Thread by @JesseLehrich

ok people, check this out.

stumbled upon this piece by the legendary Richard Rovere chronicling the Goldwater campaign in 1964... the extent to which it reads like a story about Trump is WILD.
newyorker.com/magazine/1964/…

THREAD…

we can start with Rovere musing that Goldwater rallies were better defined by a mood than politics – a mood of “joyful defiance”...

...and that the rallies essentially served to allow “great numbers of unapologetic white supremacists to hold great carnivals of white supremacy.”

here, Rovere describes being taken aback by hearing “large numbers of Americans boo” a US president, “all of them cued” by the Republican nominee.

Rovere remarks, “the whole enterprise has the air not of a great political campaign but of a great political caper”

also, Goldwater kept saying he knew about *something* going on in the country that others didn’t see, and he’d reveal it in “a week or 10 days.” (he never did).

here’s Rovere marveling that Goldwater – who’d presented himself as a Constitution-loving ‘rule of law’ candidate – wanted to ignore due process & felt the "obsessive concern for the rights of the criminal defendant" was absurd.

this whole passage on Goldwater’s use of coded language...

“‘Women’ means ‘white women’ … ‘Hubert Horatio’ (it somehow amuses Goldwater to drop the ‘Humphrey’) means ‘super-integrationist.’”

– NOTE: Trump always says 52% of women voted for him. it was 52% of white women. 🤔

another passage on Goldwater's coded language....

“In a sense, (in Goldwater’s lexicon) it is worse to be a liberal from the East than to be a Communist”

and, Rovere notes he eventually stopped wearing his press badge after frequent harassment at rallies.

aides would defend Goldwater’s frequent political missteps as proof of his “courage and forthrightness”...

...but Rovere points out that the 'bold truth-teller' always managed to avoid saying anything that would upset his racist base.

here Rovere notes that Goldwater – who railed against LBJ’s anti-poverty programs – always put the word “poor” in quotation marks in prepared text of his speeches. very Trumpian.

and here’s the kicker on the whole piece –– Goldwater insisting that some people are just worse than others, “in your hearts, you know it’s true”...

...followed by WV Republicans applauding wildly as he says “We will not convert the heathen by losing our own souls.”

one last thing – MLK Jr. had avoided endorsing candidates, but decided to speak out in 1964:

“Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid & comfort to the racist. His candidacy & philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand.”