1. Barry Morris Goldwater was an American politician and major general in the Air Force Reserve who served as a United States senator from 1953 to 1965 and 1969 to 1987, and was the Republican Party's nominee for president in 1964.
106 Facts About Barry Goldwater
1. 2.
Barry Goldwater challenged his party's moderate to liberal wing on policy issues.
3.
Barry Goldwater supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution but opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, disagreeing with Title II and Title VII.
4.
Barry Goldwater returned to the Senate in 1969 and specialized in defense and foreign policy.
5.
Barry Goldwater successfully urged president Richard Nixon to resign in 1974 when evidence of a cover-up in the Watergate scandal became overwhelming and impeachment was imminent.
6.
Barry Goldwater had a substantial impact on the American libertarian movement.
7.
Barry Goldwater long believed that he was born on January 1,1909, and thus works published during his career list this as his date of birth; however, in his later years, he discovered documentation revealing that he was actually born at 3 am on January 2.
8.
Barry Goldwater's paternal grandfather, Michel Goldwasser, a Polish Jew, was born in 1821 in Konin, then part of Congress Poland.
9.
Barry Goldwater emigrated to London following the Revolutions of 1848.
10.
Barry Goldwater's father was Jewish, but Barry Goldwater was raised in his mother's Episcopal faith.
11.
Barry Goldwater's parents were married in an Episcopal church in Phoenix; for his entire life, Barry Goldwater was an Episcopalian, though on rare occasions he referred to himself as Jewish.
12.
Barry Goldwater graduated from the academy in 1928 and enrolled at the University of Arizona, but dropped out after one year.
13.
Barry Goldwater is the most recent non-college graduate to be the nominee of a major political party in a presidential election.
14.
Barry Goldwater entered the family's business around the time of his father's death, in 1930.
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Barry Goldwater trained as a pilot and was assigned to the Ferry Command, a newly formed unit that flew aircraft and supplies to war zones worldwide.
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Barry Goldwater spent most of the war flying between the US and India, via the Azores and North Africa or South America, Nigeria, and Central Africa.
17.
Barry Goldwater flew "the hump", one of the most dangerous routes for supply planes during WWII.
18.
Barry Goldwater remained in the Army Air Reserve after the war, and in 1946, at the rank of Colonel, Barry Goldwater founded the Arizona Air National Guard.
19.
Barry Goldwater ordered the Arizona Air National Guard desegregated, two years before the rest of the US military.
20.
Barry Goldwater was instrumental in pushing the Pentagon to support the desegregation of the armed services.
21.
Barry Goldwater remained in the Arizona Air National Guard until 1967, retiring as a Command Pilot with the rank of major general.
22.
Barry Goldwater was outspoken against New Deal liberalism, especially its close ties to labor unions.
23.
Barry Goldwater entered Phoenix politics in 1949, when he was elected to the City Council as part of a nonpartisan team of candidates pledged to clean up widespread prostitution and gambling.
24.
Barry Goldwater rebuilt the weak Republican Party, and was instrumental in electing Howard Pyle as Governor in 1950.
25.
Barry Goldwater integrated his family's business upon taking over control in the 1930s.
26.
Barry Goldwater saw to it that the Arizona Air National Guard was racially integrated from its inception in 1946, two years before President Truman ordered the military as a whole be integrated.
27.
Barry Goldwater was an early member and largely unrecognized supporter of the National Urban League's Phoenix chapter, going so far as to cover the group's early operating deficits with his personal funds.
28.
Barry Goldwater won largely by defeating McFarland in his native Maricopa County by 12,600 votes, almost double the overall margin of 6,725 votes.
29.
Barry Goldwater defeated McFarland by a larger margin when he ran again in 1958.
30.
Barry Goldwater's victory was all the more remarkable since it came in a year Democrats gained 13 seats in the Senate.
31.
Barry Goldwater was outspoken about the Eisenhower administration, calling some of the policies of the administration too liberal for a Republican president.
32.
Barry Goldwater accused the Eisenhower administration of violating the Constitution by assuming powers reserved by the states.
33.
Barry Goldwater voted in favor of both the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution, but did not vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1960 because he was absent from the chamber while Senate Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel announced that Barry Goldwater would have voted in favor if present.
34.
Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly supported the bill, with Barry Goldwater being joined by only five other Republican senators in voting against it.
35.
Barry Goldwater alarmed even some of his fellow partisans with his brand of staunch fiscal conservatism and militant anti-communism.
36.
Barry Goldwater was viewed by many moderate and liberal Republicans as being too far on the right wing of the political spectrum to appeal to the mainstream majority necessary to win a national election.
37.
Barry Goldwater received solid backing from most of the few Southern Republicans then in politics.
38.
Barry Goldwater fought and won a multi-candidate race for the Republican Party's presidential nomination.
39.
Barry Goldwater did not mention Johnson by name at all in his convention speech.
40.
Barry Goldwater joked he chose Miller because "he drives Johnson nuts".
41.
In choosing Miller, Barry Goldwater opted for a running mate who was ideologically aligned with his own conservative wing of the Republican party.
42.
Former US senator Prescott Bush, a moderate Republican from Connecticut, was a friend of Barry Goldwater and supported him in the general election campaign.
43.
Fact had mailed questionnaires to 12,356 psychiatrists, receiving responses from 2,417, of whom 1,189 said Barry Goldwater was mentally incapable of holding the office of president.
44.
The campaign advertisement ended with a plea to vote for Johnson, implying that Barry Goldwater would provoke a nuclear war if elected.
45.
Barry Goldwater did not have ties to the Ku Klux Klan, but he was publicly endorsed by members of the organization.
46.
Barry Goldwater had once called the Eisenhower administration "a dime-store New Deal", and the former president never fully forgave him.
47.
The Barry Goldwater campaign spotlighted Ronald Reagan, who appeared in a campaign ad.
48.
Barry Goldwater only won his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South.
49.
In contrast, Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly supported the bill, with Barry Goldwater being joined by only 5 other Republican senators in voting against it.
50.
Barry Goldwater remained popular in Arizona, and in the 1968 Senate election he was elected to the seat of retiring Senator Carl Hayden.
51.
Barry Goldwater purportedly did not like Richard Nixon on either a political or personal level, later calling the California Republican "the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life".
52.
At the height of the Watergate scandal, Barry Goldwater met with Nixon at the White House and urged him to resign.
53.
At the time, Nixon's impeachment by the House of Representatives was imminent and Barry Goldwater warned him that fewer than 10 Republican senators would vote against conviction.
54.
At the 1976 Republican National Convention, Barry Goldwater helped block Nelson Rockefeller's renomination as vice president.
55.
When Reagan challenged Gerald Ford for the presidential nomination in 1976, Barry Goldwater endorsed the incumbent Ford, looking for consensus rather than conservative idealism.
56.
On June 9,1969, Goldwater was absent during President Nixon's nomination of Warren E Burger as Chief Justice of the United States while Senate Minority Whip Hugh Scott announced that Goldwater would have voted in favor if present.
57.
Barry Goldwater voted in favor of Nixon's failed Supreme Court nomination of Clement Haynsworth on November 21,1969, and a few months later, Barry Goldwater voted in favor of Nixon's failed Supreme Court nomination of Harrold Carswell on April 8,1970.
58.
On December 6,1971, Goldwater voted in favor of Nixon's nomination of Lewis F Powell Jr.
59.
On December 17,1975, Barry Goldwater voted in favor of President Gerald Ford's nomination of John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.
60.
Barry Goldwater was viewed by some as out of touch and vulnerable for several reasons, chiefly because he had planned to retire in 1981 and he had not visited many areas of Arizona outside of Phoenix and Tucson.
61.
The state's population had greatly increased, and a large portion of the electorate had not lived in the state at the time Barry Goldwater was previously elected, meaning unlike most incumbents, many voters were less familiar with Barry Goldwater's actual beliefs.
62.
At around daybreak, Barry Goldwater learned that he had been reelected thanks to absentee ballots, which were among the last to be counted.
63.
Barry Goldwater was now in the most powerful position he had ever been in the Senate.
64.
In October 1983, Barry Goldwater voted against the legislation establishing Martin Luther King Jr.
65.
On September 21,1981, Barry Goldwater voted in favor of Reagan's Supreme Court nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor.
66.
Barry Goldwater was absent during the nominations of William Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the United States and Antonin Scalia as Associate Justice on September 17,1986.
67.
Barry Goldwater subsequently voted for a Congressional resolution condemning the mining.
68.
Barry Goldwater introduced the 1984 Cable Franchise Policy and Communications Act, which allowed local governments to require the transmission of public, educational, and government access channels, barred cable operators from exercising editorial control over the content of programs carried on PEG channels and absolved them from liability for their content.
69.
On May 12,1986, Barry Goldwater was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
70.
Barry Goldwater said later that the close result in 1980 convinced him not to run again.
71.
Barry Goldwater retired in 1987, serving as Chair of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees in his final term.
72.
Barry Goldwater became most associated with anti-union work and anti-communism; he was a supporter of the conservative coalition in Congress.
73.
Barry Goldwater voted against the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, who had been making unfounded claims about communists infiltrating the US State Department during the Red Scare, but never actually accused any individual of being a communist or Soviet agent.
74.
Barry Goldwater emphasized his strong opposition to the worldwide spread of communism in his 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative.
75.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that emphasized states' rights.
76.
Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign was a magnet for conservatives since he opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs.
77.
Barry Goldwater voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution, but did not vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1960 because he was absent from the chamber, with Senate Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel announcing that Barry Goldwater would have voted in favor if present.
78.
All this appealed to white Southern Democrats, and Barry Goldwater was the first Republican to win the electoral votes of all of the Deep South states since Reconstruction.
79.
Barry Goldwater was strongly critical of Johnson's War on Poverty policies and argued that it might be the "attitude or the actions" of the poor that are responsible for their hardship.
80.
Barry Goldwater fought in 1971 to stop US funding of the United Nations after the People's Republic of China was admitted to the organization.
81.
Barry Goldwater was a strong supporter of environmental protection, saying n 1965:.
82.
Barry Goldwater viewed abortion as a matter of personal choice and as such supported abortion rights.
83.
In 1934, Barry Goldwater married Margaret "Peggy" Johnson, daughter of a prominent industrialist from Muncie, Indiana.
84.
Barry Goldwater became a widower in 1985 and, in 1992, he married Susan Wechsler, a nurse 32 years his junior.
85.
Barry Goldwater's grandson, Ty Ross, is an interior designer and former Zoli model.
86.
Ross, who is openly gay and HIV positive, has been credited as inspiring the elder Barry Goldwater "to become an octogenarian proponent of gay civil rights".
87.
Barry Goldwater ran track and cross country in high school, where he specialized in the 880 yard run.
88.
Barry Goldwater joined them in Green River, Utah, and rowed his own boat down to Lake Mead.
89.
In 1970, the Arizona Historical Foundation published the daily journal Barry Goldwater had maintained on the Grand Canyon journey, including his photographs, in a 209-page volume titled Delightful Journey.
90.
Barry Goldwater was a lifetime member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and Sigma Chi fraternity.
91.
Barry Goldwater belonged to both the York Rite and Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and was awarded the 33rd degree in the Scottish Rite.
92.
Barry Goldwater was an avid amateur radio operator from the early 1920s, with the call signs 6BPI, K3UIG and K7UGA.
93.
Barry Goldwater was a spokesman for amateur radio and its enthusiasts.
94.
Barry Goldwater enjoyed assembling Heathkits, completing more than 100 and often visiting their maker in Benton Harbor, Michigan, to buy more, before the company exited the kit business in 1992.
95.
In 1916, Barry Goldwater visited the Hopi reservation with Phoenix architect John Rinker Kibby and obtained his first kachina doll.
96.
Barry Goldwater was an amateur photographer and, in his estate, left some 15,000 of his images to three Arizona institutions.
97.
Barry Goldwater became interested in the hobby after receiving a camera as a gift from his wife on their first Christmas.
98.
Barry Goldwater was a member of the Royal Photographic Society from 1941, becoming a Life Member in 1948.
99.
On one occasion, Barry Goldwater brought his camera and photographed President Kennedy.
100.
Son Michael Prescott Barry Goldwater formed the Barry Goldwater Family Foundation with the goal of making his father's photography available via the internet.
101.
Barry Goldwater did so again in a 1994 Larry King Live interview, saying:.
102.
Barry Goldwater died on May 29,1998, at the age of 89, at his long-time home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, of complications from the stroke.
103.
Barry Goldwater's funeral was officiated by both a Christian minister and a rabbi.
104.
Barry Goldwater's ashes were buried at Episcopal Christ Church of the Ascension in Paradise Valley.
105.
On February 11,2015, a statue of Goldwater by Deborah Copenhaver Fellows was unveiled by US House and Senate leaders at a dedication ceremony in National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol building in Washington, DC Barry Goldwater Peak is the highest peak in the White Tank Mountains.
106.
Barry Goldwater was the first Congressman to serve while having a father in the Senate.