Barry Goldwater

Since I mentioned him earlier, I thought I'd link to this. This guy has always fascinated me.

A stickler for the Constitution, Mr. Goldwater refused to join the Republicans of the New Right during the 1980s when they began to press for legislation that would limit the authority of the federal courts to curb organized prayer in public schools or to order busing for school integration. He opposed busing and he backed prayer in schools, Mr. Goldwater said, but he thought it a dangerous breach of the separation of powers for Congress to be telling the courts what to do.

Mr. Goldwater's political philosophy also included a strong military posture, a deep mistrust of the Soviet Union and a conviction that increasing the scope of government programs was not the way to solve social problems.

In all, he served 30 years in the Senate, but he was out of office for four years after losing his bid for the presidency, and he was in a political limbo for almost 10 years after that defeat. He reemerged during the Watergate crisis of the early 1970s.

Then, the bluntness and candor that had so often damaged Mr. Goldwater's presidential campaign a decade earlier and his outspoken and harsh criticism of Nixon's failure to deal with the growing Watergate scandal were among the vital ingredients of his political renaissance.

The president, he contended, had shown "a tendency to dibble and dabble and argue on very nebulous grounds like executive privilege and confidentiality when all the American people wanted to know was the truth."