Described by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as “the most dangerous man in America” when he ran as the Republican nominee for president in 1964, 60 years later Barry Goldwater is a figure rarely mentioned in American political discourse, except when pundits invoke the “Goldwater Rule” as a warning against psychiatrists or others venturing “armchair diagnoses” of political candidates. The rule emerged in the aftermath of the 1964 campaign, during which a number of accredited psychiatrists publicly speculated about the mental fitness of the Republican Party’s shoot-from-the-hip, hawkish Cold Warrior nominee, who famously advocated the use of tactical nuclear weapons to defoliate Vietnamese forests and concluded his convention speech with the memorable lines, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Goldwater also staked much of his campaign on his senate vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he opposed not as a proponent of segregation but rather as a hardline defender of the freedom of states and American citizens to operate independently of federal intervention. Although Goldwater professed himself a racial moderate, morally opposed on a personal level to discrimination, he stood firmly in the schoolhouse door alongside the South’s most notorious segregationists in defense of states’ rights.
One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal, an incisive new work of narrative and intellectual history from Nicholas Buccola, explores the rise and beliefs of two men who would seem to have little in common besides their emergence as national leaders of two contemporaneous political and social movements, and their close identification with two diametrically opposed ideas of the meaning of freedom. Each man’s ascent also ended in abrupt and dramatic fashion: Goldwater’s in a landslide loss to incumbent president Lyndon Johnson, and King’s with his 1968 assassination. King’s legacy survives, of course, in the national holiday that bears his name, whereas Goldwater’s persists more subtly in the Conservative Movement that improbably survived his humiliating 1964 defeat—which appeared to cement the era’s end-of-ideology liberal consensus—to claim the White House 16 years later with the election of Ronald Reagan and arguably to dominate our politics ever since. If Goldwater’s role in advancing that movement is largely forgotten today, the “forgotten American” he invoked in his stump speeches—a progenitor of Nixon’s Silent Majority and the Trump era’s aggrieved white Christian nationalists—remains front and center, right where Goldwater left him.
Buccola and I discussed the way his book charts the parallel rise of the Civil Rights Movement and the Conservative Movement, how King and Goldwater helped define those movements’ strides toward freedom as they emerged in leadership roles, how each contended with the other as their objectives clashed, how their legacies are manifest in our current political climate, and why they may or may not have been as dangerous as their opponents regarded them at the time.
This interview was conducted over Zoom, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
Your previous book, The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley and the Debate over Race in America, offered an odd pairing because Baldwin and Buckley were polar opposites in many respects, but also a natural one since they famously shared debate stages. One Man’s Freedom is also focused on the clash of two opposing figures, civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. and 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. But unlike Baldwin and Buckley, King and Goldwater never met, let alone shared a debate stage. Can you explain a little bit about how you got from that book to this one, and how you decided to focus on these two figures?
Nicholas Buccola
This one was a rare case where I leapt from one book to the other. When I was working on The Fire Is Upon Us, the debate between Baldwin and Buckley gave me a reason to think about the conservative and civil rights movements together. And so that book really has a “parallel lives” format and builds toward a climactic clash between the two of them. But I set that story against the backdrop of the rise of these movements where those two were so central.
My background is in political theory, and I teach a class called “What Is Freedom?” One of the things that occurred to me is that the civil rights movement and the conservative movement in that era both centered freedom.
So I started thinking, maybe I can write another book that thinks about freedom in these two movements, this era, and try to work out what they mean by the idea, what they have in common, and where they are clashing. So after I finished The Fire Is Upon Us, I wrote a proposal for a freedom book about these two movements with leaders and various activists and intellectuals. Like a lot of our projects when they’re originally conceived, the scope was way too wide. My editor looked at it and he said, “I like this idea, but I think you might have at least two books here.” And so I thought, maybe this will be volume two in a trilogy, and I narrowed it to Goldwater and King as leaders of movements, how they conceived of freedom, and how they were understood as symbols of freedom, or as symbols of hostility to freedom.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
William F. Buckley made his views on segregation and race very clear with his 1957 essay “Why the South Must Prevail.” He may have been put off by the crassness of Bull Connor and George Wallace, but ideologically, he was with them. Goldwater, on the other hand, says that personally, he believes segregation is morally wrong, but that morality isn’t as important as states’ rights, and he sides with Strom Thurmond and opposes the Civil Rights Act. As someone who has really dug into Barry Goldwater on an intellectual history level, how do you think he managed to thread that particular needle as part of a supposedly consistent worldview? And how did it fit into his idea of freedom?
Nicholas Buccola
This is one of the mysteries.
Goldwater was a much more complicated case. Personally, in his upbringing and in his early life, Goldwater seemed to have a lot of the right instincts when it came to segregation. He seemed to be morally opposed to discrimination. He voted in favor of desegregating the airport in Phoenix when he was on the city council. He took steps to desegregate the Air National Guard in Arizona from his position in the Air Force. He hired the second African-American legislative aide to serve in the Senate during his first term in 1953. But right away he starts cozying up with people like Strom Thurmond in the Senate and other deeply committed segregationists. And then of course, Goldwater is most remembered on civil rights questions for voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So the question that you ask is one of the big questions in the book: how do we resolve this apparent paradox? What is the gap between Goldwater’s moral commitments on these issues and the politics that he brings into the world? In this book, the major takeaway for me regarding the gap between Goldwater’s moral commitments and the political realities is that he didn’t really think that deeply about that gap.
From King’s point of view, there’s a sin of omission that runs through Goldwater’s career where he’s unwilling to use the power that he has to take a strong moral stance and try to move the country morally. When the battle finally comes to a head in ’64 as Goldwater’s running for president, King is unrelenting in his criticism of Goldwater, and accuses him of aiding and abetting people who are driven by racist politics.
What do we take away from that in terms of the ways in which racial injustice is perpetuated? Maybe Goldwater gives us a mirror we can look at and ask ourselves, in what ways am I not thinking through the ways in which I am complicit in racial injustice?
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One idea that’s at the heart of this book is Goldwater and King’s very different definitions of freedom. I wonder if it comes down to a more basic thing, which is not so much the meaning of freedom itself, but rather whose freedom is more urgent to them? King is focused on winning freedom for people who have never had basic rights—Black people in particular and poor people in general. Goldwater is concerned with the freedom of his people, who he imagines fairly narrowly as white businessmen like himself.
Nicholas Buccola
The first chapter in the book is called “Prophets Rising.” Goldwater and King are both out there traveling, promoting their ideas. And Goldwater, when he goes to the South, he’s not in rooms where he’s interacting in a meaningful way with African-Americans who are on the wrong side of Jim Crow. So he’s not really confronting in a serious way what it looks like to be on the wrong side of the inequalities that are occurring economically, socially, and politically.
There’s a moment in January 1961 just before John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address when Goldwater goes on the Senate floor and delivers a speech with an innocuous title like “Statement of Republican Principles.” His idea of the “forgotten American” is the centerpiece. And we see that trope of the forgotten American running throughout American history to today.
What I find really fascinating about the speech that Goldwater gives goes precisely to your point: who is he imagining when he’s picturing the forgotten American? He talks about all these different interest groups who are vying for attention and vying for the federal government to do this or that. And then the guy who’s left out is this forgotten American, who’s quiet, who keeps his head down, who goes to work, who prays and does all the things that a respectable American is supposed to do. And those interest groups are clamoring for rights and things that, from Goldwater’s point of view, they might not really deserve. He includes racial groups in his list of people who are crowding out the needs and desires of the forgotten American. So I say in the book that it’s clear that the forgotten American Goldwater is imagining is white.
Then you juxtapose that with King, who is working on the front lines from the Montgomery bus boycott through to the end of the period that I cover in the book [late 1964]. He’s interacting with Americans who are forgotten in a different sense. One of the things that I think King took to be his mission was to bear witness to what was happening in the lives of these people and to speak on behalf of them and to try to call the country to account, to take moral responsibility for the history that had produced the moment in which they found themselves and do something about that. Goldwater is not thinking about these people in a meaningful way.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
Most Americans tend to assume they know more about Martin Luther King than they really do. Every year on his birthday we hear the same soundbites and see the same memes with anodyne quotes. And we also hear politicians promote the idea that King was a conservative at heart who just wanted to see a colorblind America that was not only free of prejudice, but also free of affirmative action and other intrusive things. In your book, King’s vision of freedom has real teeth, and from the outset is more concerned with jobs and economic rights than people might expect. What do you think might surprise readers about your portrayal of King and his notion of freedom?
Nicholas Buccola
King comes through as a kind of radically democratic thinker. I love the early moments in the story of the book when he’s on trial for the conspiracy to organize the Montgomery Bus boycott. And the lawyer who’s cross-examining him asks, “Who formulated the demands being made by the boycotters?” And King says, “Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘formulate.’ The demands were formulated by hundreds if not thousands of people.” The lawyer says, “You’re telling me hundreds if not thousands of people got together in a room and came up with these demands?” King says, “No. What I’m saying is that the demands themselves are rooted in this deep history of the country and that the people in Montgomery are in some sense collectively responsible for the claims that they’re making on their community and beyond.”
As a leader King always tried to emphasize the radically democratic nature of the project. The idea of freedom that I see running through that strand of King is freedom as conscientious collaboration: we need each other for our freedom to be realized, and we need to collaborate together in a conscientious way in order to bring that freedom about.
That’s one big theme for me. The other, as you mentioned, is the radicalism of King’s economic ideas, which come through in the book in a way that sort of surprised me. I found that radicalism was there all the way through. King definitely took Goldwater to task for what he took to be his failures on some civil rights issues, but he also criticized Goldwater’s views on economic issues. From the beginning, King really emphasized the idea that we cannot really be free in a meaningful sense if we are economically disempowered.
That’s an area where there was a clear contrast with Goldwater, who was mostly libertarian on questions of economics and social welfare. This is where King was the most unsparing in his criticism of Goldwater, who had dismissed people on welfare as lazy. King thought this was not only a dramatic oversimplification, but a great injustice to people who were struggling and working as hard as they could to make it in this country.
The last thing I would say is that I wanted to provide an explanation of the lives and ideas and political activities of King and Goldwater and how they were perceived by people who supported them. But I also wanted to capture the crosscurrent of how they were being perceived by the other side. Now we can turn on the news every Martin Luther King Day, and we will see people on the political right claiming, as you said, that King was actually a conservative who would be much closer to their point of view today. In the book I wanted to capture the ways in which that’s just not true. Conservatives and the political right of Goldwater’s time were extraordinarily hostile to King. The people who formed the coalition Goldwater was building for his run for president rightly saw that King was very dangerous to what they held dear with the status quo. King was raising the prospect of meaningful coalitions across racial lines to deal with economic and racial injustice, and that was definitely a threat to people who were central to Goldwater’s coalition.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
In his heyday, Goldwater was cozying up to Strom Thurmond and also the John Birchers, but as you say in the book, there were some lines he wouldn’t cross. Where would Barry Goldwater have fit in Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party in the 1990s, or in Trump’s party today?
Nicholas Buccola
That’s a really complicated question. There’s a case to be made that Goldwater is a crucial part of the story in building the coalition that not only elects Reagan, but in some sense allows Republicans to dominate a lot of our politics now 60 years hence. And there’s something about the compromises, or the choices that Goldwater makes during that campaign, that I think definitely set the stage for a lot of much more.
I think that Goldwater himself would probably be appalled by some of the things that have happened. And we know he was, from some of the things that he said later in life, but I think that there’s an element of responsibility that Goldwater and his campaign have for certain choices that were made at the time. The narrative in my book wraps up in late ’64, but I think as you fast-forward to Goldwater later in his career, with some other issues coming up like [his support for] the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court and gay rights, Goldwater found certain elements rising on the American Right to be beyond the pale, and he said so in no uncertain terms.
Now, as we try to make sense of who’s to blame, or to make sense of where we are now, historians have done so much interesting work on trying to figure this out. There are a couple of great books about the nineties that have come out relatively recently, like John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke and Nicole Hemmers’ Partisans.
This is where Goldwater is such an interesting figure, with his mixture of a kind of libertarianism and a kind of populism. But I think one of the things that other politicians are more comfortable with than Goldwater was really leaning into the worst instincts in human nature for political gain. He’s not without blame or fault here, and there are a lot of things I talk about in the book where you can feel that energy. He’s not going to talk much about race and civil rights during the campaign, and he begins to change his mind in October as the election’s getting near.
King saw how dangerous that was and just how insidious it was, and he provides a lens that’s really powerful through which to think about somebody like Goldwater. As much as King was “praying for Brother Goldwater,” as he said, he knew there was something very dangerous going on.
King wants to confront us with the question, if Goldwater is right about the Civil Rights Act as a matter of constitutional law, then we as a country have some thinking to do about the relationship between the Constitution and our moral obligations, and what do we have to do to adjust our politics to meet the demands of the moment in order for all people to be free. That’s the challenge that King lays down. And he’s not going to fully work out a constitutional theory to justify or think through how we’re going to do that, but it’s his demand that we figure that out.
This is true throughout American history. As Frederick Douglass says, “Each of us as a citizen has an obligation to think through the meaning of freedom, and to think through how freedom is realized in the lives of those around us.”
Each generation has that obligation. King is very much a part of that tradition with Douglass in saying that the office of citizen is an office of constitutional authority. We have obligations to live up to that constitutional authority. Throughout the book, King takes on that role and tries to offer questions and critiques and judgments of Goldwater in political real time when there are real consequences on the ground. And that’s one of the things I hope comes across for readers.
NONFICTION
by Nicholas Buccola
Princeton University Press
Published on October 7, 2025
