WI: Barry Goldwater wins in 1964 due to leak of MK Ultra

Would he really throw anyone in jail?

  • Yes

    Votes: 10 35.7%
  • Maybe

    Votes: 2 7.1%
  • Not likely

    Votes: 8 28.6%
  • No

    Votes: 8 28.6%

  • Total voters
    28
Goldwater was a rigid constitutionalist who consistently championed private businesses' rights even when they were engaging in segregation. While it seems his ideology was NOT a cover for racism based on his other actions in life (unlike plenty of Southerners), he was never one to compromise on issues of principle.
As someone in the American politics thread put it: "Goldwater seems to have been the only person who didn't realize that state's rights was just a cover for racism."
 
Why? Wasn't Goldwater a more committed de-segregationist than JFK?

I don't think this would be enough to put him over the top.

Of course he could beat JFK if sufficient scandals came to light about other things JFK was up to.

(1) Goldwater may have been *personally* pro-integration but he also had a very limited view of the federal government's constitutional authority to do anything about it, and voted against the Civil Rights Act, basically because of opposition to the public accomodations section.

(2) Very likely JFK would have been able to get some sort of civil rights bill through in 1964, but it would probably be watered-down compared to the one enacted in OTL. After he defeated Goldwater, it would probably be strengthened.

(3) It is very unlikely that scandal (or anything else) could elect Goldwater in 1964. The media in those days were very protective of the sexual exploits of presidents, and in any event it is unclear the public would care more about such things in 1964 than it did about Monicagate in 1998 or the 2016 Trump Access Hollywood tape.

(4) BTW, even if JFK cannot get a strong civil rights bill through Congress either in 1964 or afterwards, the Supreme Court will probably outlaw private discrimination under the 1866 civil rights act as it did In OTL in *Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_v._Alfred_H._Mayer_Co.
 
The other point is that Goldwater of all people would be the *least* likely in 1964 to want to expose any CIA program that was ostensibly aimed at communism. ("We have to know how people react to drugs so we can interrogate communist agents we find effectively. Suppose doing so would enable us to discover a bomb that would otherwise kill huge numbers of people." Etc.) As another poster pointed out, Goldwater was no Ron Paul (certainly not in 1964, anyway). Murray Rothbard and others have argued that the death of Taft and his replacement by Goldwater and William F. Buckley, Jr. as conservative icons meant the near-death of the isolationist Old Right and its replacement by pro-CIA, pro-interventionist hawks.

That's one reason why I find the original post so puzzling. I could see *some* politicians (and more likely, journalists) trying to expose MK Ultra. But why Goldwater of all people?

It's Journalist who are exposing it and in this case Goldwater is pulling a McCarty claiming that the reported MK Ultra program is a vast Communist plot to drug and brain wash people to kill our value system. He seemed to agree with McCarty in OTL so if he was willing to be a bit darker I can't see why he wouldn't exploit an unfolding event to trash the other side with.

Yes I know how 1964 is but I think many of the younger voters would be outraged and it would likely kill the voter turn out for the democrats trying to justify this program. Honestly water gate would likely look like child's play after something like this broke and the leak could prove JFK also signed off on it.
 

Wallet

Banned
Was JFK even aware of the program? He hated the CIA after the Bay of Pigs and planned to dismantle it. I'm sure they were doing plenty of operations under the radar.

Plus Eisenhower started the program. Besides, we didn't have 24/7 news or social media. It would take months to build up steam to have electoral impact
 
Retroactive Effect wrote:

It's Journalist who are exposing it and in this case Goldwater is pulling a McCarty claiming that the reported MK Ultra program is a vast Communist plot to drug and brain wash people to kill our value system.

The problem with the McCarthy comparison is that McCarthyism was a response to things like the Soviet takeover of eastern Europe and Mao's victory in China, events that were pretty easy to portray as victiories for Communism, But it would be rather difficult to spin MK-ULTRA that way, since, given the involvement of the Eisenhower admin and the CIA, it was pretty obviously an anti-Communist operation all the way.

In order for the OP scenario to work electorally, you would need large sections of the public to regard JFK not only as a misguided liberal, but as an outright Soviet agent, who would knowingly put into place a brainwashing program for the purpose of converting the country to Communism. In other words, the kind of people who think that the Bay Of Pigs(for example) failed not just because Kennedy was an incompetent buffoon, but because he was under direct orders from Moscow to make it fail.

And in regards to MK-ULTRA, the public would also have to believe that JFK convinced the CIA to go along with his plan to brainwash Americans into supporting Communism, or at least somehow managed to dupe them as to its true purpose. And, for the Goldwater Wins scenario, the public would have to believe that this conspiracy, as extensive as it is, doesn't extend into the Republican Party.

I'm sure you could find a sliver of the paranoid Right who would believe all that, but they would be substantially outweighed by the people who would recognize that MK-ULTRA was a CIA effort to undermine Communism, and either defend it as such, or at the very least, be very restrained in criticizing its "excesses".

And I think Goldwater's only contribution to any backlash would be to attack the journalists who exposed the program, and the politicians who allowed it to be exposted. Not the progam itself.

NOW HAVING SAID ALL THAT...

I do find it somewhat intriguing to speculate what the public reaction might have been had MK-ULTRA been exposed in the early '60s, in such a way that all its horror was laid bare for the whole world to see. As I've said, I think it would fall well short of a Goldwater-led uprising against the military-intelligence axis. However, just as Vietnam is recognized as a turning point in public attitudes toward the government, as a result of being "The Living Room War", I wonder if we could make an uncovered MK-ULTRA "The Living Room Torture Chamber", thus having public distrust of the government kick in a few years earlier.

Maybe if the whole program is exposed, AND the press focusses on stuff like the soldiers who were unwittingly subjected to drug-tests("They're doing that to OUR boys?!"), not to mention the aforementioned San Francisco sex dens, AND some of the victims appear on TV(not just quoted in the paper), and are obviously severely messed-up, eliciting a lot of sympathy. AND a leaked document emerges stating that the program has accomplished next-to-nothing(true, as far as I know), you might see a significant backlash from the public. But it would almost certainly line up along traditional left-right lines, with renegade Democrats attacking MK-ULTRA, Republicans defending it(and attacking the media), and the Kennedy administration and mainstream Democrats trying to distance themselves from the program, while not being overly negative about it.
 
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I think the overall "weirdness" of what went on in MK-ULTRA, if revealed at the time, would likely have had an alienating effect on Middle America. Imagine this sort of interview appearing on American TV in 1964...

ROBERT LOGIE (former patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron): Well, I was given LSD about every second day, injected, and sometimes it was mixed with sodium amytol and other drugs.

MACINTYRE: Most of the drugs were experimental, but seemed suitable for brainwashing, or as Cameron preferred to call it, "de-patterning". Then, during the long sleep, the patient would be forced to listen to subliminal message that were supposed to print new, sometimes bizarre thoughts on his blank mind.

LOGIE: I was aware of the speaker under my pillow, I was aware of the words.

MACINTYRE: Which were?

LOGIE: You killed your mother.

MACINTYRE: You killed your mother.

LOGIE: Yeah.

MACINTYRE: Who was alive and well.

LOGIE: Who was alive and well. And

MACINTYRE: Over and over again this voice is....

LOGIE: Well, like I say, it takes about two seconds to say that message, and this was going on for 23 days. And when I went home, after being there, when I went home, my mother was there, and why was she there, and...it didn't make any sense.

It would be kind of hard to defend this to the sort of people who think fighting Communism is all about Mom, the Flag, and Apple Pie!
 
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