Cape Town Lens: Barry Morris Goldwater, 1909-1998

A Cape Town Rhodes Memorial tagged image from photographer – gwilmore as published on Flickr.

Barry Morris Goldwater, 1909-1998

Image by gwilmore

This is a statue of Barry Goldwater, which stands on the grounds of the Barry Goldwater Memorial in Paradise Valley, Arizona.

Mr. Goldwater, a Republican, represented Arizona in the United States Senate from 1952 to 1987, except for one interval between about 1965 and 1969. Blunt, outspoken, and fiercely conservative, he was the Republican candidate for President in 1964, when he was buried in the Johnson landslide and carried only six states, Arizona and five others in the deep South. His campaign slogan that year was "In your heart, you know he’s right," to which the Democrats responded with (a) "Yes — extreme right;" and (b) "If you think, you’ll know he’s wrong."

Notwithstanding the frequent eyeball-rolling over his outspoken views, Goldwater was respected on both sides of the aisle for his integrity and loyalty to his country, which transcended purely political considerations. On August 7, 1974, as the Watergate scandal climaxed, he was part of the three-man Congressional delegation sent to the White House to inform President Nixon that his support on the Hill had vanished in the wake of the disclosure of the so-called "smoking gun" tape. The other members of the delegation, all Republicans, were Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, and Congressman John Rhodes, a fellow Arizonan.

Barry Goldwater never graduated from college, and I am not sure if he even attended at all. Yet he was highly accomplished in several fields, among the most noteworthy of which are aviation and photography. (Note the camera in his right hand on the statue.) He served in World War II and later became a general in the U. S. Air Force Reserve; and during the Korean War he shuttled between Phoenix and the Pacific coast in his private aircraft, to bring Arizona servicemen on leave home to visit their families. With respect to photography, my favorite Goldwater anecdote is of the time he took a picture of President John F. Kennedy and presented it to the Chief Executive to be autographed. In his nearly illegible scrawl, Kennedy wrote something like this: "To Barry Goldwater, to whom I wish the best of success in the field for which his talent and aptitude have best qualified him — photography."

Notwithstanding their political differences, Kennedy and Goldwater were good friends, and genuinely respected and admired each other. I read somewhere that in anticipation of the 1964 campaign, when Goldwater was expected to be the GOP nominee, the two men discussed the possibility of campaigning together in a series of joint appearances reminiscent of the Lincoln-Douglas Senate campaign of 1858. Kennedy’s assassination made that impossible, of course, but I have often wondered if this is another of the what-ifs left over as part of the Kennedy legacy, and whether this might have forever changed the nature of political discourse in America. In view of the breakdown in recent years of civility within Congress itself, and between Congress and the Executive Branch, this possibility is certainly intriguing.

I could probably have composed this picture in a more interesting way, but I liked the greenery in the background; and besides, for this one I was more interested in presenting a mini-history lesson to my fellow Flickrites. The memorial sits on about an acre of land, with Camelback Mountain just to the south — that is, to the right of the statue — and it is adorned with various species of cactus, yucca, and other desert plants native to the American Southwest which Senator Goldwater loved so much.