A Friend and Target of the Bureau's Quest for Gossip
Includes FBI Documents
May 8, 2000
By Todd Venezia
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| AP Photo |
| Sen. Barry Goldwater talks to the media on the day after his defeat in the 1964 presidential race. |
NEW YORK (APBnews.com) -- It was 6:30 a.m. Oct. 17, 1964, and Barry Goldwater -- less than a month away from one of the worst electoral defeats in American history -- held a razor in his hand and listened to two FBI men pelt him with questions.
The senator, a conservative icon who was campaigning on staunch right-wing social and economic ideals, stood patiently as the agents asked about one Walter Jenkins, an aide to President Lyndon Johnson, who just days before had been arrested for allegedly having a homosexual tryst inside a YMCA bathroom.
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The G-men had approached Goldwater as he shaved in his Chicago hotel room, in hopes of getting some dirt on the scandal engulfing Johnson's associate. But the Arizona Republican gave them nothing they could use -- and then complained about being questioned at such a bleary-eyed hour in a letter to their boss, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
An apology from Hoover
The director, a good friend of Goldwater's, was mortified and said he would see to it "that the Agents were reprimanded."
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The senator eventually asked that the unfortunate agents be spared. But the probe of the early morning question-and-answer session continued for several more days and is one of the items detailed inside 1,364 pages of documents from the senator's FBI file, released last week to the general public under the Freedom of Information Act.
The file, posted on the Internet for the first time by APBnews.com, reveals the rigors of the 1964 campaign trail: death threats, scandal, protests and even diverted airplanes.
Also revealed are the many correspondences between Goldwater and the bureau over the decades, showing Goldwater's respect for the FBI and his relationship with Hoover. Goldwater even took to calling the director "Ed."
In one passage, Goldwater praises the way the FBI kept its secret files -- just 10 years before the same sorts of files would allegedly be seized by the senator's opponents for use against him in his failed 1964 campaign.
A closet liberal?
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The FBI kept tabs on Sen. Barry Goldwater throughout his career.
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"I call him the most important loser in American politics," said Goldwater biographer Lee Edwards, who served as the senator's deputy director for public relations during the presidential run. "I thought he was quite a remarkable American and politician."
Goldwater was known as a staunch anti-communist and is regarded as the father of the social and economic conservatism that has guided the Republican Party in the last decades of the 20th century.
But though Goldwater loved small government, he approved of Hoover's big-brother methods.
The earliest entry in the files is dated Feb. 3, 1953. It shows how the bureau didn't immediately trust the newly minted senator from Arizona. The bureau feared Goldwater might be left-leaning, and tied him to "a Progressive Party meeting held in Phoenix," said a note written at the bottom of the bureau's copy of a letter from Hoover to the senator.
"The Progressive Party might influence Senator-elect Goldwater and cause him to support the program and aspirations of the Progressive Party since he was supported by a large percentage of Negro people in the Phoenix area."
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