A friend brings to my attention a classic 1986 interview with the Arizona senator in which he lights into lobbyists in general — and the Israel lobby in particular:
Antiwar conservatives sometimes feel abashed about connecting their views today with those of Cold War conservatives like Goldwater. Both neoconservatives and all too many libertarians have treated Cold War conservatism as continuous with today’s bellicose Right. Yet in fact, a lot of the classic Cold Warriors had been against intervention in World War II before Pearl Harbor, they came to take a less confrontational line against the Soviets over time, and there is good reason to think they would ultimately have followed a trajectory similar to that of other prominent conservatives now over the age of 60 who have been outspokenly critical of the “global war on terror.” Note, for example, what Goldwater tells Kolbe about the state of the Evil Empire in 1986:
By the end of the Reagan era, old-guard conservatives like Goldwater were not rattling sabers at Moscow. The neoconservatives, on the other hand, burned hotter than ever, taking shots at Reagan for his velvet-glove diplomacy. Younger cons — including the second-generation neos — were also more warlike than their elders, perhaps for the same reason that young men in the years after a hot war are often militaristic: they may have felt they were losing the chance to earn the glories their fathers had earned. Long after someone like James Burnham had ceased to envision a “Third World War,” parlor strategists insisted the great Red juggernaut was as mighty as ever and rolling inexorably forward. Goldwater, by contrast, as the quote above shows, had a pretty clear idea of how the USSR would meet its demise, and how soon.
