title: Aramaic

text: Aramaic is often spoken of as a single language, but is in reality a group of related languages. Some Aramaic languages differ more from each other than the Romance languages do among themselves. Its long history, extensive literature, and use by different religious communities are all factors in the diversification of the language. Some Aramaic dialects are mutually intelligible, whereas others are not, not unlike the situation with modern varieties of Arabic. Some Aramaic languages are known under different names; for example, Syriac is particularly used to describe the Eastern Aramaic variety used in Christian ethnic communities in Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northeastern Syria, and northwestern Iran, and Saint Thomas Christians in India. Most dialects can be described as either "Eastern" or "Western", the dividing line being roughly the Euphrates, or slightly west of it. It is also helpful to draw a distinction between those Aramaic languages that are modern living languages (often called "Neo-Aramaic"), those that are still in use as literary languages, and those that are extinct and are only of interest to scholars. Although there are some exceptions to this rule, this classification gives "Modern", "Middle", and "Old" periods, alongside "Eastern" and "Western" areas, to distinguish between the various languages and dialects that are Aramaic.


title: Aramaic

text: The earliest Aramaic alphabet was based on the Phoenician alphabet. In time, Aramaic developed its distinctive "square" style. The ancient Israelites and other peoples of Canaan adopted this alphabet for writing their own languages. Thus, it is better known as the Hebrew alphabet. This is the writing system used in Biblical Aramaic and other Jewish writing in Aramaic. The other main writing system used for Aramaic was developed by Christian communities: a cursive form known as the Syriac alphabet. A highly modified form of the Aramaic alphabet, the Mandaic alphabet, is used by the Mandaeans.


title: Aramaic

text: In addition to these writing systems, certain derivatives of the Aramaic alphabet were used in ancient times by particular groups: the Nabataean alphabet in Petra and the Palmyrene alphabet in Palmyra. In modern times, Turoyo (see below) has sometimes been written in a Latin script.


title: Aramaic

text: Periodization of historical development of Aramaic language has been the subject of particular interest for scholars, who proposed several types of periodization, based on linguistic, chronological and territorial criteria. Overlapping terminology, used in different periodizations, led to the creation of several polysemic terms, that are used differently among scholars. Terms like: Old Aramaic, Ancient Aramaic, Early Aramaic, Middle Aramaic, Late Aramaic (and some others, like Paleo-Aramaic), were used in various meanings, thus referring (in scope or substance) to different stages in historical development of Aramaic language.


title: Aramaic

text: Aramaic's long history and diverse and widespread use has led to the development of many divergent varieties, which are sometimes considered dialects, though they have become distinct enough over time that they are now sometimes considered separate languages. Therefore, there is not one singular, static Aramaic language; each time and place rather has had its own variation. The more widely spoken Eastern Aramaic and Mandaic forms are largely restricted to Assyrian Christian and Mandean gnostic communities in Iraq, northeastern Syria, northwestern Iran and southeastern Turkey, whilst the severely endangered Western Neo-Aramaic is spoken by small communities of Arameans in western Syria, and persisted in Mount Lebanon until as late as the 17th century.


title: Aramaic

text: The term "Old Aramaic" is used to describe the varieties of the language from its first known use, until the point roughly marked by the rise of the Sasanian Empire (224 AD), dominating the influential, eastern dialect region. As such, the term covers over thirteen centuries of the development of Aramaic. This vast time span includes all Aramaic that is now effectively extinct. Regarding the earliest forms, Beyer suggests that written Aramaic probably dates from the 11th century BCE, as it is established by the 10th century, to which he dates the oldest inscriptions of northern Syria. Heinrichs uses the less controversial date of the 9th century, for which there is clear and widespread attestation.


title: Aramaic

text: The central phase in the development of Old Aramaic was its official use by the Achaemenid Empire (500–330 BC). The period before this, dubbed "Ancient Aramaic", saw the development of the language from being spoken in Aramaean city-states to become a major means of communication in diplomacy and trade throughout Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, local vernaculars became increasingly prominent, fanning the divergence of an Aramaic dialect continuum and the development of differing written standards.


title: Aramaic

text: "Ancient Aramaic" refers to the earliest known period of the language, from its origin until it becomes the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent. It was the language of the Aramean city-states of Damascus, Hamath and Arpad.


title: Aramaic

text: There are inscriptions that evidence the earliest use of the language, dating from the 10th century BC. These inscriptions are mostly diplomatic documents between Aramaean city-states. The alphabet of Aramaic at this early period seems to be based on the Phoenician alphabet, and there is a unity in the written language. It seems that, in time, a more refined alphabet, suited to the needs of the language, began to develop from this in the eastern regions of Aram. Due to increasing Aramean migration eastward, the Western periphery of Assyria became bilingual in Akkadian and Aramean at least as early as the mid-9th century BC. As the Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered Aramean lands west of the Euphrates, Tiglath-Pileser III made Aramaic the Empire's second official language, and it eventually supplanted Akkadian completely.


title: Aramaic

text: From 700 BC, the language began to spread in all directions, but lost much of its unity. Different dialects emerged in Assyria, Babylonia, the Levant and Egypt. Around 600 BC, Adon, a Canaanite king, used Aramaic to write to an Egyptian Pharaoh.


title: Aramaic

text: Around 500 BC, following the Achaemenid (Persian) conquest of Mesopotamia under Darius I, Aramaic (as had been used in that region) was adopted by the conquerors as the "vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast empire with its different peoples and languages. The use of a single official language, which modern scholarship has dubbed Official Aramaic or Imperial Aramaic, can be assumed to have greatly contributed to the astonishing success of the Achaemenids in holding their far-flung empire together for as long as they did". In 1955, Richard Frye questioned the classification of Imperial Aramaic as an "official language", noting that no surviving edict expressly and unambiguously accorded that status to any particular language. Frye reclassifies Imperial Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Achaemenid territories, suggesting then that the Achaemenid-era use of Aramaic was more pervasive than generally thought.


title: Aramaic

text: Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised; its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect, and the inevitable influence of Persian gave the language a new clarity and robust flexibility. For centuries after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire (in 330 BC), Imperial Aramaic – or a version thereof near enough for it to be recognisable – would remain an influence on the various native Iranian languages. Aramaic script and – as ideograms – Aramaic vocabulary would survive as the essential characteristics of the Pahlavi scripts.


title: Aramaic

text: One of the largest collections of Imperial Aramaic texts is that of the Persepolis Administrative Archives, found at Persepolis, which number about five hundred. Many of the extant documents witnessing to this form of Aramaic come from Egypt, and Elephantine in particular (see Elephantine papyri). Of them, the best known is the "Story of Ahikar", a book of instructive aphorisms quite similar in style to the biblical Book of Proverbs. Consensus regards the Aramaic portion of the Biblical book of Daniel (i.e., 2:4b–7:28) as an example of Imperial (Official) Aramaic.


title: Aramaic

text: Achaemenid Aramaic is sufficiently uniform that it is often difficult to know where any particular example of the language was written. Only careful examination reveals the occasional loan word from a local language.


title: Aramaic

text: A group of thirty Aramaic documents from Bactria have been discovered, and an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC Achaemenid administration of Bactria and Sogdia.


title: Aramaic

text: Biblical Aramaic is a somewhat hybrid dialect. It is theorized that some Biblical Aramaic material originated in both Babylonia and Judaea before the fall of the Achaemenid dynasty.


title: Aramaic

text: Biblical Aramaic presented various challenges for writers who were engaged in early Biblical studies. Since the time of Jerome of Stridon (d. 420), Aramaic of the Hebrew Bible was misnamed as "Chaldean" (Chaldaic, Chaldee). That label remained common in early Aramaic studies, and persisted up into the nineteenth century. The ""Chaldean misnomer"" was eventually abandoned, when modern scholarly analyses showed that Aramaic dialect used in Hebrew Bible was not related to ancient Chaldeans and their language.


title: Aramaic

text: The fall of the Achaemenid Empire ( 334–330 BC), and its replacement with the newly created political order, imposed by Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC) and his Hellenistic successors, marked an important turning point in the history of Aramaic language. During the early stages of the post-Achaemenid era, public use of Aramaic language was continued, but shared with the newly introduced Greek language. By the year 300 BC, all of the main Aramaic-speaking regions came under political rule of the newly created Seleucid Empire that promoted Hellenistic culture, and favored Greek language as the main language of public life and administration. During the 3rd century BCE, Greek overtook Aramaic in many spheres of public communication, particularly in highly Hellenized cities throughout the Seleucid domains. However, Aramaic continued to be used, in its post-Achaemenid form, among upper and literate classes of native Aramaic-speaking communities, and also by local authorities (along with the newly introduced Greek). Post-Achaemenid Aramaic, that bears a relatively close resemblance to that of the Achaemenid period, continued to be used up to the 2nd century BCE.


title: Aramaic

text: By the end of the 2nd century BC, several variants of Post-Achaemenid Aramaic emerged, bearing regional characteristics. One of them was Hasmonaean Aramaic, the official administrative language of Hasmonaean Judaea (142–37 BC), alongside Hebrew which was the language preferred in religious and some other public uses (coinage). It influenced the Biblical Aramaic of the Qumran texts, and was the main language of non-biblical theological texts of that community. The major Targums, translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, were originally composed in Hasmonaean Aramaic. It also appears in quotations in the Mishnah and Tosefta, although smoothed into its later context. It is written quite differently from Achaemenid Aramaic; there is an emphasis on writing as words are pronounced rather than using etymological forms.


title: Aramaic

text: Babylonian Targumic is the later post-Achaemenid dialect found in the Targum Onqelos and Targum Jonathan, the "official" targums. The original, Hasmonaean targums had reached Babylon sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century AD. They were then reworked according to the contemporary dialect of Babylon to create the language of the standard targums. This combination formed the basis of Babylonian Jewish literature for centuries to follow.


title: Aramaic

text: Galilean Targumic is similar to Babylonian Targumic. It is the mixing of literary Hasmonaean with the dialect of Galilee. The Hasmonaean targums reached Galilee in the 2nd century AD, and were reworked into this Galilean dialect for local use. The Galilean Targum was not considered an authoritative work by other communities, and documentary evidence shows that its text was amended. From the 11th century AD onwards, once the Babylonian Targum had become normative, the Galilean version became heavily influenced by it.


title: Aramaic

text: Babylonian Documentary Aramaic is a dialect in use from the 3rd century AD onwards. It is the dialect of Babylonian private documents, and, from the 12th century, all Jewish private documents are in Aramaic. It is based on Hasmonaean with very few changes. This was perhaps because many of the documents in BDA are legal documents, the language in them had to be sensible throughout the Jewish community from the start, and Hasmonaean was the old standard.


title: Aramaic

text: Nabataean Aramaic was the written language of the Arab kingdom of Nabataea, whose capital was Petra. The kingdom ("c." 200 BC – 106 AD) controlled the region to the east of the Jordan River, the Negev, the Sinai Peninsula and the northern Hijaz, and supported a wide-ranging trade network. The Nabataeans used imperial Aramaic for written communications, rather than their native Arabic. Nabataean Aramaic developed from Imperial Aramaic, with some influence from Arabic: "l" is often turned into "n", and there are some Arabic loanwords. Arabic influence on Nabataean Aramaic increased over time. Some Nabataean Aramaic inscriptions date from the early days of the kingdom, but most datable inscriptions are from the first four centuries AD. The language is written in a cursive script which was the precursor to the Arabic alphabet. After annexation by the Romans in 106 AD, most of Nabataea was subsumed into the province of Arabia Petraea, the Nabataeans turned to Greek for written communications, and the use of Aramaic declined.


title: Aramaic

text: Palmyrene Aramaic is the dialect that was in use in the Syriac city state of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert from 44 BC to 274 AD. It was written in a rounded script, which later gave way to cursive Estrangela. Like Nabataean, Palmyrene was influenced by Arabic, but to a much lesser degree.


title: Aramaic

text: The use of "written" Aramaic in the Achaemenid bureaucracy also precipitated the adoption of Aramaic(-derived) scripts to render a number of Middle Iranian languages. Moreover, many common words, including even pronouns, particles, numerals, and auxiliaries, continued to written as Aramaic "words" even when writing Middle Iranian languages. In time, in Iranian usage, these Aramaic "words" became disassociated from the Aramaic language and came to be understood as "signs" (i.e. logograms), much like the symbol '&' is read as "and" in English and the original Latin "et" is now no longer obvious. Under the early 3rd-century BC Parthians Arsacids, whose government used Greek but whose native language was Parthian, the Parthian language and its Aramaic-derived writing system both gained prestige. This in turn also led to the adoption of the name 'pahlavi' (< "parthawi", "of the Parthians") for that writing system. The Persian Sassanids, who succeeded the Parthian Arsacids in the mid-3rd century AD, subsequently inherited/adopted the Parthian-mediated Aramaic-derived writing system for their own Middle Iranian ethnolect as well. That particular Middle Iranian dialect, Middle Persian, i.e. the language of Persia proper, subsequently also became a prestige language. Following the conquest of the Sassanids by the Arabs in the 7th-century, the Aramaic-derived writing system was replaced by Arabic script in all but Zoroastrian usage, which continued to use the name 'pahlavi' for the Aramaic-derived writing system and went on to create the bulk of all Middle Iranian literature in that writing system.


title: Aramaic

text: The dialects mentioned in the previous section were all descended from Achaemenid Aramaic. However, some other regional dialects also continued to exist alongside these, often as simple, spoken variants of Aramaic. Early evidence for these vernacular dialects is known only through their influence on words and names in a more standard dialect. However, some of those regional dialects became written languages by the 2nd century BC. These dialects reflect a stream of Aramaic that is not directly dependent on Achaemenid Aramaic, and they also show a clear linguistic diversity between eastern and western regions.


title: Aramaic

text: In the eastern regions (from Mesopotamia to Persia), dialects like Palmyrene Aramaic and Arsacid Aramaic gradually merged with the regional vernacular dialects, thus creating languages with a foot in Achaemenid and a foot in regional Aramaic.


title: Aramaic

text: In the Kingdom of Osroene, founded in 132 BCE and centred in Edessa (Urhay), the regional dialect became the official language: Edessan Aramaic (Urhaya), that later came to be known as Classical Syriac. On the upper reaches of the Tigris, East Mesopotamian Aramaic flourished, with evidence from the regions of Hatra (Hatran Aramaic) and Assur (Assurian Aramaic).


title: Aramaic

text: Tatian, the author of the gospel harmony the Diatessaron came from Assyria, and perhaps wrote his work (172 AD) in East Mesopotamian rather than Syriac or Greek. In Babylonia, the regional dialect was used by the Jewish community, Jewish Old Babylonian (from c. 70 AD). This everyday language increasingly came under the influence of Biblical Aramaic and Babylonian Targumic.


title: Aramaic

text: The written form of Mandaic, the language of the Mandaean religion, was descended from the Arsacid chancery script.


title: Aramaic

text: The western regional dialects of Aramaic followed a similar course to those of the east. They are quite distinct from the eastern dialects and Imperial Aramaic. Aramaic came to coexist with Canaanite dialects, eventually completely displacing Phoenician in the first century BC and Hebrew around the turn of the fourth century AD.


title: Aramaic

text: The form of Late Old Western Aramaic used by the Jewish community is best attested, and is usually referred to as Jewish Old Palestinian. Its oldest form is Old East Jordanian, which probably comes from the region of Caesarea Philippi. This is the dialect of the oldest manuscript of the Book of Enoch ("c." 170 BC). The next distinct phase of the language is called Old Judaean lasting into the second century AD. Old Judean literature can be found in various inscriptions and personal letters, preserved quotations in the Talmud and receipts from Qumran. Josephus' first, non-extant edition of his "The Jewish War" was written in Old Judean.


title: Aramaic

text: The Old East Jordanian dialect continued to be used into the first century AD by pagan communities living to the east of the Jordan. Their dialect is often then called Pagan Old Palestinian, and it was written in a cursive script somewhat similar to that used for Old Syriac. A Christian Old Palestinian dialect may have arisen from the pagan one, and this dialect may be behind some of the Western Aramaic tendencies found in the otherwise eastern Old Syriac gospels (see Peshitta).


title: Aramaic

text: It is generally believed by Christian scholars that in the first century, Jews in Judea primarily spoke Aramaic with a decreasing number using Hebrew as their first language, though many learned Hebrew as a liturgical language. Additionally, Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the Near East in trade, among the Hellenized classes (much like French in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in Europe), and in the Roman administration. Latin, the language of the Roman army and higher levels of administration, had almost no impact on the linguistic landscape.


title: Aramaic

text: In addition to the formal, literary dialects of Aramaic based on Hasmonean and Babylonian, there were a number of colloquial Aramaic dialects. Seven Western Aramaic varieties were spoken in the vicinity of Judea in Jesus' time. They were probably distinctive yet mutually intelligible. Old Judean was the prominent dialect of Jerusalem and Judaea. The region of Ein Gedi spoke the Southeast Judaean dialect. Samaria had its distinctive Samaritan Aramaic, where the consonants "he", "" and "'ayin" all became pronounced as "aleph". Galilean Aramaic, the dialect of Jesus' home region, is only known from a few place names, the influences on Galilean Targumic, some rabbinic literature and a few private letters. It seems to have a number of distinctive features: diphthongs are never simplified into monophthongs. East of the Jordan, the various dialects of East Jordanian were spoken. In the region of Damascus and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, Damascene Aramaic was spoken (deduced mostly from Modern Western Aramaic). Finally, as far north as Aleppo, the western dialect of Orontes Aramaic was spoken.


title: Aramaic

text: The three languages, especially Hebrew and Aramaic, influenced one another through loanwords and semantic loans. Hebrew words entered Jewish Aramaic. Most were mostly technical religious words, but a few were everyday words like עץ ' "wood". Conversely, Aramaic words, such as "māmmôn" "wealth", were borrowed into Hebrew, and Hebrew words acquired additional senses from Aramaic. For instance, Hebrew ראוי "rā'ûi" "seen" borrowed the sense "worthy, seemly" from the Aramaic ' meaning "seen" and "worthy".


title: Aramaic

text: The Greek of the New Testament preserves some semiticisms, including transliterations of Semitic words. Some are Aramaic, like "talitha" (ταλιθα), which represents the noun טליתא "", and others may be either Hebrew or Aramaic like רבוני "Rabbounei" (Ραββουνει), which means "my master/great one/teacher" in both languages. Other examples:


title: Aramaic

text: The 2004 film "The Passion of the Christ" used Aramaic for much of its dialogue, specially reconstructed by a scholar, William Fulco, S.J. Where the appropriate words (in first-century Aramaic) were no longer known, he used the Aramaic of Daniel and fourth-century Syriac and Hebrew as the basis for his work.


title: Aramaic

text: The 3rd century AD is taken as the threshold between Old and Middle Aramaic. During that century, the nature of the various Aramaic languages and dialects began to change. The descendants of Imperial Aramaic ceased to be living languages, and the eastern and western regional languages began to develop vital new literatures. Unlike many of the dialects of Old Aramaic, much is known about the vocabulary and grammar of Middle Aramaic.


title: Aramaic

text: The dialects of Old Eastern Aramaic continued in Armenia and Iran as a written language using the Estragela Edessa script. Eastern Aramaic comprises Mandean, Babylonian Jewish Aramaic dialects, and Syriac (what emerged as the classical literary dialect of Syriac differs in some small details from the Syriac of the earlier pagan inscriptions from the Edessa area).


title: Aramaic

text: Syriac Aramaic (also "Classical Syriac") is the literary, liturgical and often spoken language of Syriac Christianity. It originated by the first century AD in the region of Osroene, centered in Edessa, but its golden age was the fourth to eight centuries. This period began with the translation of the Bible into the language: the Peshitta, and the masterful prose and poetry of Ephrem the Syrian. Classical Syriac became the language of the Church of the East, and the Syriac Orthodox Church. Missionary activity led to the spread of Syriac from Mesopotamia and Persia, into Central Asia, India and China.


title: Aramaic

text: Jewish Middle Babylonian is the language employed by Jewish writers in Babylonia between the fourth and the eleventh century. It is most commonly identified with the language of the Babylonian Talmud (which was completed in the seventh century) and of post-Talmudic Geonic literature, which are the most important cultural products of Babylonian Judaism. The most important epigraphic sources for the dialect are the hundreds of incantation bowls written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.


title: Aramaic

text: The Mandaic language, spoken by the Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, is a sister dialect to Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, though it is both linguistically and culturally distinct. Classical Mandaic is the language in which the Mandaeans' gnostic religious literature was composed. It is characterized by a highly phonetic orthography.


title: Aramaic

text: The dialects of Old Western Aramaic continued with Jewish Middle Palestinian (in Hebrew "square script"), Samaritan Aramaic (in the old Hebrew script) and Christian Palestinian (in cursive Syriac script). Of these three, only Jewish Middle Palestinian continued as a written language.


title: Aramaic

text: The Samaritan Aramaic is earliest attested by the documentary tradition of the Samaritans that can be dated back to the fourth century. Its modern pronunciation is based on the form used in the tenth century.


title: Aramaic

text: In 135, after the Bar Kokhba revolt, many Jewish leaders, expelled from Jerusalem, moved to Galilee. The Galilean dialect thus rose from obscurity to become the standard among Jews in the west. This dialect was spoken not only in Galilee, but also in the surrounding parts. It is the linguistic setting for the Jerusalem Talmud (completed in the 5th century), Palestinian targumim (Jewish Aramaic versions of scripture), and midrashim (biblical commentaries and teaching). The standard vowel pointing for the Hebrew Bible, the Tiberian system (7th century), was developed by speakers of the Galilean dialect of Jewish Middle Palestinian. Classical Hebrew vocalisation, therefore, in representing the Hebrew of this period, probably reflects the contemporary pronunciation of this Aramaic dialect.


title: Aramaic

text: Middle Judaean Aramaic, the descendant of Old Judaean Aramaic, was no longer the dominant dialect, and was used only in southern Judaea (the variant Engedi dialect continued throughout this period). Likewise, Middle East Jordanian Aramaic continued as a minor dialect from Old East Jordanian Aramaic. The inscriptions in the synagogue at Dura-Europos are either in Middle East Jordanian or Middle Judaean.


title: Aramaic

text: This was the language of the Christian Melkite (Chalcedonian) community from the 5th to the 8th century. As a liturgical language, it was used up to the 13th century. It is also been called "Melkite Aramaic" and "Palestinian Syriac". The language itself comes from Old Christian Palestinian Aramaic, but its writing conventions were based on early Middle Syriac, and it was heavily influenced by Greek. For example, the name Jesus, Syriac "īšū‘", is written "īsūs", a transliteration of the Greek form, in Christian Palestinian.


title: Aramaic

text: As the Western Aramaic languages of the Levant and Lebanon have become nearly extinct in non-liturgical usage, the most prolific speakers of Aramaic dialects in the 21st century are Sureth Eastern Neo-Aramaic speakers, the most numerous being the Northeastern Neo-Aramaic speakers of Mesopotamia. This includes speakers the Assyrian (235,000 speakers) and Chaldean (216,000 speakers) varieties of Suret and Turoyo (112,000 to 450,000 speakers). Having largely lived in remote areas as insulated communities for over a millennium, the remaining speakers of modern Aramaic dialects, such as the Assyrians, and the Arameans, escaped the linguistic pressures experienced by others during the large-scale language shifts that saw the proliferation of other tongues among those who previously did not speak them, most recently the Arabization of the Middle East and North Africa by Arabs beginning with the early Muslim conquests of the seventh century.


title: Aramaic

text: Modern Eastern Aramaic exists in a wide variety of dialects and languages. There is significant difference between the Aramaic spoken by Christians, Jews, and Mandaeans.


title: Aramaic

text: The Christian varieties are often called Modern Syriac or Neo-Syriac, particularly when referring to their literature, being deeply influenced by the old literary and liturgical language, the Syriac language. However, they also have roots in numerous, previously unwritten, local Aramaic varieties, and are not purely the direct descendants of the language of Ephrem the Syrian. The varieties are not all mutually intelligible. The principal Christian varieties are Suret, both belonging to the Northeastern Neo-Aramaic languages.


title: Aramaic

text: The Judeo-Aramaic languages are now mostly spoken in Israel, and most are facing extinction. The Jewish varieties that have come from communities that once lived between Lake Urmia and Mosul are not all mutually intelligible. In some places, for example Urmia, Assyrian Christians and Jews speak mutually unintelligible varieties of Modern Eastern Aramaic in the same place. In others, the Nineveh Plains around Mosul for example, the varieties of these two ethnic communities are similar enough to allow conversation.


title: Aramaic

text: Modern Central Neo-Aramaic, being in between Western Neo-Aramaic and Eastern Neo-Aramaic) is generally represented by Turoyo, the language of the Assyrians of Tur Abdin. A related language, Mlaḥsô, has recently become extinct.


title: Aramaic

text: Mandaeans living in the Khuzestan province of Iran and scattered throughout Iraq, speak Neo-Mandaic. It is quite distinct from any other Aramaic variety. Mandaeans number some 50,000–75,000 people, but it is believed Neo-Mandaic may now be spoken fluently by as few as 5000 people, with other Mandaeans having varying degrees of knowledge.


title: Aramaic

text: Very little remains of Western Aramaic. Its only remaining vernacular is the Western Neo-Aramaic, which is still spoken in the villages of Maaloula, al-Sarkha (Bakhah), and Jubb'adin on Syria's side of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, as well as by some people who migrated from these villages, to Damascus and other larger towns of Syria. All these speakers of Modern Western Aramaic are fluent in Arabic as well.


title: Aramaic

text: Other Western Aramaic languages, like Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic, are preserved only in liturgical and literary usage.


title: Aramaic

text: Each dialect of Aramaic has its own distinctive pronunciation, and it would not be feasible here to go into all these properties. Aramaic has a phonological palette of 25 to 40 distinct phonemes. Some modern Aramaic pronunciations lack the series of "emphatic" consonants, and some have borrowed from the inventories of surrounding languages, particularly Arabic, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish.


title: Aramaic

text: These vowel groups are relatively stable, but the exact articulation of any individual is most dependent on its consonantal setting.


title: Aramaic

text: The open vowel is an open near-front unrounded vowel ("short" "a", somewhat like the first vowel in the English "batter", ). It usually has a back counterpart ("long" "a", like the "a" in "father", , or even tending to the vowel in "caught", ), and a front counterpart ("short" "e", like the vowel in "head", ). There is much correspondence between these vowels between dialects. There is some evidence that Middle Babylonian dialects did not distinguish between the short "a" and short "e". In West Syriac dialects, and possibly Middle Galilean, the long "a" became the "o" sound. The open "e" and back "a" are often indicated in writing by the use of the letters א "alaph" (a glottal stop) or ה "he" (like the English "h").


title: Aramaic

text: The close front vowel is the "long" "i" (like the vowel in "need", ). It has a slightly more open counterpart, the "long" "e", as in the final vowel of "café" (). Both of these have shorter counterparts, which tend to be pronounced slightly more open. Thus, the short close "e" corresponds with the open "e" in some dialects. The close front vowels usually use the consonant י "y" as a mater lectionis.


title: Aramaic

text: The close back vowel is the "long" "u" (like the vowel in "school", ). It has a more open counterpart, the "long" "o", like the vowel in "show" (). There are shorter, and thus more open, counterparts to each of these, with the short close "o" sometimes corresponding with the long open "a". The close back vowels often use the consonant ו "w" to indicate their quality.


title: Aramaic

text: Two basic diphthongs exist: an open vowel followed by י "y" ("ay"), and an open vowel followed by ו "w" ("aw"). These were originally full diphthongs, but many dialects have converted them to "e" and "o" respectively.


title: Aramaic

text: The so-called "emphatic" consonants (see the next section) cause all vowels to become mid-centralised.


title: Aramaic

text: The various alphabets used for writing Aramaic languages have twenty-two letters (all of which are consonants). Some of these letters, though, can stand for two or three different sounds (usually a stop and a fricative at the same point of articulation). Aramaic classically uses a series of lightly contrasted plosives and fricatives:


title: Aramaic

text: Each member of a certain pair is written with the same letter of the alphabet in most writing systems (that is, "p" and "f" are written with the same letter), and are near allophones.


title: Aramaic

text: A distinguishing feature of Aramaic phonology (and that of Semitic languages in general) is the presence of "emphatic" consonants. These are consonants that are pronounced with the root of the tongue retracted, with varying degrees of pharyngealization and velarization. Using their alphabetic names, these emphatics are:


title: Aramaic

text: Ancient Aramaic may have had a larger series of emphatics, and some Neo-Aramaic languages definitely do. Not all dialects of Aramaic give these consonants their historic values.


title: Aramaic

text: Overlapping with the set of emphatics are the "guttural" consonants. They include ח Ḥêṯ and ע ʽAyn from the emphatic set, and add א ʼĀlap̄ (a glottal stop) and ה Hê (as the English "h").


title: Aramaic

text: In addition to these sets, Aramaic has the nasal consonants מ "m" and נ "n", and the approximants ר "r" (usually an alveolar trill), ל "l", י "y" and ו "w".


title: Aramaic

text: As with other Semitic languages, Aramaic morphology (the way words are formed) is based on the consonantal root. The root generally consists of two or three consonants and has a basic meaning, for example, כת״ב "k-t-b" has the meaning of 'writing'. This is then modified by the addition of vowels and other consonants to create different nuances of the basic meaning:


title: Aramaic

text: Aramaic has two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. The feminine absolute singular is often marked by the ending ה- "-â".


title: Aramaic

text: Nouns can be either singular or plural, but an additional "dual" number exists for nouns that usually come in pairs. The dual number gradually disappeared from Aramaic over time and has little influence in Middle and Modern Aramaic.


title: Aramaic

text: Aramaic nouns and adjectives can exist in one of three states. To a certain extent, these states correspond to the role of articles and cases in the Indo-European languages:


title: Aramaic

text: Whereas other Northwest Semitic languages, like Hebrew, have the absolute and construct states, the emphatic/determined state is a unique feature to Aramaic. Case endings, as in Ugaritic, probably existed in a very early stage of the language, and glimpses of them can be seen in a few compound proper names. However, as most of those cases were expressed by short final vowels, they were never written, and the few characteristic long vowels of the masculine plural accusative and genitive are not clearly evidenced in inscriptions. Often, the direct object is marked by a prefixed -ל "l-" (the preposition "to") if it is definite.


title: Aramaic

text: Adjectives agree with their nouns in number and gender but agree in state only if used attributively. Predicative adjectives are in the absolute state regardless of the state of their noun (a copula may or may not be written). Thus, an attributive adjective to an emphatic noun, as in the phrase "the good king", is written also in the emphatic state מלכא טבא "malkâ ṭāḇâ"king[emph.] good[emph.]. In comparison, the predicative adjective, as in the phrase "the king is good", is written in the absolute state מלכא טב "malkâ ṭāḇ"king[emph.] good[abs.].


title: Aramaic

text: The final א- "-â" in a number of these suffixes is written with the letter aleph. However, some Jewish Aramaic texts employ the letter he for the feminine absolute singular. Likewise, some Jewish Aramaic texts employ the Hebrew masculine absolute singular suffix ים- "-îm" instead of ין- "-în". The masculine determined plural suffix, יא- "-ayyâ", has an alternative version, "-ê". The alternative is sometimes called the "gentilic plural" for its prominent use in ethnonyms (יהודיא "yəhûḏāyê", 'the Jews', for example). This alternative plural is written with the letter aleph, and came to be the only plural for nouns and adjectives of this type in Syriac and some other varieties of Aramaic. The masculine construct plural, "-ê", is written with yodh. In Syriac and some other variants this ending is diphthongized to "-ai".


title: Aramaic

text: Possessive phrases in Aramaic can either be made with the construct state or by linking two nouns with the relative particle -[ד[י "d[î]-". As the use of the construct state almost disappears from the Middle Aramaic period on, the latter method became the main way of making possessive phrases.


title: Aramaic

text: In Modern Aramaic, the last form is by far the most common. In Biblical Aramaic, the last form is virtually absent.


title: Aramaic

text: The Aramaic verb has gradually evolved in time and place, varying between varieties of the language. Verb forms are marked for person (first, second or third), number (singular or plural), gender (masculine or feminine), tense (perfect or imperfect), mood (indicative, imperative, jussive or infinitive) and voice (active, reflexive or passive). Aramaic also employs a system of conjugations, or verbal stems, to mark intensive and extensive developments in the lexical meaning of verbs.


title: Aramaic

text: Aramaic has two proper tenses: perfect and imperfect. These were originally aspectual, but developed into something more like a preterite and future. The perfect is unmarked, while the imperfect uses various preformatives that vary according to person, number and gender. In both tenses the third-person singular masculine is the unmarked form from which others are derived by addition of afformatives (and preformatives in the imperfect). In the chart below (on the root כת״ב K-T-B, meaning "to write"), the first form given is the usual form in Imperial Aramaic, while the second is Classical Syriac.


title: Aramaic

text: Like other Semitic languages, Aramaic employs a number of derived verb stems, to extend the lexical coverage of verbs. The basic form of the verb is called the "ground stem", or "G-stem". Following the tradition of mediaeval Arabic grammarians, it is more often called the Pə‘al פעל (also written Pe‘al), using the form of the Semitic root פע״ל P-‘-L, meaning "to do". This stem carries the basic lexical meaning of the verb.


title: Aramaic

text: By doubling of the second radical, or root letter, the D-stem or פעל Pa‘‘el is formed. This is often an intensive development of the basic lexical meaning. For example, "qəṭal" means "he killed", whereas "qaṭṭel" means "he slew". The precise relationship in meaning between the two stems differs for every verb.


title: Aramaic

text: A preformative, which can be -ה "ha-", -א "a-" or -ש "ša-", creates the C-stem or variously the Hap̄‘el, Ap̄‘el or Šap̄‘el (also spelt הפעל Haph‘el, אפעל Aph‘el and שפעל Shaph‘el). This is often an extensive or causative development of the basic lexical meaning. For example, טעה "ṭə‘â" means "he went astray", whereas אטעי "aṭ‘î" means "he deceived". The Šap̄‘el שפעל is the least common variant of the C-stem. Because this variant is standard in Akkadian, it is possible that its use in Aramaic represents loanwords from that language. The difference between the variants הפעל Hap̄‘el and אפעל Ap̄‘el appears to be the gradual dropping of the initial ה "h" sound in later Old Aramaic. This is noted by the respelling of the older he preformative with א aleph.


title: Aramaic

text: These three conjugations are supplemented with three further derived stems, produced by the preformative -הת "hiṯ-" or -את "eṯ-". The loss of the initial ה "h" sound occurs similarly to that in the form above. These three derived stems are the Gt-stem, התפעל Hiṯpə‘el or אתפעל Eṯpə‘el (also written Hithpe‘el or Ethpe‘el), the Dt-stem, התפעּל Hiṯpa‘‘al or אתפעּל Eṯpa‘‘al (also written Hithpa‘‘al or Ethpa‘‘al), and the Ct-stem, התהפעל Hiṯhap̄‘al, אתּפעל Ettap̄‘al, השתפעל Hištap̄‘al or אשתפעל Eštap̄‘al (also written Hithhaph‘al, Ettaph‘al, Hishtaph‘al or Eshtaph‘al). Their meaning is usually reflexive, but later became passive. However, as with other stems, actual meaning differs from verb to verb.


title: Aramaic

text: Not all verbs use all of these conjugations, and, in some, the G-stem is not used. In the chart below (on the root כת״ב K-T-B, meaning "to write"), the first form given is the usual form in Imperial Aramaic, while the second is Classical Syriac.


title: Aramaic

text: In Imperial Aramaic, the participle began to be used for a historical present. Perhaps under influence from other languages, Middle Aramaic developed a system of composite tenses (combinations of forms of the verb with pronouns or an auxiliary verb), allowing for narrative that is more vivid. The syntax of Aramaic (the way sentences are put together) usually follows the order verb–subject–object (VSO). Imperial (Persian) Aramaic, however, tended to follow a S-O-V pattern (similar to Akkadian), which was the result of Persian syntactic influence.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Barry Morris Goldwater (January 2, 1909 – May 29, 1998) was an American politician and United States Air Force officer who was a five-term U.S. Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–1987) and the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States in 1964. Goldwater is the politician most often credited with having sparked the resurgence of the American conservative political movement in the 1960s. Despite his loss of the 1964 U.S. presidential election in a landslide, many political pundits and historians believe he laid the foundation for the conservative revolution to follow, as the grassroots organization and conservative takeover of the Republican party began a long-term realignment in American politics, which helped to bring about the "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s. He also had a substantial impact on the American libertarian movement.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was born in Phoenix in what was then the Arizona Territory, where he helped manage his family's department store. Upon the U.S. entry into World War II, Goldwater received a reserve commission in the United States Army Air Force. He trained as a pilot and was assigned to the Ferry Command, a newly formed unit that flew aircraft and supplies to war zones worldwide. After the war, Goldwater was elected to the Phoenix City Council in 1949 and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1952.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In the Senate, Goldwater rejected the legacy of the New Deal and, along with the conservative coalition, fought against the New Deal coalition. Goldwater also had a reputation as a "maverick" for challenging his party's moderate to liberal wing on policy issues. A member of the NAACP and active supporter of desegregation in Phoenix, Goldwater supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but, in a decision that he later said anguished him because of his belief in racial equality, he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the basis that two of its provisions, specifically Title II and Title VII, were unconstitutional and a potential overreach of the federal government. In 1964, Goldwater mobilized a large conservative constituency to win the Republican presidential primaries. Although raised as an Episcopalian, Goldwater was the first candidate of Jewish descent (through his father) to be nominated for president by a major American party. Goldwater's platform ultimately failed to gain the support of the electorate and he lost the 1964 presidential election to incumbent Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson by one of the largest margins in history. Goldwater returned to the Senate in 1969 and specialized in defense and foreign policy. As an elder statesman of the party, Goldwater, who was respected by his colleagues for his honor and dedication to principle, successfully urged President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974 when evidence of a cover-up in the Watergate scandal became overwhelming and impeachment was imminent.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater narrowly won re-election in 1980 for what would be his final and most influential term in the Senate. In 1986, Goldwater oversaw passage of the Goldwater–Nichols Act, arguably his most significant legislative achievement, which strengthened civilian authority in the Department of Defense. The following year, he retired from the Senate and was succeeded by Congressman John McCain, who praised his predecessor as the man who "transformed the Republican Party from an Eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan". Goldwater strongly supported the 1980 presidential campaign of Reagan, who had become the standard-bearer of the conservative movement after his "A Time for Choosing" speech. Reagan reflected many of the principles of Goldwater's earlier run in his campaign. "The Washington Post" columnist George Will took note of this, writing: "We ... who voted for him in 1964 believe he won, it just took 16 years to count the votes".


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater's views on social and cultural issues grew increasingly libertarian as he neared the end of his career. After leaving the Senate, Goldwater's views on social issues cemented as libertarian. He criticized the "money-making ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others [in the Republican Party] who are trying to ... make a religious organization out of it." During his winter years, he supported homosexuals serving openly in the military, environmental protection, gay rights, abortion rights, adoption rights for same-sex couples, and the legalization of medicinal marijuana.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was born in Phoenix in what was then the Arizona Territory, the son of Baron M. Goldwater and his wife, Hattie Josephine "JoJo" Williams. His father's family founded Goldwater's Department Store, a leading upscale department store in Phoenix. Goldwater's paternal grandfather, Michel Goldwasser, a Polish Jew, was born in 1821 in Konin, then part of Congress Poland. He emigrated to London following the Revolutions of 1848. Soon after arriving in London, Michel anglicized his name to Michael Goldwater. Michel married Sarah Nathan, a member of an English-Jewish family, in the Great Synagogue of London. The Goldwaters later emigrated to the United States, first arriving in San Francisco, California before finally settling in the Arizona Territory, where Michael Goldwater opened a small department store that was later taken over and expanded by his three sons, Henry, Baron and Morris. Morris Goldwater (1852–1939) was an Arizona territorial and state legislator, mayor of Prescott, Arizona, delegate to the Arizona Constitutional Convention and later President of the Arizona State Senate.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater's father, Baron, was Jewish; but he was raised in his mother's Episcopalian faith. Hattie Williams came from an established New England family that included the theologian Roger Williams of Rhode Island. Goldwater's parents were married in an Episcopal church in Phoenix; for his entire life, Goldwater was an Episcopalian, though on rare occasions he referred to himself as Jewish. While he did not often attend church, he stated that "If a man acts in a religious way, an ethical way, then he's really a religious man—and it doesn't have a lot to do with how often he gets inside a church." His first cousin was Julius Goldwater, a convert to Buddhism and Jodo Shinshu priest who assisted interned Japanese Americans during World War II.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: After he did poorly as a freshman in high school, Goldwater's parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia where he played varsity football, basketball, track and swimming, was senior class treasurer and attained the rank of captain. He graduated from the academy in 1928 and enrolled at the University of Arizona. but dropped out after one year. Barry Goldwater is the most recent non-college graduate to be the nominee of a major political party in a presidential election. Goldwater entered the family's business around the time of his father's death in 1930. Six years later, he took over the department store, though he was not particularly enthused about running the business.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: With America's entry into World War II, Goldwater received a reserve commission in the United States Army Air Force. Goldwater trained as a pilot and was assigned to the Ferry Command, a newly formed unit that flew aircraft and supplies to war zones worldwide. He spent most of the war flying between the U.S. and India, via the Azores and North Africa or South America, Nigeria, and Central Africa. Goldwater also flew "the hump", one of the most dangerous routes for supply planes during WWII, as it required aircraft to fly directly over the Himalayas in order to deliver desperately needed supplies to the Republic of China.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Following World War II, Goldwater was a leading proponent of creating the United States Air Force Academy, and later served on the academy's Board of Visitors. The visitor center at the academy is now named in his honor. Goldwater remained in the Army Air Reserve after the war and in 1946, at the rank of Colonel, Goldwater founded the Arizona Air National Guard. Goldwater ordered the Arizona Air National Guard desegregated, two years before the rest of the U.S. military. In the early 1960s, while a senator, he commanded the 9999th Air Reserve Squadron as a major general. Goldwater was instrumental in pushing the Pentagon to support the desegregation of the armed services.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater remained in the Arizona Air National Guard until 1967, retiring as a Command Pilot with the rank of major general. By that time, he had flown 165 different types of aircraft. As an Air Force Reserve major general, he continued piloting aircraft, including the B-52 Stratofortress, until late in his military career.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: As a U.S. Senator, Goldwater had a sign in his office that referenced his military career and mindset: "There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In a heavily Democratic state, Goldwater became a conservative Republican and a friend of Herbert Hoover. He was outspoken against New Deal liberalism, especially its close ties to labor unions. A pilot, amateur radio operator, outdoorsman and photographer, he criss-crossed Arizona and developed a deep interest in both the natural and the human history of the state. He entered Phoenix politics in 1949, when he was elected to the City Council as part of a nonpartisan team of candidates pledged to clean up widespread prostitution and gambling. The team won every mayoral and council election for the next two decades. Goldwater rebuilt the weak Republican party and was instrumental in electing Howard Pyle as Governor in 1950.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Barry Goldwater was fundamentally a staunch supporter of racial equality. Goldwater integrated his family's business upon taking over control in the 1930s. A lifetime member of the NAACP, Goldwater helped found the group's Arizona chapter. Goldwater saw to it that the Arizona Air National Guard was racially integrated from its inception in 1946, two years before President Truman ordered the military as a whole be integrated (a process that was not completed until 1954). Goldwater worked with Phoenix civil rights leaders to successfully integrate public schools a year prior to "Brown v. Board of Education".


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was an early member and largely unrecognized supporter of the National Urban League Phoenix chapter, going so far as to cover the group's early operating deficits with his personal funds. Though the NAACP denounced Goldwater in the harshest of terms when he ran for president, the Urban League conferred on Goldwater the 1991 Humanitarian Award "for 50 years of loyal service to the Phoenix Urban League." In response to League members who objected, citing Goldwater's vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the League president pointed out that Goldwater had saved the League more than once, saying he preferred to judge a person "on the basis of his daily actions rather than on his voting record."


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Running as a Republican, Goldwater won a narrow upset victory seat in the 1952 Arizona Senate election against veteran Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland. He won largely by defeating McFarland in his native Maricopa County by 12,600 votes, almost double the overall margin of 6,725 votes. As a measure of how Democratic Arizona had been since joining the Union 40 years earlier, Goldwater was only the second Republican ever to represent Arizona in the Senate.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater defeated McFarland by a larger margin when he ran again in 1958. Following his strong re-election showing, he became the first Arizona Republican to win a second term in the U.S. Senate. Goldwater's victory was all the more remarkable since it came in a year Democrats gained 13 seats in the Senate. He did not seek re-election for the Senate in 1964, deciding to focus instead on his presidential campaign.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: During his Senate career, Goldwater was regarded as the "Grand Old Man of the Republican Party and one of the nation's most respected exponents of conservatism".


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was outspoken about the Eisenhower administration, calling some of the policies of the Eisenhower administration too liberal for a Republican president. "Democrats delighted in pointing out that the junior senator was so headstrong that he had gone out his way to criticize the president of his own party." There was a Democratic majority in Congress for most of Eisenhower's career and Goldwater felt that President Dwight Eisenhower was compromising too much with Democrats in order to get legislation passed. Early on in his career as a senator for Arizona, he criticized the $71.8 billion budget that President Eisenhower sent to Congress, stating "Now, however, I am not so sure. A $71.8 billion budget not only shocks me, but it weakens my faith." Goldwater opposed Eisenhower's pick of Earl Warren for Chief Justice of the United States. "The day that Eisenhower appointed Governor Earl Warren of California as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Goldwater did not hesitate to express his misgivings." However, Goldwater was present in the United States Senate on March 1, 1954, when Warren was unanimously confirmed, voted in favor of Eisenhower's nomination of John Marshall Harlan II on March 16, 1955, was present for the unanimous nominations of William J. Brennan Jr. and Charles Evans Whittaker on March 19, 1957, and voted in favor of the nomination of Potter Stewart on May 5, 1959.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In his first year in the Senate, Goldwater was responsible for the desegregation of the Senate cafeteria after he insisted that his black legislative assistant, Katherine Maxwell, be served along with every other Senate employee.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater and the Eisenhower administration supported the integration of schools in the South, but Goldwater felt the states should choose how they wanted to integrate and should not be forced by the federal government. "Goldwater criticized the use of federal troops. He accused the Eisenhower administration of violating the Constitution by assuming powers reserved by the states. While he agreed that under the law, every state should have integrated its schools, each state should integrate in its own way." There were high-ranking government officials following Goldwater's critical stance on the Eisenhower administration, even an Army General. "Fulbright's startling revelation that military personnel were being indoctrinated with the idea that the policies of the Commander in Chief were treasonous dovetailed with the return to the news of the strange case of General Edwin Walker."


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater voted in favor of both the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but did not vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1960 because he was absent from the chamber while Senate Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel (R–CA) announced that Goldwater would have voted in favor if present. While he did vote in favor of it while in committee, Goldwater reluctantly voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it came to the floor.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Later, Goldwater would state that he was mostly in support of the bill, but he disagreed with Titles II and VII, which both dealt with employment, making him infer that the law would end in the government dictating hiring and firing policy for millions of Americans. Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly supported the bill, with Goldwater being joined by only 5 other Republican senators in voting against it. It is likely that Goldwater significantly underestimated the effect this would have, as his vote against the bill hurt him with voters across the country, including from his own party. In the 1990s, Goldwater would call his vote on the Civil Rights Act, "one of his greatest regrets." Goldwater was absent from the Senate during President John F. Kennedy's nomination of Byron White on April 11, 1962, but was present when Arthur Goldberg was unanimously confirmed.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater's maverick and direct style had made him extremely popular with the Republican Party's suburban conservative voters, based in the South and the senator's native West. Following the success of "Conscience of a Conservative", Goldwater became the frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination to run against his close friend John F. Kennedy. Despite their disagreements on politics, Goldwater and Kennedy had grown to become close friends during the eight years they served alongside each other in the Senate. With Goldwater the clear GOP frontrunner, he and Kennedy began planning to campaign together, holding Lincoln-Douglas style debates across the country and avoiding a race defined by the kind of negative attacks that were increasingly coming to define American politics.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was grief-stricken by the assassination of Kennedy and was greatly disappointed that his opponent in 1964 would not be Kennedy but instead his vice president, former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Goldwater disliked Johnson, later telling columnist John Kolbe he "used every dirty trick in the bag." Goldwater struggled to emotionally recover for a campaign against Lyndon Johnson. The fallout from Kennedy's assassination, coupled with Goldwater's vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, greatly reduced his viability as a national candidate, as well as his popularity within the Republican party.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: At the time of Goldwater's presidential candidacy, the Republican Party was split between its conservative wing (based in the West and South) and moderate/liberal wing, sometimes called Rockefeller Republicans (based in the Northeast and Midwest). Goldwater alarmed even some of his fellow partisans with his brand of staunch fiscal conservatism and militant anti-communism. He was viewed by many moderate and liberal Republicans as being too far on the right wing of the political spectrum to appeal to the mainstream majority necessary to win a national election. As a result, moderate and liberal Republicans recruited a series of opponents, including New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, to challenge him. Goldwater received solid backing from most of the few Southern Republicans then in politics. A young Birmingham lawyer, John Grenier, secured commitments from 271 of 279 Southern convention delegates to back Goldwater. Grenier would serve as executive director of the national GOP during the Goldwater campaign, the number two position to party chairman Dean Burch of Arizona. Goldwater fought and won a multi-candidate race for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. Goldwater's main rival was New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom he defeated by a narrow margin in California's winner-take-all primary, a win that secured Goldwater's victory for the nomination.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Eisenhower gave his support to Goldwater when he told reporters, "I personally believe that Goldwater is not an extremist as some people have made him, but in any event we're all Republicans." His nomination was staunchly opposed by the so-called Liberal Republicans, who thought Goldwater's demand for active measures to defeat the Soviet Union would foment a nuclear war. In addition to Rockefeller, prominent Republican office-holders refused to endorse Goldwater's candidacy, including both Republican Senators from New York Kenneth B. Keating and Jacob Javits, Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, Michigan governor George Romney and Congressman John V. Lindsay (NY-17). Rockefeller Republican Jackie Robinson walked out of the convention in disgust over Goldwater's nomination. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who was Richard Nixon's running mate in 1960, also opposed Goldwater, calling his proposal of realigning the Democrat and Republican parties into two Liberal and Conservative parties "totally abhorrent" and thought that no one in their right mind should oppose the federal government in having a role in the future of America.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In the face of such opposition, Goldwater delivered a well-received acceptance speech. According to the author Lee Edwards: "[Goldwater] devoted more care [to it] than to any other speech in his political career. And with good reason: he would deliver it to the largest and most attentive audience of his life." Journalist John Adams commented: "his acceptance speech was bold, reflecting his conservative views, but not irrational. Rather than shrinking from those critics who accuse him of extremism, Goldwater challenged them head-on" in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention. In his own words:


title: Barry Goldwater

text: His paraphrase of Cicero was included at the suggestion of Harry V. Jaffa, though the speech was primarily written by Karl Hess. Because of President Johnson's popularity, Goldwater refrained from attacking the president directly. He did not mention Johnson by name at all in his convention speech.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: After securing the Republican presidential nomination, Goldwater chose his political ally, RNC Chairman William E. Miller to be his running mate. Goldwater joked he chose Miller because "he drives Johnson nuts". In choosing Miller, Goldwater opted for a running mate who was ideologically aligned with own conservative wing of the Republican party. Miller balanced the ticket in other ways, being a practicing Catholic from the East Coast. Miller had low name recognition but was popular in the Republican party and viewed as a skilled political strategist.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Former U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, a moderate Republican from Connecticut, was a friend of Goldwater and supported him in the general election campaign. Bush's son, George H. W. Bush (then running for the Senate from Texas against Democrat Ralph Yarborough), was also a strong Goldwater supporter in both the nomination and general election campaigns.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Future Chief Justice of the United States and fellow Arizonan William H. Rehnquist also first came to the attention of national Republicans through his work as a legal adviser to Goldwater's presidential campaign. Rehnquist had begun his law practice in 1953 in the firm of Denison Kitchel of Phoenix, Goldwater's national campaign manager and friend of nearly three decades.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was painted as a dangerous figure by the Johnson campaign, which countered Goldwater's slogan "In your heart, you know he's right" with the lines "In your guts, you know he's nuts," and "In your heart, you know he might" (that is, he might actually use nuclear weapons as opposed to using only deterrence). Johnson himself did not mention Goldwater in his own acceptance speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater's provocative advocacy of active interventionism to prevent the spread of communism and defend American values and allies led to effective counterattacks from Lyndon B. Johnson and his supporters, who said that Goldwater's militancy would have dire consequences, possibly even nuclear war. In a May 1964 speech, Goldwater suggested that nuclear weapons should be treated more like conventional weapons and used in Vietnam, specifically that they should have been used at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to defoliate trees. Regarding Vietnam, Goldwater charged that Johnson's policy was devoid of "goal, course, or purpose," leaving "only sudden death in the jungles and the slow strangulation of freedom". Goldwater's rhetoric on nuclear war was viewed by many as quite uncompromising, a view buttressed by off-hand comments such as, "Let's lob one into the men's room at the Kremlin." He also advocated that field commanders in Vietnam and Europe should be given the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons (which he called "small conventional nuclear weapons") without presidential confirmation.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater countered the Johnson attacks by criticizing the administration for its perceived ethical lapses, and stating in a commercial that "we, as a nation, are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and people... I say it is time to put conscience back in government. And by good example, put it back in all walks of American life." Goldwater campaign commercials included statements of support by actor Raymond Massey and moderate Republican senator Margaret Chase Smith.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Before the 1964 election, "Fact" magazine, published by Ralph Ginzburg, ran a special issue titled, "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater". The two main articles contended that Goldwater was mentally unfit to be president. The magazine supported this claim with the results of a poll of board-certified psychiatrists. "Fact" had mailed questionnaires to 12,356 psychiatrists, receiving responses from 2,417, of whom 1,189 said Goldwater was mentally incapable of holding the office of president. Most of the other respondents declined to diagnose Goldwater because they had not clinically interviewed him but said that, although not psychologically unfit to preside, Goldwater would be negligent in the role.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: After the election, Goldwater sued the publisher, the editor and the magazine for libel in "Goldwater v. Ginzburg". "Although the jury awarded Goldwater only $1.00 in compensatory damages against all three defendants, it went on to award him punitive damages of $25,000 against Ginzburg and $50,000 against "Fact" magazine, Inc." According to Warren Boroson, then-managing editor of "Fact" and later a financial columnist, the main biography of Goldwater in the magazine was written by David Bar-Illan, the Israeli pianist.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: A Democratic campaign advertisement known as Daisy showed a young girl counting daisy petals, from one to ten. Immediately following this scene, a voiceover counted down from ten to one. The child's face was shown as a still photograph followed by images of nuclear explosions and mushroom clouds. The campaign advertisement ended with a plea to vote for Johnson, implying that Goldwater (though not mentioned by name) would provoke a nuclear war if elected. The advertisement, which featured only a few spoken words and relied on imagery for its emotional impact, was one of the most provocative in American political campaign history, and many analysts credit it as being the birth of the modern style of "negative political ads" on television. The ad aired only once and was immediately pulled, but it was then shown many times by local television stations covering the controversy.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater did not have ties to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), but he was publicly endorsed by members of the organization. Lyndon B. Johnson exploited this association during the elections, but Goldwater barred the KKK from supporting him and denounced them.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Throughout the presidential campaign, Goldwater refused to appeal to racial tensions or backlash against civil rights. After the outbreak of the Harlem riot of 1964, Goldwater privately gathered news reporters on his campaign plane and said that if anyone attempted to sow racial violence on his political behalf, he would withdraw from the presidential raceeven if it was the day before the election.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Past comments came back to haunt Goldwater throughout the campaign. He had once called the Eisenhower administration "a dime-store New Deal", and the former president never fully forgave him. However, Eisenhower did film a television commercial with Goldwater. Eisenhower qualified his voting for Goldwater in November by remarking that he had voted not specifically for Goldwater, but for the Republican Party. In December 1961, Goldwater had told a news conference that "sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea." That comment boomeranged on him during the campaign in the form of a Johnson television commercial, as did remarks about making Social Security voluntary, and statements in Tennessee about selling the Tennessee Valley Authority, a large local New Deal employer.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: The Goldwater campaign spotlighted Ronald Reagan, who appeared in a campaign ad. In turn, Reagan gave a stirring, nationally televised speech, "A Time for Choosing", in support of Goldwater. The speech prompted Reagan to seek the California Governorship in 1966 and jump-started his political career. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, later known for her campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, first became known for writing a pro-Goldwater book, "A Choice, Not an Echo", in which she attacked the moderate Republican establishment.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater lost to President Lyndon Johnson by a landslide, pulling down the Republican Party, which lost many seats in both houses of Congress.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater only won his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South. The Southern states, traditionally Democratic up to that time, voted Republican primarily as a statement of opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which had been signed into law by Johnson earlier that year. Despite Johnson's support for the Civil Rights Act, the bill received split support from Congressional Democrats due to southerner opposition. In contrast, Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly supported the bill, with Goldwater being joined by only 5 other Republican senators in voting against it. Outside of the South, the Civil Rights Act gained a high level of approval and Goldwater's opposition to it hurt him significantly with voters across the country, including from his own party.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In the end, Goldwater received 38% of the popular vote and carried just six states: Arizona (with 51% of the popular vote) and the core states of the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In carrying Georgia by a margin of 54–45%, Goldwater became the first Republican nominee to win the state. However, the overall result was the worst showing in terms of the popular vote and electoral college vote for any post-World War II Republican. Indeed, he would not have even carried his own state if not for a 20,000-vote margin in Maricopa County.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Johnson won an overwhelming 486 electoral votes, to Goldwater's 52. Goldwater, with his customary bluntness, remarked, "We would have lost even if Abraham Lincoln had come back and campaigned with us." He maintained later in life that he would have won the election if the country had not been in a state of extended grief following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and that it was simply not ready for a third president in just 14 months.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater's poor showing pulled down many supporters. Of the 57 Republican Congressmen who endorsed Goldwater before the convention, 20 were defeated for reelection, along with many promising young Republicans. In contrast, Republican Congressman John Lindsay (NY-17), who refused to endorse Goldwater, was handily re-elected in a district where Democrats held a 10% overall advantage. On the other hand, the defeat of so many older politicians created openings for young conservatives to move up the ladder. While the loss of moderate Republicans was temporary—they were back by 1966—Goldwater also permanently pulled many conservative Southerners and whites out of the New Deal Coalition.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: According to Steve Kornacki of "Salon", "Goldwater broke through and won five [Southern] states—the best showing in the region for a GOP candidate since Reconstruction. In Mississippi—where Franklin D. Roosevelt had won nearly 100 percent of the vote 28 years earlier—Goldwater claimed a staggering 87 percent." It has frequently been argued that Goldwater's strong performance in Southern states previously regarded as Democratic strongholds foreshadowed a larger shift in electoral trends in the coming decades that would make the South a Republican bastion (an end to the "Solid South")—first in presidential politics and eventually at the congressional and state levels, as well. Also, Goldwater's uncompromising promotion of freedom was the start of a continuing shift in American politics from liberalism to a conservative economic philosophy.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater remained popular in Arizona, and in the 1968 Senate election he was elected to the seat of retiring Senator Carl Hayden. He was subsequently reelected in 1974 and 1980.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Throughout the late 1970s, as the conservative wing under Ronald Reagan gained control of the Republican Party, Goldwater concentrated on his Senate duties, especially in military affairs. Goldwater purportedly did not like Richard Nixon on either a political or personal level, later calling the California Republican "the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life". Accordingly, he played little part in Nixon's election or administration, but he helped force Nixon's resignation in 1974. At the height of the Watergate scandal, Goldwater met with Nixon at the White House and urged him to resign. At the time, Nixon's impeachment by the House of Representatives was imminent and Goldwater warned him that fewer than 10 Republican senators would vote against conviction. After Goldwater helped convince Nixon to resign, the term "Goldwater moment" has been used to describe situations when influential members of Congress disagree so strongly with a president from their own party that they openly oppose him.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Despite being a difficult year for Republicans candidates, the 1974 election saw Goldwater easily reelected over his Democratic opponent, Jonathan Marshall, the publisher of "The Scottsdale Progress".


title: Barry Goldwater

text: At the 1976 Republican National Convention, Goldwater helped block Nelson Rockefeller's renomination as vice president. When Reagan challenged Gerald Ford for the presidential nomination in 1976, Goldwater endorsed the incumbent Ford, looking for consensus rather than conservative idealism. As one historian notes, "The Arizonan had lost much of his zest for battle."


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In 1979, when President Carter normalized relations with Communist China, Goldwater and some other Senators sued him in the Supreme Court, arguing that the President could not terminate the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty with the Republic of China (Taiwan) without the approval of Congress. The case, "Goldwater v. Carter" (444 U.S. 996), was dismissed by the court as a political question.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: On June 9, 1969, Goldwater was absent during President Nixon's nomination of Warren E. Burger as Chief Justice of the United States while Senate Minority Whip Hugh Scott announced that Goldwater would have voted in favor if present. Goldwater voted in favor of Nixon's failed Supreme Court nomination of Clement Haynsworth on November 21, 1969, and a few months later, Goldwater voted in favor of Nixon's failed Supreme Court nomination of Harrold Carswell on April 8, 1970. The following month, Goldwater was absent when Nixon nominee Harry Blackmun was confirmed on May 12, 1970, while Senate Minority Whip Robert P. Griffin announced that Goldwater would have voted in favor if present. On December 6, 1971, Goldwater voted in favor of Nixon's nomination of Lewis F. Powell Jr., and on December 10, Goldwater voted in favor of Nixon's nomination of William Rehnquist as Associate Justice. On December 17, 1975, Goldwater voted in favor of President Gerald Ford's nomination of John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: With his fourth Senate term due to end in January 1981, Goldwater seriously considered retiring from the Senate in 1980 before deciding to run for one final term. It was a surprisingly tough campaign for re-election. Goldwater was viewed by some as out of touch and vulnerable for several reasons, chiefly because he had planned to retire in 1981 and he had not visited many areas of Arizona outside of Phoenix and Tucson. Additionally, his Democrat challenger, Bill Schulz, proved to be a formidable opponent. A former Republican and a wealthy real estate developer, Schultz's campaign slogan was "Energy for the Eighties." Arizona's changing population also hurt Goldwater. The state's population had greatly increased and a large portion of the electorate had not lived in the state at the time Goldwater was previously elected, meaning unlike most incumbents, many voters were less familiar with Goldwater's actual beliefs. Goldwater spent most of the campaign on the defensive. Although he was eventually declared as the winning candidate in the general election by a very narrow margin, receiving 49.5% of the vote to Schulz's 48.4%, early returns on election night indicated that Schulz would win. The counting of votes continued through the night and into the next morning. At around daybreak, Goldwater learned that he had been reelected thanks to absentee ballots, which were among the last to be counted.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater's close victory in 1980 came despite Reagan's 61% landslide over Jimmy Carter in Arizona. Despite Goldwater's struggles, in 1980, Republicans were able to pick up 12 senate seats, regaining control of the chamber for the first time since 1955, when Goldwater was in his first term. Goldwater was now in the most powerful position he had ever been in the Senate. In October 1983, Goldwater voted against the legislation establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: On September 21, 1981, Goldwater voted in favor of Reagan's Supreme Court nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor. Goldwater was absent during the nominations of William Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the United States and Antonin Scalia as Associate Justice on September 17, 1986.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: After the new Senate convened in January 1981, Goldwater became chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In this role he clashed with the Reagan administration in April 1984 when he discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been mining the waters of Nicaragua since February, something that he had first denied when the matter was raised. In a note to the CIA director William Casey, Goldwater denounced what he called an "act of war", saying that "this is no way to run a railroad" as he stated crossly that only Congress had the power to declare war and accused the CIA of illegally mining Nicaraguan waters without the permission of Congress. Goldwater concluded, "The President has asked us to back his foreign policy. Bill, how can we back his foreign policy when we don't know what the hell he is doing? Lebanon, yes, we all knew that he sent troops over there. But mine the harbors in Nicaragua? This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war. For the life of me, I don't see how we are going to explain it." Goldwater felt compelled to issue an apology on the floor of the Senate because the Senate Intelligence Committee had failed in its duties to oversee the CIA as he stated, saying, "I am forced to apologize for the members of my committee because I did not know the facts on this case. And I apologize to all the members of the Senate for the same reason". Goldwater subsequently voted for a Congressional resolution condemning the mining.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In his 1980 Senate reelection campaign, Goldwater won support from religious conservatives but in his final term voted consistently to uphold legal abortion and in 1981 gave a speech on how he was angry about the bullying of American politicians by religious organizations, and would "fight them every step of the way". Notwithstanding his prior differences with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Goldwater in a 1986 interview rated him the best of the seven presidents with whom he had worked.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: He introduced the 1984 Cable Franchise Policy and Communications Act, which allowed local governments to require the transmission of public, educational, and government access (PEG) channels, barred cable operators from exercising editorial control over the content of programs carried on PEG channels, and absolved them from liability for their content. On May 12, 1986, Goldwater was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In response to Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell's opposition to the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, of which Falwell had said, "Every good Christian should be concerned", Goldwater retorted, "Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass." According to John Dean, Goldwater actually suggested that good Christians ought to kick Falwell in the "nuts", but the news media "changed the anatomical reference". Goldwater also had harsh words for his one-time political protégé, President Reagan, particularly after the Iran–Contra Affair became public in 1986. Journalist Robert MacNeil, a friend of Goldwater's from the 1964 presidential campaign, recalled interviewing him in his office shortly afterward. "He was sitting in his office with his hands on his cane... and he said to me, 'Well, aren't you going to ask me about the Iran arms sales?' It had just been announced that the Reagan administration had sold arms to Iran. And I said, 'Well, if I asked you, what would you say?' He said, 'I'd say it's the god-damned stupidest foreign policy blunder this country's ever made!'" Aside from the Iran–Contra scandal, Goldwater thought nonetheless that Reagan was a good president.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater said later that the close result in 1980 convinced him not to run again. He retired in 1987, serving as Chair of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees in his final term. Despite his reputation as a firebrand in the 1960s, by the end of his career, he was considered a stabilizing influence in the Senate, one of the most respected members of either major party. Although Goldwater remained staunchly anti-communist and "hawkish" on military issues, he was a key supporter of the fight for ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty in the 1970s, which would give control of the canal zone to the Republic of Panama. His most important legislative achievement may have been the Goldwater–Nichols Act, which reorganized the U.S. military's senior-command structure.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater became most associated with labor union reform and anti-communism; he was a supporter of the conservative coalition in Congress. His work on labor issues led to Congress passing major anti-corruption reforms in 1957, and an all-out campaign by the AFL–CIO to defeat his 1958 reelection bid. He voted against the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, but never actually accused any individual of being a communist or Soviet agent. Goldwater emphasized his strong opposition to the worldwide spread of communism in his 1960 book "The Conscience of a Conservative". The book became an important reference text in conservative political circles.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In 1964, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that emphasized states' rights. Goldwater's 1964 campaign was a magnet for conservatives since he opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs. Goldwater voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but did not vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1960 because he was absent from the chamber, with Senate Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel (R–CA) announcing that Goldwater would have voted in favor if present. Though Goldwater had supported the original Senate version of the bill, Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that Article II and Article VII of the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do or not to do business with whomever they chose and believed that the private employment provisions of the Act would lead to racial quotas. In the segregated city of Phoenix in the 1950s, he had quietly supported civil rights for blacks, but would not let his name be used.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: All this appealed to white Southern Democrats, and Goldwater was the first Republican to win the electoral votes of all of the Deep South states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana) since Reconstruction. However, Goldwater's vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign everywhere outside the South (besides Dixie, Goldwater won only in Arizona, his home state), contributing to his landslide defeat in 1964.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: While Goldwater had been depicted by his opponents in the Republican primaries as a representative of a conservative philosophy that was extreme and alien, his voting records show that his positions were in harmony with those of his fellow Republicans in the Congress. According to Hans J. Morgenthau, what distinguished him from his predecessors was his firmness of principle and determination, which did not allow him to be content with mere rhetoric.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater fought in 1971 to stop U.S. funding of the United Nations after the People's Republic of China was admitted to the organization. He said:


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Although Goldwater was not as important in the American conservative movement as Ronald Reagan after 1965, he shaped and redefined the movement from the late 1950s to 1964. Arizona Senator John McCain, who succeeded Goldwater in the Senate in 1987, said of Goldwater's legacy, "He transformed the Republican Party from an Eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan." Columnist George Will remarked that Reagan's victory in the 1980 presidential election was the metaphoric culmination of 16 years of counting the votes for Goldwater from the 1964 presidential race.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: The Republican Party recovered from the 1964 election debacle, acquiring 47 seats in the House of Representatives in the 1966 mid-term election. In January 1969, after Goldwater had been re-elected to the senate, he wrote an article in the "National Review" "affirming that he [was] not against liberals, that liberals are needed as a counterweight to conservatism, and that he had in mind a fine liberal like Max Lerner."


title: Barry Goldwater

text: By the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan as president and the growing involvement of the religious right in conservative politics, Goldwater's libertarian views on personal issues were revealed; he believed that they were an integral part of true conservatism. Goldwater viewed abortion as a matter of personal choice and as such supported abortion rights. As a passionate defender of personal liberty, he saw the religious right's views as an encroachment on personal privacy and individual liberties. Although he voted against making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday in his last term as senator, Goldwater later expressed support for it.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In 1987, he received the Langley Gold Medal from the Smithsonian Institution. In 1988, Princeton University's American Whig-Cliosophic Society awarded Goldwater the James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service in recognition of his career.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: After his retirement in 1987, Goldwater described the Arizona Governor Evan Mecham as "hardheaded" and called on him to resign, and two years later stated that the Republican party had been taken over by a "bunch of kooks".


title: Barry Goldwater

text: During the 1988 presidential campaign, he told vice-presidential nominee Dan Quayle at a campaign event in Arizona, "I want you to go back and tell George Bush to start talking about the issues."


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Some of Goldwater's statements in the 1990s alienated many social conservatives. He endorsed Democrat Karan English in an Arizona congressional race, urged Republicans to lay off Bill Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and criticized the military's ban on homosexuals, saying, "Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar", and, "You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight." A few years before his death, he addressed establishment Republicans by saying, "Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you've hurt the Republican party much more than the Democrats have."


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Also in 1994, he repeated his concerns about religious groups attempting to gain control of the Republican party, saying,


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In 1996, he told Bob Dole, whose own presidential campaign received lukewarm support from conservative Republicans, "We're the new liberals of the Republican party. Can you imagine that?" In that same year, with Senator Dennis DeConcini, Goldwater endorsed an Arizona initiative to legalize medical marijuana against the countervailing opinion of social conservatives.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In 1934, Goldwater married Margaret "Peggy" Johnson, daughter of a prominent industrialist from Muncie, Indiana. The couple had four children: Joanne (born January 18, 1936), Barry (born July 15, 1938), Michael (born March 15, 1940), and Peggy (born July 27, 1944). Goldwater became a widower in 1985 and, in 1992, he married Susan Wechsler, a nurse 32 years his junior. Goldwater's son Barry Goldwater Jr. served as a Republican Congressman, representing California from 1969 to 1983.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater's grandson, Ty Ross, is an interior designer and former Zoli model. Ross, who is openly gay and HIV positive, has been credited as inspiring the elder Goldwater "to become an octogenarian proponent of gay civil rights".


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater ran track and cross country in high school, where he specialized in the 880 yard run. His parents strongly encouraged him to compete in these sports, to his dismay. In 1940, Goldwater became one of the first people to run the Colorado River recreationally through Grand Canyon participating as an oarsman on Norman Nevills' second commercial river trip. Goldwater joined them in Green River, Utah, and rowed his own boat down to Lake Mead. In 1970, the Arizona Historical Foundation published the daily journal Goldwater had maintained on the Grand Canyon journey, including his photographs, in a 209-page volume titled "Delightful Journey".


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In 1963, he joined the Arizona Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. He was also a lifetime member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and Sigma Chi fraternity. He belonged to both the York Rite and Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and was awarded the 33rd degree in the Scottish Rite.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was an avid amateur radio operator from the early 1920s onwards, with the call signs 6BPI, K3UIG and K7UGA. The last is now used by an Arizona club honoring him as a commemorative call. During the Vietnam War he was a Military Affiliate Radio System (MARS) operator.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was a spokesman for amateur radio and its enthusiasts. Beginning in 1969, and for the rest of his life, he appeared in many educational and promotional films (and later videos) about the hobby that were produced for the American Radio Relay League (the United States national society representing the interests of radio amateurs) by such producers as Dave Bell (W6AQ), ARRL Southwest Director John R. Griggs (W6KW), Alan Kaul (W6RCL), Forrest Oden (N6ENV), and Roy Neal (K6DUE). His first appearance was in Dave Bell's "The World of Amateur Radio" where Goldwater discussed the history of the hobby and demonstrated a live contact with Antarctica. His last on-screen appearance dealing with "ham radio" was in 1994, explaining a then-upcoming, Earth-orbiting ham radio relay satellite.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Electronics was a hobby for Goldwater beyond amateur radio. He enjoyed assembling Heathkits, completing more than 100 and often visiting their maker in Benton Harbor, Michigan, to buy more, before the company exited the kit business in 1992.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: In 1916, Goldwater visited the Hopi Reservation with Phoenix architect John Rinker Kibby, and obtained his first kachina doll. Eventually his doll collection included 437 items and was presented in 1969 to the Heard Museum in Phoenix.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater was an amateur photographer and in his estate left some 15,000 of his images to three Arizona institutions. He was keen on candid photography. He became interested in the hobby after receiving a camera as a gift from his wife on their first Christmas together. He was known to use a 4×5 Graflex, Rolleiflex, 16 mm Bell and Howell motion picture camera, and 35 mm Nikkormat FT. He was a member of the Royal Photographic Society from 1941, becoming a Life Member in 1948.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: For decades, he contributed photographs of his home state to "Arizona Highways" and was known for his Western landscapes and pictures of native Americans in the United States. Three books with his photographs are "People and Places", from 1967; "Barry Goldwater and the Southwest", from 1976; and "Delightful Journey", first published in 1940 and reprinted in 1970. Ansel Adams wrote a foreword to the 1976 book.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Goldwater's photography interests occasionally crossed over with his political career. John F. Kennedy, as president, was known to invite former congressional colleagues to the White House for a drink. On one occasion, Goldwater brought his camera and photographed President Kennedy. When Kennedy received the photo, he returned it to Goldwater, with the inscription: "For Barry Goldwater—Whom I urge to follow the career for which he has shown such talent—photography!—from his friend—John Kennedy." This quip became a classic of American political humor after it was relayed by humorist Bennett Cerf. The photo itself was prized by Goldwater for the rest of his life and sold for $17,925 in a 2010 Heritage auction.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: Son Michael Prescott Goldwater formed the Goldwater Family Foundation with the goal of making his father's photography available via the internet. ("Barry Goldwater Photographs") was launched in September 2006 to coincide with the HBO documentary "Mr. Conservative", produced by granddaughter CC Goldwater.


title: Barry Goldwater

text: On March 28, 1975, Goldwater wrote to Shlomo Arnon: "The subject of UFOs has interested me for some long time. About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information has been stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret." Goldwater further wrote that there were rumors the evidence would be released, and that he was "just as anxious to see this material as you are, and I hope we will not have to wait much longer". The April 25, 1988, issue of "The New Yorker" carried an interview with Goldwater in which he recounted efforts to gain access to the room. He did so again in a 1994 "Larry King Live" interview, saying: