The book of course was The Conscience of a Conservative. It sold well despite its origin in Shepardsville, Kentucky, where the Victor Publishing Company put it out. Perhaps sold well because of them. Owning it must have given conservatives a sense of handling a document from the suppressed rightist anti-Washington underground.
"I was born in Arizona in territorial days," Goldwater writes. There's a bit of Daniel Boone about him. He's a throwback, not at all like the eastern establishment guys.The Baltimore Sun reviewer called G's "hard counsel" a bunch of "nonsense." Walter Lippmann scored G's notion of a "great hidden majority in the country" of a large number of conservatives who don't vote but could take over the country if they wanted. When Nixon used his "silent majority" for anti-antiwar purposes in 1968, he was borrowing from Goldwater, although without real Right license to do so.
The book was a kind of rehearsal for 1964. It criticized increasing central-government paternalism at the expense of individual self-reliance. It offered "new" decentralized government as a solution. If Goldwater had been a real southerner, this call would have been nothing more or less than "states' rights" as rhetoric against African American enfranchisement and equal access to school and law. But because Goldwater was a southwesterner, a region with little to no history of slavery, he could avoid that assumption, even as some southern conservatives embraced him as good for segregation.
Should he join the Nixon ticket in '60 as vice presidential candidate? Russell Kirk, a brilliant super-conservative intellectual, wrote that G was "too good and too important...for that powerless post."
Rocky was a problem for the Goldwaterites. The two men were at opposites ends of Republicanism. Remarkably, they made a joint appearance on Meet the Press in July 1960. I will search for a recording of that!
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
