The keynote speaker for the fourth annual national convention of Young American for Freedom at New York's plush Commodore Hotel was the group's thirty-nine-year-old patriarch: William F. Buckley. It was YAFers' New Year's Eve and their Fourth of July. They were now a force to be reckoned with. They marched at the head of a presidential crusade.

YAFers, Young Republicans, clubs organized through the RNC's Youth for Goldwater-Miller: they worked from dawn to dusk, licking envelopes, phoning phone trees, planting yard signs, thumbing files, penciling precinct notecards, passing out literature at factory gates before the dew was off the grass. It was indescribable, the exhilaration they felt those long days, exhausting themselves for the highest cause they could imagine. It remade you; it made everything else seem small. They had no words to describe it. They could have borrowed some from the civil rights kids, who called it a "freedom high." The Commodore rang with stories of freedom highs that weekend. What there wasn't was doubt. They were young, idealistic; triumph was inevitable, for they were battling for the Lord. They couldn't but assume that their hero felt exactly the same way.

He did not. Bill Buckley had been skeptical about Goldwater presidential maneuvers since Clarence Manion invited him to join his endeavor in 1959. "I am especially anxious not to dissipate unnecessarily any conservative resources," he wrote Manion then, "and don't want to be identified with a total political failure." His position had hardly changed since, and not just because Baroody and Kitchel had humiliated him in the pages of the New York Times the previous September by planting a story that he was trying to take over the campaign. Buckley's approach to practical politics bore the heavy imprint of his friend the late Whittaker Chambers. In brooding, brilliant letters he used to post to Buckley from his upstate retreat in the dark days of the Eisenhower Administration, Chambers spun an argument redolent of his Marxist past: social change was borne on tides of historical inevitability. If conservatism overreached before its time, it risked a setback of decades. Then there was the problem of Goldwater himself. Buckley had had a conversation recently with Richard Clurman, Time's chief of correspondents, who had gone from an editors' lunch with Goldwater to a dinner party with Buckley--where Clurman wondered aloud just what was Barry Goldwater's appeal to this brilliant, urbane man he respected. "Barry Goldwater is a man of tremendously decent instincts, and with a basic banal but important understanding of the Constitution and what it means in American life," Buckley explained.

"But what would happen if he were elected President of the United States?" Clurman asked.

"That," Buckley quipped, "might be a serious problem."

He was making truer believers fume. "You are displaying a compulsion to proclaim, on every possible occasion, that Goldwater will be resoundingly defeated in November," Rusher implored after Buckley began seeding his columns with the Chambers argument that spring. "What you say about Goldwater's chances in November can have a measurable effect." But that was Buckley's story, and he was sticking to it. Not that his brow didn't bead with sweat, however, that September night at the YAF convention, as he took his place behind the podium at the Commodore and looked out at faces that burned with the pure blue flame of faith.

"We do not believe in the Platonic affirmation of our own little purities," he began his speech. (Immanentizing the eschaton: That was for the liberals.)

"To no one's surprise more than our own," he continued, "we labor under the visitation of a freedom-minded candidate for the President of the United States. . . . A great rainfall has deluged a thirsty earth, but before we had time to properly prepare for it.

"I speak, of course, about the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater."

His heresy sucked the air out of the room. The silence was broken by the sound of a single woman sobbing.

He tried to explain:

["]Our morale is high, and we are marching. . . . But it is wrong to assume that we shall overcome [Martin Luther King's language, archly ironized] and therefore it is right to reason to the necessity of guarding against the utter disarray that sometimes follows a stunning defeat . . . any election of Barry Goldwater would presuppose a sea change in American public opinion; presuppose that the fiery little body of dissenters, of which you are a shining meteor, suddenly spun off no less than a majority of all the American people, who suddenly overcome [sic] a generation's entrenched lassitude, suddenly penetrated to the true meaning of freedom in society where the truth is occluded by the verbose mystification of thousands of scholars, tens of thousands of books, a million miles of newsprint; who suddenly, prisoners of all those years, succeeded in passing blithely through the walls of Alcatraz and tripping lightly over the shark-infested waters and treacherous currents, to safety on the shore.["]

The point, he said in conclusion, was now to win recruits. "Not only for November the third, but for future Novembers: to infuse the conservative spirit in enough people to entitle us to look about us . . . not at the ashes of defeat, but at the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future"--ending, with a nice apocalyptic touch: "if there is a future."

There wasn't even a smattering of applause. There was trauma. This was not what this fiery little body of dissenters wanted to hear.

Even if their patriarch was correct. They were not spinning off a majority of all the American people. But the seeds were being planted.