July 20, 1964 - Senator Barry Goldwater chatted today with fellow ham radio operators around the country about putting an antenna on the White House, the income tax, and “equality ends at birth.”
This last struck the only serious note as Goldwater, sitting at his “rig,” told a ham in St. Louis that “equality of birth doesn’t mean the Government has the responsibility of maintaining all men equal.”
The assertion came in response to a question put by the St. Louis ham, Fred Abrams, a 21-year-old Washington University student who will be voting for the first time. It was his fifth radio contact with the Arizona Senator, whose call letters are K7UGA.
The student had just finished reading Goldwater’s book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” and wanted to know if the Republican Presidential nominee could “clear something up” for him without incurring the ire of the FCC.
Goldwater said he didn’t know of “anything in the FCC rules to prevent a book review.”
So, the St. Louis ham asked how the Senator would apply to the Civil Rights Law his assertion in the book that “all men are equal in the eyes of God.”
Goldwater told his questioner that a great many Americans “get mixed up” about Thomas Jefferson’s words: “All men are created equal.”
“All men are created equal at the instant of birth,” he said, “Americans, Mexicans, Cubans, and Africans. But from then on, that’s the end of equality.”
Initiative and hard work spell the difference between men, he said.
Goldwater’s ham radio equipment fills a nook off the book-lined living room of his house on Camelback Mountain in Arizona.
He turned the dials, telling hams in a half-dozen states that he was “getting ready to go back to the “land of Oz — Washington, D.C.” — the next day — and that he had four visitors, “mostly Eastern newspapermen, in the old shack,” and that the federal income tax “denies better-off people the opportunity to invest.”
He said that many of the nation’s 300,000 hams were for him and managed to tell him so despite FCC regulations.
“Since they can’t keep saying ‘we hope you win,’ they said we want a beam (an antenna) on the White House,” he said. “It’s about as close as they can get to it.”
Breaking into cross-country conversations, he announced himself as “Baker, Able, Robert, Yankee, Barry,” and when another ham asked if it was “The Barry,” Goldwater replied: “You guessed it; you get the brass ring.”
Support this project at patreon.com/realtime1960s
Comentarios