Posted on 07/31/2006 3:16:15 PM PDT by neverdem
En route to getting shellacked by historic proportions in the 1964 presidential race, the Republican challenger, Senator Barry Goldwater, suffered through a smear job every bit as oversize and ugly as Lyndon B. Johnson’s gallbladder scar. Not the infamous “daisy ad” circulated by the Johnson campaign, in which a young girl innocently pulled the petals from a flower until a mushroom cloud filled the frame. While setting a new standard for negative campaigning, that TV commercial was at least rooted in Goldwater’s loose talk about using “low yield” atomic bombs in the escalating Vietnam War.
The truly low blow came in the pages of Fact magazine, which claimed to have asked some 12,000 psychiatrists whether Goldwater was “psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States.” Among the more than 1,800 replies were long-distance diagnoses pronouncing the challenger a “dangerous lunatic” and a “compensated schizophrenic” similar to Hitler and Stalin. The year after the election, Goldwater sued in federal court for defamation of character and won $75,000 in punitive damages.
The ghost of Barry Goldwater hovers over “Conservatives Without Conscience,” the new study of “authoritarian” Republicans by the Watergate-era White House counsel John W. Dean. The book, whose title is a play on the senator’s 1960 polemic, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” was conceived as a collaboration between Goldwater and the Nixon administration’s most famous heretic. Dean shared the senator’s dislike of the “so-called social conservatives” who have risen to prominence within Republican ranks over the past several decades, and the pair planned a book for which they would talk “with people like Chuck Colson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell” and “attempt to understand their strident and intolerant politics.”
The project was cut short by Goldwater’s death in 1998, but Dean remained dedicated to unmasking what he sees as...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The loose shoes story.
I wonder who cares enough to buy it much less read it. Too bad that the NYT Bestseller list is not based on actual purchases.
Because you know the old saying
"Two Dean's don't know the Right"
Moon bat doesn't even begin to describe Dean
Thanks for the info.
Back several years ago before he [Liddy] was taken off the local radio station, John Dean kept a low profile like the coward he is.He would not make public appearances where Liddy could confront him.
Liddy called him a serial perjuer.
he was a Republican. What he said would have never been reported on a democrat, much less have cost his job. He served under Nixon and Ford.
Ford's AG Secty not Carter's.
Very good book review.
Thanks for the link.
True. An opportunistic sociopath with no scruples and no regard for human decency. I would need to see a lot of evidence before I would believe Goldwater ever sought to collaborate with this worm. I think that's a clintonesque lie.
And shoes.
Dean made a fool of himself.
Later that day, he canceled out on Hugh Hewitt.
Coward.
(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)
I might not think Dean was a total idiot if he could name one thing he disagrees with modern liberals about.
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