Ozward & Onward

Like any other Sunday ham, Nominee Goldwater sat before the radio rig in his Phoenix home, chatting amiably with people across the nation. Finally he signed off reluctantly, explaining that he had to "go back to the Land of Oz--Washington, D.C."

His first post-convention victory breather was over, and indeed there was much campaign wizardry to be brewed before November. Oz-bound early last week, Barry's plane stopped at Chicago, and in a press conference Goldwater defended his controversial quote: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

It did not, he said, mean he condoned extremist groups that worked toward "the overthrow of the Government" and, in fact, "did not apply to political philosophy at all." Insisted Goldwater: "It's the plainest English I ever used. I just think some people can't read the English language, and I feel sorry for them when they can't see the fences around that sentence."

Blaming Bobby. When someone asked about the John Birch Society, Barry retorted, "Cite me one example of extremism by the Birch Society." Barry was reminded that the society had adopted the thesis of its founder-president, Robert Welch, who wrote in his book, The Politician, that Dwight D. Eisenhower was either a "mere stooge" or was "consciously serving the Communist conspiracy."

Barry fired right back. "I would call that ignorant," he said, "but it certainly was within their constitutional rights to do it." Well, not really. The Constitution guarantees no one the right to libel another individual--and if Eisenhower had chosen to, he could have stuck Candymaker Welch with a libel suit that would have melted him down to peanuts.

As for the summer's outbreak of civil rights street fights, Barry put the blame on Bobby Kennedy. "We would not be having the trouble we are having today in the cities if we had an Attorney General who was not always trying to be moderate and would go on and apply the law," he said. Asked if he didn't think that civil rights leaders were right in their militant--and nonmoderate--pursuit of justice, Goldwater said: "No, because you see we have a law on the books, and if it were adequately enforced, a solution to the civil rights problem would be forthcoming."

Once in Washington, he found 500 excited fans waiting at the rainswept airport. But as Barry began to speak, eight leather-lunged clods from George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party set up a howl. Goldwater's fans swarmed around the agitators from Rockwell's zoo and a fist fight broke out. Goldwater cried: "Let them go! It's really pitiful what young people can do in this country if they have nothing else to do--but it's their constitutional right."

Welcome Assaults. The next day Barry drew another assault that might yet help him. In Warsaw to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Communism in Poland, Nikita Khrushchev said that Barry was trying "to enter the White House under the slogans of anti-Communism and belligerent threats."

Goldwater turned up on Capitol Hill for only one session during the week and surprised no one by voting against the Johnson Administration's poverty bill. He was already on record in a scathing Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee minority report, drafted in tandem with Texas Republican John Tower that labeled the poverty bill "an attempt to reap political rewards," and he accused Johnson of trying to sell "almost exact replicas of programs that were tried by the New Deal during the Depression."

Barry spent most of his week at his Washington apartment, where he began to tinker with the machinery that would propel his $15 million campaign for the presidency. Among other things, he decided to kick off the campaign with a mid-August speech in his "lucky town" --Prescott, Ariz., where he launched both of his successful Senate campaigns.

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