopefully I'm doing it.
- [73:00]
B
I think you found a good format of kind of taking two figures with dueling points of views and seeing how they both react to the various events of their day, but also help shape them as well. So do you have any idea who your next couple will be?
- [73:19]
A
Yeah, I've been getting this question a lot, and I'm asking for it. And I say this is probably the second in a trilogy, so I don't know exactly what it'll be. I would say the last few months with My wonderful collaborative research students here at Claremont McKenna College, they've been helping me try to figure that out. I mean, I have a couple like two or three even versions of a kind of mini proposal of what I might do. My general kind of sense of volume three is that it probably won't be a two hander, like a sort of two figures. Again, I think that might be. I'm not sure that that would be the right approach for what I have in mind for the third one. So I think that, I mean, what I had in the proposal for volume two, out of which this book emerged, the King Goldwater Emerge, is like, I was interested in activists in both movements. That was certainly part of what I wanted to capture is what people on the ground took themselves to be doing, like how they understood, you know, what they, you know, what, like what freedom was for them and what they were doing as, you know, to try to bring that understanding of freedom into the world. And then also, you know, intellectuals as well and kind of how different intellectuals were perceiving the both, like those who, the. Those who were on their side and those who were opposed to them. So I'm not quite, quite sure yet, but I think, you know, I'm hoping to do. Yeah, I think I'll stick with this story and maybe even this era for one more book. And I'm finishing up another short book about James Baldwin right now. And so I'm going to turn my attention to volume three in this trilogy in earnest probably, you know, maybe even as soon as, like next month or certainly in the new year. So. Yeah. So stay tuned.
- [75:15]
B
Yeah, look forward to having you on again for that, for the, for the next book. So. Yeah. Nick, thank you so much for being a guest on the Princeton University Press Ideas podcast. It was really fun to get the chance to speak with you about this book.
- [75:26]
A
Yeah, thanks, Caleb. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate your time.