He told a Times reporter in later years: "That's a helluva good speech. It should be--I stole it from Socrates. I always said, if you're gonna steal a speech, go waaay back."
But Goldwater's candidacy was doomed by what television had shown of the convention--the booing of Rockefeller and Scranton and the hatred many conservatives showed toward politicians on their left.
Goldwater himself said in his memoirs that the convention had cost him "whatever small chance I ever had to be president."
He told The Times decades later that he knew even then that Johnson could not be beaten because "the country was not ready for three presidents in 2 1/2 years." But he said far more important was wresting control of the GOP from the Eastern liberal wing and moving it west.
Goldwater looked back on the 1964 campaign as another turning point in American politics--the advent of telegenic mudslinging. He cited Johnson's devastating political ad, which aired only once, that showed a little girl plucking petals from a daisy and then faded to the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb explosion.
"That blow-'em-up thing . . . it opened the door to real dirty advertising," Goldwater said, "and Madison Avenue has grown fat on people running for president who are looking for dirty ways to approach the subject or approach their opponent."
Goldwater's landslide defeat sent him into retirement, because his Senate term also ended in 1964.
"The years from 1965 through 1968 were four of the most satisfying years I have known as an adult," he wrote later. He returned to his home atop Camelback Mountain in the desert outside Phoenix and to his favorite pursuits--exploring Arizona's open spaces, flying, photography and operating an elaborate ham radio in his home.
He had not rid himself of Potomac fever, however. When Arizona's veteran senator, Democrat Carl Hayden, retired in 1968 at 91, Goldwater ran for his seat and won, returning to the Senate at age 60.
Goldwater's return coincided with Nixon's election to the White House.
Despite his known reservations, Goldwater loyally supported Nixon on most issues.
But that loyalty was badly strained by Nixon's momentous "opening to China" in 1971. And it was stretched beyond the breaking point by Nixon's handling of the Watergate scandal.
Unable to believe the president had lied, Goldwater refused for months to join the growing number of Republicans demanding that Nixon resign. But when evidence finally surfaced that the president had indeed lied, Goldwater had had it.
