Hershey with Nuts

Senator Goldwater's letter to Richard Nixon in explanation of the Senator's previous utterances about extremism ranked for a few days as the most fascinating political document of the year.

Informed analysts agreed that the Senator's mind, by a curious quirk of evolution, had reverted to that characteristic of Republicans of the late nineteenth century. Not the eighteenth century, as the ignorant said: that was the age of the Adamses, of Jefferson and Madison, of Franklin and Hamilton. No, the late nineteenth century: the era when political thought was mired in the Serbonian bog of manifest destiny, untrammelled acquisitiveness and the bloody shirt.

But then Goldwater revealed that his mind's true affinity was with the middle ages-the time of logic-chopping commentaries on sacred texts. The letter to Nixon abounded in careful placings in context, the drawing of fine distinctions, the painstaking elucidation of meaning-in short, commentary on the ambiguities of Holy Writ. When this latest effort was added to the mountainous textual exegesis of the infamous two sentences already produced by the Disciples and by the Heretics, it was clear that never in the political history of words had so many owed so much to so few.

At Hershey on Wednesday, however, Goldwater reached new heights. (He realized, surely, that the old routine just wouldn't do: too many voters might have disquieting visions in dark of night of a President Goldwater saying plaintively, as the rubble settled,"Well, what I really meant by that was...") At Hershey the Senator said,"Well, I think it was the Germans that originated this modern concept of peace through strength." The Germans?Peace? The revision of modern history is as complete as the name change of that Viennese paper-hanger, Herr Schickelgruber.

Soon, of course, Goldwater, will say he was misquoted by the New York Times, that Eastern Izvestia. Or perhaps that he was misled by his speech-writer, Karl Hess, an editor of the American Mercury when it began its anti-semitic period. Or...