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View Full Version : PBS.ORG - John Dean & Barry Goldwater Jr. Discuss conservativism - Ron Paul discussed




slamhead
05-08-2008, 11:50 AM
There was a good interview on the Travis Smiley show. John Dean and Barry Goldwater discuss conservatism and how the GOP has lost its way. Goldwater discusses his support for Ron Paul. I don't do RealAudio so I cannot listen to the podcast they have on their page. I watched it live.

Can someone re-encode this and tube it.

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200805/20080506_johndeanbarrygol.html#

John Dean: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: Nice to have you for the first time.

Barry Goldwater, Jr.: For the first time.

Tavis: John's been back any number of times.

Dean: Yes.

Tavis: How'd the two of you guys hook up on this project?

Goldwater: Well, we first hooked up in high school.

Tavis: In high school, yeah.

Goldwater: We were roommates on the swimming team, we just kept - and we were in Washington, D.C. together when he was helping Richard Nixon leave, and John was involved with my father to write a book, and in the process my father got sick and eventually died, and John, in the process, I think he refers you to my father's papers.

Dean: Yeah, he told me to go check the Arizona Historical Foundation. He said, "John, you'll find stuff I think a lot of people have overlooked." And so when I went back to do the book that became "Conservatives Without Conscience," the play on his classic, I discovered this journal that was really quite striking. It was in his own voice, it was something that his biographers had overlooked it was something his co-authors in doing his autobiographies had overlooked.

So I called Barry and I said, "This stuff is just pure gold. In fact, it's pure Goldwater, is what it really is."

Goldwater: And we decided to put it together.

Tavis: What's it mean to have been high school roommates with a guy who you end up years later writing a book with?

Dean: Well, we've had a lot of fun over a lot of years; it wasn't just high school till the interim. Barry introduced me to my wife, all kinds of things.

Goldwater: Yeah, best man.

Dean: Best man at weddings, back and forth.

Goldwater: Bails you out of jail sometimes, I think. (Laughter)

Dean: That's possible, too. There's a picture in the book that not many people understand where Barry's dad and Barry are looking up at the speaker that nobody can identify, and the caption says, "Captivated by speaker." Well, that happened to be me as the speaker.

Tavis: The book is what? It's a collection of?

Goldwater: It's my father's journal, his diary, his memoirs. And he decided to keep them because his father died at an early age, and he didn't have the benefit of his father. So he decided to write this just in case he wasn't around to guide his children. And in "Pure Goldwater," it states that he wrote this as almost like a hand to a drowning person - to be there to counsel his kids as they grew up.

And he just continued it throughout his military years, his time on the city council and then in the United States Senate, up to about the time he died.

Tavis: John, to your point you raised earlier, the play on words, "The Conscience of a Conservative," the Goldwater classic -

Dean: Right, it was the classic.

Tavis: His classic text, exactly. How far is the Republican Party, how far is the right off of the mark of the Goldwater standard, "The Conscience of a Conservative?"

Dean: Well, I think today that Senator Goldwater would probably be considered a little bit left of center, whereas he was traditionally considered extremist in '64, which he really wasn't. Barry and I and others who knew him knew he's not an extremist by any definition at any time.

But I think he'd have great trouble - for example, this extended campaign that's going on for years now, two years of presidential campaigning. He actually speaks to that in "Pure Goldwater."

Goldwater: And the amount of money that's being spent.

Dean: They're related. Explain his solution.

Goldwater: He talks about the solution is to collapse time.

Tavis: Exactly.

Goldwater: Common sense, yeah.

Tavis: He'd say what, then - these questions are always difficult, I guess, but if anybody knows, the two of you would - he'd say what, not just about the campaign but about John McCain as the candidate?

Dean: Funny you mention that. (Laughter) Barry and I have had some dialogue on that.

Tavis: I figured that might spark a conversation.

Dean: We put a little correspondence between John McCain and the Senator in there. He helped McCain get reelected - win his Senate seat.

Tavis: He was his hand-picked successor, yes.

Dean: He was his hand-picked successor. There's a question in my mind - Barry might have a different impression - as to whether it was John McCain himself or his father, Admiral Jack McCain, that he really wanted to help out, the Senator wanted to help out in getting John McCain into that seat. I think it's probably the latter, the father. He greatly admired Admiral Jack McCain.

And then at one point, the relationship clearly sours and we put some correspondence in there to show that at one point, when John McCain is using Senator Goldwater's good name for his own benefit in fundraising, the senator pulls him up real short, as he was wont to do.

Tavis: Another story in here about him sending a letter to McCain. He gets a form letter back from McCain's Senate office.

Dean: (Laughs) Yes.

Goldwater: Yeah, yeah.

Tavis: What's your take on what he said about John McCain?

Goldwater: Well, I think John is right. It wasn't close, but they had a working relationship. And as far as his philosophy, he is, quote, a conservative, but not as conservative, say, as Ron Paul or as my father. But he's a lot more conservative, say, than what the Democrats are offering. So there was a relationship there, but the Republican Party has drifted, and they've gotten a lot of religion.

My father, in "Pure Goldwater," talks about that he doesn't like the idea that Kennedy is being judged by his religious beliefs. And he was concerned about that and he said, "I believe in God, but I don't want to put him on my bumper sticker."

So he feels that the Republican party has drifted too far, gotten too much religion into the - in religion instead of core belief, which the Republican party has stood for, and conservatism, which is a smaller government, more freedom, more liberty. Let people do and have their freedom to do for themselves what they want to do. And of course a strong national defense were his core values.

Tavis: You've raised a couple of issues here I want to come back and unpack - let you unpack in just a second, but first this Kennedy and Goldwater. I'll come back to that in just a second, because that's talked about in the book. So we'll put a pin in that for a second.

I want to start, though, Mr. Goldwater, with Ron Paul, whose name you mentioned earlier. Earlier in this campaign for the White House, this two-year campaign that John Dean referred to earlier, you were out campaigning for Ron Paul. Tell me why.

Goldwater: I believe in Ron Paul's core values, and he's a purist, and he's very honest. He doesn't change from one venue to another, from one day to another. It's very consistent, and I like that in politicians. I like to know what they think, and Ron Paul makes it very, very clear. He is for limited government, he is for a strong national defense, but he doesn't believe in nation-building.

He's one that feels that we ought to reexamine our foreign policy after the collapse of the Cold War and of Russia, and perhaps not be the defender and the policeman of the world, and I think my father would agree with this. Ron Paul had those basic core values and I admired it and respected it.

Tavis: Is the Republican Party or the candidate of the Republican Party so far away now from your father's notion of what it meant to be a conservative that they can't get back?

Goldwater: I think it's fuzzy. We have hyphenated conservatives running around, instead of just plain conservatives. I think we've kind of lost our way, and it was obvious in 1994 when Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America took over the control of the Congress - the Republican Party took over, and they did everything that they said they wouldn't do.

They became what they campaigned against. The budgets went out of sight, they enacted all these entitlement programs - No Child Left Behind, prescription drugs - and we had a president that wasn't much better, was not providing that conservative leadership.

And in 2006, the American people said, "We've had enough of this. We need some change." And they kicked the Republicans out and put the Democrats back in control. And I might say we might have a problem even in this upcoming election because they lost their way. They lost the core values of the Republican Party and the leadership that provided by my father and by Ronald Reagan.

Tavis: And yet these polls, John Dean, whether you're putting Barack Obama against John McCain, Hillary Clinton against John McCain, this race is still not a foregone conclusion for either side here.

Dean: Not by any stretch of the imagination, and the more and more I look at modern campaigning, the more and more I realize it's not a rational choice, it's an emotional choice, and I think that's what we're seeing right now with splitting the Democrat party - real emotional choices, a historic campaign. The first African American or the first female will be the candidate of that party. This is the best political story I've seen in my lifetime.

Tavis: The emotional part, John Dean, I get. I see it's too emotional, and God knows, as a Black man, our community is way out of control. I'll get in trouble for that one, but I said it. Black America is so emotional about this campaign, for obvious reasons. I'm not mad at them; I get it - for obvious reasons. But what would a rational campaign look like? Where Obama and Clinton are concerned, I'm not sure I understand what a rational choice, a rational process would look like to (unintelligible).

Dean: Well, I think all of our political today, we don't sit back and go through a plus-minus analysis of each candidate, each issue. Yes, we have visceral reactions to general issues and positions. We react in the voting booth overwhelmingly, whether you're Republican or Democrat, emotionally we make decisions as to which campaign we favor.

And this is the way it's - and it happens that McCain, who people know very little about, he's had such good press for so long, an exception for American politicians, that they don't really know who this man is. And they have a very positive emotion towards him.

Hillary I think has high negatives. We're now seeing, unfortunately, Barack Obama get higher negatives. So it's going to be tough this fall. It's going to be a tough race.

Goldwater: And you know another thing, my observation of this is that they've gotten away from talking about the issues of what bothers Americans and what's important. This trash of name-calling and the ministers and Hillary crying in New Hampshire - and I think the news media's partially responsible for this, that they haven't kept the candidates focused on what's important, the issues.

Tavis: You're being kind when you say partially responsible.

Goldwater: Well -

Tavis: You're being awfully kind, but I digress.

Goldwater: But in "Pure Goldwater," there's a discussion of what I think Americans would like to see between John F. Kennedy and Senator Goldwater. They were good friends. Opposite sides of the aisle, but they were good friends, and they talked about running against each other in the 1964 election. One airplane, no makeup artists.

Tavis: Because your father was a pilot.

Goldwater: My father was a pilot. I'm not sure JFK would have liked him flying, (laughter) but they would barnstorm around the country like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They'd get out and beat each other up and get back on the airplane and grab a whiskey and go on to the next. But that's the kind of campaign I think people would really take a liking to.

Tavis: I'm glad you got back to that, because I wanted to come back to that Kennedy-Goldwater idea, so I thank you for sharing that with me. I wonder though, John Dean, whether or not something like that could ever work, or candidates would even be interested in doing something like that.

Dean: Had it happened in the '64 race, had it been a Kennedy-Goldwater contest, it probably would have changed modern campaigning. It didn't happen. In fact, we saw with Lyndon Johnson the start of some of the most serious negative campaigning, with the so-called daisy commercial. Can we get back there? Surely we can.

And I think one of the things - I have a lot of trouble with Supreme Court decisions like Buckley vs. Valeo, that it prevented a lot of control and regulation of the campaign expenditures. We've got to - shorter elections, there's a way we can get down there, and that's the sort of thing we can repair this process where it isn't so totally media-driven that it's out of hand.

Tavis: I'm out of time. Let me ask you right quick, since you raised it, what did you make of Hillary Clinton, speaking of candidates, raising that daisy commercial again in this election?

Dean: Well, you know, she was very close to Senator Goldwater. This was the person who brought her out and first interested her in politics. I found, as we were working on this, some fascinating correspondence between the Clintons and the Goldwaters. They really had a very warm and nice rapport, probably closer than he was with McCain.

Tavis: The book is called "Pure Goldwater," written by John W. Dean and Barry M. Goldwater, Jr., the son, of course, of the icon Barry Goldwater. Honor to have you both on the program. Thanks for the text.

Goldwater: Thank you, Tavis.

Dean: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: My pleasure.

Rhys
05-08-2008, 12:00 PM
sweet. Goldwater's been a great asset to the campaign. I LOVED when he yelled at a fox news bimbo for excluding RP from the NH debate.

acptulsa
05-08-2008, 12:13 PM
This trash of name-calling and the ministers and Hillary crying in New Hampshire - and I think the news media's partially responsible for this, that they haven't kept the candidates focused on what's important, the issues.

Tavis: You're being kind when you say partially responsible.

Goldwater: Well -

Tavis: You're being awfully kind, but I digress.

Say what you want about PBS--and where the News Hour is concerned I'll probably agree with you--but it is the one place where any real journalists can still be found on American television.

Rhys
05-08-2008, 12:17 PM
Say what you want about PBS--and where the News Hour is concerned I'll probably agree with you--but it is the one place where any real journalists can still be found on American television.

don't let Travis Smiley give PBS a good name! lol he's still socialist, just not evil. He is real though, that's why he gets the late night show. Even NPR plays real news at 2am saturday morning.

acptulsa
05-08-2008, 12:31 PM
don't let Travis Smiley give PBS a good name! lol he's still socialist, just not evil. He is real though, that's why he gets the late night show.

Even socialists can be real journalists--just gotta lean over 'til you can see past the slant!


Even NPR plays real news at 2am saturday morning.

Not where I am :( Here we just get the BBC.

Perry
05-08-2008, 12:52 PM
I can't get the java to play the audio. Hopefully someone can rip this.

JosephTheLibertarian
05-08-2008, 12:56 PM
Say what you want about PBS--and where the News Hour is concerned I'll probably agree with you--but it is the one place where any real journalists can still be found on American television.

PBS may be left-leaning but it sure looks like the damn libertarian model of a tv station based on private charity. Well, for the most part.

acptulsa
05-08-2008, 12:58 PM
PBS may be left-leaning but it sure looks like the damn libertarian model of a tv station based on private charity. Well, for the most part.

Yeah, it does. Thing is, where truth is concerned beggars can't be choosers. I'd rather have to unslant the truth before I can use it than do without entirely...

Sad state of affairs when the rest of the media makes this look good, but here we are.

JosephTheLibertarian
05-08-2008, 01:04 PM
Yeah, it does. Thing is, where truth is concerned beggars can't be choosers. I'd rather have to unslant the truth before I can use it than do without entirely...

Sad state of affairs when the rest of the media makes this look good, but here we are.

I would love to see PBS x 10000. Everyone should have the equal opportunity of starting their own broadcasting stations. I mean, I'm not saying everyone will have access to the capital means of doing so, but I believe that state interference in this market in any way is BAD. Maybe you can make a case for the legislature defining airwave property rights, I won't argue with that as long as it's fair and just. I'm not sure how it would all look without the FEC, so I can't say. Probably better.

Rhys
05-08-2008, 01:19 PM
PBS is funded and mandated by congress. It's state run TV. please don't get happy about it. It shouldn't get tax money. if it can live only off donations, fine... show monkey porn for all I care... but they fund socialist ideas with my money!!!!!

anyway... the NPR show... we get BBC too but there's a show called "inside the headlines" or "between the headlines" or something. it's 30 minutes where they actually tell the truth! it's odd. They'll say what the media is reporting, then tell what really happened. I've only heard it twice.

acptulsa
05-08-2008, 01:24 PM
... but they fund socialist ideas with my money!!!!!

Yeah, I know. Fund socialism or let Rupert Murdoch gag Tavis Smiley and Bill Moyer. Hell of a Hobson's choice.


it's 30 minutes where they actually tell the truth! it's odd.

Is that a sad statement or what? Sounds interesting, though. No wonder it's on at 2 a.m...

JosephTheLibertarian
05-08-2008, 01:26 PM
PBS is funded and mandated by congress. It's state run TV. please don't get happy about it. It shouldn't get tax money. if it can live only off donations, fine... show monkey porn for all I care... but they fund socialist ideas with my money!!!!!

anyway... the NPR show... we get BBC too but there's a show called "inside the headlines" or "between the headlines" or something. it's 30 minutes where they actually tell the truth! it's odd. They'll say what the media is reporting, then tell what really happened. I've only heard it twice.

It's mandated by Congress? Well, that's not good.

Rhys
05-08-2008, 01:27 PM
Yeah, I know. Fund socialism or let Rupert Murdoch gag Tavis Smiley and Bill Moyer. Hell of a Hobson's choice.



Is that a sad statement or what? Sounds interesting, though. No wonder it's on at 2 a.m...

yeah... it's funny. I wrote them when I heard it and asked why I had to be up at 2am saturday to hear the truth for only 30 minutes. they of course thanked me for my feedback. lol

I don't see anything wrong with silencing bill moyer or travis smiley if it's done through the market place, and not Russian style! lol they teach people the opposite of what we're trying to teach them.

acptulsa
05-08-2008, 01:33 PM
I don't see anything wrong with silencing bill moyer or travis smiley if it's done through the market place, and not Russian style! lol they teach people the opposite of what we're trying to teach them.

You need to watch Bill Moyer more often--you have him confused with someone else.

Rhys
05-08-2008, 01:54 PM
You need to watch Bill Moyer more often--you have him confused with someone else.

lol I don't NEED to, but I get your point. I do assume he's socialist though, cause he's using tax money to fund his show. I guess that makes Bill Buckley socialist too... that sucks. I used to like him. :p

Fields
05-08-2008, 02:41 PM
bump