bill mccune has produced more than 90 documentaries including "barry goldwater and american life." thank you all for being with us. rick pearlstein, let's begin with you. in your book and his campaign, you called him a very different candidate for a different election year. how so? >> i think the thing that made him most different as a presidential candidate is that he was a reluctant presidential candidate. if we think of all the people running for president in 2012, we can't say any of them were reluctant. it's a full-time job, it's completely consuming. but ever since 1960 when the first kind of people came to barry goldwater and tried to draft him, saying, we want you to be a presidential candidate, he would always say one thing. that's the last thing on my mind. i don't want to run for president. once, he even told the chicago tribune, i don't think i have the brains to be president. over and over, they said, we don't care, we're going to draft you. that's actually what happened. he was pretty much drafted by vociferous, passionate followers who raised money on their own, and

. >> bill mccune, you watched barry goldwater in 1960, how did that set the stage for his bid in '64? >> well, it fed red meat to the conservative movement, basically. you know. he ended his speech saying conservatives, grow up, let's get to work, you know, that's, i think, the last line of his whole speech there. he was, not again, he wasn't -- who's that republican guy who ran campaigns the last few years? >> karl rove? >> yeah, he wasn't a karl rove, organizing, da da da, that kind of thing at all. but he had feelings, let's get to work, let's take this back, let's do something for a conservative movement, as it were. he had no use for nixon, especially later, you know, and probably no use for rockefeller other than they were probably friendly, but ideologically, no use for rockefeller. so he was saying, let's get to work, let's do this. >> ed in morristown, new jersey, good evening. >> caller: wrote my senior thesis in 1971 on the press treatment of the goldwater presidential campaign and i had to good fortune to spend a full day interviewing the author theodore white at his home

the reason i'm in the second grade, i met a gentleman named bill mccune, and we have been friends sincehen. in 1964, i was a lowly specialist 4th class in the army at ft. benning, georgia. i wasn't old enough to vote at that time because arizona was 21 and i was only 20. when i listened to the senator discuss using low-yield nuclear weapons in vietnam, it made sense to me, as a military person, and it made sense to a lot of my fellow soldiers at the same time. the point that the johnson campaign exaggerated the impact of using huge hiroshima/nagasaki bombs was a total exaggeration. he was an air force man. he knew what low yield meant and what it would do. and my question is, what was wrong with the term "low yield," that i believe i only heard it once or twice. >> rick perlstein, you wrote about that in the book. >> yeah, i actually talked to one of the physicists at lawrence livermore laboratory who designed some of those low-yield nuclear weapons and he said it was absolutely insane to believe you could contain the explosions from those weapons, so i'm not so sure that's true. >> can

. >> and bill mccune bill, the author and producer of a documentary on barry goldwater. >> barry goldwater american life. >> thank you for being with us. and the audience of the cold water is a two. we want to leave you with some of the words of barry goldwater in an interview we did with him when he was winding his political career down from 1985. >> another thing i would tell you, tell young politicians coming into washington, your reelection is not going to make or break the united states. do the best job you can do. that is what you are here for. to defend the constitution. against all enemies, foreign and domestic. and be honest. that is all i'll tell them. >> how about the republican party leaders today? >> well i think we have good leadership today. lord knows we spent long enough time out of office that we should've learned some things. politics goes in a circle. you'll find the liberal element running things for a while. then we found the conservative on the way up. the conservative will run the place until he runs out of ideas. he runs out of people. and the other party, even the