Daniel McCarthy: Goldwater has many claimants to his legacy, but most lack his rebellious spirit

In the years leading up to Barry Goldwater's death, conservatives wondered what had happened to their hero. They had wondered for some time, actually—since at least 1976, when Goldwater endorsed moderate incumbent Gerald Ford over insurgent conservative Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination. Back then, conservative activist John Lofton suggested Goldwater must not be in his right mind,"still in an ether fog" from recent hip replacement surgery:"Possessed of all his faculties, he would never say the things he has been saying about Reagan."

But by the early '90s, there could be no doubt: Goldwater damned the Religious Right at every opportunity, spoke out for abortion rights, and not only supported letting gays serve openly in the military, but even lent his name to an effort to pass federal antidiscrimination laws for homosexuals—quite a turnabout for a man who as a senator had once stood on federalist grounds against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Goldwater's death in May 1998 rendered all of that moot. Whatever his heterodoxies, his place in conservative history, and conservatives' hearts, was settled. He was still, as Pat Buchanan wrote at the time,"the father of us all."

Yet now, less than a decade on, Goldwater is at the center of a philosophical paternity suit. Every part of the political spectrum wants to claim him. Libertarian Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason, recently called down the ghost of Goldwater to testify that government does not belong in the bedroom, the boardroom,"or, as [Sen. Larry] Craig might add, in your bathroom." National Review's John J. Miller and the Claremont-McKenna Colleges' Andrew Busch have contested such uses of Goldwater, with Busch claiming in the Claremont Review of Books early last year that in his heyday, the Arizonan had been more a social conservative than a libertarian. Even liberals have joined the fray, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Watergate informer John W. Dean holding up Goldwater as a contrast to—in the title of Dean's recent book—Conservatives Without Conscience, such as George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, and the leaders of the Religious Right....