A Ghostwriting Job
And a little look inside the process
The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater
This book was highly influential, in ways that books by American senators don’t tend to be. Barry Goldwater, senator for Arizona, was later a presidential candidate — at least in part because this book was widely read, widely considered (among the right people) a serious and principled man in an age of liberal consensus and degeneration.
For all that, it was not long after the book appeared, and was praised in the ways it was, that its true authorship became more widely known. The Conscience of a Conservative was written, put together and superintended by L. Brent Bozell, Jr. He was a relation of William F. Buckley — an energetic young man who had earlier co-edited a book with Buckley about how Joseph McCarthy was right about the communist conspiracy and all his opponents were wrong. Bozell was a debater — a Yale debater.
This book reads like it was written by a debater: good on argumentation, quite effective in sidestepping particular traps and common assumptions, a little specious and sophistic when needed. Its success might have come from this fact. It’s written like a legal brief, point succeeding point and even if each of these points may be dull, and even if they build to a conclusion strange and far from the consensus, they go down relatively easily. It’s like formal logic; one thing quite naturally follows another. For those who are minded to be convinced or seduced, it is effective.
We may as well play around a little with the question of authorship. Bozell said, and later advocates claim, that all he was doing, really, was giving a little spit and polish to Goldwater’s thoughts, to his principles as expressed in speeches and other matter. Goldwater spoke often about what he believed; he was charismatic, upright, forceful. It’s no problem to take dictation from a source like that, apply a little gloss, put the thoughts in the right order, and go off to the races.
I believe this is largely true. In my own meagre working life I have transmitted and channelled the thoughts of politically engaged people when they did not want to do the writing themselves. With some, it really is a simple business; you know what they think and what they would like to say. You master their voice quickly enough — improving things here, dropping a little idiomatic phrasing in there — and the job is soon done and a good ‘un.
Other clients, however, are uninterested enough in the products theoretically of their own pen that they give almost no direction. A sentence or two suffices for the creation of an essay or a think tank report or a book chapter, in some cases. Those people outsource a good deal to the ghost: not only every word of the finished product, but the very shape, the contours, of all their supposed thinking. We do not know how Bozell and Goldwater worked together.
I take it as most likely that the argumentation and the somewhat flat, Ivy League style were Bozell’s, and the thoughts, the fire, were Goldwater’s. I believe this book is a good and decent summary of Goldwater’s thoughts.
And what did Goldwater believe?
What Goldwater broadcast most of all in this book is fear. Fear of communist capture of the world entire; fear of infiltration of institutions; fear of a rapacious state swallowing all of American life and paving the way surely and certainly to the concentration camps and the collective farms. Fear that the slow encroachment of the state will destroy not only man’s spiritual essence but also his material basis: that the hope of filling empty stomachs will not only leave men poor but bound to moral collapse and perdition.
The moral collapse can be solved by cutting back the state in all senses — not necessarily on moral grounds, but because the functions the state lately annexed are not constitutional. Goldwater believes that the state can have no position, constitutionally speaking, on education or environmental protection or wage rates or prices or health provision, or economic subsidies. (The bravest chapter in this book, one with which few American politicos would publicly agree, is on farm subsidies and why all of them ought to be torn up immediately. Living in subsidy Britain, and bordering the squeaky-wheel-greasing European Union, I must say this chapter alone seemed the most urgent, the most potent, the most refreshing.)
But beyond that, in Goldwater world, is fear. Fear of communists, fear of unions influenced by communists and mobsters.
The remedy to fear is not mitigation, on Goldwater’s planet, but violent, decisive action. In the Cold War circa 1960, the Soviets and the communists appeared to be on the march. The answer to their progress was to withdraw diplomatic recognition from all communist states and their satellites, to speed up the development of ‘clean’ tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use (such things never existed); and to prepare to invade any part of the world which appears ripe for a revolution akin to the one which was crushed in Hungary in 1956.
No wonder that when Goldwater stood for the presidency in 1964, the campaign of Lyndon Johnson was successfully able to claim that his foreign policy would result in a nuclear war which would end all life on earth — Goldwater explicitly says this was something America ought to risk and the only alternative is abject surrender. (No wonder, too, that another Goldwater initiative was defunding the UN.)
In a world where the United States won the last Cold War, Goldwater’s view that the Americans should boldly embrace nuclear risk seems insane and his insistence that the Soviets were clearly winning and the US governed by feckless traitors quite bizarre. Yet it is always worth remembering, as we survey history, that people in the past truly had no idea what was to come next — and in a world where foreign policy authorities like Henry Kissinger said the Soviet empire would be immortal, even thinking the Cold War could be ‘won’ per se marked one out as an eccentric, though that was in fact what accidentally happened.
As a statement of principles, this book is mostly clear in ways that are admirable. And even the moments of shifty furniture-moving and deceitful insisting that the question X is not the really important one, and what we should really be talking about is Y, is decently enough done. As a book of practical politics, it is not useful. But that is not what Goldwater hired his ghostwriter to produce.