Things Worth Remembering: Barry Goldwater’s Failure at the RNC

Welcome to Douglas Murray’s column Things Worth Remembering, in which he presents great speeches from famous orators we should commit to heart. To listen to Douglas Murray read from Barry Goldwater’s speech at the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, scroll to the end of this piece.

Last Sunday, the day after he was shot, Donald Trump told the Washington Examiner he’d ripped up the speech he’d been planning to deliver upon accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention. He would focus not on his opponent, Joe Biden, but on uniting the nation. “This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” he said.

On Thursday night, as promised, Trump called for “unity” many times, in the course of his ninety-minute address in Milwaukee. Toward the end, as red, white, blue, and gold balloons were about to be released from the ceiling, he made a final pitch for us to “go forward united as one people, one nation, pledging allegiance to one great, beautiful—I think it’s so beautiful—American flag.”

It was a reasonable thing to do. The Biden campaign promptly responded with a statement arguing that Trump was offering an “even more extreme vision”—a reminder that this is not a nation easy to unite. Indeed, the past weeks have brought to mind another time when the US was bitterly divided, and the difficult speeches that had to be given then.

Thinking of the sixties perhaps inevitably evokes Barry Goldwater’s address at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, on July 16, 1964. It was a speech which he, too, made upon accepting the presidential nomination. At the time, much of the mainstream leadership of his own party utterly hated the Arizona senator.