What is “extremism,” and how is the term used to attack political opponents? What justifies charges of extremism? Did Barry Goldwater qualify as an extremist? Nelson Rockefeller, Goldwater’s leading opponent during the primary battle for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, believed he did. Rockefeller charged Goldwater with representing the forces of extremism within the Republican Party; the press and the Democratic Party then picked up Rockefeller’s charges, fueling them further. The Democrats used them in backing their candidate, incumbent president Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had stepped into the White House following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

In seeking the Republican nomination, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater put himself forward as the “conscience of a conservative,” the title of his best-selling 1960 book explaining the principles of conservatism. Goldwater embodied a shift in the Republican Party away from the eastern liberal wing of the party, represented by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, toward the libertarian-minded Sunbelt, whose citizens championed limited government and personal freedom. During the general election campaign, Goldwater attacked the expanded welfare state under incumbent president Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the timid containment policy against communism that both Democrats and Republicans had followed since 1947.

Attacks on extremism set the tone for the presidential campaign of 1964. During a bitter and close primary battle for the Republican nomination, Rockefeller told audiences that the party was on the verge of falling to “subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority.”

Feeding charges of extremism was the establishment of the John Birch Society, an anti­Communist organization started in 1958 by a Massachusetts candy manufacturer Robert Welch. The formation of anti-Communist organizations such as the John Birch Society drew wide attacks from many in the early 1960s, who labeled them part of the “ultra-right,” “the Extremist Rift,” and the “Radical Right.” The John Birch Society was equated with neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and white nationalists. Welch and other anti-Communists were outraged by this association, but to little avail.

It did not help the Goldwater cause that many members of the John Birch Society joined grassroots efforts to back Goldwater in the primary and general election campaigns. Nor did it help that Goldwater, breaking with Republican Party leadership, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in June of that year. Goldwater based his opposition on constitutional grounds.

Goldwater attempted to counter these charges of extremism in his acceptance speech for his party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in late June 1964. In a speech that was broadcast nationally, he declared, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater’s words sparked a firestorm. Former Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower requested Goldwater to meet with him; newspaper editorials across the country assailed him as an extremist; and in the general campaign, Democrats continuously hammered at the theme of extremism. The Democratic television campaign ad nicknamed “Daisy,” in which a young girl picking petals from a flower was followed by an image of a nuclear explosion, embodied this theme. This political commercial’s message was clear: if Goldwater were elected president, there might be nuclear war. Unable to counter charges of extremism, Goldwater lost the election to Johnson in one of the greatest landslide victories in modern American politics.