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.