I marched with Barry Goldwater!

Many liberal baby boomer like to look back on the 60's with nostalgia. They remember the protest marches and of course they were all at Woodstock. I have a different memory of that period. The Goldwater campaign of 1964. In 1963 as a teenager I read Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater and I was hooked.( Later I moved on to The Road to Serfdom). I wanted this man to be President of the United States. In fact, I read somewhere that Hillary Clinton was a "Goldwater Girl"..... But that is before she went over to the "dark side." Long before the campaign started and before Goldwater got the nomination I used my own money and sent away for 50 black and Orange "Goldwater for President" bumper stickers and put them up everywhere. We worked all across the country, on the local level,to take back the Republican Party from what we now call RINO's.(back then we called them the Eastern Establishment) Oh, how I wanted to go to San Francisco to the Cow Palace and watch Goldwater accept his party's nomination. I loved it when he said extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. That was 41 years ago this summer. The victory celebration in San Francisco during the summer, turned into the gloom of the fall campaign when every political prognosticator predicted a LBJ landslide. I remember going door to door working for Goldwater. I remember getting in trouble at school for stuffing the football programs, our high school Speech Club sold at games, with Goldwater campaign materials. North Bend, Oregon was then in the power grip of the labor unions and the true rebel's were the conservative youth. Most of all, I remember in the gloom of that campaign, A speech on TV, late in the campaign, by an actor by the name of Ronald Reagan. He told us about freedom and how we could lose it, in this the United States, the last best hope on earth for freedom. . "The Speech" as it became know , was to us, like Churchill's speeches to the British people in the dark days of WWII. I had a friend who had "The Speech" on record and during college we would gather at his apartment and listen to it. Even though I loved Goldwater I could see his deficiencies as a candidate. After the election one of my social studies teacher at North Bend High told me the Republican Party was on the road to extinction. I wanted to call him 16 years latter on the day Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as President of the United States.