Making the Rounds

Arizona's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater seemed to be everywhere at once last week. He showed up on Jack Paar's late-night talkathon to denounce the tractor trade with Fidel Castro. He gave the commencement address at New York's Long Island University, at the same time picking up his fourth honorary doctorate in ten days (the others were from Arizona State University, Hamilton College, Brigham Young University). He debated on television with New York's liberal Republican Senator Jacob Javits, was a great hit at a glittery Washington debut party for the daughter of former State Department Protocol Chief Wiley Buchanan. And he gave a typical two-fisted, newsmaking speech to the editors of United Press International.

As chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, Arizona's Goldwater travels the country with his eye clearly fixed on winning the 1962 elections. But as a forceful spokesman for U.S. conservatism, he also makes his round in hope of winning converts to his doctrine. Before college audiences, he speaks of the national need for an unabashed patriotism, for courage in crises, for a return to the constitutional principles that made the U.S. great. "Freedom today--as always--is dependent upon Government confinement," he told his audience at Long Island University, "for freedom can only be drained away through the concentration of authority."

To the U.P.I. editors, Goldwater made a slashing, campaign-style attack on President Kennedy's "response to blackmail demands" in the Cuban tractor deal. Goldwater denounced U.S. Information Agency Director Edward R. Murrow (who has defended the deal) as a "Government-paid huckster," declared that "if official policy is so shaky that the USIA has to be utilized to sell it to our own people, then that policy should be abandoned in favor of one that the American people can support." Labeling John Kennedy's cold war policy as "almost calculated confusion," Goldwater called for the President to lay down a clear cold war objective that the Administration really intends to carry out. So far, said Goldwater, Kennedy's "government by crisis" has been "moving from one presidential message to another, switching its emphasis from one imaginary emergency to another with such rapidity that not even the Congress can make head or tail of the true needs of this nation."

It was on the Paar show that Goldwater was at his most forthright. He opposed the tractor deal on both political and practical grounds. Said he: "Allowing a group of citizens, no matter how well-intentioned they may be, to conduct our foreign affairs once could lead to a repetition of it at any time a foreign Communist leader saw fit to take prisoners and then offered to release them, say for 500 electric shavers or a solid-gold Cadillac or 200 tractors."

Goldwater added that the U.S. should think about ways of freeing U.S. citizens jailed in Red China. Paar worriedly asked: "What could we have done outside of atomic war? It would have been war, wouldn't it?" Said Goldwater quietly: "Well, what if it would? Can American people live in the kind of peace we would have if Communism were dominant in this world? Life wouldn't be worth living." The audience burst into applause.

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