convenience. on your desktop, laptop or mobile device. here's how. go to our home page, c-span.org, and click on the video library search bar. here you can type in the name of a speaker, the sponsor of a bill, or even the event topic. review the list of search results and click on the program you'd like to watch or refine your search with our many search tools. if you're looking for our most current programs and you don't want to search the video library, our home page has many current programs ready for your immediate viewing such as today's "washington journal" or the events we covered that day. c-span.org is a public service of your cable or satellite provider, so if you're a c-span watcher, check it out at c-span.org. coming up next, environmental historian brian allen drake explores barry goldwater's commitment to environmental preservation and looks at how this commitment evolved over his lifetime. the kansas city public library hosted this hour long event.

>> well, good evening and welcome to the kansas city public library. i am henry fortunato, director of public affairs. i want to thank you all for participating in my ongoing stealth campaign to provide speaking opportunities for all of my buds from graduate school. my -- all the guys i went to graduate school with at the university of kansas. tonight's entrant in that category is brian allen drake. an up and coming environmental historian who studied under the incomparable donald warster and now he's a lecturer in history at the university of georgia. but before i tell you any more about brian, let me introduce the topic of his talk by adapting an opening line that another one of our fellow

graduate students used every fall on the first day of the undergraduate history classes that he taught. 100 years from now, he would say, all of you will be dead. how's that for a wake-up at 8:00 in the morning for sleepy undergraduates? 100 years from now, all of you will be dead, and unless you accomplish something utterly extraordinary or perpetuate some horrible evil, the odds are no one then alive will remember you. he would then go on to say that even if you do get into that rarefied zone where your name lives on, the odds are it will be as a caricature, which is to say you'll be remembered all right, but possibly for the wrong thing. which brings us to barry goldwater. 50 years ago today, today, right now, the then senator from arizona known as

mr. conservative accepted the republican nomination for president at the cow pa las in san francisco. only two things about that moment in time are generally remembered. first, a phrase from goldwater's speech, which in its mangled form goes something like this. extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. and second, the fact that goldwater went on to suffer an electoral defeat of landslide proportions at the hands of lyndon johnson. but what if we are remembering barry goldwater for the wrong things? what if there is a different barry goldwater, someone who wrestled with apparent contradictions between his intellectual beliefs in limited government and his personal attachment to the great outdoors? that in a nutshell, i think, is the question that brian drake is going to explore in tonight's

presentation. an original lecture developed just for us titled "barry goldwater, the conscience of a conservationist." the talk draws on his first and recently published book, loving nature, fearing the state, and antigovernment politics before reagan. it's published by the university of washington press. it's for sale after this talk, and he'll be signing copies. one last comment before i depart. a month from now, it will be, hard to believe, 15 years since i went back to school to begin work on what i called my middle-aged masters degree. brian drake was in both of my first two classes that semester. in the early sessions, i was struck by the cogency of his arguments and his unerring ability to decipher the point of the assigned readings, which, well, many of which were rather opaque and somewhat slow going.

then when we started to write papers which were peer reviewed by other class members, i was struck again by brian's phenomenal talent for writing. his ability to produce scholarly work that was totally accessible. brian had cracked the code, the first one in both classes to do so. some people never quite figured it out, but i digress. in his remarks tonight, i have no doubt that brian will demonstrate that talent for all of you. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome brian drake. >> thank you. that was wonderful. thank you, thank you very much. let me begin by saying some nice things about henry. who is one of the most -- one of the smartest, wittiest, most erudite people i know, and he is a treasure, and you're lucky to have him here. thank you very much for those comments.

i also wanted to say as well, it's a thrill to be here in kansas city. i love this town. this is a great town. i love this region. big fan of the great plains, and i have been reminded of that over the last 48 hours or so. just what a great place it is. so thank you for that. i think it's time to cut to the chase, and i wonder if we might begin by hearing those famous words of barry goldwater from 50 years ago today at the cow palace. if we could queue that video to begin -- or not. >> i would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no advice. and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

>> there they are, in somewhat edited form. before i talk about that, let me tell you a little about myself. as henry mentioned, i'm an environmental historian. what that means is i study the influence of nature on human history, and the reciprocal human influence on nature. what do people think about nature, how do they treat nature? how does nature respond in turn and affect us? it's always a back and forth. one of my favorite historical topics. when i was in graduate school, i got interested particularly in the environmental movement. who became an environmentalist, why did they become an environmentalist, what happens when other parts of their life intersect with their environmentalism, and particularly, i got fascinated by people who became environmentalists that you would never expect. you can kind of see where this is going. one of the things i love about historical study is when historical actors go off script.

when they do things that you do not expect. that you would never expect. i like the fact that people are complicated. that's a truism, i realize, but it is a truism for a reason. i think sometimes we lose sight of that. people are complicated. and i wanted to explore that. so my two interests came together in my book, and they come together in this talk today. so i want to explore the complicated world of arizona senator and environmentalist barry goldwater. who accepted the republican nomination, as you know, for president 50 years ago today. now, the complicated world of barry goldwater, if you remember barry goldwater, know much about him, complicated is not a word that is normally associated with the senator from arizona. it might even elicit a laugh. the classic image of goldwater, of course, this is one of his campaign posters. the classic image looks something like this. barry goldwater was extremely conservative.

predictably and extremely conservative. the distilled essence, you might say, of political conservatism, an opponent of the new deal, an equally vociferous opponent of lyndon johnson and the great society, as opposed to welfare, as opposed to regulation, as opposed to excessive taxes, a defender of traditional morality, an opponent of unions. militantly anti-communist, supporter of the military, et cetera, and so forth. we can tick them off. they are -- put together, he almost emerges as a kind of cardboard cutout. a statue, an ideology attached to a warm body. uncompromising, aggressive, perhaps even according to his critics, dangerously so. and you can see that in just a couple film clips that i would like to show you now. can we run the communism video?

these are from the -- this is from a great website. called living room candidate. this is a 1964 campaign commercial from senator goldwater. >> hand over your heart. ready, begin. >> i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america. >> to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god. indivisible. [ speaking foreign language ] >> liberty and justice for all. >> i want american kids to grow up as americans. and they will if we have the guts to make our intentions clear. so clear they don't need translation or interpretation, just respect for a country prepared as no country in all history ever was. in your heart, you know he's right.

vote for barry goldwater. >> there is his famous campaign motto. needless to say, this very intense anti-communism made critics rather nervous, and the johnson campaign took full advantage of that. if we could run just another weapon, please. this is a lyndon johnson campaign commercial from that same year. >> on october 24th, 1963, barry goldwater said at the nuclear bomb, merely another weapon. merely another weapon? vote for president johnson. the stakes are too high for you to stay home. >> the next one, yeah, the next one is even more famous. you may remember this. this is the infamous daisy commercial of 1964. if we could run that as well, please. it's a little bit longer.

>> one, two, three, four, five, seven, six, six, eight, nine, nine. >> eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. zero. these are the stakes. to make a world in which all of god's children can live. to go into the dark, we must either love each other or we must die. >> vote for president johnson on november 3rd. the stakes are too high for you to stay home. >> again, maybe the most famous political cartoon in all of american history.

you'll notice, not mentioned by name. it's sort of understood that you're supposed to know who is being referred to. barry goldwater scared many democrats and many republicans as well. i would like to finish one more commercial before we get into the meat of this. this one is lesser well-known, but note, there's an environmental element here. this is a commercial called ice cream. >> used to do. they used to explode atomic bombs in the air. now children should have lots of vitamin a and calcium, but they shouldn't have any separatiam 90 or cesium-137. slug these things come from atomic bombs and they're radioactive. they can make you die. do you know what people finally did? they got together and signed a nuclear test ban treaty, and then the radioactive poisons started to go away. but now, there's a man who wants to be president of the united states, and he doesn't like this treaty.

he fought against it. he even voted against it. he wants to go on testing more bombs. his name is barry goldwater. and if he's elected, they might start testing all over again. >> vote for president johnson on november 3rd. the stakes are too high for you to stay home. >> all right, now in 1964, as in 2014, don't expect nuance in our political ads. and ads from both sides, i think, were misleading. lyndon johnson was not a socialist dictator, not josef stalin with a texas drawl. and barry goldwater was not a warmonger, a dr. strangelove-esque type character. in fact, if you look at his whole life, his whole political life and his life in general, what you find is that barry goad water often went off in

interesting and unexpected directions. he was a more supple thinker than he was given credit for, not just from his opponents but also his supporters. examples, something you're probably familiar with. at the end of his life, he broke with the republican party over the influence of the religious right. he was not a fan of jerry falwell and pat robertson. he championed the right of gay people to serve in the military. supported a democrat, karen english in 1992 when she ran for congress. he was a supporter of planned parenthood for his entire life. he was also a member of the naacp. which was, for white supporters of segregation, maybe the most hated organization in the country. he even, of course, as you probably know, had a warm reputation with -- forgot this picture. incidentally, this is from his 1968 senate campaign. great picture, there he is in

his backyard. and this photograph grasz the cover of a book on the ''64 campaign. but goldwater, of course, was good friends with his -- one of his big political rivals. that was john f. kennedy. they in fact talked about campaigning together. imagine that in 2014. going on the campaign trail together and debating one another but still remaining friends. so back to the commercial, the last one that i showed. the idea that goldwater's election would be a kind of environmental disaster is especially relevant to this idea of goldwater being complicated. as we're going to see, the famous maverick streak of the senator from arizona extended to environmental issues. so let me begin by telling you a lilt bit about barry goldwater. he was born in phoenix, arizona, first of january, 1909, and he was the son of a well to do department store owner named baron goldwater. he was an adventurous kid, a little wild. maybe a lot wild, actually.

he ended up in military school in stanton, virginia, actually because of his wildness. he loved to do all the things that boys did, play pranks, run around with his buddies. he loved to camp. he loved to ride. he loved to hunt. an area around camelback mountain, i don't know if you have been to phoenix, but if you fly into sky harbor airport, look to the north and you'll see camelback mountain. it's probably the most faups nar icon in phoenix. this is a picture of it in the early 1900s, as barry goldwater would have seen it. it's covered in houses mostly now. here's another shot. wide open spaces. these wide open spaces had a significant influence on goldwater for the whole of his life, in fact. these youthful experiences in the desert are going to shape his environmentalism as an adult. so, let me tell you a little bit about his mother, who was crucial to this. josephine goldwater was from

nebraska and she moved to arizona because she had tuberculosis. the idea at the time was the clear invigorating air of arizona would cure you or at least make the symptoms less intense. she did not expect to live long. she lived for several decades. maybe it worked. she met baron goad water, married him. had three children, and she loved nature deeply. one of the things she loved to do, in fact, was to go on car camping trips. this was in the 1920s. in the 1920s, this was the era where we first had car camping. camping, going to the wilderness, used to be some ways the domain of the wealthy. you went on the train and went to yosemite. now you got in your model t and you head out into the desert. that's what she did. and she took her kids with them. you can't see them. i believe that's barry goldwater at the wheel. he did a lot of driving on those trips. there they are in their automobile crossing the colorado river, on their way over to southern california.

in one of these many, many trips they took. jo goldwater lectured her children on natural history. she pointed out the beauties of nature. she was not an intensely religious woman, but she believed god was present mostly in his creation, so she was very keen to point that out, the real church, so to speak, was the wild. that was a lesson that barry goldwater took to heart. just some really wonderful experiences. as barry got older, he continued this tradition. he picked up a camera -- he picked up a rifle before he did that. this is barry goldwater on the left with a rifle in hand. that's his younger brother bob and his younger sister carolyn. his mother is on the left next to him. the other two folks are unidentified. but this is one of their many camping trips. but as he became an adult, he continued this. he got into photography. when he got married, his wife

gave him for one of his first christmas gifts in 1934, gave him an eastman camera. he started lugging the camera around the arizona countryside. he also learned to fly and he would take aerial pictures. and so he became pretty critically a really remarkable artist. this is something i think we didn't always appreciate. in 1940, he published the first of what would be several books of photography. he was elected to the royal society of photographers on the basis of this book. got a couple shots here. there he is, i love this one in his levis taking a picture of an arch somewhere in arizona. he was a big fan of the four corners area, as you can tell. like this one as well. this is circa 1940. and take a look at some of these pictures here. these next three shots are shots, actually, excuse me, one more. this is later in life, wearing those same levis as near as i can tell in his house in scottsdale with his camera.

cactus and american flag. i thought about asking if i could get this to be my book cover, but we went with something else. but this is one of his shots. i love this one. gorgeous. he's not and is he adams, but he's not bad. he was in fact friends with ansel adams. very different politically, but they shared a love for this kind of photography. i think this is just a wonderful shot. my favorite maybe of all, though, is this one. monument valley in arizona. look at those clean lines. this is man who has an eye for light and shadow and an eye for that pristine ansel adamsesque look. i love this photograph. one of my favorites. one more. he was also famous for photographing native people. this is a navajo man, and maybe his most famous and most reproduced photograph. so, again, you can see long before he got interested in politics, long before he became a politician, he was a man who is thinking about the

wilderness, thinking about nature. briefly, goes off -- he goes off to military school, as i mentioned, in virginia. comes back home to go to the university of arizona. he does not finish because his father dies and he takes over the goldwater store. he ends up being a businessman. gets married himself, has three children. and begins in the 1930s, begins his career as a conservative. he was, as you would expect, deeply opposed to franklin delano roosevelt, did not like the new deal for a variety of reasons. editorializes against it in the arizona republic, so on and so forth. and getting ahead of myself. let's go back to this one. this would be appropriate. round about this time, 1939, 1940, he got a chance to go on a trip through the grand canyon. now, the grand canyon and the colorado river was a different place in 1940. there was only one dam on it, and that was hoover dam. the rest of the river ran wild.

and not many people in the 1940s had gone down it. goldwater would be a member of the 13th, only the 13th expedition to go down the colorado river and the 73rd person. he joined what was called the neville's expedition. there were a couple of nevilles expeditions but he joined one of them in the summer of 1940, and darn if he didn't make it all the way through the grand canyon. it was an incredible experience for him. he kept a journal, and he took a lot of photographs, which i'll get to in a second. i want to read, though, an entry from his journal on that trip. and i quote, the tall spires near the rim looked as though god had reached out and wiped a brush of golden paint across them. gliding -- gilding those rocks in the bright glow of setting sun. below the heights, the canyon is filled with a blue haze, not unlike smoke. the river winds lazy and brown

through au of this beauty and bob this grandeur float clouds in the pastel shades of evening. thought we were going john muir here for a second. that's not something we associate with barry goldwater. who knew about this lyricism. his love for the canyon. he loved the grand canyon above all natural features. the love for that comes out strongly in this. he took his camera with him, as i mentioned. he took a motion picture camera and a still camera. he took hundreds and hundreds of photographs. 3,000 feet of moving picture, and he went on a speaking tour after he emerged from the canyon. he -- there were times when he was showing the film and the pictures five times a day. over 10,000 people saw it in the year or so after he went through the grand canyon. and this, i would argue, had at least something to do with his political success. he decided to run for phoenix

city council in 1948. and people are going to vote for him primarily on the issues. he was concerned about corruption and concerned about excessive government and concerned about a pro-business atmosphere, so on and so forth. people voted for him for those reasons, but i think they also voted for him because he was the m man who ran the canyon. that gave him a kind of cache. he used to fly in his aircraft to campaign stops and that was such a romantic image, the cowboy image, outdoorsman image. i think it was crucial. he had the canyon as a backdrop. so he's successful. he finds out he has a talent for politics. he decides in 1952 to run for senate. lo and behold, he wins. this is something of a bellwether. the democrats had always dominated the state of arizona, and now we had a republican junior senator in 1952. this is portending the shifts that have brought us the current political map. he knocked off earnest mcfarland and joined carl hayden in washington, d.c. and as a young senator, he gets

a lot of the dirty jobs, the ones no one wants to do. he has to do the re-election tour, has to go around giving speeches and eating rubber chicken and that sort of thing. his agenda at the time was typically conservative. when he spoke on the floor of the senate, he railed against labor unions. he was very anti-communist, as you know. he was not an environmentalist as we would recognize it today. yet. but we're going to get there. which means i'm going to switch gears for just a second. i want to tell you a little bit about environmentalism because that's important as well. you need to know a little bit about that. if we're going to go back a ways, i often tell my students, environmentalism is a function of the '60s, the 1860s. environmentalism is very old. if you go back 200 years, you will find what we recognize as environmentalism. you have people in new england protesting the effects, the environmental effects of textile

mills, for instance, and asking their governments to regulate and things like that. it's a very old movement. and as the industrial revolution picks up steam and gets bigger and bigger, what you see is more environmental damage. what we got in the turn of the century, an era called the progressive era, we got an emergence of what was known as conservation. conservation is the first organized environmental movement in america. and what a conservationist was, someone like this, they were a reformer. they were usually middle class. and they believed -- there are a few principles. one was that the industrial revolution that unregulated unorganized economic growth was destroying natural resources. they were not opposed to growth. they interpreted it as an anti-growth idea, but the idea was the growth was done in an unsustainable way as we would say today. we need to ameliorate those

ills and what we need to do is have scientific experts, the conservationists said, working for the government to manage resources in a way that they didn't disappear. the timber scarcity. you wonder where the u.s. forest service comes from or the bureau of reclamation or any federal bureaucracy, it emerges from this period. it's very use-oriented. and it's very, as you notice, it's very pro-government. it believes the government has a duty, in fact, to do what it can to manage resource development. so here's one of the big ironies. if conservation had a political home, a partisan hope, it would be in the republican party. this was an idea that was strongest in the gop. you think of teddy roosevelt as the greatest example. gifford pinchot and we could name others. it's a republican movement. i'll touch on that later. some conservationists always

said we should preserve land not for economic reasons but just because it's beautiful and spiritual. we should have wilderness areas and natural parks. think of john muir when you think of this. they were called preservationists. sometimes they would fight, inside the conservation movement, there were pro-growth people and then there were wilderness preservation people. it was a civil war and they could get very angry at one together. by the time barry goldwater is on the scene, conservation is the dominant environmental ethic in the country. this is the philosophy informing how almost everyone inside and outside the government, how they treat the natural world. when goldwater starts out, he's a conservationist. he believes very much in economic growth. he was an avid champion, as you might imagine, of economic growth. and he was, in fact, an avid -- he was an intense advocate of what was called reclamation.

forgive me if this is too simple. far west, people know about that. in georgia, they don't always know about reclamation, which is where i teach. but conservationist rivers that not they were tamed and made to work for the good of the country, and so the way we tame a river and we make it work is we put a dam on it and so the government very early in this progressive era got involved in dam-building starting in 1902. and this was the idea that it formed the new deal. the new deal of fdr and those folks loved their damages, and i'm sure you know all about that. go to hoover dam and grand cooley dam and think of the tva down in the southeast. new deal projects because new dealers, who already, of course, believed in an aggressive government, they gravitated to this naturally. goldwater gravitated to it as

well. as in arizona, a place of economic prosperity and not a lot of water he recognized reclamation had to happen. even federal reclamation and this put him in kind of an interesting situation because it's only the government that can build these really massive dams. so what you have is goldwater in somewhat of an awkward position of asking, sometimes even demanding that the federal government build dams in the west. in fact at the same time he was lambasting the tennessee valley authority in the southeast. he called it galloping socialism. creeping collectism and socialism on the dead run basically. he did -- he did some ideological gymnastics to pull that of course, i think. he would temporarily transform into a loose constructionist, for instance, the constitution to -- to deal with that, and you look at some of the major dams of the period and he was a big supporter. he supported the ecopark dam in

the 1950s. the problem with the ecopark dam it was right in the middle of dinosaur national park. it was defeated in 1956 by a -- after a pretty intense fight. much of environmental groups, sierra group and so on got together and fought it, but he was a big champion of that dam. he said don't worry about it. it's not going to destroy the aesthetics and we need the water. we need the water. he was a big supporter of the central arizona project in the bridge canyon dam. i don't know if anybody knows about this, but the central arizona project brings water from northwestern arizona all the way down to phoenix and tucson, some 300 miles. it's a coal-generating plant that provides the pump that water. originally it was going to be done by a dam called the bridge canyon dam which would be built inside the grand canyon national park and that would never fly today. you can imagine even then that the uproar was intense.

goldwater, a man who loved the grand canyon, still was a the isser of that. he said don't worry about that. it's going to be fine. and so, again, as i was saying before, not really an environmentalist yet. the final thing he does he votes against the wilderness act of 1964678 the wilderness act created the official government wilderness designation which you see today all over the place. he was a big opponent of that, but not for the reasons that you might expect. here's where we start to see the first flicker of barrel goldwater, the environmentalist. he stood up in 1964 and he said i'm opposed to the wilderness act because i love wilderness so much. what a wilderness act will do it will be like a four-star rating for a hotel. if you make a wilderness area, everyone will want to do there, and when they do that they will destroy it through overuse. better just to leave it alone. it's a very interesting argument, and it has a lot of merit to it because in places like the grand canyon, that's

precisely what happened. it's been loved to death and he warned that is what would happen with the wilderness act. so, moving on. in 1964, as you know, decides to run for president, and i guess he got a couple of shots here. there he is giving -- there he is giving a speech. classic kind of goldwater look here. like this one as well. he had a bluegrass band during with him called the goldwaters and there they are performing. as you know folk music in 1964 was not usually associated with conservatives. think of pete seager and folks like that, but this is was kind of a conservative version. this is, of course, a goldwater girl. does not appear to be hillary clinton who was a goldwater girl, as you may know, but the results -- getting ahead of myself. the result, as you know, were not good for barry goldwater. he was beaten pretty severely,

and here is the map of the results. now, just a couple of things, he funded his campaign partially through the sale of a book of photography called "the face of arizona" and i've been fortunate enough to see this thing, and it's beautiful. white leather bound book with all sorts of captions captured by goldwater himself and something that any environmentalist would like to own today. i find it interesting he's funding the campaign with this. 2,500 bucs and you got one of the first autographed copies and that's quite a bit of money in those days, but, second of all, after goldwater goes down to significant defeat, you'll notice, again, as well, the only plays he wins in his home state in the deep south. i always tell my students why did a jewish republican member. naacp win the south? because we're in the middle of a very important political shift,

but that's for another lex tour i assume. what does barry goldwater do? this is the mountain today surrounded by suburban sprawl, but you'll notice there's no development on the money than and one of the reasons for that is because of barry goldwater. he was associated with and one of the main organizers of a group called save the camelback mountain foundation, i believe is the name, and they went around collecting money, working with landowners to buy the rights in order to preserve this mountain untouched, and they were successful. again, one of the ironies is they had to rely on land and water conservation funds to help them because they couldn't raise enough money, but goldwater for years worked very hard to keep development off camel back mountain. can you go hiking there, too. go hiking there today. fabulous hike and little tough and wonderful money and it and said this old mountain is worth the hype.

while out. political eye he was preserving landscape in phoenix, so let's go back though to -- to -- there we go. to history again. now, after world war ii is when conservation starts to become what we would call today environmentalism. a couple of things going on. in the 1950s and '60s we have massive economic growth. creates a big middle class, and what do middle class people want to do? they have got money and they want to spend it on things. they want to buy tvs and automobiles, and they want to take that automobile and go on a road trip to the national parks. they want environmental amenities. they want natural experiences as part of their middle class lifestyle, and they begin organizing and asking and insisting that their government do things to protect those environment that they like and enjoy. i have a friend who writes about

this and when you get is the birth of environmentalism. i wouldn't call it a radical movement but it emerges out of the least radical population in america and it becomes very strong and people go the interested and clean air and clean water and so on and so forth and liberals pick up on this. lyndon johnson, read the famous great society speech, he talks about preserving green space and preserving the national world. they goin see themselves of defenders and not just of the working class and of things but the middle, the hey men miss of -- liberals like lyndon johnson to pick up this. this is the origin of liberal environmentalism. the government has a beauty, they argue, to protect nature for people's use and enjoyment.

many and then comes the anti-vietnam protests and the civil rights movement and so on and so forth and those thing infuse the environmental move president and give it new vigor and so on and so forth, and by 1970 you have things like earth day, april 22nd, 1970. you have a slew of legislation like the clean air act and a little bit later the clean water act and the endangered species act and all sorts of things, the development of the epa in 1970. on and on and on. all the -- i think major pieces of environmental legislation that we are familiar with today, most of them emerge for this period and signed by mix mix. arguably the most environmental president. he tended to see voters when he looked at earth day rallies, and things have changed. it's a very different world in 1970 than it was in 1964.

barry goldwater comes in, and he's influenced by this. this is the point that i want to make. he's deeply influenced by all of this. his influence by some of his personal experiences as well. in 1969 he was flying into luke air force base, and he couldn't see because of the smog and he had to land on instrument and he was freaked out saying i could not believe what i had to do. our air plugs please is getting out of hand. >> he called it gouging and cutting from suburban growth. makes me nervous. we should do something about it. he's very strain stream i would argue when it comes to the sports of the environmental problems of the-year-old and when i first read the quote, had the moment where you think smoking gun, bank. doesn't happen very often. have you to create the smoking fun, so to speak, with the

evidence, but listen to this. he wrote a back in 1970 called "conscience of a majority," and he wrote -- it was the usual goldwater stuff until you got to the next to last chapter. the chapter was called "saving the earth." listen to this paragraph. i happen to be one who has spent much of his public life defending the business community, the free enterprise system and local governments from harassment and encroachment from an outsized federal bureaucracy. thus, it is that my attitude on the question of pollution seems to have caused more than customary interest. i'm very frank about how i feel. i have discussed it with newspapers, reporters and speeches, and on nationally televised talk shows. i feel very definitely that the nixon administration is absolutely correct in cracking down on companies stand that continues to -- while a very

believer in the system and what it entails i'm in a stronger position of the right of our people to live in a clean politician-free environment and when pollution is found it should be halted at its stuff even if this requires string ent government action against important sections of our national economy, end quote. that sound -- his supporters go wow what? a phenomenal example. changes that's going on. he's reacting and he's not froze-in in time. >> just too many sang. he urges crackdowns on copper fines in in in. he voted against the legislation to make that possible. he worked to expand the grand

canyon national park to expand the size and worked with lawrence udall, a democrat on that and tried to eliminate boating down the grand canyon and on and on and on. at earth day yourself as you can see here he's at adelphi university in new york where he gets a rip-roaring speech, castigating us for pumping smoke into the air, and essentially a croat. clean sir is more important than a healthy connection and urge people to -- we have a conservative member of the snrt speaking in ways that i think is impossible to imagine today. final thing is the glen canyon dam. ever been to lake powell, right? 186 miles long. shrinking right now because of lack of water, but gold waerlt

voted to approve that dam and even though it flooded one of the most scenic stretches of the colorado, and by the mid-'70s he had changed his tune. because glen canyon dam had done all sorts of things. what happened it stops all the silt from going downstream and it ruined the beaches in the grand canyon and reduced the temperature of the water to something like 47 degrees. you can't swim in the colorado as i once discovered when i was 17 thinking it was the desert and it would be great. i nearly didn't make it out. he said that this was in fact the biggest political mistake of his life voting for the glen canyon dam, even bigger than the vote for the grand canyon act and wilderness act. i think that's astounding. now, as i said, goldwater was a man who responded to change. he responded to the tenor. time, and what you'll find as well is his environmentalism, it comes and it goes.

by the mid-'70s and late '70s he started to relate a little bit. i think he had a little bit of buyer's remorse. he supported the epa but was kind of shocked when it actually began to regular late or at least regulate when was beginning to have doubts about the epa and grumbling that maybe it should be eliminated. the sierra club, his grand canyon proposal was too -- was -- was not aggressive enough, and they got into a big fight and he quit the sierra club of which he had been a member for many years, and my files, one of my favorite files is i have his very indignant letter of resignation. doesn't like it either when environmentalists opposed to the supersonics transport. environmentalists were opposed to it predicting it would cause terrible climate change which i think were overblown and

goldwater liked anything that flew and so their opposition made him mad, and then along came the reagan revolution and james watt, and goldwater responded to that as well. he began, i think, to -- to question perhaps whether he had gone too far in his environmentalism. he liked james watt. i don't know new remember james watt. james watt was environmentalists like him intensely because he was a very active environmentalist and they are bumper stick somebody back there and goldwater liked him and -- and, again, he's responding to the rise of the reagan yes, but he never entirely abandons his environmentalism. if you look at the late '80s you see a number of things. in 1984 he sponsored the arizona

wilderness bill which provided for 28 federal wilderness areas in the state of arizona. now, again, remember, he voted again the legislation that made that possible, the wilderness act of 1964. the ashes. sagebrush rebellion, it was a move president of state legislatures in the west arguing that land that was in control of -- of the federal government should be given back to the states. and that environmental regulations of the federal land were too stringent and they needed to be eliminated even though the embers from that was still smoking, later on he joins be a organization called republicans for environmental protection which is now called conserve america. now, i -- i don't want to read too much into this, but the

republicans were visual protecti protection. their argument is republicans have a strong environmental bra digs in that we've gotten away from that, they said, so we need to get that back, and i think goldwater's joining of that group in a way what is -- as you know, we've seen this all over and other aspects of his life. we know he disagreed very much with the religious. he was, again, a champion of serve in the military. got applied to his successor john mccain. that imagine sick there and still has a tint to it in the 1980s. notice a couple of things. he dies -- retires in 1986 and dies in 1988 and his ashes, some of them anyway, is spread over the grand canyon which i think

is an appropriate lays to be. my graduate wofs earl always said the question you can answer is so what. i'm trying to tell you my take on so what. we've learned a lot of things. first of all we learned vernalism was a very, very powerful movement and that it could appeal to cots of people. >> could sometimes show up in the most unusual players. >> it was a sea change. it's not a movement that belonged to one side of the political spectrum or the other and related to that is there's a very strong environmental republican tradition, and when we look back on 2014 i think it's a really interesting question. today -- today you don't often associate environmentalism and certainly not environmental regulation with the republican party. that's a fairly recent phenomenon and i think it has a

lot to do with a complicated answer that the republican party has swung to the right over the last 20 or 30 years as a result of a number of things, and you may remember reagan's famous line. he said government is not the solution. government is the problem. when you say that, you do make it difficult for goldwater's environmentalism to exist anymore. i think it has a lot to do with why it sort of disappeared, and i think there are lessons, again, for both sides. conservatives can look at environmentalism and not -- not think of it as an alien ideology, a legacy kind of like civil rights of the conservative movement and liberals can look at this as well and realize it's not just them. it's everyone and that we're all in this together especially in this era of significant climate change and environmental problems that are unprecedented and i think we'll look back to history and draw some lessons from one. with that i'll yield the ball of

my time in the senate and wait for questions so thank you very much. [ applause ] >> in your estimation what current presidential candidate or potential presidential or national politician most resembles barry goldwater in his kind of nuances conservatism? >> you're asking essentially is there any environmentally minded republicans? not many are springing to mind. the last one i think of quite honestly, olimpia snowe and it's a regional thing. republicans come from new england or come from california, oregon, washington. they tend to be more environmental than they are from other regions of the country. democrats, too, from the rest can sometimes be less environmental.

that's an interesting observation. that's an interesting historical puzzle. that's another book and i confess in my own puzzle i don't dig deeply into it for my answers so i think it will take more thought. go ahead. >> i was fascinated to learn that the republicans really did originate environmentalism so i -- i learned something tonight. >> okay. and then i'm equally astounded that they have moved so far away from something that was such a background from them and especially think now about the state of oklahoma, extremely conservative. they now have three times the number of earthquakes than california due to the fracking, but it seems that consequences be damned as their policy now, and -- and kind of ties back into that other fellow's question. what is it going to take for the republicans to return to their

conversation -- the conservation roots? >> sure. again, historians are really bad at predicting the future so my chinese history professor told us three weeks before tiananmen square that it would never happen so i'm basically going to avoid predicting the future and this is a useful example. we can look to the past. if barry goldwater can do it, i think anyone can do it and maybe it sends a lesson that maybe it doesn't make you a traitor to your ideology. i lay in bed and don't have a good answer for you and good examples of the past that can maybe help us. >> given the fact that you said he was apparently great a bit ahead in terms of being an environmentalist by calling himself that, do you think or did he ever inkate that he

resented about the left kind of took that over and became, you know, the standard bearers of it and he had been interested in trying to do things long before they ever -- >> he did, he did. one of the things that he did like is what he considered the extremism of some environmentalists. he thought, for instance, that the opposition to the air pollution caused by the sst was absolutely just ridiculous and that it was motivated more by ideology and kind of anti-technology and anti-modernist feeling. it was never that -- that -- it was never as direct as you but you can infer from a lot of his comment in the late '80s and '80s that he believed -- in mod rates and the pursuit of justice is no vice except for environmentalism he was very moderate in some ways. >> he died in 86, you said?

>> died in '88 and retired in '86. >> it sounds like he might have actually been interested notice whole environmental change that's happening. >> yes. >> and given what he knew and happened in his own state. >> yes, yes, i think that's a great observation. i thought about this a lot. i think climate change, for instance, he would be concerned about it. when you think about somebody for long enough and feel like you can get it into their head and i don't doubt that he would be concerned about it. especially because as a national security aspect, and he was very concerned about resource scarcity back in the oil crisis days in 1973. he was really panicked, and -- and the -- the resource side of climate change would make him very nervous. he would also warn you against being too nervous. again, always go for that middle

ground. he wouldn't like -- he wouldn't want you to go too out there, but he would certainly -- i'd have no doubt that he would be concerned. >> seem to go from one extreme to the other. >> moderation. >> that we can live with it easily. >> a question in a parallel avenue. i think goldwater was characterized as such a warmonger, and ironically johnson took us deep into the vietnam war. >> yes. >> being characterized as the peace-maker. do you have any feel for what might have come 1 of a goldwater presidency in relation to vietnam? >> i'm going to dodge that question if at all possible. >> okay. >> you know. again, one of the things they also warn you in graduate school with counterfactual. it's very difficult to say. again, the warmonger thing was

over"boston globe." i don't think he was going to -- to nuke vietnam. i'm going to let the -- i don't mean -- in all seriousness i don't mean to dodge but i think experts who are -- are better versed in foreign policy are better suited to answer that question. good question for late night debate. >> possibly he would not have saturated with agent orange. >> that would have been interesting because the national defense thing going up against his concern. a couple times he expressed concern about ddt. land issues and preservation was more his interest, but he did a couple times wonder about ddt. angst original, maybe. i didn't get a sense of which way he would go. it's maddening sometimes what you don't know. >> thank you.

american history tv primetime continues tonight with a look at 1964 presidential campaign of barry goldwater. it begins at 8:00 eastern with "the contenders," a two-hour discussion. life and career of the republican nominee. at 10:05 p.m. eastern, barry goldwater's nomination acceptance speech and at 10:50, a look at his role in the conservation move president in the 1950s and '60s. the c-span radio app makes it easy to continue to follow 2016 election wherever you are. it's free to download from the apple app store or google play. get audio coverage and up to the minute schedule information for c-span radio and c-span television plus podcast times for our popular public affairs, book and history programs. stay up to date on all the election coverage. c-span's radio app means you always have c-span on the go.