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“Draft Goldwater for President committees” were formed. 5
    In the haze the liberal establishment media has created in their celebration of the election of John F. Kennedy as the beginning of “Camelot,” it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the election of Kennedy coincided with the rise of a new conservative movement in the United States and in the Republican Party.
    • In 1960, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) was founded, as we have noted.
    • In 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater published
The Conscience of a Conservative
.
    • In 1961, conservative Republican John Tower was elected in a special election to fill Lyndon Johnson’s vacant Senate seat; he was the first Republican to win a Senate election in the Old South since the Reconstruction Era.
    • In 1962 the New York Conservative Party was formed.
    • On March 7, 1962, while I served as executive secretary of Young Americans for Freedom, YAF held a huge rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
    The Madison Square Garden Rally would be my nomination for the day the modern-day conservative movement had its public debut. The rally was put on by youngsters: Don Shaftoe and David Franke were in their early twenties; I was the old man at twenty-eight. Marvin Liebman, whose small PR firm housed YAF, was the adult supervision.
    “A Conservative Rally for World Liberation from Communism” drew a sellout crowd of 18,500 mostly young people to liberalism’s East coast citadel, and gave national exposure to its featured speakers, L. Brent Bozell Jr., conservative Republican senators BarryGoldwater, Strom Thurmond, and John Tower, and to honorees “for contributions to conservatism and the nation,” such as Sen. Thomas J. Dodd (D-Conn.), novelist John Dos Passos, Herbert Hoover, Prof. Richard M. Weaver, actor John Wayne, columnist David Lawrence, newspaper publisher Eugene C. Pulliam, and editor M. Stanton Evans. 6
    Before that day what we were doing was largely out of the public eye, but when thousands were lined up around Madison Square Garden and the speeches and sellout crowd were front-page, “above the fold” news the next day in the
New York Times
, the conservative movement leapt onto the national political stage.
    Far from being intimidated by the media’s love affair with Kennedy, or swept away in the glamour and liberal celebrity worship surrounding “Camelot,” conservatives were an energized and growing force rallying for the ideals of freedom, liberty, and limited government.
    Goldwater was enthusiastic about the prospects of running against President John F. Kennedy and drawing a sharp contrast to Kennedy’s policies. What’s more, Goldwater understood that the problem was as much the establishment Republican Party leadership as it was the Democrats.
    In 1961, F. Clifton White organized a movement to nominate a Republican conservative for president. Traveling around the country, White exhorted conservatives to seize control of their local Republican Party organizations and elect conservative delegates to the Republican National Convention.
    The movement he orchestrated gave conservatives more influence over the inner workings of the Republican Party than they had had during Taft’s 1952 defeat and helped persuade Goldwater to run for president. 7
    In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, Goldwater briefly considered dropping his campaign, but he was persuaded to continue by this grassroots support and a desire to wrest control of the Republican Party away from the establishment’s Eastern liberals,and for what Bill Middendorf called the “noble reason” of building the conservative movement. 8
    This scared the devil out of the progressive-dominated Republican establishment, who had long embraced me-tooism and ceded the national agenda to the Democrats.
    The establishment launched a desperate “Stop Goldwater” campaign in the face of which Goldwater’s support began to wane, especially in those states where the progressive