American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas

campaign plane sometimes wearing a white sombrero with a yellow-and-white-striped Mexican blanket slung over his shoulder.
    His enemies, solid LBJ Great Society liberals, many of them formerly JFK aides, feigned horror and shock at some of the cowboy’s antics. How could he have waded into a crowd and snarled, “Get that damn baby away from me!” when some mother lifted the thousandth baby of the day to be kissed? How could he have put a sign on his campaign plane that said BETTER BRINKSMANSHIP THAN CHICKENSHIP ? They dug up what they considered damning actions in his personal life, actions that I loved, like taking a minicamera to a party and trying to catch his friends in compromising positions without their mates; putting a microphone and a loudspeaker into the bathroom of his house and booming, “Hi there, honey!” as women guests did their business; floating for hours at the bottom of his pool, a weight bag across his stomach, a snorkel sticking out of the water because, he said, “I get damn tired of answering the damn phone.” There was also the matter of his behavior as a city councilman in Phoenix. He kept a toy set of windup teeth near him and when someone rambled on too long, Barry would set the teeth clattering (the perfect Christmas gift for future president Bill Clinton).
    I was depressed when Barry Goldwater was decimated in the election, my mood brightened only by the comments made by his vice presidential running mate, the obscure and abysmally undistinguished New York congressman William Miller: “What we have said was apparently little noted by the electorate, and certainly will not be long remembered. But it is for us the living, and not the dead drunk, to here resolve: That this government, of the birds, by the birds, and for the birds, shall not continue on this earth.” Barry’s response to Miller was typically right on point: “No campaign crew in history drank more booze, lost more laundry, or bet more money on card games than his.”
    Yet, ultimately, through the years, I did remember, and so did many others, two things about landslide loser Barry Goldwater . . . even as I got involved in the movement politics of the sixties and seventies. He was right about Vietnam when in his nomination acceptance speech he said, “Yesterday it was Korea; tonight it’s Vietnam. Make no bones of this. Don’t try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President . . . refuses to say . . . whether or not the objective over there is victory. And his secretary of defense continues to misinform and mislead the American people.” (It wasn’t until 1997 that Robert McNamara would finally admit misleading and deceiving us. And he did it in a book—for which he was paid a lot of money.)
    Barry was also right about Walter Jenkins, whose situation presented a relevant and somewhat analogous issue to ponder in the year of Bill Clinton’s impeachment travail. In 1964, White House aide Walter Jenkins was Lyndon Johnson’s closest adviser, his personal assistant. Married and the father of six children, Jenkins was arrested at the YMCA, a block from the White House, for committing a homosexual act—a month before the election. Reporters learned of the arrest and also of a previous arrest for the same act, in which the charge read “Pervert.” Walter Jenkins was a scandalous front-page story in the most fevered days of a presidential election. Against the counsel of his advisers, Barry Goldwater issued orders that Walter Jenkins’s arrest not be used in the campaign. (Johnson, on the other hand, ordered a poll before he issued “a statement of sympathy” for his old friend.)
    As much as Hillary and I loved Barry Goldwater, we loathed Richard Nixon, his successor as the Republican standard-bearer, with an equal fervor. “Richard Nixon,” Barry Goldwater had said, “is