The 50th anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run for the presidency has been surprisingly muted in a year of anniversaries: 50 years also for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the British Invasion; 75 years for the beginning of World War II; 100 years for the beginning of World War I.
Under the slogan, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right,” Goldwater suffered a monumental defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson, who garnered 61.9 percent of the vote, more than any presidential candidate except George Washington. LBJ enjoyed a booming economy from his tax cuts earlier that year—paid for by actually cutting pork in the federal budget, not by running a deficit. The death of President Kennedy a year before left the country in no mood to change presidents again.
And Johnson ran a vicious campaign, painting Goldwater, who believed in a strong defense against communism, as a mad bomber who would plunge the country into war. The culmination was the infamous “Daisy” attack ad LBJ launched like a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb. It showed a little girl in a field picking daisy petals, counting each one. As a man’s voice counts down to zero, she looks up. An atomic bomb explodes. We then hear LBJ’s voice-over: “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either...