Another spot linked the corruption of government officials to moral deterioration. Goldwater exclaims, "Americans everywhere are indignant about the moral decay in Washington," while the narrator calls on voters to "put conscience back in government." A third advertisement asked "What has happened to our America? We build libraries and galleries to hold the world's greatest treasury of art—and we permit the world's greatest collection of smut to be freely available anywhere." A fourth featured Goldwater speaking directly into the camera:
Is moral responsibility out of style? Our papers and our newsreels and yes, our own observations, tell us that immorality surrounds us as never before. We as a nation are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and people…. [The] philosophy of something for nothing, [the] cult of individual and governmental irresponsibility, is an insidious cancer that will destroy us unless we recognize it and root it out now. Goldwater made morality the centerpiece of a 30-minute televised address that aired on CBS on October 20, 1964. After citing George Washington's dictum, "'Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,'" Goldwater said, "The moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay," and pledged "every effort to a reconstruction of reverence and moral strength."
The campaign also produced, but did not air, a television program called "Choice." It focused on the "moral issue," and featured disturbing footage of topless bars, wild beatnik parties, drunken college students, and riots by both whites and blacks. Goldwater declined to use the film in the end, but only, it seems, because he feared that scenes of blacks rioting would introduce unseemly racial overtones into the campaign. But he had no inherent objection to addressing the other issues raised in the show.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s History of American Presidential Elections included a scathing contemporaneous account from John Bartlow Martin: "Goldwater's moral strictures soon began to sound preachy; he almost castigated Americans for their wickedness…. Goldwater looked not only like the mad bomber, but the half-crazed moral zealot." Sympathetic observers would characterize his message differently, but what is clear is that Goldwater hardly eschewed moral, social, and cultural themes.
The Goldwater Myth: Why Barry Goldwater was not a "Goldwater conservative."