They left after making a breathtaking ad hoc run at drafting Goldwater for president instead, and taking down the presumptive nominee as an unprincipled sellout. The name that came up over and over in my interviews with these veterans of Young Americans for Freedom was 'Richard Nixon.' They came to the 1960 Republican National Convention determined to draft Barry Goldwater for vice president. In a sense, I considered you political role models. As an unabashed ideological liberal in the depths of the age of Clintonian triangulation, I found the recollections of the risks you all took for a cause absolutely inspiring. David Keene of the American Conservative Union set up a breakfast for me at the Capitol Hill Club at which Alfred Regnery, William Schulz of Reader's Digest, and Alan Riskind of Human Events, reminisced about the old days.

That same week I interviewed Richard Viguerie. I interviewed both these gentlemen for my Goldwater book on the same day in 1997. Stanton Evans, cofounders of the pioneering conservative activist group Young Americans for Freedom and movers in the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign. I was the token liberal, part of the panel 'Barry Goldwater and the Modern Conservative Movement,' alongside Lee Edwards and M. Karl Rove showed up for a surprise after-lunch briefing and Q&A, in which he defended his conservative purity by boasting of how he pressured a reluctant Republican into voting for a free trade bill ('That sombitch was cryin!'). Historian and American Enterprise Institute Fellow Steven Hayward opened the conference, posing the question, 'What do we mean by conservatism?' He answered by quoting the conservative philososopher Russell Kirk: 'Belief in a transcendant moral order.' Conservatives, he said, 'defend the unchanging ground of our changing experience.' The conference included Richard Land, director of the Southern Baptist Convention, New York Times columnist David Brooks, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Moral Majority founder Paul Weyrich, and William Bennett. It's something of The Big Con project's manifesto-a lesson about why conservative ideology, as it is lived in the real world, is in its way as abominable as Leninism.

I've referred here often to my 2005 Princeton speech, and thought I might as well publish it here.

Rick perlstein goldwater